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Music

#12261 Azath Vitr (D'ivers

Ascendant

Group: Malaz Regular
Posts: 3,080
Joined: 07-February 16

Posted 10 May 2024 - 12:42 PM

Gorefest, on 10 May 2024 - 07:29 AM, said:

How is this even relevant? A guy who produced a ton of awesome and era-defining music died and some people just wanted to commemmorate that.

I'm sorry Azath, I'm sure you are a really nice guy in the flesh, but you have a rather obsessive habit of spamming topics to death with at best tangentally related and often undecypherable slabs of copy-pasted word salad, hijacking the origal conversation. To the point where at least myself (I cannot speak for others) just stop reading and step away from the conversation.

The topic of this thread is music, not Steve Albini. So yes, my previous post is only tangentially related to Albini: because he "produced a ton of awesome and era-defining music", your post reminded me of a couple of interesting recent articles about comically vapid songs he probably would have hated that have apparently been dominating streaming. And the Creed revival. (An actual immersive Creed themed multi-day cruise, with Creed, the most critically reviled band of the 90's, who make vapid Christian rock.) The segue from that to AI exterminating humanity should be obvious. (Of course it's a joke.)

OTOH the relation between Albini and generative AI might not be obvious: Albini was a major advocate for recording to tape and using analog equipment instead of digital (even though digital was/is the dominant trend), and for trying to capture raw and "authentic" performances (though there is a bit of a contradiction there: analog methods add saturation and distortion that isn't present in the raw performance). Generative AI, being completely digital and not even involving any performers, is arguably the polar opposite.

I've tended to assume that anyone who likes Erikson's writing will have a relatively high tolerance for reading things without having their relevance explained in advance; granted, not everyone here actually likes that aspect of Erikson's style. In the past I've certainly gotten carried away and posted with a frequency and text length that's more than I could reasonably expect people to read, and I'm sorry about that; I've been trying to be more mindful about it, and so posting less frequently and including fewer quotes. However, when I want to share a few related articles, which are usually very long but only have a few parts which I find relevant or especially interesting or amusing, you may not have time to read them all, and so it seems considerate to include the most important quotes, with unnecessary filler words removed for your convenience so that they take less time to read. Of course it would be much easier for me to leave in unnecessary transitional phrases inside the quotations; perhaps that would actually make it easier for you to read. Likewise, I've been keeping my prefatory explanations to a minimum to save you time, because I thought that if you were to actually read the quotation its relevance should be obvious; but apparently I was wrong about that.

I could go on at length about my thoughts on "I'm looking for a man in finance" in relation to Bergson's theory of comedy (he argued that we laugh at "a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being"), and how that also relates to the embrace of the mechanical rhythms of drum machines in Albini's early work and in various genres that began or became relatively popular around the same time; and how they relate to humanity's shifting relations with machines, transhumanism, and Albini's prefereance for noisy, saturated, timbrally complex analog technologies over the clean, "cold", and timbrally relatively simple early digital methods that were displacing them. Similarly, I was tempted to expound on "That's that me, espresso" in relation to Albini's renunciation of nihilism, among other things. But this is probably already too much.

Since this is the music thread, here's some music for you (produced by Steve Albini, incidentally; from the album Life Metal):

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 10 May 2024 - 12:44 PM

#12262 worry

Master of the Deck

Group: Malaz Regular
Posts: 14,588
Joined: 24-February 10
Location:the buried west

Posted 10 May 2024 - 02:52 PM

Good write-up from David Roth at Defector, with some contributions from others at the end (I think it's not paywalled): https://defector.com...ve-albini-album

Quote

Albini seemed sincerely contrite about some of his cruel and stupid provocations from this period, not because he had become any less defiant but because that defiance reoriented around some real and robust values—things he believed in more and more urgently than the continued performance of an increasingly abstracted defiance. That sort of principle, especially when it is as grounded in humanity and work as Albini's was, tends to keep a person in the opposition anyway. He didn't get any less punk for being less of an asshole, and anyway he never seemed to worry about it. He hated snobs and users and bullies and bosses, and so he lived in a way that made sure he never became one. This didn't mean that he was always or even often nice, but it did keep him and his work authentic. "You hated our band and made fun of us while we were recording at your studio," the band Fucked Up posted after Albini's death. "But you stood for something honest and fair in music and tried to make it a better place in everything you did."

He recorded a couple albums from one of my favorite bands, those Welsh wonders Mclusky. Their final one is just one of my favorite sounding albums of all time.

They came with white hands and left with red hands.