In a matter of days, I went from hipster-platinum to waeguk-nobody. In the beginning of May 2009, I packed up my crates of LPs, stepped down as Music Director of the burgeoning Chicago Independent Radio Project, quit my job at Reckless Records, handed over the helms of Plustapes/Addenda Records to my co-founder, canceled all my DJ gigs around Chicago’s west side (Whistler, Burlington, Danny’s, etc.), handed my cat over to my little brother, and left the city. Days later, I stepped off an airplane at Incheon Airport and took a late night bus to Daejeon, a city located in the heart of South Korea. I slept that night on a single-sized mattress, the only piece of furniture in my allotted studio apartment. Moments before I fell into a deep sleep after my 24-hour journey, I heartily questioned my decision.
I had no idea what to expect coming to South Korea; I had little time to prepare. On a whim, I inquired about a teaching job and not three weeks later reluctantly accepted one. It happened fast and with little premeditation. All I knew was that Chicago was feeling stuffy and redundant after four years. I needed adventure and a setting where I could effloresce into adulthood without too many outside influences. “Individuality” was the word of the moment, and nothing was more foreign to me than South Korea.
Innately, Korea is very different. But superficially, it’s rather westernized. Besides the Hangul script and the copious amount of dragonflies in late spring, Daejeon didn’t seem that far out. The kids dress rather stylishly, the technology is modern (if not slightly ahead of the U.S.) and commerce bustles. Daejeon is certainly a city, but it’s no Chicago. It’s about the size of Portland, OR actually. With the rather uneventful cultural touchstones and nightlife though, it’s much more akin to the Charlotte, NC’s of the world. It’s a city built around a particular business ethos (technological innovation in this case), not around the arts. The opportunities and communities that I gravitated toward in Chicago were obsolete.
Our next best of 2008 list spans from tunes recorded at the beginning of the 20th century to a band that may just be 2009’s next big thing.
Check out Michael Ardaiolo’s list below
Favorite Releases of 2008 in no particular order:
This Thursday night is circled on calendars around the country for the undoubtedly entertaining political spectacle that will be the televised Vice Presidential debate. But this is 2008, and we are no longer slaves to the space-time continuum. We have something more practical now: TiVo. And though technology has crumbled one law of physics after another, it has yet to improve upon the experience of a live musical performance. That is why you need to program your VCR… er… DV-R now, so you’ll be free to go to Chicago’s Hideout this Thursday evening instead. It will be a performance too good to experience in any other form than in person.
Headlining the bill is the Norwegian duo Deaf Center. Signed to the always-intriguing U.K. label Type Records, Erik Skodvin and Otto Totland craft moody soundscapes inspired by silent 8mm black-and-white film. Utilizing sampled ambient noises and aged recording methods as well as acoustic instrumentation, their music evolves into dramatic scenes without the crutch of visual stimuli. Whereas most bands rely on huge crescendos or entrancing rhythms to hook their audiences, Deaf Center concentrates on texture and acoustics. Its emotion relies on brevity of sound rather than amplitude or melodramatic climaxes, a talent many musicians seek but few succeed. (Erik Skodvin will also be performing solo under his Svarte Greiner moniker at Reckless Records‘ Wicker Park location at 6p on Friday).
Type Records label-mates and staples in the experimental Chicago music scene, Zelienople are also on the bill. Now in nearly the tenth year of their musical partnership, Matt Christensen, Mike Weis and Brian Harding have perfected their bewitching brew of psychedelic folk and drone-based jazz. Their most recent release His/Her is the product of a band on a matured creative high. The music is as seamless as it is loose, letting each musician explore the outer edges of their instrumentation’s acoustics while still defining a solid song structure in the process.
On March 21st, I went to see Collections of Colonies of Bees perform at the AV-Aerie. I’ve been a fan of the band for some time, though keeping track of their limited releases and off-shoot projects is no simple task – however, their entire discography has recently been made available digitally through drummer Jon Mueller’s DIY label Crouton Music. Behind Mueller and fellow co-founder Chris Rosenau, CoCoB was a Pele side-project that formed as an outlet for the ever-antsy musicians to explore the more experimental and quirky tangents of post-rock. This began the Milwuakee-based band on an interesting evolution that has morphed from exploring the possibilities of folk and bluegrass instrumentation mingling with digital post-production effects to the heavily tinkered, melodically stuttering sound of their 2004 release for Polyvinyl, Customer.
Regardless of style though, the band’s talent was in the texture and subtlety of their music, which in turn led to fascinating headphone listens. This detail is what made their show last month so surprising. It was loud. Very, very loud. And bombastic and striking and just completely aurally encompassing… to such a degree in fact that I was worrying about my ears’ health for the following few days. Their latest record – Birds released via Table of Elements subsidiary Radium – though an indication of their expanded sound, just didn’t completely warrant their recent comparisons to Rhys Chatham and the like… the live show, on the other hand, very, very much does. Not to mention that it now fully makes sense why the band is included in the Guitar Series Volumes 3 & 4, a series of twelve limited-edition, single sided LPs pressed on clear vinyl with laser-etched illustrations that includes other guitar noise-makers like Oren Ambarchi, Thurston Moore, Christian Fennesz, Stephen O’Malley and even Chatham himself. It also makes me snicker a bit at the reaction the Bees must have received opening for indie-pop darling Bon Iver throughout April. One of wide-eyed, attention-grabbing surprise I would venture to guess (a recorded collaboration between the touring mates will also be released via Jagjaguwar hopefully in the fall of 2008). Prior to their ear-splitting show, the four touring members of Collections of Colonies of Bees huddled in a hallway to chat with CHIRP.
If you are looking for something out of the ordinary to do this Friday night, let me hip you to a few live music events that are a bit off the beaten path here in Chicago.
Photo by Calbee Booth (snapcult.com)
The work of the Chicago Independent Radio Project is supported in part by a generous grant from the Crossroads Fund. More information at crossroadsfund.org.
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