March 19, 2006
New Feature: MP3 of the Moment
Here in New York, you have to pick your battles, so to speak. You can't be an art buff, a film geek, a music nerd, a theatergoer, a balletomane, and an opera fanatic; there just isn't enough time in the day. My life is filled with art, writing, music, and the events attending to those three passions. The rest I experience haphazardly at best. In acknowledging this I have just frozen my Netflix account, which was perhaps a losing venture for me from the start.
My three regular readers will see that I have removed the "From Netflix" listing at the bottom of the middle column on this site. In exchange I have added "MP3 of the Moment," which features a randomly selected song from my hard drive and which will change once or twice a week, as the desire strikes.
The first selection is JK Broadrick's remix of Pelican's "Angel Tears," taken from Australasia, the band's debut full-length. Broadrick, as you may know, was behind Godflesh and Napalm Death, and has recently begun recording music under the moniker Jesu; Pelican is a new-ish instrumental metal band from Chicago. (Coincidentally, I knew two of its members ten years ago, in high school.) The original version of "Angel Tears" is a plodding, eleven-minute behemoth, all chugging guitars and (two-thirds of the way through) double-bass-drum attack. Broadrick works solely with the initial melody, adding an ethereal synthesizer "chorus" that hovers behind the music and some echo/reverb to the guitars—essentially giving "Angel Tears" the metal-meets-Slowdive sheen of his current recordings. To my mind, it's an utterly stunning cocoon of noise. Due to bandwith usage concerns, please right-click and download the file rather than playing it directly from my web server.
A few related links: Pelican's record label, Hydra Head Records; reviews of Australasia; Jesu's homepage; and an informative review of Jesu's self-titled album.