My pops and I went to New York City last month to catch a Mets game. We try and hit an out-of-town ballpark every summer and we decided to splurge a bit on the trip this year. I’d never been to what is, essentially (I’d argue) the capital of the world before, so along with some sweet National League baseball, we took in some of the cultural highlights and, kind of, did the tourist thing. The highlight for me was the few hours we spent in the Museum of Modern Art. Holy shit is that place sweet; there are any number of things that I just wanted to stand and stare at for hours. (Most notably, there was this mammoth Sol LeWitt installation that was a series of cubes that changed predictably along multiple axes. You could look at it for a month and still find new bits that were fascinating.) My pops took a ton of pictures, but I kind of picked my spots. (It still freaks me out to snap pics in museums.) The picture I’m happiest with from the whole weekend is the Pollack closeup above. My photo is just a shad out of focus, which, I think, adds another layer of complexity to the piece itself; it’s also strange in that it’s a tiny snippet of a much larger canvas. Why do you give a shit? Because AIDS Wolf belongs in MOMA. We’ve talked about the nature of art in the past, notably with AIDS Wolf’s labelmates, Gay Beast, but the folks in AIDS Wolf are really stretching the aural boundaries. I’ll openly acknowledge that the stuff they crank out is difficult to listen to. (That might be putting it mildy.) It’s dissonant, there’s rarely a semblance of a tune, it’s crazy loud and, if you’re not really paying attention, it seems to be utterly without intention. But. It is high art. Does music have to be pretty in the same way that a classical portrait does? I love something like Lot’s Wife (from my local museum’s stellar collection), but wouldn’t disagree with labelling it ugly. In much the same sense, there’s pleasure to be found in the harshest of AIDS Wolf’s songs. Further, there’s some sort of pattern in there in the madness. Just as a Pollack pieces start to cohere into something logical and linear, repeated listens to AIDS Wolf yield some core nugget of rationality. You can snag a digital copy of their tour cassette, a fourteen minute, gapless odyssey of noise, here. There’s interesting shit happening out there at the edges; it might not be soothing like a Vetiver record, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t interesting. (Sidenote: AIDS Wolf’s press photos are also a sight to behold. Freaky shit (and totally NSFW) . Also, what the hell is going on with these noise band’s names? Gay Beast? AIDS Wolf? I love the records, but let’s step the nomenclature game up a bit people.)
AIDS Wolf – Elle est si cochonnne
In other news pertaining to me, Mrs. Citizen bought me a record player for my birthday. I love it. More to the point, I love listening to records on it. As a reward to myself for slogging through the first week of school, I stopped by Music Saves after work and snagged OK Computer on the big nuts 180 gram vinyl. All I did for the rest of the night was sit in the living room, read (Stern – Bruce Friedman, get it if you haven’t) and stand up every twenty minutes to flip the record. If there’s a better pair of bookends to an album than “Airbag” and “The Tourist,” I don’t know what they are. Enjoy.
