Nasty Conjugation

Hello human worm-things. Things are slowing down around here, but only for about a week before they speed up for us to come back to the United States. We had visits from my family and from New York ladies Kate and Julie, and we got to play around in Japan and show off everything we’ve learned. Wow! We’ve updated our Flickr account with some pictures of our adventures.

I am inaugurating a new category on my website, a category all about music and how it makes me feel. Will it succeed? Will it explode? Will I ever stop talking as if I have an audience? I must apologize ahead of time because I’m afraid this new category may be a little impenetrable for people who are not pretentious, insufferable music snobs. Here is our first edition of Musics: defunct indie rock band, Grandaddy. From the Book of Shadows -

To me this seems like music that should be listened to in space, or maybe music that was made in space. The band was forced to live in orbit - for health reasons - and their only respite from the deadly boredom of space station life was their music.

So many Grandaddy songs seem like music for lonely observation, written by men whose only view of Earth, their home, is a tiny circular window set into the side of their ship. If I had to name the genre I might call it Orbit Rock (which has nothing to do with the band Orbit, but Space Rock was already taken).

Maybe it would be better to call it Distance Rock, or Alienation Core.

Maybe Post Space Pop.

Their songs seem to sweep across the landscape. I get the image of the sun cresting the wide blue arc of the earth, a sunrise from space. As the space station turns - to maintain even heating - you can see the light falling across China. The longer Grandaddy stays on their station the less they know humanity and the more they associate themselves with geography. They build robots to listen to their concerts. Sometimes the robots drink themselves to death.

The songs, even the poppy ones, seem built over the hum of old life support systems. The space station probably looks like something Russian, ramshackle, built after the collapse of the USSR. Sometimes, when there’s no light for the solar generators, they have to turn off the indoor lighting to save power for their amps. In times like these they perform by the red lights of their robot audience’s eyes. They loop tapes of angel choruses through the robots’ voice programs because, in space, it’s hard to find real angels.

The station has been built out of theremins and old sequencers, so wherever you move you’re accompanied by the eerie wail of old electronics. There’s only one escape pod, built out of two oversized laundromat dryers and a collection of parts from old Macintosh computers. One day, out of boredom, they put a microphone in it and launch it to Earth so they can sample the sound of incinerating upon reentry. They never planned on using it, anyway.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 12th, 2007 at 10:15 am and is filed under Musics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.