Last year I wrote an essay for my course at Uni where I argued that the music video as a medium was dead on its feet. It was over. Done. Nobody paid attention to them anymore, they’d lost their power in attracting audiences, no label was prepared to put money into them, that they were surface-level tedium, and that they were obsolete as a promotional tool. In many cases I still maintain that these aspects are true; old ideas are recycled constantly and cheap performance videos multiply overnight. But I think I’ve changed my mind since then. I now believe that the music video is re-emerging.
After a decade of new internet services siphoning off the music video’s previous purpose, to expose and promote the band visually and to develop a band image they are able to sell, broadly the music video is still filled with the same old content, but the bands and their management are using them differently. Instead of drumming up hype before a release they are now utilising them as a means of remaining in their audiences’ consciousness. In an environment where there are hundreds of bands, nigh thousands domestic and internationally, vying for media attention, the videos have transformed from ‘ooh we have a new release check us out’ to ‘we’re here, we’re here, we exist!’. And so if a band receives any sort of attention it’s integral that they remain in the news in any way they can, and a music video serves that purpose. As Marshall McLuhan said, ‘the medium is the message’.
William Carlos Williams was an American poet and short story writer who had strong ties with modernism and imagism and had a background of being a working physician. He is probably most famous for his poem 'The Red Wheelbarrow' which implements the 'ideas in things' ideology where the language is stripped down and imbue emotions within concrete images. This style of writing can be influenced as strongly by photography as well as writing.
Here you will find probably my favourite Williams short story, where he makes use of his physician background entailing a rather difficult home visit on a sickly little girl. The frustration and forcefulness is conveyed powerfully and engages the reader with the struggling doctor-patient relationship.
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They were new patients to me, all I had was the name, Olson. Please come down as soon as you can, my daughter is very sick.
When I arrived I was met by the mother, a big startled looking woman, very clean and apologetic who merely said, Is this the doctor? and let me in. In the back, she added. You must excuse us, doctor, we have her in the kitchen where it is warm. It is very damp here sometimes.
Chapter I – A Thread 01. Nothing (We Are…) 02. The Heart Of Every Country 03. Get Down And Live With It 04. (In The Yonder Marsh) 05. A Letter Concerning Dogheads Chapter II – The Trap 06. Laying Traps 07. Born In A Hurricane 08. Release The Clowns 09. (What?)
CD2: Chapter III – The Blues Of Man 01. A Suggestion (Not A Very Nice One) 02. (Dig, Bury, Deny) 03. Operation Mincemeat 04. We Will Never Get Out This World Alive 05. Faced With Complete Failure, Utter Defiance Is The Only Response
‘Craft’ is one of my favourite words in the dictionary (my most favourite being ’clavicle’, it has such sweet phonetics). It denotes as skilfully producing something by hand, and it is this ‘by hand’ bit which I wholly endorse. ‘By hand’ leads to something unique, something which has been imbued with its creator’s personality and skill. However, ‘Craft’ can also mean deviousness and trickery in an archaic form, and I believe it is this denotation Crippled Black Phoenix had in mind with the name of their latest record, especially when they still consider us all as those primordial apes.
On paper, and by right, Crippled Black Phoenix should be a crushing doom super group, with ex-Electric Wizard, ex-Iron Monkey, ex-Gonga and ex-Teeth of Lions Rule The Divine members; you wouldn’t have expected then that they undertake an expansive Pink Floydian approach to progressive rock. Yet, within the lush psychedelic soundscapes and handsome guitars and thumping rhythms they have that element of deviousness, that feeling of a pretty mask hiding the ugliness beneath, which lends a cliff-edge to this warm flowery meadow.
The comic-esque record artwork is interesting to interpret. The wolf face echoes the same one that appeared on 2010’s I, Vigilante and is now attached to a human body, and though it is snarling and looking fierce it’s running away. In fear, perhaps. Maybe there’s something worse than a wolf-headed man, something scarier?
I keep returning to Crippled Black Phoenix as, beside Colour Haze, I believe they are the classiest band operating today. Their I, Vigilante record was stunning, it was a descent, that weary journey from the zenith, and it reminded me of coming home from a long walk. No fanfare or crescendo, no blaze of fire but embers that smouldered in the dark and cast red across the floor.
I have found The Crafty Ape to have a much fuller and rounder sound than I, Vigilante, which was a more straightforward guitar record, now there are horns, organs, strings, choirs in places, female vocals stand out a bit more and the piano is beautifully played. It is this melding of orchestral sounds into a strong, cohesive stream or soundscape that, with recent forecasts in mind, makes me think of the weather and it’s forgotten splendour. All the elements have to be perfect, the temperature, wind, pressure, humidity, cloud cover, geography and only when they are all perfect does this pure, unique, white snow fall with it’s perennial aching beauty. Yet, of course, some sit in awe of the snow’s majesty whereas others stare in tragedy and it is this bi-polar beauty of snow that encapsulates The Crafty Ape for me. It is beautiful and psychedelic but also mournful and dark.
It isn’t all frosty, as there are sunbursts seen at the powerful end of ‘A Letter Concerning Dogheads’ and the visceral rhythm of ’Laying Traps’, but the British-instilled misanthropy and famous misery reflects most from this record. I care a great deal for Crippled Black Phoenix, their records are always stirring and The Crafty Ape is a continuation of their triumph.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is an illustrious writer who's won the Nobel Prize in Literature and has written classics like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and is well known for popularizing the magical realism style.
I don't know why I haven't thought of this before, but there seems to be a great resource of online versions of classic short stories and I think it'll be cool to repost them here on (((Hyperpower))), so yeah this Marquez short story gets the honour of going first. Also, it's a personal favourite of mine. Check it out after the jump....
Yeah, this isn't very exciting , it's just I have the layout and format of the 'zine sorted out the other day and I thought I should document it on here. I've actually gotten to the point now where I've started to design individual pages and the cover and back cover designs and asking for contributors, so yeah I've been busy in this mini-hiatus from the flurry of posts of recent. Hopefully normal service will resume soonish...
As a music record review writer I have found the form itself has been cheapened considerably over the last couple of years. Of course the fact that anyone can start up a blogspot and write about music makes the writing landscape so varied and interesting and colourful, but it also means there’s no filtration device. The degree of quality writing in reviews has cooled significantly.
I believe a review has it’s own art form; the writing has to be informative of the subject that you are reviewing, but it must also be entertaining and persuasive. Pure information is a pamphlet. A well-reasoned and thought-provoking discussion is a review.
This is not only restricted to digital media, which is a common misconception, printed media too have been on this slippery slope and continue to flail in their shallow puddles of vocabulary. To appeal to mass audiences does not mean the writing has to be dumbed down to the bare-essentials: clichés and a formula.
In the Music and indeed the Art industry, nothing else is as important as having your work be quality and unique, so why should it be different when you’re writing about those industries?
Here I break it down where I think the quality of reviewing is going awry, and follow with how I think a review should be.
This record needs to be listened to under the night sky; my eyes are drawn to finding the Hunter that has stood poised for a millennia or two. A sword raised and a bow drawn. An image drawn with stars captures rather elegantly the scope of Mastodon’s latest release The Hunter. Mastodon had explored flight and wide expanses of the sky with Crack The Skye, now on The Hunter they’ve strapped themselves on to a rocket and are falling through space with style.
Giant Squid’s music is as strange and rare and phenomenal as their namesake. Their works are subtle and nuanced, a delicate orchestration of oceanic sounds dancing lithely with the guitar’s heavy-handed jig. The band’s ecological philosophy deserts their urban surroundings of hometown Sacramento, California, you’ll be more likely to find them roaming a nature reserve or peering into rock pools by the sea.
It is that natural curiosity that shines through their body of work, most noticeably on 2009’s full length The Ichthyologist, where multiple guests leant their instrumentation to Giant Squid’s complex orchestration. Flutes, banjos, violins, cellos, trumpets, oboes, all additions that were explored to their limits and bent to main songwriter Aaron Gregory’s will. The Ichthyologist got them signed; it was that good.
Now Giant Squid return with the EP Cenotes (suh-noh-tees), a comparatively simpler record, the grandiose composition stripped away and no guests are involved. This is Giant Squid spouting their own black and inky concoctions.
‘Aion of Drakon’
Saturnalia Temple
[AJNA Offensive]
Have you ever had that dream where it’s really urgent and really important to get somewhere but things are holding you back? Cobwebs, mud, vines, family members, waves crashing down on you; you spend your strength fighting off and fighting through to get to do this really important thing. Desperation sets in and you feel hopelessly lost, the ground elevates around you and then you fall. Then there’s that stomach plunge feeling when you wake up and you literally jerk awake in the smallest moment of absolute terror.
Saturnalia Temple is the deluge of mud that surrounds your knees and forces you into a crawl. They tap that desperation and play on your astral paranoia, they channel the occult and raise their altars and pillars and summon the beasts in the forests. They tether you down, they plunge their knife, then you wake in terror.
