Category: Music

Momus is trying to get his “Screengazer” meme out to the world so in the name of genre maximization here’s his entire essay.

I describe in my current essay Sound Dust hearing a member of a French laptop group called Shinsei talking about how he’s more influenced by My Bloody Valentine than electronica. And Bingo! — it all falls into place. Laptops are the new guitars, glitchtronica is the new indie art rock. Okay, fine, that’s all been discussed on another thread.

But suddenly I realise that a genre term is there for the taking. It’s on its hind legs yapping at me, begging to be used. ‘Screengazer’. MBV were ‘Shoegazers’, these laptop people influenced by them are ‘Screengazers’. The guitar is worn lower than the laptop, so you gaze shoewards. The laptop has an interface that casts light on your face when you gaze at it, so it’s a bit more dramatic. But in both cases, it’s the music that matters, and the concentration and listening that are emphasised by your ‘gaze’. It’s the idea that you’re entranced by the possibilities of sound, and forget about the audience, your own body, your responsibilities as a performer to ‘entertain’.

I googled ‘Screengazer’ and was rather surprised to find that nobody has used the term. Nobody has put these two scenes together in that one handy word. So today I want to use ILM to declare this the term for all indie glitchtop forthwith, and declare myself its baptiser and godfather! Hurrah! By perhaps no co-incidence whatsoever, I am also cited in Simon Reynolds’ discussion of the nascent genre as the aphorist who said ‘In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen people’, which is another relevant point about the Screengazers.

There are distinctions to be made. The Shoegazers lived in a specific place: Camden, London. They all drank in the same pub (supposedly). The Screengazers, a mere ten years later, are post-geography, and post-nation state. They live in San Francisco, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Reykjavik, Rome, wherever. Their community is where we are right now, in the liminal interzone of the net. (Expand distinctions / similarities.)

I’m a little nervous about my new genre term, because it’s satirical. Nobody is going to say ‘I’m Jim, I have a laptop project called O.bso/lite, and I’m a Screengazer’. Just as Shoegazer (who coined that term, wasn’t it some Melody Maker journalist?) was a slightly mocking and hostile term which hastened the end of the delivery style of Slowdive and early Ride, so Screengazer is the kind of mocking, prodding term that will have laptopists stage-diving before long — ie that will shame them into renunciation of the very features that make them important and distinctive, ie their deep, valuable concentration on sound, their avoidance of hoary old rock gestures and the physical staples of entertainment (‘put your hands together, yeah!’).

Googlism on Shoegazer: ‘shoegazer is / was an insult over here’.

So it’s with reluctance that I unleash, in this thread, the viral meme ‘Screengazer’ on a previously unsuspecting world. I suspect that, launched today from ILM, it will have a deadly effectiveness, erasing and effacing other genre terms and becoming perhaps the standard label for the genre, at least for people cynical of the genre’s practises, and that its way of defining a bunch of disparate activities will actually hasten the change and dissolution of those practises. Changes I don’t particularly want to see, although I personally mix dancing and singing with my Sound Dust, and would never think of gazing at my iBook’s screen a second longer than it took to trigger the next mp3.

I know that, if I hit ‘Submit’ now, when I run Google and Googlism searches one month hence, and one year hence, I will find many references to ‘Screengazer’. They will mostly be more hostile and dismissive than references to ‘Laptop’ and ‘Glitch’ (Googlism on Glitch: ‘glitch is definable as a rhythmic offshoot of musique concrete’).

Googlism on ‘Screengazer’, December 20th 2002: ‘Sorry, Google doesn’t know enough about screengazer yet.’ Fine, why don’t I just leave it like that?

So do I hit ‘Submit’ and get that gratifying ‘Success!’ screen, or do I leave the genre to keep growing in its current diverse, organic, shambolic and slow way, protected, like a flower by thorns, by the current mishmash of terms: ‘Laptop’, ‘Glitch’, ‘Sound Mangling’, ‘DSPism’, ‘Mad MAX’…?

— Momus

Shit. NME has the full story.

Some cool photos from the Savage Republic show in Portland. Hey, they got an actual fire!

From the “what doesn’t kill you…” department, Mike Daddino is blogging reviews of every rendition of “Send In The Clowns” he can find.

Julian Cope reviews Comets On Fire’s Field Recordings From The Sun…

A press release that kinda grabs you by the PooPoo, huh? Almost beats Keith Altham’s ‘Narcissus in Metamorphosis’ note of SCOTT 3. Make ya wanna listen? Yup, me too. And, like Les Rallizes Denudes, it doesn’t disappoint. Comets on Fire stuck a 4-track TEAC cassette machine in one room like Donald Ross Skinner did with DROOLIAN, but these suckers came out with the loudest record this side of the Cheer’s ‘Song Cycle’.

Next thing we know, they’z flagged down a passing hearse and supped on the dead remains of our lately passed and beloved Lord David Sutch, got themselves well bombed out on that goon’s pills, and speedily delivered an even better 2nd album, faultlessly-named (and itchy-with-self-understanding) FIELD RECORDINGS FROM THE SUN.

Wakka-wakka, as Fozzie Bear would say.
Be expectant, be very expectant.

Because gone is the extreme-just-to-be-extreme Ibiza sunburn of the first LP, to be replaced with the choicest melange of FUNHOUSE and HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN GRILL. Those first album turds on a bum ride have, by this second album, become spectral starchasers with Pausanius’ ticket to ancient truths. In just a few months, they’z gone from three foot six inch Austrolecipethicus types to divine six foot temple builders. Sonically, it’s a distance thing, like they’ve moved the horizon several miles back and parked a fjord in front of the microphone. But emotionally and psychically it’s the difference between UNKNOWN PLEASURES and CLOSER, and it’s the daring action of forward-thinking Motherfuckers.

So there you go. Obvious, immediate, totally absorbing – buy them, steal them, burn them, both albums are a Must Have. Anyway, I figured I’d better push FIELD RECORDINGS FROM THE SUN because it’s newer, easier to find, and MUCH better. But I thought I’d better at least inform you of the presence of that first one because you still need it and it’ll only get re-issued on CD if irate heads berate those involved. So, here goes on the description, and I’ll keep it as minimal as I can without frothing at the mouth too much…

From the transcript of Letterman show with Warren Zevon

Dave: what was the diagnosis?

WZ: it’s lung cancer that’s spread.

Dave: that’s tough.

WZ: it means you better get your dry cleaning done on special.

…

Dave: from your perspective now, do you know something about life and death that maybe I don’t know now?

WZ: not unless I know how much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich. you know.

Some more photos from Terrastock V.