Честит рожден ден, Петя!

Обичам те, супер мъного. Happy birthday.

The partridge or the drummers?

Merry Christmas. I'm off to scenic Baltimore tomorrow, the first stop on my trans-continental tour, but I should be blogging most days while I'm away. In the meantime, I leave you with the album that easily got played more than any other in our house this year.


The National, Boxer

The day after the day before Christmas

OK, so it's a day late, but I'm guessing not too many of you spent Christmas Eve awaiting the next installment of my favorite albums of 2007. Still, I hope you'll agree this one was worth the wait. And I know I said these wouldn't be in any particular order, but I've definitely been saving the best for last. Enjoy.


Panda Bear, Person Pitch

Dave Longstreth, author of Damaged

The Dirty Projectors’ 2007 album Rise Above borrows its name, as astute fans of early West Coast hardcore will surely notice, from the opening song on Black Flag’s landmark 1981 album Damaged. Described by the Projectors’ sole permanent member Dave Longstreth as an attempt to re-imagine the original, the album reconstructs its source material entirely from the memory of an album that many of us thoroughly internalized a decade or two ago, and which played a constitutive role in defining the musical taste that has somehow brought us to where we are today (full disclosure: I never really liked Black Flag, but my rejection of them was mostly a pathetically failed attempt at asserting my own taste, since virtually every band I listened to in the late-80s would cite Black Flag as one of their foremost influences).

Anyone who knows the Dirty Projectors, however, knew better than to expect a covers-album, even before this record was released. The dreaded “concept album” tag sticks better, though it probably distracts from what a fantastic album Rise Above is, even without the concept. Still, one of the things that really strikes about the album is that it actually makes the concept work for it, though the operative concept might not be exactly the one being advertised at the front door. Allow me to try to explain.

One of Borges’s most deservedly famous short stories recounts the literary accomplishments of the fictional author Pierre Menard, who, besides a number of lesser texts (“a manuscript list of verses which owe their efficacy to their punctuation”), distinguished himself through his effort to re-create from the ground up Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

He did not want to compose another Quixote—which is easy—but the Quixote itself . Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

If you’ve never read “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” before, I promise it will reward the 10-15 minutes it will require of you. The narrator of the story, something of a Menard apologist, holds the author’s absurd aspirations in the highest regard, and heaps praise on Menard for improving on the original, even though he has merely produced exact replicas of three of its chapters. Comparing two identical passages, one from the original and the other from Menard, the narrator concludes: “Menard's fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes'.”

Of course this is (nearly) pure farce. If anything, it is meant to expose the fallacy in certain platitudes of literary criticism while cracking the kind of joke that makes nerds like me drool all over their worn copies of Labyrinths. And yet I’m tempted to say, in all seriousness, that the following lyrics, as performed by Longstreth, possess far more pathos and nuance than when barked by Henry Rollins:

We are born with a chance
Rise above
Were gonna rise above
I am gonna have my chance
Rise above
Were gonna rise above
We are tired of your abuse
Try to stop us its no use

Granted, at face value that’s some embarrassingly juvenile sentiment, any way you cut it. But one of the remarkable and admirable things about Longstreth’s take on his source material (and now we’re approaching the real concept) is his utter refusal to back down from the reality of its memory, even when that reality is less than pretty. These are lyrics that (somehow) were deeply moving to many of us at 13 or 14, and it would be so easy to mock their naivete with the help of even a touch of perspective. But that would also be far less interesting. One more digression, if you’ll be so kind.

There’s a certain other album released this year that’s been receiving heaps of accolades for, among other things, its “maturity.” Now this kind of compliment always comes across a bit back-handed, since maturity is something most of us take for granted in adults. But it carries an even deeper poignancy when directed at an album of the kind of dance music that fuels a brand of escapism and refusal of maturity that many see as a plague affecting aging hipsters (god, I hate that word, and I promise I’ll never use it again) in denial about which side of the cool-apex they’re presently dancing on.

Still, this kind of thing is being said about LCD Soundsystem's (aka James Murphy) Sound of Silver, and apparently it is intended as praise. Take the following review of one of its singles, for example:

At heart, "All My Friends" is a poignant piece of songwriting designed to resonate with those in the upper limits of the 18-to-34-year-old demographic. It's a song written by a middle-ager that looks back upon the kinds of simple momentary glories it's likely soundtracking this summer: hanging out, joking around, escaping into flings, and dancing on drugs.

Alright. That might actually resonate more than I care to admit. But finally acknowledging that you’re an adult when you’re well into your thirties (Murphy’s or mine) should hardly count as maturity, anymore than reflecting on this kind of delayed growth should count as interesting. But whereas Murphy’s take on the misdirected energies of his youth is cynical, jaded, and just plain weary, Longstreth’s (if I may be permitted to read it this way) is, well, far more mature.

The fact that Rise Above flatly refuses to ever condescend to its inspiration, deserving thought it may be of such treatment, makes it a fascinating study of memory and taste, and how these develop with us we struggle to outgrow them. The Projectors’ version of “Rise Above” retains all the striving and urgency of the original, but swaps it coarse energy for a depth of feeling that is at once melancholy and triumphantly optimistic, more beautifully melodic than you ever would have believed Black Flag could be, and well, damnit, more than a little transcendent.



(edit: Not liking Black Flag is no excuse not to listen to the song, which sounds almost nothing like the original!)

Cold like Finland

Our internet was out yesterday, so I'm behind one entry on my 12 days of Christmas project. More on that in a minute.


Today, I spent the better part of the day trying not to freeze to death while shooting photos of snowboarders launching themselves off the snow-covered mountain that was recently constructed in downtown Sofia. It was so cold that by the time my legs got completely numb I was happy, because at least it meant they didn't sting anymore. It was so cold my ipod froze, and wouldn't work again until I kept it my armpit for half an hour. It was so cold, I heard the Finnish guy standing next to me say, "Man, it's cooooooold here!" Cold.

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Caribou, Andorra



Here are a couple of albums that made my jaw drop this year, one very suddenly and the other only after a few listens. One is also by an artist whose last album I loved, the other by an artist whose last album I (mistakenly) wrote off as over-rated and a bit dull. hey, we all make mistakes. Can you guess which one is which?


Burial, Untrue

The magic position

I'm supposed to blog today, but after Petya's office party I'm too tired to do much more than eat leftover гювече and go to sleep. Pencho did his best to get me drunk, Niki cursed me for being a Levski fan, and Krassi (големият) accused me of being a bad luck charm (see Levski), but in the end it was trying to keep up with my wife that wore me out. So, with words failing me at the moment, I'll leave you with a picture and a song, and ask you to find the connection between them. Лека нощ.


Patrick Wolf, The Magic Position

On noise and sound

To my mind, one of the most interesting qualities of consciousness is the way it is thoroughly embedded in time as one of its basic conditions. What do I mean by that? I mean that if you reduced reality to a series of moments, and then added these moments to each other, the resulting whole would not remotely approximate our experience, even with an infinite series of such moments. The present state of consciousness never exists independently of our memory of the past and our anticipation of the future.

And one of my favorite qualities of music is its ability to make this quality of consciousness apparent to us, but also to manipulate and even exploit it.


No Age, Weirdo Rippers

The two members (a drumset that sounds like its just about to draw its last breath, and a guitar with one very fuzzy, reverb-heavy pedal) of No Age used to play in a noise band together, and those roots betray themselves at the opening of the song "Every Artist Needs a Tragedy." For the first 2:15, distorted guitar loops build and fade away without much discernible pattern or progress, while cascades of cymbals don't so much keep time as merely add texture. It starts to feel like things are going nowhere, except towards building atmosphere.

But when a (really simple) hook and a beat emerge, as if out of nowhere, suddenly the first two-plus minutes of the song are completely transformed, retroactively. What at first sounded like droning, aimless noise instantly takes on the sound of a sonic primordial ooze, slowly stirring itself into patterns of organization that don't reveal their intelligibility until after they give rise to something else. It's a really simple trick (and song), but when it works it's hard to beat.