SUNDAY AFTERNOON WITH MSX HURRICANE

After a party like the one I witnessed last night, I get up with such a headache…it’s pounding my brain….like a sledge hammer..and I don’t even drink! X !
Berlin Mitte has spiraled down quite a bit since I was last there…and this is what you get when you do an old friend a favor…nevertheless…it’s always good to experience all kinds of different things. ….I guess…usually it’s the music. last night felt a bit like landing in this big empty space, white, nothing….death but without the thrill to enter the unknown. So in Berlin-West you wake up the next morning…that gray city…everything smells like cigarettes…dry throat. Immediately my mind tells me: Put this CD on…Araki Kenta….come on, you got it months ago in Japan…and you still haven’t even opened it!

In Los Apson , one of my favorite record stores in the world (which seems weird, now that there are probably 31 stores left on the planet…having a favorite record store sounds like saying this is my favorite gray whale.), so in Los Apson the guy showed me this CD, described it as video game music. And I buy it straight away - you know when you can see what is good just by looking at the artwork.

Even though most of this music makes this silly link to children entertainment. I assume because these sounds remind us of when we were 4 years old and this was the music that came with games and toys. When you enter a new age, you change the music, that’s what it used to be. Now people who are 42 years old listen to music which could have been made for 10 year olds…not even that! it sounds like it was recorded by 10 year olds…just without the imagination, and the fun that comes with not following / knowing too many rules in your life.

One of my first songs that I wrote at the age of ten was called “Don’t touch that stove - you’ll get burnt!” (in German though)….people around me always interpreted as something sexual… so this raises the question: Who decides which music is being liked and understood by kids, when even adults have their music taste on such a tight leash, that the definition of the term “music taste” could be replaced with “poodle” ?

If you want safety in your life, go to bed, stay there and don’t do anything, but don’t listen to music which is not challenging you. Use sound to connect new dots in your brain…it will thank you for it.

Video Game music is not for kids - never has been really. If you really listen back to the 80ties arcade game music, you’ll find music which could be compared to pieces Bach wrote for String Quartets….
So this is when Araki Kenta comes in…I wasn’t expecting anything because of my headache…it got me staring at the speakers….there is this guy somewhere in Japan making this, and some tracks have the quality of the first Neu! album…but done with 8bit computer sounds… he is not trying to be funny…this is serious stuff… I should have played that last night to those art pinheads…and not Boredoms…

3-audio-titel-snippet-1

4-audio-titel-snippet-1

5-audio-titel-snippet-1

7-audio-titel-snippet-1

Even though this was my most fun moment… to stand there letting this 12 minute track go on, get heavier by the minute, and one sound engineer screaming in my ear, the lighting guy freaking out, see people leave, others try to wrap their brain around it, and then the handful, we call them the elite in our DJ scene, these are the ones who get it….the top of the pyramid, they react, they understand , they get involved and not just consume! they (still) feel and think….their bodies as one….
If you go to a Baby Shambles concert you see people behave like rice grain… dumb people glued to a dumb band with guitars. total rock’n'roll conformity, created by tabloid magazines…believing like fundamentalists in the old lie, that a drug can make a musician create something exceptional ….at some point around when Bush got elected UK music died…when hero John Peel died, it was totally over….

Look towards the East more…you will find the best music there…it will take a few years until the USA is back on track…like Obama said , it’s a long way…and this is also the case for the music scene…aspirin….and a six pack red bull….the pain will hopefully go away…

Alec Empire

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 16th, 2008 at 8:57 pmand is filed under album reviews, alec empire's journal, digital hard-core, music articles, posts with digital audio. 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.