Dave Knapik

Technically summer started on June 21, but it didn’t feel quite like it around here until Vice Records kicked it up a notch with their Intonation Music Festival this past weekend in Chicago’s Union Park. Last year’s inaugural Intonation was curated by local tastemakers Pitchfork Media, but 2006 has seen them hand the reins over to the Vice crew. Don’t worry, we didn’t lose a festival, they just splintered off like something from high school biology class and regenerated: P-Fork is throwing their own two-day Union Park party in late July. Two great festivals only a month apart from each other? Both located only a 10-minute stroll from my house? Hot damn!

I can remember being a Chicago indie kid in the 90’s: man, was life ever rough back then! Summertime showed us no sunshine. We had to get our kicks by night in the dark recesses of Lounge Ax or Empty Bottle. And we had to walk uphill both ways in the rain just to get there.

Although Intonation spanned two days, Rin and I were really only thrilled about Saturday’s second half. It’s the only part of the weekend we attended, but with The Streets, Lady Sovereign, Ghostface, Boredoms and Roky Erickson packed into it, we didn’t need anything else.

I like my live concert-going experiences to be concise. I don’t want any of this five-million-opening-bands-I-don’t-give-a-fuck-about nonsense; I just wanna cut to the business. The indie/punk era spawned this weird rock thrift, wherein we were led to value quantity over quality. I think I was about 17 years old when I first heard about how The Jesus and Mary Chain used to do 15-minute concerts back when they first formed. Apparently, so the story goes, people would get pissed off because they felt gypped by this and riot and spit and throw shit and generally go apeshit in ways that rockers always do in stories, but never do at, say, the Empty Bottle. But I wouldn’t have rioted for more, I woulda been cheering them on. I’d take 15 minutes of thrilling sonic mayhem over a bloated hour-long set (plus encores) any day.

With that spirit, we stayed home to watch Mexico lose to those dirty fucking cheating Argentineans and then walked over to the gig. Arriving during the opening moments of Roky Erickson’s set, I was pretty impressed with the space: two stages, a nice big park, lots of food and retail vendors and plenty of space to move around in. Roky’s set was a bit too bluesy - not lysergic enough for my tastes - so we took the opportunity to stroll around the grounds. I noted a place selling half-slabs of BBQ ribs, which I could sense were in my immediate future.

About midway through our questing, we passed by the Tower Records booth. I have no interest in buying CDs anymore, so I almost didn’t pay it any mind, but luckily I stopped to read their sign promoting the day’s artist “meet and greet” sessions. My mouth dropped open in disbelief as I read that from 7.30 – 8:00 p.m. I could meet Lady Sovereign! Could this be real? Like, I could meet the biggest midget in the GAME? Oh snap!

With about an hour to go on my photo op with the S-O-V, I bought some ribs for myself and some pulled turkey for Rin and we sat our asses down on the lawn for some Roky. He was starting to cook a bit now and even treated us to the 13th Floor Elevators‘ classic “You’re Gonna Miss Me”. Not quite the full 20-minute jam on “Rollercoaster” that I had been fantasizing about ever since I heard he was playing the festival, but it was good enough. Hell, it was good enough he was even there in the first place! The only stories I had ever heard about his past left me thinking that the rest of his days would be spent in relative obscurity at home in Texas, damaged by the electroshock therapy administered to him in the early 70’s under the mistaken notion that he was insane when really he just liked pot (who doesn’t?). Roky making a public appearance with a full band, and playing this strongly, was pretty inspirational.

Soon after I finished my ribs and Roky finished his set, it was time to get serious. It was Boredoms time. Japan has plenty of experimental noisy exports, many of who have been aurally terrorizing us for longer than even Boredoms’ impressive 20-year run. Having a higher ratio of fun to fucked-up-sound than most bands do in their live acts, their performances never fail to surprise and please.

These days their music is less random and more tribal, with no less than three drummers to bring the focus home to the rhythm section. It was Rin’s first exposure to their sound and she aptly noted its similarity to traditional Japanese taiko. I hadn’t thought of it that way, and I couldn’t help but agree once she pointed that out. And then some crazy bloops from a synthesizer washed over us, making sure that we didn’t forget the modern hidden inside the ancient.

Although it was hard to tear myself away from the mesmerizing call of Boredoms’ drumming triad, I knew that I had to answer another, higher, calling: the Lady Sovereign meet-and-greet at the Tower Records booth! It was 7:26 p.m., 4 minutes until the meeting and greeting was set to begin. We dashed over to the booth and were met with a mild queue. I could see the S-O-V already signing and posing for pictures. The only coherent thoughts I could muster were “OMG!” and “Do I have BBQ sauce on my face?”

The next few minutes were a bit of a blur, which ended with me at the front of the queue. Sovereign seemed surprised at her popularity, gazing out over the crowd while lamenting to herself and me, “Oh noooo, this queue’s never going to end!” I just sort of stood there looking at her thinking, “Uh, sorry dude, that sucks”, surprised to be having this funny little aside happening. She quickly snapped out of it, whisking around to me and quite sincerely saying, “Oh, sorry”, realizing that she was spacing out during my 10 precious meet-and-greet seconds.

And then the best thing ever happened: she grabbed my Tron jacket and said, “Hey, Adicolor! This is cool, I don’t have this one!” Having just received a high compliment from newly-crowned hip hop royalty, I said “thank you” like some five year-old that had just met the Queen of Siam and asked her which Adicolor gear she had. She said she had “the red one”, which I’m guessing is the Betty Boop jacket. No matter, Sov just praised my threads and the picture got snapped:

I could have called it a night here and been well happy, but there was more music to take in!

Wu-Tang’s Ghostface rocked the park next. Errbody loves some Wu-Tang action, but admittedly I’m a bigger fan of classic Wu-Tang than his new output. It’s probably safe to say most people are, unless you are in Ghostface’s posse, in which case your life insurance premiums go down a bit favoring the Killah over the classics.

After running through his own repertoire, Ghostface paused to pay homage to the dearly departed. We all raised our fingers up high in the air for the Ol’ Dirty Bastard, kicking off what can only be described as Ghostface Killah’z Medley Of Wu-Tang Tunez. All the classics were there, represented by a verse from one and a chorus from the other. The recitation of the “Wu-Tang clan ain’t nuthin’ to fuck wit” mantra made me realize that they just could have done that for an hour and it would have been an awesome show, because that’s how powerful that one simple refrain is. Hands were raised in the air in the shape of the familiar W but despite enjoying the music, I couldn’t shake the nagging sensation of being an extra in a Chappelle skit.

Ghostface’s biggest enemy wasn’t his new material nor his overindulgence in the past, but rather the sound engineering. His vocals felt too high in the mix with the bass failing to even remotely surround us. It’s a problem that would carry over to Sovereign’s set as well. Ghostface’s minimal arrangements, however, still gave his flow some room to breathe, whereas Sovereign’s grimy chaos left her fighting her own backing tracks.

It was still pretty damn exciting to see one of my favorite MCs of recent times take the stage. Hits like “Random” and “Ch-Ching” were as fresh as ever, but given the bad mixing job I think that my enjoyment was only facilitated by my prior memorization of the lyrics. With the subtraction of thick bass, the songs veered away from grime toward the unholy terrain of rap-rock, where no man (nor midget) should tread. I wish I could have seen her last year at Sonotheque, a tiny club near my house, instead. Her strength lies in her ability to engage playfully with the listener and to deliver lethal dosages of bass, both of which were not possible in this larger festival setting.

The first few songs in the subsequent The Streets set were all muddied up too, then thankfully someone capable took to the controls and balanced it all out. Mike Skinner’s ramblings were now bouncing happily over his garage beat, just the way they were meant to, and we soon had a new contender for the “Most Fun of the Day” title.

I didn’t really think much about The Streets having ever been fun, but they certainly were on Saturday. Sure he has his cheeky rhymes that make you smirk, and entire hilarious songs like “Don’t Mug Yourself” and “The Irony of It All”, but just around the corner from those he takes you back in where it’s dark. Live in concert, however, he’s a very different animal and soon I found it hard not to smile the entire time.

Skinner snatched up every opportunity to keep us along for the ride. His on-stage banter quickly centered on some big dude in the front row dressed in green. I’ll never forget him bringing this guy five free drinks, urging him to consume them all at once with the assertion, “We need to feed this green man some more alcohol.”

At the end of the night we were energized and thirsty for more. I don’t know if I would have felt that way had I attended for the entire day, but trimmed down to a dinner of all meat and no potatoes (ooh and ribs – don’t forget the ribs!), it was just the sort of quality-over-quantity soirée that I’d love to repeat. Guess I’ll see you fuckers at the Pitchfork weekender!

During a recent mp3 binge, I happened upon a random collection of works by the artist O Yuki Conjugate. The name rang a bell, and I couldn’t think of what they sounded like, so I thought I’d give it a shot. The album, Primitive (1983 – 1987), turned out to be a wonderful surprise. It’s experimental post-industrial ambient – occasionally you can hear the time frame it came from in its tracks, most certainly, but in a good way. It’s dirty and grainy, ghostly and creepy, repetitive and psychedelic: just the way I like it.

I liked the record enough to want to learn more, so I turned to allmusic.com. Now, a quick word about allmusic.com. Pre-internet, the All Music Guide along with the Trouser Press were the weirdo music lover’s bibles. They held myriad details of the secret history of underground music. If you wanted a discography on The Raincoats or Throbbing Gristle with descriptions of their music, they had it at a time when you were the only kid on your block that ever even heard of those artists let alone actually heard their music. When All Music Guide launched allmusic.com, it was an online music geek’s dream. To this day, I use it all the time, but I have my problems with it.

Chief among allmusic.com’s problems is its slow speed. I already feel a bit 90’s when consulting AMG, but I really have to congratulate them on their 56k modem simulation, as it really completes the sensation. Worse than the lag, however, is the consistency of the content: poor quality writing and half-baked opinions litter the site randomly. You might find a fantastic article on one topic and then an utterly awful one on another with your next click. The trouble with this is that because it all falls under the allmusic.com umbrella, it takes on an authoritative feel. The branding makes it feel like if you can trust one article, you can trust them all.

The more I thought about allmusic.com last night, the more I came to the conclusion that I was right in my “it feels 90’s” hunch on a level that was more fundamental to web development than music fandom. Whether you hate buzzwords or love them, it’s succinct and safe to say that allmusic.com is very Web 1.0. Yes, it has a varied group of contributors, but they are all chosen through a hiring process, which their FAQ told me I could learn about from their corporate web site. I went there and they told me exactly how eager they were to hire me: “AMG is not currently looking for additional freelance writers, but please check back for changes.”

It’s fine to hand-select your writers in this way. Music review sites that I read every day do this to a great effect. I wouldn’t let anyone else but me write on this blog, for example, except in the comments. But the internet is growing in a direction that makes it feel less useful for information repository sites like allmusic.com to do this. I can’t help but think that an allmusic.com wiki would be more useful. The collaborative spirit of the wiki would allow a wide variety of people to contribute to articles, resulting in a greater diversity of opinion and a more complete set of facts. If that’s too extreme, then at least the addition of a message board on each artist’s page or each album’s page would give the site visitor a polyphony of voices sounding on the subject of their research rather than the monolith they currently offer. Their model works great for a printed book, but it’s pretty closed-minded given the wide range of possibilities that emerges when bringing a concept like the All Music Guide to the internet, where nothing needs to remain static or single-sided.

I’ve digressed so much that I almost forgot about the O Yuki Conjugate, and might have were it not for the sound of the child chorus in “Sedation” playing in my headphones, making me wonder if there was acid in my morning coffee. Every day I listen to a lot of music that I’ve never heard before, so often I hear many things that I don’t find remarkable. It’s the price you pay for trying to find something awesome (remind me sometime to talk about the 60’s psychedelic album by the Freak Scene that I listened to yesterday: proof positive that drugs didn’t help everyone make cooler music). But after hearing a few songs on Primitive, I woke up and realized that I really dug this… enough to look them up on allmusic.com! (You doubted me, but I made like Dylan and brought it all back home, yo!)

After a brief skimming of their bio page, I skipped along to check out their discography, wondering what other treasures awaited me. On the discography page, each album an artist has released is listed along with a star rating on a scale of 1 to 5, with usually the highest ranked one receiving the “Best of Artist” honor in the form of a checkmark. I was excited to see that this honor went to O Yuki Conjugate’s mid-nineties excursion, Equator, which I haven’t yet heard. I was also surprised, however, to see that the album I dug so much, Primitive, only got two lousy stars. With such a low rating, I figured there must be a review to accompany it, and indeed there was.

The review was only a paragraph long, but it was possibly the snottiest, most pretentious review I’d ever read, and I read a lot of snotty, pretentious reviews on a daily basis. It’s fine not to like the album I like: diversity of opinion is a good thing. This review, however, went beyond that to say that not only did he not like the album, but that “there is no reason to like this disc.” That really got me, not to mention the fact that he closed that sentence and the paragraph by saying another close-minded adage: “and that is reason enough not to like it.” It is one thing not to like something, but it’s entirely another to crap on the act of liking it. What reason do I need to like it other than I like it? And since when was art about reason anyway?

Here’s another sampling of our writer’s fine criticism: “If there is such a thing as ‘middle-of-the-road’ e-music, this is it. OYC does very little to offend or challenge — at least on this disc. There is some dissonance, there are atmospheres, but the music is just kind of there.”

Okay, that’s a tall statement. Let’s dissect it.

First, he calls it “middle of the road”. I’ve heard a lot of music and this is far better than “middle of the road e-music” (whatever e-music is… personally I’d rather do ecstasy whilst listening to Merzbow, but that’s another story for another day). What a pretentious pseudo-critique to throw down and then give nothing to back it up!

Next is the real kicker given the background of the reviewer (more on that in a second): “OYC does very little to offend or challenge… there is some dissonance, there are some atmospheres, but the music is just kind of there.” I like a great deal of potentially offensive, challenging music, and this O Yuki Conjugate disc is certainly not all that offensive, whatever that means anyway. It’s not even the best of its class, but that’s not the point. It’s a solid collection of some far out tracks which I’m probably going to use in an upcoming DJ mix. It’s good and I dig it. To say that it does little to offend or challenge really sells it short. It makes it sound like a goddamn Enya record and belies the musicians’ real talent here for making intricate sound experiments with a taste for the dark side. And since when was art about offense anyway?

When you bitch to me about a piece of music doing little to offend or challenge, you better have something to back it up. Few people have that privilege around me. After all the noise they’ve heard, I’ll let Peter and Spencer say that. I’d let Masonna or William Bennett say that. I’d still find the comments pretentious, but their backgrounds afford them such bold statements. With that in mind, I Googled the author’s name: “Jim Brenholts”.

I got an assload of results. All of them from sites claiming to be about ambient music, but really were about new age music. Yeah. Not the good ambience that you or I or anyone decent and wholesome likes to hear upon getting home at 6am wanting the drugs to wear off, no, this is the middle-aged hippie-cum-yuppie shit that does very little to offend or challenge.

Since I came all the way to Google, I decided to peek around. I stumbled upon a site that featured a compilation CD that Jim himself released. Being a good journalist, I tracked down a few songs by these artists before starting this diatribe. What I found confirmed my suspicions. Big swooshy synth swirls, Tangerine-Dream-derivative arpeggios and the big godlike “ahhhhhhh” sound of space were all over these productions. They were like crudely-drawn caricatures of ambient music, laughably indulgent in every cliché known to the genre.

And yes, I hate this music with every fiber of my being, but despite that, I would never say that there is no reason to like it. You don’t need a reason, just like it if you like it, and if you don’t like it and want to share that sentiment, please do it in at least a semi-intelligent manner that doesn’t make blogpunks like me have to tear you a new asshole.

In summary:

• * O Yuki Conjugate’s Primitive: decent dark experimental post-industrial ambient music
• * allmusic.com: web dinosaur
• * Jim Brenholts: middle-aged new age hippie

Up for a chuckle:

http://www.ambientvisions.com
http://www.aucourantrecords.com/books/tracks/tracks.shtml

Despite starting out life as an introvert, I’ve grown into being quite the opposite. Except for when they totally suck and I want to kill them, I like people. Mostly. (Mostly….)

I enjoy meeting people and talking to them, but I also enjoy talking at them. I like the sound of my own voice. That’s probably why I got into college radio. Monologue is the preferred form of discourse in that arena of the unwell.

My fourth grade teacher once told me that I had a good radio voice. I took that complement and ran it all the way into spending ages 18 until I-don’t-wanna-mention-it DJing at my university radio station, WNUR. In future posts I’ll talk more about the time I spent there, but for now I’ll just say that I met some nice people that I wish I got to know better, others that became friends that I hope I’ll keep for ever, others still that I could always count on for knowing where to get decent weed and also some total motherfuckers that, in all honesty, deserve to get their asses beat to this day.

At the end of the day, though, I had a good radio voice and I liked hearing it. But more importantly, I had a good name: Dave Knapik. daveknapik. All one word. @yourmomshouse.com. Actually it was a totally retarded polack name, but by a bizarre twist of fate it actually rolled off the tongue rather nicely.

Here I should stop and give props to a fellow WNUR DJ from the old days, Leslie Hellman. She always called me “Daveknapik” instead of “Dave” or just “Knapik”, as in shouting “Hey, Daveknapik!” if she saw me walk past on the street. I liked the idea of it being this one solid phrase and so it stuck. I think maybe I actually feel slightly anxious now when I hear “Dave” or “Knapik” said separately instead of as one solid mass of syllables.

As the years rolled past, the self-deprecating indie kid had his battles with the egomaniac and eventually they balanced each other out. But I never stopped liking the sound of the phrase “Daveknapik”. I like to think it’s okay to be a little egotistical as long as you’re not a total dickwad about it.

I like inserting it in place of lyrics in my favorite songs. For example, it works pretty well with the 70’s Dr. Pepper jingle. “I’m a Knapik, you’re a Knapik, wouldn’t you like to be Daveknapik, too?” If you don’t remember it, just Google the 70’s or consult a retrowiki. The internets remembers.

Similarly, it works in, say, “The Reflex” by Duran Duran in place of where, well, the phrase “the reflex” appears in the song: “Daveknapik is an only child, who’s waiting by the park/Daveknapik is in charge of finding treasure in the dark”. Weird. Dude. I was an only child. I was also a fat kid. But I never waited in parks because my parents didn’t let me wait in parks for fear I’d be abducted by some fat kid molesting child molester. And I was only ever in charge of finding Little Debbie snack cakes in the supermarket, which come to think of it, were pretty good treasures to a fat kid.

Lately, however, due to my Tilly and the Wall obsession, I like plugging it into their new song “Rainbows in the Dark” from their Bottoms of Barrels album. It’s a beautiful song and I know I pay it a horrible injustice treating it this way, but how can I not give into the temptation to sing the line “Sometimes you just can’t… hold back the river” as “Sometimes you just can’t… hold back Daveknapik”?

I mean, sometimes you just can’t hold back Daveknapik.

And let that be a lesson to you, one and all, but especially the total motherfuckers that, in all honesty, deserve to get their asses beat to this day.