|
|
February 23rd, 2006 by Godfre Leung (Permalink)
Label: Ache Year: 2005 Add Comments |
A few months ago, I played my advanced copy of Secret Mommy’s Very Rec for a friend. His response: “It’s nice, but hasn’t this kind of conceptual project been done to death already?” According to the press release, the backstory behind Very Rec is that Andy Dixon, a.k.a. Secret Mommy, went to recreational spaces like community centers and gyms with microphones hidden up his sleeves. He then sampled the sounds to create some interesting, though not particularly groundbreaking, glitch-tronica (Mouse on Mars’ Idiology is a pretty good comparison point). But the conceptual project behind Very Rec isn’t the creation of electronic music from field recordings of everyday sounds. That, to be sure, has been done. What is interesting about Very Rec is how Dixon plays with his field recordings — the double-entendre of the title “Very Rec” (recording/recreation) is the first clue. The songs are immediately pleasurable because they revolve around sounds like a tennis racket hitting a ball, the echo after a squash ball bounces against a wall, and the sound of an ice skater stopping. Upon further reflection, Very Rec asks us why these sounds are so pleasing and how we relate to recreation itself. The student of Marxism in me is tempted to analyze the unnatural division of labor and free time in capitalist society but, really, that’s only a small part of why Very Rec is such an incredible album.
For me, the real backstory behind Very Rec begins ten and a half years ago. At fourteen, I went to my very first all-ages punk rock show at Seylynn Hall in North Vancouver, BC to see Andy Dixon’s band, the late and lamented Vancouver punk rock legends d.b.s. When d.b.s. broke up five years ago, I interviewed Dixon for some ambitious start-up magazine that, curiously, never got around to paying me. When I asked him about Seylynn Hall, the site of my (and his) teenage punk rock years, he said, “It is still around and there are shows every month, but nobody ever hears about them, including me.” I was nineteen and he was twenty; our time in the Lynn Valley punk rock scene had passed. But spaces like Seylynn Hall, a daycare by day, remain and will remain for future generations of teenaged D.I.Y. punk rockers. All around North America and, probably, the world, kids are putting on their own secret punk rock shows in rec centers, community centers, middleschool gymnasiums, and daycares. When bands come through town to play these shows, the kids form their own bands and open for their heroes. When no touring bands are passing through, these kids headline their own shows and become heroes themselves. Kids see other kids at their school playing in bands and realize that there’s nothing stopping them from having a band of their own. The spaces of Very Rec aren’t only spaces for bourgeois recreation; by night, they’re the spaces of punk rock. There is a track on Very Rec called “Daycare” that is built around the sound of scissors cutting construction paper. In the sound of kids making art, you can hear punk rock being born.
A.A.Davidson, review 2:
Sameness might matter when we die. Until then, it’s a confine. Sure, modern music apes The Beatles, The Beatles aped some people who didn’t get as much publicity, who aped some blues musicians, who aped some jazz musicians, who aped some classical Argonauts, who basically dolled-up chord progressions that some Pharaoh thought of on an instrument that disappeared in a sandstorm 2,000 years ago. Or whatever. History requires/recycles sameness the same way death does: as a symbol of permanence. History needs a consistency untouchable to the charms of change, innovation, or evolution. Like death, history is still. In this way history is, at least somewhat, dead.
Until we die, there are more valuable ways to lasso the experiences of the world. Vancouver, B.C., Canada’s Secret Mommy understands many of them. More importantly, Andy Dixon, the man behind the Mommy, understands how to gift-wrap these experiences, making them desirable. Secret Mommy has delivered three LP’s and one EP of deviant electronica. His first album, 2003’s Babies That Hunt shred IDM like David Lee Roth’s solo debut with Steve Vai shred Van Halen. Secret Mommy’s follow-up, 2004’s Mammal Class, revealed a method to the madness, finding Dixon hacking up pop songs and dipping them in his own vat of radiation until they became unrecognizable—a more interesting species. His 2004 EP, Hawaii 5.0 was more focused, building songs around impossibly specific moments: waves crashing, seagulls cawing, a luau happening. These records handle familiar sounds in a familiar medium, but Dixon’s manipulation and reconstruction are in a league of their own. His efforts culminate on his latest, Very Rec.
Secret Mommy songs involve meticulous layers of sounds, each unhindered by recording hiss, sloppy white noise, or static. These crystal sounds dance on techno rhythms, rhythms often built from the sounds themselves. Dixon is a master of effecting and compressing his samples. He can make the sound of a soccer ball colliding with a chain link fence sound like a crash symbol. Give this man digital scalpel and a wall to hang his credentials, and he’ll reveal the surgeon within.
On Mammal Class he reclassified snips of pop songs into his own rigorous electronic language (see what he does with the mantra “let’s get a party started!” on the track “Andrew W. Cake”). The beauty of Very Rec is how Dixon liberates that language. Music this dense takes pleasure in eluding description, but Very Rec limits the possibility for description: the songs are built from the sounds of things. “Tennis Court” takes crisp samples—the ball hitting the racket, a shoe screech on pavement, or a player grunting—and organizes them into an intricate song. On “Dance Studio” Dixon (an accomplished guitarist) loops a melody over metronomic snippets of tapping shoes and swishy arm movements. One sample records a shoe sliding along the floor. It’s a minimal sound that takes a few listens to discover. The challenge of the discovery makes it more endearing.
It’s bliss to watch Dixon get unexpected mileage from his concept. On the track “Weight Room” a voice keeps time by counting reps of pushups. “Music Room” features a singer clearing a throat; on “Basketball Court” Dixon plays with the natural echo of a sneaker squeaking on the court. “Squash Court” abandons the Kylie-speed techno familiar to Secret Mommy’s entire catalog. Instead, the track drones around what sounds like a single game of squash in a lonely gym. It’s a careful found sound, real emptiness that Dixon fills up.
There’s still more history relevant to Secret Mommy’s sonic success. Before the Mommy, Dixon was the shogun guitarist for the abstract-punk outfit The Red Light Sting. The band rocked the spectrum between early Fugazi and late Blood Brothers, with structural twists in its song architecture that a) set the band apart from the post-punk morass, and b) screamed Andy Dixon. With both The Red Light Sting and Secret Mommy, Dixon’s truest concern involves the preservation and transmutation of the ever-hallowed institution of the “riff”—perhaps the only institution Fugazi would allow. The Red Light Sting was all about the riff; the songs would spawn from an angular, hammered-on guitar line and end with a dozen more. This is Secret Mommy’s winning trick: intricate, rocking, and all around memorable parts. Arguably that’s the trick in all successful music, but like The Red Light Sting, there are few artists daring to cram this many memorable parts into such tiny song-machines. The result, especially in the case of Secret Mommy, is a higher-tech robot. It’s unfamiliar and useful.
Like the musical equivalent of a film within a film, Very Rec achieves the feat of recording the process of recording sound. The swath of reference points for Secret Mommy is broad: Fennesz’s Endless Summer and Matmos’ The Civil War come to mind, as does Four Tet’s Rounds (Dixon released a Four Tet 7” on his stellar label, Ache Records). Like these bands, Very Rec collages Dixon’s tenacious musicianship in an electronic medium. But Very Rec’s work with familiar subjects becomes a sacred talk point and the ballast for its success. Dixon’s nimble manipulation of everyday sounds qualifies him to write a guidebook describing the frailty of sameness. Regarding that book, here’s anticipating hypothesis one: Everything might lead to the same end, but until then everything can go everywhere.
Secret Mommy online
Ache Records online
The Red Light Sting Myspace
