Blasts from the Present
by Grant MoserMusic
1. "i’ve been living without you"
If you hang on to something long enough, it’ll be new again. Fashion inevitably returns to a former state, adapts it some, adds in some new components, and is big again. As we’ve seen over the last few years, music is no different— at least the music getting all the press and front covers.
The Sun City Girls’ Schizophrenic Universe
by Nick StillmanMusic
Dada and Duchamp comparisons are almost too easy; the Sun City Girls’ project seems more Warholian. Warhol incorporated newspaper clippings, brand-name logos, and any other ready-made material he could find for his own work. He took familiar things and altered them, thus altering and blurring the viewer’s perception.
Eddie Durham: Forgotten Guitar Pioneer
by Dann BakerMusic
Plenty of recent pop albums feature fine production, tasteful arranging, and hummable tunes. The drag is that so many of them endlessly wallow in pop’s past glories; they’re based on worn templates—the sounds of another time and another place—that were created decades ago.
Notes from (the Pop) Underground
by Dave MandlMusic
Jad Fair & R. Stevie Moore
FairMoore, Old Gold Records 2002
FairMoore brings together two fiercely original figures in the American music underground. Jad Fair, with his brother David, was the co-founder of the hugely influential post-post-punk group Half Japanese, who, as Fair gloats on his website, "have recorded more albums than the Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined." (Incidentally, that’s post-post-punk in style, not time; the group’s first, home-recorded record was released back in 1977.
