August 2004 – LonelyMachines

Go north. Invest in hydrogen cells.

The subject of John Titor came up in conversation today. In case you never heard, he showed up in early 2001 claiming to be a time-traveler from the year 2036.

Sadly, many people believed him, and many still do.

Apparently, the world in 2036 is recovering from a global war in which American civil liberties eroded to the point that, in 2004-2005, there were “Waco-type events” on a weekly basis, and the country finally fell into civil war, the opposing factions being centralized urban areas and organized rural militias. Then the militias allied themselves with the Russians, who subsequently nuked the urban areas, leaving the United States a semi-nuclear wasteland.

Yep. It gets better.

This war escalates and draws in China and the EU, and by Titor’s time, a shaky and traumatized US is split into five regions, each governed by a separate president but united under a central Constitution. The economy is largely agrarian, and technology is scarce.

Continued...

Music

Codename: Dustsucker by Bark Psychosis

Man, it’s been awhile. Hex came out in, what, 1993 or so? What gives? Graham Sutton gets some friends together, records a modest record which receives almost no promotion but invents the whole “Post-Rock” genre, then he just disappears for eleven years? Hm.

If you’ve never heard Hex, kick yourself now. When your posterior regains feeling, get a copy. You won’t be sorry. It was (and still is) one of the true masterpieces of the 1990’s, easily ranking along with records like Loveless and the first Low record in terms of sheer originality. It’s a slow, sparse and almost hopelessly melancholy record that exists in its own private universe, with nary a trace of any outside influence. One critic, not knowing how to pigeonhole it, coined the term “Post-Rock” to refer to it, and the name stuck, but after touring for a bit, Bark Psychosis just seemed to dissipate. Sutton went off to work on a drum-and-bass project called Boymerang, and that was seemingly it.

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Music

Faking the Books by Lali Puna

Lali Puna have always come across to me as more of a “concept” act than anything else. After hearing the rabid, foaming fanyboyish praise that got heaped on Scary World Theory, I was completely dumbfounded. The whole thing came off as a premeditated Stereolab-meets-Notwist experiment, with little of the latter’s subtle power and far too much of the former’s fey smugness. I wrote it off as by-the-numbers Post-Rock and forgot about them.

Needless to say, I had no expectations for this record, but on impulse, I decided to check it out. Glad I did. Faking the Books drops the coyness and Tinkertoy aesthetics in favor of something more straightforward and much more successful.

The opening track could have been lifted straight out of the Notwist catalog, even though it’s got a character all its own. Valerie Trebeljahr has a pensive, almost exhausted-sounding voice, and when she sings, “everybody knows/this ain’t heaven,” she evokes the type of elegaic feel that fills Notwist’s best work.

Continued...