Lo-Speed Brainplow "Backstabbin' Centerfold" and "Broken Mirror"

For as long as I can remember listening to music, I can remember manipulating it. As soon as I got my first two-deck cassette jambox, I started remixing tapes and shuffling their running orders, based on whatever criteria I thought fitting. My most popular methodology was to re-organize the tapes in descending order of “favorite song” to “least-favorite song.” While it was fun to do (especially for a kid with few extra-cirricular activities and like 3 or 4 friends, all of whom did), I would only listen to the remixed versions one or two times each, because they started to become a drag on the second side, which I might have well dubbed “the side with the shitty songs on it.” In retrospect, my primitive mixtapes probably made me appreciate (at least unconsciously) the fine art of album sequencing, but just recently, after coming across one of those old tapes and (ultimately, in vain) trying to listen to it after almost 20 years, it made me realize another tendency I’ve always had: trying to fool myself into liking music.

About 7 or 8 years later, the 3-disc CD changer I got as a high-school graduation gift ended up serving as a machine with which I would systematically attempt to con myself into liking albums. If there was a record I simply couldn’t get into, I would put it on shuffle with two other discs—on the setting where individual songs would play off each disc until all three were done—and see how songs sounded when they crept up and surprised me. I’ve always explained it by comparing it to a visual example (meaning, of course, an example that can be much more easily understood): certain colors (or patterns, etc.) don’t look good until you put them beside other colors that accentuate different, more appealing qualitites. Sometimes, even artist-created context can strangle an album, burying otherwise great individual moments under the weight of some big theme, or more commonly in my experience, a uniformity of tone. Plucking a song from a record that has a bold or repetitive motif, and playing it alongside with a group of other songs from other records, is like finally letting your child play with children other than his own brother and sister. But, you know, with kids instead of CDs.

Now that even the lumbering triceratops of the mainstream music industry has acknowledged that the irreversible trajectory of pop music is to the level of endlessly reproducible icon, the irony of music as information is revealing itself to me. While the listener (now increasingly called a “user”) certainly has infinitely more options for music re-contextualization, he/she also is overwhelmed with associated information about that music, which works to limit the new contexts that the listener can give the music. These days, the way I listen to music with iTunes is just an exponentially more massive version of what I used to do with tapes and CDs, and while it should thus automatically be that much more fun, it’s often just tiring. I don’t consider myself the average music listener or anything, although if you’re reading this site and you’re name’s not “Mom,” I can assume you know what I’m talking about. When I hear a new song, or a full album of songs now, one of my first instincts is to plow around the Web and find as much information about the band as I can—what they look like, where they’re from, etc.—and that ancillary information often helps me make a value judgment about the music as much as the actual music itself does (for a lot of reasons I’ll go into at some later point, I’m sure).

What I’m getting at is that even though now that I can take 20 days worth of songs anywhere with me, turning them into little film scores of my activities (a dog walk is not a dog walk until it’s soundtracked by Jean-Claude Vannier, for instance), I’m almost positive that I privilege what the musicians or their representatives say about themselves more than my self-created connections. In other words, I’m so used to seeking out “official” information about bands (and I’ve done this since way before I had this blog) that it gets massive dibs over anything I can dream up on my own (to some people, I’m buying into the intentional fallacy, but that’s their problem). However, on exceedingly rare occasions, I’ll come across music with absolutely no contextual information whatsoever, and the only meaning it will have will be that which I create in my head. It fulfills one of the contradictory (but inherent), promises of music-as-information, which is the oasis-like existence, somewhere out there, of music-with-no-associated context. Digitized, invisible music that, through its technological makeup, fools me like I used to fool myself. The equivalent of finding a cassette on the street with no label, popping it in and trying to make sense of what’s going on. Who are these bodiless people, or machines, or zombies, making this music, and why am I imagining them to look a certain way? The visual (the associated information with music) is a much, much more powerful memory-creator than the aural (the music all by itself), to the extent that when you only have the latter and have to provide the former on your own, it can be an incredibly enjoyable thing (see: Jandek).

I got an email from a random guy a month or so ago, which was actually kind of refreshing. On an average day, a blogger of my mediocre popularity level gets 20-30 messages from PR people pitching their bands, most of which I don’t like (the bands, not the PR people, of course). But this guy just said hi, and told me about his own site, which I then visited. It was more a personal website than a blog, and I eventually stumbled on a page that had a bunch of streaming music on it. The embedded player only played a single track, though, with several songs sequenced together, like on a tape. The music definitely came from some sort of home-recorded tape, that was for sure. And I found myself listening for what seemed like an hour, spacing out and making my own backstory for how the musicians looked, how they formed as a band, how their internal dynamic operated, and so on and so on. It was an experience I haven’t had in I don’t know how long (at least as long as All Music Guide has been around, for sure): hearing music for the first time with no context provided, not even a name. This guy’s website was using technology strictly for its transportive capabilities, and almost not at all for its contextual information-providing function. All I had to go on while listening was that the musicians were friends of this nice guy who emailed me.

I eventually emailed the guy back, asking for mp3s and okay, All The Information He Could Provide On This Music, Which I Like Very Much. I have no factual evidence for this, but I hope what he sent back was a bunch of made-up stories, because it all seemed so weird. But maybe it was because it simply didn’t conform to the master narrative formula that record labels and artists themselves are forced to create in order to sell music (providing genre information, RIYL, relevant autobiographical information, etc.), but was instead a personal story about an unassuming guy who recorded himself playing music (and I’m now realizing that I’m providing that narrative here…powerless…to…resist…).

Anyway, here are two of the mp3s he sent me, from I think around 1995, and recorded under the name Lo-Speed Brainplow by some friends of the guy who emailed me. They're called "Backstabbin' Centerfold" (mp3) and "Broken Mirror" (mp3). Just some people recording themselves playing music 11 years ago. Who sound like a rawer Royal Trux, or maybe a more melodic Germs. Whoops—sorry, that slipped out.