Month: December 2019

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #44: SURGICAL FOCUS

Guided by Voices
“Surgical Focus” b/w “Fly Into Ashes”
1999, TVT Records

Summer of 1999 was the last time that the music industry was truly comfortable. They were the last few months of business as usual.

Napster was brand new, but the controversy over it didn’t kick in until autumn when college kids went back to school and had access to their university’s high-speed internet connection. For the average schmoe like me, it was still a dial-up world, and in a dial-up world an album could take hours to download via your 56k modem–and that’s IF your fragile connection didn’t crap out on you every ten minutes.

It was also a world without portable digital music players. CD burners were around, but they were expensive and only a niche saw the need for one. Meanwhile, it was normal for cars on the road to still have cassette decks in them, even some new cars.

In 1999, the future of music as an intangible digital experience was here… and it was free and illegal. And it also kinda sucked unless your favorite place to listen to music was at your computer through speakers that were probably shitty.

Things were in transition. The rules were changing. We were all mixed up.

And this was the world in which Guided by Voices went major label.

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Robert Pollard-Mania! #43: IN SHOP WE BUILD ELECTRIC CHAIRS: PROFESSIONAL MUSIC BY NIGHTWALKER 1984-93

Nightwalker
In Shop We Build Electric Chairs: Professional Music By Nightwalker 1984-93
1999, The Fading Captain Series

As a collage artist, Robert Pollard is crazy about contrasts. Whether he works with images clipped out of vintage issues of National Geographic or works with piles of his own songs, he’s always looking for those two pieces that make no rational sense when joined together, but the fit is somehow perfect nonetheless. He’s looking for those two bare wires that you can press together to make an interesting spark. Deconstruct and reconstruct. That’s his game. Or it’s one of them, at least.

Many of his albums at this time are patchworks of different types of songs and sounds. Lo-fi home recordings sit next to full-bodied studio bangers. Rockers rub up against slow and sparse moments. After a great pop melody, something weird usually follows.

Album sequencing is an obsession of Pollard’s. So is sleeve art, which he almost always designs himself–by hand, with an x-acto blade and some glue and a stack of old magazines–with an eye toward making them all look different and mysterious and interesting to flip through.

The ride through Pollard’s body of work is bumpy, but that’s intentional. You’re not supposed to relax.

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The Constant Bleeder Is The World’s Slowest Anime Reviewer #5: BUBBLEGUM CRISIS episode 5, “Moonlight Rambler”

The most emotionally effecting episode so far of this cartoon series about girls in mechanical suits who fight evil robots.

That’s the Bubblegum Crisis way, though. Among its essential ingredients–synthesizers, drum machines, neon, some goofy humor, lots of flaming destruction and plenty of Blade Runner love–is a curious tragedy that runs through everything.

The setting is a world gone wrong and it looks like the bad guys are going to win. The villain gets more imposing with each episode because it’s not a single person. It’s the Genom Corporation, a weapons and technology mega-manufacturer. It’s a beast with no single controlling head that you can cut off. Rather, it’s a complex, many tentacled creature that, when perfectly constructed, is designed to live through anything. As long as it’s making money and is a part of everyone’s daily lives, a corporation is an unkillable enemy.

Genom’s latest dastardly deed is the invention of realistic human robots that run on human blood–and they need fresh infusions to keep going. The robots themselves even feel human and have emotions. Cut them and they literally bleed.

Yep, we’re talking robot vampires.

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