Southern Hospitality/Noise

Whew! I finally found a place to stay in Austin. I was this close to losing all faith in humanity, cursing all of Austin TX, and saying 'to hell' with Southern Hospitality after requesting a couch at two co-ops around town only to be turned down in the name of rules, regulations, and bureaucratic bullshit. Finally, after a sleepless night in Denver, a flight to Austin, an incredible all-ages show across from a Macy's, a night spent sleeping under the stars, and a wrongfully-perceived-as-shoplifting attempt at an Urban Outfitters, some true sweethearts at the Seneca House allowed me to stay for supper and gave me a room to set up shop in.

I was talking with a gentleman at the show last night, and I really like how he chose to describe Austin. He said it "has guts" and "has dirt under its fingernails." Somehow these words rang true after wandering around in the 100° heat and watching all the Texans come alive at night once it began to cool off, as mosquitoes tend to do in Minneapolis.

We'll see if his description holds. I'm also excited to discover if indeed Texas is the country that everyone outside of Texas tells me it is. Did you know that "y'all" is not only the appropriate way to address a sir and a ma'am at the same time, but also the formal means?

I'll write the Texas ethnography on a later date as I get settled in with these co-opers and get them to give me the grand tour of Austin (scheduled for Tuesday).

Although San Francisco is still a good 1750 miles away, I still have a thing or two to say about it. I'm still working this out in my head and on paper, and any generalities I write of should be read with a skeptical eye, but it seems as though there are (generally speaking) two distinct camps of homemade album cover genres–indie/punk/hardcore and industrial/electronica/experimental/noise. For imagery of the latter, please check out the album "Aquarius records" in the Picasa page. (The albums really work now!)

I've intentionally kept my distance from categorizing album covers according to musical genres and just sticking to what can be seen and heard: forms, artwork, dates, and stories. I mentioned a few reasons for this decision a while back when I introduced the Homemade Album Art Historical Preservation Society, stating that I didn't have the time to do any musical content analysis and that simply tracing dates and graphic forms to construct a narrative was enough of a challenge for the time being. Don't get me wrong–I'm certainly not trying to make my job any less challenging–it's just that I feel that fitting sounds and artwork into my own neat categories, ones that may not jive with what their makers would file them under, is arrogant and simply irresponsible. So when I refer to genres, I'm mostly going off of what I see records filed under in record stores. For the sake of hypothesizing and testing out ideas, let's explore this modest duel-camp proposal…

…and back to San Francisco: I spent hours in Aquarius Records in the Mission photographing album art and talking with the clerks who specialize in electronica and experimental/noise. Never had I seen so many homemade albums that weren't in piles, drawers or boxes marked "Indie/Punk/Hardcore"! After photographing literally hundreds of records, I'm at a point where I can look at an album and usually date it in my head within a few years of what's printed on the sleeve. This is to say that I've seen enough imagery to file nearly any record in my head with others that share similar graphic qualities. Most of the records at Aquarius stumped me, because I hadn't seen that type of imagery before. An observation such as this is good sign that something is going on that I am otherwise clueless about!

In the meantime, I've had the opportunity to speak with a few different people about this observation, and two of them have shown me the doors to understanding why these records (mostly CDs, I might add) found at Aquarius under the electronic/experimental/noise section feature such different imagery than the usual suspects. Nat Russell, who designed the first two- dozen covers for Isota Records, didn't mention the usual Pacific Northwest individuals and labels like Calvin Johnson and K Records, that others usually do, as sources of inspiration. Instead, he told me that the experimental/noise folk were handmaking their own covers long before the punks and DIYers were on the west coast–and that they were mostly based out of the east coast. Darien, one of the engineers at Aardvark Mastering confirmed this and included 'industrial' music in the same boat as the experimental/noise pioneers.

Possible answers I and my gracious correspondents have proposed for the big question of "why make these things?" and "what function do they serve?" have usually applied to what record stores label indie/punk/hardcore. I cannot say with any degree of certainty that the same hypotheses apply to the other camp of noise/experimental/electronica/industrial until I speak with the artists and musicians and labels who make these products happen. (Again, these are the predominate labels I find in record stores, not the ones I group the music into.)

Oh dear–I think the heat here has worn me out and I need some rest. I'll write more in the morning.

later,
James