One of the amazing things about Journey to the End of the Night is how natural it seems for the Mekons to use this quasi-mythical mode that runs through the album. It's natural. I don't find it odd to have a song where Heracles is the main theme; with another band I might find it to be a forced attempt at being epically meaningful.

One reason it could be different is that the material seems to have been made their own.

The albums before 69 Love Songs sound more monochrome now. And I've even heard them plenty since hearing 69LS. It's just today.

On the way home today I put on the first Silver Mt. Zion album, which I'd had sitting around in my office for a few weeks, but which I hadn't heard for months. It has a strange intensity for an album that's so atmospheric and "ambient". I didn't think it would fit well with riding on the bus, but that didn't seem to matter - in fact, it even complemented the almost-end of Crying of Lot 49, which I was rereading, very well. Oedipa's despair at putting together the pieces of the Tristero puzzle was mounting, and I started feeling it.

I started it again because my trip took long enough due to waiting at stops; when it got to the track with the childlike vocal smears, maybe "Angels Stand Guard Round His Bed" or something like that, I had just walked down the block on Ashland far away from Snelling and all the traffic that everything seemed totally quiet around me - just the sound of my boots on the sidewalk and the cries in my headphones. It reminded me of snow.

Sometimes I don't realize that I'm having a memory until I snap out of it somehow. There's some kind of house noise in our house right now, water or something, maybe the laundry. For the past few minutes I had been sitting here, half-noticing it while I type, until I realized that I thought it was the big noisy fan on the woodburning stove that was down the hall from my room in the basement in the house where I grew up.

Sometimes I have similar mis-memories, like thinking that I will walk down the hall to a room which is in a place I used to live or work, or like being aware of the place I'm in yet seeing it as some other one (especially the case with bedrooms).

There's a relation to music.

The narrow line of separation between work and play: often when I hear the Dismemberment Plan or Fugazi I think about the band members actually working together, or actually playing together: that is, about the working or playing as activities involving a group of people doing things together. This isn't really something special to their music, it happens all the time. In fact something like this idea might be involved in a lot of conceptions of what good 'rock' is. Or jazz especially.

But sometimes I get the impression that these bands are working, and really enjoying it. Sometimes it is the kind of work that puts a serious look on people's faces. Sometimes it has serious overtones, but despite the seriousness everyone seems to take pleasure in the work, perhaps because of its seriousness. I think these things more often about Fugazi, not as often about the Plan. Sometimes the music seems more clearly to be a kind of play: it's a lot like work, but even if they're careful and determined, they're not so serious. (Does being at play always mean being playful? Probably not, but I think it may often, in the situations I'm talking about.) Seeing the Plan live makes it clearer when they really have fun, when they're not just playing but at play. But a lot of Fugazi's Argument sounds as if they are at play, to me, far more than any previous album. I've never seen them live but I imagine that they "indulge" a bit more in this when in concert.

These senses that music exhibits people at work or play (working together or playing together) can be very strong sometimes, so that it seems as if we should use them as criteria for success or quality. This can rub the wrong way people who like a kind of music that doesn't depend so much on musical elements of which we are able to say that they let us see people at work or play. This, despite the fact that often this kind of music can have similar qualities to it, in the sounds, in the structure. Autechre do this especially, once they start a track (circa tri repetae especially) going. I think this sort of privileging 'work' music can rub these other fans the wrong way because it seems kind of unfair, especially because the other music can come so close (arbitrarily close, let's say) to sounding the 'right' way anyway. These other kinds of music should be respected without being expected to meet the standards like 'work' and 'play' that seem to compelling and helpful to apply to other music. But that doesn't mean we should avoid talking about music in these terms - just that we should be careful what we do with the words.

Also, Dave's Nirvana article makes me think, since Golden Band has been my bedtime music for a few days in a row: since it seems like there's no particular reason why all the post-grunge bands imitate the style of their predecessors, other than that those things were popular, or were what happened to form the bands' earlier musical experiences, or anything of that sort, and moreover since it seems like much the same could be said of any musical style or movement and its followers, shouldn't you be able to imagine watered-down followers and imitators of any band, or album, or style? Or is this not in fact true? If not, what's special about your counterexamples? Something distinctive about their style? (Or something undistinctive, even: I suppose this question wouldn't be very interesting if the band being copied were just boring or nondescript already.)

(I was thinking, what would it sound like if this album became the imperfect model for a movement? Would the variation involved mean that we would see more singer-songwritery versions of the AAS's sound, more aggressive versions, catchier versions, versions concerned more with emotional commonplaces and platitudes, versions concerned more with love songs, with funny songs, with guitar solos?)

After hearing the Silent Way box the opening to Bitches Brew seems even more continuous with the earlier material.

"Pharoah's Dance" or whatever it's called has a compelling momentum to it, say 10 minutes in (and most other places) - for such a long piece with comparatively few points of large-scale structure (comparatively, with respect to western art music, that is), it seems to have a definite sense of going somewhere in the long sections between the turnarounds and edits and whatnot.

Is there just a lot more typical pop cadencing on The Argument?

kid606's ps i love you is beautiful, I think, and I'm told it counts as glitch, but I wonder if it's just too sparse, if it uses the wrong kind of noises, whatever they're called, to count as 'glitch'. Not that I'm saying Tim had to cover everything that could possibly be relevant to his fine article.