Through the thought­ful­ness of dot­dot­dot­mu­sic and the peo­ple at New Ams­ter­dam, I have two worth­while record­ings to lis­ten to, and write about. But first, a ques­tion; how do you pre­pare for the apocalypse?

This is not the idle spec­u­la­tion of a dilet­tante or a crazy per­son. The last seven years have seen the might of this coun­try turned towards the pur­pose of cre­at­ing cre­at­ing and spread­ing chaos and insan­ity around the globe, down to the level of the indi­vid­ual — and for no other com­pre­hen­sive rea­son (as in a demon­strated con­nec­tion between means and ends) because it can. And those who approve of this direc­tion most fer­vently see the upcom­ing elec­tion as one in which there is only one right out­come, and any­thing else would be the result of the (almost lit­er­ally) dark forces of super­nat­ural con­spir­acy. Why would peo­ple be in favor of such chaos, such vio­lence? I can only think the answer is that they seek the apoc­a­lypse, assured as they are that par­adise awaits them. I’m not so sure. I think it will be more like” South­land Tales.” After all, Cal­i­for­nia is the future.

This chaos and vio­lence, seek­ing it, pro­mot­ing it, approv­ing of it, the whole is com­pletely immoral, uneth­i­cal, with­out val­ues, despite the smug self-assurance of many peo­ple. While entropy is the inevitable final state of exis­tence, how does any­one with ethics and morals work towards order in the midst of this chaos over the short-term? By cre­at­ing some­thing — music, perhaps.

There has been a par­tic­u­lar style of music coa­lesc­ing these past few years — it has no name, it’s not an iden­ti­fi­able genre or sub­genre … at least not yet. It’s very much a new fla­vor, but is built on some goals of the past that never quite suc­ceeded. It’s a syn­the­sis of pop/rock and clas­si­cal music, but not like the Third Stream jazz of the 1950s, or more recent Art Rock groups; it’s con­tem­po­rary in every respect, in that con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal music is often heav­ily tinged with the legacy of rock music, includ­ing an empha­sis on the audi­ble beat, pattern-based forms and an inter­est in a lit­tle thrash­ing. The dri­ving force behind this has been the Bang on A Can orga­ni­za­tion, and their label has a record­ing that, although unlike the style of David Lang, Michael Gor­don or Julia Wolfe, exem­pli­fies the par­tic­u­lar style I’m explor­ing in this post: the aston­ish­ing, mag­nif­i­cent “Zippo Songs,” from Phil Kline. The cool, beau­ti­ful sur­face of the music encap­su­lates a par­tic­u­lar mad­ness within, the direct words of war and chaos, includ­ing Three Rums­feld Songs, a set of unself­con­scious absur­dist rav­ings taken directly from press con­fer­ences. This is not insane music, it is actu­ally involv­ing, pow­er­ful, mas­ter­ful music that dis­arms chaos by see­ing and reflect­ing it clearly.

Add to that Corey Dargel’s “Other People’s Love Songs” and William Brittelle’s “Mohair Time Warp.” The lat­ter is most explic­itly a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of chaos and insan­ity, and I mean this in a good way. Lyrics as abstract as Cecil Taylor’s poetry:

hey panda hey panda oh
the fal­con and the sun­beam
she was my girl­friend
now it’s all over town
where is my field of fire the hum of
flu­o­res­cent lights
joseph beuys who is this guy
the atrium looms I’m in a char­treuse jun­gle
where cig­a­rettes taste like night­mares
dem jeans dem jeans

Abstract, but with enough pop cul­ture sig­ni­fiers to keep the lis­tener grounded in some sense of real­ity. The music is scored for cham­ber ensem­ble and is tightly set both to the lyrics and to extremely quick jux­ta­po­si­tions of style and qual­ity; it owes a debt to Carl Stalling and Frank Zappa, and is more coher­ently orga­nized than John Zorn’s hyper­ki­netic game sys­tems — it’s all about the songs. The effect is not as extreme as this descrip­tion may imply, it’s actu­ally an exhil­a­rat­ing blend of absur­dity, exu­ber­ance and musi­cian­ship. Take a look:

Brit­telle is smil­ing through the apoc­a­lypse — the smile that comes from tak­ing it’s mea­sure and know­ing he has noth­ing to fear. The music has that same con­fi­dence in the face of absur­dity, it faces chaos and demol­ishes it on its own turf, by mak­ing it friendly, charm­ing, socia­ble, cut­ting it down to size. It is smart with­out being just clever, good humored and invig­o­rat­ing. It’s also a nicely com­pact disc, not overly long, which is ideal, because as fas­ci­nat­ing and enjoy­able as the music is, there is some­thing a lit­tle exhaust­ing about try­ing to fol­low the twists and turns of the lyrics, like the fun of being on a roller-coaster.

Corey Dargel’s disc is as wel­come in deal­ing with the absurd, and is some­thing spe­cial. It’s com­pletely self-made and pro­duced — Dargel makes use of tech­nol­ogy to han­dle all the chores, in his own way like The The. He sings with a sweetly nasal tenor voice in sat­is­fy­ing, log­i­cal four-square musi­cal phrases, rem­i­nis­cent of Morrissey’s style, but more con­fi­dent and tune­ful. And what he sings are the most trans­par­ently per­sonal, elu­sive, charm­ing songs this side of The Mag­netic Fields. Every song seems to cap­ture a dif­fer­ent facet of a com­plex, adult, human emo­tion, that par­tic­u­lar com­bi­na­tion of regret for how things could have been yet sat­is­fac­tion with how they came to be that is so much like the stim­u­lat­ing, com­fort­ing pain of press­ing against a loose tooth with your tongue, some­thing that for most adults is itself a lost mem­ory of regret and sat­is­fac­tion at the same time. He sings:

berke­ley, cal­i­for­nia
is really only in your head
it’s only berke­ley, cal­i­for­nia as you imag­ine it
so don’t say i didn’t warn you
when you lie awake in bed
won­der­ing why i’m not a lit­tle more compassionate

… because it’s not how you imag­ined it would be, but there will be a way to make it better:

don’t spend any time
think­ing of me love
it’s really only best that i’m no longer per­ceived
please find some­one else
or some­thing else to think of
i’ll be thor­oughly grate­ful and relieved

There’s a lot of pop music about love and loss and regret, very lit­tle about peo­ple being decent to each other even as things don’t work out. Dargel’s songs are about that. And he’s funny too:

no har­monic pro­gres­sion
leaves as last­ing an impres­sion
as look­ing into his brown eyes
all other sax­o­phone solos
are woe­fully lack­ing in mojo
those other guys can’t really improvise

(all other sounds)

The premise of the disc is that he is singing love songs meant to be from one third party to another, they are not really his. Rather than mak­ing it some arti­fi­cial exer­cise, it adds to the sin­cer­ity and gen­tle absur­dity. This reaches it’s height on “sum­mer of love:”

it was nine­teen sixty seven
the sum­mer of love was upon us
the doors and jef­fer­son air­plane
excel­lent sex and decent marijuana …

they say you can no longer find
any roman­tic men
at stan­ford law school
falling in love is not rec­om­mended
and they’ve even stopped bussing the mills girls in
it’s a good thing we left when we did
’cause our sum­mer of love never ended

The home­made aspect of the record adds to its plea­sure. Dargel lays down elec­tronic tracks, and they are quirky and off-kilter, eccen­tric accom­pa­ni­ments that give an exper­i­men­tal and inte­rior aspect to the songs — there’s the sen­sa­tion that we are lis­ten­ing to Dargel lis­ten­ing to him­self in his own head. It draws us in. The music is not pop per se, the com­bi­na­tion of pop sen­si­bil­ity in the vocals makes this a record of pop art songs. “other people’s love songs” is a refuge from from chaos. Rather than reap­ing chaos like Brit­telle, Dargel shows that with the sim­plest of tools, essen­tially sin­cer­ity and gen­tle­ness, we can inoc­u­late our­selves against that stain; know­ing what works, what is good and what we value means that non­sense and ugli­ness in thought and feel­ing can’t influ­ence us. This is a record that gives more plea­sure with each listen.

But what do we call this music? It doesn’t mat­ter and it mat­ters — call­ing it some­thing, any­thing, doesn’t change the qual­ity of the music, but giv­ing it a label makes it eas­ier to share it with oth­ers. The more I lis­ten to and think about it, the more I think of the great soprano sax­o­phon­ist Steve Lacy, who pio­neered a suc­cess­ful syn­the­sis of jazz and the clas­si­cal Art Song. Klein, Brit­telle and Dargel are doing the same thing, I think, but instead of jazz they are bring dif­fer­ent fla­vors of rock and pop music together with the tech­niques and sen­si­bil­i­ties of con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal music. There’s a grow­ing and fruit­ful point where these two paths are meet­ing and pro­duce stuff that is truly new. Lis­ten to these records, all of them, and think about what they are. What would I call them? Songs for the apoc­a­lypse is good enough for me.