Two years ago, I wrote this thing about Vampire Weekend. Here it is, reproduced in all its blinkered glory:

listening to vampire weekend oh god have you guys heard this fucking record i mean it’s not the second coming but it is fun and you know how i am a fun guy who enjoys pretty much only fun things and that these things are universally fun because i deem them so so download and buy the vampire weekend record and dance with me because we are only alive in this moment and it will pass it will PASS people come on

at least listen to “a-punk” which is totally on my myspace page which is totally way cool daddy-o one of those tasty grooves inspired by paul simon’s graceland and the talking heads’ remain in light except its heart rate has been accelerated to unnatural levels because it ate some goddamn spicy food and must say what it needs to say in the shortest amount of time possible or else it will explode midway through and no one wants to be covered in unfinished song entrails so it was kind enough to blow your goddamn mind instead

It betrays all my old writing transgressions. For one, my fascination with improvisation. I felt the need to write from the precipice of a sudden, violent reaction. This has something to do with Jack Kerouac. I don’t know. I was in college once. There is also a sense, in these two old paragraphs, of how I worked my small giggles into the woodwork—I forced a personified song to have gorged upon spicy plates until near flashpoint. I may yet backslide.

I first heard about Vampire Weekend from this guy. I listen to this guy about most everything. When he opens his mouth, horses come galloping out. Horses with good taste. These horses also bear a remarkable sense for how things connect, or how they battle for connection. Even in the desert, abandoned wires may rise from the earth and search for their mother tower.

This guy was right about Vampire Weekend. Some strange and terrible work or ritual gifted them with adept tunes. Future scientists who have mapped the music genome will scrutinize Vampire Weekend and realize, again, their propensity for good tuneage. Then the bell will ring, and they will clear their tables and embrace each other with their robot arms. In the future, a bell ringing signifies the hour of embracing. I should have mentioned that.

I don’t know what this has to do with Vampire Weekend. What does the future have to tell us about them? Maybe we should just hug each other more. Carry one another through the fast darts of life. Nitsuh Abebe seems to prefer this over an inherently broken play for power. Which is performed among people who already possess the power they deride.

Deconstruction is good, yes. Chipping away at our status-quo keeps up from rotting internally. We need to observe our tiny actions in a system that transforms them into large, thundering effects. Perhaps, though, we shouldn’t use them to trip others lest we meet them at eye-level one fathomed day.

What am I saying. There is a new Vampire Weekend album. It is called Contra because something something The Clash. I woke up this morning with a fist in my mouth. This second album is not so removed from the first in that it is innocuous pop music that could accompany your eating some sort of vegetable. This is not a judgment. It is a fun kind of music, made more fun by the new stabs of percussion that gore Contra throughout, if only to remind us that it is alive.

As with the last record, their sound and song structure borrow liberally from “world music,” a term used by people who, I imagine, do not live in the world. At times critics have reduced this qualification to “Afrobeat” or “Afropop” or “African.” There is surely stuff from other continents in Contra, and there is danger in conflating and coalescing cultures into some signifying and sufficiently “exotic” guitar line. I would numerate them, but I do not possess the knowledge necessary to unravel these songs of their appropriated skins.

In lieu of this appropriation, though, there has been talk of exploitation. Vampire Weekend steal from the ever-afflicted Africans. Its a complaint that ignores rock and roll’s long history of theft in which every goddamn band has some tangential hand. Jessica Hopper acknowledged this, as she acknowledges most every stark reality that scrapes against an objection, with Led Zeppelin. It doesn’t make it right. It just establishes a historical pattern. Meanwhile, Nitsuh also disassembles the critique by first avoiding the word “steal,” because, unlike Zeppelin, there’s no obvious theft here, and also avoiding any talk of Vampire Weekend. Instead, he deconstructs the dichotomy between influences “near” and “far.” How bland would Vampire Weekend be were they to only exploit their nearest influences, in the senses of both of geography and genre? The fist knew me, knew my mouth well enough to consider it home.

There has also been talk of class. Of establishing fronts from which we may freely discuss out-of-context lyrical trademarks and how they may or may not be establishing a front diametrically opposed to our front. Our front sympathizes with the poor and exploited and the plight of non-white, while theirs seems entirely preoccupied with Williamsburg and designer socks and the plight of fucked-up rich. Privilege, I mean. Perhaps the collision of the two talking points inspires our daily rages against a band that makes really slight pop music. They steal their music from Africa, and then, atop, conniving grins fixed to their faces, they sing the anthems of the gentrifying youth. Also, they went to college once.

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The fist communicated to me through its salt. Its instructions and cautions come in its own sharp language: I read Jessica Hopper’s article and followed its birds of thought into their ill-prepared nests. I said, “I want to be Jessica Hopper when I grow up.” And I do. For many other reasons, most having to do with this article and how it shakes down all who reside in the emo tree, from which heights women are small casualties of their big gestures of hurt. But lo, Robert of Hardcore for Nerds and Nitsuh righteously bristled over some clear misrepresentations of the real live identities of those Vampire Weekend fellows, and I stared at my shoes real hard over this whole exchange. There are values in which we deposit ourselves and I’d like to think that I’m not invested in quotes warped and played for the full power of their zing. The fist in my mouth is my own.
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The problem with this critique is its emphasis on “white” as a signifier of privilege, which simultaneously presupposes a disadvantaged “black” or “non-white.” The problem is conflating these racially-bound terms with class critique—though race and class intersect it is dangerous to confuse them for the same social ill. The problem is this incredible and strange ability of some people to consider each member of Vampire Weekend white because of the tax bracket they occupy and the school they went to. The problem is that most of the people on this side of the discourse are upper middle-class white people who fear their own reflection and who, by some casualty of white guilt, have made the continued separation and delineation of people according to barriers of class and race their unconscious desire.

I don’t mean to idly summarize what Nitsuh has already pointed out in respectively mad and ornate forms. As suggested by others, by this point in the argument, we have traveled a motherfucker of a distance from the actual music to the land of societal representatins. Regardless of The Game’s inherent fallacy (according to Nitsuh), Vampire Weekend still grow this discourse on their every new branch, and it ventures in this direction so often as to seem a function of what they have brought to our table.

Everyone is quick to single out the lyrics, as the superficial African sonics would hardly register offensive if married to any other monologue. The defense, as given by most fans I’ve talked to, is that the lyrics are satirical; Hopper notes this in her article, too. I’m not sure who said the word “satire” first. An I Love Music thread leads me to believe that it wasn’t anybody in the actual band who stood up and clarified to a misunderstanding world their subtle damnation of the upper class.

But even if they did, how to trust people who haven’t mapped out their intentions on their whole body? How to place good faith in those who do not possess recorded evidence of follow-through, committed to ancient technologies that are impossible to massage? I do not know. I am just a guy with a blog and a flag. Regardless, there’s a passage in Contra‘s “Holiday” (oh, a privilege of class!) that determines my lean. There’s a clear engagement with the upper class here, but one that inflates into absurdity. Witness their typographic unfurl:

A vegetarian since the invasion
She’d never seen the word “bombs”
she’d never seen the word bombs blown up to 96 point Futura

This is hilarious! Everything hisses beneath Vampire Weekend’s lens and sun. You may remember Futura from such films as anything directed by Wes Anderson. The words “invasion” and “bombs” change radically when employed in a context in which their historical realities are impossible—one can emerge from an “invasion” knowing the pleasures of a specialized diet. One can only know bombs as a fat, aesthetically-pleasant word on a poster and not as an imminent threat to your continued walking or living.

This isn’t to say that this is so ridiculous, it must be a joke. Rather, to not consider some form of play going on here, from the apparent exaggerations and damning focus on its characters, is to insult and condescend to its auteurs. Which, okay, is sort of our function sometimes as music writers! But here, regardless, I think it’s misplaced. To find Vampire Weekend essentially empty of appeal is a totally righteous stance that I somewhat share! To flank this opinion with class war based on the band’s preoccupation with the abortive actions of people with money, without regard to the possible contexts of that preoccupation, seems a lazy sort of dismissal.

There is also “I Think Ur a Contra,” which maybe amounts to a mission statement. I don’t know. I think everything is a mission statement. This is a mission statement. I am saying to you, “See, I have engaged with something I don’t care about and I have found the light that spits from one of its sides. That’s a mission.” I don’t really care about Vampire Weekend. They are a good singles band, but I audibly sighed at the debut’s every mention on the decade lists, and my friends rightly chided me for audibly sighing at the internet. Though Contra is not as entirely front-loaded as its predecessor, it’s got a similar bland stretch to the end.

But oh, what an end.

You said,
“Never pick sides
Never choose between two”
Well I just wanted you

There’s a very small and boisterous part of me that would not tell you this outright. This part of me believes that somehow, probably knowing the vehement reactions to their first record, they preemptively anticipated this path of discourse for Contra and, instead of loading up on tools with which to see their enemy’s wiring, have chosen gorgeous disarmament. “I Think Ur a Contra” is probably about someone you believe in, someone whose beliefs you share, but whose beliefs prove to be a brief fortune of that person’s position. By all this “mission statement” talk I largely refer to the song’s interesting parallels with all this critical second-guessing of Vampire Weekend’s stance. There you go. I am transparent.

But there’s more here than that! Vampire Weekend aren’t victims and they should stop committing the cardinal sin of responding to their critics! The song also details the spark of initial connection, how that is something to move toward even if it is a two month sort of deal. We are desert wires that lean toward their nearest analogue. You should prepare yourself for more “we should just take care of each other” hippie shit because that’s where I am landing.

Also, the narrator oscillates over the actual “Contra” status. It is suddenly a fluid distinction upon his intended’s desires for “good schools and friends with pools.” How tenuous our own small positions are! The rest of the record, all these keening eyes toward privilege, seem the result of our severed attempts to connect. Vampire Weekend engage with this disconnection, and they make it the most ridiculous prospect, so that maybe we can fight through these absurd signifiers and get to some real ribs and hearts. Which is why I stand by my sophomore-in-college avatar, blinkered and awkward and given to spicy food metaphors as he may be, because that is exactly what he retrieves from “A-Punk,” and most music that sets his heart in electric tremble: a sudden, violent desire to relate through it.

Here, today, we return to the book of fusion. We return to Miles Davis and the words that he wrote on the mountainside—how they told of a world without skin, a world sun-bruised, its bedrock rippling in rhythmic, red beats. A world whose dirt is made from the juiced human collective!

We return not to reiterate these inborn certainties, but to examine how they distort with changing time and context. Perhaps they dilate beneath the microscope. Perhaps they wriggle. Perhaps they assume our future forms. This is the drama of analysis.

Big Fun is a record from 1974 collecting side-long tributes to the Sun God that didn’t fit among Bitches Brew‘s howling sacrifices. They gave in too easily. Stole the fun and meaning from our dark ritual because they too closely resembled our own devotion to the hungry sky.

So we held them in, like air, or a knife. We handed them to Teo Macero so he could maybe alter them back into candidates for sacrifice. But to no avail. They grew more devoted than us, and we are fucking devoted. Our love is an awesome love. But to hear these cast-offs was to look into a mirror full of light.

Finally, we released them. We released them not realizing that, prior to release, they stole our bitching sitar.

We redden when it carves its humming path through these tracks.

Now, our justification! Examples of why this music had to be set free to scratch out a wild space of its own!: Side three, “Go Ahead John,” features the glitched drumming of Jack DeJohnette, who never feels obligated to either side of the stereo spectrum. His movements are free, sudden, awkward, disorienting—what happens when stereo-panning is left to the discretion of cymbals. Then guitarist John McLaughlin comes in as he will, like a locust on fire come to plague our oppressors, but filtered through the same effects as DeJohnette’s drumming, an interrupted object of fury at the whim of windfall.

You see why we had to do what we had to do.

But let us, for the moment, quit our narrative—from-here-on-out it is diversionary and induces boredom even among the converted—to focus in on “Lonely Fire.” Though bearing similar length to its brothers, it is more meditative, perhaps in reaction to “Go Ahead John” and its eyes that dart with a methamphetamine pulse. Though languid, it is still the funk—that is what Miles is all about in these days of fused glory, how much the soul can distort if it rides on an endless backbeat into the heart of the sun. But it’s the funk stretched and reclined on a plane. (“Lie” is the word. The funk lies. “Lay” is not the word, unless the funk “lays” you down with its attack. We are open to this possibility.) It is a very patient funk; it is a funk maybe waiting for the next calculated star move. The groove it gains in the last ten minutes is slight, but subsequent listens reveal it to have been there the whole time, pulsing beneath the skin. “Lonely Fire” knew all along, but it kept this knowledge from us. Were we immediately cognizant of its intent, we would drink its particular light with big and knowing gulps instead of being suddenly stuffed full with divine grace.

So it unfolds, and unfolds. It unfolds on its big hurting legs that throb like light through passing trees. It tears at its pained body in large ambient strips, built from Joe Zawinul’s and Chick Corea’s keyboards that are transparent and horrifying, like ghosts, Davis’ and Wayne Shoter’s slow sawing in, plus the good work of Khalil Balakrishna and Airto Moreira who have taken our sitar and tambura but have made trembling clouds with them. Finally, at the eleven minute mark, “Lonely Fire” has dug through enough muscle and bone to reach its heart. Which, somehow, still thumps with delight.

Often fusion is discussed in direct relation to the critical barbs it endured, mostly high whines over its diversions from traditional jazz. We here at (desperation + noise) value your time. We know their are other adjective-stuffed blogs you could choose, and we appreciate that you have chosen to occupy our underground bunker for the time being, at least until the bombs stop dropping. We are, regardless, going to waste your time now with a paragraph about the perceived intentions of jazz fusion and how this song is an embodiment of the wild hope inherent.

Fusion is a simultaneous rejection and acceptance. It rejects jazz’s classically defined lines (though it never had any; this is what happens when you let historians fuck up music) and accepts rock’s pretty-goddamn-apparent alignment with jazz (they both embrace improvisation, rock is just more private about it; as they evolved, the both of them decided they wanted to kill you, the listener). Fusion says, “Fuck history,” all the while acknowledging that we are in its thrall. In this way it is totally punk fucking rock. (We at (desperation + noise) say this about everything we love. And we believe it. We are fools.)

So too with “Lonely Fire” and this belabored body metaphor which maybe does not merit a few more sentences, but you know how we do. The long jam acknowledges the inevitable pain of living in bodies with nerves and senses and desires for oblivion, but does so knowing of the incredible bright thing at our centers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Three seconds of “Lonely Fire”‘s original 1,280 serve as the backing for the two minutes of The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Suicidal Thoughts.” No. Wait. Stop that train. I want to get off.

There’s, like, only a few icicles of keyboard and a sitar strum intact. There is none of the fire or hope that inform the original. Alien drums come in through a thick haze, courtesy of producer Lord Finesse. Over this, Biggie confirms his intent to quit even the heart’s incessant movement forward, completely rejecting what we have established as promising on a basic level. And then there’s Sean “Puffy” Combs, at the other end of Biggie’s proposed phone call, whose protests grow new awful limbs in light of how he has since made Biggie’s corpse dance for money; Sean “Puffy” Combs, who fails to stop Biggie (probably because he, Puffy, is a failure), whose presence injects the proceedings with some pretty inane and obstructive melodrama, but it’s comforting that someone besides us is aware of Biggie’s state, even though that someone is a complete dick.

(We have now gone out of our way to insult Puffy. Sorry, Puffy. You produced some pretty good tracks in the early-to-mid-’90s.)

The reasons to kill yourself, according to The Notorious B.I.G.: Loving your transgressions, though they have destroyed everything else you love; “All my life I been considered as the worst / Lyin’ to my mother, even stealin’ out her purse / Crime after crime, from drugs to extortion / I know my mother wished she got a fuckin’ abortion.” There is no light here. Biggie has so driven himself toward oblivion that his light inherent has winked forever into the black. These are deteriorated and desperate conditions in which to experience “Lonely Fire.”

What I fear is that they might bear more truth.

(This is an expanded and heavily-altered version of an article originally published in the Reno News & Review.)

There are nights when you consider surgical attachment to your coat. Maybe you could replace one of your kidneys with a space heater too. Because there is no visible future in which you are taking off your coat. You know that Les Rallizes Denudes song, “Flames of Ice”? It knows where you are at. This weather only exists to make you more comfortable with death.

There are nights in which you shuffle into a basement to watch some goddamn bands play. Maybe one will have a guitar. Maybe they will play it and the whole audience will sail on an electric groove into the gelatinous center of the universal hivemind.

There’s no blood on the floor or anything at the Hen Den, a house and basement on Sinclair Street where the shadows grow, and all stains are the long-faded consequences of hardcore shows, but your concentration with regards to the cold and the remnants of somebody’s gum tissue have briefly obscured your surroundings, which reveal themselves in a real moment of reckoning.

There is a fucking tent. In the same space that those electric-guitar-playin’ astronauts normally only fill. Shadows move within the tent, supposedly calculating whatever sound this is that gallops from the speakers and directly into your guts. It sounds like the earth’s long-held-in exhalations. It is bigger than you. These shadows seem to extend and bow, as though they are all kowtowing to the sound. As if the sound built them from nothing, and they must pay their respects.

Which is understandable, because the sound bears wrath. The sound has an unknowable bottom. My best guess: It is either a black hole or full of teeth.

This was the Reno noise group Chinese Gore on November 6. At an interview at Swahili’s practice space one month later, now separate from their tented shadows, they appear alarmingly human. Three of them resemble the same overpowered superhumans who drag Swahili through the heart’s great violence: Troy Micheau, John Griffin and Van Pham.

In fact, the first Chinese Gore show resulted from an untenable Swahili date—an August 29 show with Santa Rosa bands Starskate and A Pack of Wolves.

“I think we were scheduled to play a show as Swahili and we could not,” says Pham. “So we made a fake band.”

“Van and I had talked about doing something else for awhile,” says Micheau. “With Swahili—I don’t want to say we’re locked into a sound, but we kind of know what we do, so we wanted to try out some more freeform ideas.”

The first performance, in the middle of Clinton Sleeper’s (of Reno emo heroes Praying for Greater Portland) living room, featured Pham, Micheau, Griffin and Swahili drummer Ryan Schofield giving abrasive birth in costume. Micheau, dressed in full grandma garb, and Schofield, dressed as Robin in the “Batman and” sense, hit metal sheets, hit drums, hit assorted objects laced with contact microphones. Griffin, topped with a tiger hat, conjured from his bass guitar the black mud of the soul. Pham—I can’t say what she was but she resembled some unearthed Egyptian ghost—moaned into microphones and levitated over a keyboard display. The music? The music was big electric saw that coursed its rhythmic way through the pleasure centers. It left us with only the raw and awful feelings. We were unwilling to move, as though the slightest twitch would break us free of our new Zen existences.

“It feels like more of an exercise for us and then hoping they (the audience) enjoy it,” says Micheau. “It’s putting us in this position where everything is up in the air for them and us. The audience doesn’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know what’s going to happen. The only thing that’s happening between us is the sound.”

“I remember getting out (of the tent at the Hen Den show) and being surprised that people were actually in the room,” says Michael Modene of Think in French and Short Hair, and recent convert to Chinese Gore’s sonic pilgrimage.

Chinese Gore create an improvised drone that can emerge arbitrarily or with malevolent intent, that can undo itself in a great fire or evaporate in slow motion. In between, it bores its way through all attendant living matter, but in varying degrees. It can resemble the off-the-cuff assault of Japanese noise or the composed serenity of the occasional Kevin Drumm record.

“There’s always a bit of anxiety before a show,” says Modene. “Not knowing at first what a song’s going to be, or where we’re going to transition. It’s fun because we don’t know where it’s going as much as anyone watching does.”

If the names of band members seem thrown-around and oddly fluid, it is by nature of Chinese Gore’s construction: they have an open-and-revolving door policy with regards to membership. Those who currently operate under the name think of the project as, in Pham’s words, “an exercise”—as an outlet for less-band-and-song-based explorations.

“It allows you to get into a different head space than playing in a normal band does a lot of the time,” says Micheau. “When you’re playing in your band, you have your songs that you’ve written. When we do this we have no idea what’s going to happen at any time.”

“It’s nice to go by the seat of your pants and not have to practice,” says Griffin. “You’re in so many other bands over the years and you’re always trying to remember a plethora of things you’re trying to achieve. And with this you just go out there and shit into a mic for ten minutes, and it feels way better sometimes because you don’t have to worry about it.”

The tent in the Hen Den was itself a last minute decision, but one that, regardless, had the site in mind. The sound too is built for the place in which it will be received.

“For me, what we do here, the sound is an environment in a lot of ways,” says Micheau. “So I want the music that we’re making to fit the surroundings and to alter it in some way and to be part of it.”

Thus the 14 minutes and 10 minutes above, the whole of Chinese Gore’s Hen Den and Flavor Country sets.

“I don’t know if we try to play short sets,” says Micheau. “I think at around the ten-minute mark we’re all…”

“Oh, I think we’re boring now,” mimes Griffin. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“To me it almost suspends time,” continues Micheau. “After we played that first show, I felt like that was going on for centuries. And then you guys were like, ‘Oh, that was seven minutes.’ ”

Last night, Chinese Gore played for what seemed like 20 minutes—I’m not entirely sure, I didn’t film it. And thank God I didn’t. Fuck this incredible internet-based need to document every musical happening in full. It is a source of great disconnect between noise and receiver. When I am trying to film someone, I cannot give into them.

Last night, I gave into Chinese Gore. They took me into the tunnel and showed me what happened there.

I saw the blood. I felt the cold.

My decade list will occur on my Tumblr which is where I have wasted my hiatus time. It will occur in an order that is practically arbitrary (though the last album I write about will be my favorite record of the past ten years) because I can’t prefer Blut aus Nord over Jay-Z because the only similarity between their records is that they are designed to sound huge (skyscrapers for the latter, ice mountains for the former). So no numbers, just emotions. See you all there tomorrow.

(desperation + noise) will be on hiatus for a month, after which I may be finished with papers and school and the excessive tyranny of both. These papers will all play into this blog’s larger theme (as much as it could be said to have one) (okay one’s just going to be about ’60′s Japanese psych-rock but that has always been what this blog is about) which I guess is about the visceral impact of music but also how this visceral impact relates to larger social movements that are maybe evil? I should stop here. (These papers will probably be published here, is what I intended to say.)

I will still write intermittently at my Tumblr because I cannot resist page 50 of my dashboard and I will achieve it and linger in its glory one fine day. If you would like to read more sentences like the previous one then please follow the link. I know some of you fear links not for the places you may be inadvertently taken to but for your own responsibility in reaching that particular destination. Know that I understand as much as anyone can understand anything, which is very little. Know that I am earnest?

Also I am on Twitter just makin’ eyes at everybody. See you in a month.