Pah

Coming out pinching and punching

Yesterday The Melbourne Times—a glossy, free, weekly magazine, with a circulation of 88,000—ran an article that featured my work (not my workplace, but my actual work, stuff I designed, implemented, tested, and supported) in scare quotes. Have I arrived?

Last night we ate a green curry featuring brocoflower: a bright green broccoli/cauliflower hybrid, it’s got the texture of cauliflower with a sweeter taste.

We haven’t seen X-Men 3 yet. It’s not the most important thing in the last week, you know. (Tickets now booked for Saturday.)

We have bought and read Scott Pilgrim & The Infinite Sadness. Which is the most important thing in the last week.

But right now I feel like geeking out about Peeping Tom, the new album by Peeping Tom (that’s Mike Patton and friends).

First let me say how much I enjoy the work of Martin Kvamme, resident designer and illustrator for all things Patton-related at Ipecac since the second Fantomas album. Peeping Tom doesn’t have the secret-at-the-heart-of-Pulp Fiction-glow of Mit Gas, but it’s just below par of the imagined packaging that would fold-out-and-transform-into-Patton. Kvamme always reminds you that albums are special.

Unfortunately, the manuafacturing of the packaging causes problems. Like Mit Gas, my CD was jammed onto the nub, requiring wince-inducing force to remove—I almost snapped the disc in half in doing so. Unlike MG, my problems didn’t stop there: the edge of the disc was stuck fast to an exposed adhesive part of the packaging’s unfolding mechanism. I pulled them apart, but the adhesive tore a chunk of material from the top of the disc. When I experimented with putting the disc back in, it stuck again. Not good.

First spin was in Pen’s car, which has a decent stereo. The album sounded rather bland. I enjoyed the last track, We’re Not Alone, but as Penny pointed out, only the first track, Five Seconds, was really what you would expect from a pop Patton.

Second spin was on the home system. The album sounded much better on it. I really enjoyed the aforementioned tracks, plus the trippy Your Neighbourhood Spaceman and sly Sucker. And I began to understand why the album had sounded bland on first listen: it inverts conventional pop mixing. Most albums have higher frequencies at the top of the mix: vocals, cymbals, guitars. Peeping Tom has the lower frequencies most prominent: bass, drums, beats. It makes me think of a live music mix for playing big at a club. When played at a lower volume, the lower frequencies distort and the higher frequencies are too quiet, turning songs into sludge. I tested this theory a bit, but not too much, as it was late.

I did make out that there were a lot of layers to the album. A lot of depth to each song that will take time to tease out, a lot of unusual harmonies and dissonance that will take time to get used to. (It crossed my mind that this might be the toxic endpoint of the journey started by the Beach Boys and the Beatles in ’66-67.)

I also finally realised that, though Patton had assembled an all-star cast of collaborators, I didn’t actually like any of them. Rahzel, Dan the Automator, Massive Attack, Kid Koala, Norah Jones… some of them have tracks I like, but no consistent body of work. Perhaps this album just isn’t going to be for me.

Anyway, I took my copy back to JB Hi-Fi. The guy there was very understanding: he got me a replacement; which had the same problem. So he pulled out a stack of copies. Three more opened packages later, I finally got one in working order. The guy said he’d have to make sure to get a nice one for himself! Another JB guy said maybe I should wait a few months for the regularly-packaged version. But I’ve got to have my Kvamme. Even though I’m sure the packaging will cause me more problems in a few months.

So tonight I got home early and put the disc on and cranked it right up. As it played, I turned it up some more. Louder than I’ve ever played anything on the new system, except maybe some heavy metal for 30 seconds. Getaway is better this way, but Kill The DJ and Caipirinha really come alive. The couch was shaking, the cat was running around like crazy, and I’m sure the vibrations were going straight through the neighbouring apartments—but at last I could hear all that activity going on under the low frequencies. Well, most of it, but I was too nervous about the volume to turn it up any more. I started to think I really need a sub-woofer to take over handling the low stuff. 7/11ths of the way through the album, the neighbours screamed for me to turn it down, so I did.

There’s some amazing sounds on this album, but most of the tracks don’t cohere into a positive musical experience for me yet, I don’t just get it like I immediately did with previous Patton. But I’ll keep working through the mix, the layers, and the collaborators. I’m sure I owe it to myself and the music.