Crosswalking

Paedantic Basterd · 04-09-2013, 07:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Janszoon

Ped, these are amazing. I feel like you're really starting to master your style here and as much as I've always loved the art you've posted, I'm completely blown away by these. The first and the last are my favorites. My only critique is the that the backgrounds look like they're probably royalty free vector patterns from deviant art or somewhere similar. They look good, but I think your work would be better served by backgrounds that are as unique and unusual as your foregrounds. That's a minor criticism though. As I said, I'm really blown away. Beautiful, wonderful work!

I am chuffed to hear this, especially knowing you work in the field. Thank you.

You've nailed the source of the textures. I would like very much to be able to create my own in the future, but wasn't/am currently not in a position (with the knowledge or technology) to do so. I'd like to swap them out of the PDFs for work that's entirely my own in the future.

Again, thank you. I haven't had a lot of time or motivation to work on this project in the last 9 months, but encouragement like this inspires me to get back on it over the summer.

Paedantic Basterd · 05-22-2013, 12:08 PM

.

Trollheart · 05-25-2013, 04:40 PM

OK, well I read it. Honestly, didn't make me fall about the place laughing but I don't think that was your intent (I'm not well up on comedies these days anyway); some good parts were "twincest", the "hey mister you lost our ball" and the "I did a poo!" thing. Very well written; I could see everything happening and even sort of hear the voices. Loved the flashback of the guy dragging the body through the woods --- "Why do you have two baths?" Class.

All in all, not riproaringly funny all the way but it did make me smile, and I think it could certainly have a future. I'd be interested in reading more. For 27 pages it didn't drag or seem to take forever either. Great job!

Paedantic Basterd · 05-25-2013, 05:49 PM

Thank you, Trollheart. That's a very good review for something written with such a cultural basis to it as this has.

Paedantic Basterd · 06-08-2013, 06:46 PM

The Knife - Shaking the Habitual (2013)
Genre: Electronic, Experimental

Judith Butler was the first great sociological thinker to acknowledge that gender is not born, it is made. There is no gene in our DNA which dictates that a man cannot benefit from a moisturizer or enjoy a cocktail. There is no biological imperative that drives women to paint their nails, and nothing preventing them from practicing carpentry. Baby boys are not born with an innate preference for the colour blue, and why is “is it a boy or a girl” a higher priority question than “is the baby healthy”? Gender is not genetic or dichotomous. It is tradition, passed down from history, filtered, and interpreted by the culture of a given generation. Gender, Butler concluded, is a performance which is practiced and developed for show.

A closely related concept in sociology is that of Erving Goffman's impression management, which posits that people perform their various roles on two stages: the front of house, where behaviours are controlled in the presence of strangers, and the back stage, where a person breaks out of the characters they play. Everyone engages in impression management daily when they go to work, when they host dinner for friends, when they present to a boardroom, or when they post on the internet.

The concepts of gender performance and impression management intersect and pervade our lives, affecting everything from how we dress, what we eat, and even our posture when we sit in a crowded room. Women are inclined to eat more peckishly if in the presence of men or strangers. In a classroom or on a bus, men will tend to sprawl their belongings and slump, taking up more physical space than the women, whose posture will be more self-contained. This crash-course in gender theory may seem preposterous to some, but it is a necessary background to the feminist-postmodernist Shaking the Habitual, a work of sociology in both theory and performance.

If ever there was a convincing case for feminist-postmodernism, it would be found in The Knife, who have engaged heavily in impression management throughout their career writing stone-cold electropop. The duo have refused articles, interviews, and live shows, appeared for years disguised in venetian masks, and have accepted awards dressed like melting aliens. 2006's Silent Shout applied this obscurity directly, and Karin Dreijer Andersson performed her part with pitch-shifting effects, eschewing her voice and even her gender in an arctic tundra of synths.

Silent Shout's performance of gender was merely a precursor to Shaking the Habitual, which stands not only as one of the year's best records, but as a remarkable work of gender theory in an industry where it is not well represented. There are many compelling examples of women in the music industry, but they often suffer from the restrictions of gender roles prevalent in the art, taking a backseat in song-writing or having their voice stereotyped into uses for softness and clarity, with all of the imperfections that give a male voice character glossed over. Habitual soaks these tropes in kerosene and sets them ablaze with a middle finger and a smirk.

Shaking the Habitual opens with the aquatic pop song “A Tooth for an Eye”, where Dreijer Andersson's voice rises in tension like a flood siren, her rasp setting the textural tone of the album to follow, The Knife's most distant and removed album yet. The ascent is followed immediately by the blackened beats of “Full of Fire”, demonstrating that if Silent Shout were a cold smoulder, Habitual is a raging inferno. Dreijer Andersson laughs at her own social commentary, but it sounds more like a threat. As the song closes, prompting the listener to “talk about gender, baby”, her voice deteriorates into a mechanical screech neither male nor female, or even human. From this point the album alternately sears and boils through an hour and a half of thinly-veiled discontent. “Without You My Life Would Be Boring” is a classic Knife pop song, scattered with primitive beats and bird-calls, over which Dreijer Andersson trills territorial and graphic imagery of pissing-matches. “Raging Lung” sees the fury return, the disillusionment with economic stratification spelled out with a contemptuous sneer. The dark washes of normalized injustice are punctuated with questioning squeals, unsettled and confused. “Stay Out Here” is a love-letter to Occupy Wall Street protestors, whose voices diffuse through the dense buzz and sinister submerged beat.

Shaking the Habitual is not free of flaws however, and is bogged down at its mid and endpoints with filler, as most double-albums tend to be. The listener may struggle to wade through the combined thirty-minutes of brown, sludgy drone, which serve only to break up the flow and tone of the album, and are perhaps best left at the bottom of the melting-pot which they came from. Even taken as a whole though, Habitual is still superior to the year's repertoire, and is the most ambitious and complex Knife album to date. Shaking the Habitual lives up to its promise in respect to music, both as a pop album and as a Knife album. Like the concepts it conveys, it can be challenging to interpret and digest, but it is an achievement for equality in society as well as in music, which departs from the norms while remaining thoroughly The Knife in sound and ideology. If Shaking the Habitual has made any impression, it's that music is as much a woman's territory as a man's.

Spoiler for YOUTUBAGE:

Mojo · 06-11-2013, 07:02 AM

This is one of the best reviews I have seen on this site, Pedestrian. Well done.

Certainly nobody could accuse you of simply scratching the surface of this record!

Paedantic Basterd · 06-12-2013, 06:08 PM

Thank you! And yet I feel as though I only nicked it!

Paedantic Basterd · 06-15-2013, 05:52 PM

.

Paedantic Basterd · 06-17-2013, 12:29 PM

Welcome to Dirty Laundry, a fun article where I am going to strip down and expose myself as I explore all of the musical missteps of my misguided teenage years. Here I will comb through my LastFM library for all of the atrocious artists of my youth who I have tried to bury in the laundry pile, and I will shake anybody loose who has five or fewer total plays and subject myself to a complete piece of their work.

It should be gross. It should be embarrassing. It should be dirty. But best of all, it should be fun.

A Burning Water - We Can See the Sky From Here (2005)

Total Plays: 1
What I Remember: Absolutely nothing. It came out in 2005, during the height of the emo-pop-punk glory days, and the band name suggests sugary guitar riffs and screamed choruses. It has an RYM rating of 2.77. Promising. Also, it's well over an hour long. WHY.

01 Introduction There's the babble of a concert crowd, probably straight-edge. Some faint guitar distortion. A hollow drum beat and some deep rumbling bass. It meanders. There's the melodic lead guitar. CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG AND--

02 So Much You Hide Oh, there are the slightly-uplifting Yellowcardy power chords I expected. The introduction ends abruptly in the middle of the second song, then a whiny voice starts belting. I can't really get over the decision to give the introduction its own track, run it 30 seconds into the second track, then start the new track with an obvious moment's rest. Are they trying to make a "real album"? I would move away from this question, but I can't actually understand the lyrics.

03 Out in the Dark TISH TISH TISH TISH TISH TISH TISH TISH SCREEE: Distortion riff. Screaming. Gang vocals. A sung chorus about thinking differently from your parents' values. Spoken word bridge.

04 Missiles and Markers Man these bands love their delay pedals. WE CAPTURE TIME AND SPACE WE MADE IT RELATIVE TO THEEEE OCEAAAAN. What? Was this album written during the first term of a high school physics class?

05 In Failed Attempts If all of the songs on one album are this similar, I wonder if I should even bother reviewing more of this genre. There is only so much to be said for this stuff, really. OH GUITAR HERO SOLO.

06 This is a Test CHK-A CHK-CHK CHK-A CHK-CHK WUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH WAUUUUGH AUUUUGH WUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH (Wuaaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuugh auuuugh!) WUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH THIS IS AUUUUGHRRRRR BEST CHANCE AUUUUUGHHHHHHHHH (We are the lost!) WUAAAAAAAAAAAAGH HAVE WE FORGOT ABOUT THE WORDS WE ALWAYS SEEM TO NEVER KNOW THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE WE RO-FRAIN THIS IS THE PLACE WE ALWAYYYYYYS GOOOOOOO (WUAAAAAAAAAHHHHH).

07 Retract AUUUUUUUUUGH. Lyrics. AUUUURGH. I take it that this stretch of the album was penned during the angry months of senior year, and encompasses all of the curfews, slammed doors, and squealing tires that television has led me to believe encompasses American youth. There's a line about being held back. I'd like to believe the next one goes "a year, because I failed my English class".

08 Instrumental Watery, delayed atmospherics and a trumpet that sounds like a wet fart.

09 These Ruins A run of the mill power-song with drawn out vocals and heavy chugging. Well, I must admit that I am moved. To unplug my laptop and chuck it off the deck.

10 A Passing Wish Song starts with a tinkly delayed guitar line and softly sung lyrics slurred together in that faintly-British pop-punk accent popularized by Fall Out Boy. I'm not sure what is happening, but I think someone has either died or been dumped, which to be fair are interchangeable events at 16.

11 Patience is Me No, patience is ME having listened to this entire album.

Conclusion: I just predicted an hour's worth of music based on an album cover and band name. I wonder, is it worthwhile to continue to review these albums in this fashion? Is it worthwhile to read about it? How much can be said for the generational equivalent to hair metal?

NSW · 06-17-2013, 01:36 PM

Please do continue. That was a great read....and yes, super fun. And a little gross.

05-22-2013, 12:08 PM	#132 (permalink)
Paedantic Basterd Music Addict Join Date: Sep 2010 Posts: 5,184	. Last edited by Paedantic Basterd; 04-24-2021 at 02:51 PM.

05-25-2013, 04:40 PM	#133 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,992	OK, well I read it. Honestly, didn't make me fall about the place laughing but I don't think that was your intent (I'm not well up on comedies these days anyway); some good parts were "twincest", the "hey mister you lost our ball" and the "I did a poo!" thing. Very well written; I could see everything happening and even sort of hear the voices. Loved the flashback of the guy dragging the body through the woods --- "Why do you have two baths?" Class. All in all, not riproaringly funny all the way but it did make me smile, and I think it could certainly have a future. I'd be interested in reading more. For 27 pages it didn't drag or seem to take forever either. Great job! __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

06-11-2013, 07:02 AM	#136 (permalink)
Mojo Melancholia Eternally Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: England Posts: 5,018	This is one of the best reviews I have seen on this site, Pedestrian. Well done. Certainly nobody could accuse you of simply scratching the surface of this record! __________________ Last.FM \| Echoes and Dust

06-15-2013, 05:52 PM	#138 (permalink)
Paedantic Basterd Music Addict Join Date: Sep 2010 Posts: 5,184	. Last edited by Paedantic Basterd; 04-24-2021 at 02:51 PM.

06-17-2013, 12:29 PM	#139 (permalink)
Paedantic Basterd Music Addict Join Date: Sep 2010 Posts: 5,184	Welcome to Dirty Laundry, a fun article where I am going to strip down and expose myself as I explore all of the musical missteps of my misguided teenage years. Here I will comb through my LastFM library for all of the atrocious artists of my youth who I have tried to bury in the laundry pile, and I will shake anybody loose who has five or fewer total plays and subject myself to a complete piece of their work. It should be gross. It should be embarrassing. It should be dirty. But best of all, it should be fun. A Burning Water - We Can See the Sky From Here (2005) Total Plays: 1 What I Remember: Absolutely nothing. It came out in 2005, during the height of the emo-pop-punk glory days, and the band name suggests sugary guitar riffs and screamed choruses. It has an RYM rating of 2.77. Promising. Also, it's well over an hour long. WHY. 01 Introduction There's the babble of a concert crowd, probably straight-edge. Some faint guitar distortion. A hollow drum beat and some deep rumbling bass. It meanders. There's the melodic lead guitar. CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG AND-- 02 So Much You Hide Oh, there are the slightly-uplifting Yellowcardy power chords I expected. The introduction ends abruptly in the middle of the second song, then a whiny voice starts belting. I can't really get over the decision to give the introduction its own track, run it 30 seconds into the second track, then start the new track with an obvious moment's rest. Are they trying to make a "real album"? I would move away from this question, but I can't actually understand the lyrics. 03 Out in the Dark TISH TISH TISH TISH TISH TISH TISH TISH SCREEE: Distortion riff. Screaming. Gang vocals. A sung chorus about thinking differently from your parents' values. Spoken word bridge. 04 Missiles and Markers Man these bands love their delay pedals. WE CAPTURE TIME AND SPACE WE MADE IT RELATIVE TO THEEEE OCEAAAAN. What? Was this album written during the first term of a high school physics class? 05 In Failed Attempts If all of the songs on one album are this similar, I wonder if I should even bother reviewing more of this genre. There is only so much to be said for this stuff, really. OH GUITAR HERO SOLO. 06 This is a Test CHK-A CHK-CHK CHK-A CHK-CHK WUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH WAUUUUGH AUUUUGH WUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH (Wuaaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuugh auuuugh!) WUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH THIS IS AUUUUGHRRRRR BEST CHANCE AUUUUUGHHHHHHHHH (We are the lost!) WUAAAAAAAAAAAAGH HAVE WE FORGOT ABOUT THE WORDS WE ALWAYS SEEM TO NEVER KNOW THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE WE RO-FRAIN THIS IS THE PLACE WE ALWAYYYYYYS GOOOOOOO (WUAAAAAAAAAHHHHH). 07 Retract AUUUUUUUUUGH. Lyrics. AUUUURGH. I take it that this stretch of the album was penned during the angry months of senior year, and encompasses all of the curfews, slammed doors, and squealing tires that television has led me to believe encompasses American youth. There's a line about being held back. I'd like to believe the next one goes "a year, because I failed my English class". 08 Instrumental Watery, delayed atmospherics and a trumpet that sounds like a wet fart. 09 These Ruins A run of the mill power-song with drawn out vocals and heavy chugging. Well, I must admit that I am moved. To unplug my laptop and chuck it off the deck. 10 A Passing Wish Song starts with a tinkly delayed guitar line and softly sung lyrics slurred together in that faintly-British pop-punk accent popularized by Fall Out Boy. I'm not sure what is happening, but I think someone has either died or been dumped, which to be fair are interchangeable events at 16. 11 Patience is Me No, patience is ME having listened to this entire album. Conclusion: I just predicted an hour's worth of music based on an album cover and band name. I wonder, is it worthwhile to continue to review these albums in this fashion? Is it worthwhile to read about it? How much can be said for the generational equivalent to hair metal? Last edited by Paedantic Basterd; 06-17-2013 at 02:23 PM.

05-25-2013, 05:49 PM	#134 (permalink)
Paedantic Basterd Music Addict Join Date: Sep 2010 Posts: 5,184	Thank you, Trollheart. That's a very good review for something written with such a cultural basis to it as this has.

06-08-2013, 06:46 PM	#135 (permalink)
Paedantic Basterd Music Addict Join Date: Sep 2010 Posts: 5,184	The Knife - Shaking the Habitual (2013) Genre: Electronic, Experimental Judith Butler was the first great sociological thinker to acknowledge that gender is not born, it is made. There is no gene in our DNA which dictates that a man cannot benefit from a moisturizer or enjoy a cocktail. There is no biological imperative that drives women to paint their nails, and nothing preventing them from practicing carpentry. Baby boys are not born with an innate preference for the colour blue, and why is “is it a boy or a girl” a higher priority question than “is the baby healthy”? Gender is not genetic or dichotomous. It is tradition, passed down from history, filtered, and interpreted by the culture of a given generation. Gender, Butler concluded, is a performance which is practiced and developed for show. A closely related concept in sociology is that of Erving Goffman's impression management, which posits that people perform their various roles on two stages: the front of house, where behaviours are controlled in the presence of strangers, and the back stage, where a person breaks out of the characters they play. Everyone engages in impression management daily when they go to work, when they host dinner for friends, when they present to a boardroom, or when they post on the internet. The concepts of gender performance and impression management intersect and pervade our lives, affecting everything from how we dress, what we eat, and even our posture when we sit in a crowded room. Women are inclined to eat more peckishly if in the presence of men or strangers. In a classroom or on a bus, men will tend to sprawl their belongings and slump, taking up more physical space than the women, whose posture will be more self-contained. This crash-course in gender theory may seem preposterous to some, but it is a necessary background to the feminist-postmodernist Shaking the Habitual, a work of sociology in both theory and performance. If ever there was a convincing case for feminist-postmodernism, it would be found in The Knife, who have engaged heavily in impression management throughout their career writing stone-cold electropop. The duo have refused articles, interviews, and live shows, appeared for years disguised in venetian masks, and have accepted awards dressed like melting aliens. 2006's Silent Shout applied this obscurity directly, and Karin Dreijer Andersson performed her part with pitch-shifting effects, eschewing her voice and even her gender in an arctic tundra of synths. Silent Shout's performance of gender was merely a precursor to Shaking the Habitual, which stands not only as one of the year's best records, but as a remarkable work of gender theory in an industry where it is not well represented. There are many compelling examples of women in the music industry, but they often suffer from the restrictions of gender roles prevalent in the art, taking a backseat in song-writing or having their voice stereotyped into uses for softness and clarity, with all of the imperfections that give a male voice character glossed over. Habitual soaks these tropes in kerosene and sets them ablaze with a middle finger and a smirk. Shaking the Habitual opens with the aquatic pop song “A Tooth for an Eye”, where Dreijer Andersson's voice rises in tension like a flood siren, her rasp setting the textural tone of the album to follow, The Knife's most distant and removed album yet. The ascent is followed immediately by the blackened beats of “Full of Fire”, demonstrating that if Silent Shout were a cold smoulder, Habitual is a raging inferno. Dreijer Andersson laughs at her own social commentary, but it sounds more like a threat. As the song closes, prompting the listener to “talk about gender, baby”, her voice deteriorates into a mechanical screech neither male nor female, or even human. From this point the album alternately sears and boils through an hour and a half of thinly-veiled discontent. “Without You My Life Would Be Boring” is a classic Knife pop song, scattered with primitive beats and bird-calls, over which Dreijer Andersson trills territorial and graphic imagery of pissing-matches. “Raging Lung” sees the fury return, the disillusionment with economic stratification spelled out with a contemptuous sneer. The dark washes of normalized injustice are punctuated with questioning squeals, unsettled and confused. “Stay Out Here” is a love-letter to Occupy Wall Street protestors, whose voices diffuse through the dense buzz and sinister submerged beat. Shaking the Habitual is not free of flaws however, and is bogged down at its mid and endpoints with filler, as most double-albums tend to be. The listener may struggle to wade through the combined thirty-minutes of brown, sludgy drone, which serve only to break up the flow and tone of the album, and are perhaps best left at the bottom of the melting-pot which they came from. Even taken as a whole though, Habitual is still superior to the year's repertoire, and is the most ambitious and complex Knife album to date. Shaking the Habitual lives up to its promise in respect to music, both as a pop album and as a Knife album. Like the concepts it conveys, it can be challenging to interpret and digest, but it is an achievement for equality in society as well as in music, which departs from the norms while remaining thoroughly The Knife in sound and ideology. If Shaking the Habitual has made any impression, it's that music is as much a woman's territory as a man's. Spoiler for YOUTUBAGE:

06-12-2013, 06:08 PM	#137 (permalink)
Paedantic Basterd Music Addict Join Date: Sep 2010 Posts: 5,184	Thank you! And yet I feel as though I only nicked it!

06-17-2013, 01:36 PM	#140 (permalink)
NSW Bigger and Better Join Date: Mar 2008 Location: Texas girl living in the UK Posts: 2,596	Please do continue. That was a great read....and yes, super fun. And a little gross. __________________ Hi.