Mark Richardson

I'm the editor-in-chief of Pitchfork and I wrote Zaireeka, a book in the 33 1/3 series about the Flaming Lips album.

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Reblogged from pitchfork|55 notes

Fantastic album and Mike Powell wrote a beautiful piece on it. 

“Took the Christmas lights off the front porch February 31st” kind of sums up my state of mind this year.

(Source: pitchfork)

Posted at 11:21am.

Reblogged from pitchfork|66 notes

pitchfork:

Art-rock great Robert Wyatt rhapsodizes on Miles, Mingus, and more in our latest 5-10-15-20 feature. Photo by Alfie Wyatt.

Great piece here, worth reading.

Posted at 4:51pm and tagged with: writing,.

Reblogged from seanfennessey|31 notes

Posted at 10:59am and tagged with: pitchfork, writing,.

17 notes

Kraftwerk doing “Pocket Calculator” in 1981. Ralf is a good dancer; the other guys, not so much. I hope to catch them at this MOMA thing. I saw them at the 930 Club in 2005 and that is my go-to answer for the best show I’ve ever seen. I also interviewed Ralf in 2009. I was on Skype, wearing headphones, sitting on the floor of a new apartment in Riverside, Calif., which did not yet have furniture. He was talking to me on a speaker phone as he sat in an office in London. Technology!

Ralf: I think it was more like an awakening in the late 60s of the whole living situation— the German word is einfach musik. Everyday music, like— it’s more like discovering the tape recorder for us. Like, the world of sound: Everyday life has a sound, and that’s also why our studio is called Kling Klang studio because “kling” is the verb and “klang” is the noun for “sound.” So it means “sounding sound.” That’s really what Kraftwerk is about. Sound sources are all around us, and we work with anything, from pocket calculators to computers, from voices, human voices, from machines, from body sounds to fantasy to synthetic sounds to speech from human voice to speech synthesis from anything, if possible. We don’t want to limit ourselves to any specific sound like that was before when we were brought up in classical music. Then it had be strings, it had to be piano, blah blah blah. We wanted to go beyond, to find a new silence and from there to progress to continue walking into the world of sound.

Posted at 9:24am and tagged with: kraftwerk, writing,.

8 notes

I was at a place in my life in where I would still pick up The Best American Poetry just to see what was good. In the 1994 edition, published in 1995, there was a series of three poems by a guy named Tom Andrews. The series was called “Cinema Verite” and the poems took the form of short film scripts.

At that time, in addition to poetry, I was also very interested in screenwriting. I read books on it, talked to friends about it, collaborated with people. It was the post-Sex, Lies, & Videotape wave of independent film, and the way you might say “I’m starting a blog” now, you’d say “I’m working on a screenplay” then. 

So these “Cinema Verite” poems were great—funny, sharp, original. Or at least they seemed that way to me. And in the author’s bio in the back, it said that Tom Andrews was working on an entire book in the series. So from that point forward, every few months, I’d look for the book in the poetry section in bookstores. Never saw it, but it took me a long time to give up. Years, for sure—just became a habit to look for that Tom Andrews book.

I still think of the below poem pretty regularly because I think it says something about what our lives have become in the digital era, but of course it was written well before the digital era. It also makes me chuckle. 

Thinking of it today and googling, I discovered that Tom Andrews died in 2001. He never did finish that book. But there’s a volume of his Collected Poems that might have others from this series. Guess I’ll order it on Amazon. 

___

Cinema Verite: The Death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson by Tom Andrews

The camera pans a gorgeous snow-filled landscape: rolling hills, large black trees, a frozen river. The snow falls and falls. The camera stops to find Tennyson, in an armchair, in the middle of a snowy field.

TENNYSON:
It’s snowing. The snow is like…the snow is like crushed aspirin,
like bits of paper…no, it’s like gauze bandages, clean teeth, shoelaces, headlights…no,
I’m getting too old for this, it’s like a huge T-shirt that’s been chewed on by a dog,
it’s like semen, confetti, chalk, sea shells, woodsmoke, ash, soap, trillium, solitude, daydreaming…Oh hell,
you can see for yourself! That’s what I hate about film!

He dies.

Posted at 1:45pm and tagged with: writing,.

3 notes

I watched this fight live on TV. When I was young, Larry Holmes was very much the heir apparent to the 70s boxing giants—Ali, Frazier, Foreman. He was undefeated through most of his career, then he lost to Michael Spinks, then he retired, then he came out of retirement. Tyson destroyed him. Holmes was 38, Tyson, 21.

Posted at 12:58am and tagged with: boxing,.

5 notes

This happened and footage exists.

Posted at 12:37am and tagged with: Ella Fitzgerald,.

8 notes

Anita O’Day performing “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Tea for Two” at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. She was a hipster. This is American music.

The clothes people are wearing in this clip are just incredible. What beautiful footage. Never seen it, but it’s from a feature called Jazz on a Summer’s Day. 

Supposedly she was high on heroin during this set which is pretty hard to believe when she goes into that scat improv in “Tea for Two”.

Posted at 11:58pm.

3 notes

Round about 1997 I bought a cassette called Neckthrust One by Mixmaster Mike, who was a member of the SF DJ crew Invisibl Skratch Pikliz. During this time, I was very into the scratch DJ scene in the Bay Area. Hand to god, in 1997 I thought to myself, “The Beastie Boys should hook up with these guys,” and then, in 1998, it happened and Mixmaster Mike has been the Beastie Boys’ DJ ever since. You won’t believe I really thought that. And since you don’t know me, you shouldn’t. But I did. I know the truth and that’s all that matters. The fact that the Beastie Boys have never been any good since then is immaterial. 

Anyway. Mixmaster Mike. Neckthrust One. I listened to it often. I had a cassette deck and a walkman and, a couple of years later, a car with a tape deck. And this was in all three, often. Mike did most of it live to tape with two turntables and a mixer.

This passage has an instrumental bit—>Lord Finesse’s “You Know What I’m About” —> Snoop Dogg’s “Pump Pump”. I didn’t know what the Lord Finesse song was for years. This was before Google. There was not a search engine for me to find it. Later I learned that LF had many brilliant tracks to his name. I also learned that his voice was pitched way up here, as was Snoop’s, I’m guessing +5 or so on Mike’s decks. And I much later learned the the Lord Finesse track sampled the theme from “Scooby Doo”. And there’s an organ bit in the Snoop song that connects it. This cassette rip could be better, but maybe you’ll enjoy it.

Posted at 10:30pm and tagged with: Lord Finesse, Mixmaster Mike, Snoop Dogg, writing, audio,.

Reblogged from pitchfork|182 notes

Should be fun…

(Source: pitchfork)

Posted at 2:54pm.