Winter was a sort of interminable prison sentence this year, but spring is finally doing its slidy dance into the corners of the grass plots of Brooklyn. This month I don’t have any great back stories or epic inspirations, just an old cliché: the-best-of-something-or-other. So, this mix is the Best of White Gilt.

As a very few of you may know, my good friend Shay and I hold a sporadic dance party in Greenpoint called White Gilt, which was the name of our band, but then I turned 30 and we both got very career oriented. So, why not turn it into a DJ night, which is much more mature and serious-minded? This was, we both agreed, a Good Idea.

During the course of the evening, I often get a few people who ask what this or that track is, and it reminds me that I haven’t actually shared the bulk of my favorites that I play ‘out’, including a few remixes by us truly. Now, this is contrary to traditional DJing logic, which holds that if you have something good you white knuckle it until death’s bony hand pries it from your grip. However, I think that since I am not a ‘real’ DJ (meaning that I don’t have everything on vinyl and I don’t care if you want to ask me questions during the set, just don’t be creepy) I should share these in the hope that they will make others smile and shuffle their feet around a bit.

Most of these tracks lean towards minimal synth, electronica, or italo disco, since that is the focus of the night. It’s a somewhat dated genre in many ways, and though the eighties electro thing has been done and done to death, there’s something special about many of these dusty things. I’m still not sure what draws me to this particular aesthetic, save that it is snappy without being sugary, lonely without being maudlin, and dark without sinking into hyperbole. I think it’s fun. And I hope that you will, too.

Click here to play it all:

1. Games (White Gilt Reup mix) – Dying in Africa
2. Grauzone – Eisbär
3. Calling Hearts – Cosmology
4. Candide – Dreamers Never Talk
5. Martin Dupont – Just Because
6. Laugh Clown Laugh – Feel So Young
7. Tres – Operator
8. Young Things West – Trans-Europa
9. In Trance 95 – Brazilia
10. Eleven Pond – Watching Trees
11. Basic – Face In The Night
12. Nathalie – My Love Won’t Let You Down
13. The Electronic Circus – Direct Lines
14. Jessica Blue – The Dark Of Light
15. Tesla Boy – Neon Love
16. Q-Lazzarus – Goodbye Horses
17. Nicolas Makelberge – South America
18. Midnight Magic – Beam Me Up (Jacques Renault Remix)
19. White Gilt – You’ve Got the Assault

What he left behind is decidedly slim: a few short films, photographs, and performance pieces comprise his entire body of work. Emerging from this fragmentary, almost incidental material is the picture of a man struggling with elemental forces in his life, using physical means to attempt to express the invisible weight of his emotions and past. Born in 1942 during the German occupation of the Netherlands, Ader’s parents turned their home into a safe house for Dutch Jews, hoping to hide them from the Nazis until the war was over. Unfortunately, the safe house was discovered and his father was summarily arrested, briefly imprisoned, and executed in the woods outside their home. Given only fifteen minutes to gather the family belongings and leave the country, his mother threw all their clothing out into the garden, hoping to come back for it later. When told that his father would never come back, Ader pleaded with his mother, “Mama, please don’t leave me”.

Echoes of these events ripple through all of his work: in his best-known film, I’m too sad to tell you, Ader weeps uncontrollably into the camera for a full ten minutes. In a subsequent performance piece he scrawls ‘Please don’t leave me’ on the gallery wall, and in All My Clothes he strews his clothing on the roof of his house, the same roof that he later films himself toppling off in Fall I. It can be tempting to see all of this from a reductionist standpoint: the events that shape a personality in the beginning will determine its direction through the course of life. Ader definitely struggled with what might be termed the inevitable– death, loss, and even gravity; the forces that pull us down. However, his explorations into this territory are tinged with humor as well as a deep understanding that the only way to rise above these elements is sometimes to surrender to them.

Perhaps this is the reason he decided to make the Atlantic crossing, to pursue something beyond the weight of the past, beyond his own frailty. Some have suggested that he went only in search of death, though I doubt that to be true. He seemed to have an innate understanding of the specific weight of time and emotions, the physical objects surrounding them, and the invisible forces that act in tandem: a grand concert of events in which we are small, if integral points. In search of the miraculous he was overcome, and in that overcoming he created his own persona, which if not based purely on truth is anchored in what he understood best: myth.

Here, then, is a mix for Bas Jan Ader at the beginning of autumn, a season of remembering.

Click here to play it all:

1. Valgeir Sigurdsson – Dreamland
2. Mister 1-2-3-4 – Jef
3. Emeralds – Now You See Me
4. Gravenhurst – The Diver
5. Colin Newman – Alone On Piano
6. Clogs – Last Song
7. Max Richter – Infra 5
8. Julianna Barwick – Bode
9. Doveman – The Best Thing
10. Big Star – Holocaust
11. Tim Hecker – Chimeras
12. Tindersticks – Until the Morning Comes
13. The Durutti Column – Darkness Here
14. Antony & The Johnsons – Thank You for Your Love

I got into synthpop and post-punk at the same time I got into goth and New Wave, but never made many of the distinctions or connections that this film makes. Partly due to the fact that I picked up the thread after much of this music had lost its appeal to mainstream audiences, (we’re talking mid-Nineties here) I was simply ignorant of how hard many of the musicians I loved had struggled just to get heard. Britain in the 1970s was a bleak place, deep in a recession with cities transformed by urban planning from bustling neighborhoods into concrete mazes. The future had slowly receded from a shining beacon of a new society into a grey, desolate present full of right angles and industrial noise.

Into this inhospitable environment came a group of young people inspired by the energy of punk and the future shock novels of J.G. Ballard, tired of the excesses of 70s schlock rock and disco, and ready to use any technology possible to find a new method of expression. As John Foxx, lead singer of Ultravox states in the film: “I wasn’t angry about it anymore, I just wanted to make music for it”. It took the better part of a decade for synthpop and New Wave to break through to the mainstream, after which it lost much of its darkness and intensity to the commercialism and self-centered energy of the Eighties.

Synth Britannia does a great job of presenting the economic and societal issues underpinning the music, as well as introducing some of the most influential (if not necessarily famous) artists involved in the movement. However, the music is presented in clips and as background, so I thought I would compile most of the artists featured (and a few others) into a soundtrack of sorts. I hope that you enjoy this introduction to British synthesized and electronic music.

You can watch the film here.

Click here to play it all:

1. Throbbing Gristle – Hot on the Heels of Love
2. Cabaret Voltaire – No Escape
3. The Normal – Warm Leatherette
4. John Foxx – Underpass
5. Robert Rental – Double Heart
6. Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – Electricity
7. Fad Gadget – Back To Nature
8. Joy Division – Atmosphere
9. The Human League – Marianne
10. Gary Numan – M.E.
11. New Order – Chosen Time
12. The Flying Lizards – TV
13. Die Doraus und die Marinas – Tulpen und Narzissen
14. Visage – Fade To Grey
15. Silicon Teens – Sun Flight
16. Depeche Mode – Dreaming of Me
17. Yazoo – Only You
18. Heaven 17 – Let Me Go
19. Ultravox – Vienna

White Noise deals with these issues within the boundaries of a family. Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies (humorous in itself, never mind that he doesn’t speak German) at an unnamed, bucolic American college, and his fourth wife Babette live with their various children from previous marriages in a large if indifferent house filled with objects that have lost meaning– souvenirs, knick knacks, mystery kitchen appliances, and the constant hum of the television. Conversations between characters read somewhere between poetic monologues and an infomercial, which is, let’s face it, very often how we try to communicate– our memories are indelibly printed with commercial objects, our childhood nostalgia defined by a longing for products no longer produced.

As Gladney says: “I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities”. Here, then, is the touching, fragile aspect of DeLillo’s work: in this sea of static, of noise, of glaring plastic, we still try to make sense of the babble, to break it down into its component parts, to make connections, and thereby to understand. Otherwise, we are helpless against it. Jack and Babette are both terrified of death, terrified of something beyond their control, are surrounded by things which in themselves have no meaning and can offer no solace. Sound at all familiar?

The original title of White Noise was Panasonic, and though unused for copyright reasons, the intent is there: ‘pana’ meaning ‘all’ and ’sonic’, ’sound’: all sound, all noise. We are cradled, surrounded, and brought up by this noise, this background din of culture, nurture, nature, Herbal Essences, microwave dinners, Bud Light, Smurfs, and the interstate. At the end of the postmodernist tunnel lie apathy and irony, dissolute twins that have infiltrated deep inside art and culture. This was not DeLillo’s intent, however. When asked about the book, he quoted Joyce: “I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning.”
So too this imagined soundtrack to his work. It is 3AM, all the lights are off save the television, the volume is down, and you are listening to the highway.

Click here to play it all:

1. Autechre – 444 (edit)
2. Team Ghost – Echoes
3. Outlier – Visible Light Eater
4. Worst Friends – AG
5. The Sight Below – Shimmer
6. Kammerflimmer Kollektief – ‘There’s a weight on you, but you can’t feel it.’
7. Talk Talk – I Believe In You
8. Sinikka Langeland – Sølv
9. Bill Fay – Pictures Of Adolf Again
10. Food – Christcookies
11. Television Personalities – Sick Again
12. Yasushi Yoshida – Permanent Yesterday
13. Shearwater – Lost Boys
14. Wes Willenbring – In a Quiet Dark Room
15. Telefon Tel Aviv – I Made a Tree On the Wold
16. Daniel Johnson – Damn

Trends and fads in music shift continually, sometimes in response to greater cultural factors, and sometimes at pure whim. I’m not sure what impetus drives small groups of people to create similar structures in art and music at the same point in time. It’s almost like a certain tendency in the process of manifesting itself creates a feedback loop, building on its own momentum until it reaches a crescendo, and eventually declines.

I’m not going to deny that I’ve always been attracted to colder, electronically influenced music, and I’m glad that minimal synth, darkwave, coldwave, and italo disco are seeing a resurgence, especially since much of that effort is concentrated around my own Brooklyn, New York– though it exists in pockets in other cities as well. For those of you that aren’t familiar with these genres, let me spare you the history and simply say that if you enjoy sparse, elemental, atmospheric tones, stay up too late too often, are familiar with the strange feeling of disconnection that is ever-present in major cities, or just need a good dance beat without the schmaltz factor, you will most likely enjoy this mix.

Click here to play it all:

1. Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – Joan Of Arc
2. Obscure By Degrees – I’m Dying
3. Absolute Body Control – Into The Light
4. Snowy Red – Never Alive
5. Black Fantasy – Evil Places
6. Reserve – Destination Pour L’Inconnu
7. Das Ding – Reassurance Ritual
8. Deutscher Kaiser – Danse
9. Clan Of Xymox – Seventh Time
10. Led Er Est – Port Isabel
11. Soft Moon – Breathe the Fire
12. Telefon Tel Aviv – You Are the Worst Thing In the World
13. Zola Jesus – Run Me Out

For some reason, days like this make me think of northern France. Directly south of the English cliffs at Plymouth there is a town called Brest. It was almost entirely destroyed during World War II, left with only three buildings standing. In 1945, the poet Jacques Prévert published his poem Barbara, which I think is a fitting complement to such a day as this. If you are feeling a little wistful, a little longing for a rainy sea and a French day that smells of brine and wet wood, on a beach where the horizon melts into the earth– this is the mix for you.

Remember Barbara
It rained forever on Brest that day
And you walked smiling
guileless delighted streaming wet
In the rain
Remember Barbara
It rained forever on Brest
And as I crossed Siam Street with you
You smiled
And I smiled the same
Remember Barbara
You who I didn’t know
You who did not know me
Remember
Remember that day
Don’t forget
A man on a sheltered porch
He called your name
Barbara
And you turned toward him in the rain
Streaming wet delighted guileless
And you threw open your arms
Remember that Barbara
And forgive me if I say your name
But I call by name all those whom I love
Even if I only see them once
I call the names of all lovers
Even if I do not know them

Remember Barbara
Don’t forget
This wise and happy rain
On your happy face
On this happy town
The rain on the sea
On the fort
On the Ouessant ship
Oh Barbara
What wretchedness is war
Where are you now
Under this rain of fire
Of icy fire, of blood
And he who lay in your arms
Lovingly
Is he dead gone or better still alive
Oh Barbara
It rains forever on Brest
Like it rained before
But it is not the same and all is decayed
It’s a mourning rain, terrible and desolate
It isn’t the same storm
Of fire of ice of blood
But simply clouds
That burst like dogs
Dogs that dissolve
On the shores of Brest
And rot far away
Far far very far from Brest
Where nothing is left

This is my own translation from the French. See here for the original, read aloud and written.

Click here to play it all:

1. Yann Tiersen – 1976
2. Françoiz Breut – Si tu disais
3. Ólafur Arnalds – Raein
4. Barbara Carlotti – Tunis
5. Paul Barnes – Orphée Suite: II. Orphée’s Bedroom
6. Boxhead Ensemble – When Johnny Comes Marching Home
7. Dominique A – Décrocher les trains
8. Thurston Moore – Spinning Goodbye
9. Yann Tiersen – Au dessous du volcan
10. Françoiz Breut – Les jeunes pousses
11. René Aubry – Chaloupée
12. Bertrand Belin – Au coeur des astres
13. Arvo Pärt – Pari Intervallo
14. Michael Nyman – A Watery Death
15. Lavender Diamond – Rise In The Springtime
16. Yann Tiersen – II
17. Max Richter – The Haunted Ocean 4
18. Low – Sunflower
19. Balmorhea – Night In the Draw
20. Yann Tiersen – Yellow
21. Keren Ann – Lay Your Head Down

Desperately trying to figure out who I was, I stumbled through the next few years, clinging to whatever small morsels of truth were tossed my way. Sometimes they came in the guise of books, music, or places, but most often in the form of other people. There were good-time drinking buddies, itinerant exes, the enemies who seemed like friends, melodramatic showboats, fortune-readers, dreaming idealists, and pragmatic scholars. Each person that intersected my life at that time was a sort of guide, for good or ill, but most of them faded into the background din of the city, save a very few. Perhaps a pat truth, but it took me a long time to realize that good friends are both hard to find and worth their weight in gold about fifty times over.

These were the few who graciously received the brunt of my post-adolescent thrashings, who didn’t hold it against me when I called them at 2AM and asked for a ride from Queens, who stayed with me until the bitter end of the night, climbed construction fences in Manhattan, drank Sparks and ate White Castle sliders, survived the absolutely retarded Vice party of 2005, helped me garner six noise complaints for karaoke stylings, blessed out my ex-boyfriends in public, cooked innumerable dinners, crashed ICFF events, and have loved and lost with me for the last seven or more years. We have spent arguably the best and worst decade of our lives here, equally defined by our attachments to one another and by the city itself, an icon of vastness and inhospitable indifference, of excitement and frightening impenetrability. But, things change.

This week, one of my best friends takes the next step, following another of us a year earlier, and one the year before that. So, this mix is very much dedicated to Alicia, but also to Leah, to LeeAnn, and to all of us that laid our foundations here. I wouldn’t be who I am without you, and here’s hoping for another ten years.

For all that I learned: that the city can’t hold you forever, that you won’t be 20-something for very long, that ‘cool’ really doesn’t mean that much, that you have to learn who you are without looking for a reflection of yourself in another, and that success is relative, the most valuable things I gained were the people who I learned with. To everybody: thank you. And to Alicia: I hope that this gives you something to listen to, to remember, to roll your windows down and turn the stereo up on the way to Tejas. I love you and will miss you.

Click here to play it all:

1. Gliss – Morning Light
2. Best Coast – When I’m With You
3. Asobi Seksu – Lions And Tigers
4. Bear In Heaven – Ultimate Satisfaction
5. Small Black – Bad Lover
6. LCD Soundsystem – All My Friends
7. Desire – Don’t Call
8. FM Belfast – Synthia
9. Parallel Dance Ensemble – Turtle Pizza Cadillac (Yam Who? Rework)
10. Woolfy – Oh Missy
11. Telefon Tel Aviv – Helen of Troy
12. Unsolved Mysteries – Falling in Love
13. Washed Out – Despicable Dogs (Small Black)
14. Millionyoung – Mien
15. Joe Goddard – Lemon & Lime (Home Time)
16. La Grande Illusion – I Wanna Be Your Dog

Still, there’s some comfort in listening to a few things that might be a good soundtrack for your imaginary getaway. So, let’s go on a magical journey to a semi-tropical futuristic funky city where the lights are always bright and the liquor cheap, the people dance in the streets and the temperature is always in the mid 70s. Oh, wait. That’s LA. Oh well, enjoy your trip to LA.

Click here to play it all:

1. Laser – Planet of No Return
2. WORSHIP – Lights (The Dome Part III)
3. Prophet – Right on Time
4. Larry Graham – Sooner Or Later (Instrumental)
5. out hud – How Long
6. The B-52s – Legal Tender
7. Severed Heads – Dead Eyes Opened
8. Kevin Irving – Children of the Night
9. Frankie Knuckles – Your Love
10. Dâm-Funk – Chocolate
11. Craig Peyton – Be Thankful For What You Got (Instrumental)
12. David Joseph – You Can’t Hide Your Love (Larry Levan Remix)
13. DVAS – Inner Sanctum
14. Wizardz – Boogie Slyde
15. Manu Dibango – New Bell

So, what is ‘tiki’, exactly? Well, once upon a time (in the late 1920s) there was a man who called himself Donn ‘the Beachcomber’ Beach. (Which is a fabricated name to start, he was born Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt.) He kicked around in the South Pacific and Caribbean for a few years before becoming a bootlegger during Prohibition. Once it was repealed, he moved to Hollywood in 1934 and opened Don’s Beachcomber Bar, and later, across the street, the first Don the Beachcomber restaurant. The decor was a nostalgic mishmash of all his travels from the Philippines all the way to Jamaica, becoming a sort of syncretized, ideal version of an American’s perspective on ‘the South Seas’. And man, was it a success.

The musical component to Donn’s tiki was called exotica, and was ‘invented’ by Martin Denney around 1957. Originating markedly later than the design/cultural tiki style, it came about more in response to tiki rather than as a force in shaping it. Nonetheless, it ushered in an era of acceptance for ‘foreign’ instruments and artists that might not have otherwise gained popular appeal in America.

Somewhere along the wayside the tiki movement faded and all but disappeared, but remnants can still be seen of just how popular it was– the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland, for example. What piqued the American imagination about tiki is perhaps the same thing that causes many of us to journey to remote regions today: an escape from the everyday, from the ‘man in the gray flannel suit’, from the obligations of our lives and the orderly sterility of the suburban grid: to experience what life would be like in a place not ruled by the dollar and the clock.

So, as you listen to this mix, lie back, mix up some Demerara and passionfruit juice and dream of Tikiland, a place lost in the American subconscious…always there, and always just out of reach.

Click here to play it all:

1. Arthur Lyman – Hawaiian War Chant
2. Terorotua and his Orchestra – Elle Est Partie
3. Martin Denny – Jamaica Farwell
4. Nat Mara – Pehe Pehe Maira (Maybe)
5. Chaino – Afro Cha Cha
6. Richard Hayman – Danse Calinda
7. Herbie Hancock – Watermelon Man
8. Ozzie Hall – Take Five
9. Richard Hayman – Afro
10. Chaino – Gua-gua
11. The Out-Islanders – Little Island
12. Martin Denny – Flamingo
13. Richard Hayman – Conjuration
14. Manu Dibango – Hibiscus
15. Donald Byrd – Jamie

This coincidence aside, I went on to read everything of Murakami’s that had been translated into English at the time. His books are some of my most favorite comfort reads, and my copies are heavily dogeared, the pages stuck together from overuse. It isn’t so much his grasp of language or narrative that gets me, nor the variety of his capabilities as a storyteller (all his protagonists are similar enough to fade into one another) but his ability to portray the taut, frightening tenuousness that underlies our day to day grasp on normalcy. How often have you been strolling along, humming a tune, thinking about something mundane (like spaghetti) and an Event occurs, maybe small, maybe large, that changes the course of your personal history? A woman’s face, the movement of a cat in a window, a plane crash, the cry of a strange bird– these are, if noticed, harbingers, entreaties to enter a totally different plane of reality, and once entered, we may not be able to come back– or at least not as the person we left.

This is the world according to Murakami, and it is underwritten by music. He has said that his longstanding love of music is what indirectly led him to write, and that the most important aspects of his prose are its rhythms and its melodies. I’ve often noticed how many references he makes to both artists and specific songs in his books, but never took the time to try to pull it all together. However, picking up my copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle this past weekend made that desire rather strong, and I suspect there are others of you out there that, having read something or other of his, would like a crash course in the music that is referenced in many of his works. This mix is by no means exhaustive, but I have dug out specific songs/performances where I thought necessary, while the others are artists that are mentioned in one or more separate works. Book references are below.

Click here to play it all:

1. Chamber Orchestra Of Europe & Claudio Abbado – La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie): Overture (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)
2. The Beatles – Norwegian Wood Norwegian Wood
3. Xavier Cugat – Perfidia A Wild Sheep Chase
4. Nat King Cole – Quizás, Quizás, Quizás (Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps) South of the Border, West of the Sun
5. Itzhak Perlman & Samuel Sanders – Prophet Bird, Op. 82, No. 7 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
6. Claude Debussy – Clair de Lune Norwegian Wood
7. Bob Cooper – Milano Blues Dance, Dance, Dance
8. Kyu Sakamoto – Sukiyaki Norwegian Wood
9. Duke Ellington – Anitra’s Dance from Peer Gynt Suite No. 1″ South of the Border, West of the Sun
10. Charlie “Bird” Parker & Machito and His Orchestra – Mango Mangue Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
11. Smokey Robinson & The Miracles – Going to a Go-Go Dance, Dance, Dance
12. Ray Charles – Born to Lose Dance, Dance, Dance
13. London Philharmonic Orchestra & Reinhard Linz – Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), K. 620: Overture The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
14. Miles Davis – Concierto De Aranjuez (Part One) Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
15. Woody Herman – Body and Soul Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
16. Gene Autry – South of the Border (Down Mexico Way) South of the Border, West of the Sun
17. Bill Evans & Jim Hall – I Hear A Rhapsody The Elephant Vanishes
18. Herbie Hancock – Watermelon Man (Alternate Take) The Elephant Vanishes
19. Charlie Christian – Air Mail Special A Wild Sheep Chase
20. The Lettermen – Theme from “A Summer Place” Dance, Dance, Dance