Damsel - Distressed

I woke up with Rush's Time Stands still on the old brainbox of doom, so that can only mean 2 things. One, it's Sunday and we have to wrap up this adventure. Desmond TuTu) it's always about money and new exciting ways to take it away from people. So, as the innocence slips away, we'll listen to the complete noise chaos that is Damsel. Liz Phair? 

S: i suppose that is fair, the last two albums were really enjoyable and very mainstream. But how are we supposed to actually do it? 

B: all sorts of ways. We could answer Maynard's rhetorical question how can this mean anything to me when i really don't feel a thing at all?  Then again, overthinking, overanalyzing separates the body from the mind. I'm totally fine with that, but most people are not. Let's define our experience. It's only 4 tracks. 

E: but that means they are super long. 

B: yes, but there are only 4 of them. Plus there's a guy from Wilco here, so it's not like we're in a room full of strangers. Compy, give us the official album explanation. 

C: ok, gimme a sec. 

"For the past few years, avant-jazz legend Nels Cline (Wilco, Thurston Moore, The Geraldine Fibbers) and omnipresent beat freak Zach Hill (Hella, The Ladies, Team Sleep) have been waiting for an opportunity to spend a few hours making noise. When Cline joined Wilco full-time and Hill started The Ladies with Pinback's Rob Crow, the dream seemed increasingly unlikely. And by the time Hill's full-time gig as half of Hella saw him touring arenas with modern rock staples like System of a Down, the dream seemed dead. But through a bit of careful planning and a whole lot of serendipity, Wilco had a day off in Chicago the same day that Hill was in town. Recorded and mixed in one day at Semaphore Studios in Chicago, IL, the four pieces on 'Distressed' are entirely improvised, with a little post-production editing courtesy of Cline's former Geraldine Fibbers partner, Carla Bozulich. Sitting somewhere between the most abstract freak-outs of Wilco's more recent material and the looser, more minimalist moments of Hella, Damsel exhibits a surprising amount of control over its chaos." 

B: k, so made in a day, total improvisation with the titles giving us some conceptual framework. Take them or leave them, but i think it often helps to imagine they had that title in mind as they started playing. It also helps to remember that they aren't just standing in separate isolation booths playing whatever the brownian motion of their seizure-fingers happened to produce. No, they see each other, they hear each other, they respond, they vie for psychic control of the lumbering ship that is the ensemble, they push forward then lean back, and the result is a product of pure doing, an artifact of an irreproducable moment in the universe. You might like it, you might hate it, it might inspire, it might make you cry, it might make you wish we could go anywhere except a future where 99% of us grind away at pointlessly meaningless tasks just so 3 guys can be trillionaires and their combined 7 friends run the universe, 'cause that's the actual structure of capitalism. Remember, you are not a capitalist you are a person leasing everything in your life from a capitalist. You get to keep the change. No matter how much change that is, it's still a fraction of the value you generate: you did you did thousand dollar work for $47 and the only thing you can do is recruit more minions on the gamble that it'll work for you too. 

Track one is Enduring Freedom. Does that mean "freedom that stands the test of time," or does it mean "trying to just get through it so you can go home and sleep?" Choose your own adventure. 

Fork-Fed is much more jaunty at the start. Like you were looking forward to the meal, but those tines keep getting sharper and it's way too much food and what actually determines the end of "all-you-can-eat?" The concept of physically being able to not eat anymore is quite a lot terrifying, to be honest. 

I don't need to guide you through it, listen and do it yourself. What's really going on? 

It's quite simple, really. Is work and the product of that work more or less valuable than owning and controlling the mechanisms by which those commodities are distributed? One side says ownership and management are vastly more important, the other side says the work and its utility are more valuable. The owner side raises its value but putting up ever increasing barriers to entry and finding people to buy in on the promise of financial gain from selling the promise of that financial gain. 

You'd look at this album and think "clearly the label and the studio and the pressing plant and their respectively successful bands and the stores that sell the record are more important and valuable than the 4 guys who spent one day playing gibberish on their instruments. Plus, i don't even like it." 

That's certainly one way to look at it. It's not my way of looking at it, i'm using it as an example of the complexity of value. I suppose it's as valuable as any other record i could be listening to while i write this, i suppose it's as worthless as any other piece of plastic junk in my house. I suppose if you offered me $50 for it i'd make that trade. Personally, i much prefer thinking about the accumulated chaos that led to me even holding it in my hand. They wanted to do it, but things kept preventing them until a brief coincidental moment in 2010 when they had the opportunity to be in the same place at the same time. 

They weren't worrying about how to buy food or pay for car parts or send their kids to school or breaking their ankles but not getting to see a doctor because the hospital is full of people sick with a highly contagious respiratory virus. They weren't trying to steal someone's television or jewelry, they weren't robbing a bank or mugging a pizza delivery driver, or more horrible things. No, they were standing in a room and attempting to express some fundamental physical activity while some other people attempted to capture it so that anybody could hear it happen, hear that it happened, let it inside their brain to wreak whatever havoc it wreaks. They made it, i listened to it, and now it exists for me to use as i wish. I suppose you could spend all your time and energy trying to put a price tag on that convergence of chaos, but that seems to me to be much less valuable than most anything else you could be doing. Conversely, what possible value could you justifiably assign to my random statement to Barnes & Noble when that statement amounts to "send me the most amount of actual albums for the least amount of money." That whole process seems incredibly unfulfilling and stupid. That's probably not fair, but it is honest. 

One way of thinking says i got a whole lot of milage out of this $11 record (or whatever it actually cost, point was it was cheap), but move to the left a little and the whole sculpture changes. Now i'm noticing that maybe one or 2 of those dollars represents money the band got to use for something like gas and food. It cost me $9 to give you 2, or maybe it cost you $9 to get me to hand you 11. Either way, that's a lot of work for 2 dollars. 

Another step or two and now it looks like it would be way better for both of us if we just agreed on an up front price and you send me the results of what you can do with it. Some people say that's worse though, so who knows? Am i the one doing Deathwatch On The American Empire or am i the one killing it? Yay sports team? 

Handling frustration. Controlling anger. There are times, however, when you simply cannot have something you want. It may be Damsel. 

E: i feel kind of nauseous. 

B: yeah, albums like this tend to make you seasick. Dramamine? 

E: yes, please. 

B: anybody else need some? No? Ok. Welp, this run is by the board. All hands on deck! Batten down the hatches and trim the sails! We got a Monday a-brewin' starboard.