There’s a lot goin on in LA already, I highly encourage you two to contact and join forces with Job Leatherette and Tony X who run the minimal/wave/death rock scene in LA through their great clubnights MRX and Wolfpack there since 2003, amazing guys who truly understand the spirit of minimal electronic and cold guitar wave music. You can reach them through the MRX page:
[quote author=“WIERD”]There’s a lot goin on in LA already, I highly encourage you two to contact and join forces with Job Leatherette and Tony X who run the minimal/wave/death rock scene in LA through their great clubnights MRX and Wolfpack there since 2003, amazing guys who truly understand the spirit of minimal electronic and cold guitar wave music. You can reach them through the MRX page:
There is not a lot going on in L.A. This club night only happens once a month…and i love it of course. If they are down to join forces-I’m ready when they are
Ah this is why I LOVE the internet…sit there on yr lazy fukin ass too afraid to promote new music in your town and then bitch and complain about how music sucks now (...1981 was so amazing! - yeah guess why???) as you check yr sad little MYSpace pages alone in your room…
For the precious Very Rare few of you who may interested in changing things here is how you have a party. If you have a party you will help new music be nicer and your friends will be happy and the world will truly feel like a better place for a few lovely hours which you and your nice friends will never forget forever:
Step 1: Get some music you like and put it in a bag or box, a grocery bag or shoe box will work fine and look nice and is free
Step 2: Turn off your computer and walk out the door of your house, this for many people is the hardest part…you can do it!, reality isn’t as scary as you think, be strong(and wear nice shoes)!
Step 3: Walk to the local bar down the street where people get drunk and ask the bartender, “Hi, can I play my music here tonite? My nice friends will come and you will make more money than if I was not here.” ...They will say yes because they like money
Step 4: Walk back to your house and back to your computer. this is the easy part
Step 5: Send an email and MySpace bulletin to your friends and say “Hi friends, I am playing nice music tonite, please come, you will have fun!” They will come because they like nice music and fun. (BTW don’t worry about noone showing up, if noone comes to your party just be strong, it is OK, take a deeeeep breath and send another MySpace bulletin…and another…and another… anyone who gives you shit tell them to fuck off or you will cut them with a knife in their face you are sick of people whining that music sucks in your town…just keep doing it and eventually they WILL come and they will be happy they did, they always do…and it will be truly worth it.)
Step 6: Turn off your computer and go back to the bar and play nice music for your friends all night long. This part starts out hard, but gets easier after you see them smile as they walk in the door to the bar and you and they will both feel so so nice inside
Step 7: Come home and feel amazingly happy because you and your Very Rare friends all had fun together with each others real bodies and minds in the Very Rare world of reality today, and helped new music live and grow stronger in the frozen cold world of 2008. History, much to your surprise, is not yet over, imagine that???...
Step 8: Do steps 1-7 again next week, and the next week, and tell everyone else who comes to your nice party to do the same in the neighborhood where they live. They will because it is easy and so so very nice and fun and makes people happy which is a reason to stay alive
[quote author=“WIERD”]Ah this is why I LOVE the internet…sit there on yr lazy fukin ass too afraid to promote new music in your town and then bitch and complain about how music sucks now (...1981 was so amazing! - yeah guess why???) as you check yr sad little MYSpace pages alone in your room…
For the precious Very Rare few of you who may interested in changing things here is how you have a party. If you have a party you will help new music be nicer and your friends will be happy and the world will truly feel like a better place for a few lovely hours which you and your nice friends will never forget forever:
Step 1: Get some music you like and put it in a bag or box, a grocery bag or shoe box will work fine and look nice and is free
Step 2: Turn off your computer and walk out the door of your house, this for many people is the hardest part…you can do it!, reality isn’t as scary as you think, be strong(and wear nice shoes)!
Step 3: Walk to the local bar down the street where people get drunk and ask the bartender, “Hi, can I play my music here tonite? My nice friends will come and you will make more money than if I was not here.” ...They will say yes because they like money
Step 4: Walk back to your house and back to your computer. this is the easy part
Step 5: Send an email and MySpace bulletin to your friends and say “Hi friends, I am playing nice music tonite, please come, you will have fun!” They will come because they like nice music and fun. (BTW don’t worry about noone showing up, if noone comes to your party just be strong, it is OK, take a deeeeep breath and send another MySpace bulletin…and another…and another… anyone who gives you shit tell them to fuck off or you will cut them with a knife in their face you are sick of people whining that music sucks in your town…just keep doing it and eventually they WILL come and they will be happy they did, they always do…and it will be truly worth it.)
Step 6: Turn off your computer and go back to the bar and play nice music for your friends all night long. This part starts out hard, but gets easier after you see them smile as they walk in the door to the bar and you and they will both feel so so nice inside
Step 7: Come home and feel amazingly happy because you and your Very Rare friends all had fun together with each others real bodies and minds in the Very Rare world of reality today, and helped new music live and grow stronger in the frozen cold world of 2008. History, much to your surprise, is not yet over, imagine that???...
Step 8: Do steps 1-7 again next week, and the next week, and tell everyone else who comes to your nice party to do the same in the neighborhood where they live. They will because it is easy and so so very nice and fun and makes people happy which is a reason to stay alive
You can do it! Please try…please…
VRp
LMFAO. How does anything that has been said lead to you concluding that we are lazy? Furthermore, this is L.A. and it is not 1980 or w/e. There are much better and easier ways to promote music now. I doubt people would come out to a bar just to listen to music. haha. (and if they do…it is probably the crowd that already listens to minimal here…that doesn’t really improve anything right?) The best results you’ll get at a bar here is if you invite people to watch a sport. And you have to consider the areas where me and the guy who posted this live in and also the seriousness of hosting an event. A) I can call up some buddies and invite them to a bar to listen to my music and not care if only 10 people show up or B) Think things carefully and promote the genre for a while and build a buzz which would eventually lead to a good turn out.
Well darling…I suppose you hit a nerve here at Chez WIERD Centraal…
Now that I think about it, if you and anyone else, especially in the US continue to whine and bitch about new music in yr town and don’t do anything about it then yes, my frozen cold biting VRemarks were directed at you and Carlos, and any of the 20 or however many people look at and post on this forum regularly. Anyone content to live the remainder of their sad, lonely lives wishing it was Sheffield, Rennes or Brussels in February 1981 and being OK with that, you might be a slightly sad character but no problem. If however you wish for a change, and to have an exciting contemporary musical life and you procede thus to bother others with your negativity and complaints about your local ‘scene’, and how ‘new music sucks’ when nearly always you have no clue what is even goin on underground(which believe it or not still exists - its just that because of the internet ironically enough few people ever find out about it because you have to leave the house and THE INTERNET ITSELF to do so…complicated), then you have no excuse, and you are in my book living in what Sartre called ‘bad faith’...meaning you are partially most certainly to blame for the problem itself. In other words, ‘the problem’ with the quality of contemporary music can be blamed BOTH on post-internet-raised un(musically)educated (and albeit innocently in most cases) young people thriving purely on the vulgarity of MySpace, Soulseek, ITunes, and the truly evilest of all ‘Russian’ cyberspace - downloading and stealing music from bands over and over so as to entirely dissallow new and old artists to monetarily survive in 2008 AND on crotchety old 35+yr cynical and jaded old selfish record collectors who have absolutely no involvement in new music, or sharing their wisdom and encyclopedic, sensitive minds with the rabidly hungry youth outside the window…and shiny plastic 2000 Euro glowing ‘screen’ in front of them and seem OK with the notion history is over…you had to be there…please…go back to masturbating over yr little Transparent Illusions on ebay and Gemm where you belong.
The way I see it, any one of the exceptionally Very Rare individuals who has gained the wisdom to know about and the passion to pursue owning in whatever form the rare secretive historical gems of cold wave and minimal electronic music, new and old, it is your duty to share it with the world, especially with young people who simply because of generational age, never had the opportunity to experience this world first hand as many of us old folks over 35 did and at least here in NYC, Bochum, Nancy etc., still do. Thank God for people like Sandra, Mike 1334, and our beloved hero Mr. Plastikmann for their continual efforts in playing their musical knowledge to the world each week tirelessly..over and over…amazing. And honestly(and I recently had this bizarre lysergic dream this came from) if Very Rare minimal 7"s were small pieces of bread, our esteemed friends Joerg Opitz, Herve, Nils E-Lectron and his VRexcellency M. Chevalier could alone solve Africa’s hunger problem, let alone Germany or Los Angeles’s thirst for new and amazing cold, emotionally vulnerable and romantic sounds…
Specifically as relates to your initial situation I can tell you whether they are out at night or not from my growing up there and just from the sheer emails and record sales I do daily there in conjunction with radio requests WIERD gets from KXLU and the like there are a ton of people out there just hungry for something to happen. I just spoke with both Liz O. from the LA Weekly and Job Leatherette and I’m sure both would be more than excited to help you get a weekly cold/minimal party going in LA and I’m sure Job would guest DJ at the first few to bring his crowd. Just find a cozy dark spot in Echo Park, Silver Lake, or Eagle Rock, maybe with a tiny stage and a turntable or two and couple nice lights, candles and fog if the owners are cool, make a few fliers and get on MySpace and start babbling. The next MRX party August 2nd happens to be a listening party for the WIERD Comp. II and Magick Daggers are playin who are great live. Take yr fliers there shove them in people’s faces and bug the shit out of them to come. The first few weeks will be tough but stick with it and it will catch on by the fall when the new music season starts up in Sept., students are back, vacations are over etc…give it a shot, if noone shows up, try again…and again. The first weekly parties the 6-7 of us here in NYC did before naming the party back in 2001-2 we’d get 5-8 people…by early 2003 we had 35 regulars, alone enough to support a small bar’s monetary demands for an evening and guaranteeing you freedom and lasting power at the venue…and last week we had 550 people over the course of 6 hours 10pm-4am dancing hysterically to Neural Circus, Staccato du Mal, Human Puppets, 18e Oktober, Xeno and Oaklander, Ronin, John Bender, Private Entertainment, Carmody et al et al et al and we’re doin it again tonite…please…give it a try, in a few months with a little work you and all of us will be so glad you did… the world truly needs to hear your sounds.
Refraining from using the quote function for obvious reasons…
Well, Pieter,
I’ll just pick up on what I see as the most interesting point for me here - namely the question what “young people” really want these days.
Personally I am not convinced that it is minimal wave music they want. Typically the younger generation tries to differentiate itself from the generation before them which is a “bunch of strange old farts stuck in the past”.
I very clearly recall having that feeling about hippies when growing up in the stylish eighties.
Funnily enough that feeling about them has never quite gone away even though I’ve changed sides in the meantime and belong to the group of old farts myself now.
What I feel as well is that there is a kind of vacuum out there, caused by factors like:
- there have been no completely new exciting music styles fostering the creation of tribes for quite a while
- even though pressure on the individual has grown with technical progress, the pressure itself has become less obvious
So in a nutshell you don’t know what to choose musically as there’s so much, and you don’t know what to fight for/against either because nothing’s really black and white out there anymore.
IOW you have a lot more opportunities these days, and are less motivated to take advantage of them. Which is sad.
My guess is that when the next big thing comes along, it won’t be music that sounds complex. But then again, how can it sound simple and still be something completely new?
In any case, in order to find mass appeal (hey, here’s my favourite term of the day again), a musical style has to match the rhythm of its times. And I don’t think the rhythm of 2008 is minimal wave.
Generally I think everybody who grew up in the 80s is lucky as we had something we could feel very strongly about. I guess the same can be also be said for the 60s and 70s.
Amd I don’t think there will be a lot of retro parties where they will play “2000s” only in the future. 8)
So indeed as much info and events as possible should be available for those looking for something special in today’s plastic world. And it is of no importance whatsoever if a song was made in 1982 or 2008, if only the spirit is right.
You know I do my share in this sunny ghetto.
And even if sporadically I throw nights and organize mini festivals.
Have been doing it for quite sometime now!
Underground and aboveground.
As a matter of fact I’m looking for a venue right now for a throwdown.
It’s been long overdue!
My problem here is that it starts great and each time it gets worse and worse until they pull the plug on me and have to call it quits.
But I still do it again and again and again.
Yeah, you’re a bit ridiculous with your comments. I still don’t understand how I am whining and bitching about “new” music in my town and how you would know whether I am or not trying to do something about it. Also, if anyone has any negativity here it’s you. Going off ranting over something that is completely irrelevant to what Carlos and I were talking about. Not once did I (or Carlos) say, “new music sucks”. I happen to love the indie scene that has taken off beautifully here in L.A. the last couple of years and especially here in my area after me and a couple of pals helped bring it in a bit by having some of the first gigs with Indie bands instead of lame punk and ska bands. Oh, but I suppose that makes me lazy. How could you even be so sure that I don’t have a clue about what is going on in the “underground” or that I don’t leave my house????? Lol. I happen to work at concert venues and guess what I’m doing most of the time when I am not working? I’m usually at a show. Keep your irrelevant and burned out comments about the “vulgarity of MySpace, Soulseek, ITunes, and the truly evilest of all ‘Russian’ cyberspace - downloading and stealing music from bands over and over” for a post or someone who actually cares enough to hear your “intellectual” arguments.
I would loooove to see KXLU do something with Minimal…too bad…I doubt that will happen but if it does…GREAT! It would only add to the BUZZ that I’ve seen building up. Dj’s from club nights where you’d least expect it such as “club moscow” (a club I’ve hanged at sometimes since it started) saying they are spinning Minimal Wave and popular bands like Hot Chip going under the genre name of Minimalist and many new bands doing the same only helps to spread the word about it here. Oh…these little things I just notice here and there ya know? While I eat my pie and lay like a lazy dog and use my myspace because I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t go out much right?
Awesome. I am excited too if they are willing to help me or anyone else start more events here in L.A. But it is not that easy. As I said before. It all depends on the area on where you are hosting the event. I am from East L.A. : ) do you know how many people I know around here that even know of the genre minimalist? About…10…the friends that I’ve told.
Anyways…you should listen to Falcks comment about music although I don’t completely agree with it…AT LEAST he makes some sense. Just to let you know…I am not some 35 year old who reminisces about them good times when the “music was good”. I’m 20 years old and to me the music has always been good. I can put on some chet baker, ken nordine, absolute body control, white stripes, can, the kills, the chameleons, lcd soundsytem, manic street preachers, ladytron, joy division, the flow, broder daniel, the walkmen, rancid, bush, nirvana, the knife, placebo, the beatles, elvis, medio mutante, oviformia sci, los prisioneros, Bronco, Land Of Giants, Luis Armstrong, Thierry Muller, DAF, Keren Ann, Fishermen, Mika Miko and ENJOY IT all the same.
