Unless You Speak From Your Heart from Porcelain Raft on Vimeo.

One: Christopher R. Weingarten on Twitter and music criticism.

Two: Warren Ellis on criticism, word counts, and media.

Three: Michael Antman on media evolution and how it will affect creative work.

Two: Rudy Wurlitzer — whose The Drop Edge of Yonder is definitely worth your time — discusses the upcoming reissue of several of his novels.

Three: At The Rumpus, Peter Selgin explores Amazon’s customer reviews and shares some particularly memorable swings at modern classics.

We will also no longer be restricted by word and page counts, meaning we can feature more content and go into more depth, not to mention publish content with much more regularity. We also envision the future skyscrapermagazine.com to be larger and more diverse than we were ever able to achieve with the print incarnation.

Recently, I’ve had music writing on the brain — being out at the Pop Conference definitely played a part in this, as does the fact that a number of people involved in/fond of music writing have been doing some very public thinking on the subject. One thing I’ve been especially curious about is how one might create a new outlet for longer-form prose pieces on artists. This isn’t meant as a criticism of interviews at all, but it does seem interesting to me that the majority of online* pieces on bands tend to fall into only one category.

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This week, I’m going to be thinking out loud on this topic. For this post, I’m generally going to volley out a number of links; future posts will get more specific, and look at whether certain structures that have worked elsewhere can be applied to culture (specifically, music) writing. A very relevant discussion on the evolution of book criticism can be found at the fine literary blog The Millions. Their first part focuses on criticism and its connections to newspaper sections; the second, on Amazon.com and revenue and community; and the third, on potential downfalls to Amazon. While some of what’s said in that discussion applies specifically to the literary world, much of it, I’d argue, is relevant whether you’re following books, music, or film.

Also worth reading: Warren Ellis on bookazines (which brings to mind Stop Smiling‘s announcement of a shift from magazines to books**), and Carl Wilson on Blender and music magazines in general. Wilson comments:

I still think there is room in the market for one more readership-oriented music publication, one aimed at the same audience that buys books about music. Something close exists in the UK (Mojo and, to a degree, The Wire) but a North American one might bring less of that musty British muso feel – like a general-interest version of No Depression, a great mag that was hampered by the narrowness of its “alt-countryâ€� focus.

I don’t disagree. Though I also wonder whether the proper model for this wouldn’t be online, at least to begin with. I would argue that longer-form arts pieces — D.T. Max’s piece on David Foster Wallace, for instance, or John Wray’s on Sunn 0))) — are being read online, and Gerald Marzorati’s address on online readership*** references someone reading a New York Times Magazine feature on their iPhone — which, I’d say, upends the conventional wisdom of online readers opting for brevity.

An interview with Stephen Elliott on his work with The Rumpus offers one of the more interesting alternatives — and, I’d say, makes for a model to watch. Though given that it’s generally unpaid for all involved, I don’t know whether it’s a model that could be repeated. (The generally excellent Dusted does come to mind, though.) And, to bring things back around to music writing, I would argue that Rick Moody’s column contains some of the best music criticism out there right now.

More to come as the week continues…

*-more specifically: online in the sense of “pieces that originate online,” though I realize that this distinction is edging into moot territory as we speak.

**-scroll down to JC Gabel’s bio for this information. I haven’t seen much about this on the sites of either Melville House or Stop Smiling, oddly enough.

***-the address’s subsequent usage of “bloggers in pajamas!” imagery is, I’ll admit, a bit frustrating.

Trash rock drums pound out the sex beat. Vocals are delivered in a nasal monotony best likened to those of Mark E. Smith, pinning the tension between the instruments to taunting heights. The synths and piano provide some of the more delicate moments in an otherwise brusque album; creepy, spectral tones rise out of a bed of background din (“Ten to Dawn) or add a percussive element (the bone xylophone crossbeat of “I’ve Got Your Face�) to the thrash.

Review is well worth a read; album is well worth a listen.

My ballot can be found right…here. I am pleased to see that I was again the sole voter for roughly half of my choices in the “Singles” category.

I think I’m also going to follow Reed Fischer’s lead and post what I jotted down at the time that I filled out my ballot, a month or so ago.

(And a quick aside, given that the link above references Pepi Ginsberg — having seen her read last weekend at the Hex Education Journal’s Volume 1 reading, she’s rapidly joining Will Sheff in the realm of songwriters whose tour diaries stand on their own as powerful travelogues.)

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A lot of the records I liked this year came in on the noisier side of things, and a lot of the noisier records I liked this year hearkened back to my days standing in basements watching bands play through piecemeal sound systems, sweating uncontrollably and losing my hearing and grateful for the fact that I was there. It’s a strange thing, then, to see a band tailor-made for a tiny space playing to hundreds, if not more; given that I found the sight of No Age and High Places at the Bowery Ballroom disconcerting, I can only imagine what Deerhunter’s shows opening for Nine Inch Nails earlier this year must have been like. A running discussion that I had in 2008 involved asking which bands could make the transition from DIY spaces to concert halls and, in some cases, back again; at perhaps the apex of this was the Black Mountain/Bon Iver tour early in 2008, equally striking in the aforementioned Bowery Ballroom as it was in the tighter confines of Glasslands, though the divergent spaces brought out differing qualities from each artist.
This isn’t to claim that the days of basement shows and piecemeal sound systems are over. A couple of the better live sets I saw this year, including San Francisco’s Hank IV and Seattle’s The Dutchess and The Duke, took place below Brooklyn bar The Charleston, a space that’s a dead ringer for any number of late-90s New Brunswick basements. But it’s that push outward — not simply a case of groups moving from a more intimate location to a larger one, but a wholesale export of the fractured, explosive audio that one might hear through a speaker borrowed from a practice space and a decades-old, half-busted amplifier. (On his National Arts Journalism Project blog, Robert Christgau’s recent discussion of sound systems versus headphones as preferred methods for hearing music evolve seems directly connected to this.)
Adherents to the blown-out aesthetic generally start from punk rock and move outwards from there. In the case of some, that reaches out and begins to tweak other musical traditions: the degraded Spectorisms (which seem strangely apt these days) of Deerhunter’s Weird Era Cont.; the skewed baroque-pop that Oxford Collapse* applies on their single “Spike of Bensonhurst”. And while there’s a tendency to push the glorious clatter of noise-punk to its logical extension — see No Age’s “Eraser” for a high point of this — my vote ends up being in favor of the groups that go to places unexpected, that blend together a fractured, impressionist sound with some other quality, that blend and cross-pollinate rather than turn inward. (Sic Alps, Women, and Parts & Labor also come to mind as examples of this.) It’s hard to argue with unchecked momentum and transcendent noise, but to borrow from both and bring in a memorable hook or harmony — that, I suspect, is what I’ll still be listening to come 2009 and beyond.

*-full disclosure: friends of mine; I contribute to crowd vocals on their album “Bits”, which is why it’s not included on my albums ballot.

Worth reading for most anyone interested in the debate on how technology will affect journalism, book publishing, and — for lack of a better word — print.

I’ll miss it. Not only because I did a fair amount of writing for it, but because it cultivated a style of honed-in music writing that I daresay doesn’t exist anywhere else.

Plus, this was pretty damn funny.

What’s most notable about the film’s use of blackface is how much softer it is compared with the rather more vulgar and far less loving exploitation of what you might call Jewface.

Which has me wondering: can a Manohla Dargis/Jody Rosen discussion on this theme be far off?

As a side note to my earlier post on responses to criticism, I wanted to volley out a general question: do you think there’s a connection between the two mindsets? Or, given that sites I read ranging from Brownstoner to The AV Club are beginning to regulate their comments sections more, is this more emblematic of a general unrest/rise in the desire to, well, talk shit?