serious <3

wazzap wazzap, with feelings.

serious plug!

Hey hey hey!
Mabibili niyo na at last ang Kanto sa may datelines sa cubao-x for only 30 pesos. bili naman kayo! sulit yun pramis, dumanak ang dugo at luha para lang maisilang ang isyu na yun, hehe, yes naman.

Basta bili kayo!
For additional queries, email kantonista@gmail.com
For additional friends please add kanto_zine@yahoo.com.

Ang hindi bumili may tae sa ilong.

serious death sentence

Talk is that You tube is going to share part of its revenue generated from advertisement to its users. Now this could herald a much welcomed paradigm shift in terms of artist-audiece relationship, that has long been bannered by movie and audio piracy. The direct artist-audience interaction would be very beneficial to both parties, mainly for the reason that prices would be cheap, way way cheap. The death knell for the worthless mediator that is the corporate marketing companies, which are the ones mostly responsible for the high cost of products, is now within earshot.

Who ain’t pestered by the jeepney barkers we all encounter everyday? In a room of 10, bet that I can reach a vote of 11 that these barkers, or dispatchers as some would dare euphemize the term, are something we all could do without. But of course, that would entail some extra work for the driver, but which actually is not much-say like counting how many seats are left or calling passengers. If only the driver would be willing to shed the extra sweat, he could pocket what he was once giving to the barker and save us all passengers the irritation of being pestered by these barkers.

Well, aren’t all these corporate marketing industries nothing but glorified barkers? All they do is provide mileage, which the artist could now very well take up on his own, thanks no less to the global community that is the internet. The continuing success of indie bands is a proof to how the relevance of these corporate structures is slowly being rendered obsolete. My space (for musicians) and you tube (for almost everyone) are just two of the new marketing tools for artists, count there also the proliferation of blogs and now you got a global three dimensional elbow room for everyone. Just one click and an artist in Asia can promote his wares the world over, with just a fraction of the cost it would take if he was marketed by BMG records or Universal or what.

More than cutting costs, the shrinking space between artist and audience also signals a more personal interaction between the two. It strips the corporate make-up of the aritst and allows the audience to approach him in a more personal level. Think of the kilometric red-tape, courtest of company protocols, one has to go through if an ordinary fan would like to score a chat with his favorite celeb. With the web community, it allows the artist and audience more room for interaction, and hence, appreciation of each other.

I’m being optimistic here. But you can’t blame me, after shelling big chunks of cash for albums that only have one or two songs that puts the repeat button on my player to some use.

This retrenching of the consumer landscape could also foretell an uplifting of aesthetics in terms of production. For one, artists would be free to produce material on their own time and convenience, unencumbered by the pressure of completing an album contract for a label company under limited time, only to produce ten-track albums with 10 fillers.

All of this just points to the elimination of an unwanted player in the field, the unnecessary go-between, the needless relay point.
You know how things always end up in a mess when some “bridge” goes between you and your prospected partner. Well I know! haha. That’s why I’m all for eliminating unnecessary intermediaries in any relationship and just establish direct communication between the sender and receiver. (Note though that there exists a thin line between an intermediary and a gatekeeper)

Geometry directs us to the elementary lesson: the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

seryosong pag-ibig

Omg with a capital o. May friendster na tunay ang aking sinisinta. Hihimatayin na ako.

seryosong panawagan

serious fandom rambling

amputek, ambangis ng Amputechture.

I’ve actually waited so long to say that in my blog. I’ve been listening like crazy to their album amputechture. At first, it was quite weird because the initial songs are filled with seemingly wayward instrumentals that seem to go nowhere, sort of like an overextended soundcheck by drugged-up sound engineers. The album actually is quite a taxing listen. There are only eight tracks but the shortest song actually is four minutes, with the most being sixteen minutes. That said, the album’s a crazy musical jungle, hell, it’s an insane musical fuckfest!

The album actually has very sophisticated and much advanced musical technology (but what mars volta album actually is not?), but surely not in the same vein as freakin linkin park. A slew of broken time signatures and deranged chord progressions is what I mean, with the insanity compounded all the more by the fact that the album is actually made by two individuals, and the mystery is all the more compounded by the fact that Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez actually performs their songs live. This is insane because the domain of progressive rock have mostly been occupied by bands with complete members, or if not, with numbers close to a full size orchestra, dare I say Dream Theater?

I have this thing for indie bands because I take them as an empowerment for listeners in that they show that music belongs to everyone. The whole indie thing is a solid countercultural gutpunch against the dominion of corporate music establishments. But it’s also cool to hear bands like Mars Volta, who have passion enough to raise the bar and add different levels of sophistication to their outputs, caring not about whatever corporate standards pop bands are worshiping just to clinch a spot in the Billboard Top Ten or what.

It would sure be career suicide for bands to release an album with no catchy ditties, but fuck that, here’s Amphutecture, inconsiderate of whatever sales strategy, in absence of any effort to court mainstream aesthetics and unencumbered by whatever musical trends. It’s just plain sonic orgasm brewing with blazing pyrotechnics and tonal madness. It’s too pretentious, but I’ll go on and say that Mars Volta is a genre unto its own.

One can’t ignore the guts of the duo to come up with an out of this world album, and speaking of guts, Amputecthure is then again another gamble as the output is yet again another concept album with a unifying theme so transcendental you would think metaphysics is a kindergarten concept.

Cedric says this: “This album’s a commentary about the fear of God instead of the love of God, which goes hand-in-hand with Catholicism…To me, religion is the reason there is so much conflict in this world, and I think it’s just so unnecessary to believe in this blue-eyed, white-bearded, white-haired God. Amputechture is my personal way of describing enlightenment, or just the celebration of this person who is a shaman and not a crazy person. It’s about the pineal gland and how it has certain elements that mimic a DMT experience, and how we can come up with cures for cancer and AIDS if we’re more in tune with what’s going on in the rainforest.“

I don’t freaking know how in the hell they were able to patch up concepts of fear of religion, pineal gland and DMT experience (what the hell are those?), AIDS, rainforest, whatever. But don’t mind that much because you really don’t have to fully comprehend everything to appreciate it. You know the stuff with beautiful poetry? You don’t quite understand what the writer actually says but you know that it’s beautiful. haha.

Lourd de Veyra said in his column at Burn mag, “Great music should produce tectonic shifts in your perspective, because if not, what’s the point?” De Veyra said that in the context that rock and roll nowadays is safe and boring and no longer dangerous. De Veyra waxes nostalgic to the days when rock and roll was associated with satanism and all that stuff, come to think of it, everybody nowadays call themselves rock, like pop rock, alt rock, and the like, hell, everybody wants to be rock.

I remember my parents back in the days when I was initially introduced to rock and roll and was consuming it like crazy, blasting the radio speakers far beyond friendly neighborhood standards with basti or lars ulrich bellowing at the speakers. My parents would usually say, “Ano ba yan? Music ba yan?”

I think great music is such, that it would make you second-guess its form if music it truly is, but then get away with it. Isn’t that the same thing James Joyce did with his novels? He revolutionized the very concept of a novel, took the technology to levels no one thought possible, and got away with it.

Okay, I’m rambling now. What I just want to say is that Mars Volta is nothing short of extraordinary, and Amputecthure is definitely a testament to it, including their two previous albums. And have I said how cool it is to hear someone rambling in Mexican amid a backdrop of frenetic musical bedlam? Go listen.

habal-habal

Malabong paglisan,
Malinaw na kalungkutan.
-Cotabato, Dec. 20.

eto na yun eh.

Dahil malapit na ang valentines, eto na pangalawang isyu ng kanto, ang halloween isyu. Very timely no. Bili kayo ah. Malapit na, onti na lang. Isang araw susulpot na lang ito bigla sa may Marikina Shoe Expo. steeg.

A room with a view

(Royal River hotel, Thailand, Nov. 22)

“My father says there is only one perfect view, that of the sky over our heads.”
George Emerson, A Room with a View