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Tape heads By Kimberly Chun› kimberly@sfbg.com SONIC REDUCER What is it about fading formats, the slow trudge toward obsolescence, that brings out the romantic in us all? Cassettes may seem like an objet of our analog yesteryears, but I'm still attached, like a spurned lover or a relentless stalker. Until last year or so, some diligent, strange mix-taper would regularly send me cassettes decorated with homemade, sucking-in-the-sucky-'70s, rock-poster-style collages, always with some semiclothed babe worked into the acid-drenched Max Ernst cover art: Too bad the tunes themselves were a disappointment; I recall one that included a very noisy, staticky, and definitely non-avant "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" that sounded as if it were recorded off Jandek's car radio parked across the street from the mixer's ancient Death Star–like Radio Shack boom box. I wanna hold your noise reduction tab down. Though I've been the lame, passive recipient of these musical mash notes, I've rarely made them myself — and shame on me because there's something almost heroic and forward-thinking about the act, the art: selecting the songs, crafting the artwork, and picking out the colored pens. As Dean Wareham writes in the Thurston Moore–edited Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture (Universe, 2004), "It takes time and effort to put a mix tape together. The time spent implies an emotional connection with the recipient. It might be a desire to go to bed, or to share ideas. The message of the tape might be, I love you. I think about you all the time. Listen to how I feel about you. Or, maybe: I love me. I am a tasteful person who listens to tasty things. This tape tells you all about me." The book lovingly details the tapes and tape-related art made — and saved — by everyone from Allison Anders, Mary Gaitskill, and Jim O'Rourke to Elizabeth Peyton, DJ Spooky, and Kate Spade. Burning it all to a CD just doesn't quite do it — maybe because you don't really have to listen carefully, bopping along to each track till it reaches the end and imagining the listener you want to turn on (to the music or to you) discovering each song and then quickly punching pause. That extra effort, along with the visual of unspooling tape, heightens the intimacy and physicality of listening, an experience that can't be replicated with the bars and bleeps of media players. Even just talking about the personal qualities of cassettes and mix tapes almost seems too close for comfort. That was the feeling when I checked in with Controller.Controller drummer Jeff Scheven and the prerecorded cassettes scattered in his Toronto dance-punk band's van. A discussion of the tapes dug up to listen to on the vehicle's tape player immediately segued from their role as prefab time capsules of the band's teen years to mix tapes as sonic sonnets. "These would make a great DJ night," Scheven mused, shuffling through New Order's Substance, Grace Jones's Island Life, Killing Joke, Bauhaus, and Michael Jackson's Thriller in the van outside the Calgary, Alberta, venue they were playing that night. The way to someone's heart runs along those tiny reels: Vocalist Nirmala Basnayake, in fact, met her husband while trading tapes via an online mix site. "There's a whole society out there," Scheven added. "It's a big thing if you like a girl — you make a mix tape, and you find out this person makes cool stuff." Scheven, 28, makes cool stuff too: Controller.Controller just released their debut full-length, X-Amounts (Paper Bag), and he's doing his part to rile up audiences with his group's notorious live shows ("Personally, I end up swinging my hair around a lot onstage — it's just a blur of lights and sweat"). His video for the band's "History" will be shown as part of the 24th San Francisco Asian American Film Festival's music video night March 20 — just one of many video projects he edits on a laptop in the back of the van itself. "It's not the greatest, actually," he said. "It's pretty nice to have a desk as opposed to a laptop propped on a sleeping bag, turned at a weird angle." SPEAKING OF WEIRD ANGLESThat was the tone of my recent chat with Electric Six frontperson Dick Valentine, who riffed on the origins of the jokingest band in rock: "A lot of my favorite bands were Devo, Pere Ubu, and Wall of Voodoo, and it was all this white suburban male sexual tension, like, 'I can't get a date, and I'll never get a date, so I'm gonna pick up this synthesizer and write this song about a robot.' And that's kind of how this band started too." That outlook dovetails perfectly with the band's audience, which Valentine described as "15-year-old white males from the suburbs." Why that demographic? I could hear Valentine's shrug over the phone from Houston, where "the Bush clan plays tennis." "Before we had a record deal, I was under the impression that we were cool," he said. "Then we got on the road, and I actually learned I'm not very cool at all. It's geek chic. There are really cool geeks and really hot geeks, and that's the best you can do. When we played in Glastonbury in 2003, we were surrounded by celebrities, and none of them came to our trailer. Nobody wanted to hang out with the Six, y'know. Local celebrities, yes. Anchorwomen and weatherpeople in various towns." *
With Scissors for Lefty and You Say Party! We Say Die! Sat/11, 9 p.m. Rickshaw Stop 155 Fell, SF $10 (415) 861-2011 ELECTRIC SIX With Every Move a Picture and Rock Kills Kid Sat/11, 9 p.m. Independent 628 Divisadero, SF $16 www.ticketweb.com CHECK 'EM OUT AUCTION BENEFIT FOR STEVE CHINNStrychnine, UK's Sick on the Bus, and Poop (with the Adolescents' Rikk Agnew) give it up for the Fang member, who suffered an aneurysm in August. Wed/8, 9 p.m., Annie's Social Club, 917 Folsom, SF. $7. (415) 974-1585. GOBLIN COCKHaven't gobbled enough Pinback spinoff heavitude? Fri/10, 9 p.m., Mezzanine, 444 Jessie, SF. $9 advance. (415) 625-8880. RAL PARTHA VOGELBACHERAmazing emanations from Bay Area artist Chad Bidwell's brain, judging from his new Shrill Falcons (Monotreme). Sat/11, 9:30 p.m., Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. $7. (415) 923-0923. * *
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