The one-night-only debut of Space Cruiser, next Thursday's game-cum-concert in question, is described as a "cooperative mission-based game centered around navigating around a fictional universe" that's designed for up to 200 participants, who together will control a spacecraft, which the planetarium has been re-imagined as.

The co-founder of Babycastles—whose existence The Observer has previously documented with enthusiasm—Syed Salahuddin's overview, via email, may better explain it:

A multi-player control deck at the center of the theater will offer a small crew the chance to navigate the spacecraft together, piloting through treacherous asteroid belts. The crew is an unassigned, free-form team that works together to pilot the spaceship, with various parts of the ship spread out over the theater while being guided by a on-board computer system that is voiced by Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields.

The night also includes admission to an open bar, some indie video games, and a live performance by the band One Ring Zero. Tickets from the museum are $75 (but apparently a discount code of "BEYOND" will make hanging out with all of the city's hippest geeks a little cheaper come Thursday).

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Maybe it's a coincidence! But if we're right, J. David, give us a "Yeah! Oh Yeah!"

They are, apparently, more rock-star-inspired shoes on the way from these French shoemakers. Given the folks listed under “inspiration” on bluedy.com—including Bob Dylan, Brian Eno and Talk Talk—we may have some interesting footwear coming our way.

Yet, while the band has always been a sucker for a blunt conceit, the years since the release of 69 have seen the very bluntness become esoteric. 2004's i was a string-laden soft-pop ode to melodrama where all the songs began with the prime pronoun and were arranged alphabetically. Then there's the string of Mr. Merritt's side-projects, from the guest-vocalist-heavy 6ths to the Gothic Archies' morose children's songs, an accompaniment to the Lemony Snicket Series of Unfortunate Events books. Showtunes was a 2006 collection of Mr. Merritt's work for Chinese theater director Chen Shi-Zeng. Recently Mr. Merritt's voice even graced a Volvo commercial.

Which brings us to Distortion, an album with its own thematic conceit. The Magnetic Fields' eighth album, in stores today, begins with a howling, surfy stormer of a song, its title and only lyrics, "Three-way!" repeated three times in three minutes, accompanying a fantastically distant piano roll fit neatly behind a twanging guitar line. It's a clever introduction to an album the theme of which is so simple it becomes the title: Distortion.

Mr. Merritt wanted to build an album that would pay homage to the Jesus And Mary Chain's epochal Psychocandy, itself a fawning pastiche of surf music and 50's pop fed through distortion pedals and amplifiers and then fed back through the guitars. Think of the fuzzy thrash of "He's A Rebel," "Be My Baby," or "Leader of the Pack" turned all the way to its screeching metallic most.

Mr. Merritt has said the album is meant to "sound more like the Jesus and Mary Chain than the Jesus and Mary Chain," though fans will be happy
to know that many of the tunes sound more like the intricate chamber pop for which the band is best known delivered through a blissful, noisy haze.

"My reason for emulating Psychocandy," Merritt told The Observer, "was that I thought it would be a great way to make a record quickly."

"I was wrong," he went on to say.

And in fact, like the music he is responding to, the simplicity hides the workmanship. Perhaps that's why Mr. Merritt and a lot of pop purists like him believe that the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and all those who worked with Phil Spector through the 60's ushered in the greatest era of studio experimentation and perfection ever seen.

Mr. Merritt said that Distortion was an effort "to respond to what I see as the last significant event in pop production."

The formalism of the Jesus And Mary Chain owes plenty to Spector et al, and suits the obsessive Mr. Merritt, but in place of moaning paeans to wayward bikers and dumb love, we have smart love and nuns wishing they were porn stars.

Italicized after the production credits in the liner notes is the phrase "No Synths," and indeed the band seems to have upped the ante of their thematic self-challenge by using their usual instruments.

"There are no mistakes of any kind on this album," Mr. Merritt said, "and it's been edited to death for 18 months. Every available technology has been used in this process."

But in fact, the recording itself took only a month. A lot of the technical work on the album was coming up with the D.I.Y. techniques to deliver distortion and reverb from an unlikely instrumentation, all without manipulation on a synthesizer. For Claudia Gonson's piano and farfisa, the amp was laid next to the piano frame and turned up until it fed back; John Woo's guitar was outfitted with tiny amps to channel vibrations directly back into the instrument. All this is to say nothing of Sam Davol's cello and Daniel Handler's accordion (a tiny amp was taped to the bellows). The only thing not distorted with amps was Ms. Gonson's drumkit, which was recorded in a cavernous stairwell for maximum reverb, distortion's gentler cousin.

All of the tracks flirt with the three-minute mark, none missing it by more than a few seconds, and the result is startlingly refreshing brevity unknown to most current pop albums. Mr. Merritt is at pains to stress that the album is an offering to rock fans, long left in the cold by the band's meanderings. "Three-minute songs with distorted guitars: that's a complete definition of rock," he said.

Mr. Merritt clearly adores the Jesus And Mary Chain, along with the Beach Boys, the Beatles and the Velvet Underground, yet he is clever, and talented enough to put the Magnetic Fields stamp on everything he does. The consistent fuzz harkens back to earlier albums like Holiday, yet nowhere has the band been so rocking so much of the time, and the sonic assault is addictive, especially in such small chunks. "Too Drunk To Dream" is perhaps the best example of the meeting of Mr. Merritt's wit and the album's textural force. He sings a capella: "Sober, life is a prison / Shit-faced, it is a blessing. / Sober, nobody wants you / Shit-faced they're all undressing ... / Sober, you're old and ugly / Shit-faced who needs a mirror." As the lines continue to roll by the echo increases until the song begins in earnest with a swinging tune and a screeching, tinny guitar. Other tracks deal with the damning march of time ("Old Fools"), the sublimated erotic desires and regrets of a nun ("The Nun's Litany") and a hopelessly lonesome Christmas ("Mr. Mistletoe"), where the plant in question is called a "useless weed." Mr. Merritt told The Observer he prefers his lyrics "to involve conflict, drama, and tension," which may be putting it lightly. Songs alternate between Mr. Merritt and a female singer, though in place of the usual Claudia Gonson is Shirley Simms, whom Mr. Merritt employed on tracks he felt were too pop for his deep baritone. Ms. Simms shines on the second track "California Girls," whose refrain is (of course) "I hate California girls" as well as the noirish "Till The Bitter End," and the two singers trade verses on the giddily contrarian "Please Stop Dancing." While Mr. Merritt's lyrics always return to themes of love and melancholy, there's an iciness to many of the tracks here.

Mr. Merritt has long suffered from hearing problems, making live Magnetic Fields shows into pretty stripped-down affairs (the tour for this album will not involve the reverb and distortion techniques used to create it). But it's not simply volume that makes a wall of sound, but the texture and interplay of instruments and vocals.

In the "loudness wars," a trend critics say has led to songs so dense with sound that they lack dynamics, and so processed in the studio that they lack any personality, does this album take a side? "The loudness wars have been the normal way of making records for the last fifty years," he said. "The aberration was the insertion of dynamics into popular music, as happened in the early '90s when music radio became less relevant. Normally, producers try to make their records loud all the way through, to sound good on radio and other degrading audio media (laptop speakers, iPod headphones). Consumer audio, on MP3 especially, sounds better the more it gets compression in the studio and the less it relies on compression by the consumer's crummy, unpredictable equipment."

The challenge of so much noise doesn't come without pitfalls, one being that Mr. Merritt's delightful rhymes are occasionally swallowed by the imposing fracas. But then, that's somewhat the point, since the echoing voice is just another instrument in the greater musical texture, and though Mr. Merritt's wit is often touted as his strongest suit, perhaps he would rather we hear more of the totality of his songwriting, and hear music the way it sounds in of Stephin Merritt's wonderful, defective ear.

]]> There are two people's voices I can impersonate well: that of Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt and Project Runway frontman Tim Gunn. It seems Merritt is forever impersonating as well, or perhaps just exploring the many forms of his beloved pop and rock songcraft. (Alas, Mr. Gunn specializes in another kind of craft, one that falls outside the purview of this review.) Of course this diversity was most prominent on the Magnetic Fields' 1999 compendium 69 Love Songs, for which he and the band ran through nearly every permutation of the love-song conceit, and came to rest on the lucky number.

Yet, while the band has always been a sucker for a blunt conceit, the years since the release of 69 have seen the very bluntness become esoteric. 2004's i was a string-laden soft-pop ode to melodrama where all the songs began with the prime pronoun and were arranged alphabetically. Then there's the string of Mr. Merritt's side-projects, from the guest-vocalist-heavy 6ths to the Gothic Archies' morose children's songs, an accompaniment to the Lemony Snicket Series of Unfortunate Events books. Showtunes was a 2006 collection of Mr. Merritt's work for Chinese theater director Chen Shi-Zeng. Recently Mr. Merritt's voice even graced a Volvo commercial.

Which brings us to Distortion, an album with its own thematic conceit. The Magnetic Fields' eighth album, in stores today, begins with a howling, surfy stormer of a song, its title and only lyrics, "Three-way!" repeated three times in three minutes, accompanying a fantastically distant piano roll fit neatly behind a twanging guitar line. It's a clever introduction to an album the theme of which is so simple it becomes the title: Distortion.

Mr. Merritt wanted to build an album that would pay homage to the Jesus And Mary Chain's epochal Psychocandy, itself a fawning pastiche of surf music and 50's pop fed through distortion pedals and amplifiers and then fed back through the guitars. Think of the fuzzy thrash of "He's A Rebel," "Be My Baby," or "Leader of the Pack" turned all the way to its screeching metallic most.

Mr. Merritt has said the album is meant to "sound more like the Jesus and Mary Chain than the Jesus and Mary Chain," though fans will be happy
to know that many of the tunes sound more like the intricate chamber pop for which the band is best known delivered through a blissful, noisy haze.

"My reason for emulating Psychocandy," Merritt told The Observer, "was that I thought it would be a great way to make a record quickly."

"I was wrong," he went on to say.

And in fact, like the music he is responding to, the simplicity hides the workmanship. Perhaps that's why Mr. Merritt and a lot of pop purists like him believe that the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and all those who worked with Phil Spector through the 60's ushered in the greatest era of studio experimentation and perfection ever seen.

Mr. Merritt said that Distortion was an effort "to respond to what I see as the last significant event in pop production."

The formalism of the Jesus And Mary Chain owes plenty to Spector et al, and suits the obsessive Mr. Merritt, but in place of moaning paeans to wayward bikers and dumb love, we have smart love and nuns wishing they were porn stars.

Italicized after the production credits in the liner notes is the phrase "No Synths," and indeed the band seems to have upped the ante of their thematic self-challenge by using their usual instruments.

"There are no mistakes of any kind on this album," Mr. Merritt said, "and it's been edited to death for 18 months. Every available technology has been used in this process."

But in fact, the recording itself took only a month. A lot of the technical work on the album was coming up with the D.I.Y. techniques to deliver distortion and reverb from an unlikely instrumentation, all without manipulation on a synthesizer. For Claudia Gonson's piano and farfisa, the amp was laid next to the piano frame and turned up until it fed back; John Woo's guitar was outfitted with tiny amps to channel vibrations directly back into the instrument. All this is to say nothing of Sam Davol's cello and Daniel Handler's accordion (a tiny amp was taped to the bellows). The only thing not distorted with amps was Ms. Gonson's drumkit, which was recorded in a cavernous stairwell for maximum reverb, distortion's gentler cousin.

All of the tracks flirt with the three-minute mark, none missing it by more than a few seconds, and the result is startlingly refreshing brevity unknown to most current pop albums. Mr. Merritt is at pains to stress that the album is an offering to rock fans, long left in the cold by the band's meanderings. "Three-minute songs with distorted guitars: that's a complete definition of rock," he said.

Mr. Merritt clearly adores the Jesus And Mary Chain, along with the Beach Boys, the Beatles and the Velvet Underground, yet he is clever, and talented enough to put the Magnetic Fields stamp on everything he does. The consistent fuzz harkens back to earlier albums like Holiday, yet nowhere has the band been so rocking so much of the time, and the sonic assault is addictive, especially in such small chunks. "Too Drunk To Dream" is perhaps the best example of the meeting of Mr. Merritt's wit and the album's textural force. He sings a capella: "Sober, life is a prison / Shit-faced, it is a blessing. / Sober, nobody wants you / Shit-faced they're all undressing ... / Sober, you're old and ugly / Shit-faced who needs a mirror." As the lines continue to roll by the echo increases until the song begins in earnest with a swinging tune and a screeching, tinny guitar. Other tracks deal with the damning march of time ("Old Fools"), the sublimated erotic desires and regrets of a nun ("The Nun's Litany") and a hopelessly lonesome Christmas ("Mr. Mistletoe"), where the plant in question is called a "useless weed." Mr. Merritt told The Observer he prefers his lyrics "to involve conflict, drama, and tension," which may be putting it lightly. Songs alternate between Mr. Merritt and a female singer, though in place of the usual Claudia Gonson is Shirley Simms, whom Mr. Merritt employed on tracks he felt were too pop for his deep baritone. Ms. Simms shines on the second track "California Girls," whose refrain is (of course) "I hate California girls" as well as the noirish "Till The Bitter End," and the two singers trade verses on the giddily contrarian "Please Stop Dancing." While Mr. Merritt's lyrics always return to themes of love and melancholy, there's an iciness to many of the tracks here.

Mr. Merritt has long suffered from hearing problems, making live Magnetic Fields shows into pretty stripped-down affairs (the tour for this album will not involve the reverb and distortion techniques used to create it). But it's not simply volume that makes a wall of sound, but the texture and interplay of instruments and vocals.

In the "loudness wars," a trend critics say has led to songs so dense with sound that they lack dynamics, and so processed in the studio that they lack any personality, does this album take a side? "The loudness wars have been the normal way of making records for the last fifty years," he said. "The aberration was the insertion of dynamics into popular music, as happened in the early '90s when music radio became less relevant. Normally, producers try to make their records loud all the way through, to sound good on radio and other degrading audio media (laptop speakers, iPod headphones). Consumer audio, on MP3 especially, sounds better the more it gets compression in the studio and the less it relies on compression by the consumer's crummy, unpredictable equipment."

The challenge of so much noise doesn't come without pitfalls, one being that Mr. Merritt's delightful rhymes are occasionally swallowed by the imposing fracas. But then, that's somewhat the point, since the echoing voice is just another instrument in the greater musical texture, and though Mr. Merritt's wit is often touted as his strongest suit, perhaps he would rather we hear more of the totality of his songwriting, and hear music the way it sounds in of Stephin Merritt's wonderful, defective ear.

]]> http://observer.com/2008/01/magnetic-personality-disorder/feed/ 0 jhanasobserver http://observer.com/2007/11/hot-tickets-ifarnsworth-inventioni-magnetic-fields-aretha-franklin/#comments Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:45:34 -0400 http://observer.com/2007/11/hot-tickets-ifarnsworth-inventioni-magnetic-fields-aretha-franklin/ Gillian Reagan http://www.observer.com/2007/11/hot-tickets-ifarnsworth-inventioni-magnetic-fields-aretha-franklin/ THEATER

Now that the Broadway strike is over, there’s going to be a mad rush for tickets and most of this weekend's shows will be sold out. But throw some elbows and get a good spot on line for Aaron Sorkin’s The Farnsworth Invention, which is opening on Monday, Dec. 3. It's so good, it'll make you forget Studio 60.

[Check here for tickets.]

CONCERTS

Boston’s post-punk fogies Mission of Burma are coming to the Music Hall of Williamsburg on Jan. 19. Okay, so maybe they were way more important, and more attractive, in the early 80’s, but Mission of Burma is still worth seeing, if only so you can get sore singing/moshing to “That’s When I Reach For My Revolver.” Classic! [On sale: Since noon today. Hurry!]

The Foo Fighters are making their Madison Square Garden debut on Feb. 19 in support of their new album Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, released in September. Check them out while they rock their special brand of guitar-driven pop against stoic dudes in riot gear in the video for "The Pretender," the first single off the album. [On sale: Fri. Nov. 30 at noon.]

The Magnetic Fields added another date to their series of shows in February! The other shows sold out, so bookmark ticketmaster.com. The Town Hall on Feb. 24 is the place to be to hear Stephin Merritt’s droopy love songs that we sad bastards love to put on repeat. We’re looking forward to their 8^th album, Distortion, set to be released on Jam. 15 on Nonesuch. "The impetus started with a lunch with Nonesuch, where they said, 'Why don't you make a record quickly?'" Mr. Merritt told Billboard.com. "So I thought to myself, 'What could I record in a month? What would I do if I was forced to be a normal person and have a band that sounded the same from song to song, and not be bored?' I would be the Jesus & Mary Chain." Silly Stephin, you’re not normal! But we aren’t mad that the new album will be inspired by the Reid brothers. [On sale: Fri. Nov. 30 at noon]

Have R.E.S.P.E.C.T. for "Lady Soul" Aretha Franklin, who's playing Radio City Music Hall—for the gazillionth time, but we're not complaining!—on March 21. We hope she wears a sparkly, fringed dress like the one in this performance from the 90's. [On sale: Monday Dec. 3 at noon]

From NPR:

(Thanks, Sterogum)

Also, as we told you before, Hall & Oates are coming to the Beacon Theatre on Dec. 12. That show is sold out, but you can order tickets for their second show, which was just added, on Saturday at 10 a.m. for their Dec. 11 performance at the Beacon.

Thanks to Brooklyn Vegan for the heads up.

Stephin Merritt, a 30-ish Yonkers-born resident of the East Village, pals around with a close-knit group of followers and collaborators, always carrying with him, these days, a Chihuahua named Irving, as in Berlin. Right now, his work inspires sane pop insiders to make enormous claims for him as being just possibly the greatest living American songwriter right now. The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs –all 69 of them written by Mr. Merritt–is the kind of album that can inspire wildly strong allegiances. This happens not only because Mr. Merritt is good, which he is, wickedly; it is because he does something hardly anyone else even attempts right now: He writes songs .

On this new album, a triple CD, Mr. Merritt steps out. Sometimes he is as irony-soaked as Warren Zevon, as miniaturistically brilliant as David Baerwald, as musically omnivorous as Elvis Costello. The songs explore country, drawing-room, electro-pop, new music and cabaret styles, running toward juicy hooks here, elongated melodic passages there, hick chic and gay obsessions and genre jokes. But Mr. Merritt never suffers from any loss of identity. While getting spot-on work here and there from singers like L.D. Beghtol, Dudley Klute, Shirley Simms and his best friend and manager Claudia Gonson, he is always himself.

One of the 69 songs, "A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off," is narrated by a farmer who is a strange hybrid of Mister Green Jeans and Austin Powers. Incorrigibly cool, randy and high-stepping through a quick country-rock beat, the man boasts in a low tenor that his heart behaves like, well, "a chicken with its head cut off." His wife doesn't understand him; "I'm for free love," he explains, "and I'm in free fall."

Another song, "Busby Berkeley Dreams," traipses off into shattering piano nostalgia. In it, a reader of True Romance magazine decries his lover's decision to leave him. In the mind of the narrator, the romance is not over, and he sees himself and his lover dancing through his "Busby Berkeley dreams." In long-lined melodic phrases just upon the point of breaking into soft shrieks, Mr. Merritt gets all Noël Cowardish: "Well, darling," he sings, "you may do your worst/ because you'll have to kill me first."

Still another song–a new-wavish rocker floating on a silken boomerang of a synthesizer riff–is titled "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure." The narrator identifies himself as "just a great composer" (although instantly afterward, in a brilliant touch, a chortling clutch of hand claps undercuts the claim). Saussure pronounces love flatly incomprehensible. This enrages the composer, who, defending the empirical honor of 60's Motown, impulsively shoots the old semiologist. Mr. Merritt sums it up in a neat, cleverly rhymed couplet invoking the names of Motown's greatest songwriting team: "It's well and kosher to say you don't understand/ But this is for Holland-Dozier-Holland!"

Then there's the one about circus performers. Breaking up, the song's panicked narrator argues, would be tantamount to the end of nonstop touring, and velvet ropes, and gainfully employed stagehands–clowns. The song is called "Promises of Eternity," and during the chorus, as declamations of "I can't let this happen to you" and "Don't you let it happen to me" unfurl, you remember the Who's Pete Townshend, years ago, maintaining that Abba's "Knowing Me, Knowing You" amounted to one intense portrayal of domestic love.

Mr. Merritt–who occasionally writes criticism for Time Out New York and, at least on one memorable occasion, torched without mercy a bunch of then-current singles in Details –has all this decade inhabited that bratty little universe of obscure labels, smallish budgets and high I.Q.'s known as indie rock. During the first part of the 90's, indie rock is understood to have unearthed Nirvana, the decade's most lavishly loved rock band by fans and press alike; lately, though, indie rock has returned to the margins of the record business, the home of querulous Americans like the husband-and-wife duo Quasi (now divorced) and rarefied imports like the Scottish band Belle & Sebastian. As best-selling hard rock such as Limp Bizkit has grown so loutish that even Pearl Jam fans can't really hang with it, the outer reaches–as critic Eric Weisbard noted glumly a while back in The New York Times –has gone high-toned and pristine, a stereo lab of sounds and strikingly put notions. Rowdy, that's just for the Limp Bizkit masses.

None of which ever amounted, as one of his characters might put it, to a hill of beans for Mr. Merritt. On the records he previously made under the name the Magnetic Fields–the inverted truck-stop music of The Charm of the Highway Strip and the tweaked Europop of Holiday , both from 1994 are the best known–Mr. Merritt played around with inexpensive, keyboard-based sounds that added up to what might be called a harsh-minded prettiness. Yet sound compelled him nonetheless, and on a 1995 project like Wasps' Nests , his only major-label work to date, Mr. Merritt took a Quincy Jones tack, writing and arranging for indie-rock stars and starlets like Sebadoh's Lou Barlow and the Chicago-based singer-songwriter Barbara Manning. He subsequently made variously witty and slight records with groups with names like Future Bible Heroes and the Gothic Archies. Now, with 69 Love Songs , he is giving his fans and would-be fans a chance to see what he's made of more clearly.

Sometimes, the songs on this gently ambitious album settle into tall-tale mode. In "Papa Was a Rodeo," Mr. Merritt sings, "Papa was a rodeo" and "Mama was a rock-and-roll band." Home, he sings, following along the template of the Temptations' "Papa Was a Rolling Stone," was "anywhere with diesel gas," and love was "a trucker's hand." The couple in the song goes on to enjoy "the romance of the century."

In another song, a funny duet, Ms. Gonson, in her spectacularly lucid and quick-witted soprano, wonders: "Are you out of love with me?" and, a little later, "Do I drive you up a tree?" To which Mr. Merritt replies, "Yeah! Oh, yeah!" the phrase that gives the song its name. The exchange goes on and on, against a guitar speed-jangle the listener comes to want to strangle, and the mix of her interior sadness and exterior hilarity grows deeply unusual, as Mr. Merritt just continues to seem exhausted. It's a real end-of-the-century Honeymooners moment. Several songs later, Mr. Merritt casts Ms. Gonson in the role of the late Duchess of Windsor: "We got so many tchotchkes/ We've practically emptied the Louvre."

Then there's the song about pretending to be bunny rabbits …