Black Marble

Black Marble (aka Chris Stewart) goes record shopping at Amoeba Hollywood in this "What's In My Bag?" episode. The electronic musician digs into the book section, picking up How Music Works by David Byrne and Lol Tolhurst's Goth: A History, and finds one of his all-time favorite post-punk albums. Black Marble's new album Life in Small Spaces is available August 21st via Sacred Bones.

Black Marble's picks:
• The Necessaries - Completely Necessary (Anthology 1978-1982) (LP) 
• Liz Pelly - Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist (BOOK)  
• Jonathan Richman - I, Jonathan (LP) 
• Uwe Schütte - Kraftwerk: Future Music From Germany (BOOK) 
• Pylon - Chomp (LP) 
• David Byrne - How Music Works (BOOK) 
• The Only Ones - Baby's Got A Gun (LP) 
• Lol Tolhurst - Goth: A History (BOOK) 
• Graham Nash - Songs For Beginners (LP) 

Featured Artist: Black Marble

Editor: Michael Cruz
Executive Producer: Rachael McGovern
Producer/Director: Craig Miller
Assistant Director: Derich Heath
Cameras: Derich Heath
Audio Recorded by: Patrick Emswiler
Assistant Editor: Patrick Emswiler

Watch Black Marble's "What's In My Bag?" episode on Amoeba.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:00

Hey, I'm Chris from Black Marvel. I am at Amoeba Music. This is What's in My Bag. This is a not very well known band, the Necessaries. Arthur Russell played keyboards in this band for a minute. There's a funny story about how he he quit the band. They were in the middle of a tour, they were going through the Holland Tunnel. He got sick of the band, so he just got his cello and got out of the car and just walked through the Holland Tunnel. So that was him quitting the necessaries. I would say they're a bit like talking heads, and they're just like not well known enough, I feel like. But this is just everything that they wrote. They had one full length and then they had like some demos. So this kind of puts everything together. It's 37 songs. Mood Machine, the rise of Spotify, and the cost of the perfect playlist by Liz Pelley. So I've read a few books on Spotify. One was called Spotify Teardown, which kind of went into more like from a developer's standpoint. This book is more about from like the standpoint of the founder and how over time he was trying to turn Spotify into like a money-making business. So when it first started, it was basically during the Napster era. So its original intent was just to keep money going to the record labels. So record labels did deals with Spotify in order to own a piece of it, which is why there's like a natural conflict of interest between labels, artists, and Spotify, for those who don't know. Over time they pivoted to playlists and just the enemy was basically silence. Their direct competitors weren't really like iTunes or like Apple Music or whatever, it was more just like silence. So that's why Spotify Radio exists, and that's why they developed all these different algorithms in order to just keep you listening passively. Very interesting and terrifying if you're a musician.

SPEAKER_03 2:25

All of this so-called innovation was going to level the playing field for artists. Spotify Obsessively promised. What we actually got though were playlists heavily dominated by major label acts, Angelus feeds of Neo Music loaded with ghost artists, anonymous stock music commissioned at a discount, and a series of pay-to-play schemes.

SPEAKER_05 2:48

So a lot of people know about this record or know about Jonathan in general. I feel like this is like the perfect distillation of like the kind of innocent 60s pop sound. Parties in the USA, Velvet Underground, that summer feeling.

SPEAKER_06 3:11

And that summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life.

SPEAKER_05 3:20

To me, this is the quintessential post-Modern Lovers Jonathan Richman like solo record. So for anybody who's a fan of Modern Lovers and you're like, which Jonathan Richman record should I get? Like, this would be my choice.

SPEAKER_07 3:36

How in the world are they making that sound? Velvet underground, like this.

SPEAKER_05 3:45

So this book is about craft work. It's called Future Music from Germany. It kind of contextualizes craft work within more of like the arts movement at the time and post-World War II Germany. So basically, you had modernism and the Weimar Republic, and then you had World War II, which kind of destroyed all that because they tried to get rid of like all the artists. Craft work was kind of coming out of that, and part of the kind of unification of their sound, which is completely new because they made their own instruments, their visuals, just tying it together in one package was seeing it more of like an artistic movement and trying to kind of rebuild some sort of aesthetic point of view in Germany post-World War II. So that's really cool.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

By using their own language and actively celebrating their national identity, Kaftwerk were articulating the mood of Germany's post-war generation. It was time to reclaim German culture from the dark shadows of recent history and move forward.

SPEAKER_05 4:44

This is cool. So I actually got an opportunity to play with Pylon in Detroit. They still sound amazing. So this is their second record.

unknown 4:53

Shaping builds.

SPEAKER_05 5:08

REM loved pylon. In my opinion, this is my favorite Athens band, and one of my favorite kind of post-punk bands of all time. Yo-yo is my favorite pylon song, so that's on here. Everybody should definitely check this out if you haven't heard it, I feel like.

SPEAKER_09 5:23

Like a yo-yo! Like a yo-yo.

SPEAKER_05 5:30

High music works. A lot of people have read this book. I thought this was cool because music doesn't change based on the whims of the people making it, it changes based on the context that it's made in. So on the African plane, it makes sense that there's tribal drums because you're playing on a hilltop and there's people down there all dancing around. Punk music came out of clubs, like small clubs, because it's the only place that would book punk bands, was like 200 cap. Dance music comes out of like big dance clubs with like huge sound systems, so then it makes sense that that becomes more of like a driving beat and it's all about kind of like four on the floor kicks. For me, after reading this book, I started mixing my own more dancey songs on like club speakers instead of studio monitors. So thanks, David.

SPEAKER_04 6:26

How music works or doesn't work is determined not just by what it is in isolation, if such a condition can ever be said to exist, but in a large part by what surrounds it, where you hear it, and when you hear it.

SPEAKER_05 6:41

I picked this out just because I couldn't believe that I saw it. They have that song Another Planet, which is kind of like their hit.

SPEAKER_08 6:57

I'm on another planet with you. With you.

SPEAKER_05 7:02

But other than that, I feel like there are no hits. It's an amazing band. It's like one of the first power pop bands. This is a good DJ record for sure. Okay, so this is Goth, a history by Lol Tolhurst, co-founder of The Cure. I expected this to be kind of like a gossipy book about goth, but instead it kind of starts with like what are the origins of goth, and it starts with like poetry like Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, and then it moves on into the big bands like Susie and The Cure and the Bauhaus, obviously. So it kind of contextualizes Goth within the broader culture. So I thought it was interesting that it, you know, traces it through like poetry, through music, through art and through fashion, and not just being like a gossip book like Please Kill Me or something like that. Even though Please Kill Me is an awesome book and an honorable mention.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Gotha's style and the culture undoubtedly arose in the post-punked musical underground. One can also trace the prehistory of Goth through literary and artistic precursors.

SPEAKER_05 8:12

Songs for beginners by Graham Nash.

unknown 8:15

Military Madness.

SPEAKER_05 8:35

Military Madness is like my favorite song off this. Band Woods covered that, which is a really good cover, but obviously the original is amazing. There's another song on here, Chicago, which is about the 1968 Democratic Convention that was in Chicago. And you had kind of the student groups kind of like rioting outside the convention because it felt like they weren't getting any representation. And then you had the democratic establishment kind of keeping them out. Interesting record from a very interesting time in our country's history, and very, I believe, instructive and instrumental if you want to kind of like understand some of the things that are going on now. It hasn't changed all that much. Those are my records and my books.

SPEAKER_08 9:35

Thank you so much for coming in today.

SPEAKER_05 9:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 9:38

We really appreciate you talking to us.

SPEAKER_05 9:40

Awesome.