#damon krukowski

[bandcampsnoop]

7/13/24.

Well, this was unexpected. Galaxie 500 is releasing a 2 LP behemoth - including many unreleased gems from between 1988-1990.

There's not a lot to add to this except that the two songs here rock more than I was expecting. I mean this is Dean, Damon and Naomi. This is pre-Luna Dean Wareham. And this clearly influenced by The Velvet Underground and The Dream Syndicate.

This release is housed in a mock TMOQ sleeve.

[spilladabalia]

Galaxie 500 - Fourth Of July

[saramencken]

GALAXIE 500 LIVE AT CBGBs 1988 SILVER GELATIN by Michael Macioce. 

Printed, signed & numbered by Macioce. In 16"x20", 11"x14", 8"x10" each in edition of 10. 

Contact Michael for price & avail: macioce.org/about

[mywifeleftme]

144: Galaxie 500 // On Fire

On Fire Galaxie 500 Rough Trade (Bandcamp)

On Fire very nearly got a churlish review primarily consisting of complaints about Dean Wareham’s voice, but today I am very hungover and have spent the evening alternating between playing guitar and “getting to know my body a little better” (as best-selling novelist and three-time WWF Champion Mick Foley called it in his memoirs) and now the album sounds perfect. I’ve always been a little on the fence about Galaxie 500, preferring for the most part Wareham’s less eccentric second project Luna, but few bands have ever been better at evoking a sensation of abstract yearning. On Fire feels the way the insides of your eyelids do when you close your eyes and face the sun. I wonder if part of their trick is in Mark Kramer’s production: it’s rich, clear as a bell, but somehow muted, so that Wareham’s frequent guitar pyrotechnics become textural details rather than the focus. You could remix this and it’d be basically Spacemen 3, but Naomi Yang’s soulful basslines and Damon Krukowski’s expressive drumming are always treated as co-lead instruments. And yes, Wareham’s vocal stylings could be accurately if uncharitably described as yowling, but today at least, it largely works for me. A word of warning though: if my George Harrison-loving stepdad ever hears how Wareham ‘sings’ “Isn’t It a Pity,” the adenoidal chanteur had better watch his back.

P.S. Yang’s design work on the sleeve is tremendous, and Kramer’s Don DeLillo-esque liner notes might be my favourite of all time. I’ll have to have a think on it, but nothing better is coming to mind.

144/365

[archivist-crow]

Galaxie 500 - “Fourth of July” (1990)

[libratalks]

The Resurgence of CDs: the "forgotten format" remembered by me

I know what you're thinking. There is no rebirth of CDs, Isha.

The facts tell us that they have been dying a slow death since their peak in the 2000s, suffering a 97% drop in sales revenue back in 2020. It fails to be a viable commercial format due to performing terribly in sales' data, with only a 1.1% increase in the US during 2021. No one is buying CDs, and those who are, well they just don't matter in the grand scheme of things for a few reasons. There are various sources of media that say otherwise, yet Damon Krukowski boldly states that one of the reasons why journalists have been penning articles regarding "the resurgence of CDs" is because there is a sense of false consciousness attached: it is an attempt by the industry to substitute the interests of the rich for one's own; to distract music consumers from facing the deeper problems within music distribution, such as a supposed booming economy in the music industry despite there being a great income inequality. To which I say, true, but un(?)fortunately, our minds do not resort to that aspect of the resurgence of CDs immediately. I mean, really, when I came across a sticker-peeled, used copy of Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill in the snug CD section of my temporary hometown's Oxfam (I was in Bath during my second year of university), I was hardly thinking of the effects of CD sales in the music industry. What I was thinking about was the excitement I felt in the pit of my stomach to be eight years old again, sat on my bedroom floor, wanting to scream the lyrics to Ironic whilst dancing around my stereo. If there is a resurgence of CDs, it is thanks to my generation: Gen-Z.

Perhaps one of Krukowski's faults is that he is building his conclusions based on CD sales from corporate stores, not independent stores that sell pre-owned copies. An hour ago, I was stood in a place named Record Collector in Sheffield, a whole store dedicated to collecting CDs along with artist memorabilia, such as tour posters and band autobiographies. There are also places such as Oxfam and Truck Store in Oxford where pre-owned copies of various CDs are sold at cheap prices ranging from 99p to £5. These stores are where the heart of CD-love lies. It's the accessibility with personal ownership that is comforting, along with the affordable pricing in contrast with vinyl prices. This reason for CD appreciation has always been evident, yet the introduction of MP3 files and the quick accessibility to downloads back in the 2000s is one of the murderers of the CD craze. Once there was a rise in MP3 players being sold, CD sales nearly halved between 2000 and 2007. Despite this, various artists and music fans remain defending CDs against MP3 players due to MP3 files becoming compressed when downloaded, affecting the audio quality of the song. With CDs, the audio is never compressed nor tweaked in any way. Yes, you could also just encode your MP3 files at a higher bit rate, but that leads me to my next favourite thing about CDs.

THE CREATIVITY IS UNMATCHED. I have always been a visual learner of some sort, falling in love with aesthetics that are carefully crafted in front of me for my own enjoyment. It's why I adore films over books, possess a keen eye and attention to detail when it comes to their direction and fashion, and it is also why I love CDs in the way that I do. I mean, I have a whole Instagram page dedicated to the craftsmanship that artists have demonstrated through their CDs. I own a growing collection, ranging from artists like Hole and Radiohead, along with Avril Lavigne and Alanis Morissette. All CDs I own are bought based on two things: how much I love the music and how much I adore the artwork. This creativity that artists can build on introduces a realm of sentimentality for when a music consumer witnesses time taken to produce a delicate work of art, where thorough thought has been given to which photos will be used for the cover - what colour scheme we are aiming for in terms of the album's aesthetic - which font should be used for the title and should it be the same for the lyrical pages in the booklet? - these are intricate details that an artist recognises and appreciates, no matter what. With so much love and care given to a piece of work that you have crafted, not always alone but with a team, you can't help but feel a sense of inspiration along with appreciation for the beauty of it all - allowing you to feel a strong connection with the artist. With that, no other music format could even compare to the liberation of creativity that CDs possess.

If there's anything you're going to take from me and my ranting, please let it be this: close your eyes, think of an album, or a song, or an artist that you can't help but feel a strong connection to, and buy one of their CDs. Go through the cover booklet, consume and appreciate each framing of text on each page - ask yourself why they chose to use that font or that colour - have the music playing at the same time and read through each page that consists of their lyrics... Let yourself be completely enamoured by the artist's choices of creativity and build your critical thinking in terms of what could be going on inside their minds.

You'll find yourself tapping into a whole new aspect of consuming music, especially in terms of appreciating visual individuality and the liberation that comes with it. All these feelings... thank you, CDs.

[z428]

Did we discuss avoiding #Spotify recently, at least as single source of access to music? Guess it's same as everywhere else: Fair payment and "cheap access" are mutually exclusive. If you care about diversity in music, about a healthy and thriving community rather than just a mass market of industry music streamlined for fast success, support artists that matter to you also by helping them make a living...😔

"And now, to make matters far worse, starting in 2024 Spotify will stop paying anything at all for roughly two-thirds of tracks on the platform. That is any track receiving fewer than 1,000 streams over the period of a year. Tracks falling under this arbitrary minimum will continue to accrue royalties – but those royalties will now be redirected upwards, often to bigger artists, rather than to their own rights holders."

[tirta-liquidity]

"I lay down on a blue martial-arts mat placed before the screen and let its story flow and crash. It crashes repeatedly—like waves, like our computers, like the economy. Twenty minutes in, all three of those crashes coincide, and desktop messages begin to pop up on the screen" - From Damon Krukowski Artforum

Video taken at Posthuman City Exhibition, NTU CCA Singapore, 2019

[ppwbm-blog]

Comment les musiciens sont-ils censés survivre avec 0,00173 $ par stream ?

Dans son article dans the Guardian (*) , Damon Krukowski souligne l’injustice de la rémunération des musiciens dans l’industrie musicale actuelle, où les plateformes de streaming dominent le marché et les revenus générés sont insignifiants pour les artistes (1). Il met en lumière le besoin urgent de réformer le système financier du streaming pour garantir une juste rémunération aux créateurs de…

[reckonslepoisson]

Copenhagen, Galaxie 500 (1997)

One of the more immediate features of Copenhagen, the only official live record from beloved 90s dreamy whingers Galaxie 500, are the guttural, demented screams of its crowd. And that’s sort of interesting. After all, this is slowcore: you’re supposed to be melancholic and depressed, not enraptured and wild. Or so you’d think.

And yet, listening to Copenhagen one can fully understand the passion and joy behind those screams. Adding an entire new dimension to the band, here the band is more muscular, soaring, wonderful. The recording alone elevates, Dean Wareham’s guitar so luscious, Naomi Yang’s bass so sprightly, Damon Krukowski’s drumming so anchoring and propulsive. If I was there, I’d be screaming dementedly, too.

Pick: ‘Decomposing Trees’

[spilladabalia]

Galaxie 500 - Tugboat (Live)

[webionaire]

My favorite records sound the worst, because I’ve played them the most. Each time a needle runs around an LP, it digs a little deeper into the grooves and leaves its trace in the form of surface noise. The information on an LP degrades as it is played—as if your eyes blurred this text, just a bit, each time they ran across it.

Analog sound reproduction is tactile. It is, in part, a function of friction: the needle bounces in the groove, the tape drags across a magnetic head. Friction dissipates energy in the form of sound. Meaning: you hear these media being played. Surface noise and tape hiss are not flaws in analog media but artifacts of their use. Even the best engineering, the finest equipment, the “ideal” listening conditions cannot eliminate them. They are the sound of time, measured by the rotation of a record or reel of tape—not unlike the sounds made by the gears of an analog clock.

In this sense, analog sound media resemble our own bodies. As John Cage observed, we bring noise with us wherever we go:

For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds.

Silence is death, the ACT UP slogan painfully reminded us at the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1987. Why seek it out as a part of our musical experience?

[richardvarey]

Sly Fidelity: The Paradoxical Vitality of Live Albums

Damon Krukowski investigates the nature and appeal of live albums. They simulate the social experience of an event. But are they a record of a performance that can be reproduced in the home? Or are they not a preservation for repetition, but a creation. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/live-albums-social-experience-1202685179/

[screamingforyears]

ERRRDAY_LIKE_SUNDAY:

// “STRANGE” is the fourth track on GALAXIE 500’s second LP titled ‘On Fire’ (1989 @roughtraderecords) & it never fails to get this here author misty-eyed AF (I’m not crying ur crying) The Cambridge based trio of Guitarist Dean Wareham, drummer Damon Krukowski & bassist Naomi Yang would go onto influence every single “indie” group that followed in their wake, thats not up for debate, from SlowCore to lo-fi psych to DreamPop their fingerprints are evident. Galaxie 500’s run was a short-lived yet ridiculously rich one, that being said nothing has ever hit me as hard as “Strange” when it comes to their wonderful discography. There’s something insanely raw to “Strange,” something a little more ramshackle, a little more “punk” w/ it’s violent strums, percussive thwack & coarse vocals... yet it’s still filled w/ the same devastatingly emotional gut punch that Mazzy Star would perfect later on down the road. Thank you Dean, Damon & Naomi.

////

[dustedmagazine]

Damon & Naomi with Kurihara — A Sky Record (20/20/20)

A Sky Record by Damon & Naomi

The last couple of years have been tough for collaboration, especially for like-minded musicians who happen to live many miles apart. Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang have been working with Michio Kurihara for decades, beginning with their 2000 album Damon & Naomi with Ghost. They’ve toured together and had Kurihara in to play evocative, atmospheric guitar bits on their last several albums. And, indeed, you can see why they’d want to. There is something rather magical about the way that Kurihara quietly, beautifully disrupts the placid surfaces of their songs, with long, languid tones just fuzzed with distortion around the edges. But the pandemic has made all sorts of meetings of mind more difficult, and the fact that they did join forces, both in person, in Japan, at the end of a 2019, and virtually afterwards has a melancholic edge. The distance, the isolation, the weirdly peaceful quiet of lockdown are all here in these songs, wrapped in gentle jangle, quiet percussion and the most delicate sort of vocal harmonies and counterpart.  

Indeed, the very first song is called “Oceans in Between,” as Yang sings sweetly, airily and with caressing sadness about trying to connect over distance. She is listening to crickets and watching fireflies, wondering if the person she misses is doing the same. And, yes, Kurihara seems to say at the end, here I am, far away but right here, as he launches into a solo that vaults over the songs’ soft contours in a stirring, triumphant way.

Later, Krukowski celebrates the little gatherings that we hardly knew how to appreciate, the dropping by for music or cards or drinking that stopped altogether in 2020. His “Between the Wars” is a bit denser and more mobile than “Oceans in Between” was, with Yang playing subtle runs of bass and bits of piano. Brushes swirl on drums and cymbals and little flourishes of acoustic guitar flare up here and there. In the long instrumental intro, you hear the melody first from Kurihara, playing it on guitar, then later from Krukowski. The lyrics start prosaically, welcoming a musical guest and telling them where to put their violin case, and then arcs towards the metaphysical, with the ending line, “I’ll meet you on the other side, bring your violin.”

Like many of us, Krukowski and Yang seem to have drawn some comfort from nature during the pandemic. Their songs are full of closely observed details about birds, insects, weather and animals. The best line in the whole record comes in “Sailing By,” where Krukowski observes “The mockingbird in East LA, makes a song from car alarms.” This is a rather lovely idea, made even more beautiful by the way that Yang’s sighing counterpoints curl around Krukowski’s main melodic line, by how the guitar strings out pensive notes like the stars in a loose constellation. Like all artists, and even some birds, Damon and Naomi and Kurihara have made art out of what was in front of them, and it’s a gorgeous, emotionally resonant reminder of the times.

Jennifer Kelly