Donna Juana 7 - the Books on Tape retirement party!
Lev’s show airs every Sunday at 11pm on WHFR. This week’s episode is a tribute to Ball Deep fave-band, video client and friend, Books on Tape, who announced his retirement on Friday ——> MPfree.
PLAYLIST: Books on Tape retirement party: Upon Rock City Grey Matters Siberian Sound System Deathbomb Mafia The Crucial Killing Machine Frission Kingston Lil Wayne - Miami Vice Unk feat Andre 3000 & Jim Jones - Walk it Out (remix) Young Jeezy - Child of God Baby Cham - Vitamin S Acapella Skream w Warrior Queen - Check-it Lee Perry & Dub Syndicate - Kiss the Champion
There’s something worth saying about BoT, because you might not know it from the music. When recording in the studio, he performed every song “live” — playing his distortion pedals, samplers and KAOS pads straight into a recorder. So if he didn’t like a take, he couldn’t fix it — he had to rerecord the whole thing. That’s probably partly why his live show’s so good. He doesn’t have to re-adapt his music for a performance setting.
This unusual way of working also affected the kind of music he made, which is so different from the laptop/glitch people he’s usually grouped with. Like, I don’t know what kind of music BoT would have made with Pro Tools, but I bet the unusual, sometimes droning, sometimes punchy timing of his songs comes from him approaching his music as a moving target and not as a static “canvas” on a computer screen. If the music sometimes feels more like classic dub than you’d expect, I think this is why.
But more importantly, BoT’s working methods were way inspirational to me and W…
The non destructive model provided by digital software and hardware allows you to cut and paste and mix and remix everything — you’re always able to undo any decision. That’s great for a lot of things but it’s also dangerous. It allows us artists to produce exactly what we think we want. In doing so it closes our imaginations to the surprises offered by our tools, our bodies, our friends and of all the other unpredictable contingencies of the world.
When you know you have to get everything right, it forces a degree of commitment and involvement that would be lacking if every take was just a scrimmage. That’s why we rehearse scenes a bunch of times, but film them only once (ok, twice if we’re working with video). Like BoT, we create high stakes moments of ‘being on’, for ourselves as directors and for the actors as performers.
Anywayz…
if you’re in LA, go see one of BoT’s farewell shows. Besides everything else, he has a easy-yet-manic, showbizzy stage presence — very Jewish in way I can’t explain, and very rare for an electronic musician. If and when his tour hits the East Coast, W and I will definitely tap that shit. For some reason, NYC never showed him enough love (theories anyone? It can’t just be the un-googleable name…)
Well whatever. Quitting well is one of the best things people can do — and retiring after putting out a sweet and acclaimed album like Dinosaur Dinosaur puts BoT in a Dave Chappelle/Ricky Williams/Bjorn Borg class of of heroic quitters. He never made an album that was less than awesome, saving me from writing him embarrassingly over-entitled complaint letters like I wrote to Kid 606 last year. Instead I wrote this, to which I only want to add
Breast Wishes, Todd!
From me and Whitney
P.S. You might have read in your local youth-culture section something about us doing a new video for BoT. For various reasons — mainly this retirement and/but-also cuz we had different ambitions for the release — that isn’t going to happen. No biggie. For those of you who were in the video, don’t sweat — the footage is all beautiful and we’re definitely planning to give it the repurposing it deserves.
P.P.S. Hah! I about to write good stuff about Todd (aka BoT) as a person; how he gave me and W our first break by inviting us to do a video; how generous and hospitable he and Kerri were to me and A when we visited L.A.; how he once played a show that had been cancelled for just me and W (documented in our music video. I’m the skeleton.)– but then I remembered, Todd isn’t dead! Man, that RIP shit is misleading…