canon fodder

Castanets - Dub Refuge - All this talk about cannons/canons and I get a PR email regaling the forthcoming Castanets album (TEXAS ROSE, THE THAW, AND THE BEASTS, OUT 9/22 ON ASTHMATIC KITTY) that opened with

Castanets' contribution to the American music canon has always been a strange, experimental, defiant one.

No dis toward Castanets (they seem like a nice enough band) and not to heavily parse some PR copy (it's what they are hired to do) , but is Castanets contributing to the American music canon? Are all bands doing that by default? Is a canon a bracket of what is there and rises to the top, or is it a groomed thing?

I like this dub version of their 2008 album City of Refuge. I think dub is defintiely part of the canon, and not enough people are playing around with the idea anymore without just adding a dull reggae sheen to the work. Castanets are taking dub at definition and stripping out and skeletonizing previously recorded tracks into something that emphasizes the continuum that lies at the soul of source material, usually with a lot of echo. We tend to only really hear something once it has bounced off something else anyway.

Mark Kozelek - What's Next to the Moon (listen) The kernel magic of AC/DC songs persist whatever recontextualizing has been done to them. If I had a copy of For Those About to Rock sitting around, I'd play that just to answer the canon/cannon question with an actual cannon.