Montauk to release EP with original material

Fresh from their release of the Boys EP, where Montauk edited three old disco songs, the Scandinavian duo is going to release a new EP. This one is entitled The Newsroom, and it will feature five tracks worth of original material. It will be released on the 11^th of April via Brilliantine. And to be honest, I’m really digging the artwork these guys have come up with for both Boys and this one.

The newsroom has changed a lot over the years, as can be read in Lordoniere’s illuminating study entitled From Nothing Ever Happens To Everything Always Happens: how the newsroom went from objective calm to zany and subjective. The following are a few excerpts from this study:

Before the 1930s the news room was a calm, relaxing place where one earned his wages without getting burned out. One had coffee, read the news that came in from all their reporters, and then edited both the stories as well as the lay-out of the newspaper itself.

Now, this changed in the 1930s. For in the 1930s, nothing happened in the lives of a lot of people. Laid off as they were (the economic crisis due to the crash in 1929), they had to get their excitement from elsewhere. From newspapers, for example. Now what attracted all these bums attention was when reporters were flying around, taking photographs of crime scenes, running to the news HQ, and through the window they would see reporters frantically waving all kinds of papers in the air talking animatedly. Now, things were happening in the world! Things are going on! And these guys here are putting it to paper! So those kinds of newspapers (not all did it, and notoriously the New York Gazette put off this transition for so long they eventually could not recover) with the newsrooms where people were shouting and waving and screaming and running, they sold more stories. For they made it seem that more was happening in the world, and that is a comforting notion when nothing is happening in your own life.

This trend was inversed when WW II struck, because yes, a lot was happening at that point in the world, but no one really wanted to read about that. So they aired cartoons instead. This was infamously spoofed by NBC, for when regular television reports resumed, they showed the newsroom with a large rabbit running in front of either a man with a John Deere cap on or with a very large moustache and a Southern accent. They were fined, and the man playing the rabbit was stuffed and eaten for Christmas.

Again a change came during Vietnam. The emphasis didn’t lie anymore on if something was happening (because everyone knew something was happening because everyone’s blonde, Apollo like son and that guy from the first half of Full Metal Jacket had been shipped off to war), but the emphasis now was on who had the latest news. So the newsroom was depicted as even more hectic, and they especially depicted people constantly on the phone to get the latest info. A stroke of genius by Fox was the guy that ran into the News broadcast to give the anchorman the very, very, very latest. Hot of the presses. CNN, envious of this, tried to convince the audience that they had the very latest news by indeed heating up the pieces of paper as if it indeed was hot off the presses. Not only didn’t it fool their erudite audience (who massively walked out on them and started watching Sky), but their very best anchorman Richard Lazenby had to be hospitalized with second degree burns.

In recent years how the news room is depicted has taken a step back, since in an attempt to give the person watching the idea that something is always going, news broadcasts are constantly running one quote or another at the bottom of the screen. So everyone is watching that (it is the renowned subtitle effect). ABC once did a test by having the news read by a man in drag imitating Greta Garbo, but no one noticed and the man quit because Gilda deserved more attention according to him.