Week 5: Waterdigger

Dedicated to Stanislaw Aesculapian Lem.
In a Borgesian kind of mindset I imagine an I-pod that has all the music that has ever been or will ever be recorded. All possible permutations of sound combinations in all rhythms and melodies, tones and timbre are found in it. From the shortest micro-tune written in mirco-scales and played in one nano-beat to the longest (still playing) epic multi-symphoelectronic terramuzak, this I-pod has it all. How far are we from that I-pod? Turns out, not far at all. A musician that goes by the moniker of Anonymous has already developed the only music that won’t go into my not-so-imaginary I-pod – Silent Music.
At the current rate of music production, statisticians have predicted that 100% of musical possibilities combined with 100% of sound wavelength saturation will occur sometime around June 19, 2011, just a few years away. Experts call this the Cacomoment in music. Though some countries have gone as far as monitoring the number of musical pieces being produced and played at any given time, and some have even placed restrictions on certain forms of new music, most music production continues unabated. And it might as well, since most experts agree that the forward advance of music is unstoppable and must be allowed to reach its obvious conclusion - the Cacomoment. But what happens afterwards? Though the post-Cacomoment is somewhat of an elusive concept not unlike what happens to time at speeds faster than light, most theories describe the post-Cacomoment as all the music, all the time. And this is where Anonymous and Silent Music come in. In the post-Cacomoment, Silent Music will offer an oasis of peace amidst an atmosphere filled with the incessant sounds of all the music all the time. As the name implies Silent Music doesn’t make a sound; it’s music that can’t be heard. Like any innovative creator, Anonymous is keeping secret many of the technical details; however, initial leaks from Anonymous’ studio have resulted in a number of “silent” headphones now flooding the market. Notwithstanding, Anonymous has stated that unlike the headphones which mainly create silence as a negative effect of sound, Silent Music creates silence a priori, in other words, it would create silence even if there was no music in the air. But the principal difference, says Anonymous, between regular silence and Silent Music is that while regular silence is the absence of sound, Silent Music is silent sound, which means that it will continue to provide the other characteristics we currently associate with music, but without making any sound. When listening to Silent Music we will, depending on the Silent Music piece, experience joy, sadness, elation, mystery, a desire to dance or to cheer. In the post-Cacomoment, we will see a flyer for our favorite Silent Music band, go to our favorite live music club, pay a cover, and drink beers while we toast to the awesome Silent Music being played, but we won’t see any performers on stage playing any silent instruments. We will follow the neon lights to the dance clubs were we will twist and shake in new provocative dances while attempting to ‘hook-up’, but we won’t see any DJ spinning any silent records. At home we will sit back after a busy day at work and relax with a cigar and a glass of scotch while listening to the latest Silent Music recording from the Columbia Silent Record of the Month Club.
Exponent of Silent Music and fellow snakester Stanislaw Aesculapian Lem predicted Silent Music. In his book “Imaginary Magnitude” he called for a “liberation struggle in the name of – and for the good of – Introductions.” While Aesculapian Lem refered to book introductions, the same principles apply to Silent Music. As a creator of Silent Music might say in the post-Cacomoment, Aesculapian Lem wrote, “I shall deceive you, and for that you will be grateful to me. I shall make you a solemn promise with no intention of keeping it, and that will satisfy you, or at any rate you will pretend that it does, with appropriate masterly skill… I promise and guarantee a wonderful freedom, and give my word that Nothing will be there. What shall I gain? The greatest of riches: the one prior to Creation. What will you gain? Supreme liberty, for no words of mine will obtrude upon your ear in your pure upward flight. I shall take you only as a pigeon-fancier takes a pigeon, and slings it like David’s stone, like a rock in the path, so that it may fly off into this immensity – for eternal enjoyment.”
In the meantime, as we wait for the imminent Cacomoment, we can still enjoy Waterdigger’s “Piece of Shit Volvo Station Wagon”.
Finally, I hope that Hall and Oates create some silent tunes, cause otherwise I’m gonna miss ‘em in the post-Cacomoment.

The History of Recorded Live Music or How the West Was Spun

P.S. This tidbit was recorded live.
P.P.S. Does Chicago think it is strange that Dan the Fan celebrates his 50th as we debate the merits of live music?
P.P.P.S. Watched We Jam Econo last night. It's terrific and I'm not just saying that because it was a nice walk down memory lane. It was, but it would be a great movie for any musician or music fan unfamiliar with the Minutemen. Anybody who owns "Pet Sounds" (for example) - because she wants to study classic creative outbursts caught on tape- owes it to himself to pick up the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime which is well discussed in this documentary among other things.
P.X.Y.Z. Things change. The Stradavari of our time?

Part I: Mans. Mans have been banging things together (sticks, heads, d*cks, other things) to gain things (attention, snatch, d*cks, beer, rain) for well over five years. These mans who bang things together have faced back breaking reverence ever since mans has been named for their most reverence-worthy ticks (Kilian the Pig Farmer, Carlos the Goat F*cker, Justin the Wisenhiemer, John the Baptist, Heidi the Woman, And the SoForth). In this limited perspective, the entire history of recorded music is not even a sixteenth note and here at the end of the recorded music era we can look back, remove our oxygen masks for a sec, and laugh at all its flaws and at how amazing the technology appeared at one time. Take the origins of recorded music - if one had only the old recordings to go by, one would think that all people listened to at the beginning of the Organized Death Century was brass bands and hillbillies with head colds. Of course nasally sounds were the only things that projected from early recording/playback thingys. But people in their misled real lives were also listening to military marching bands an awful lot. The Germans particularly loved this stuff. It was difficult to get them into a studio however -the Germans I mean, the marching bands were easy because they took orders well. We know that now and laugh heartily into our carbon monoxide filtering masks but at the time people were not laughing, they were dying mostly but before that they were saying ooooo how real-a-list-ic-acal while listening to thin scratchy recordings of inbred Appalachian families singing about the sunny days they'll know when they're dead. Two days later ribbon microphones came along and better recording devices and the phenomenon of the Crooner came to pass. One would think that heavy breathing was the only thing wetting panties back in the age of the Bestest Generation Ever, EVERRR! but really people were so sick of hearing recorded chalkboard scratches that they couldn't get enough of these new deep sounds coming out of particle-board boxes against the wall in their living rooms across from a pile of clean underwear on the sofa that still needs folding. -- Correction, the underwear needs folding, not the sofa -- Suddenly, the Germans discovered sterEO® and War broke out and people were so amazed to hear Jimi Hendrix's guitar in one ear and a whistle pop in the other and then footsteps that pan from one ear to the other that they totally freaked out and started an entire decade that we now call the Summer of Love. Then along came the blessed vinyl. Vinyl was the opie-pity-me of the recorded music era because the vinyl was nice to hold and the vinyl had pretty pictures and when you were done with the vinyl you could turn the vinyl into a clock or a bowl. But towards the end of the vinyl era the vinyl started to get shitty because the people in charge of the vinyl were also in charge of the suckiest of recorded music contraptions, the compacted disk. These people wanted their new money-sucker to succeed and so they suckified the vinyl by making the vinyl too thin and they further suckified the cd by overpricing it thereby replacing the dagger into the heart of the entire era. Still the era went on another millennium in this dagger replacement phase but its fate was set as if a dagger had been replaced in its heart. In fact the only reason cd's stuck around as long as they did is that touring bands couldn't figure out a way to display their mp3's on a folding table at the back of the club. We look back at this time in Hungarian history and we laugh directly into our laughy laugh laugh masks and we remember how people used to say silly things like "they didn't sound anything like their record" and "I wish they would just stick to playing their hits so I could remember the young me the way I want to and not the fat pimply mess that really was me" and we remember how radio stations were once dedicated to playing the same four songs over and over for twenty-five year cycles and how you could still hear (mainly in vintage clothing stores) the ridiculous "poetry" of a 19 year old Jim Morrison thirty years after he himself had checked out because he never wanted to hear himself again. Soon none of this will matter but right now it is a matter of life and death so pay attention. After all it has only been two minutes since the Great Live Music Crisis when once gentle live music fans finally took back the music which had been hoarded by an ugly conspiracy fronted by the Doofus Triumpherut (Paul the Sucker of John Lennon and then Michael Jackson's d*cks, Ticketmaster the Every greedy bastard who ever decided live music would be a great business, and firstly Professional Roadies the Who decided these people should have families and full medical when they hardly deserve the back stage d*ck sucking they were already contracted). Personably I don't think it was necessary to throw these people to the Fatal Flying Guillotines; knowing now what we don't that they were just tools of an even greater "Stay At Home" conspiracy started by frumpy Victorian housewives and then taken over after Sex in the City by their anus infatuated husbands. It's fantasticable really that the music was taken back from the Doofuses because for a while the only viable rebellion was headed by Pearl Jam who nobody liked. But when people realized they didn't have to like Pearl Jam in order to dislike paying 50,000 pesos to watch Mick Jagger jiggle around Keith Richards' d*ck it was only five seconds later that they realized they didn't like the Rollingstones anyway and they could go down to the corner bar which actually has a really good open mike night For Free! Even then it was not until the Greater Cleveland Live Music Directory Riots when thousands of people came to shout "Down with Live Music!" And twelve other people, carrying a scarecrow with "What would Jizzle Dizzle?" scribbled across his shirt, were there to say "What the F crawled into your pants?" And it looked like it was gonna be a really disorganized end to the Organized Death Century, when a guy in the back started to shout "Down with the vinyl, Up with CD's!" Then the entire crowd stopped shouting and stared at this guy and said in unison "you are so living in the eighth decade of the Organized Death Century." Then there was a lot of "pinch poke you owe me a Survival Tablet®" and this made them all laugh and Fred Frith was there and I'm pretty sure that's where he came up with the laughy laugh laugh mask and so we are barely here to tell the story. Soon all music once and future will be available by satellite for a one time fee of your nose and you will say ooo it sounds so real-a-mull-istic (because that's how good kind folks will talk in the future) and you won't even have to leave the confines of your personal hell to hear all of this stuff that you never put on anymore anyway but at least it isn't cluttering up the den. One side note very small like a sixteenth note but played only by the first chair flute is that some people still exist that collect all that old clutter like LP's and singles and what not but they have no real historical importance other than to preserve history and to point out that Captain Beefheart and the Stooges were playing punk rock well before some English pricks came over here just to be spit on but really jeesh they sound so pretentious it's hard to care about anything those guys say anyway even if it's true. Those of us who still slap d*cks and boobies together to gain things (attention, poontang, d*ck, beer, rain) will not know any better not even that there will always be limitizashunums to recording thingys. After all, it's still hard to believe that unbelievably at one time studios were limited to one hundred thousand recordable tracks plus fifty-five more if you ping pong them. This is hard to believe, or rather unbelievable, because it was never true, they just said that but nobody knew any better because they dropped it down to two iPod speakers anyway. They also became very confused as to which "they" was doing what or who "they" were even. Let's just say that one "they" was the people who manufactured fake one hundred thousand-track recording devices and the other "they" is nobody important really. It's also unimportant to remember that there will always be something to gain from getting out into the world and creating for the moment as any Puerto Rican will tell you but that's just because they are stuck on a small island which couldn't support all the Puerto Ricans in the world if they only ate pop rocks and they should just get on with it and stop waving flags around like that's going to make the island any bigger. Sure, rather than go see live music, many people watch a lot of silly things on telifizzles (and they will continue to do this until the end of the Miller Lite Age) but that doesn't mean the idiots watching live music want those couch potatoes to come out and get in their way. It's hard enough to get a drink around here as it is. Besides, it's the way of the world and it has been ever since The Way of the World was recorded by Cheap Trick (in Dolby® SterEO® mind you). Besides watcha gonna do when they come for you?

Ah, you might as well jump.

As always I sign out now with a traditional human-thingy expression of goodwill - go, go now and slap a d*ck (or boobie)!

Preface: You can order a copy of this written oral history on cassette tape, compacted disc, streaming mp3, or cardboard for $25 in cash - write to info@disclexington.com for details OR you can hear it for free (in stereo provided you have two good ears) live at Bernice's Tavern on Chicago's Southside most Thursday nights upon request or at Rudyard's Pub/Poison Girl in Houston during the holidays most every night of the week.

~~~Any idiot can have an idea. The hard part is making it happen - A re-usable quote from your favorite gift-wrapping artists Jeane-Claude and Christo.~~~

The Three Sides of Duality

Far be it from me to abandon something that is dying a long slow death. No, I am only happy to sit and pick at the corpse like a vulture, and hope to somehow inject a single drop of vitality back into the thing and see where we go from there. The idea of comparing the merits of watching live/performed music to the merits of listening to a recorded document has been bandied about in these pages within this the first month of our stunningly ingenious music blog. The young Mr. Medina did the world a favor and released (or is it unleashed?) the long dormant photos of the immensely influential (joke), and slightly retarded (understatement), Schlong Weasel. In the interest of destroying all that is beautiful by reducing it to an either/or argument (apparently an idea that is the very spawn of Satan himself), I will give a few examples of duality in music. I will do so both from within the very limited confines of the Schlong Weasel universe, and from other facets of my creepy, inbred world. And ultimately, I will fuck the whole thing by adding a third element to the polar opposition of the first two; because, well, because what better way to point out just how far from reality red-blooded music dorks truly are?

So let's get this party started, kay-o?

Schlong Weasel was all things at once. To everyone. This point is indisputable. You know it, but to deny it is natural. It doesn't matter really. Know simply that it all boils down to the credo of Schlong Weasel in all its paralyzing stupidity: No God only Schlong.

I played a 45 minute drum solo totally nude.

Schlong Weasel was playing the Axiom, Houston's home for morons with guitars. If you were here in the late eighties, early nineties, you saw everyone play there. And if you were really, really lucky, you saw me naked.

But let me sweeten the pot, because I can sense that some of you are cringing in fear, and I want to make sure we are all here together, feeling the healing.

Joining me, directly to my left, was a certain local fixture of the Houston scene.

Sybil.

Deep breaths. Okay, let's move on.

My consciousness was, uh, lets just say that my consciousness was compromised at the time. I think it helps for you to know that I'm not exactly the drum solo type. I mean, I'll whip one out if you request one, because I have no shame, but guys like Neil Peart would probably run me over on their "ghost bike" rather than sit through one second of my drum solo. And that's if I was fully clothed.

Those were nights of complete and utter mayhem. Things were slightly out of hand at all times, and always totally ridiculous. In fact, this sort of delirious lunacy was roughly par for the way I handled myself at the end of the eighties.

Let's call the above story the "either" story. Let's move on now. Let's move on to the "or."

Throughout my entire life, I have battled with crippling shyness. in fact, when I was a child, it was so bad that I once stood in a t-shirt shop in Celeveland heights, Ohio (Daffy Dan's) for over an hour because I was too shy to ask for help. I spent a summer over at my aunt's place the year my family returned from living in France. She thought it would be a good idea to sign me up for swimming lessons. It was, but there was a small incident. The first time I walked into the Canton, Ohio YMCA, I walked up to the counter, got my locker key, went to the dressing room, tried the key in the locker a billion times to no avail, looked at the key, and then suddenly realized that the guy had given me a key to the ladies locker room. it was the seventies. My hair was really long, and I was a bit girly in appearance. The guy made an honest mistake. I was mortified. I almost left, but since I had nowhere to go, I finally mustered the courage to tell the guy, "I'm not a girl." Pure horror.

And here we are, last year, and I have a show playing solo as The Powers of Light and Darkness, and I am driving to the club, mortified. I am fantasizing about driving home, abandoning the whole thing. The whole time I am at the club I visualize myself at home, comfortable, and it keeps me from actually fucking off and leaving. And this is all from the guy who played a 45 minute drum solo, with Sybil, not giving a shit, buck fucking naked, and best of all, fearless.

That's my "or" story. Admittedly it is one of many, but it will do.

And the third part of these two bits? Where I am now. I am sitting here, plunging away at the keyboard, making no discernable point. Digging in my virtually useless synapses for something of value, but finding only this. Another meandering plunge into the murk of wanting to make a cogent point but always falling quite short.

But this is a blog about music, and all of the writers in here love the stuff. And we don't give a motherfuck what anyone else really thinks when you get right down to it. We just want to share what we feel about things musical. For my part, I have invested much of my life into music. I love playing music, though I am in a virtual retirement. I love listening to music, though I am constantly overwhelmed by how much of it I will never get to enjoy. Ramon, I've known since high school. We've played in many bands together. He is never boring, and always plugged in. He loves to spar over ideas, and he loves to piss people off. I don't think he gives himself enough credit for his guitar playing. I personally have a soft spot for him because he tends to laugh at my jokes (and it isn't because I'm intrinsically funny). Kilian has played in damn near every band I heard about through someone I knew from here or there. His bands were always better than mine, or at least better liked, and when I lived behind Rudz, I jealously watched his bands pack out the place while imagining what it was like to be that adored. Justin was a KTRU (Rice U. radio) fixture forever, and he also was kind enough to hook me up at the Greenway theater. Thanks. Heidi was the KTRU program director, and a begrudging Mike Gunn fan (poor thing). Hell, we even wrote one of our better songs about her. The new dad of the bunch, Mr Anaconda, rocked the universe in Dry Nod, a Houston band par-excellence. He also had the dubious honor of living in the commune I passed through for about a month when my mom and I decided the free ride was over (she did most of the deciding. Okay, she did all of it). We sat up all night once chatting up the members of New York's, Honeymoon Killers. I think the entire house thought I stole all their bikes during a break-in because they all barely knew me. Doug is a guy I know only through the name of his Houston band, Ultra-Hummus. I think I knew he was a Rice guy, too. He shares my love of movies, so for that reason alone I like the guy, but his writing on music is also good stuff.

So are there no implicit either/or realities in the world of music appreciation? It actually doesn't really matter that much. But will that stop us from arguing to the very opposite of this idea? I hope not. I hope we argue like crazy, and draw many more music lovers into this site to join the argument. Hopefully, you will be one of them.

I Led 3 Lives, Nublu

This week’s wanderings included excursions to Nublu in Alphabet City (Manhattan) and Bembe in South Williamsburg (Brooklyn). Both have a single blue light outside their doors to indicate entry. I have not yet ascertained the full set of unwritten rules behind the single blue light coding system, but there must be one. Usually, the single blue light is found on the exterior of an otherwise unilluminated pre-war brick building, inside of which is generally a good bar with great music. Or, sometimes, it’s just a great bar with passable music- the Opium Den in the East Village and the Sapphire Lounge of the Lower East Side fall into the latter category. I enjoy imagining a networked system of bars and nightclubs throughout the city using the blue light as a signal to identify themselves to each other. Those bars/nightclubs not meeting certain standards of excellence would get their bulbs shot out. Such is not the case, yet...

The Brazilian Girls got their start at Nublu as a group of four people just playing together on occasion. They are huge now, at least in the New York scene. Butch Morris conducts the Nublu Orchestra on Mondays. Other randomly significant evolutions in band formations and musical experimentation occur there often. Partner-in-crime Jennie and I happened to be there for “I Led 3 Lives” playing the music of Ilhan Ersahin, Juini Booth, and Jochen Rueckert.

Nublu does not have a stage and the musicians seemed to wander in from the street to start playing just when the crowd energy felt right. DJs from Etherea Records filled in before, between, and after the sets. It appeared as though there were five musicians total, and I would guess they were Ilhan Ersahin on tenor sax and keyboards, Jochen Rueckert on drums & laptop, Juini Booth on double bass, accompanied by someone on guitar and someone else on electric bass and laptop. They didn’t bother to introduce themselves. I don’t know why. It was brilliant. The drummer played circles around the beats coming out of the various laptops. It sounded like the double bassist was doing the same- riffing off of pre-recorded compositions triggered by the laptops. Ersahin alternated between channeling Bernie Worrell and John Gilmore. Must I compare them to other things you might have already heard? (I may add some reference points later, everything I'm coming up with right now seems like an exaggeration).

The name of the project, “I Led 3 Lives,” comes from from an anti-communist series that aired in the 50s. Imdb writes “Philbrick is a Boston advertising executive used by the U.S. government to spy on the Communist Party USA. It was all blatant anti-left propaganda. The scripts were actually reviewed by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and played on the paranoia of the McCarthy era.” We ended the evening with a drink at the KGB Bar.

After witnessing a nice family spat between my mother and sister-in-law- just what one needs to inaugurate the holiday season- my friend Jake and I decided another night out was in order (... am now envisioning a future in which one can package family blowouts and sell them to other families for everone's amusement). My friends and the crowd all enjoyed Bembe very much. Each night of the week, Bembe hosts a different party, usually Latin-related. On Saturdays it’s RHUM which is “Rotating Dj's: Sabo, Moci, Joyride, and Dave Medina spinning you around the globe with Salsa, Reggae, Merengue, Samba, Brazilian music and House-Rhythms accompanied by Live Percussion.” I would like to go back on a Wednesday night before commenting further because I’ve heard that the Convalescence party is really good. Let’s just close this paragraph with the observation that a blaring brass section sometimes doesn’t resonate well with my brain frequencies.

Get over yourself and go see Casino Royale, if you haven’t done so already. I will spend the boring moments of construction site meetings flashing back to that opening chase scene while at work this week.

Thanks, Doug, for switching with me.

known unknowns and unknown knowns

While I have no love lost for Donald Rumsfeld - I think the fucker should be tried for violations of the Geneva Convention, at very least - I do think he got a raw deal for his now-infamous quote about known and unknown unknowns. (Scroll down here if you have no idea what I'm talking about.) If anything, I don't think he went far enough.

I went to see Ratatat and Shaky Hands Monday night. Shaky Hands are a New Zealand group about whom I knew next to nothing other than the fact that they were playing - a known unknown, as it were. Through a fluke in timing, we showed up mere moments before they launched into their set - four people clad in black button-downs and black jeans. (They need to work on getting their shoes matching, however.) A guitarist, bassist, drummer, and vocalist. And, well, they were a fucking blast. I'm a sucker for jittery nervous energetic melodic music, and these guys delivered on all fronts. I'm not convinced their songcraft is fully formed yet, but on a moment-to-moment basis they were never not engaging, and I had a big goofy smile on my face the whole time - the smile of discovery, one of the best pleasures live music can give. Aucklanders be aware: they play again December 8th with So So Modern, a Wellington-based outfit who must own at least one Six Finger Satellite album and held their own opening for Deerhoof in their last Auckland appearance. Is there any way this show could not be essential?

Then there's dancy instrumental duo Ratatat, who I would be wont to describe as an unknown known. I've enjoyed both of their official records as well as their remix record, but their sound, while entertaining, doesn't obviously indicate what a live performance might be like. I knew there'd be two of them, and that the rest would be pre-recorded. But would it work live?

The answer, I suppose, is sort of. There's no doubt that Ratatat tries to maximize the stage impact possible within their format: a guitarist and a bassist playing along to pre-recorded tracks, which I think came off a DVD that they were projecting with various mostly cool synchronized visuals. (Though they never topped the opening song, which used clips from various blaxploitation movies.) In conjunction with a considered light show and smoke machines, plus a PA pushed to the breaking point, you couldn't really fault them for their effort.

But ultimately, I think, live music has to feel like it's living. And for me, maybe by virtue of being a drummer, it's through the drums that that comes through. A little looser drum sound, a little pace in the tempo, a little less precision, a little more passion: these are the things that a drummer can often add in a live setting that makes the music breathe. And with a pre-recorded track, none of this can happen. And it's this that was what kept the show from ever soaring for me, and despite my enjoyment of Ratatat's albums, my smile was never quite as big as it was during Shaky Hands' set.

By the way: Heidi and I have traded, so I'm on Sundays now. Hi!

Monkeys, we are all monkeys!

As I sit here listening to M.Ward’s “Requiem”, I think John’s point earlier this week about the thrill of listening to albums is well taken. The personal one-on-one discussion that you can have with a song is really wonderful and that absorption of detail is something that gets lost in a live performance. Nevertheless, I think there is something that has to be said for seeing a band live.

Going out and listening to live music is not something that is given to you in a nice easy to swallow package. I think all the complaints about live music are all related to inconveniences – smoke, bad music from bad bands, bad sound, money, being tired, and so on. But consider the fact that an LP is an artifact - beautiful and very personal yes, but it’s static. Where is the chance operation? Where is the unpredictability? Where is that fleeting uniqueness of memory? Leave the comforts of your domicile; experience the sloppiness that is life and, amongst all the noise and clutter, go out and converse with your fellow human beings.

Oh fuck it’s that crappy opening band that you tried to avoid! Look - over there - isn’t that that loudmouth asshole who couldn’t shut the fuck up during that Jazz show? Hey did you catch Kevin Jackson at Notsuoh last week? Man they played a killer Klezmer set! They fucking missed notes and got off-time but those guys played with heart. Fists were pounding on the tables to the beat! Fuck perfection! In this smelly bar with its sticky floors and foul smell lies the irresponsibility of arriving to work tired and possibly hungover the next day, the irresponsibility of wasting a good 20 bucks in the door and booze that you should be saving, the irresponsibility of filling your lungs with the ashen colored smoke of crappy cigarettes, and the irresponsibility, that “is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”* You with me? !!

Now, me, I make noise too and I have to say that there's nothing more fun than busting your ass, coordinating a show, making flyers, rehearsing and then (like some bad “Our Gang” episode) put on a "little show" for people. I remember my first show at Commerce Street Warehouse. We were so scared to play that Malcolm McDonald had to tell us – “Hey, you have to play BEFORE people leave.” John Cramer, Mike Gunn, Kyle Phillips, and I played a terrible set I’m sure but where would we be without that first step? I’ll tell you where, we’d be one those people at work who clock into work and bust their ass for a company and die with their resume on as their epitaph. Fuck that!

I mean, look at these Debra Wendell snapped photos below of us in High School; I think this is our third show - Malcolm’s Birthday Party At Chez Imbecile. Malcolm got us to wear some dresses and I distinctly remember butchering “All Tomorrow Parties” My guitar strap is a tie for Christ sake! You can’t be this idiotic in a garage! No, we took the freak show on the road! (Well… down I-45 at least.) We played a show once where we did nothing but flatten a BBQ pit. We played a show where we fell to the floor, fed-back, and laid still as fake blood gushed from some insane Larry Liska engineering marvel for 20 minutes and billed ourselves as The Dead. There was a show where we tried to crucify a drugged-out Brian Firr and a show where we set cooked meat on the grill and when the fire roared at Escondido the bartender jumped over the bar to put out the fire. We did the show where we got so giddy with the fog machine that nobody could see 2 inches from their nose causing the bartender to be pissed because nobody would walk in the bar except for Gibby Haynes. I mean it goes on and on. Fuck last year we did the show where we Bar-B-Qued for people at Sound Ex and I think we’re still $200 in the hole from that endeavor.

Look, strings break, you offend people, you miss notes, hell you even frikkin’ bomb but goddamn that’s the chaotic fun of a live show. Make your noise, commune with your fellow noisemakers, raise a bottle of Shiner to those who came out, and fling your poo like the monkey you are. Playing live is like a baby kicking and screaming vainly; “Look what I made in my diaper! What’s on you epitaph, motherfucker?!”

Lewis & Alfred Black help butcher VU.

A wee John Cramer

Malcolm sings for his birthday

Malcolm and John.
Likely butchering some Stooges song.

Kyle Phillips (with bow) and myself.

Play spot the geek.
Hints: tie guitar-strap, Bauhaus
sticker, & overcoat over dress.

*Pauline Kael "Trash, Art, and the Movies" from Going Steady

Jana and the Kiwis

This week I went to Emo's to see Jana Hunter. I just happened to be looking through their calendar and spotted Jana's name--and how can you not go see Jana? She was fantastic as always, but there were only twenty or so people in the room. If more people knew about this show, there surely wold have been more people there. It's tempting to say that they don't promote themselves because they are painfully shy and the evidence certainly points in that direction. For example, Jana's brother John, who played with her, often looked like he was either in pain or scared. Or both. But, later he told me that he had fallen down into the grass during a particularly raucous game of capture the flag and had spent the last several hours battling an allergic reaction. So maybe he wasn't scared. For her part, Jana told me later that she's really bad at promoting her shows or even telling people that she's going to be in town. I told her she should quit that, because I would really like it if more people knew how great her shows are. And so I'm writing this. Go see Jana. And try to convince her to tell more people when she's playing.

Also on that bill were a couple of Kiwis that call themselves Over the Atlantic. They were two guitarists and a laptop and they were fairly lame. One of them started their backing track and they played along with that. They came all the way from New Zealand to play this stuff? Maybe they were limited in what they could bring, but they should rethink touring if they are going to play such forgettable shows.

I didn't stay for any of the later bands because I am old and cranky and my patience is short.

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Week 4: Shredders

This week's entry goes out to Duke Rattler. And in the spirit of Thanksgiving excess the entry is about shredders. Because I don’t care if you are Caspar Brötzmann or Lee Renaldo or Tony Iommi, the only valid reason to still play an electric guitar in the 21st century is to shred on YouTube. Based on my intensive and thorough research of YouTube shredders, here are the winners of Anaconda’s First Annual Thanksgiving Shredding-on-YouTube competition. And now for the winners:
Looking like you never leave your room gets you lots of points, but these two shredders prove that you can leave your room and shred in public, in front of people, for dozens of screaming teenagers at some color coordination summer camp.

The second place shredder makes a clear statement by having no furniture in his apartment and wearing white tube socks while he shreds. He also got bonus points for being old.
The third place shredder clearly understands the meaning of shredding – speed. Having a Japanese name also got him some bonus points.
Besides giving bonus points for being old or having a Japanese name, we also award bonus points if you have proof that you work at a guitar store - the ultimate shredder job.
And now here's a little advice to shredders looking to place in next year’s competition.
• We have to be able to see your face, or at least that you are covering it with a hat or hair or whatever.
• Don’t try to be ironic or sarcastic about your shredding, being able to shred is the ultimate accomplishment as an electric guitarist, do not apologize for it.
• A shredder’s room is like his record cover, do not try to create atmosphere in your room with lights or any other visual tricks.
• Do not play with background tracks, shredding does not need any backup.
• Finally, do not, under any circumstances, play Eruption (or any Van Halen licks for that matter).

And finally I have to add one special shredder category, the Special Canon Award, for those shredders who specialize on playing JerryC's arrangement of Paco Bell’s Canon in D Major (it’s good to see that this little heard oldie is finally getting some well deserved attention). The winner of the Special Canon Award did not let his Malaysian prison cell confine his soul as it did his body. Fly away little buddy.
And you all have a great Thanksgiving weekend. Excess!

Sing Sing a Song to Last the Holiday

Thanks Miggy who ever you are.


And Thank You Robert Altman for learning us that suicide is painless and other things.

The Conspicuous Absence of Focus

I think it's funny that any musician who has had to put up with the honestly unendurable agonies of playing live in clubs would ever try and claim that live music blows recorded music out of the water. I mean sure, okay, occasionally in theory, and occasionally in practice, this is true, but there is so much more than a simple macho exclamation of superiority behind such a loaded statement. For example, no album will ever get drunk and then hold you up in a corner telling you about the joys of mike-ing 4x10 cabs in a room with egg crate soundproofing, and no CD will even think of playing longer than the one you plan on hearing next, forcing you to have to cut short the one you are actually interested in hearing. You can enjoy your recorded music safe in the knowledge that you won't have to wade through a lake of barbarian piss just to endure through a piss yourself, and you can crank up your headphones comfortably ignoring the fact that your friends may be out at some club, in your absence, getting tasered from some amped up pituitary anomaly of a bull from HPD.

Now, in defense of shows over recordings, I will say that part of the joy in seeing live music comes in the experience of being present at the creation of something. It doesn't even have to matter if that something is totally rehearsed. The point is often just in the being there. But there is nothing to compare to pouring over a CD repeatedly, learning more about it every time you play it. Or playing one for the thousandth time, and suddenly unlocking something about it you never noticed before. Now I will say that I have felt like a fucking king at shows before, and that is something I have rarely felt at home with recordings. Witnessing the coming together of all the elements, and being satisfied in that certain way that only live music can provide is a peerless experience. But so what, there is a more consistent (albeit less dynamic) reliability to recordings, and there are never any fuck-wits yelling at the band because yelling is the only way to draw attention to the fact that nobody will ever willingly fuck them for free. And also I will be the first to admit that the lion's share of my shows I have seen are rock shows. In fact, the memorable factor of shows over recordings goes up dramatically if you begin to only count avant garde/free jazz and other outside my usual realm type of performances. These are usually less loaded down with inbred yokels, openly drunk pedophiles, and cretinous vampires who haven't seen the sun in years. Usually.

The thing is, I for one have generally soured on the whole live show experience. More often than not I find myself wondering why I bothered to leave home in the first place. And when I do, I make sure it's for something I really want to see, like Linus (never boring, usually genius), or other friends like Charalambides. In case you, dear reader, don't know me, it would go a long way to explain that I am a virtual recluse. Yes, I'm functional, well-versed in the realm of small talk, thanks to my parents and their propensity towards dinner parties since as far back as I can remember, but I am most happy alone.

Now there is something to be said for the merits of sound quality within either medium. Live sound is dependent on many tenuous variables. You need a good room, good equipment, a sound man that isn't a retard, musicians that aren't tone deaf, and a whole lot of special something that is impossible to nail down. Recorded music needs most of the same things, and it also needs for you to have a stereo of sufficient quality to enjoy it as those guilty of its creation intended. In order to do so you would really have to eliminate 99.9 % of every stereo in every house you have ever visited. And despite the popular consensus, vinyl slays CD's. In fact, I would venture to guess that most people now have barely even heard vinyl at all.

Me, I'm tone deaf. If I can make out the instruments, I'm good. I grew up, at least in part, with DRI and others of their sort, and it really didn't matter to me if it was played over the phone. The gist was there. I'm cool with CD's. My turntable is in the shitter, and has been for years, and I don't really care because almost all of my good vinyl is long gone with one of my ex-girlfriends anyway.

Let's also throw my age into the pot. I'm 38. Live music is not for me anymore. It's for my 16 year old half brother. Me, I'm slumming. I'm at shows for the music. Fuck the rest. And more often than not, the music is shitty. So I'm continuing to stay home.

So here's the first telling peek into the horrors of my personal life in this blog. I usually save the self-loathing for my MySpace blog, but I'm sure it will bleed deeply into this one as well.

And for those of you who are clever enough to spot it, the answer is yes, I am floundering here today. I'm not sure why, I think it's because I'm exhausted. My apologies.

tripped hopped

I saw Electric Kulintang Tuesday night, which is a collaboration between legendary free jazz drummer Susie Ibarra and Roberto Rodriguez, a heretofore-unknown-to-me drummer and electronician. (Despite the reference to Sean Lennon in the above link, he was a no-show; whether or not he's part of the group or was just involved with the aforementioned performance, I have no idea.) I last saw Ibarra ten years ago in a duo, and her contribution was overpowering, a percussion maelstrom that was somehow organized coherently, like a dangerous weather pattern operating with scientific precision but chaotic fury.

So imagine my disappointment that on the few times Ibarra bothered to sit down behind a drum kit, she didn't even pick up a set of sticks. Mallets and brushes were as far as it got, and even then at the edge of subduedness. Her attention was more often directed towards what I thought was a gamelan but apparently is a kulintang, eight tuned metal bowls of varying shape. She also availed herself to a wooden percussion instrument (varying lengths of resonant wood, somewhat laid out like a dumbed-down marimba) and a keyboard at various points. While Rodriguez spent most of his time behind a laptop, adding percussion on his wooden seat beneath him, the actual high point of the show featured him behind the drum kit with Ibarra taking his seat at the laptop/mixing board. As he laid out a pretty interesting rhythmic exploration behind the kit, Ibarra took his work, looped and processed it, and brought it back into the mix. It was a dense and engaging stew and really fucking impressive.

But overall, it was hard for me to appreciate the self-described "Filipino Trip-Hop", diverting though it was, when thinking about what I'd seen Ibarra do before. This is a woman who is generally considered the best drummer the David S. Ware quartet had to offer, who could hold her own against Ware and Matthew Shipp and William Parker. When the highlight is her sitting behind a laptop ... well, it was sort of like going to see Iron Maiden, only to have them announce that they were doing a "back to basics" tour without any big stage show elements. (True story. I saw them on the NO PRAYER FOR THE DYING tour in 91, I think.)

So what musicians have you seen that, by doing what they love, strayed far afield from what you loved about them?

(Although I haven't done it yet, sound clips of the Kulintang can be downloaded here, as can bits of Ibarra's other projects. Perusing her web page further, it appears that she has several other projects on the hop, so it's not so much that she's forsaken her other work, just that us in New Zealand only got to see this project. But really: when's the next time I'll get to see her in New Zealand?)

I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue

As my friends and I get older we often go in search of musical experiences that do not involve taking drugs/drinking excessively, staying out all night, and jostling with people who have been set loose on New York’s nightlife scene for the first time in their lives. Yesterday afternoon was to provide such an occasion. A friend invited us out to see a piano recital in the West Village and another friend had, coincidentally, heard about it on WNYC and wanted to join us. The setting was intimate and meant to replicate the salons of the 19^th century where poets, musicians, philosophers, physicists etc. could all get together for an evening of enlightened conversation and musical entertainment. Yes, I’m sure we all enjoyed Schubert’s Sonata in C Minor, some of us more than others, but half of our little group of friends didn’t even make it because they were too hungover from staying out until 7am and then going to morning meetings (who hasn’t learned not to schedule a meeting on a Sunday!) and the other half just wanted to see Borat as soon as the performance was over. To our host’s evident dismay, we were seen making cell phone calls immediately afterwards instead of engaging in insightful, thought-provoking discourse. Borat was able to provide a much needed antidote to the earlier period of intense concentration and earnestness.

Another bit of comedy I’d like to recommend to you is The Now Show, which airs weekly on BBC Radio 4. This week there’s a great part about Motörhead sponsoring an under-10 football (soccer) league. I would also suggest that anyone who considers him or herself to be very familiar with English humor challenge themselves with an entire episode of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. Most of it is utterly bewildering to me as an American because I miss half of the references and the rest of it is just ridiculous. This week Jeremy Hardy gave a rendition of the Sex Pistol’s ‘God Save the Queen’ to the tune of ‘Tulips from Amsterdam.’ I must warn you that listening to Radio 4 regularly is a sign of your inevitable aging.

One of my best friends is moving to Cambridge and I’m not happy about it. Anna has been a partner-in-crime for the past five years, without whom I probably never would have gone to Homelands, the Big Chill, the Notting Hill Carneval or seen the Bays perform. Fortunately, flights between New York and London are more reliable and more frequent than either subway or tube service (especially on weekends) and often less expensive than renting a car to drive out of the city.

An elusive memory of a great evening of music - Charalambides, Tara Jane O'Neil, Shane David McMillen at Rudyards 14 Nov 2006

My band, the Linus Pauling Quartet, hardly gets out to see shows. I usually invite the band but they end up making some excuse but this night, to my surprise, we all decided that we would rehearse early and race to Rudyard’s to see the Charalambides “reunion” show. You knew something special was going down as even John Cramer was there but don’t worry, Hell has back-up generators and the furnaces are working overtime to warm its halls back up.

The night opened to my surprise with Shawn David McMillen, who had been erroneously billed as the folkie Shawn Mullins. I actually enjoyed the error as it was a huge kick to see this half of the long gone but not forgotten Ash Castles on the Ghost Coast. Shawn and a fellow musician played a set that was much too brief but thrilling nevertheless. Whereas his brilliant new album Catfish has a lot of aural space, live the sound is notably very dense – sounds are layered upon sounds in a kind of aural pastiche through a seemingly endless arsenal of electronic effects. Much like listening to a church organ in a cathedral, the sounds were as gorgeous as they were massive. If you happen to stop by Austin and see Shawn performing, I guarantee it will be worth your time but for now just pick up his new album.

I hadn’t heard of Tara Jane O’Neil when I came to the show but her’s was an incredible performance. There was an old willow tree that I loved when I grew up and the effortless grace of that tree caught in arms of a soft breeze came to mind when I listened to O’Neil’s guitar. Just listen to her guitar lines on The Poisoned Mine or Blue Light Room on her myspace - simple effortless melodic stuff. The kind of stuff that almost slips by if you don’t stop and listen. The songs and her singing reflected the simple beauty of her guitarwork and made sure as hell that if you needed a beer, it could wait. Her closing number crashed ashore with this amazing crescendo; O’Neil built a hypnotic rhythm, set her guitar delay to loop this simple rhythmic riff, set the guitar down, picked up a toy kick drum, and banged on it with her palm letting it resonate and fill the room as random bursts of emotion would burst out of her mouth. When the music abruptly stopped, the room seemed endlessly empty. That is how you end a show!

Now, just as a side note, I as it turned out I later spoke with O'Neil and asked her about what she'd done previously as John Cramer told me she'd been in some bands. She humbly said "Oh I've played in a million bands." I pushed her to at least name one she said "Ok, um Rodan." Holy shit! I immediately started gushing about how much I loved Rodan and how I still have a single of theirs. Sure enough scrabbling in my 7" pile was the record I'd mentioned (see image) with it's old KTRU markings (I'd given Rodan's song Darjeeling the highest rating possible a check check plus but my review is missing sadly. [No, I didn't steal it; back then we'd bring our own albums in and put them on rotation.] So , I had heard Tara Jane O'Neil before - 14 years ago! Go figure!

Before I go into the Charalambides section here, let me just say that I totally put my foot in my mouth. Now while I’ve kept up somewhat with the solo efforts of Tom and Christina, I was under the impression that the band (now on opposite coasts) hadn’t released anything new until now beyond re-issues. So naturally, with any “reunion” I’m always a bit suspect especially in a case like this where both members have really made stellar solo albums that have expanded on what they brought to the band. So, naturally when I began to express this to Charalambides they were a bit taken aback.

“What are you talking about? We never broke up!” exclaimed Christina.

“I thought you were only occasionally doing a festival and all you were releasing were re-issues.”

Then Tom set me straight; “We’ve released three albums of new material since we moved to opposite coasts. I fly to the east coast and we record.”

Well shit! This is why I can hardly be taken serious as a critic. But to my defense, I can think of two other people here in Houston who were also under the impression that this was the band’s first album in years and one IS a paid music critic. I guess it just goes to show how much is going on out there. But enough about my not being hip (that’s all a-priori anyhow, no?)…

If you love the Charalambides’ new album (A Vintage Burden), you’ll find that they take these simple songs and really expose a raw more improvisational side of the songs when you hear them live. This is to me what albums and live performance should work – as two distinct but unified parts of a whole. The album is sonically gorgeous and exposes the simple beauty of the songs while emphasizing just what a great vocalist Christina is. I will say though that the one part that the album’s engineered precision just cannot deliver is the chaotic swirls that this duo can throw at you with their guitars live. Consider Black Bed Blues from the new album; it closes with a long instrumental passage which is lovely and transcendent. On stage, though, material like this jumps on you with waves of sound pushing against your body as the harmonics build and crash against each other in a way that completely take you and envelops you like a very very bad drug that wont let you go. It’s something that I’ve always loved about this band (so much so that my band ripped this off in one of our singles) and it is something that has to be experienced live. Tom later apologized saying he was having some issues with his pedals on stage but you know I’ll take raw uncalculated emotional power over Pro-Tools precision any day. That unpredictable skittish energy of all the musicians this night is likely what I’ll remember when years from now I search for the elusive memory of a great evening of music.

Links:
More Pictures from this show can be found here on my flickr

Charalmbides:
Wholly Other
Kranky

Tara Jane O'Neil:
www.myspace.com/tjoistarajaneoneil
tarajaneoneil.com/

Shawn David McMillen:
emperorjones.com/mcmillen.html


In other show news:
Another cool show I went to that I don't have time to devote to here was the Sharks and Sailors, My Education, and Traindodge show at Rudyards on the 11th. It was a lot of fun but you can find some pictures I took on my flikr and you can read my pseudo-review of 2/3rds of these bands back in August in here. Basically all you need to know is that I had a blast and that Linus is a class act - we got Melissa a bottle of Googer Grape(!) for her birthday!

Hello Cleveland

This week I indulged my inner eleven year old and saw Joan Jett. She wore leather pants. She had her guitar low-slung. She played all the hits (was “Light of Day” really a hit?) and a peppering of new songs—the formula of the nostalgia act. I have no real complaints, as I pretty much got what I expected there. What I want to talk about, though, is one of the opening bands.

The Eagles of Death Metal apparently got their name when a man argued to singer, Jesse Hughes, that Poison were a death metal band. Hughes apparently replied that Poison were “the Eagles of death metal.” That's the story of the ironic name of an ironic band. There was a Flying-V. The drummer (not Josh Homme as on EoDM albums) predictably used lots of cowbell. Hughes was mustachioed and sported aviator sunglasses. And he walked the stage saying things like: “Are you ready for some rock and roll?” There was so much rock and roll cliché, in fact, that it was hard to pay attention to the music. I persevered, though, and can report that the music was crappy.

The first rule of irony is that you have to be smarter than your subject. For example, if you are an ironic comedian, you have to tell your joke with a wink that implies you don't believe what you're saying. You are saying that you would handle the situation differently. Or at least you are saying “Can you believe this shit?” By extension, playing in an ironic band you have to play the music well. Possibly better than your subject. If not, people might not get the joke. Or worse, they might laugh at you, rather than with you. For example, if you intend to make fun of metal, you should include guitarmonies that are as good as anything that Iron Maiden produces. Or if you want to mock indie rock, you have to wear your pants tighter and your glasses thicker. These are things that the Eagles of Death Metal have to learn or else the listener ends up in an irony spiral.

Are they mocking rock and roll or are they actually trying to be rock and roll? But wait, if they are trying to be rock and roll are they really rock and roll? I mean, if you have to think about it and actually try, is that really rock and roll? I spent at least half an hour in an irony spiral once when I saw the guitarist from Arctic Monkeys hesitate before smashing his guitar on Saturday Night Live. If you have to stop and think about smashing your guitar, you should just not smash it. The point is reckless abandon, not a calculated show. Hesitating made it ironic. Didn't it? It's hard enough to tell where the intent is without making it more difficult. It's just one more step to the hall of mirrors that you get with somebody that lives their whole life ironically. You know this guy—he's the one that wears a mullet. Where does his life end and the life he's mocking begin? It makes my head hurt.

None of this stopped people from enjoying Eagles of Death Metal. In fact, there was a crowd of recent college grads in front of me that sang along with the songs. They didn't seem to have any trouble enjoying it. I didn't see any hint that they were the least bit bothered by all the irony. Maybe I just think too much.

Week 3: everybodyfields

This one is for little baby anaconda (aka Marina Rae), born on November 13, 2006 at 10:31pm, 8lbs, 13oz. The everybodyfields were the soundtrack that welcomed her to the world. Here’s them singing ‘By Your Side.’

I'm gonna go on a little long today in celebration of Marina's birth. So here's TVA , from the first record “halfway there: electricity and the south,” with a bit of a long spoken intro, but wait for it, as this is probably my #1 favorite song of 2004. Sam has one of the most distinctive voices out there right now. And here's So Good to be Home., another song featuring Sam on vocals and with an appropriate video of Sam’s family. And here’s another one of Jill’s songs. This one is Can’t Have It.
These last two are from their second and most recent record “Plague of Dreams.”
Ok, now I’m gonna go look at my baby some more. You should go have a drink to her this weekend.

feenicks

Malachi Ritscher lived in the mid-west and died in Chicago on Friday November 3rd. He was 52 years old. He leaves us over 3,000 hours of audio documentation (largely focused on Chicago jazz groups) as well as the secret ingredients of his original hot sauce recipe. He also, seemingly unintentionally, leaves us a puzzle.

Tubular Hells

Back when my family first moved to Texas, my mom fell prey to the dorktacular spectacle that is the Texas Renaissance Festival. As a result of her retrospectively enormous error in judgment, we were treated to all the thrills that attend one of these silly, silly things. Returning to the present, I have managed to since avoid - with religious fervor - the entire RenFest universe, almost with totality. Until now.

My son spends inordinate amounts of time in his daycare; and aside from the occasional bout with croup, skin rashes, upper respiratory distress, pink eye, bruising, bumps, ant bites, and bacterial stomach expulsions, the only thing we ever bring home from the place are opportunities to spend some time with the parents, and siblings, of fellow daycare inductees. And so it is with great consternation that the brood took the seemingly interminable trek to the great fairgrounds spread across a half trillion acres in an otherwise forgettable though picturesque little town called Plantersville.

I wouldn't even dream of bringing this jaunt into darkness into an overtly music oriented blog were it not for the following story.

As we strolled about, taking in the compellingly absurd surroundings, we happened across something that left all the Captain Hook pirate suits, chain mail speedos, grotesquely overwrought heaving breasts, shitty accents, myopically narcissistic "knights," and 250 pound "fairies" to shame. It was a small stage, seating about a hundred people, that had upon it a device that resembled a piano of sorts. But instead of the giant coffin-y part of the piano, there was a triangular assortment of big bells. And I knew immediately that I was going to watch this. Look, I know promise when I see it. And when the doofus charged with wielding such a mighty instrument - clearly fit for the Gods themselves - sauntered out on to the stage like a gay ninja... it was on like Donkey Kong.

You have to picture this guy's getup. He is wearing an all black leotard type deal (skin tight), and on top of this, he is wearing only one other item: a metal face mask that looks like a throwaway from the Eyes Wide Shut orgy scene. And the music, you ask? Gold. He is uninspired to an epic degree. There is a drum machine backing track which sounds like it was sampled from any eight-bit Super Nintendo game from the eighties, there is a bass track that may quite possibly have been recorded by someone with no hands, and then there are the bells themselves. They have the timbre, the utterly enveloping, tonal dutch-oven quality, of severe flatulence. And to top it all off, the whole thing goes on for way too long, which admittedly is actually anything more than about three minutes. Yet for those bold enough to stand in the midst of this soul-defaming debacle is the crown jewel, the coup de grace. The phantom ninja dorklord steps directly up to the proverbial mike and delivers the mother of all insurmountably hilarious career moves: Tubular Bells.

Yes kids, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. The very same bells of tube that made the Exorcist that much more interesting. These bells are the some ones that so impressed Richard Branson that he simply had to start a label just to handle ingenious shit like this. But in the hands of the tormented ninja dweeb, all has been reduced to the opening melody of Tubular bells played repeatedly, and horribly, with no end in sight. The guy simply can't play at all. He knows one lick, and still manages to fuck it up repeatedly and without apology.

I bring this up because it takes me all the way back to the early seventies, during which my family (pre-divorce) are residing in a suburb of Paris. My dad, who was almost always away on business, drinks himself to sleep every night on Scotches on the rocks that I make for him dutifully and with fascination at him, his music, etc. He would sit in his ultra-modern wire-framed leather chair, sipping Scotch, feet propped on the ottoman, getting lost listening to Mike Oldfield on massive headphones. I actually have rather fond memories of these nights for several reasons. For one, they meant that my dad was at home, and not off somewhere like Iran, or Moscow, or Johannesburg, or where ever else he might happen to be working. It is also one of those memories that denotes the beginning of my love affair with music. I clearly recall trying to figure out what the hell the seventies album covers meant. Covers like Neil Young's On the Beach, Frank Zappa's Apostrophe, Emerson Lake and Palmer's Pictures at an Exhibition, and of course, Tubular Bells all had a profound effect on me. I mean, look at the damn thing. It looks like it should mean something (but probably doesn't). It's just a tubular bell, twisted into a lovely shape, hovering over a beach with a swath of whitewater foam on the bottom of the image - meaningless, but effective. *1

And as for the music of Bells, there is simply nothing like it. It has this odd repeating theme, that cyclically works around itself with constant yet slight variation. Eventually the whole thing begins to show off Oldfield's desire to show the listeners just how many instruments he can bust out at once in one multi-tracked recording. And to make it all even better, he announces each instrument before it is heard.*2 After about approximately fifty hours of this nonsense he reaches the mountain top, the titular tubular bells, and in they rush with orgasmic release in what has to be one of the single most cheesy moments in the history of popular music.

Or at least I thought the cheese title had been won, until I saw this guy:

*1 Thanks to Heidi for pointing out that the Tubular Bells cover is actually pilfered directly from famed Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte's Chateau des Pyrénées. Of course it still makes no sense.

*2 Matt Thurman was kind enough to point out that Viv Stanshall - and not Oldfield - was the doofus you hear announcing the instruments on Bells. Unfortunately for Matt, he also mentioned that he worked as the Fest while in college. In fact, I'll let you in on a little secret. That's him in the first photo of this blog.*3

*3 Just kidding.

berlitz

So it seems from what I've read that the pact is largely aligned on the supremacy of live music over recorded music. Allow me to be the dissenter.

At its best, live music can be better than recorded music. But there are so many variables. Few bands are effortlessly consistent. Few bands can replicate their sound live, even when gifted with a proper soundman, which is far from a probability. (And some of those that do merely provide a mummified version of their work, rather than a living breathing thing.) Few bands are fortunate enough to get the audience they deserve. How many times have you been near-rapture, live, only to be brought down to earth by the people next to you discussing the cute guy in the accounting department? And - truth be told - not all music automatically gains from being performed live. (See: every guy with a laptop, barring Merzbow at All Tomorrow's Parties 2003.)

But then there's another element, and it's you, or in this case, me. And so to say that I didn't enjoy the Animal Collective show this week was not to fault them. I just stood there, waiting to connect to the music, and it never happened. I like their records, to the extent that I've heard them, but there never reached a point, despite their desperate costuming and light show and clear focus, that I was glad I was there instead of on a beach, staring at the sky, and listening to one of their records on headphones. Which, for me, is the ultimate test of a live show - does it improve on listening to the record in an optimal condition?

Every once in a while, though, you do get a live show where you have the reverse experience, where instead of being the only one excluded you get the feeling the show was just for you and that nobody would have appreciated it as much as you, even the you that would have showed up had it been the night before or the night after. Flipping through an issue of GIANT ROBOT this week and finding an article on Sooyoung Park reminded me of his band Seam, who I haven't listened to much for years. But in, I think, the fall of 1993, or perhaps the spring of 1994, I went to see Don Caballero, with Seam, a band I didn't know very well, opening, on a night where I almost didn't leave the house because I was broken-hearted in a way that seems curious and alien in its depths now. But the house I did leave, and I got there for Seam, and then ... I left when Seam was done.

This was irregular for all sorts of reasons - I was a Don Caballero fan, I'd paid to see both bands, it wasn't like I had anything better to do - but it was the complete emotional experience that I needed right then, and I left so that I could retain that experience rather than have it wiped flat with an hour of virtuoso but emotionally empty prog-core. Ironically, I can barely remember the show itself; all I can remember is walking out of Emo's, past the fetid pool and the tattooed patrons, through that flimsy fence, and into the night, not saying goodbye to any of my friends that were there. And I went home - I suspect with a copy of THE PROBLEM WITH ME, for which they were touring at the time - and sort of wallowed, but in that way that makes you feel less alone and is actually emotionally healthy.

I haven't listened to Seam in years, but this memory seemed as good of an excuse as any to break out ARE YOU DRIVING ME CRAZY, the album that followed PROBLEM. I remembered CRAZY as a better, more ambitious but not as consistent album, with one highlight: "Port of Charleston", a song of heartbreak with a perfectly timed combination of words, vocal style, and arrangement: over a break of lightly strummed guitar, Park intones "she's just a skinny little thing, doesn't ...", and then the band explodes in, rendering the next line completely inaudible, receding just in time to hear "doesn't mean what she says". The sort of thing that I emotionally hooked onto the first time I heard the record. (I suspect that they were playing this even on the first show I saw, but again detail is lost.)

So I was pretty surprised to discover: this record is a fucking masterpiece, and one of the best lyrically written albums about the dissolution of relationships ever, with a surgically focused eye on the failures of communication. I don't know if it's intentionally a "concept album" per se, but if you listen to it with that ear, it plays like one. The first song, "Berlitz" (a genius title for a song about the difficulties of talking), has a brilliant lyrical setup:

I've forgotten the words again
But I'm sure and I'm sure and I'm sure
It sounds right but the words come out so wrong
Am I driving you crazy?

Those with memories of greater than one paragraph will remember the album's title, of course, is ARE YOU DRIVING ME CRAZY?, and what I have to assume by the switcheroo is that Park is setting up a protagonist who is so paralyzed in fear and self-doubt that, in the face of being driven crazy by his relationship, he still blames himself for the failings.

I could probably write an essay about every song on this album, but I can't imagine you'd want to read it, although to my 33-year old ears I found all sorts of resonances throughout the album that I couldn't have appreciated a decade ago. Perhaps because you have to have had somebody you once loved threaten to put all your belongings on the street to appreciate "Tuff Luck":

Shake out the sheets
Throw my things out, out the window
I wasn't down with this
I wasn't prepared for you

I mention their lyrics, but Seam was equally notable for their arrangements: I can't think of a putatively straight-ahead indie rock band who, at least on this record, was more concerned with arrangements and dynamics that fit the lyrical matter like a glove. I suppose further verbiage will just obscure the issue, but I encourage you to at least download "Berl