Methodology of a Mix (Heidi substitution edition)

I would apologize for writing another navel-gazing entry, but you're probably pretty used to it by now, so I'll just proceed. :-) In any case, I'm going to discuss the mix tapes I make from time to time, which I also produce on CD and give to friends. Unlike other forms of mixology, such as a "Best of 2007 Mix", or a "Songs to Get Your Groove On", neither of which I am against in any way, incidentally, I use a somewhat different mix methodology, which I shall now explicate.

Basically, I make a new mix when I have noted enough songs that fit certain criteria to fill an 80 minute CD-R, with a couple extra tracks thrown in for the classic 90 minute cassette format. The main criterion for inclusion is that I have fallen in love with the song in the time period since the production of my previous mix. And I mean really fall in love, since the primary function of the mix is for repeated listening in my car, over and over and over again. Each song must be catchy enough for me to dig it in the first place, but must be substantive enough not to become annoying after 500 listens. I know for sure when a song should be included when I get home and just have to listen to a certain song at high volumes for like 20 times in a row, or go to a show and keep hearing that song in my head, wishing I were seeing it played on stage, or wake up and my brain has obviously been humming the song all night long.

Choosing a song becomes a bit more of a judgment call in cases where there's a really cool part that I fall in love with, but some other element to the song that maybe isn't so thrilling, or is perhaps even cheesy. I have become more adept in recent years at appreciating what good I can take from a song rather than letting some less savory aspect poison my view of it entirely, however. The song doesn't need to be a new song, but is usually new to me, although even this generalization has exceptions. Sometimes I have owned an album for years, such as U2's "Boy", and although I appreciated it, I never got to the infatuation stage until a couple years ago, with the song "The Electric Co.". Sometimes I really fall for an album, and so want to include it on a mix, but no one particular song presents itself as the obvious choice. And sometimes the selected song doesn't hold up as well by itself as it did as part of the whole album. And sometimes things aren't as clear as in the ideal situation. I may like a song a great deal, but haven't gone through the infinite-play rotation. Does it make the cut?

Above all, the purity of the selection process must be maintained. No notion of coolness, indie cred, or any similar concept can be permitted to enter into my thinking. Often I will listen to an album and really get into a song, then later find out that the song in question was released as a first single, and perhaps even became popular enough to merit a backlash from the forces of obscurantism. This cannot affect my decision either for or against. And then there are the matters of sequencing, editing, titling, and CD vs. cassette versions, but I've written enough for now. I'll leave you with a few words about the selections on the latest ConorMix(tm), just on the off chance it is of interest to anyone besides myself.

01. Yo La Tengo "Pass The Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind" (I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass, 01)

This is a ten minute guitar jam/rave-up that totally rules. Saw them play this at Pitchfork, but didn't fully appreciate until I got the CD.

02. CSS "Alala" (Cansei De Ser Sexy, 03)

A dance jam by our too-sexy friends from South America. In the few seconds before the bass & keyboards kick in, it could almost be mistaken for some between-song Ultra Hummus rehearsal tape detritus, which I find hilarious.

03. Band of Horses "The Funeral" (Everything All the Time, 04)

Another band I saw at Pitchfork. All tension until the wall of guitars kicks in after a minute or so.

04. Billy Nicholls "Girl from New York" (Would You Believe, 11)

My friend KQ put this on one of his mixes, so I guess I kinda cheated a little, but hey this is an impossibly great little song. Billy Nicholls is a fairly obscure 60's dude you should check out. Great fuzz tone guitar on this one. I love putting this on repeat for about 25 times and trying to play along.

05. Ivy "Point of View" (Realistic, 06)

Warm and fuzzy but melancholic pop, French girl vocals, drifting away repeatedly. Was going to end the mix with this, but it seemed to work better here.

06. 27 Various "Shag" (Fine, 05)

Early 90's Minneapolis band that obviously listened to a My Bloody Valentine album or two. Had a dub of this on an old cassette (side A: Pavement "Slanted & Enchanted", side B: 27 Various "Fine") that I hadn't listened to in years, but randomly found a shrink-wrapped CD in a store up in Portland.

07. Lilys "Knocked on the Fortune Teller's Door" (Everything Wrong is Imaginary, 04)

From another fine album by the Lilys. This track is churning and dreamy, slightly claustrophobic.

08. Sinéad O'Connor "He Prayed" (Throw Down Your Arms, 04)

I got into Sinéad's gone-reggae album, but wasn't sure which song to use. This one perhaps sounds a bit too much like your standard issue reggae song, but even so I think that lends it a certain spareness that allows her vocals give you the chills.

08.5. Massive Attack "Spying Glass" (Protection, 05) [tape version only]

Now I'm wishing I had put this on the CD version too. I love the unusual stuttered vocal phrasing, and the similar techniques utilized in the backing parts. Each miniature explosion of sound creates of ripples of space around it.

09. Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Gold Lion" (Show Your Bones, 01)

One of those bands I was prepared to hate, but just couldn't deny.

10. The Shins "Sea Legs" (Wincing the Night Away, 05)

I had somehow ignored the Shins the past couple years, but have recently changed my ways. They have such great vocal melodies, for one thing. The electronic elements here fuse perfectly into the song.

11. 20 Minute Loop "Jubilation" (Decline of Day, 01)

I had wanted to put this on a mix for a long time, but only had an mp3 of it until recently. This is a well crafted song by a local Bay Area group. Seems like standard pop/rock at first, but something is slightly askew in a wonderful way. There are a couple drum breaks on here that are just perfect.

12. Polyphonic Spree "It's the Sun" (The Beginning Stages Of, 02)

Finally got around to hearing the Spree. This song is just like its lyrics. It feels like going out into the bright sunshine, stretching and seeing blue skies.

13. Eugene Kelly "Bridge from Eden" (Man Alive, 09)

Former Vaselines/Eugenius guy. This album has a few terrible songs, but also some really good ones. This one's kinda melancholic but beautiful. Sort of a classic rock sound on this one.

14. The Dears "Ballad of Humankindness" (Gang of Losers, 10)

This is another thing that sometimes happens with songs for me. I don't think I had ever listened to the Dears before, but heard this song on The Current 89.3 while driving into Minneapolis, and instantly decided it had to be on the next mix.

15. Sonic Youth "The Neutral" (Rather Ripped, 10)

SY's latest album is strong from start to finish. The chords when she sings "it's a perfect sin" are what got me on this one.

16. Deerhoof "Matchbook Seeks Maniac" (Friend Opportunity, 09)

It's amazing, the hoof can do no wrong. My favorite part is at about 2:40, when the song kinda chills out for a second, but you know the drums are just about to come back in, which they do, puncuated by a delicious single snare hit at 2:45 right before the guitar and chorus come crashing back.

17. Kelley Stoltz "Let's Go Out Tonight" (The Sun Comes Through, 04)

This song is just waiting for somebody to put it in a movie or an ad for something. Nice guitar work and cool effected harmonica solo, but the lyrics and the insistent single note bass/piano really make this one.

18. Monade "Becoming" (A Few Steps More, 07)

Laetitia from Stereolab's side project. Two distinct parts, the second of which got me with its dreamy backwards drift sound, floating off into the aether.

18.5. Triangle "The Results" (*, 01) [tape version only]

A bouncy little ditty with nice vocals.

anonymity

I have music files, amongst the many we have ascertained that I have, that have no identity. Merely, for instance, "Track 1". Or "Track 7". Bad tagging plus the Internet = information lost forever. Sometimes, however, the obfuscation and confusion created by bad tagging is more complex.

Several years ago, I wound up downloading a chunk of funk, and one of the tracks was "Undiscovered Break". It was attributed to the group Funk Spectrum II. An odd name, but hey, it's funk. Over the years, this sprightly little piece of funk eventually became a favorite of mine. I love how it not only starts with lively crowd noise but said crowd noise bubbles throughout it, despite it seemingly obviously being a studio track, and I love how it manages to mine a slow tempo while never not promoting ass-shaking. I can't say I'd ever followed funk very closely, but this was definitely a topic for further investigation.

Fast-forward several years, and I'm finally ready to investigate further. (I have many long-term projects like this, lest you think I have a specific block on researching funk.) So I go to order an album by the artist Funk Spectrum II, only to discover, in fact, that "Funk Spectrum II" is not a band at all, but an album title - specifically, a compilation title. (There are also "Funk Spectrum" and "Funk Spectrum III" in the series.)

So I ordered the compilation, in part to discover who "Undiscovered Break" was actually by, only to discover: nobody knows. (At least, not at the time of pressing.) The series was curated by Kenny Dope and Keb Darge, who dug through their only vast stashes of funk to bring obscurities to air, and they felt so highly about this track that it's the lead-off track for the album. But they didn't know who it was by.

(I wish I had the liner notes with me, because then I could be a lot more specific, but here we are.)

All of this makes me wonder. How many of the other files that I have are attributed incorrectly? How many seemingly-straightforward pieces of information hide a complex history? How many forgotten nights will surface 30 years from now, turning up on the optical head-chips of the future as "Track 05", making somebody wonder what people got together in a room some glorious night in 2007, the same way I wonder about "Undiscovered Break"'s legacy?

NAPcast XVI

20 songs for the 200th post.




Click on the podcast link in the right margin of this blog to hear this episode and past episodes, or go here to listen with the embedded player. If you need help, just ask.

Please submit guesses for Kilian's mystery tune in the comments section of this post.

Clues may be provided if the song cannot be guessed.

Oh, and, I say that this is my favorite episode to date in the Intro, but now I don't think it is. My favorite music on this one however, is of course my own selections, but I also liked the HUMAN FEEL, BATTLE and SHARON JONES tracks. This episode almost seems a little creepy. Maybe it's the weather... Maybe it's because I was watching The Devil and Daniel Johnston while I was putting it together.

How about a nice big cup of...

In the Trenches

Man, I'm always amused how people are still pissed about my dissing one band on my old blog. Here it is nearly a year later and I just got this frikkin awesome comment this week:

just curious if you actually know anything about buddhism or hinduism? also people degrade symbols of Jesus Christ all of the time. they where the cross act in ungodly manners as you have here. the truth is that there is a God. He demands our holiness, but we all have failed Him. this includes you sir. there is hope for you in Christ. he can take away that hatred that you have for others. he became sin so that you could be righteous in God's eyes.

i don't understand what is so wrong to you about theatre either. theatre can be more real, truthful, and transcendent than many other forms of art. music doesn't have to just be about the instruments and some guy yelling into the mic with a terrible voice. have you ever been to the opera or ballet?

i hope and pray for the salvation of you soul.

I like to think that the reason I'm still getting shit for that piece is because I didn't just write some snarky piece making fun of the band from a distance; I wrote some snarky piece making fun of the band in the trenches. I earned the right to do this! I actually went to see one of their shows, mocked them from a distance, mocked them to their face, and even got into a verbal tit-for-tat with them at the Rice hotel. In short, I didn't keep a safe distance. That's the way it should be. If you abhor something enough that you are going to mock it, you've got to pay some dues in the process. So let me explain my views on really trashing something.

Phenomenology of that which is worthy of a Dis

There are two categories of items worthy of derision - those you are invested in and those you are not. In the former, to be invested in something, you have to participate in it in some manner; this can mean being a fan or doing an activity yourself. By participating you have expectations that come from hours of time spend doing or enjoying the subject. Here the critique, when you get down to it, will always be less about the subject than your expectations of that subject. Regardless of the tone there is always an underlying layer of support for the subject; you want it to succeed. The critique is simply attempting to put the train back on the tracks.

The latter category, that in which you are not invested, should occur less often because it has to rise above the simply bad or pedestrian. To actually be worthy of being mocked, it has to be a complete antithesis to what you find so utterly compelling about those things you do love. Additionally, you have to be willing to get down in the trenches and experience that which you abhor so much. If we're talking music, that means you have to go see a show and engage the band. Sometimes, as in the one that garnered the call for my salvation, the disjunct is too great to overcome and concludes with both sides thinking the other is, pompous, an asshole and or and idiot. Other times this can lead to a respectful draw as in the case of Lonestar Pornstar where one guy listened to my pointed and mocking critique as to why I couldn't stand them and then replied with something like "Yeah, that's cool. I see where you're coming from but, look, this is just who we are. This is a party band. We're here to have fun, drink, and get laid." That guy was willing to sit there and have a serious discussion about his music, take his lumps, and, with a sense of humor, state his case for his band. That made me rethink the band, give them one last listen, and conclude the music was still awful but at least I couldn't call them stupid, delusional, or hypocrites. That's kind of cool really. The point, again, with both of theses incidents is how I did not keep a safe distance.

ISO 9000 Certified Bitching

A recent article on the Houston Noise Scene brought this to the fore. In the piece, the writer mocks an entire scene without having delved into it. The work of many people and the history of a local phenomenon were reduced to a lazy hacky joke column written by someone in the comfort of their air conditioned office. No messy time spent in a club or a bar. No time listening to bands and grasping what they are trying to do.

I contrast that with a discussion I had with Handstamp's Sara Cress about her dissing a Jandek show in Austin. She hated the show and I suggested that at some point she probably should have just left since it was clear she wasn't digging it. She emphatically said I was wrong; she felt that she had a duty to stick it out in case it did at some point resonate with her. She didn't like the Jandek show at all but she stuck it out, made the investment, and earned her right to express her reaction and opinion about the performance. I thought that was an admirable thing and I think she's got the right approach.

My vow to you is simply this. If I'm going to use space to dis something or someone, it will be something that I give a shit about. If it is something that I'm not invested in, then I have to at least bother to attend one show and confront the subject directly. The reason I'm setting these ground rules for myself is that I don't want to devolve into the lazy hacky writing of the afore mentioned Noise article. This high cost-to-benefit threshold simply makes it harder to spend time trashing something. Instead, I'd rather do the much better work of celebrating and documenting what's around me and you probably should to.

---

Attention NAP Readers
The NAP Book of the Month Club Selection for May 2007:

Excerpt:
"Jimminy Jasper," said Duck. "Who's the Master Blaster?"

---

Movie of the Week

This week Netflix brought me the Townes Van Zandt documentary, Be Here to Love Me. I'm not exactly the Townes superfan that somebody like, say, Steve Earle is (“Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that”*), so it was a difficult watch for me. Van Zandt, it seems, was almost single-mindedly self destructive and while the documentary shows quite a bit of the effects of his bad decisions, it doesn't say much about why he made them. There are mentions that Van Zandt may have been manic depressive. There is the implication that the insulin shock therapy he got early in his life erased some of his long term memory and therefore took away some of his ability to know where he was from, leading to rootlessness and isolation**. If the documentary is to be believed, he did little to battle these problems. Instead, it mostly romanticizes Van Zandt's life as the beautiful loser, the sort of guy who would fall from a fourth story balcony just to see what it felt like.

I've never much liked Van Zandt's performances of his songs. Van Zandt lacked any sort of commitment. He sings his songs with little emotion as if they don't matter and they are just something he's doing to pass the time or collect the paycheck that would allow him to get to the next show. To be fair, I imagine it's difficult to sing the same song for decades and still feel like you can do it any justice. Musicians also have to be actors and Van Zandt just wasn't a very good actor. That's not to say that the songs aren't good. They work pretty well in the hands of other performers. Though his lack of commitment doesn't work for the performance, it seems to work really well for lyrics. That's a trick of poetry. The words don't exactly mean anything, but are just rich enough to allow a listener to impose his own meaning. What they mean to you is probably not what they meant to Van Zandt. But his meaning is irrelevant—the lyrics are interactive; the point is in your meaning.

It's hard to create things from thin air. There are lots of ways to conquer the uncertainty that comes with creating, tricks to convince yourself that what you're creating matters and is worth creating at all. One way is to be born with a huge ego that lets you believe that everything you do matters. I've talked here before about the specialness complex. Van Zandt didn't seem to have such an ego, so he either had to be able to convince himself that it doesn't matter if it matters or at the very least impair his ability to determine if it matters. Guess which one he picked.

*Apparently Townes reacted to this by saying “I've met Bob Dylan and his bodyguards, and I don't think Steve could get anywhere near his coffee table.”

**I was not aware that insulin shock therapy led to memory loss and am unable to find any information suggesting that is the case. There is quite a bit of evidence of memory loss resulting from electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which is more commonly known as electroshock, but that is a very different procedure. Maybe somebody reading this knows more about it than I do.

Week 26: The Midtown Dickens

Also included: the conclusion of the first cycle of The Book of Fables.

To the NAP writers – 26 weeks, half a year, and no one has quit.

The Midtown Dickens are really taking cute to a whole new level. Their new record will be released on 307 Knox Recoirds on May 12 at 305 South in Durham NC. When I was in grade school I knew two brothers, both of whom played sports, but whereas the younger brother had to apply himself to the sport he chose before being able to play it with any noticeable skill, the older brother could pretty much pick up any sport and excel on the first try. The older brother was what I would call a natural. He might not have had the proper methodology, and might at times appear a bit sloppy in his moves, but he got the baskets, the hits, the birdies, and the wins. The Midtown Dickens are natural musicians. Kym Register and Catherine Edgerton can pretty much pick up any instrument and play it with a natural musicality that is endearing. On their myspace page they list their instruments as guitar, drums, trombone, banjo, trumpet, accordion, bass, bottlecaps, uke, fiddle, slide, tinky thing, saw, (bowed) bass, harmonica, skateboard, melodica, piano, and slidewhistle, but I’ve seen them play stuff that is not on that list. I am quite sure they could pull out tunes out of a stone.

The show itself should be full of surprises. Kimya Dawson, of Moldy Peaches fame, is scheduled to make an appearance. But as if that wasn’t enough, the list of guests also includes, from Raleigh, The Bowerbirds and Megafaun; from Chapel Hill, Charles Latham; from New York, The Bicycats and Malcolm Rollick; from the Bay Area, Sarah Vroom, and from Durham, The Ex-Members, The Future Kings of Nowhere, Eberhardt, Beloved Binge, Cantwell Gomez & Jordan and the Wigg Report. However, don’t expect these acts to play in the conventional line-up way where one band plays, breaks down, another one sets up plays, and so on. If previous Midtown Dickens performances are any indication, the show will be a continuous flow of music played by a varying roster of performers using a multitude of instruments. These girls are the real deal, playing music they want to play and having a good time doing it. This is going to be a great show.

Here’s a video of the two of them, two voices, one guitar and handclaps.


And here’s the conclusion of the first cycle of The Book of Fables:
THE FIRST CONCLUSION: THE TRUE MUSIC

We all know what happens when Folk Singers hang out with Record Label Executioners right? Remember? They get eaten. Wait, you say, wasn’t it two A&R Men who ate the Folk Singer? A&R men, Record Label Executives, bad people, greedy people, people out to suck the soul out of the music just to keep their jobs while pretending that they are doing it for the music cause one has to compromise if you want to work as part of a team, and our accountant is a poet too, so he understands, here, have a copy of his new hardcover glossy poetry book, it’s called Sucking the Life Out of Music Because I Ain’t Got No Life Left Since I Am Just a Mummified Corpse. All the same, all one and the same. But also, watch out and don’t be fooled by the fearful ones, the scared people, the scardy cats who are afraid to stand up for music while claiming to only care about music all the while living inside clogged up toilets cause it’s the only way they can play the music they like since nobody understands them because people are idiots, but here’s my record that I just recorded, it’s called Giving This To You Because I Hate You and I Hate Myself for Giving it To You Because I Am Terrified of Mummified Corpses Sucking the Life Out Of My Oh So Special And Important Music. Devils sometimes dress like gods and gods sometimes dresses like devils. So be watchful but not fearful cause either way at the end of the story the Folk Singer gets eaten.

Yes, in this story the Folk Singer gets eaten, again. And the Metalhead sees it, again. And the Band of Brothers hears the Metalhead’s song, again. And the Band of Brothers play the song for the DJ, again. And the DJ, again meets The Teenager and plays her the song the Metalhead played after seeing the Folk Singer, who was her father and would soon be her, get eaten again. And The Teenager hears this song and learns it from the DJ again, and plays it for her new band, again. Wait, is this how it went? Well once again, just when I think that life is just one big spiral of crisscrossing repetitions and that everything has already happened, and everything has been done, I find that sometimes things are a little bit different than they were before, and that it is impossible to repeat the past, it is impossible to repeat the past, it is impossible to repeat the past…

But we must nearly repeat the past, almost repeat it again and again and again before we can get to the True Music of Black Death at the End of Time. Because all the music we currently hear is nothing but an echo of the True Music of Black Death at the End of Time. We hear harmony and disharmony, chords and notes, melodies and noises, but all this that we call music is a fading echo of the True Music of Black Death. We hear this echo and it gives us an intimation of the True Music, and we attempt to reproduce it with our guitars and trombones, our drums and our cellos, our voices, our hands, our feet. And thus we create another echo of that echo until we are surrounded by echoes of echoes of echoes of echoes of echoes on all sides. And we have all these echoes bouncing around and yet we have an incomplete music that promises and appears to fulfill but only with more promises. And we love it for what it is because it echoes our own incompleteness, but it is not the True Music of Black Death.

We remain cut off from the True Music of Black Death at the End of Time, until that moment when all the echoes we’ve made are all at once repeated, the oldest echo combining with the newest echo until suddenly the echoes cancel each other all the way to the very first echo and we will find ourselves in the big void of the final silence. A pause.

And then we hear the True Music of Black Death as it is created when we blink our eyes, when we move our arms, when the leaves fall, when the birds fly, when we choose to leave, when we stay, when we smile or cry, when we walk to the end, when we have a plan, when we improvise, when we listen all around us we will hear the music that we are making for an infinite moment and then it is over.

But first we must go through the cycles. We must once again tell the story of the Folk Singer and the two Record Label Attorneys. But not now. Another time. In another place. Maybe by a bedside. Maybe on a green field full of white sheep while a black sheep looks on from the nearby woods. Maybe. Depends.

Moral: Go play outside before the wolves get you.

For other parts of the Book of Fables click on the label link below.

Sisters of Mercy

Hello. My name is Jonathan. Today I am guest-guest-writing for Kilian; Electramummy is busy refuting the pervasive myth of the sleepy small-town life. (We may be sleepy sometimes, but that's because we're awake so much the rest of the time.)

A word of warning and apology: this is a self-centered and verbose post because at the moment I am self-centered and verbose. The great advice to avoid beginning all sentences with "I"? I heed it not...

RISE UNSHACKLED TO THE DARK SERENE

Yes you, who must leave everything that you cannot control
It begins with your family, but soon it comes round to your soul
Well I've been where you're hanging, I think I can see how you're pinned
When you're not feeling holy your loneliness says that you've sinned

I went to college. Why? In the end, I think I went to college as a way to gently extract myself from the college-going course of life pre-charted for me and most of the people I knew in high school. And I'll cover just the points that make my point here: from a straightforward white-bread midwestern suburban high school of 1200, I moved on to a college of 450 steeped in a beautiful anti-establishment work-study self-contradiction, and (skip forward at least thirteen moves in as many years) I now find myself in a village of perhaps 45 in one of the most remote parts of the United States. And I am preparing to leave.

Why? To go back to school. To learn working-day things. It was a tough decision to leave, and it was a tough decision to leave for working-day things rather than a self-indulgent excuse for two years' worth of immersion into music-making. In the end, I hope I made the right decision: to occupy my conscience with strenuous comfort and save music for myself. It's the only thing that always brings me peace when I ask, so assigning impersonal obligations to it might be an awful idea.

THESE ARE THE RESULTS OF CONSTANT STRUGGLE

This is my escape plan and my love letter to the village and people that have become my home. Somehow, I always seem to leave my deepest loves. And it's always for the same reason: I can't stand not doing them justice. It's a wonderful and worrisome Catch-22.

I've been singing the same song to myself for a long time now. I sing it every chance I get, and that means whenever no one is there to listen.

Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can't go on
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me this song
Oh I hope you run into them, you who've been traveling so long

Yes you, who must leave everything that you cannot control
It begins with your family but soon it comes round to your soul
Well I've been where you're hanging, I think I can see how you're pinned
When you're not feeling holy your loneliness says that you've sinned

Well they lay down beside me - I made my confession to them
They touched both my eyes, and I touched the dew on their hem
If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn
They will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem

When I left, they were sleeping - I hope you run into them soon
Don't turn on the light, you can read their address by the moon
And you won't make me jealous if I hear that they've sweetened your night
We weren't lovers like that, and besides, it would still be alright
We weren't lovers like that, and besides, it would still be alright
Leonard Cohen - "Sisters of Mercy" (Songs of Leonard Cohen)

I will miss many people here. Two (+1) of those people are musicians who have invited me into their home to join in a tiny collective movement unlike any other I have ever tried. I was in a couple of bands in high school, as well as the fairly coherent and highly competitive/ snooty/ mixed-meter marching band. I was in a couple of bands in college. I was part of a producers' collective in San Francisco. But through all of those eventually abortive efforts, I never had the feeling that everyone involved wanted exactly the same thing.

STEADFAST AND MINDFUL

I have that feeling now. Denial is my friend and I will rely on her until she grows and blossoms into Truth; I tell myself that somehow, we can keep this momentum running through the great digital chasm of the Internet, the Post, and if we're lucky add the channel from the extra terrestrial squad. This is the band I always wanted. Even with the interruptions, the prior commitments, and the fits and starts borne on our asynchronous moodiness... it's the band I always wanted. It's where I can express exactly what I want to express.

Wish I had some music to link in here for you all, but we haven't gotten that far yet. Hopefully that will change within the next month. I need to drop anchor before I drift again.

BORBORYGMUS

Many of us reading and writing here are musicians and many of us create our own music (for every definition of "create" and "own" and "music"). I have read many viewpoints on music in these pages. They make me happy. I've also heard some of the music some of you have made - listening the music of people who really mean it always makes me happy.

It is with the spirit of inspiration and community that I challenge you to a duel... trial... quadrille? No. I think we should try an exquisite corpse. With music (rather than paper and pen) the process is both less straightforward and more open to interpretation.

The easiest way is to choose a "seed" piece or person and select a chaining order (by chance?), then pass songs or parts thereof along the chain. Anything can happen at any stage, but you only hear the stage immediately before your own. The format of the passed pieces should depend on what the receiver can handle. Anything from a snippet played a few times into an answering machine to a complete DAW file can work; it's up to you to decide what you need and want. At the end, we gather together the disparate parts and see what we can do - individually or otherwise. Then we share the potentially awful genius of it all!

If you're interested, please let me know in the comments. Variations of the basic collaborative idea are certainly welcome, so please share those too.

Laughing Stock - The Road to Mark Hollis

I came of age in the horrible, tragic nightmare of the eighties. My partner in crime for the most influential of my formative years was none other than the man himself, Mike Gunn. Everyone take out their Awkward White Doofus manuals and flip straight to the High School chapter, in case you are unfamiliar with our particularly pathological fauna. Being like I was back then -- which is to say, painfully shy, gawky, lonely, and bored stupid -- didn’t do much to help my inability to comfortably assimilate into suburban Houston teen life. In fact, on the contrary, Texas holds the dubious honor of being the place in which I found out just how mean kids were capable of being.

I spent five years living in a northwest Houston suburb called Jersey Village before my parents finally made their mutual hatred for one another official, and my mother moved the rest of us way south of town to the Clear Lake area. The school I walked into in the fall of 1983 was also the school for about 3000 other kids, and it was this fact coupled with my personal foibles that made my fitting in a near impossibility. I languished in this setting for a full school year before I really made any friends. My first real friend was a guy named Reese who was a true-to-heart Texas cowboy. He had the whole get-up: the ridiculous accent, big truck, critter he raised for his Future Farmers of America class, affinity for guns, and burgeoning love for the Dead Kennedys and the Sex Pistols. I can only take credit for the last part. He was a really great guy, and for the record, I really wish I could locate him and say hello today.

In the lunchroom, Reese and I would sit around, bored, thinking up ways to be a nuisance to the people around us. Since sitting at a cool-person table was out of the question, we were relegated to the dork quadrant of the lunchroom. To amuse ourselves, we would waste lots of time and lunch money flicking boiled vegetables at those geeks that we found to be beneath us on the totem pole of dorkdom. Of course it’s all relative, since flicking veggies on your peers in eleventh grade isn’t exactly going to thrust you into the arms of popularity.

Our most frequent and most pliant target in the veg toss -- was Mike Gunn.

I guess you should know that all of this happened before Mike and I actually got to know each other. That event came about through the interloping of my friend, Clinton.

Clinton and I were well versed in the joys of excessive beer drinking, but I was hell bent on as much negation as I could get my hands on, and knowing that Clinton was friends with a guy who could take care of this little desire of mine was an attractive prospect. It didn’t matter that I had, just months before, made a practice of flinging boiled carrots into Mike’s own carrot-hued mane. He probably forgot that anyway, I surmised (I was wrong).

Mike’s implement of choice at the time was a tiny green plastic bong, and once we were done smoking it I knew what would become my best friend for the foreseeable future. Dope.

In our cerebral travels, Mike and I visited many states of altered consciousness, all well known to other explorers of the inner world. And as any stoner will tell you, listening to music while being high is about as good as it gets. It was in this frame of mind that I discovered the music of Mark Hollis and his band, Talk Talk.

There were so many good reasons to do drugs with Mike over at his mom’s house. The pot was almost always free. Mike’s mom was notoriously lax in her enforcement of anything vaguely resembling discipline, not to mention the fact that she was almost never home. Mike had a killer stereo and a growing selection of good vinyl. The fridge was always stocked with stoner munchies. The Gunn’s had MTV.

MTV was a great way to burn away your baked hours. In retrospect, watching as many videos for songs we both hated was a real exercise in masochism, but at the time it was more like a slightly annoying diversion. So, nestled among the Bryan Adams, and Phil Collins, and MC Hammer, and Whitney Houston, was Peter Gabriel’s inventive and somewhat trippy videos, and the occasional Camper Van Beethoven, Sonic Youth, or other token hipsters, and that made you feel like things were getting more interesting when they really weren’t.

On top of that, there were the times when you would be watching MTV at like three in the morning, already convinced that aliens were running the earth, and that we were pawns in some sort of extraterrestrial cattle-wrangling ploy. Often during these nights, we would be somewhere in the ether, fried on acid, thinking our way through great circles of sophistic garble, thinking we were approaching the absolute, when all the while we were simply chasing our tails. At these times would come up the artifacts of the eighties that were actually worth a shit, things like the movie, Fandango, or the Coen brother’s first feature, Blood Simple, or Apocalypse Now, or the stray Talk Talk video.

When you have slipped the surly bonds of sanity, and left this world for another, there are often the slightest tendrils that tether you to reality that make the whole adventure one upon which to return to this world with a new understanding. This sort of revelation often comes to me cloaked in the guise of song.

One night, while roasting our synapses – I on one of my improvised piano excursions, and Mike no doubt lost in his dungeon master fantasies – we paused our travels to take a small sojourn into the bowels of MTV. We caught the video for the Talk Talk song Life’s What You Make It. For those who are unfamiliar with Mark Hollis, he has an incredible unique voice, and his music is as good an example as any of the very best in eighties pop. Talk Talk, while still plying the pop trade, was very much catchy, smart, melodic, mature, and slightly more formal than your average new romantic pop band. There is an unforced anthemic quality to Talk Talk that always takes them out of the dated quagmire and into a more timeless space. Life’s What You Make It revolves around a little four or five note melody played on the piano. The video for the song repeatedly shows a hand playing the piano part, and this image is still stuck in my mind these thousand years later. For the rest of that night I was the bitch of this song, which in some undoubtedly perverse way had become my guide through not just the night’s activities, but the untended overgrowth of the eighties. And though it has a certain Dr Phil ring to it, the passage “life’s what you make it. Celebrate it,” is really not a bad way to approach things.

So, several years later all I knew of Talk Talk was their greatest hits CD (buy it). On it was a decent selection of what made them so adept at writing pop songs for their era. In my opinion, it really is unmatched in its quality. Eventually I began to catch snippets of information about a little known “difficult” Talk Talk album that had come out and how no one knew about it but that it was a slice of multi-dimensional genius. I knew I had to hear it, so I eventually hunted it down online. Actually what I got was probably not the one I was looking for. That honor is saved for the album Spirit of Eden (which I have yet to inexplicably hear). What I got was Laughing Stock. Without reviewing it in too much depth I’ll just say that you need to check out the album, it’s beautiful.

I spent a growing amount of time wondering what the story was behind this wildly diverse band, and in particular, I wondered what the story was behind its main creative force, Mark Hollis.

To be honest, there isn’t a ton of pertinent information about Mark Hollis out there. There’s the usual biographical data, but there is little depth to what you can stumble across beyond the basic data. Hollis is someone who falls into my favorite category of artist: the uncompromising, exploratory outsider. Pegged (probably fairly), for his bristling façade, Mark Hollis is really a bit of an English treasure. Even when Talk Talk was at its most accessible peak, Hollis’ individuality and intelligence kept them from ever being another cookie-cutter eighties outfit. If you go back and listen to their output from their relatively brief tenure, you will hear a band that is constantly pushing against the boundaries of rock/pop, and occasionally jazz/ambient to arrive at something truly unique. Starting out, Hollis quickly displayed an adept ear for melody and catchy yet elaborate pop. This gave the band an early measure of financial success. As Talk Talk’s music began to leave the accessible and obvious behind, so did they leave behind their charting ability. This meant that in the depth fearing eighties, Talk Talk was bound to clash with their label, and that’s exactly what happened following the release of their seminal album The Colour of Spring. When Hollis brought his cohorts into the studio to record the follow-up, it took them an unexpectedly long 14 months to complete the project. To make matters worse, the label had no clue what they were about to hear, and in fact fully expected more along the lines of Colour. What they got was Spirit of Eden, an exploratory, heavily instrumental album that abandons the short termed concision of the pop song for the more fertile, but less commercial, fields of experimental rock and jazz-tinged ambient meandering. The controlled orchestrations of the past gave way to a much more organic and fluid sound. As you can imagine, EMI was not amused. In fact, the story goes that once one of the thugs at EMI heard the final mixes he actually cried. The album set in motion a legal battle that effectively ended both the classic line-up of the band and their time with their label. And while Spirit of Eden was widely loved by critics and a new, smaller contingent of fans, sales were poor.

Landing on Polydor after the legal wrangling with EMI, Hollis began work on his next release. By now, Hollis was working almost entirely with guest musicians, and the recordings were, by most accounts, a strange and strained series of events. There were reports of working in total darkness, of never actually seeing Hollis in person, of incredibly difficult demands placed on all involved, and ultimately of a generally high level of peculiarity surrounding Hollis’ behavior. Whatever the circumstances, Laughing Stock is a masterpiece and a creative breakthrough for a man who was soon to completely extricate himself from the public eye.

After the release of Laughing Stock, and following the refusal from Hollis to tour, citing the impossibility of reproducing his dense work in a live setting, Talk Talk finally made it official and called it a day. In 1998, Mark Hollis released his first and only solo album to more critical acclaim and more poor album sales. By now he had cemented his image as the impossible and crazy loner, which no doubt is a mix of truth and exaggeration. If you go back and read the available interviews, you can see for yourself how he is almost painfully, and quite deliberately, removing himself from the world around him. His bandmates tell of great difficulties getting through the idiosyncrasies of his demeanor. I would imagine that he is simply a man who decided that going with the flow was simply no longer an option, and that listening to your inner voice is sometimes the only way to go in order to preserve some measure of sanity in an otherwise totally insane world. What is known about him now is that Hollis lives at home with his wife and children, is a loving father, and is not sad about retreating from the public eye. He still plays and records music at home, but none of it will probably ever see the light of day. Clearly I am drawn to people like this. My best friends share these traits and so do I. And I think that Hollis going out in a blaze of glory is the ultimate “fuck you” to the shallow, vampiric vagaries of popular culture. And while I can certainly relate to his desire to make a quiet exit, as a fan, it is a shame to lose a talent as strong as his.

Picking up on Talk Talk in the way that I did those years back reminds me of the ways in which I tie narrative threads to the screenplay of my life. I have learned to define myself through the perception of that which I find important. While I share the common practice of paying less attention to the undesirable influences on my life, I am also a total whore for the exultation of my heroes (in my own internal, and practically private way). I use the story of guys like Hollis, or Paul Nelson, or Florain Fricke, or John Coltrane, or Werner Herzog, or Jandek, or Tom Carter, or any of a whole endless list of others to help shape where I want myself to be as a person. And while I can’t actually dream of approaching the genius of these people, they serve well as a guidepost in the murk that always lies ahead. As for the forced imposition of your standard fireman, or cop, or priest, father, and typical macho hero types, you can have them all. I’ll just stick with my own personal brand of expressive and highly emotive heroics. Life, after all, has to have some mystery and magic, and god knows there’s sometimes so little of it just lying around.

And for the record, I’m sorry for flicking peas at Mike Gunn.

11 years later...

photo by Scott Friedlander

List of things to do today:
Messenger revised printed drawings to contractor for showroom bid.
Send synagogue/rabbi’s residence/office/dormitory building drawings to printer for copies to go to contractors.
Email photographer to get photo of Human Feel.
Write invoice for showroom.
Pack broken hard drive that has been sitting on my desk for at least a month into box with filled-out service order form and ship to cleanroom in Florida so that read/write heads can be replaced.
Email Giovanni to tell him the clients he recommended to me are screwing up my life.
Tell ex-boyfriend what to offer for an apartment in Brooklyn Heights.
Call mechanical engineer to figure out where his drawings are.
Draw hung ceiling detail.
Write blog entry.
Move columns on rear wall of so that they are not in front of windows.
Explain in meeting to structural engineers why it is not a good idea to place columns in front of operable windows in best deadpan, non-judgemental voice.
Console ex-boyfriend who ‘tooted’ in yoga class while trying to do the splits.
Eat BBQ.

Oi, and this has been the best to-do list in the past two weeks!

Chris Speed (clarinet/ tenor saxophone) gave me a copy of the latest Human Feel cd (to be distributed by Carrot Top, North Country, and directly from the Skirl website) after their performance on Saturday night at the Tea Lounge on Union Street here in Brooklyn. There were at least 150+ people in a packed lounge where they played two blistering sets of their latest and greatest along with the old, reinterpreted. This is the first cd they’ve put out in 11 years and it is beautiful- better than I remembered them. You can listen to a few of their tunes here or to the podcast next week where hopefully they will make it into EM’s mix.

Ok, so what has happened in the intervening 11 years and why are they so great? I know a bit of their personal trials, but not all. What I do know is that they’ve been torn in different directions and it must be great to be able to reconnect and communicate with old friends. I know Jim (drums and percussion) used to run off to beaches in Portugal every chance he got as a respite from all of the touring he does with other bands while also managing to put out a number of records with his band AlasNoAxis. Kurt (guitarist) had been recording for Verve for the past 8 years and lives in Switzerland with wife and two kids. Andrew (bass clarinet/alto saxophone) has turned into a bit of a rock star with a cult following among aspiring young jazz musicians in Park Slope- or so it would have seemed at the Tea Lounge. There was something about a fight between Chris and Andrew but then they somehow ended up becoming next door neighbors, and well, hell, how long can anyone keep being angry at anyone? It takes a lot of energy to stay angry- especially when you can hear the person you’re angry at practice an instrument very similar to your own across an 8’ driveway. Meanwhile, Chris has been busy starting a record label and a number of other groups such as Pachora (with Jim), The Clarinets, and his own bands.

Look for a photo to be posted as soon as the photographer responds to his part of my to-do list. Please note: that’s a smoke machine; Jim is not literally on fire.

iPod roulette April edition

Hi guys,

Well, I had big bright plans for a lengthy feature about Bruce Springsteen this week, involving such disparate threads as covers of his songs, the layers of irony in both himself and his songs, and my musical coming of age and how Bruce fits into it repeatedly.

But then I had a misadventure of colossal proportions today that involved a hike that went horribly awry and me getting home several hours later than planned. (Memo to self: read hike descriptions before going on them. Go on hikes with people with more common sense than you, not alone. Tell people what hike you're going on. Figure out beforehand whether or not the hike will end before or after dark. And if the beginning of the hike seems horribly steep and slippery, don't assume it's magically going to get better.)

So that will have to wait. Instead I'll be incredibly lazy and introduce another feature, which is iPod roulette. Basically, hit shuffle and write about what comes up until you're sick of it. (The music group that I did it on would do ten, but after my hot bath I don't think I'll make it past five.)

1. At The Drive-In, "Ursa Minor" (from VAYA) - I like IN/CASINO/OUT a shitload, and a couple bits of RELATIONSHIP OF COMMAND, but I've never quite dug the rest of their discography. As far as I know, I've never heard this song before, which over-relies on its stereo mixing of the guitars and under-relies on making its verse rocking. There is a rocking chorus, but it's brief. In conclusion, it's no "Invalid Litter Dept." or "Pickpocket".

2. Robyn Hitchcock, "Maria Lyn" (from LUXOR) - not sure how I wound up with this album (probably Conor's doing) or what it represents in Hitchcock's discography (I think it's somewhere in the early 2000's) or what it has to do with the rather astonishing Luxor casino (if anything). Anyway, this song, which again I think I'm hearing for the first time, is sort of Hitchcock beige, which is to say that it has a pleasant Hitchcock vibe but doesn't particularly distinguish itself out of the rest of his song catalog. I do like the guitar/harmonica instrumentation.

3. Rilo Kiley, "Variations on a Theme (Science and Romance)" (from TAKE OFFS AND LANDINGS) - what the fuck is this? This is terrible. 37 seconds of a synth demo. I assume I have this whole album on here and this is the bonus track or some shit, but I don't trust any band that would put this anywhere near their album. Suck. Pass.

4. Immortal Technique, "Battle vs. Flow" (from PORTABLE IMMORTAL) - 28 seconds of live dissing from this hip-hoppity guy that my friend Alastair hipped me to. Too insubstantial to stand on its own. Although there is a funny bit about how the only projects the recipient of the dissing had seen were in high school science class.

5. The Rapture, "Heaven" (from ECHOES) - definitely the standout from this album and their discography thus far as far as I'm concerned. If all dance punk was this unfussy sounding (not talking about the vocal breaks here, which are admittedly quite polished, but the instrumental chunks, which are sloppy noisy fun and jagged) it would be my favorite genre ever, instead of having worn out its welcome in my life.

6. Billie Holiday, "Summertime" - I LOVE the trumpet playing in the intro to this, down and dirty and messy. What can you say otherwise, really? There's a reason her music has endured when so little from her era has. I am noticing her scansion is a bit aggressively on the beat near the end of the song, which is slightly offputting. Like anybody cares.

7. Dirty Three, "Flutter" (from CINDER) - The Dirty Three put out so many good records, it's easy to overlook one here or there, and I never spent the quality time with CINDER when I got it that I should have. (A recurring problem I have, apparently, but I digress.) Anyway, this is a particularly fantastic track, there must be some effects pedal looping the shimmering strings sound at the start which combined with the percussion assault is evocative in a distinct way from a lot of their other tracks.

Okay, that's me.

NAPcast XV

Click on the podcast link in the right margin of this blog to hear this episode and past episodes, or go here to listen with the embedded player. If you need help, just ask.

Please submit guesses for John Cramer's mystery tune in the comments section of this post.

Clues may be provided if the song cannot be guessed.

Album Reviews - Jana Hunter, Tambersauro, Gong, Moving Sidewalks, Claque, The Bent Mustache

Jana Hunter - There is No Home -
Gnomonsong
Rating



I’m going to say something quite sacrilegious and I will likely be hung for it. Ready? I wanted to like Jana Hunter’s “Blank Unstaring Heirs of Doom” more than I did. A large part of this was the limits of home recording containing the unlimited talent of Hunter – as a whole, the album simply felt too boxed in.

This time Jana Hunter left the 4-track behind, walked into Chris Ryan’s studio*, and left with an album that does her vast talent justice. From the first plucked notes of Palms you immediately note the organic feel of this album. The vocals, instrumentation, and production are so crisp and clean that it’s easy to close your eyes and feel yourself is the same room, then when Matt Brownlie’s piano lays you down on a soft pillow of a vocal chorus you really appreciate how acoustic space and understatement can be beautiful and powerful. Take the slow arc of Pinnacle on side 2. John Adams’ drums roll like thunder over valley as Hunter’s voice and guitars huddle underneath. Its strength lies in its deceptively simple arrangement and execution. Take the intoxication performance on Oracle. I love the drum accents and the point where the melody jumps to the octave. Both those little touches are implied in the parts preceding so when the band hits them, you feel this gratitude for the band; thank you.

That’s the kick of this album; Hunter benefits from having members of Bring Back the Guns, Fatal Flying Guilloteens, Innoculist, and the Jonx in the studio with her because it opens up her music in ways that her last album couldn’t quite pull off and it’s not done in a manner that is pushy or overt but simply comfortable and confident. That’s not simply because the musicians are great but also because you get to hear that give-and-take between Hunter and those musicians. It may sound odd to consider a static object to be conversational and dynamic but trust me; inside these grooves is a beautiful dialogue - a conversation that you love listening-in on and can’t help but be wrapped-up in. That my friend is what all music strives to be.

*See Danny's correction in the comments.

Links:
Gnomonsong - Jana Hunter
Jana Hunter on Myspace




Tambersauro - One Picture Frame and One Half of a Picture
Rating



I have to love an EP where the first my first reaction is to belt out with a hearty laugh. Not a derisive mocking laugh but one of sheer surprise and giggly amusement. Now look, I grew up with a lot of admittedly cheesy Prog Rock so maybe I have a bias towards left field patchwork songs with shameless timing changes and crazy dynamics. If you hate that stuff, you may as well move along. Personally, when done well, I love it.

The EP side is one song that starts with this quiet drone then bursts into this crazy Rush fucking King Crimson while Rick Wakeman looks on thing. Hell let's kick in some Minutemen vibe right afterwards, then lets get a little Slint vibe, and then… well you get the idea. I’m not suggesting that they are just doing a mash up of styles or are simply emulating these artists but that these guys have clearly absorbed a lot of music resulting in some crazy ideas and all that stored up potential energy just exploded into an EP of unrestrained kinetic energy. Is it cheap to say that this EP is fun? Well, it is fun. And fuck if I’m not pissed that there isn’t more than just one side. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go clean up. That stuff on the walls is my brains that just exploded.

There’s another side to this two-band 10” split EP but it’s kind of dull, so I’ll skip it.

Links
Tambersauro on Myspace
Esotype Records



Gong – Magick Brother – BYG/Charley
Rating



This caught my eye the other day at Sound Exchange as I normally associate BYG Records with Jazz. What I got was a lovely introduction the Daevid Allen’s absurdist world of Gong - psychedelia for those who love for sounds and love having their brain tickled.

Curiously this is a product of visa problems that would not allow Daevid Allen (an Australian) to return to England from France with his fellow Soft Machine bandmates. Allen therefore remained behind (with the Scottish poet Gilly Smyth) and began playing dates. A band eventually began to form and in 1969 Jean Karakos of BYG advanced Allen money for three albums without a contract. Karakos got his money’s worth with this the first release - a psychedelic classic and clearly the first Gong album. *

The album is filled with freak-out soundscapes that are a headphone listener’s wet dream mixed with cheery and infectious songs. You get the vibe that everyone is having a blast putting this stuff together. Take gorgeous melodies add brilliant production, arrangements, performances and Smyth’s lyrics and you have a heady mix you can’t help but pick up and gulp down. In fact, my one complaint is that the lack of lyrics in the otherwise great packaging are a real travesty. Smyth’s lyrics have enough of a mix of the concrete and the absurd as to leave the listener wanting to understand clearly what is being said. Take the lovely Pretty Miss Titty with it’s rousing chorus of “Big Bad Businessman have you any ???” Any what? Arrg, clearly there’s juxtaposition of the chainstore worker and the businessman but it’s frustrating figuring out small parts like this. Ultimately, it hardly matters as it’s such clever music. The same goes for Gong Song where Allen explains his meeting Mr. Pothead Pixie – an alien from the planet Gong. I can’t follow the lyrics but it’s horribly endearing as a whole. Yes, that’s right, I didn’t make that up, Mr. Pothead Pixie from the planet Gong. If you have problems with that you gotta loosen up, roll a fatty, and leave your hipster shoes at the door. Until then we’ll be waiting for you on Planet Gong.

Gong on Myspace
Planet Gong

*originally released as Daevid & Gilly in 1970. Oh that biographical paragraph, by the way, this is all cribbed from the liner notes by (I believe) Fred the Fish and Sir Jon "Mojo" Mills.


The Moving Sidewalks – Flash – Akarma
Rating



Here is another one of those weird 60s albums from my youth that I recently bought to see if it holds up. At first, I was a bit disappointed but clearly my Toyota simply couldn't handle the insane stereo separation of this album – this is best listened to with a pair of headphones. The good news is that the album holds up though not as great as it did at age 15. The biggest problem lay in any songs with Hendrix influences. Take Pluto – Sept.31st where Gibbon’s lyrics are simply awful and the vocals, which ape Hendrix’s delivery, don’t help. It’s simply too derivative which is a shame as the break with the backwards guitars and other psychedelic silliness are really great and throughout the song Gibbon’s guitars are brilliant. Lastly any ballads – no. Gibbon’s isn’t a crooner and the limits of his voice are apparent in songs like No Good to Cry.

But enough about the faults of the album, there are some gems that justify the album beyond simply a Pre-ZZ Top curio. The opener, Flashback, is bouncy 60s garage fun and one of the most inspired moments is Eclipse which a classic studio wank-o-rama. The song has hilarious background vocals over this amazing groove then degenerates into this craziness that simply has to be heard to be appreciated.

The bonus material is worth the price tag alone and the most fun. The classic 99th Floor with its distorted organ and driving 60s beat is a classic of the era. Here Gibbons’ doubled vocals are great and his guitars (no fuzzbox just an overdriven tube amp sound) are just a whole lot of fun. Their version of the Beatles' I Want to Hold Your Hand is simply unbelievable. When you hear the grungy performance you can feel a slight bit of the Texas insanity associated with later day bands like the Butthole Surfers. Need Me is also great fun garage stuff; you can almost see Gibbons swinging on a cable from the Hobby Center (as one hippy used to recount to me at Half Price Books). Really, this bonus material is the best part of this CD reissue because it’s just jump up and down 60s garage pop fun at it’s best.

The Moving Sidewalks on Myspace
Akarma Records

Claque – S/T – Big Deal Records
Rating



For fans of The Ex, Dog Faced Hermans, and The Donkey here is another album of angular riffs, spot-on time changes, and lyrics that are more shouted than sung, over guitars, violin, and drums. It’s great stuff. Those of you familiar with this community of musicians from the Netherlands will know what to expect. Lisa Fannen’s vocals and violin are crisp, sharp, and grab you by the throat as the guitars and drums chisel away. Definitely a nice addition to your Netherlands Anarco-Punk collection.



The Bent Mustache - Forst – Transformed Dreams
Rating

The Netherlands' Bent Mustache follows Claque’s love of the angular and precise but with a more melodic bent and a hilarious and often biting wit. For example, in Can the Man the lyrics come at rapid fire indignant monologue: “Your mindset is half hippy/ You are half middle-class/ Eating your designer organic sandwich / while looking at a clear catalog / You are the worst members of the old empire / eagerly awaiting another clash of cultures on the telly...” But it’s not all just aggressive in-your-face rhythm and noise. The Deadroom is downright shoegazer turf with it’s cascading guitars echo encased vocals, Tigers are Milking is fun and trippy synth-wanking, while On Leaving the World Tonight sounds like you heard it at 80’s dance floor. This album is proof that all those Anarchist Punks from the Netherlands can throw a party with the best of them.

The Bent Mustache
The Bent Mustache on Myspace
Transformed Dreams

Rating System

David Thomas (Pere Ubu): So good my head is going to explode!



Dave Thomas (Wendy's): Pretty tasty.



Dave Thomas (SCTV): Oh My fucking God! What happened to these guys!
*Reserved for bands that at one time were great.



Celine Dion: Hey, more power to the artist and the fans but leave us out of it.



Nickelback Dude: So bad that I'm only reserving it for the worst of the worst; I mean, come on, we're talking sucking worse than Celine Dion.

Woo. Top.

It was another weekend of nostalgia acts for me. On Friday, I went to see Sebadoh play in Houston; see Ramon's post for more details. Then on Saturday, I rushed back to Austin so that I could see ZZ Top. Yeah, that's right: ZZ Top. You got a problem with that?

If you're keeping score, I have seen both Joan Jett and ZZ Top in the last six months. And I don't think I ever mentioned that I also saw Thomas Dolby. So there you have it, somehow I went into an 80s timewarp when I moved Austin. And yes, I do have plans to see The Police in a couple months, thank you very much.

So, yeah, anyway back to ZZ Top. There was a time—well before I ever heard ZZ Top—that they made some pretty cool music. Sure, it was mostly limited to boogie blues, but as that stuff goes, Top was the top. And I guess they still are. I can't imagine liking anybody else playing that style of music—and believe you me there is plenty of it here in Austin—but I still quietly hum “La Grange” to myself every time I drive past the actual La Grange (which is often in the last few weeks). I understand they got a lot of nice girls out there.

Like most people my age, my introduction to ZZ Top was via MTV. Well, sort of. I had heard some the earlier stuff on classic rock radio occasionally before that, but since that wasn't current music, it didn't have a lot of resonance with me. ZZ Top may as well have been Steely Dan. Steely Dan never did MTV* so there was little chance that I would be able to think of them the same way that I thought about, say, Prince. The 80s were all about style over substance. It didn't matter so much what the music sounded like, so long as the people making it (or not making it) looked good. Nobody would ever accuse ZZ Top of being beautiful, but somehow with the beards, the cars, and the girls they made themselves into an MTV friendly package. And just like everybody else on MTV their music became dull and formulaic. I suppose that worked out well for them, though, as it's not likely that they would be playing to sellout crowds today had they never recorded Eliminator.

And how were they live? Well, they were the kitschy cartoon characters that you imagine they are. They still have the beards and the synchronized guitar moves. Billy is still wearing that strange hat that he took to wearing sometime in the 90s—the one that makes it look like he's got a short set of dreadlocks, very likely the only thing close to hair up there. Billy and Dusty have taken to wearing rhinestones on their Nudie suits. Frank looks bored and plays like it. Dusty doesn't sing so well anymore. Despite all that, they played hit after hit for a good hour and a half. Most bands are lucky to fill a set of 45 minutes with that much solid material.

Don't get me started on the audience. There is probably nothing sadder than a sea of lumpy middle aged white people all holding up their beers and cheering about looking for some tush. It seemed as though the whole audience was trying to prove that they've still got it. Woo!**

Here's the thing, though: ZZ Top seem to really enjoy playing. Somehow after playing together continuously for longer than I've been alive, they are still good friends. This is no small feat. I start hating all the members of the bands I'm in after a couple weeks, so for them to be chummy after 35 years, well you have to respect that, don't you?

*Donald Fagen did have that video with the fallout shelters for "New Frontier," but I had no idea who Donald Fagen was until much later. Come to think of it, it's possible I didn't know who Steely Dan was until much later, either.
**Also, the venue had the worst parking situation I think I've ever encountered. Who thought diverting hundreds of cars down a narrow, winding dirt road to an unpaved lot was a good way to handle parking?

Week 25: Julieta Venegas

Also included: Part 9 of The Book of Fables.

To the NAP writers – 25 weeks, a quarter of a century if centuries were counted in weeks, and no one has quit.



The right vocal delivery can be sweet nectar for the soul. Add an accordion and you really have something special. Remember when you fell in love? The first time you felt that innocent tug? Like the first time I listened to Astrud Gilberto. The first time I heard Diana Ross. One soft tender voice, one sweet melody. And I think of my daughter and the music that awaits her. And I smile.

[Ms. Venegas has been performing and writing since the early 90s when she lived in Tijuana. Besides the accordion, Ms. Venegas sometimes plays the piano or the guitar. Here she is doing a rare solo performance on the piano of her song ‘Me Voy’ - "I’m going, too bad, but goodbye.” - my translation]


And here’s part 9 of The Book of Fables:
THE MOUNTAIN MARCHING BAND

Many years ago, in my younger days, I was on a 24-hour train ride through the Largest Canyon, not as deep as the Deepest Canyon, but much much larger. It was not a comfortable train ride; we were pressed so close together that I could practically feel the pulse of those standing halfway across the cabin. But after a few hours of pain and suffering, the body and mind adjust and one forgets about the back pain, the numb legs, the smelly sweat, the thick air, and the very long train ride ahead. One forgets about the discomfort of it all, and friendly conversations suddenly spring up all around, card games break out, and one starts to hear music. I started to hear music. Clear as day I could hear a song. And suddenly that is all I could hear. The lull of a hundred conversations, the excited yells of card players, the playful screams of children using the luggage racks as monkey bars, the squeals of the train wheels against the tracks, all disappeared and I could hear the song as if it was the only sound in the cabin. And then I saw her. In the midst of all that crowded chaos, The Teenager was sitting comfortably at the other end of the cabin playing her guitar as if she was on the dunes of a wide open desert. And through some trick of the acoustics I could hear her song as if she was whispering it right in my ear, almost like it was playing right inside my head. At that point we made eye contact and before I could smile, we were standing alone, leaning against the back rail of the caboose looking up at the stars while the earth sped away a few feet below us, and her song reverberated through the walls of the canyon.

We did not speak the same language, but when the train stopped at the very center of the Largest Canyon, we both got off the train together and holding hands we walked past the little station (the only building for miles around) and headed right into the woods. Like long time friends we set up camp, started a fire, and played songs for each other on the guitar until we fell asleep. When we woke up I realized that there wouldn’t be another train for a week and we were in the middle of the Largest Canyon, and our canteens were empty. So we walked to the nearby station to fill them up, but the attendant said that since it was the draught season, there was only water every third day for two hours and we had just missed it. If we wanted water we would have to walk to the well in the woods and fill up our canteens there.

He gave us directions and we headed into the woods to find the well, and as we walked The Teenager told me her story, but I didn’t’ speak her language, so I didn’t understand the story until years later, until now that I am an old man. And her story is this that I have been telling you. She knew the beginning of it and she knew the end of it, even though the end hadn’t happened when we met. And so it is that it is only now that I’m telling her story, many years after she told it to me, and as my memory slowly fails me. But back then as I was happily listening to a story I didn’t understand, we lost the trail and were lost and without water in the woods of the Largest Canyon.

We had lost the trail and were wandering thirsty and aimlessly among the yellow, sun-dried vegetation, starting to feel the heat of the late-morning sun. We were surrounded by dry trees, the occasional chirping of a lonely bird, and the blazing sun hanging in the sky like a wrecking ball waiting to knock down our hopes. A feeling unlike any other suddenly came over me. Like the calm before a storm, I had a prelude to panic. I felt that the world had come to a halt; time stood still and the magnificence of nature towered around us like a Van Gogh painting; the sun, the sky, the trees, The Teenager, all became a series of brushstrokes on a giant canvas. And sweet life rushed through me, a refreshing iced tea of colors and sounds, and I felt the majestic canyon cradle me in its hills, and the wind whispered in my ear the answer to the riddle of life. And in the distance a dog was barking.

A dog was barking and suddenly time was rushing forward again and the panic set in. Without water we would die; if we died here no one would find us; my mom would never stop worrying. Then the dog barked again. The Teenager said grabed my hand and led me towards the barking dog and we found a man cutting wood in a clearing while his three dogs kept guard around the periphery. All three dogs barked at us as we approached and the man called them back. Hello, I said hoping he could understand. Hello, he said back and we sighed with relief.

Soon we were following him and his dogs in a straight line towards the well, over several wooded hills. And just when I was starting to feel my throat choking around the dryness, we heard the music of a thousand instruments playing all at once. We had reached the top of the last hill and were overlooking a dry riverbed filled with thousands of musicians in the process of tuning up. We had run into the Mountain Marching Band.

The Mountain Marching Band appeared like a giant rectangular mandala stretched over the riverbed. At the front end was the Field Commander, his baton towering high above everyone else, while lieutenants could be seen scattered through the mass of musicians, batons also held high. At the center of the formation the drumline glittered under the afternoon sun as additional snares and bass drum sections radiated like sunbeams out towards the edges of the formation. Meanwhile, the brass and woodwinds were divided into many small sections creating a type of checkered pattern in juxtaposition to the sun-like shape of the drumline. This basic formation was peppered throughout with sections of less traditional instruments such as glockenspiels, flugelhorns, and other instruments that I had never seen before. The imposing sight was further enhanced by the many colors of the many different marching band uniforms worn by the musicians. But the view was nothing compared to the sound made by the Mountain Marching Band as it finished tuning up and began to play.

Like a giant slowly rising, the Field Commander began to mark a very slow tempo with his baton. The Lieutenants immediately picked it up, then the hundreds of drums began to play a slow and steady marching rhythm. Then the rest of the band started to play a repetitive dirge that echoed throughout the hills of the canyon. After several minutes of this, the whole band began to slowly move down the riverbed, and the Field Commander began to carefully increase the tempo. Sections of brass then began to introduce melodies which were then echoed by other sections elsewhere in the band. The Field Commander continued to increase the tempo until it reached a parade marching speed. By this time, the various sections of instruments were engaged in a call and response type of arrangement that steadily built upon the harmonics of the various melodies being played by the individual sections. The power of the slightly out of phase harmonics, compounded with those created by their echoes as they bounced throughout the canyon walls, built a sound that was almost unbearable in its magnitude and depth. And just when I thought it would burst my eardrums, the music reached a peak and the now thousands of melodies being played at once exploded into a plateau of sound that seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. At this point I looked next to me at The Teenager and the man with the dogs and passed out.

When I woke up the moon was high up in the sky and I was down on the dry riverbed next to a well. There were fires lit all around as far as I could see, and members of the Mountain Marching Band were joyfully eating, drinking and singing all over the place. The Teenager was sitting near me avidly talking with a man that seemed to be older than time itself. The man with the dogs had just pulled out a fresh bucket of water from the well and handed me a cup. It was the sweetest water I’ve ever tasted, and I fell back asleep.

The next day I woke up to various sections of the Mountain Marching Band standing around the riverbed practicing different tunes. The Teenager saw me and came over to say goodbye; she was heading out. She had spent the night talking to The Critic and she had played him her song. He had not liked it, but he had helped her understand it. She realized now that not only had she written the song, but that the song was about the death of her father, The Folk Singer, who had been murdered by a couple of record label executioners. That was the moment when The Teenager landed from her eternal jump out of childhood, and became a grown-up, and whether she wanted it or not, took her father’s place in the world as The Folk Singer. And she set out to find the two men who had murdered her father.

Moral: All teenagers, even eternal ones, eventually grow up.

For other parts of the Book of Fables click on the label link below.