Movin' on up.

Proud to announce that my BLOG has been pre-empted by my MOG. Here's the new link:

http://www.mog.com/Spencer_Owen's_Maracatu_Atomico - the new location of MARACATU ATOMICO

Not as easy to type in, but bookmark it. Or, if you do not have your bookmarks, go to www.mog.com, where either you can find me on the front page (for an indefinite period of time) or you can search for me.

Or, come here and click on that link. Or this one. Don't need to click both. Same thing.

It's over! Y'all stop comin' here! Start goin' there!

A review.

E.T.R. (Electric 3rd R-Word) has received its first review. It is a modest three-stars-out-of-five response. He's right on about two of those influences.

Spencer Owen,"E.T.R. (Electric 3rd R-Word)" (Ballbearings Pinatas)
Trippy, mellow pop songs recorded in Owen’s apartment over a three month period in the fall of 2005. The combination of a cheesy organ synthesizer and a melodica gives these songs an almost dreamlike quality at times. As far as influences go I would have to guess that there’s a bit of McCartney, Moby, Elvis Costello and maybe a little Pink Floyd as well. If these are not his influences they’re what I hear when I listen to him for whatever that may be worth. For fans of mellow pop songs.
- J.R. Oliver

You can also find brief reviews of Lover Boy by Ariel Pink and from u.s. to i, the bbp compilation featuring AP, Goodbye the Band, and the rest of the bbp army including myself.

Thanks for listening to my record, J.R.! E.T.R. may yet be reviewed again somewhere else someday.

I'M PLAYING

Mama Buzz, 7 PM, with P.A.F., Leyna Noel and Hardy Harr. Show is "donation" show. I'm playing guitar+singing. C'mon. 2318 Telegraph. C'mon.

I don't post here because new music is not exciting me lately, and all other music has been comfort (South African township jive/Brazil/etc.). Just bought new Tom Ze album, haven't heard it yet, will see how it goes.

See Long Gone Daddy!

Kalen Egan's Blue Saddle Pictures has a podcastin' website where you can watch his films. Available on the site now is The Word of a Salesman, a 17-minute dramatic short shot on B&W 16mm, and part one (plus a trailer for the suite) of the DV-feature-turned-episodic-opus Long Gone Daddy. Parts two through five will be coming soon. The best part? (Or, rather, the relevant part?) I scored them!

Long Gone Daddy is the first and so far only feature that I've scored, and I'm proud of it. It's an enjoyable picture; it has a myriad of charms, and there's good dialogue and it's well-acted all around, and also, not boring. I truly had a blast working on the music, an exercise in thematic poignancy and nuanced playing. (You can download the soundtrack, if you're jonesin' for it after [or even before] all five parts of the film have been bro-- er... podcasted... at archive.org-- search for Spencer Owen. It makes for a pretty good album, too.)

This isn't to discount The Word of a Salesman, of course-- I did significantly less work for this one, but it's a noticeably finer and sharper film, and it represents an evolution in Mr. Egan's work as a writer/director/cinemateur.

What do you say? Ring in the new year the Long Gone Daddy way!

A realization!

Reading the liner notes of Clive Davis's compilation from the late '80s, Homeland: A Collection of Black South African Music, I discovered something I didn't know about apartheid-era South Africa. Hence the name, many black Africans were sort of herded into reservations called "homelands." They were supposed to have been split up by tribe, but this was done poorly and a lot of people were estranged, continuing the traditional African diaspora familiar to the last half-millenium or so of Africans...

Anyway, these places would often be called "_____land." Graceland, then, makes a lot more sense as a title.

I'll be 22 on Monday. I'll also be at Disneyland. In tribute, I've been listening to a lot of Perrey-Kingsley-- well, at least, a lot of the same few songs. They made "Baroque Hoedown," otherwise known as the Main St. Electrical Parade theme song. They also made a version of "One Note Samba" which was-- YES you're about to hear correctly-- SAMPLED by Stereolab. No. They didn't just make a song that sounds exactly like it. They sampled it on Transient Random Noise-Bursts. Three songs on that album, actually, bear the Perrey-Kingsley trademark-- "Pack Yr Romantic Mind" opens with some P-K electronic noises, the end of "I'm Going Out of My Way" has the "One Note Samba" sample, and then "Lock Groove Lullaby" (and thus the album) ends with a short loop from (I believe) "The Savers." Check on this! It's worth buying and returning their double disc anthology of four full albums (two of them solo by Perrey, but barely a difference in style when Kingsley left), The Out Sound from Way In! All the songs I've mentioned, though, are on Spotlight on the Moog.

"Most of all, I remember the sun." - Colin Moulding in XTC's "I Remember the Sun" from The Big Express

Just as I said!

Ballbearings Pinatas: From U.S. to I is on sale. Featuring two previously "released" Spencer Owen tracks (though they'll be new to nearly everyone) and two previously unreleased Ariel Pink songs. And one John Acquadro tune (previously "released" as Goodbye the Band). It is an excellent compilation, and I don't just say that because I'm on it. Really!!!

This month, I was propositioned by a man in Amsterdam to have my song "Security Song" quoted in the novel he's writing, and a man in Sweden bought E.T.R. (Electric 3rd R-Word) and the old Ribcage. This part of the planet knows what is up.

The Del-Byzanteens' Lies to Live By.

The Del-Byzanteens were a band in the early '80s. They featured the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, but this is more or less unrelated to the fact that they were great. My good friend Jeff Larson ripped me his vinyl copy of their sole LP, Lies to Live By, and I've been digging it immensely.

The first half is poppy new wave with a darker no wave influence-- in other words, the kind of music that a lot of people are trying to make today, while failing to summon up the quality and ingenuity that is present here. "Draft Riot" should be #1 on the charts ("the charts"?), as its hook continues to slay me, my mouth watering the first time I heard its chorus; "War" is a winning cover of a calypso number by Atilla the Executor. (As a calypso fan, I was very pleased with the attitude.) The second half is more industrial, "jammy," hypnotic, with the 31-minute record finally tailing off in a 5-minute experimental collage. (31 minutes sounds too brief, but it's just right.)

I want to see this record issued on CD, remastered, with bonus tracks! This group is good enough, and it fits right into the sonic zeitgeist while showing people a thing or two.

I'm going to live up to my status as a music blog, for once, and, with Jeff's permission, I'm posting the link he gave me to the album. It's a zip file. Enjoy.

It's time to die!

The best news you've heard all day is that John Maus has finally released an album. It is called Songs, and almost no matter what songs are on it, it's guaranteed to be great. You may never come across this CD or record in your daily life, but I am buying it from them directly as a preemptive measure. John Maus ran the great, minimal and mysterious Demonstration Bootleg website/"label?" with Ariel Pink; I've met him on a couple of occasions, played experimental music with him in Eagle Rock, and he seemed like a right good bloke. His songs are stellar and just about as unique as Mr. Pink's.

Some other good news is that I just got a copy of the ballbearings pinatas compilation (LONG AWAITED!) in the mail today, entitled From U.S. to I. I humbly submit that the eclectic tracklist paints a pretty fantastic portrait of what we at bbp are doing. I will surely post when it is available for sale.

Snips!

I am buying an album from the iTunes Music Store. Suppose there's a first for everything, isn't there? I am purchasing Peach Blossom Fan by Mr. Stephin Merritt. I found the songs from this theater piece (opera?) to be the finest of those collected on Showtunes, his compilation of songs from three Chinese musical theater pieces (operas?). I am a fan of source over compilation, whenever possible. Anyway, of course I'm immediately burning the album onto CD and then converting it into regular mp3, in order to wash that dirty proprietary format out of my hair.

I just watched 24 Hour Party People and it was a smash, but-- not as good as Tristram Shandy. Still, Steve Coogan's quite the badass, and though the film made me no more interested to listen to Joy Division, New Order, or the Happy Mondays (albeit a bit curious about A Certain Ratio), I had a good time soaking up the "scene" as portrayed.

I am going to see Dave Chappelle's Block Party again tomorrow. I am dispirited with the slim pickings for filmgoers such as myself at the moment, and so I enrolled friends Jeff Larson and Caitlin Craven to join me; I like seeing films again as long as I'm seeing them with someone who hasn't seen them yet. And did I mention that the Block Party is BEAUTIFUL, and anyone who even thinks they might be remotely interested SHOULD SEE IT? Perhaps I didn't? There you are.

We -- the ballbearings pinatas supercorp warehouse experiment -- are in the process of getting Ribcage pressed again, and this time with a bonus EP, and this time it should probably take over the entire world, because it's pretty good rock-based music, and we all know the entire world sometimes has to listen to the same pretty good rock-based album, and this might as well be the one, you know?

Bird by Snow's Sky recording is coming more slowly than anyone would like, because I am a distracted human being. I hope tonight to take a major step in the recording of Sky, which is to take all the bloody songs and put them on a bloody tape so I can bloody record on top of them (with my parts, that is-- not over them, not to erase them, of course not). Seriously though, I'm proud of the recent Bird by Snow recordings, and so is Fletcher, and here are some of them. There will be the Sky record, and there will also be a 7" entitled Industrial Collapse which I have produced.

The upcoming Spencer Owen album, tentative release date Someday 2006, is The Recorded Century. It will be made when he can find a place to record screaming and bashing on things for extended periods of time.

How, exactly, am I supposed to feel about the Spinto Band?

Their music was once special to me and some folks I knew. Mersey (the first disc of their double disc opus Mersey and Reno) will always possess a magic and nostalgia for me; so will the mp3.com opus Roosevelt, and even Digital Summer. These were the albums they made in the basement, and I didn't take them too seriously when they told me, more or less, that they were not really going to continue making music like this. Even their first Nashville recordings were reworkings of such classics as "My Special Car" and "Puff Daddy Blowjob Movement." The summertime week I spent with them in Pennsylvania-- it didn't even seem like I was in a state, or a place, other than the house in the countryside by the silo-- was really unique, and though I was in my most immature emotional state, a lot of great things took place nonetheless.

Now they're featured in the SF Weekly and the Bay Guardian, touring the world, playing on BBC Radio, opening for the Arctic Monkeys, being compared to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (...Jesus...), in Sears commercials... and they'll be at Amoeba in SF on Sunday at 2 PM, before their headlining Cafe du Nord performance. I made up my mind a while ago not to show up. Why? Because they don't really make music I like anymore? That's absurd. It's true, I don't really care for Nice and Nicely Done, but they're all great people, and we actually had a bond back when... It's just so surreal. I think I can't really handle people I know getting famous.

I think, then, that I am going to go, at the very least, to see their free show at Amoeba.

Here is an album with a title I've never liked, and with mostly very silly and not very good music, but on which I play a good deal of the instruments, and can actually be found rapping for a few seconds (on "Just Bliss," which I produced). It's far enough into the past, and the memories are positive enough, that I can unearth it. Take it with a grain of salt, but there it is.

EDIT: So I didn't make it to the show. Rats. They'll be back in town.