Maracatu Atomico

Movin' on up.

2006-06-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-06-06T10:13:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-25T12:27:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-04-09T00:25:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-04-05T22:04:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-03-30T07:26:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-03-22T10:55:00.000-08:00

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!

2006-03-20T18:34:00.000-08:00

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!

2006-03-17T22:17:00.000-08:00

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?

2006-03-10T21:28:00.000-08:00

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.

Remembering Ricky Nelson

2006-03-02T19:13:00.000-08:00

As I recover from my bike accident, I decide that I should watch Jeopardy!, which reminds me of relaxing and enjoying down time.

In single Jeopardy! (as opposed to Double Jeopardy!), there was a category called Remembering Ricky Nelson, and they had a picture of Ricky Nelson in the little TV with the category in it. No one on the program seemed to remember Ricky Nelson very well, which was made clearer by the fact that it was the very last category remaining, and only two of the five questions were answered by the contestants. Three of them were song-recognizing questions, and only one song was recognized. I thought it was an absurd category to begin with, and then it hit me: this category must have been designed for the show's typical audience-- that is, folks born before 1940. I wonder how often they do that.

Bitter Tea hotline!

2006-03-01T15:59:00.000-08:00

Maybe not, actually; I hold no responsibility if you call this number, but it's 323-221-7625. It's an L.A. area code. Eleanor repeats it four or five times at the end of "The Vietnamese Telephone Ministry." Who will answer? You tell me; I don't like cold calling people.

The Fiery Furnaces' Bitter Tea.

2006-03-01T15:34:00.000-08:00

Okay. Who's willing to give the Fiery Furnaces a second chance? Perhaps a third chance? I'll foist this record upon you if you are. I loved Rehearsing My Choir, and though I can vehemently disagree with you, I can understand why you did not. God, though. Fucking thrilling, this new album, Bitter Tea. It reminds you of what you liked about Blueberry Boat, with the same running length, only a couple more songs, and it's somehow LEAGUES more inviting. The tunes, the dancing, the both, the neither! It's also fairly witty, and there is a huge amount of backwards singing, which is a really great idea because nobody's ever put this much backwards singing on a pop album. It's wild, it veers, it's got power as a whole and in its moments.

When this band is at its best, it reminds me of all the art-pop music I've ever loved while becoming some of that music itself. I didn't expect such an early contender for Mr. Pink's House Arrest (bold words, I know, and perhaps take them with a grain of salt) but here it is. The Fiery Furnaces are brilliant! This is their best work! Throw everybody else out the window. All you Coachella bands, take off running. These guys have officially cleared the bar.

In other news, the Isley Bros.' Between the Sheets is also very good to listen to if you skip the 6th and 7th songs.

LISTENING TO: Bitter Tea

Free jazz! (pt. 1 of 2)

2006-03-01T02:28:00.000-08:00

Just got back from a night at the Hemlock presented by my very talented solo guitar friend Sean Smith, who played a dynamic, edgy set that, he claims, will be the last time he ever plays some of his older songs. The headliner was a group of five by the name of the Dystemic [sic] Quintet. There was a rather out-of-place electric guitarist, at best ambient and at worst a tad distracting; he was a last minute adjustment to the group, apparently, and it was fairly clear. The rest of them were stellar. The place done burned down... in a free jazz fire. You might recognize the saxophonist and the drummer from this group at various venues on Shattuck in Berkeley, such as: in front of the library; half a block from Walgreens; etc. Last night at around 10:30, I passed the sax player practicing for his show. He's phenomenal and if you're ever on Shattuck and there's a large, white sax player, playing perhaps with a drummer, stay and listen.

On the way back from the club we listened to Black Sabbath's first album on a crummy tape. I don't think I ever want to hear it in another fidelity; it sounded perfect. Somehow, my circuits got switched; the most cerebral music to some is the most visceral to me, and vice versa. Black Sabbath works really well in my head; I appreciate it and especially enjoy the intensity as channeled through enthusiastic listeners such as Sean, Matt and Cara (my riding companions) but I don't feel it in that way. Strange.

Gillian Anderson said yes!

2006-02-25T22:01:00.000-08:00

The great new Michael Winterbottom film, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, surprised me by featuring my favorite music ever written for a film, Michael Nyman’s score for The Draughtsman’s Contract. It was a tad unfortunate that the recordings used were by the Michael Nyman Band rather than the ensemble on the original recording, but no matter; the music worked really well-— better, in fact, than it did in The Draughtsman’s Contract. “An Eye for Optical Theory,” my favorite piece, is actually the most common cue in Tristram. I couldn’t have been happier.

I haven’t seen 24 Hour Party People yet, but if it’s as good as Tristram, I’m all over it. In Tristram, Tony Wilson plays a reporter named Gary Wilson who interviews Steve Coogan. Wacky.

As an amusing sidenote, I read in the hyperbolically titled yet very well-researched The Smiths: Songs That Saved Your Life that Morrissey and Tony Wilson had a nice public spat back in the day. Why, here's the segment (pp. 119-120, from the new edition):

[In response to the Morrissey lyric 'Belligerent ghouls run Manchester schools'] The Manchester Education Committee wasn't ... impressed, and tried-- in vain-- to prevent The Smiths from playing within their jurisdiction. The controversy resulted in an amusing confrontation between Morrissey and Tony Wilson during a Granada TV news report coinciding with the album's [Meat Is Murder's] release, in which the singer not only defended his 'right' to attack his former school governors but impertinently suggested Wilson should try his hand at being a pop star himself.

Relations between these two opposing leviathans of the Mancunian music scene curdled considerably thereafter. When Wilson called Morrissey 'a woman trapped in a man's body', the latter replied that the Factory Records' boss was a 'pig trapped in a man's body' and that 'the day somebody shoves Wilson in the boot of a car and drives his body to Saddleworth Moor, that is the day that Manchester music will be revived.' Asked to defend the severity of these comments by The Observer in 1992, Morrissey digressed; 'Actually I was misquoted on that one. What I actually said was that he is a man trapped in a pig's body.'

"What to Wear" by the Danielson Famile

2006-02-20T18:07:00.000-08:00

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream...
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

What to wear to that funeral?

Got 50 different questions,
None getting answered.

What to wear to that funeral?

The devil sucker-punched you, man.
The devil kicked you when you were already down.

God said, "You're a little early son."
God said, "Well, well, well, get the D.J.,
"Looks like we're goin' dancin'."

Goin' to a dance party with God.
Dancin' with God.

What to wear to that funeral?

-----

If y'all want an assignment, listen to the Danielson Famile. Try Fetch the Compass Kids, but any other album will do (this song's from A Prayer for Every Hour, Daniel Smith's debut and college thesis project). I'll write again pretty soon.

LISTENING TO: "Bluebird," Tortoise; "Below the Belt," Scientist

So, J Dilla is dead at 32.

2006-02-14T22:10:00.000-08:00

People on music blogs all over the internet (and I should know-- I’ve nearly read them all by now) are mourning the passing of Jay Dee/J Dilla, one of the finest producers in hip hop, and therefore, modern music. I will merely join the voices with a very brief anecdote. When J Dilla’s Donuts came out last Tuesday, I bought it hoping for a primer in his style. At times, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around what stylistically distinguishes one hip hop producer from another-- rather, I find it occasionally difficult to recognize a producer solely from the sound of the beat-- and here, with Donuts, we had a beat record, untarnished by a distracting MC. What I ended up getting was a ridiculously exciting ADD selection of beat concepts-- 31 tracks of cut-up vocals and songs driven by an enormous boom-bip-- that, I now realize, is more of a stylistic experiment than his other works have been. Whatever the case, I fell in love with it; it’s likely to be one of the better albums of 2006. I vowed to do more research: listen closer to his Slum Village work, find out what other artists he’s produced (some of the best Busta and latter-day Tribe tracks, turns out)...

and then on Friday night, I learned that he is dead. I sat in shock for five whole minutes, and though I’d just had a good performance that evening, I now felt soured. So the task of exploring a great artistic body of work, a task I continue just as I had been planning to do, is unfortunately tainted by the fact that its creator was recently lost to the world. He has two completed albums on deck for 2006, and he produced some cuts on the eternally forthcoming Busta Rhymes LP, The Big Bang... at the very least, then, there is more to hear, but sadly, there is no more innovation or exploration or transformation from an absurdly talented, constantly evolving, and, from what I hear, kind-hearted man. Sorry, Dilla.

Nobody reads this!

2006-02-08T23:28:00.000-08:00

http://www.mamabuzzcafe.com/index.php?section=events is the page to go to to find out about my concert on Friday with Sean Smith and Nathaniel Russell at 8 PM (don't be late, that means you, one of the zero people who reads this and decides to come to my show) at Mama Buzz, which is on Telegraph in Oakland, 2318 Telegraph to be exact

I don't have a melodica at the moment. I might still play a good show. Please come out.

Psych-rock-- that really works!

2006-02-07T21:08:00.000-08:00

Leave it to Hoppy Kamiyama and Otomo Yoshihide to form a band that would make the first psych-rock album I can really appreciate: Optical*8 with their debut, 1994's Bug. Hoppy is a creative, talented keyboardist whose work I'm just beginning to explore; Otomo is a guitarist and experimental turntablist to whom I've been listening for some time, but who has a very large discography, of which I have barely scratched the surface. Together, with a heavy and talented bassist and drummer, they create a heavy and psychedelic album that dives into psych-rock-funk-jam cliche while sounding fresh in all the ways I like my Japanese fringe to sound. Rich turntable texture from Otomo (no scratching) and Hoppy's unique MIDI/SNES-esque synth palette contribute to a generally beastly, often goofy sound with a heavily saturated mix. I may not ever listen to Blue Cheer or Atomic Rooster, but I can now count a bit of psych-rock amongst my friends.

As part of my job, I'm reading a ton of mp3 and music blogs, and I find that mine is much more of a personal blog than most "music blogs," a suspicion I had which is now confirmed. The music and mp3 blogosphere is filled with intimidating, frequently updated and exceedingly well-informed sources. I feel okay not really being a part of it. I'm not a tastemaker, anyhow, just someone with taste. Plus, I'm not in New York. The New York music scene makes me a bit more sick every day, and only because of how overwhelmingly influential it is, and only also because of how much I still hate Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. (I still love Sufjan, but I stubbornly, and unfairly, set him apart.)

Found a job!

2006-02-02T22:05:00.000-08:00

I now work for a company that, in a couple months, is going to launch an ambitious music website based around social networking. Can't say much else than that, but keep your eyes peeled, because this blog is likely going to eventually start talking about it (when I can, that is). I've luckily found myself involved with it, and I'm as excited about the product as I am about the fact that I'm being paid to help out with it.

Thanks for asking, Matty; the January shows went really well. Adobe Books was a nicer place to play-- run-down-ass bookstore, all cluttered, really good vibe, more people than at the Utah-- but both performances ended up succeeding about equally. However, I was able to dub myself "Spencer Owen and the Serious Business" (or, just "The Serious Business") at the Adobe Books show. I think it's a good name and it may appear every now and again. The next show's on February 10 in Oakland. The next show I'm attending is Stereolab at the Fillmore on March 4; the next concert is Meredith Monk and vocal ensemble at Yerba Buena on February 15, and won't that be wonderful. As for my recording schedule, I imagine I'll soon be working on the new Bird by Snow album, depending on when ol' Fletcher's got it in a shape to send me for my parts. (Bird by Snow's Antlers and the Sun, featuring Spencer Owen, can be purchased at K Records... perhaps you want to buy it from K Records? [those are both the same link])

The RZA is actually, at least on the Wu-Tang's albums, a really good rapper. Although now that I make that clarification, I realize that one of my favorite flows he's done (and one of my favorites I've heard) is on the song "Snakes" on the debut Ol' Dirty Bastard album. I would paste it here but I recommend tracking down the song, because his delivery absolutely makes it. His energy is fairly untouchable. "The RZA" is also my new nickname for my friend Ben's new girlfriend, Theresa. I have yet to use it in conversation with her, but it is going to be the first thing out of my mouth the next time I see her.

Here is a short list of the 5 best shows I saw last year (in chronological order):

1. David Byrne with the Extra Action Marching Band, Fillmore (S.F.), 2/24
2. Boredoms, the Indepedent (S.F.), 5/19
3. Sufjan Stevens, the Attic (Santa Cruz), 7/19
4. Ruins Alone with Ed Rodriguez and Devin Hoff, Hemlock Tavern (S.F.), 7/24
5. David Krakauer with Klezmer Madness! and Uri Caine, Herbst (S.F.), 10/10

I believe there were moments of each of these shows (particularly the last one on the list) where I was laughing out of sheer joy. The next five shows that didn't make it to the list were by Elvis Costello & the Imposters, Matmos (at Mills College in Oakland, doing material from their upcoming record The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast...ooh, excited), Deerhoof (on a bill with Octis and Whysp), Of Montreal, and Brian Wilson, but doesn't that make a handy top ten, all combined?

LISTENING TO: (iTunes random) "The Emergency Kisses," Stereolab; "Tigresa," Caetano Veloso; "Hemiones," Camille Saint-Saens; "I Was Never Young," Of Montreal; "Duck Seazon," Wu-Tang Clan; "Ibhanoyi (Aeroplane)," Blanket Mkhize; "Rush I Some Dub," Tappa Zukie; "Para Xo," Moreno + 2; "Slip Away," David Bowie; "Two Janes," Los Lobos

Tonight's show!

2006-01-26T14:21:00.000-08:00

Adobe Books. 16th between Valencia and Guerrero. 8 PM. Bird by Snow. Spencer Owen. White White Quilt. Go. Free show. San Francisco.

LISTENING TO: Fletcher play guitar

Ariel Pink's House Arrest.

2006-01-24T16:51:00.000-08:00

One fine day in 2003, I was riding in a car down Sunset Blvd., being driven home by Jeff Eliassen after a lovely breakfast. During breakfast, Jeff had told me about Ariel Pink. He put on a copy of House Arrest on his car stereo, and it was this copy that I purchased from Jeff upon leaving the car. I am unable to express exactly what his music means to me; suffice it to say, it's one of the few times that I can vividly recall the circumstances of hearing a record for the first time. I was blown away from the first 10 seconds of the first song, and House Arrest quickly became one of my all-time favorite albums.

If you'll allow a familiar-sounding litany detailing my love for this music: House Arrest contains everything that is beautiful about the Left Banke and the Zombies, everything that is punk about Yoko Ono and Ween, more than everything that has ever been exciting about lo-fi recording. It's a prime early "aughts" document, a filtered version of 40 years of rock albums, the result of a peer with agile (if clumsy) hands and an honest-as-hell (if a bit dirty) mouth hammering out one of the most enticing series of disgusting pop hooks I've ever heard. The radio-transmitter quality is necessary, even if the songs would be just as good without it-- and it's more than likely a deilberate aesthetic, as nobody else makes music on their Yamaha MT8X cassette recorder that sounds like this. And yes. Yes. Almost every drum sound is made by his mouth. This is undeniably amazing, and while it should not overshadow the quality of the songs, one should marvel at it nonetheless.

Today, this album was released by the Animal Collective's label, Paw Tracks. I did my civic duty and purchased it at Amoeba. I am hoping that the release of this album brings a bit of attention to my homebase, ballbearings pinatas, because everyone making music affiliated with this label deserves to be heard, separately, together. House Arrest is likely to take my number one spot at the year's end, and I hope it finally receives the audience it deserves.

LISTENING TO: House Arrest, Ariel Pink

Free house!

2006-01-23T12:26:00.000-08:00

I just finished recording the soundtrack for a short movie by my pal Jeff Griffith-Perham entitled Lost. In Dutch. I'm pretty proud of the tunes and I bet if you're one of those kinds of people who I show my work to, you'll see the movie eventually. There has been a landmark sort of event here; for years, I've wanted to cover the outstanding Goodbye the Band song "With Loss Comes Replacement" (from the outstanding LP What We Were On To, which you can download from that link!) and now I've finally done it. What makes it a serendipitous treat is that Jeff had wanted to use the song, and since I was already scoring the film, I figured I'd use this opportunity to make the cover, not to mention that it would make the soundscape of the movie a bit more fluid, as there is a lot of music in it, all by me, mostly with a very similar tone. Oddly (if you will allow me to proceed describing the song, both of us fully aware that you probably have not heard it), there is a moment at about 1:59-2:00 in which the guitar appears to develop a delay effect that I did not apply to it, nor do I recall playing the guitar in a manner such as to emulate this delay effect. This kind of thing has happened several times in my recording history, and every time it surprises me.

His Name Is Alive has a new album called Detrola, and it's really wonderful. This band (and Warn Defever, its mastermind) has been a pleasure to watch over the years; they're one of the reasons I'm sincerely glad I'm a modern music fan. Experiments and evolution are the two, uh, "E"s that drive this Detroit-area underground pop band. The minimalist Michigan synth-funk particularly excites me here, as well as the presence of saxes, but the record is a pastiche of styles and there's a track for everyone. (EVERYONE. YOU ARE NOT EXCLUDED. YOU MUST LIKE ONE TRACK FROM THE ALBUM. If it is not one of these, then it is another.) Detrola officially gets 2006 off to a great start.

And if you're like me, you'll love exploring Warn's indie-label website, Time Stereo. Hell of crazy good-sounding ideas on it. Find the Electric Pinecone.

The word!

2006-01-18T23:36:00.000-08:00

The Word of a Salesman, a film written, shot and directed by Kalen Egan, featuring a few spots of music by Spencer Owen, is showing in Santa Cruz on Friday night at either 7:30 or 8 at the Digital Media Factory (2809 Mission). I would recommend showing up at 7:30 even if it's 8 because if you show up at 8 and it was at 7:30 you've missed the entire 20 minute film. It's a very good movie. Any SC readers should attend. Kalen will be there to talk about it, as will others who worked on the movie. (Clarification: I will not be there. Y'all should go though. For real.)

COME SEE ME, SAN FRANCISCO!

2006-01-16T16:33:00.000-08:00

This is a shameless reminder (is there any other kind? why would I be ashamed?) to come see my show tomorrow, Tuesday, January 17. It's at the Hotel Utah Saloon at 4th and Bryant in San Francisco at 9 PM. It costs $5, and if you want a copy of E.T.R. (Electric 3rd R-Word) there, it will only be an extra $5. I am thinking of actually starting a mailing list at this show. It is not a bad idea. I will also be playing in Bird by Snow, not to mention alongside the Sevenly Virtues and Jean Marie. You shouldn't be late! 9 PM is the time!

Soon, I want to write about Vous et Nous, the thoughtful late-'70s recording by Brigitte Fontaine and Areski Belkacem.

Drum's not dead!

2006-01-12T17:52:00.000-08:00

I downloaded the leak of Liars' Drum's Not Dead. I'm one of those people who became much more interested when they released They Were Wrong So We Drowned; I barely ever listen to the first one, now, as much as I enjoy "Mr. You're on Fire Mr." ... anyway, great new record, I'd say not as fresh and interesting as Drowned but definitely a lovely and enveloping one-track-mind experiment. If I had the freedom of recording percussion that I once did (the freedom of living in a house, not an apartment, in a neighborhood where the only consequence to my drumming was our next door neighbor moving a mile away), I might be as fixated upon it as the boys are on this record. The percussion was janky and broken-sounding on the last record (in a way that you know they meant it to sound), and now they've streamlined it for warmth, comfort; some comparisons to Drum's Not Dead would be Black Dice (when they were better), Animal Collective (Here Comes the Indian-era... ahhh, refreshing), and neo-Boredoms (AKA Vooredoms), and a guy on I Love Music (sometimes I read new-release discussions on this board) was spot on when he said the last song sounded like Spacemen 3.

When this album comes out, it will come with 36 short films (that is to say, three music videos per song, one by each member of the group) on a DVD; therefore, I plan to buy it. It is convenient that I was planning to purchase it anyway, however, because the rip had a couple flaws. Its main flaw was that it had two second gaps at the end of each mp3, while this appears to be a record with almost entirely banded tracks (meaning there aren't meant to be pauses between the songs, they're almost all segued together). I went into Sound Studio and fixed this... and while I was at it, I got rid of a brief blippy glitch in the first 30 seconds of the third song by cutting a moment from the next nearly identical bar and pasting it in. It sounds perfect, but probably doesn't sound as it is supposed to, since thankfully Liars don't appear to be a Pro Tools looping band. It's an almost totally insignificant .25 second thing, but if I were in Liars I'm sure I'd notice it. I really did it exclusively for smoother personal listening purposes, and it's really merely a stopgap measure for when I end up buying it (and even if I hadn't been planning to buy it, something like this would cause me to hunt down a new rip, or buy it anyway). Just in case my version gets in anyone else's hands, though-- not likely to happen on Soulseek, where no one is able to download from me, and not because of anything I did-- I'm labeling the mp3 "(Unofficially Repaired Version of a Flawed Mp3 Rip by Spencer Owen)."

Anyway. Day in the life of a new-age music-head. (No, not new age music. I mean the new age we are in.)

And here, David Byrne urges you not to buy music from the Big 5. Listen to the man: "CDs from the big five run the risk of damaging your computer, opening you up to security risks, and you can’t rip the music onto your iPod. Stop buying CDs now. At least until they guarantee us that they will never try this shit again. O.K., I’m exaggerating, but if I need to carry around a list to know which CDs I can safely buy it’s getting out of control... These guys deserve to go out of business, they obviously don’t love music, and they don’t understand their own customers."

It's January!

2006-01-10T21:33:00.000-08:00

My top films of 2005 are going to be in this post, because I spent time making the list, and I'd like to post it somewhere. More importantly, however, I just finally discovered how wonderful Randy Newman is. Bird by Snow just played a show in Santa Cruz this weekend, and when Fletcher showed up to take me down there, he mentioned he'd listened to Randy Newman's "I Love L.A." about 11 times before he got here. He played it in the car, and I've got to admit, I'm not sure I had ever listened to the song from beginning to end before; it is ecstatically good. When we got back the next day, I copied Trouble in Paradise (the album featuring "I Love L.A.") and nearly the whole album ended up being like sophisticated candy. Now I've heard Little Criminals ("Baltimore," my god) and Good Old Boys and I will continue to listen to more, and more. Newman is one of the nation's underrated pop talents.

The Bird by Snow show went well; we will play the same set, only even better, twice in San Francisco this month-- and-- this is important-- I will be doing my solo set at those shows, too. Here are the tour dates, e-zine style:

1/17 - Hotel Utah (with Sevenly Virtues, Jean Marie)
1/26 - Adobe Books (with Jeff Manson [of Whysp], the White White Quilt]

I plan to practice for this set at the Shop Show this Saturday.

Without warning, the top 20 films out of the seventy-ish I saw in limited/general release in 2005:

20 Tony Takitani (Jun Ichikawa, 2004)
19 Dear Wendy (Thomas Vinterberg, 2005)
18 Transposition of the Great Vessels (Lee Lynch, 2005)
17 Oldboy (Chan-wook Park, 2003)
16 Munich (Steven Spielberg, 2005)
15 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell, 2005)
14 Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, 2003)
13 The Constant Gardener (Fernando Meirelles, 2005)
12 No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (Martin Scorsese, 2005)
11 The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005)

10 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Chan-wook Park, 2002)
09 Good Night, and Good Luck. (George Clooney, 2005)
08 Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005)
07 The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Jacques Audriard, 2005)
06 Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
05 Last Days (Gus Van Sant, 2005)
04 Match Point (Woody Allen, 2005)
03 Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005)
02 Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch, 2005)
01 A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)

And, the five worst (but also probably the only five I didn't like at least a little bit):

05 Yes (Sally Potter, 2005)
04 Walk the Line (James Mangold, 2005)
03 Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2005)
02 The Brothers Grimm (Terry Gilliam, 2005)
01 Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005)

LISTENING TO: Little Criminals, Randy Newman

2006

2006-01-02T10:40:00.000-08:00

In honor of the new year, I present a massively entertaining August 2005 interview from the man who once made 2009 beats for your 2009 Mercedes-Benz: Kool Keith. It is a bit of a shame, as he has obviously lost it significantly (musically) but he talks as if he is the number one innovator. One thing is true: he is still unique. And now, my favorite quotation:

People look at me and they see just me to Kurt to Automator, but my life expands. I get on the phone with big rock groups. I do stuff with acts that are 10 times into different levels of other stuff. My knowledge of music is so expanded. You might see me at a small show watching a few rappers that keep it real. Then I'll be on stage with Dave Matthews Band or something. And people don't understand that shit. All these other motherfuckers have to buy their way to fame. For me it's just natural. Somebody might just make a call and say, hey we want Keith to perform at the Cardinals game. It's not like I am at a record company calling and asking them to take my artists. I don't have a bunch of people. It's just natural. Even with my television appearances. It's just my sporadic lifestyle. I'm not looking for them, but they are looking for me. I am not begging. I am not buck dancing. People just bug out on my naturalism. Like right now, I'm talking to you in front of a check cash place in a fucked up neighborhood. I'm not in an office at Interscope or Columbia . I am across the street from a bullshit carwash.

LISTENING TO: "Der Baum," Faust

Merry Christmas!

2005-12-25T07:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.mothersagainstnoise.org/

2005 addendum #2: Trapped! In the closet!!

2005-12-24T16:14:00.000-08:00

I think I have run through this before on the blog, but here's a quick summary of an important and strange pop phenomenon from 2005.

To my ears, R. Kelly is occasionally a brilliant musician. In my list post, I included the top 5 on TP.3 Reloaded because I mean to say that they are genuinely good songs; there are even one or two more I left out. Lyrically, they're either unrelatable (by me) or blatantly goofy (to everyone, including, I presume, Mr. Kelly himself), but this is no problem; the meat is how well he and his Chocolate Factory arrange the tracks, and how delightfully he spins his vocal melody, constantly taking it to appropriate, unexpected places, in a manner displaying as much talent as any of the classic soul singers.

"Trapped in the Closet (Chapters 1-5)" is no exception. I stood in Tower Records at the listening station, unable to believe I was so interested in the same R&B rhythm and chord progression (and such a pulpy, predictable, nonsensical story) for 18 minutes. The bonus DVD that came with the album was a charmer; I soon found that many of my peers were (and are) amused and fascinated to some degree by the suite (though mainly its accompanying film). To this day, however, I get the slightly sinking sensation that the interest in my peer group is more out of a recognition of its "ridiculous" content and less out of admiration for R. Kelly's talent. I don't mind a good bit of antagonistic amusement, but I find it a tad frustrating how I almost feel as if I'm on the defense saying things like "But listen to his singing!" or "He obviously KNOWS it's funny!"

Now he has made it even harder for me to appreciate him with the release of chapters 6-12. He made all the wrong decisions (at least three key blunders, by my count), and now it's no longer even enjoyable for its own merits.

1) It's become too knowingly wacky. Rosie the Nosy Neighbor? To think she could defend herself against those guns with that spatula! The policeman's wife, a fat white country girl named Bridget? Well, she has an affair with a midget! The midget even brings a scatalogical element into the story, just one element of the many that drive it into the red of the goof-o-meter.

2) Chapter 12 is the least suspenseful chapter of the entire story. Yes, things are left relatively unresolved, but it's still redundant and pointless, and a hell of a stupid cliffhanger, the worst kind, in fact; you know there are going to be more chapters, and you don't expect anything very good to come of them.

3) This is the most important mistake he made, as it heightens your frustration with the other problems: HE USES THE SAME MUSIC. This piece of music is now 40 minutes long-- 2/3 of an hour. It was audacious in an excellent way for him to keep it up for as many minutes as he did in the core suite (which, comparatively, ended with a very good cliffhanger, I should add); it is audacious in a bogus, lazy way for him to keep it up for over twice that long. He sounds like he's lost his luster for exploring the progression, and there is a chapter in the middle where he uses the "this is the intense part" top-of-the-range melody for almost the whole thing and nothing is happening to warrant it.

Far be it from me to advise people like Mr. Kelly how to do their job, but ... well, I'm telling him how to do his job, because he can do better than kitschy drivel.

Happy day!

2005-12-21T11:17:00.000-08:00

You can buy E.T.R. online now. This is where. Finally got a copy of Saint-Saens's Carnival of the Animals on CD. I grew up watching the Bugs & Daffy version and when I bought the video on Amazon recently, I flipped out. Beautiful. Highly recommended video. I have a few more movies to see before the year's out, at which point I will publish my top 20 films of the year as well as my bottom 5. Happy holidays.

2005 addendum (no. 1?)!

2005-12-19T10:11:00.000-08:00

I hate "Since U Been Gone" by Kelly Clarkson. (Sorry, Lisbeth; you can skip this post if you want.)

This isn't exclusively a Pitchfork rant, but I have to begin it with them: This song is in the top 10 of Pitchfork's singles list. Tell me this: what would they rate the previously-unfairly-dubbed-as-0.0 Matrix-produced Liz Phair commercial record now? 8.2? Sasha Frere-Jones labeled this song at some point (I'm not going to bother to look again, but suffice it to say if it's not still true, it was a month ago) as the NUMBER ONE single of the year. Mike Doughty loves it. Ted Leo loves it. Did I say "Ted Leo loves it," because I meant he covered it. Hipster bloggers love it. I do not understand. Where were these saviors of unbearable teen-girl-angst-chunk-pop when "Complicated" hit the scene? I don't recall people liking that tune much, am I wrong? I'm so confused. I don't like accusing people of posing, because I understand loving ABBA and other "guilty" pleasures with the whole of your relatively-language-free music-enjoying self. Hell, I even liked Annie when P-fork broke her, and I liked Robyn back when my friend Jamie played her for me some months ago in Santa Cruz. But those are not of the genre I scorn here today, the Avril/Kelly/Ashlee/Hilary thing that I hear more often in either Wendy's or California Pizza Kitchen than anywhere else I go in my life. 'Course, just hearing it inspires just about the same reaction in me as any song by Franz or the new Strokes single, which might explain something.

I hate Kelly Clarkson's song called "Since U Been Gone" (and more or less every song I've heard that sounds like it) because it is not unique, it is not, it is pathetically formulaic in a genre I have tried to avoid, a genre that has been disgusting to me every time I've witnessed it in action. And now I love to listen to things like Mexican sons huastecos-- I genuinely love it, but I also wouldn't write it off if someone suggested that it was at least partially a subconscious effort to remove myself from the demographic that now enjoys the soundtrack to Party of Five. Wasn't that show on Fox? What channel is American Idol on? Hmm...

2005

2005-12-16T01:53:00.000-08:00

I have six mix CDs I want to make before the end of the year, and five of them I'm going to get to this weekend. Jamie and Shan both gave me great abstract themes for each of their next serial mixes. Jamie: giggling. Shan: ringtone.

Here, without further ado, is 2005.

(Honorable mentions:)
xx Asa-Chang & Junray - Minna No Junray
xx Beck - Guero
xx Ry Cooder - Chavez Ravine
xx Dengue Fever - Escape from Dragon House
xx Missy Elliott - The Cookbook
xx David Krakauer & Socalled with Klezmer Madness! - Bubbemeises: Lies My Gramma Told Me
xx Kronos Quartet & Asha Bhosle - You've Stolen My Heart: Songs from R.D. Burman's Bollywood
xx Paul McCartney - Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard
xx Stereolab - Kyberneticka Babicka EP
xx Shugo Tokumaru - L.S.T.

20 Makigami Koichi - Koedarake
19 John Vanderslice - Pixel Revolt
18 Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine*
17 Between the Buried and Me - Alaska
16 Broadcast - Tender Buttons
15 Lightning Bolt - Hypermagic Mountain
14 Robert and Karen - From the Nervous System
13 The Black Dahlia Murder - Miasma
12 Of Montreal - The Sunlandic Twins
11 Momus - Otto Spooky

10 Mount Eerie - No Flashlight: Songs of the Fulfilled Night
09 Debashish Bhattacharya - Calcutta Slide-Guitar 3
08 Kate Bush - Aerial
07 The Fiery Furnaces - Rehearsing My Choir
06 Quasimoto - The Further Adventures of Lord Quas
05 Sam Prekop - Who's Your New Professor
04 Amadou & Mariam - Dimanche a Bamako
03 Deerhoof - The Runners Four / Green Cosmos EP
02 Sufjan Stevens - Illinois
01 The Residents - Animal Lover

12 great songs from 2005, unrepresented above:
"Iera," Autechre
"Anthem for the Earnest," the Bad Plus
"Shut Us Down," Lindsey Buckingham
"Hush," John Cale
"Mina Loy (M.O.H.)," Billy Corgan
"Hominy Grits," Josephine Foster
"Nostalgae (Seems Unlike Old Times)," Goodbye the Band
"Strawberries & Cream," Mathematics feat. Allah Real, Inspektah Deck, Ghostface
"Ceolakanth Is Android," Polysics
"Love on One Condition," Bonnie Raitt
"Hollaback Girl," Gwen Stefani
"Crack Music," Kanye West feat. the Game

Top five songs on R. Kelly's TP.3 Reloaded (in all fairness, one of them is a suite of five songs):
5 "Remote Control"
4 "Trapped in the Closet (Chapters 1-5)"
3 "Touchin' (feat. Nivea)"
2 "In the Kitchen"
1 "Kickin' It with Your Girlfriend"

Five awesome 2005 updates (yes, the Kate Bush cover from the mid-'90s counts, it wouldn't have been on any lists then 'cause it was just released now, and she made "King of the Mountain" then too, so pack your bags and get out of here):
"Sexual Healing," Kate Bush (Marvin Gaye)
"Chatterton," Seu Jorge (Serge Gainsbourg)
"Talkin' About a Revolution," Reel Big Fish (Tracy Chapman)
"5 Superstar," Solex & Maarten Altena Ensemble ("Five Star Shamberg," Solex)
"What Goes On," Sufjan Stevens (The Beatles)

Excellent experimental music that I managed to pick out this year:**
Ryoji Ikeda - Dataplex
Jandek - Khartoum
Merzbow - Merzbuddha
Merzbow - Senmaida
Merzbow - Sphere
Merzbow & John Wiese - Multiplication
Orthrelm - OV
Sonic Youth su Tim Barnes - SYR6: Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisiminimui

*MIKE ELIZONDO VERSION, CHUMPS

**Why did I make a separate category for "experimental music"? Well! Aren't you nosy! I don't listen to experimental music the same way I listen to pop music (or the other types of music repesented on the list, for that matter), especially the particular records with the privelege of being separated, and rarely (if ever) would demand to be played on a whim. (With the key exception of Dataplex, most of them feature [very] long tracks.) As for Jandek, he's in the rock section of the Berkeley Amoeba, and the experimental section of the L.A. Amoeba; if I were curator, I'd put him in the latter. This is a very unscientific distinction I'm making, but you get the gist. I'd like to be able to rank them with the rest, but it would not be genuine of me to do so.

Get the whole thing!

2005-12-09T17:16:00.000-08:00

Get the whole thing.

Watch this video, if you can.

"Don't settle for 30 second previews"? Who is having this problem? Who would be interested in "the new Napster" for this reason? "Oh, I simply can't find a way to hear the entire song!" "1.5 million full songs," eh? I'd like to find the mp3 service that charges for partial songs. Then, of course, there is the attempt to tie mp3s to pornography, which in this situation seems completely ineffective.

Either this is just another aspect of the music industry that is blatantly and egregiously out of touch, or people really do have this problem, in which case I do not understand why.

Merry X+!

2005-12-09T12:04:00.000-08:00

Man celebrates X+ every day

This otherwise blatantly off-topic article (which you should read, nonetheless) becomes appropriate content for the MAtomico at the very end.

Park is hoping his love of Christmas can translate to the music charts when he releases a single on December 9.

"I want to be number one," he said.

Fittingly entitled It's Christmas Every Day, it follows his previous unsuccessful efforts like The Christmas Man, Yuletide Oh Yeah, and Alleluia It's Christmas.

Any commentary I could provide would merely be superfluous, except to say that, for some reason, I only get positive feelings from this story.

Also, I've been meaning to mention: Malcolm McLaren's Duck Rock (1983) is the most childlike fun I've ever experienced from such a sophisticated record. I highly suggest anyone who trusts my track record, in terms of musical appreciation, to check it out. Basically, it predates Graceland in its Western appropriation of Soweto styles, and also dips into other African and Latin pools, not to mention grabbing hip hop's emergence by the horns and throwing in a surprisingly enjoyable mock-country-dance number at the end. On top of it all, McLaren is his goofy self. Somehow, my desire for substance is totally fulfilled by such an amusing, fun-loving work.

Bidin' my time!

2005-12-03T18:24:00.000-08:00

It's true, I've been neglecting the MAtomico. (Hey, you want to read my second and third published reviews? Track down West Coast Performer... or else they're right here!! [click on the West Coast issue and "Recorded Reviews"]) I'm going to pull a reverse-everyone on this one and give away my top 5 of the year, since it is unlikely to change by the end of December, although I am planning to post a complete year-end feature by Dec. 15 (featuring a top 30, and even more lists to boot), so consider this a bit of a teaser. Of course... who is reading this? Whoever you are, enjoy this teaser!!

05 Sam Prekop - Who's Your New Professor
Sometimes I walk around my apartment (no really, ask my roommate about this) saying, "Sam Prekop is so good. Why is he so good?" His cool Brasillian fascinations continue to be swept up in the wind of Thrill Jockey's version of Chicago, this time with more of a focus on laidback funk (he claimed a Curtis Mayfield fixation, and I believe it). The fulfillment I get from this record is probably similar to that given to my grandparents by Perry Como. In other words, just like the genius self-titled record from some years ago, Who's Your New Professor is easy listening for young, "up with it" people in the 2000s, and really, don't think I'm selling it short; it is excellent.

04 Amadou & Mariam - Dimanche a Bamako
What I said on Sept. 4, 2005: "Amadou & Mariam's album gets a solid A from me. Basically I consider Manu Chao a hero with everything he's done since (and including) 'Machine Gun' on Mano Negra's Casa Babylon. Malian musical taste running all up in Manu's programmed grill = one of the freshest combos I could hope to hear in '05."

03 Deerhoof - The Runners Four / Green Cosmos EP
Read what I thought about Deerhoof's Runners Four in West Coast Performer in about seven years! (or, I guess, in Feburary)

02 Sufjan Stevens - (Come On Feel the )Illinois(e!)
Kill Bill Vol. 2 to (Greetings from )Michigan(, The Great Lakes State)'s Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Enjoy Your Rabbit's Jackie Brown. (Pulp Fiction, sorry; you're relegated to the Christmas albums. I know, you deserve better, they're nice albums and all, but really. Reservoir Dogs, you're better than A Sun Came!, but about as good as Seven Swans, so why don't we just say Swans plus the good songs on Sun. Phew.)

01 The Residents - Animal Lover

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: The Prepared Piano, Hauschka (Momus's #1 album of the year... not digging it so much; this album goes for a soothing, moody thing, Tiersen-meets-Cage style, but is not that well performed, kind of feels like it's tripping over itself half the time, which would not be a bad thing if it were in the service of better compositions with better structuring)

Hot diggity!

2005-11-24T22:16:00.000-08:00

First of all: we're playing "Meredith," and I have also installed myself into auxiliary spots on some of the Archies tunes. So that's settled. C'mon by! 9 PM! Roxy! Black Friday!

One of my favorite places to do music shopping, at least when considering the two times I've done it, is EB Games in the Santa Monica Place. I don't know if this is a common EB Games feature (although the Berkeley locations on Telegraph and Shattuck also have it), but there's a tiny used CD rack. Both times I've been to this location, they've featured... shall I say... an intriguing selection. Many of the less populist picks are $1.99, and this time, I learned that if you buy three, you get two for free. Here are the five CDs I picked up in the tiny CD rack (I mean from more or less 100 CDs total) at EB Games in the Santa Monica Place, for $6 (plus tax):

Jean Dubuffet (yes, the painter): Experiences Musicales de Jean Dubuffet. This is the only disc in the pile I can't imagine hearing all the way through (let alone more than once). I count this among the two extras (especially now, since I learned, when researching, that it's available for free download from the great Ubuweb). You can hear for yourself at that link; it's a bunch of more-tactile-than-musical improvisation on a random selection of nice instruments, recorded poorly. If you know me, you realize that type of description isn't even necessarily damning, but in this case, it just doesn't jibe with me. I'm plenty glad Dubuffet had these experiences, but I don't get much out of sharing them with him.

Pierre Henry: Messe de Liverpool/Pierres Reflechies. This is RAD. Pierre Henry appears to be a major badass, if this disc is any indication. I knew who he was, but for some reason, I didn't expect the pieces to be so immediately, viscerally excellent. Of the two, I preferred Messe de Liverpool, an experimental Catholic mass with male voices (alternating between various types of intoning, spurting and feverish fluctuations) and instruments bleeding and swooping in for haunting effects. Pierres Reflechies is neat, though: a phasing, droning piece for processed wind and brass instruments (among others, possibly), although it could be all tape loops. I haven't been this instantly enthralled by experimental music in some time, and there seems to be more to hear.

Malcolm McLaren: Fans. It looked strange-- a 1984 Malcolm McLaren album with six songs, all of which appeared to be adaptations from operas-- and it is strange, in basically the same way I expected it to be. Three of the songs are endearing, with awkward sections; three of the songs are mostly terrible with redeeming qualities, one of these qualities being the general novelty of the project. I will keep this around, and it makes me curious to hear Duck Rock, his debut. (I've always wanted to try out Bow Wow Wow's debut, too [a tangent-- McLaren only organized that group], if only for its outrageous title-- and yes, this is the real title: See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy!.)

Jordi Savall: Les Voix Humaines. Savall seems to be an extremely tasteful, warm artist, his basic gig being performing and/or arranging early-to-mid-millenium music on period instruments. Here he plays solo on the "viola da gamba," two different ones ("bass-viol" and "lyra-viol"). It sounds to me, as one mainly uneducated in these periods, essentially like a very soft cello. Bach and Telemann are the only names I recognized out of several, but everything on this is gorgeous; it requires close (and rewarding) attention to tell the 20 different pieces apart, while making for lovely ambient music otherwise.

Stravinsky: Symphony in C/Symphony in Three Movements (L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Charles Dutoit). I have not heard this yet, but I cannot really imagine it being poor. So, that makes four out of five worthwhile purchases in a $6 shopping spree. Hot diggity!

Finally, a brief, only marginally music-related thought for this year's Thanksgiving: Denis Leary should have stopped doing comedy when he realized he could do drama. 'Night!

What it is!

2005-11-22T01:33:00.000-08:00

This is kind of a roundup. First of all, anyone can comment, now. Turns out there's a feature where I can make it so you don't have to register to make a note. Whoops!

The biggest news of the month (now that Aerial's out and E.T.R. is finished and pressed) is that Robert and Karen have a new album. It is called From the Nervous System and you can download it for free at the link. At least three years in the making, as I understand it, this ambitious and lovely 8-song piece reminded me of what I like about indie rock. Crashy rock, ambience and prog-style movements are the soup du jour, yet some of its tunes have seeped into my brain already. Highly recommended.

Speaking of pressings: in order to celebrate (?) the selling out of my 50-run of Meredith, it's now available on archive.org. Search for my name; there's a link to the right, as well, that already takes care of it for you.

I'm in Los Angeles, and a trip to the closing Aron's Records got me T. Rex's Tanx and a $3.99 copy of Gil & Milton, all at 20% off. (Check this lyrical post from Morgan's livejournal for thoughts inspired by the closing of Aron's.) T. Rex was purchased because the trailer for Neil Jordan's Pluto for Breakfast has made me aware that I am quite fond of "Children of the Revolution," which was a preceding single to Tanx and is available on the expanded remaster that I got. (Plus, I really haven't gotten into much rock in some time, so the time felt right.) The album is nice, a bouncy, meaty Visconti production riding on mellotron and Bolan's character. Further investigations shall occur. At Amoeba, I found Gil's Refavela at last (nice, too), as well as a Milton Nascimento album that hasn't appeared in Berkeley yet (there were actually two and I bought the wrong one; I meant to get Sentinela from 1980, yet purchased Milton Nascimento, opening track "Sentinela," from 1969... they had both, and I can explain the mixup simply by admitting carelessness), and finally another Thomas Mapfumo compilation, called Choice Chimurenga, this time from tunes released from 1998 to '02 or '03. I took a wonderful Benadryl-induced nap to the Mapfumo today.

In terms of a followup to a previously-introduced topical thread... only a substantial period of getting into ABBA could lead me into listening to the first musical I've purposely subjected myself to in a long, long time: the original studio recording of Andersson/Ulvaeus/Rice's Chess. I played it at the airport and on the plane. I tried my best to shed my dislike of the general tone of musicals and remember what it was like when I was a kid, listening to Guys & Dolls and Andrew Lloyd Webber a lot and really getting a lot out of it. It worked, sometimes; I really love the song "Nobody's Side," and the "Quartet" near the beginning is delightful, among other pleasures (including the inimitable "One Night in Bangkok" ... now that's some awkward goodness). Some of the moves in the ballads really turned me off, and longer, less rock-oriented and more dramatic sections would occasionally lose me. I do feel as if I'll listen to it on the whole at least one more time, though. Nothing like a dip in the ABBA bath to help you lose your musical inhibitions. I've certainly got easier inhibitions to shed than some, of course; I'm already a fan of Sachiko M, for instance, whereas someone who starts with ABBA may never, ever even come close.

I'm seeing John Cale on Saturday night with Daniel and Todd. I'm in talks to write it up for West Coast Performer. Hopefully he'll make it an impressive show; I expect the rock side of Cale, if blackAcetate is any indication.

On Friday night, Nov. 25, I'm supposed to be singing one or two of my tunes with my brother's band, the Archbishops. One of them could be "Helmet"... one of them could be "Meredith/Square One"... why don't you find out, if you can? It's at the Roxy and I think the Archies are on at 9 PM.

I must have more to say-- maybe it's in some of my computer notes at home-- but I shall leave you all with this, featuring (about 2/3 down, I guess) the most harrowing film scoring tale I've heard in some time. A glimpse towards the big end of one of my currently developing trades, an end I hope not to find myself in. (Surely it should be easy to ensure that. Shouldn't it?)

Quiet down!

2005-11-12T19:24:00.000-08:00

I have found an album that is as quiet as (actually, the tiniest bit quieter than) E.T.R.: Real Gone by Tom Waits. Thank god. I'm not worried anymore. Meredith and E.T.R. are both particularly quiet albums (E.T.R. even more so), and I wondered if it was a huge problem; it's the best I could do with the mixes the way I liked them, at least without mastering. Now I find it sounds about as good as a Tom Waits album? Couldn't be happier about that.

Just came from The Passenger (Antonioni, 1975) at the Act I & II. The last two movies John and I have seen there have had long stretches of quiet which were unceremoniously augmented by the bass frequencies from the theater below. I can get over things like that; I just find it amusing. In fact, in this case, it assisted even further in my appreciation of the sonic landscape of the film: essentially no music! Only well-done ambient sound. The four situations in which there was brief music really stood out, and one of them was a car radio blasting by for less than one second. Yet another example to support my case that a score is not always necessary. A film can carry itself without it. In a strange way, actually, Nashville (which I watched last night, and appreciated very much) was practically a movie without a score-- not in the way I've been suggesting, but it made me think of the idea all the same. There were many songs, but they were all performed live or played on radios, and so they scored the lives of the characters as much as they did the film.

I'm very quickly exploring Milton Nascimento's '70s work and much of it is immediately intoxicating. Something about some of his arrangements and soundscapes draws me in right away, and I'm also really intrigued by how often he reworks his material. That's something I'm surprised more people don't do; when you've got a composition that you like, why not revisit it now and then? (See track 3 on Spencer Owen and the last two tracks on E.T.R. for proof that I think this is a good thing; I've done it with a couple more ideas as well.)

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: (iTunes random) "And She Was," Talking Heads; "Artifacts of the Black Rain," In Flames; "Impatience," Elvis Costello; "This Is for Me and I Know Everyone Knows," Blonde Redhead; "Ghost Hide Your Eyes," Merzbow; "Prrr," Makigami Koichi; "Beanstalk," Jeff Parker; "Iron's Theme (Conclusion)," Ghostface Killah

Comin' down!

2005-11-09T00:12:00.000-08:00

My days feel emptier (in a good way) now that I've finished my album. I've ordered 100 copies with artwork, and those'll be $5, not to mention I'm sending out free CD-Rs or mp3s to anyone who wants them. The condition on the CD-R (if you want me to send it through the mail, that is) is that you only get it if you want me to make you a mix CD, too-- and you have to tell me what kind. Give me an assignment. That's how I like it.

Probably the final word on Kate Bush for a while: Aerial has not disappointed. Most likely going to finish in my top 5. I've definitely given it several listens and I see myself putting it on in the near future (tonight?). I have trouble describing it, and why I like it. John interrupted my struggling the other night to say, "You're just a fan!" 'Course that's true, but it's also a record amongst others, not only by Kate Bush but also by anyone I've ever heard! I wanted to call it an "adult contemporary masterpiece" but that falls a bit short of describing the breadth of the material. There are moments in which I am reminded of Joni Mitchell, The The, Fleetwood Mac, recent Bowie... and yet it's all so uniquely Kate. Mike (a fellow fan, and unfortunately an Aerial detractor) complained that she hasn't got anything to sing about, but it really pushes the right buttons to hear her sing numbers for most of a song, or make a chorus out of "washing machine... washing machine..." (and the rest of the lyrics of that song, by the way, are just plain sensual, and evocative, and great). Granted, the Joan of Arc number could have better lyrics (great song nonetheless-- that's the recent Bowie one), and I admit I dislike one song ("Somewhere in Between"-- title phrase is a bit cringeworthy, isn't it... she doesn't do anything great with it, either). Overall, though, I've got a musically exquisite, thoughtful, substantial Kate record on my hands, and I'm pleased as punch about it. (Not to mention that you would be unlikely to find me kickin' to the curb any record with a one-two slugger as potent as "Pi" and "Bertie.")

Madonna, on the other hand-- heh. Granted, I don't feel like she's had a hand in anything great since a couple tunes on Ray of Light (and might I add, I thought that "Don't Tell Me" song was just "decent" in the end). Confessions on a Dancefloor is really too weak for words, though. It's too bad that tepid Eurodance really does get people moving in the club or else there'd be no excuse. Unfortunately, there's absolutely no justification for the monstrosity of the song "I Love New York." Sincerity? Satire? Utter hogwash. One of the worst songs I've heard in quite a while. No, I think you need to see some of these lyrics:

If you don't like my attitude, you can F off
Just go to Texas, isn't that where they golf
New York is not for little pussies who scream
If you can't stand the heat, then get off my street
(get off my street-- get off my street-- get off my street...)

Imagine that sung very deliberately and forcefully, in a low, demanding tone, over a dance beat, with lots of time in between each line to think about what she just sang. What? Did you say ... chorus, you wanted to see the chorus? Really? Well, I have to warn you, it's-- FINE, YOU'RE THE BOSS:

Other cities always make me mad
Other places always make me sad
No other city ever made me glad
Except New York
I love New York

It almost makes me want to stop writing here and now, until I remember why Madonna's album is important. You see, she sampled ABBA's "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)" for the (weak) single "Hung Up," and when I heard it, it immediately occurred to me that the song from which that sample was pulled had to be superior. Well, I was right, and that's when I discovered that sometimes, I love ABBA. The song had been erroneously appended to the bonus tracks of the album Super Trouper by a Soulseek user, along with the actual bonus track "Elaine," in the case of which song I say that if you have not heard it, you are a lost soul. Definition: pure and perfect pop. And while the other actual bonus track (something about a sombrero) was basically garbage, Super Trouper really took me by surprise! I like most of it a whole lot! Well, I've gone investigating the rest of their career, and needless to say, it's spotty, but there are some incredible gems ("The Name of the Game" from The Album, for instance, or "Should I Laugh or Cry" from the bonuses for The Visitors, and I feel it especially important to remind everyone just how good "Dancing Queen" is). The Visitors, in fact, not only as a record but as a record by a set of minds that appeal to me, happens to fall into that ever-so-slim flawed-record category that makes it prime for the covering in my annual cover album project. I've special ordered Voulez-Vous (presumably their most disco work) from Amoeba, and I think that should about do it for ABBA until I get to work on ABBA: "The Visitors" by Spencer Owen in early 2006.

Okay, that's about all that's been eating me lately. Oh, and one more thing: if you've got a friend with the brand new Trapped in the Closet Chapters 1-12 DVD, go ahead and watch it, but don't waste the money yourself. Robert Kelly went and wasted all the non-awkward melodic invention and charm he could've managed on those first five chapters; the rest (uh, spoiler alert) sound forced, and content-wise, range from obvious and inconsequential (yes, the policeman's wife is having another man's baby, obviously) to the height of unexpected absurdity (that other man is a midget). I am unsure if I will want to see or hear anymore chapters in the saga... unless he changes up the music.

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: Under an Hour, Menomena; Suspicious Activity?, the Bad Plus

Nice guys finish first!

2005-11-05T01:10:00.000-08:00

Spencer Owen's 16th album, E.T.R. (Electric 3rd R-Word)

1. Sleeping in Public (4:17)
2. Double Double (5:40)
3. Romance on the Rail (2:25)
4. *Phenomenon* (7:13)
5. (Did You) Tie Me Down (Or Up?) (4:14)
6. What Is a Spotlight? (4:12)
7. One Night (5:30)
8. (I Think, Therefore) Persona (2:29)
9. I Want You to Know (4:43)
10. It's So Easy (5:08)
11. (__'_ __ ____) (0:38)

Usual cast of instruments: electric guitars, synthesized organ, electric bass, melodica, steel guitar, percussion (toy drums, Zildjian hi-hat, egg shaker, tambourines, etc.), and the almighty KAOSS. Recorded on a Tascam 488 mkII. Completed on Nov. 5, 2005. Distributed by way of CD-Rs and mp3s (at first), potentially with a small pressing.

Now, regular life can resume. Maybe I'll even watch a movie soon.

Long time no see!

2005-11-01T20:05:00.000-08:00

Morgan came over last night, crashed here and spent the day. We had a lovely time. At Amoeba, I purchased three more or less blind stabs in the dark: Semi-Formal by the Claudia Quintet (a supposedly unclassifiable jazz album with keyboards, accordion, clarinets, sax, bass and drums); a disc of works for harpsichord and tack piano in alternate tunings by Lou Harrison, as performed by Linda Burman-Hall (incredibly ugly artwork, but I imagine it will be great); and Robert Carlos's 1970 debut (the only one of these three I've listened to and it's abysmal; maybe I need to hear his earlier work but it's unlikely... I can't tell for the life of me how this guy positively influenced the tropicalia folks, and maybe I had to be there, since Caetano conveys a lot about Carlos's attitude talking about him in Tropical Truth, but the record just sounds like sappy easy listening with the occasional drab Motown knockoff). I forgot that I actually wanted to pick up Horace Andy's Good Vibes, but I'll look for it next time.

Morgan picked some music as well, most notably Joe Zawinul's Zawinul, his first solo album. The main reason this is notable is for the liner note by Miles Davis, which ranks as one of the finest liner notes ever created.

Zawinul is extending the thoughts we've all had for years. And probably the thoughts that most so-called musicians have not yet been able to express.

MILES DAVIS

P.S. Dig the two drummers and Herbie with the Echoplex - and the clear funky black soprano sound - and the setting that Woody has to play in. All these musicians are set up. Joe sets up the musicians so they have to play like they do, in order to fit the music like they do. In order to fit this music you have to be "Cliche-Free." In order to write this type of music, you have to be free inside of yourself and be Josef Zawinul with two beige kids, a black wife, two pianos, from Vienna, a Cancer, and "Cliche-Free."

My album's 7/10 done. November 5 is still the goal. I am attempting to download Aerial by Kate Bush, at last. She's been the only artist I've listened to consistently while working on music these last days, and it's really not showing through my music, at least as far as I can tell, but maybe it will next time. I did listen to the Fiery Furnaces' Rehearsing My Choir and felt as if it was quite special, like discovering a wonderful NPR story-program with a great score. I haven't yet listened to it again-- the prospect of listening again seems more like re-viewing a film than re-listening to an album, but it is still music; based on the one spin, it's the work of theirs I admire most and have enjoyed most all the way through. Critics aren't enjoying it because it's not a pop album. Oh, no! I felt some similarities to the Residents' Not Available, overall a more successful album for "music-listening" purposes (one of my favorites, in fact), but as I've been hinting, I'm not even sure Choir was made for those purposes.

Anyway, this is a requisite check-up, posted mainly to voice that remarkable liner note. Oh, and my review of Sick Bees can be found right here, or in your local music retailer that's "cool" enough to distribute West Coast Performer to you. It would probably be more fun for all of us to read it in print, so if you want to hunt it down, go for it.

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: (iTunes random) "Elektro (he held the world in his iron grip)," Stereolab; "Mediterranean Pukoo," Ruins-Hatoba; "Bat Macumba," Gilberto Gil; "Quicksilver," Korekyojinn; "War on Jazz II: or How I Learned to Love the War on Jazz," Destroyer; "Bungalow," XTC; "Suncidal Cendencies (Vision - Creation - Newsun)," Boredoms

Ooh, baby! (pt. 2)

2005-10-25T22:08:00.000-07:00

I know this is my third post today but I really thought I should clarify. "Sexual Healing" is six minutes long, not ten. (I got it from Mod Lang today.) The admittedly sketchy note on the Amazon website must have phrased it wrong; the CD's just over 10 minutes total, not the B-side, as it was worded. I was a bit disappointed at first, but then I listened to it. "Seksyewuhl healin'" is right. Kate brings it, and not only does she bring it, she brings it with some traditional Irish instrumentation. The very familiar-sounding, woodwind-sounding breath-controlled instrument that is in many traditional Irish ensembles is found throughout, and takes a solo in the final two minutes. Never before have you (and never again will you) associate this sound with geting it on R&B-style, but I am glad that it has happened once. Generally a faithful cover, and is comparable to the original, although I'd probably rather listen to Kate than ol' Marv.

Went on eBay recently and found this, which I just received in the mail today: Lo-Fi: ~Electro Acoustical & Radical~. One of those Boredoms-related items that would make my eyes pop out were it in the CD racks of the Japanese Fringe section of the SF Amoeba. (Any other section would do, as well, but that's the most likely.) Very rare. It fills a hole in my collection. I feel like I recognize the riffs on "Adba Gadba Hey," and "Trash" is a fantastic punk piss-take (but really, all the songs are piss-takes of something). Some fine eYe artwork, and great liner notes, if only for featuring more fine eYe artwork, not to mention yielding the "all time best 5" as named by Melt-Banana (who are on the disc three times), at least circa 1995:

1. "For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder ?" / the POP GROUP (ROUGH TRADE)
2. "Complete Discography" / Minor Threat (DISCHORD)
3. "Mirror Repair" / Gastr del sol (DRAG CITY)
4. "Camembert Electrique" / GONG ( BYG)
5. "No New York" / V.A. (???)

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: "Sexual Healing," Kate Bush; "Sexual Healing," Marvin Gaye

What a show!

2005-10-25T17:40:00.000-07:00

The most recent post in David Byrne's journal is about musical showmanship. Give this guy an award-- oh wait, he's already recevied several, including one for his blog, well, fine then. When I'm at middle age, presuming I haven't been blown up with everyone else, I'd like to be as sharp-minded and insightful about basic, everyday concepts of presence and presentation (and so much more) as Mr. Byrne is. He's very quotable, so I would quote it, but I want everyone to go and read. Could be my very favorite website.

Keeping his terms in mind, I think my show is a combination between early new wave methods of presentation and the emo variety. I allow my full-blast nervous energy to take the reins, but in its own way, that is a method of control.

By the way, speaking of Pitchfork (as I did in the post some hours previous), Ballbearings Pinatas got its first PFM namedrop in the latest news article about Animal Collective, referencing the original release of House Arrest. I sure hope House Arrest will be his best received work yet. It is the first (and still by far my favorite) record that I've heard by Mr. Pink. As for BBP... well, the site hasn't been updated since May, and Jeff promised a compilation joining us all together (From U.S. to I) was going to be out late summer, so I hope it's still in the works.

Should I get back in touch with Ariel? Is he too busy? Too famous? Wonder how he feels about all this Kate Bush hubbub. For Kate he no longer waits, it seems...

Give me a break!

2005-10-25T15:47:00.000-07:00

Pitchfork Writer X (can't tell the difference between them anymore) has this to say about the "recommended" Joggers: "With a Cape and a Cane sounds merely like a solid indie rock record on a passing listen; give it a few more spins and you will be rewarded."

Just listened to some Amazon samples and my initial jaded post-indie-rock-listener reactions were right. This isn't a manifestation of my Pitchfork grudge; it's a reaction to what appears to be the norm for the music on the radar of those "in tune" with what's "hip." This is "merely...a solid indie rock record," and you can't convince me otherwise. I know it's a matter of opinion, but it's also a matter of analysis. I find it very pretentious of these folks to suggest that they're not simply fans of "solid indie rock" by throwing out terms like "merely." They love it because it's indie rock. Why attempt to explain it away by making up reasons why it's extraordinary? Might as well even describe everything the way you already do; just don't pretend it's special.

I hope I'm no longer guilty of this stuff, myself. I'm sure I used to be.

Ooh, baby!

2005-10-24T17:41:00.000-07:00

Word has it that Kate's version of "Sexual Healing," from the "King of the Mountain" CD-single that just came out today in the UK, is over 10 minutes long.

I don't even know what to do about that but buy it. Stopping by Mod Lang in the next couple days to take care of that.

Tascam's back. Full half an album complete. Tonight will probably begin on either the sixth song or the score for the play. Got to make the next installment in my mix CD club for Jamie-- his requested theme is "symmetry" this time, and last time it was "basslines." I prefer receiving creative assignments (or at the very least setting them for myself) than just making things entirely up as I go along. Some guidelines are necessary. Curious how school was such a drag, even with that in mind. Realized (way too late) the genius of the album Bridge Over Troubled Water this weekend. Every experiment works (and the album has nothing but), and that percussion and those synths are like rockets to the stars. Gonna have to hear that Fiery Furnaces record; I lost interest in even Blueberry Boat at some point ("Quay Cur" and "Straight Street" would probably still do it for me, though) but I'm still hoping for a They Were Wrong So We Drowned-sized ratio of critical alienation to personal fulfillment. (Only album I've ever seen to get one star in Rolling Stone.) Speaking of which, can I hear Liars' Drum's Not Dead yet? Not coming out until February, you say? NO.

Gave a comfort spin to Diamond Dogs last night (that's my #1 "Bowie comfort album"), and despite having the same qualms with Remain in Light as ever, the remastering brings out the heights higher than ever. Thrilling darkness. Africa through the jangled nerves of the white man. Adrian Belew.

Also I'm really just kind of thinking about Kate Bush all the time.

You should read an entertaining post over at my friend Morgan's livejournal because it isn't getting very much better than this.

Try this on for size!

2005-10-20T17:51:00.000-07:00

I'm probably not going to blog until sometime next week (I know, cry about it); my folks are visiting this weekend and I'm looking forward to a relaxing, fun time. Monday and Tuesday are my last days on this job and starting Monday I'll be recording again-- THAT'S RIGHT, Bruce of East Bay Audio Repair seems to have been for real; I'm picking up my machine tomorrow. He still claims some "calibration issues" but I imagine that if he didn't screw it up anymore, it's as good as it was, and it was good.

Between now and my next post, everyone listen to Thomas Mapfumo's singles collection from 1977-1986, Spirits to Bite Our Ears. That's a little piece of me (and a slightly bigger piece of Zimbabwean history) to take with you.

A couple quick wrap up notes. The San Jose concert will not be taking place next weekend as initially scheduled. Updates as they come. There may be a concert at the Hotel Utah on January 17th. If there is, it will certainly feature Spencer Owen. It may also feature one to three of your favorite friends of mine (and who are your favorite friends of mine but all of the ones that make music, of course! [excepting, naturally, anyone that has influenced my recordings or appeared on the cover of Meredith (or, for that matter, why don't we just go with the idea that they're all incredible people, so really you can just limit it to some of the musicians I know that live in the Bay Area, thanks)]). AND FINALLY mark my words: E.T.R. (Electric 3rd R-Word) WILL DROP NOVEMBER 5TH. MARK THEM AND MARK THEM WELL.

Double take!

2005-10-18T14:16:00.000-07:00

These two albums were released in 2005. I listened to them again last night and I had a fresh/expanded take on each, and so they were on my mind, and so now I'm writing about them.

1. John Cale's blackAcetate: ultimately, not very good... but wait! What is nice about the album-- not so much the songs as the overall effort-- is that the obvious fresh/inspired energy that went into its creation does a good deal to keep my positive feelings intact, especially for his upcoming concert appearance (got my TICKET, SNICKET). Where the album fails on the merits of content is generally on its straightforward rock numbers. "Perfect" and "Turn the Lights On," the two drivin' rock singles, are both fairly insipid in that sort of "I don't actually want to listen to this" way, although similar-minded opener "Outta the Bag" manages to charm (two reasons, among others[?]: falsetto, and a hint of R&B). There are a couple exercises in nouvelle-hip-hop-dirty-soft-dada-pop: "Brotherman" is incredibly bizarre, and the equally spacious "Hush" is, as I claimed several posts back, a delicious 2005-bathed song that should be the single (and in fact will lead off a mix CD for a friend that he has commissioned with the title Gospel Bootcamp). What I mean to say about this album is that it has four or five wonderful songs (and I mean that); the rest is not very good but curious nonetheless; and even "Perfect," which I haven't liked listening to one bit (John can attest to this based on my out-loud reactions), still has a "gosh darnit, I'm doin' this" kind of greatness that makes me reconsider the track as I'm humming the hook the next day (today, right now).

Anyway, you can tell that I'm conflicted. Ultimately the main thing I can definitively claim is that it's reminiscent of the spirit of his Island years (as compiled in the essential 2CD set, uh, The Island Years). So what I really mean to say is: better than HoboSapiens. Isn't blackAcetate a better pun, too? Scandalous.

2. Matthew Herbert's Plat du Jour: I'm not actually very motivated to say something about this anymore, but I'd better sum it up in a sentence. These are the details behind it, and they're great to read, but listening is an entirely different experience; it's a pleasant, consistent mood record with round, glass-like tones carrying all the melodies and a very calm, electro-swingin' European rhythmic sensibility (a sort of trademark of Herbert's), and despite Herbert's tunes now and then falling prey to Sequencer Syndrome ("I use a sequencer and so I thought these up when I was programming"), overall they're real nice and I like almost every moment, even if the record fails to convey much of its political furor through its sonic element, which I would consider a minus only if it didn't have going for it what it does. So there's the sentence.

It's really neat for anyone to read that link, though; just don't let it get your hopes up about what the album might sound like. Try to reconcile what I've said with those notes, and then see if you're interested.

UPDATE: Some actual news ... the fella at East Bay Audio Repair tells me that my darling, newly adopted son, the Tascam 488 mkII, turns on. He wanted to run some tests on the performance, apparently, before he gave it back to me; I guess that's a good idea. I could have it back by Friday ... THANK YOU DEITY.

Al-right!

2005-10-17T17:32:00.000-07:00

A couple of pretty alright things happened this weekend and I thought it might be nice to quickly go over them here.

I saw the great Deerhoof on Friday and it really did me good. Satomi played guitar for almost all the new songs! What a pleasant surprise. She had a very charismatic noise guitar solo closing out "Rrrrright" as well. Tunes from The Runners Four took precedence and they were all that I'd hoped for in a live incarnation. Each of the two stringmen took a turn on lead vox, as well, another first that I've seen. I've never seen a band so uniquely beam with energy as Deerhoof does. Pretty much anyone I know who likes any interesting rock music should go see them play.

My acquaintances in Whysp (with whom I played at Fletcher's house, alongside Josephine Foster and Nick Castro as well) were the first opening band; they sounded at their best, even though most of the crowd was talking. Then Octis (Mick Barr)! Boy! What a lucky thing that I got to see this guy by chance. He made nonstop sound with his electric guitar for about 30 minutes. For the first half of the performance, he went from metal riffing to more genre-less technical ostinatos to Fripp-ish tone clusters, barely ever stopping to rest his rhythmically-chopping picking hand. By the second half, any doubts that I might have had about how well he had planned this performance were shot down by the inclusion of a drum machine for some ridiculously precise, basically totally unrepetitive tech-metal blasting. HIGHLY impressed by this entire display, the kind of show that inspires a burst of laughter every five minutes, having completely given yourself over to the spectacle. Cannot wait to hear his albums. His work on Orthrelm's OV had already impressed me quite a bit (not to mention drummer Josh Blair of course), but to see it live was enough to turn me to a stone-cold fan.

At the show I saw Rob Little and his housemate Chris, Julia Mewes and some of her friends (including a gal who works with my temp agency), and Todd, with whom I went back to his house in San Jose to crash and, the next day, play music. I got to play drums for the first time in quite a while and this is always remarkably therapeutic. It is exercise and rhythmic fulfillment; every time I sit down at a kit now is an exploration. I realized that without noticing, my style has developed more and more into a loose yet mechanical beast. Hip hop nuance, both double- and half-time triplets, improved bass pedal control, playing around the beat-- it's all true. Is it Brazil? Could be...; anyway, maybe this means I'll record a couple numbers with a kit if my 8-track gets fixed by the next time I go to San Jose.

Todd & I worked out ten very short songs; on half, I play guitar and he plays drums, and vice versa for the other half. They're fun, and they were fun to make; they'll be a decent, brief, puzzling opening act for my set on Oct. 29 at the theater on the San Jose State campus. It's a free show; still, will anyone attend? I'll post another mention of it closer to the event, I'm sure. John's going to show a video or two, as well; his works are truly unique and I, personally, love them.

Oh, and the name of my project with Todd is the Blendorphins. Look out.

p.s. You've heard of the Free Fiona campaign, the one that tried to get Extraordinary Machine released (and ... succeeded? I guess?). Well, I've got my own Free Fiona campaign, or, if you'd rather, Cheap Fiona. The Warfield show is $40!! GOD! That's $52 after Ticketmaster charges! Don't do that, people! It's Fiona Apple! Fifteen or twenty bucks cheaper and everyone would still be rich. I guess this is God's way of saying I don't need to go see her, but I'd sure like to. Sayeth the Apple, "Oh well."

p.p.s. EVIL. Get me to New York or get this club out here or build a nationwide speed-train right from the BART station to this club 'cause this is too much.

Two in a day!

2005-10-14T17:09:00.000-07:00

For the first time, I had a mind to click on one of the "related links" on the side of a Gmail message; the headline grabbed me. According to Carlos Santana, Gene Simmons is not a musician.

What a battle! Did this just come out of the middle of an interview? What a silly guy, that Santana. It's true that I might even like an old Santana song or two, whereas I can't name a single KISS song I enjoy. It's also true that Gene Simmons is a chauvinist bloodsucker. Santana, though ... what a foolish thing. I can only presume that he's placing himself in the pantheon of "real musicians," though I'd like to see the conversation or at least the whole source for this. Give me a break, though. It's sound and visuals. It's ridiculous to start conversations about who is a real musician and who is not in the year 2005-- especially if your target is Gene Simmons, but even if it isn't. "A musician doesn't need the mask and mascara." Talk about confusing the persona with the person. Baloney!

That being said, I have a kind of strong distaste for Santana's playing sometimes, and I hate his hits from Supernatural more than anything KISS could throw at me, so my personal opinion about this new rivalry (?) is more along the lines of "don't even go there 'less you ready to come all the way back, chump change."

Tangentially: what is this monstrosity of a website that this article comes from? How is it assembled and for whose interests? Is it solely to be found from links on the sidebars of Gmail messages, and from search engine hits? It looks like 1/3 spam, 1/3 links to other sites, 1/3 ... original content? I guess the internet is filled with sites just like the countless privately owned convenience stores in Berkeley; gives 'em what they want, just in case they missed it about half-a-block back.

Laffs aplenty!

2005-10-14T15:42:00.000-07:00

Coming from me, "novelty" has very negative associations; I take music with humor very seriously, and only when the silly rises over the sounds would I call it "novelty music." (My roommate John uses the term differently, but who would we all be if we weren't different, am I right?) What keeps Danger Doom's The Mouse and the Mask from sinking into full-on novelty is the talent of Doom foremost, with Danger's capable beats taking the sidecar. The [adult swim] folks are amusing, especially Master Shake and the Moononites (although Meatwad rapping as a "bonus" is pretty intolerable), but if you don't like the [adult swim] shows, I can only imagine sheer contempt arising at their every appearance. As for Doom, he either raps about the characters and scenarios from the shows, or uses them as an associative starting point; nevertheless, his flow is always a basic pleasure. If only they'd put as much effort into filling out Venomous Villain, which is only about half of a brilliant album, in retrospect.

Meanwhile, the two people that I told about Lightning Bolt this weekend commented on how silly the name was. Lightning Bolt do a fantastic job at skirting the edges of absurdity while turning out absolutely stunning music. Hypermagic Mountain unfolded into even more glory the second time than it did the first. They are to American rock energy what Melt-Banana is to Japanese rock energy.

Oh, boy, am I feeling stagnant, though. It's been a week without my machine, and like I said in an e-mail to a friend recently, I feel like I'm missing the third limb I grew up with. Sure, I turned in two reviews for WCP, I'm seeing Deerhoof tomorrow, I'm seeing my friend Lee Lynch's debut feature length film tonight at midnight (didn't even know the movie existed until a couple days ago; it's at the Balboa, it's free, come on down), I've got the Katamari sequel coming in the mail, I'm loving Umberto Eco... but I'm at the turning point of my album. Honestly. As I said to John yesterday, it's like seeing the first part of a two-part episode of your favorite TV show. Something is going to happen and I don't know what. It's really, really bothering me.

Ha, ha!

I'm working here for another week and two days now; maybe I should get some music in here. It's allowed, after all.

I love it!

2005-10-12T13:57:00.000-07:00

Not only am I seeing Deerhoof this Saturday (with Octis and Whysp opening, what a show!), but also, well, I don't mean to brag, but check West Coast Performer in a couple months for a review of The Runners Four penned by yours truly.

Oh, and that new Lightning Bolt album, that's some kinda heavy. Bought a delay pedal, it seems. Got into the metal riffin' a bit more. Good work, Brians. Probably their best "album," and as many memorable songs as their other albums, plus it's their longest yet at 12 songs and 56 minutes. Sweet.

Really just wanted to let off some excitement about that review. Feel free to move along.

Bust city!

2005-10-11T14:47:00.000-07:00

As of the last writing, each of the two (of three) CDs I had bought at Amoeba on Sunday were a bust. Well, turns out the third one's no exception: Barra 69, a recording of the concert that Caetano Veloso & Gilberto Gil gave before being exiled out of the country. Should've paid more attention to the reputation. It's just as bad as described, EXCEPT-- the performance isn't even as good as they say! In person, one might have been as enraptured as their fellow music-loving Bahian, and the audience is warm and enthusiastic, but on record, the only thing as bad as the overall terrible sound quality is some of the sloppiness of the performance. (In case you're not paying attention, that adds up to essentially no redeeming qualities.) The worst is that "Aquele Abraco" loses its sense of groove on the chorus. That's what that song is ABOUT! People. Hunt down Gilberto Gil's 1969 self-titled album. "Aquele Abraco" is one of the finest songs I've heard, a samba. In Tropical Truth, Caetano Veloso describes in rapturous detail the moment he first heard it from his friend Gil; he says he cried. Well, the performance on Barra 69 may have been historic, but it's simply not very good.

Thanks to this reminder, however, I'd forgotten until now to place a well-deserved "caveat emptor" on the El reissue of A Banda Tropicalista do Duprat. Rogerio Duprat was a friend of the tropicalismo and arranged many of the classic tropicalia records, including, I believe, many or all of the self-titled Veloso & Gil albums. Here is the review I placed on Amazon: "If you listen to this Rogerio Duprat reissue and enjoy it, either you're even more of a fan of harsh noise music than I am (and I'm a bit more than casually into it myself), or you otherwise have managed to get past what I consider to be a fine display of a label's untenable lack of integrity. Appears to have been played off of a beat up record with a dirty needle. The most charitable read suggests that this was the best or only possible source material available; if it MUST be released in this condition, put a warning sticker on the front. Nearly every mid-range sound is unpleasantly distorted at any reasonable listening volume, and there are not many other types of sounds to speak of. If I'd heard this before buying it, I wouldn't have. " I didn't bother saying that I found the music hadn't aged well either; that's a much more subjective point.

You should listen, however, to David Byrne's Rei Momo. It's not his most consistent solo album (I still believe that honor goes to David Byrne, occasionally referred to as David Enryb), but it's his most distinctive, with some of the most powerful songs he's ever thought up. Did I do a bit on this already? If you've ever been interested in any music the man's made, I say go listen to it. I get "Make Believe Mambo" in my head all the time, and "Don't Want to Be Part of Your World" (surprise, a samba!) is not only what Ariel should've sung in The Little Mermaid, but also in the running for my favorite song Byrne's touched... aside from, of course, "This Must Be the Place," which gets its own category.

For those not in the know: I sometimes refer to "Sharkey's Day" by Laurie Anderson as my favorite song, but the only song that gets the title more often is "This Must Be the Place." It has been my favorite song since I was a child more consistently than any other. It indirectly inspired my song "The Method," as well as most of the other pop songs I've made. My biological father, who committed suicide before I turned 5, can be seen on a videotape lipsyncing to the song and doing Byrne's incredible lamp dance from Stop Making Sense. I probably saw him do it on the tape before I saw Byrne do it in the film, but I can't be sure. I wonder if the moment or the song would touch me as much as it does without the association. Considering how many people it touches on its own, or for their own associations, I say it doesn't really matter.

I'm not going to weigh in on the Talking Heads reissues much. Suffice it to say, I've got them now, and they're necessary for any fan of the band. (If you plan to buy them, no need to run out and get the "brick" box set; they'll be individually released in a few months.) There will be plenty of talk about them, and there will probably be a ridiculous Pitchfork review, so y'all can just look for that. One thing I don't think anyone will say (whether it doesn't occur to them or they simply disagree) is that "Fela's Riff," one of the four "unfinished outtakes" from Remain in Light, would be a perfect backdrop for Yoko circa '71. Gonna see if I can't make that happen a little bit later. YES IT'S MASHUP TIME.

Revolutionizing Hollywood!

2005-10-10T16:58:00.000-07:00

I have an idea that will revolutionize Hollywood! (If you understand this as a reference, you are one of a very small group of people in the world, and in fact, I would be surprised you are reading this.)

If you're a director, and it's time to make music for your movie, and the results turn out something like they did in Capote (scored by Mychael Danna, whose filmography screams "hack," despite my not having seen any of the other movies he's worked on... although I will be seeing Tideland, in all likelihood), try something really bold and crazy: no original score. I know, it's wacky, and I know there's probably a film composer out there who could do your film justice, but maybe you won't find him or her, and maybe you aren't good at deciding where the music should go, anyway. Just try it. Your club scene needs a swingin' tune, that's okay, but otherwise: no music. But how to convince the heads of the studios? Maybe there should be some sort of "no music" day, where all the filmmakers in the studio system announce that their films will not feature a score.

Anyway, forget "Rich Girl." (Also, that comment about Jewish culture-- well, apparently Madonna's gettin' it mixed up in the tunes, too. The Kaballah, that is. No, I won't link to an article, y'all can just figure it out. Song's called "Isaac." We'll see if the music reflects the subject matter.) I mean, okay, "Rich Girl" is good, but I have a stunning confession. I heard "Hollaback Girl" for the very first time on Friday night. Yes. Not just "for the first time all the way through." The first time, period. Am I the only person actually blown away by this song? Did I miss the seismic jolt of heart-folding glee in the hipstelligentsia-sphere? What a beautiful, funny song! It was my most played track over the weekend. Also, even though L.A.M.B. is overall a rather poor album, "Rich Girl" falls to "3rd best Stefani track" due to Andre 3000's hijacking of the end of the album with "Long Way to Go," more or less a Love Below outtake with Gwen singing backup. We all should know how much I love my Love Below.

"Long Way to Go" is the second time I've noticed Outkast taking over an album on the last song. Mystikal's Let's Get Ready ended with the Outkast-written-and-produced "Neck uv da Woods," and it was so much their song that Mystikal even drops out before the last couple minutes, leaving Andre & Big Boi to sweep up. Maybe I should get them to do that for one of my albums sometime.

Some more unclassifiable reports:

Ni Hao!, Gorgeous: I'm telling you, these new quirky Japanese "garage" bands aren't doing it for me... first Afriframpo, now this. The energy isn't enough to do these gals justice on these records; the songs are too pedestrian. I would like to see them live, but I don't care about their CDs one bit.

London Is the Place for Me: Trinidadian Calypso in London, 1950-1956: I thought I should give this compilation lip service; ever since I borrowed it from Cory, I have been listening at least once a week. I love every track. Some of the coolest songs ever made are "I Was There (At the Coronation)" by Young Tiger (one day, I hope to find an entire Young Tiger CD; this is the only song of his on the compilation and I love the guy's voice), "Mix Up Matrimony" by Lord Beginner, "Aguiti" by Lord Invader, and "Kitch's Bebop Calypso" by Lord Kitchener. The compilers also hilariously bookended the disc with two Kitch songs, beginning with "London Is the Place for Me" about how marvelous it is to live in London, and concluding with "Sweet Jamaica" about how living in London is the most regrettable thing he's done.
(I'm going to seek out Klassic Kitchener Volume One, but I purchased Volume Two yesterday and didn't very much like the songs, nor the way they sounded on better, mid-'60s studio equipment; London features the far better collection of Lord Kitchener songs, so far, as he takes up 9 of the 20 tracks.)

Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine: Sorry everyone! Elizondo > Brion! Conventional label wisdom appears to have somehow won out this time around. Okay, so Brion's would have been a smash (of high quality, if not commerciality), and there really wasn't a dire need for a re-do, but even without criticizing the previous producer's vision (and said criticism is unnecessary anyway), the final version is simply better. Nicer sounds, more cohesive, more diverse in welcome ways. All spats aside, this is a truly great album, by far Apple's best work, whimsical tones and personal sentiment gelling into a record that's really a pleasure to hear. And this, if anything, had been established upon her debut, but nevertheless may I say: what a voice! I just may trek out to the Warfield to see her perform on November 25th... the night before the John Cale concert; boy, what a weekend that'd be.

HYPER DISASTER INDICATION

2005-10-07T17:45:00.000-07:00

Oh god! Okay, oh god, so, I get home yesterday-- the fourth day of my nightly recording regiment-- then I turn on the machine and nothing happens! I unplug it and try a different outlet then I turn it on again and nothing happens again except there is a sound-- a kind of sizzly, hissy, microscopic popcorn (oh, good phrase) kind of noise and it's coming FROM INSIDE THE MACHINE. Today John takes the machine into East Bay Audio Repair on my behalf, and, well, we'll see what in God's name will happen.

This is so nerve-wracking to me. In this type of crisis, I no longer see money as an object. I will pay to get this fixed. Case closed. It has been working so well... I have half an album done... I've agreed to score the Windward School play (yes, my old high school-- four years after scoring the play as a senior, The Skin of Our Teeth, the same man, theater professor Rob Duval [no, not Robert Duvall], is actually paying me to do it, so there's a deadline of mid-November and I wanted to start this weekend-- I hope this isn't the second time I'm explaining this, but this is Turboblog, so I'm not lookin' back now)... oh, mercy. I get so sad when these kinds of things happen. I went so long without a recording machine and now it has happened again.

How did I go almost my entire freshman year without making music? I guess it was such a ... freak adjustment to my lifestyle (dorm life, new people and all) that I didn't even bother. My 6-track was near my desk, untouched, for almost that whole year. Oh, if only I could transfer all the unused time on that machine to this one-- or even the old one! Anything would do for now!

I suppose to beg for a different reality would be to blaspheme against God's divine plan, as He is the keeper of all knowledge.

By the way, my numbering system is no longer. Systems that require arbitrary exceptions ... hmm, starting to look like bureaucracy to me.

Oh, and for some legitimate news, as I don't think this has been posted anywhere except on various venue sites (maybe some fan listings, who knows): John Cale may be coming to your town. Look out. He's playing Nov. 25-26 at the Cafe du Nord (!). He's playing in L.A. around that time too. Watch out for the original live saboteur, y'all.

Very brief epiphany.

2005-10-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

"Rich Girl" by Gwen Stefani, Eve and Dr. Dre is great. Dancehall rhythm guitar lightening up a plodding 1 & 3 groove... those lovely harmonies at the end (almost goosebump-worthy)... and what a genius idea to get some Jewish musical culture into a pop song! Who's ever done that? Great. Just on the virtue of this song I have to download L.A.M.B.

"All my barriers are going" - Kate Bush. (#24)

2005-10-03T17:19:00.000-07:00

Meanwhile the new Kate Bush album has a tracklist. Double album. (Presumably:) Long songs. Ooooh. Get excited. Time to listen to her whole career again. What? You say it's been several years since you heard The Red Shoes and even though you didn't really like it then, you should give it another shot? You say The Sensual World never really grew on you even though it should? You're not saying that? Who is? I am? Well in that case it's time to do something about it. The just-over-a-month countdown begins. Kate could be yet another star of the era that the last couple of years have revealed: the golden years of pop music as we know it, an industry full of people with 20-40 year careers priming themselves for their "comebacks" and/or stabs at their continued relevance and/or (since "relevance" is hell of subjective) liveliness. David Bowie, Elvis Costello, the Residents, Peter Gabriel, John Cale, Paul McCartney, Morrissey, the Rolling Stones (sigh), the Pixies (soon?), Gang of Four (soon again?), God, who else?

Meanwhile Merzbow puts out several albums a year, with releases on more labels than your average blogger (such as myself) has heard of in a lifetime. I have decided that when I see a new Merzbow release, I'll buy it. So far I tally three: Sphere, Merzbuddha and Senmaida. Any missing? Didn't Alien8 put one out? What makes Merzbow so great? He is one of those artists with whom you know exactly what to expect while never knowing what to expect. He is madly prolific and it's hard to say he's made a bad album, because everything I've heard is good to varying degrees, and he has so much more music than that. I can't even try to master the catalogue, only pick up whatever interests me, based on the album art, title, sticker quote, or, as I said, whether it's new.

Meanwhile I bought a Playstation 2. Here is the reason (if you've been reading, you shouldn't be all that surprised about this reason): Katamari Damacy. It takes over my brain. I've been thinking about it a couple times an hour while at work. I've never had urges to play a video game the way I've had urges to play this one. Grand Theft Auto is fun but I can never play it again and not care. I am actively interested in continuing to play this game. That is new. It is funny, though, how similar GTA is to Katamari, or any other game craze based in whole or part on wandering destruction (the best part of Katamari is how colorful and childlike it is, so the destruction is candy coated to a certain degree). Here is the best part of all these games: no, not just the music, the sound as a whole. Using Katamari as an example: generally, they've created songs for their soundtrack that can repeat for extended periods of time, both without irritating the listener and while making them feel quite content with the sonic environment; however, when you roll over a building, you hear an enormous group of people screaming bloody murder. You might be seeing the effect of a ball rolling across the terrain, picking up giant octopi and ocean liners, but without the sound, you'd remain unconvinced. The sound makes it visceral. What your fingers are doing is causing this to happen. The size and definition of the television screen that people normally play these games on might be what requires the foley to be that much more vibrant and impressive, but whatever they're doing in those sound studios, it works. With a nudge of the joystick, you're making people scream-- loudly.

And speaking of making people scream (ha ha)-- meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile I am not Not NOT going to let this distract me from finishing either my album or my track for the Astral Flares compilation (link to the right). I'm going to record nightly until I'm done. Got it?

MUSIC IN MY HEAD WHILE WRITING: "The Infant Kiss" and "The Big Sky," Kate Bush; "Promise to You Girl," Paul McCartney

Playing a building.

2005-10-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

David Byrne has developed an installation entitled "Playing the Building."

If only I lived everywhere at once! I would travel constantly if it weren't so expensive.

More soon.

MAGIC! (#23)

2005-09-28T15:59:00.000-07:00

The end credits post looms. In the horizon. The distant, distant horizon. (Are some horizons more distant than others? Oh.) Meanwhile I'm back into Lindsey B. mode. "Shut Us Down" is a new song on the soundtrack to Elizabethtown and it is tasteful and SUBLIME. Part of what I love about the man is his frequent willingness, uncharacteristic of a multi-platinum rock/pop star, to approach a song with the idea, "Let's do something different, and let's make that really clear." Here it's his multi-layered fingerpicking in top form, but the singing is so hushed, yet strained, a new voice for him-- the affect is far too effective. Oh, so good. The drum machine, so quiet, such a relevant pulse to the song. This is another track from the fresh and exciting side of LB-- unlike the song that just came up, "Steal Your Heart Away," which, while pleasant, represents one problem that keeps him from being the best, which would be his now-and-then bending to a truly MOR aesthetic that I find just occasionally unlistenably mediocre. (It's what sunk Out of the Cradle, although it's not what sunk Go Insane, which is mostly a classically crazy failure.) Upon "Shut Us Down," I say please, please keep it up.

The new John Cale album, blackAcetate, shares similar qualities to McCartney's well-aged (by about two weeks now!) Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard-- it tries old and new and works well at both... most of the time. Couple of the rock numbers are insipid. Couple of them are insipidly fantastic. "Hush" is pure 2005 and should be on the goddamn radio. I mean it! If you're a fan of anything involving the current state of R&B, or pop related to it, listen to the song.

Under one of my many logistical text files, there's a heading that says "BLOG TOPICS" and one of them is "got me a job." I don't know what this means. I didn't get that ringtone job, nor is the temp job that I just signed up to perform over the next couple weeks related at all to music... I don't know. I really don't know. I will say that I've been continuing to record when I have the time, and four of ten songs on the album are done. I've had to bend the chronology, as the first three are done, and now so is the fifth. Today I plan to start on (if not finish) the fourth.

I've been seeing a lot of movies, however, and I can say something about the last three I saw.
- Everything Is Illuminated featured Eugene Hutz from Gogol Bordello as one of the two main characters. He was wonderful, and I had hoped for some GB in the soundtrack, but at least I was able to accurately predict that they'd show up in the end credits. The score was used kind of irritatingly/relentlessly, although the composer (Paul Cantelon, of the known-to-me-by-name-only group Wild Colonials, who I also think might have had a '90s hit I've heard but can't remember) didn't write anything bad for it-- Ukrainian/Balkan in style as expected, and appropriately so-- and in fact wrote a rather lovely theme that I was happy to hear reused in the denouement.
- Proof featured Jake Gyllenhaal as a major supporting character who played drums in a "terrible" rock band that was supposed to be made up of math geeks. (Their music really was terrible, and I wasn't sure whether it was supposed to be until the main characters called it bad, too, which was nice.) They had a song called "i," named after the imaginary number, where they stand on stage silently for three minutes. This is either a tribute to "4:33" or not at all a tribute to "4:33" and just a joke. There is a scene where it is performed at a lively funeral party, and it's played off by balancing comedy with drama, but I, of course, wish they'd stuck with it for all three minutes instead of the 30 seconds they went with. Could have been the film's most powerful moment, a montage of silent faces. It was too milquetoast of a film for that kind of thing, though, even though I really enjoyed it overall. Stephen Warbeck wrote the most Reich-aping nonsense for the score, however. Do away with that in the future, please. I remember liking the music for Shakespeare in Love, too, another Madden/Warbeck collaboration, although it has been quite a while.
- Touch the Sound featured Evelyn Glennie, the great, deaf, Scottish percussionist, in a documentary about her by Thomas Riedelsheimer of Rivers and Tides, overall a much better movie. The banality of the generic "sound is everywhere" sentiment really weighed down the film. Glennie was interesting, but the movie should have featured less of her wandering through environments and dilly-dallying and more of her performances, and some of the quotes they chose from her interviews were far too repetitious in content and even phrasing. The best scenes in the movie were her duets with Fred Frith in giant, reverb-mother, German abandoned-factories-turned-studios. I want the CD that supposedly features these duets. The parts where Glennie played the marimba were not as great, unfortunately, as I found her technical skill as a percussionist seemed to outweigh her ability to improvise good music.

Okay!

MUSIC WHILE LISTENING: songs by Fleetwood Mac and Lindsey Buckingham on random ("I Must Go," "I Want You," LB; "Red Rover," "Steal Your Heart Away," LB [a-ha -- Gift of Screws, not Say You Will. GOT IT?]; "Don't Look Down," "Gotta Get Away," LB; "World Turning," FM; "The Singer Not the Song," LB; "Second Hand News," FM; "Murrow Turning Over in His Grave," LB; "I Know I'm Not Wrong," "Tusk," FM; "Someone's Gotta Change Your Mind," "Say Goodbye," LB)

"As if to an Afro-Brazillian beat" - Umberto Eco. (#22)

2005-09-24T12:11:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a two-day break on making my album, because why do I need to work that quickly at it? I know why I want to-- I work in chronological tracklist order these days, and I want to hear the next song as much as I'd hope anyone else would when listening-- but I also like it to kind of unfold in between making time for other things.

Thumbsucker is the first movie in a long time that I am debating not seeing at all based on its score: the Polyphonic Spree composed and performed it. I love being positive, but I also really dislike the Polyphonic Spree. Can't you all understand?! Polyphonic Spree, Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah ... all bands endorsed by one or both of my favorite David B.'s ... I guess that after "indie" had really been established in the '90s (post-"college rock"), it took the turn towards featuring a whole lot of bad news, and that a true music fan just has to take his music, bit by bit, from all the scenes at once.

Normally, I listen on speakers, but the other night I was listening on headphones, and when I put on Broadcast's new Tender Buttons album for the first time, I got that pleasing sensation of not wanting to take your headphones off, enveloped in warmth and soothing pop pleasantries as I was. I mean, it was great. Would I have enjoyed the Broadcast album as much if I'd put it on through speakers? It's likely I wouldn't have. I was going to say that this is the only new album I've listened to lately that has inspired even the most banal of comments (such as those), but it's really the only new album I've listened to lately at all. As I said in a different way in one of the more recent posts (unless I didn't say it), my music starts making the other new music that's around less important to me.

The more Paul McCartney songs I hear, however, both released and unreleased, the more he reminds me of Ween. Found a 5-1/2 minute track called "A Big Day" where he just sings "MY BIG DAY!" over a kind of dirty programmed beat and a bunch of layered guitar parts ... sounds right out of the demos for Chocolate & Cheese. I made a playlist of all the released McCartney/Costello collaborations and it's more spotty in quality than I thought it might be. I was surprised to find that while I actually really enjoy all the ones that McCartney released, Costello's actually got the weaker ones, although I think they most falter in their production, whether it's the insincere-seeming insanity of parts of Mighty Like a Rose ("Playboy to a Man"-- and yes, I'm one of the ones who finds that album underrated) or the paper-thin sound of Spike ("Veronica"). I found a bootleg of them playing the songs together as demos, which should be great.

The answer to my interest in Paul McCartney, by the way, is really simple (probably the same reason I have such an interest in Lindsey Buckingham, except LB's quite better): he's a hobbyist, like me, and he gets paid-- in incredible amounts-- to do it.

"Though distrustful of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas. As long as you don't believe in them, the collision of two ideas- both false-can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it was jazz, all the better." - Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (yes, I'm reading the paperback, but this is too funny)

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: (iTunes random) "The Last Waltz in Budapest," Boris Kovac & LaDaABa Orchest; "Starshine," Gorillaz; "Mahalo Field," Saicobab; "Les Fils des Etoiles, wagnerie kaldéenne du Sar Peladan—Prélude du 1er acte: la Vocation," Erik Satie (Aldo Ciccolini, piano); "Desperate Man Blues," Daniel Johnston (this song is amazing-- he's singing into his jukebox over what sounds like an old jazz standard playing in the background... does anyone know this song, and what song he's singing to? I'm too curious); "Scary Monsters (live on 99x)," David Bowie with Reeves Gabrels (in the introduction he claims to have written the song with Johnny Cash "in the late '50s, early '60s" while in prison for a bank robbery-- this acoustic session also featured a version of "Dead Man Walking" that made me realize just how much I love the song); "Goriri," Tortoise; "Weak Become Heroes," the Streets; "Nishiyamakun," Ruinzhatova; "Pinefresh," Beck; "Bone China," 50 Foot Wave; "Gumboot 1993," Blanket Nkhize, Ngangabanye Zondi, and Stephen Shelembe, from Gumboot Guitar: Zulu Street Guitar Music from South Africa

Eat our chips, c'mon, we've got loads. (#21)

2005-09-22T00:19:00.000-07:00

No, it's really true-- I've started recording music and I don't feel like writing in this. Yet, I'm favoring it over watching this movie that I've had from Greencine for over a week (Orson Welles's Mr. Arkadin). Why? Is it a desire to keep up my erratic, pointless numbering system? Is it the fear that the five or less people that read will stop reading if I don't update regularly? Is it The Fear, in general? Is it watching in horror (not fear, or Fear, those are different) as my download folder piles up? The new Broadcast album ... the Bad Plus ... AR Kane ... Blackalicious ... McCarthy ... Pale Saints ... Scritti Politti ... King Tubby meets the Skatalites ... Odetta ...

I thought of Junior Senior earlier today, when thinking of things to remember (like how Eno & Cluster has been reissued, and how TMBG are playing Nov. 3 & 4 at Bimbo's, but that I can't go Nov. 4 because I'll be seeing John Vanderslice), and then Mike went ahead and reminded me separately just now. D-D-Don't Don't Stop the Beat has aged-- "aged"-- even better than expected. There is magic there. Currently obtaining the new record, Hey Hey My My Yo Yo. Will there be magic here? I don't have many regrets in life, but the ones that I do fall along the lines of, while at Coachella, going to see a disappointing Beck set and getting separated from everyone I knew instead of going to see Junior Senior at the same time...

The magic of Junior Senior reminds me of the best of the music from Katamari Damacy, which I finally played and makes me incredibly thankful that I don't have a PS2 as I would be playing it right now instead of doing anything that I've done over the past few days.

Didn't get that job at Rasputin (so it seems), but today I had a rather good interview, kind of seemed like how interviews should go really, with the creative director at Moderati, a ringtone company. He said that he was a music fan, and that a lot of the people that work there are musicians and music fans, but that you kind of have to check that sort of thing at the door at this job, and focus on a lot of "crap music" that's really popular. I liked the fellow's honesty and the hipness of the office and I hope I get the call.

Yes, Mom, one day I will enter a studio. This I'm sure of. I'm seeing things gradually work in that direction. I don't want it to slight the recordings I've already made, though. I do not put inherent value on studio recordings over home recordings. But Spencer, isn't most of what you listen to better recorded than your music? Yes, and I think the reason is that ... well, home recordings that aren't on Fleetwood Mac's Tusk don't get famous, normally. (He probably did not record those songs at home, actually. This is something I've never been sure of, though.) Everything I listen to has reached a certain level of fame-- either that, or I know them personally or have seen them live. My recorded music, well, apparently something about it is obviously fame-barring to all kinds of people, and yet it semi-commonly solicits comments about how I will be famous for making music. Strange! This all will undoubtedly lead to my entering a studio. To record music, that is.

I called my music "uncategorizable one man band" to Jeremy at Moderati today, and he said, "Who else would you put in that category?" I had to answer, "Uh ... some people I know personally, basically." I would have said "art pop" as I normally do, but earlier today I'd read something that called Duncan Sheik "art pop" and I cringed. I hope they used it as a misnomer and that I haven't been.

Oh, insight, where have you gone? The effort I put into you has been drained in favor of musical creativity. So be it. I will go see a bunch of movies this coming week-- Corpse Bride (oh, Danny Elfman), Dear Wendy (soundtrack composed entirely of Zombies songs!?), and Touch the Sound (Thomas Riedelsheimer's new documentary about Evelyn Glennie), among ... others? I thought there was at least one more. Music will be rather upfront in these films, just as it became in Crimen Ferpecto recently, when the denouement and end credids were made twice as enjoyable by having them set to cocek songs! That was a pleasant surprise and the main reason why I would recommend the movie (not a backhanded compliment at all, as I did enjoy it).

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: D-D-Don't Don't Stop the Beat, Junior Senior; tracks from Katamari Damacy and its sequel

"It's the return of the--" - Eminem.

2005-09-19T17:26:00.000-07:00

I have been recording and I couldn't be happier about it. The new album, entitled E.T.R. (Electric 3rd R-Word), should drop mid-October. (By drop I mean "be finished," not "be released," although whoooo knooows....) My new 8-track, if it continues at this rate, is a gem. I turned in my Sick Bees review and it should hit the racks (or the piles, I guess) in West Coast Performer in November; already got two more assignments for, I assume, December. Everything appears to be going well. I'm not listening to other music for these reasons-- mainly for the recording. My weekend with Fletcher, including the show in Big Sur, went well and I think that's what inspired me to start up for real. I sold a CD each to three strangers after playing "The Girl Who Couldn't Look" (the song I chose when Fletcher generously allowed me to play one solo) and that's all I need sometimes. He announced me from the stage as "one of the world's greatest unknown musicians" (maybe not "one of," I can't remember), and the reminder that people could feel that way about my music, even if comunicated through hyperbole, also helped.

On my Crackerbox profile, I said, "Don't confuse me for a rising star, please; I'm only a hobbyist." I think it's 100% true that I'm only a hobbyist, but the reality is that I would rather people confuse my hobby for the work of a rising star. Doing promotional work is daunting and not part of my M.O. up until (and including) this very moment. I already did plenty of work when I made the music good, and I will continue to do the work. It seems like they should just come asking for it now. "We're starving for more good music. Your music is good, isn't it?"

Is Sufjan Stevens only popular because the fidelity of his recordings is unstoppably high? Because I feel like, basically, I'm doing what he's doing, except at home and on an 8-track. I want what Sufjan Stevens has, and I'd like to be alongside him.

So, that's that for now, and when I re-enter the world of other hobbyists, I'll have something to say.

"No new rock" - Buffalo Daughter. (#20)

2005-09-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

I have to fight myself from listening to the new Stereolab EP. It's like candy. I don't want to get sick of it yet. It's only out ... this is the fourth day, now. It's so heavy. On "Kyberneticka Babicka (pt. 1 & 2)," they tackle Glass-ian composition (and keep in mind, kids, this actually sounds like something Philip Glass might have written, or at the very least is likely to have been inspired by him... you can't just slap PG's name onto any ostinato and call it a day, 'k?) in that "aw, shucks" Stereolab kind of way. It's the doggedly blocky repetition of his late '60s and early '70s work as tackled by these damn day-glo ye-ye fans they've become ever since the first Switched On LP did not predict it at all. Me, I like the drumming. Also, "Plastic Mile" has an intro I could swim in for ages. Laetitia is bringing it all back home these days. Her voice is finally delivering all the goods that she and Mary used to deliver together.

Caetano Veloso's Tropical Truth reminded me what I love about reading. Critics of postmodernism, go forth and I dare you to find what you dislike in such a beautiful book. It: is born from an intelligent, well-read person, and doesn't hide it; covers Veloso's experience and reality with subjectivity as the tie between them, without removing for one second the visceral hooks of his stories; is human, delightful and exciting; features a wry self-conscious tone without relying on any gimmicks at all. These terms sum up the best of postmodernism in any form, to me. (Sure, now and then I'll go for a gimmick, but it's not necessary.) Plus, you get to learn about politics in Brazil, in case none of that sounds inviting or you don't care what I think about books or pomo bullshit. I could never be a book reviewer; I don't know what's good or bad about them, I just know what I like. 'Course it's the same for music, except I feel much more capable at analyzing and eating that culture up. But anyway, Veloso's book is about Brazil, music and himself, and I connected with him on far more levels than I could've hoped to.

There's a photograph on one of the picture pages of the man himself sitting on the floor in his apartment in the '60s, crosslegged, in front of a fireplace, with hair not unlike mine at its longest, and he's playing the guitar in his lap, with his fingers on the neck just like I play. Libby has promised that one day we can recreate this picture in front of her fireplace.

Playing a show with Bird by Snow tomorrow in Big Sur. Fletcher's coming over today to practice. End credits blog will come soon. I've lost interest in talking about Ingmar Bergman's Shame so here's the thing that interested me, in brief: It's a movie about musicians in wartime that has no score at all. The only music is played briefly from a radio, and there's a moment where they pick up their instruments and make a slight pluck at the strings, and play nothing more.

Oh, and the title was inspired by how I don't like new rock bands. 'Cept Frog Eyes. Destroyer is opening for the New Pornographers for two nights in a row at Bimbo's, the two nights after the Seu Jorge show. Brazil wins my ticket money; sorry guys!!

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: Pixel Revolt, John Vanderslice; (iTunes random starts) "Don't Become the Thing You Hated," Destroyer with Frog Eyes; "Clown and Crown," Nobukazu Takemura; "These Things Take Time," the Smiths

Oooh, romantic, wasn't it? (#19)

2005-09-12T17:29:00.000-07:00

Tros. You'll have to excuse me for that. I was really kinda glowing about it all night, and I had to use the language of someone who still believed in pop culture magic. Apologies where due.

One of the McCartney albums I revisited was London Town by Wings. I used to listen to it a whole bunch when I was a kid; I even remember buying the record in a store, picking it out myself. I hadn't heard it since then at all. The first side didn't take me back too many times, even though all the titles looked familiar and some of the tracks were distantly reminiscent of themselves. As a kid, I don't think I'd even made the connection that the original version of the famous-by-Michael-Jackson "Girlfriend" was on this album, and I loved MJ. It's a better version than on Off the Wall, and I think that's Linda singing, in a surprisingly effective turn. THEN! Oh, I thought I was, but I wasn't ready for the second side at all! I skipped "With a Little Luck," as I've heard it quite recently and it's really just not that good, and ended up on "Famous Groupies." By the last 30 seconds, I was reeling with nostalgia, to the point where when McCartney began the speech that ends the song--

Ladies and gentlemen, those magnificent examples of female pulchritude and luminosity, direct from their global perambulations to the very boards of this supremely magnificent proSCENIUM AAArch

--it sounded like it was coming from my brain! Isn't that funny? The next two songs pleasantly went along, and then the smack came back with the closing track, "Morse Moose and the Grey Goose," except this time it's terrible. Oh, god. Such a bad song. By far the most intensely terrible song on the album. Six and a half minutes of disco rock with an obnoxious concept to end all obnoxious concepts: "Right on down to the bottom of the sea, tell me, are you receiving me? My name is Morse Moose and I'm callin' you!" belted out by Paul over and over again with Linda smashing the keys of her keyboard in a fake morse code rhythm. You know a song is bad* when you hope for another thirty-second sea shanty interlude just like the one that provided the slightest relief at around the third minute. Bad things happening at the end of this album.

Must say, though, London Town ended up pretty nice, all told. When I relistened to McCartney, I found its charm to have worn off somewhat since the last time I heard it; it's pretty good, but it doesn't reach basically any of the heights of his better albums, and there are several songs on London Town that are better than the best on McCartney. The role of McCartney in my life can probably be resigned to one of those subconscious seeds that brought me confidence as a multi-instrumentalist and home recording artist.

As for Percy "Thrills" Thrillington, this is a good article if you're curious. It's a Macca pseudonym from the mid '70s, used obscurely and exclusively to release an orchestral instrumental version of the album Ram which was recorded more or less immediately after the original's release. I think McCartney's money, positing him as a comfortable post-Beatles pop star, put him in a mindset that is responsible for much of the tepid and unremarkable nature of his output (Thrillington being a perfect example). The fact that enjoyable and/or interesting work has occasionally surfaced throughout his career could serve as proof that his talent relies on focus and pressure for cohesive results. This may be one reason why he still misses the Beatles.

Before this turns into a psychological examination (too late?), I should begin now to talk about the Matmos concert that I saw on Friday. It was great! They're for sure one of the most entertaining live acts around. Martin lived up to his name (you know, M.C.) for the first time that I've seen by reciting some Wittgenstein in an absurdly funky opening number. ("The rose has teeth in the mouth of the beast.") There were abstract tributes to Darby Crash and William Burroughs; the former featured Drew's hair getting shaved off almost all the way (for the benefit of a microphone as well as the "gestural element" that one of them mentioned in a calendar spot promoting this show), and the latter starred an adding machine and a Tangiers rhythm that sounded right out of Peter Gabriel's Last Temptation of Christ. During the famous (to me) piano number, Martin dropped some ivory science the way I'd have never expected, especially because of the countless times he had told me that he's not a musician. All this M.C. showmanship was delightfully balanced by Drew's straight-man subtle body grooving and knob twiddling. I think you should go see Matmos, whenever possible!

'Nuff for now.

*actually determined on a case by case basis

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: The Imperial, Flipmode Squad

No, Moraga-- thank you. (#18)

2005-09-12T00:31:00.000-07:00

I now have a backlog of topics. The end credits topic, for instance, will have to wait. As will my brief talking point on the idea of music in Ingmar Bergman's Shame. I can sum up my interview with Rasputin very quickly: it was... very quick, and I regret only not mentioning that I am a musician; otherwise, I think my genuine enthusiasm must have come through. I can hope only that I was convincing enough. I finished Caetano Veloso's Tropical Truth and will have to talk about that soon. Saw Matmos, same. There's this weird thing and I can't decide whether or not it's worth analyzing, except I must say that I definitely prefer Brian Wilson hating rap music to Brian Wilson liking rap music. (Go ahead, click the link, I dare you. Oooh, it's so trivial!) Then there's all this Paul McCartney junk, discovering some of his pre-Chaos work and helping me relive some of my childhood, which I will talk more about later, with one teaser: Ever heard of Percy "Thrills" Thrillington? None of this will be dwelled upon tonight. Here now is a story that attempts to convey, through an efficient description of building details, the sheer magical experience brought on by a single unlikely and unexpected event.

Today, my good friend and former housemate Libby came to visit John and me. (She is asleep mere feet away from me right now.) She arrived with some pastries from her job at the Buttery in Santa Cruz, and after a good hour or so of catching up and dilly-dallying, she realized that what we should really do is go visit her brother Tim, since he now goes to school in Northern California. Why not? Our internet wasn't working at the time, so we couldn't look up the address, and she didn't have his number. We decided to high-tail it to a gas station, where we first looked at a map and the name "Moraga" rang a bell, then found the school in the phone book-- St. Mary's College, in Moraga-- and called them for directions. We got on the 24 East and found the college, but not before almost deciding to eat at Jack in the Box, which we put off just until we could find something to eat that we'd agree better on.

After about an hour of futzing around at the college, unable to find Tim or reach anyone who could help us find him, we decided it's time to eat for real. We drove to the strip mall area we'd seen before, and looked at several places, without deciding on one. We decided to ask some folks where we should go in Moraga, which was turning out to be a lovely and green but seemingly culture-barren town. They directed us to another strip mall area. We scoped out a couple of Italian restaurants and a couple of Chinese restaurants, all of which were too expensive. We passed by a candy store called Fudge Alley (empty of customers, like many of the places there) and snickered at its promise of "ICE CREAM HOTDOGS & CANDIES." Ultimately, we decided on eating at Nation's, where I had a burger and some pie. We began to walk back to the car, when I glanced back at Fudge Alley, still empty of customers, and asked, "Oh, should we go in there?" Libby realized she wanted to buy some candy for Tim, so we went ahead on in.

The middle-aged, non-Caucasian clerk (I barely got a look at him, but I think he was Asian of some type) did not appear to speak English as his first language, but was kind all the same, recommending various types of candy to Libby. John and I did our standard analysis of the location-- scanning the walls which had been scrawled all over, apparently as some kind of tradtion; checking out the free magazines; glancing over the candy selection with Libby; and finally coming upon a jukebox. This jukebox had quite a selection, and I had to wonder who facilitated it, since the gentleman behind the counter didn't seem like the type. My eye was immediately drawn to "Destination Unknown" by Missing Persons, so I dropped my quarter in and selected it. The record must've been flipped, though, since it played the B-side, the title of which I can't remember. The jukebox came on very loud, especially considering the size of the store and our proximity to where it was placed. The quality of sound was full and beautiful, and it seemed to be caressing the edges of that Missing Persons song, which ended up actually being quite good. As I looked over the selection, which featured a surprisingly diverse set of records-- even 7"s by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana were present-- my eye was drawn towards a French phrase. "Les Tetes Qui Parlent." Talking Heads. Someone writing on the tag decided to make a joke of it. I saw through it. This was a Talking Heads 45. "Take Me to the River," backed with ... "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel." John said, "We should hear that ['Angel'] next." I was already ahead of him on that; "Take Me to the River" is easily one of my least favorite tracks of theirs, but "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel" is as glorious as early Heads can be. He then remarked, "It could be a different version." This did not even occur to me, and made me even more excited to realize it was very likely to be true.

I couldn't really wait for Missing Persons to end. By the time they did, I dropped my quarter in and selected K7. It indicated that we'd selected "J7" even though I entered it correctly, but this only added to the suspense. The dirty needle dropped on a dirty record, and after several seconds of vinyl noise, a distant, reverberated bassline gradually surfaced, and the song kicked in. For someone who has heard the original version a million times, this recording of "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel" was completely different and a revelation. The drums were softer, acoustic guitars were prominent, but the sound of the jukebox, and the bass, and the pulse of the rhythm conveyed an incredible power. The sung sections were accompanied by easily some of the deepest, roundest, most transcendent pop-organ chord-pads I've heard. Byrne's vocal performance was as good as he ever gave. "You can walk, you can talk just like me!" My jaw was dropped. I covered my mouth. I grinned the largest grin. I mean it was lush. It was enveloping.

The night continued in Moraga as if that didn't need to happen, finding Tim and heading home. I will never forget it. I am almost saddened to find that this version of the song will be available for general consumption on a disc of the upcoming Talking Heads remaster campaign-- what if that moment, that song, could have been just for us? It was a textbook example of music finding me, finding us, coming out of nowhere, out of a pile of insignificant and wandering decisions, being magnificent, the sound embracing it, and drifting away. A true moment of amazement.

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: Carolina, Seu Jorge (playing on Sept. 26 at Bimbo's-- will you be there?)

Let's give 'em something to talk about. (#17)

2005-09-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

How about love? No. Anything but that!! Ah, is it my mother's fault that I'll always have a soft spot for Bonnie Raitt? Of course, but there's no point in blaming, since there's no reason to be ashamed of it. I'm going to have to track down the albums Nick of Time (one of my mom's favorites) and Fundamental (an album I enjoyed when it came out a few years ago). All because of that subject line I just thought up.

A correction-- not only for this blog, but also for my entire life-- must be made. The Cutting Crew song brought up in the last post is NOT TITLED "(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight," but, in fact, IS titled "(I Just) Died in Your Arms." This is a bit of a heart-quake for me... shakes things up a bit. I'm currently not really able to reconcile the fantasy that I thought was real with the reality that just doesn't seem right. Of course, the gut-busting humor inherent in the track can in no way be put to rest-- far from it-- but let's mourn the phantom word, nonetheless, sung with verve and justice by Mr. Crew yet deemed too clunky and obvious for its inclusion in the title. Oh, if only Cutting Crew had a sense of itself.

Bizarrely, we're here to talk about the new Paul McCartney album, Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard. Ooh, he plays all the instruments, isn't that nice? I say best since Ram and you can't talk me out of it! That is, until I listen to it more than once. Over the last several years, Paul McCartney records have become a thing to ignore even by those fans who stuck around with Off the Ground. (I say fair play to them-- aside from featuring the lilting and lovely "Hope of Deliverance," that one collected a couple more of those lingering Macca/MacManus collabs, "Mistress and Maid" and the marvelous "The Lovers That Never Were." Naturally, nothing-- not even their duet on "You Want Her Too"-- beats "My Brave Face" from Digging in the Dirt, but I digress.) So: even though Chaos and Creation ends with a very sappy ballad, well, it's the weakest track on the album (by a long shot), and it doesn't even close out the disc, as there's a hidden track (saved from hidden track hell by featuring only about 30 seconds of silence rather than the interminable lengths some artists choose) that sounds as fun and carefree as his auteured very first post-Beatles album. It sounds like the end credits to the album. (That's it-- next post will feature albums with final moments that run like "end credits." I've definitely thought of this before while listening to albums, so I know I'll have a list if I really think about it.)

Let's just say that by the end of the second song, I was already predicting five stars from Rolling Stone. By the end of the whole thing, I still wouldn't be surprised if they whipped out the "classic" status.

I'm typing at my last day of this temp job. I have to go move boxes. There might be more on this album in future posts, like how I read in a Time Magazine feature that producer Nigel Godrich told Paul that he agreed to do the album, but that he didn't love a lot of his solo work and so they were going to do things his way. Oh, well, I guess I had time to say that. Thank goodness. How about the way the article closed with him confessing that he's happy to go out on the road without a "crap album" to play songs from that he doesn't care about, or admitting that sometimes he doesn't take his own music seriously, and this time he wanted to make "a good album"? Great stuff.

Here at Maracatu Atomico, LLC... (#16)

2005-09-08T20:25:00.000-07:00

...we pride ourselves in making every effort to maximize both efficiency and profit. That's why, for the first time, CEO Spencer Owen has decided to outsource for content, providing jobs for our faithful readers while maximizing the income. We hope this new and exciting leap for our corporation pays off as well for you, the reader, as it does for m-- ... us.

First of all, a message from the CEO:
Spoke with Cory from AK last night. He had nothing to do with my getting the interview at Rasputin. You therefore may want to revise your guess to the question posed in the previous missive.

Okay, here it comes!

1) You can find out what song was number one on any day in human history (up to mid-20th c.) in both the UK and US! Mine were bummers: "Footloose" by Kenny Loggins in the US, and "Hello" by Lionel Richie in the UK! Thumbs down! So hey, what was yours? You can use your birthday, or, in fact, you can use ANY day! Just a day you're curious about! Go for it! I'm curious, too!

2) When Kerry looked up her birthday (that's right, her-- I'm not talking about the senator, you understand), she found that the song was "(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight" by Cutting Crew! I think that's probably one of the most unintentionally yet unfailingly hilarious songs ever made. So who knows some other songs that fit that category? Maybe not ones that are so obvious, you know? Anyone?

In other words, this blog will get better soon, or I'm killing it like I've killed the others. I'm betting on the former.

Maracatu Atomico, LLC: signaling crisis through subtle font changes since 2005.

Could this be a sign?

2005-09-07T16:41:00.000-07:00

Been a couple days... might be a couple more. Quick update, though:

- Bought an 8-track, Tascam 488 mkII. Second and last time I'll be doing that on eBay. Fella said the heads were cleaned after every session. Shipped today, or was supposed to be.
- Due to various circumstances, felt inspired to get back in touch with John Vanderslice after about four years. Sent him Meredith. Time will tell.
- Writing at the front desk of an office complex on Montgomery & Lombard, where I am temping. Related because I have an interview with the SF Rasputin on Saturday. Word to the wise: Better to find someone who knows a manager in the chain than to drop off three resumes and five notes, you know? I've been around both, and guess which one got me the interview? (Still, you know: could be that all those stories about perserverance aren't made up, so ... hey, go for it, tiger.)
- Review of The Marina Album of Sick Bees has been brewing, brewing, brewing. Should begin writing tonight; took notes a couple nights ago.
- More Stereolab: Trevor kindly reminded me that "The Free Design," from Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night, very plainly quotes the instrumental refrain from "Dancing Queen" in the horns at the end. This quote doesn't exactly fit the unspoken criteria that was informing my original list-- more looped references or even half-covers, in those cases, whereas this is simply a quote-- which may be part of the reason why that never stuck with me. Of course, new singles coming out on vinyl and mp3 on Sept. 12. I may ... I may just pay for those mp3s. The 'Lab is one to not let die. (Not that I'm letting anyone else die ... oh, forget it, I'm not getting into this now.)

New job-having Spencer (we'll see how long this lasts) might put the kibosh on daily updates of the Maracatu Atomico that you know and love, or, more realistically, might have begun to grow on you by now. Then again, it might not. So hold on to them hats and glasses, because this here's the wildest ride in the wi'derness.

Labor-free. (#15)

2005-09-05T03:19:00.000-07:00

I was over at blogcritics.org, and one of their "hot topics" was Rolling Stone's list of 100 greatest guitarists. I had to be a bit surprised. This list is... well, it says right on there-- two years old. (Wow, those two years went by, didn't they?) How is this a hot topic? Apparently, there have been two years of constant discussion on this one post about the 100 greatest guitarists, and what I find odd about it is that no one, as far as I could tell from reading as much as I could stomach and then using the "find" feature in my browser, had quite the same complaint about it that I had (and still have), aside from the obvious grievance that Jack White should be #17 only on lists dealing with people's names that start with Jack (in no particular order).

One entry on the list destroys the whole thing's credibility: Ali Farka Toure. There's no denying that Toure is wonderful. But the inclusion of Toure throws the context of the list into mass confusion. Every guitarist there is playing in Western styles of music except Toure; yes, Toure plays the blues sometimes, but he is Malian, and his main cultural and musical expression is that of Mali. Even if he does fit into their Western criteria by playing the blues now and then, the entire continent he's from still manages to be marginalized a great deal by featuring only one inclusion on the list. There are plenty of things that throw the list off balance, and there could not be a good list really, but there could be a consistent one, and Toure's inclusion is reckless and careless in the wrong way.

It's just hard not to think "token" when I see that. If you're going to include someone like Toure, go whole hog, hunt down the soukous masters, the other blues masters of Africa even, the classical guitarists, the free-formers, the Gypsies, or else just leave him off and include someone more like Jack White for consistency's sake.

Speaking of Paul Simon, today I listened to The Rhythm of the Saints in reverse running order precisely because I felt like it. It was the first time I'd ever felt the desire to listen to an album backwards. My reaction was as positive as it had ever been listening to it forwards, if not even more positive, because for some reason I was hearing the songs more in the order I would've wanted to hear them. I can't really explain it other than in this one case, that's how my taste for the songs on this album has grown. I admire the way the album was chosen to run, but to ease in with the quiet glory of "The Rhythm of the Saints" and "Spirit Voices," and then to stir the pot with the complex mini-epic feel on "The Cool, Cool River" and to keep going until we get to a climax beginning with "Proof" and cresting with "The Obvious Child" ... it made a better album! I'm not going to go listening to other albums in reverse order just because this worked, though; it's got to be something that I really feel like doing. It has to come to me.

Curious, though, how such a desire would have probably never even come close to occurring to me if my music listening interface weren't so malleable. Computers are beautiful in this way, I feel. Still doesn't change my hard-wired cravings for albums-as-intended, beginning-to-end consumption, but it allows me to make more room to stretch my legs in an album such as The Rhythm of the Saints, which I've known for over a decade and would only know the same way otherwise.

By the way: I moved on to Gilberto Gil's second self-titled album (why isn't GIL on the list, huh, RS?!), but I must briefly give unexpected lip service to this Between the Buried and Me album. It's ambitious, a giant prog-deathcore swamp of good sounds. Without my friend Johnny Thomas, I'd never know that I liked them, or In Flames, or especially the Black Dahlia Murder, who I love, in fact. I'm not exactly jumping into the metalcore pits at the moment-- I can only keep track of so much at one time, as in fact I am only one man-- but I am downloading the new album by the Red Chord, because Johnny recommended that too, and I guess he'll be my taskmaster general for this genre (for now).

As for Gil ... on the wonderful number "Vitrines," you can hear the hi-hat squeak, unoiled, before each cymbal-close. Sounds great. Sounds like a person playing it. This whole album is vital like that. Why isn't Gil on the list, huh, RS?! Some words for Mr. Jann S. Wenner: one solid listen to "O Canto Da Ema" from Expresso 2222 and you'll be lobbying for a reprint with a top 50 list for each continent.

If anyone reading this works at Rasputin in San Francisco, my name is Spencer Owen, and I'd like to work at your store. I mean you are hiring and I keep bothering you and I'm just well nearly overqualified so I think it'd be fun. Thanks.

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: Alaska, Between the Buried and Me; Gilberto Gil (1969), Gilberto Gil

Loose ends sink trends. (#14)

2005-09-04T02:07:00.000-07:00

#13: I was moved to listen to Pet Sounds today, due to the delightful renditions of favorites like "Sloop John B" and "God Only Knows" at the concert, and it's spotless. "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" slayed me the way it never has but always should have. Then, in a moment of some sort of perverse interest, I decided to give a listen (probably my second ever) to David Bowie's version of "God Only Knows" from the Tonight album. Time has not been kind to Tonight (even upon its release, for that matter), such that I imagine even an enthusiastic yet casual Bowie fan would not be aware that he has done a version of "God Only Knows." It is very weird. He really gives it the Vegas treatment, with his most affected dramatic croon, and the ending vocal arrangement gets only a half-hearted, inaccurate attempt. When I say "very weird," I mean it is "very bad," but if you're fascinated by Bowie as I am-- successes and failures included-- it's not an unenjoyable listen, especially since the song is well-written enough to show through such a schmaltzy thing, and Bowie's voice is doing its thing absurdly well, even if it's remarkably stupid. I would call the Beach Boys original "untouchable" if it hadn't been tapped on the shoulder by the Brian Wilson band's version last night. Just excellent.

#12: Amadou & Miriam's album gets a solid A from me. Basically I consider Manu Chao a hero with everything he's done since (and including) "Machine Gun" on Mano Negra's Casa Babylon. Malian musical taste running all up in Manu's programmed grill = one of the freshest combos I could hope to hear in '05.

Unnumbered post titled "Another day...": Here's that list of songs Stereolab ripped off (and no, they don't sample, they just recreate) in part or in whole for those tracks.
"Cadriopo" takes its core elements from Sun Ra's "Love in Outer Space."
The central groove and bassline of "Metronomic Underground" comes from Yoko Ono's "Mindtrain." (Do yourself a favor soon and listen to "Mindtrain" if you think it will do you any good; I think it could for quite a few folks I know.)
So, too, is Yoko similarly plundered for "Emperor Tomato Ketchup;" the bass and general pulse (made much tighter and peppier by the 'Lab) is right out of "Why."
The general thrust of "The Noise of Carpet" seems built and extrapolated directly from the very first second (which is a repeated motif, but still) of "Complication" by the Monks.
"Super Falling Star" cops a feel from "Light My Fire" by the Doors. (It's humorous how much better the Stereolab song is. Humorous because comparing the Doors to good bands makes me laugh. Oh, how I laugh!)
The middle section of "Animal or Vegetable" cribs right off of Faust's "It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl." This is tied with "Cadriopo" for "most similar to its source material."
"Jenny Ondioline" ... haha ... Neu!, basically. "Hallogallo," "Fur Immer," anything like those. I guess a few other 'Lab songs go that route, but "Jenny" is the clearest bearer of the Neu! torch. Still, much livelier than Neu! most of the time, even though Rother & friends managed to pull off some real rockers in their day.

#10: The novelty of Raheem DeVaughn has worn off. The novelty of R. Kelly has not. God bless R. Kelly!

#9: Simon & Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970). "Bye Bye Love," baby-- all live! It's a way to signal their super-popularity as a group releasing their obviously-final album, and a nod to their ties to the Everly Brothers in more than just covering their song. I forgot this one in the main round, maybe because of how particularly natural it feels in the tracklist, maybe just because ... I forgot. I'd like to do a post about Bookends and the Simon & Halee megaforce production duo eventually.

M'kay, that looks like all the loose ends for now. Going back six posts is about as far back as I'm willing, anyway.

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: "Vileness Fats: Mom's House" (from the Icky Flix DVD), the Residents; "Green Grass," Tom Waits; "Laisser-Faire," Stereolab; "Lapland," Ratatat; "Jason," Sufjan Stevens; "The Rose Tattoo," David Byrne; "Analogue Rock," Stereolab; "Honest Joe's Indian," Renaldo and the Loaf; "Adelaide," John Cale; "Doghouse," Throwing Muses; "Beat the Clock," Ghostface Killah (iTunes random)

Brian Wilson vs. Merzbow. (#13)

2005-09-02T23:35:00.000-07:00

Or, as my friends They Might Be Giants put it in one of the (musically) worst songs they ever came up with, "content vs. form." Or would it be "form vs. content"? Perhaps an equal share of both for each? Either way, Brian Wilson won tonight.

Let me explain, okay? I was going to see Merzbow at the Great American Music Hall. Wearing my new Clarks for the first time, I walked from 1 Embarcadero Center, where I'd just worked entering the names of physicians into Excel for four hours ($60 total), to O'Farrell and Polk, only to make a couple phone calls and find out that Daniel had smashed his foot and was not going to be walking, let alone driving, as he was more or less unable. So it was 5:30, the show was at 8, I was alone in SF, the air was cool, the part of town sucked, I partially witnessed a guy get hit by a car, I ate an unsatsifying dinner, I didn't feel like walking in SF much more, and all this added up to being reminded that Brian Wilson was playing in the town where I lived. By 7 o'clock, I had already determined that I couldn't get a refund and didn't feel the slightest amount of anxiety about blowing $15 on that Merzbow ticket to go and see Smile at the Greek Theater. Two shows, each will be fantastic, but what did I want? What I wanted: to feel the cool night air and listen to a group play "Cabin Essence" at the perfect volume.

So, that's what I got. Took the BART back, high tailed it up through campus, got a $65 ticket for $45 from a dude with an extra, and sat in the sweet spot of the amphitheater (perfect, perfect, literally dead center of the place, wouldn't have wanted a different seat). I even got a view of the soundboard and lightboard, and got to watch the light guy punch the board in rhythm to make the lights dance on the beat, and read the setlist that was propped up on the soundboard. I determined, from reading what the encores were meant to be, that I wasn't going to stay post-Smile, and so after "Good Vibrations," I gave my share of rapturous applause, cried for about 15 seconds, and then quit that place right quick. Before Smile, though, there was a nice run of songs I didn't care about (it was like Brian Wilson opening for himself), and then, a beautiful series of hits: "California Girls," "Sloop John B," "Pet Sounds," "Wouldn't It Be Nice," and "God Only Knows." Brian had some great damaged stage patter, my favorite being, to introduce "In My Room": "This is a little ballad about bein' in a room."

Smile being brought to life made for some interesting reactions to the piece, mainly during one section, due to its accompanying visuals. "You Are My Sunshine" was always the strangest part of Smile to me, because not only is it a sad song to begin with, but also Wilson's variation makes it even sadder-- except for when the hyena lounge sax comes in, and then the string players melt like the tape is slowing to a stop. There's a sadness and then it almost appears to mock itself. Well, what was so strange about it in concert was that up came a sun-shaped yellow projection on the backdrop, and in the middle of it was Brian Wilson's face-- the young Brian Wilson. When the strings melted, the Briansun warped and faded. What does this say? Is this a personal message from Brian? "I was once a bright star. I took myself away from the world, and this makes me sad. Now it's time to celebrate what remains and move on." They play the "fire" segment, and I wonder, how does he feel about this? He spearheaded it, of course, but are his demons still alive? Then, of course, they go right into "In Blue Hawaii." So, I'm not sure what Smile used to be, or once was meant to be, but now it's outwardly a cycle about awareness of evil and hardship in America and American lives, and living for the day regardless. There's a fire in Chicago, but there's an ocean surrounding Hawaii to put it out. At least that's my take on it. It's certainly not a politically useful way to feel, but it definitely sums up a big part of pop music's role in our society to a T.

I had a great night! Sorry, Merzbow! I'll listen to Merzbuddha before the weekend's up!

(By the way, I am perfectly aware that certain readers of this blog aren't exactly fans of Smile. This disclaimer is meant to serve as a surrogate to your desire to respond with a comment like, "Oh, come off it, hype and bullshit," because I know how you feel, and now so do other people that are reading. Sorry, thanks.)

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: none

MOVIE SOUNDTRACK WHILE WRITING: Shoot the Piano Player

Nai!! (#12)

2005-09-01T19:56:00.000-07:00

I hate calling people, and I hate bothering people. I've been thinking about self-promotion and I literally feel the impact in how I breathe and how my chest feels. I really feel tense. It doesn't work for me, not yet. Not used to it, not interested in it. Doesn't fit into my life yet. Either I want to be eased into it or I want a label that believes in me and will take care of it. One thing I definitely want to do is play more shows, and I'll do my best about starting on that in the next few days, but I need to make money in my life, and I need connections to get my stuff out there, and I don't ever want to approach Pitchfork again as long as I live (as a writer, artist, anything), and these things all conflict with what I'm comfortable doing. It's enough of an irritant that I don't have a multitrack that works yet. I honestly wish word of mouth with the people I know would just get me shows. I guess I just need to know some more people. Enough of my friends and friends of my friends play my music for people who end up loving it that I know it's possible for me to catch on at a certain level. Tension, tension.

That being said, my page on Myspace has a new song on it! It's called "Laughs" and it was actually recorded back in late May, but it's the most recent song I've recorded (and even the last one I wrote), and also signifies the end of an era: the (at least first) era of my Sansui 6-track. Here is a link to the page; won't you click on it and tell all your friends? WON'T YOU?! ALL OF THEM??!

Speaking of links, here's a hilariously unsupportable yet completely fascinating factoid. Johnny Marr hasn't done anything worthwhile, so far as I know, since The The's Dusk; his potential with Modest Mouse, who are in a very interesting stage of their career that I would call "haven't made bad music yet despite their popularity," is ... impossible for me to calculate. Nonetheless, I'm all for it.

Also, just watched Down by Law which had a nice atmospheric score by Mr. John Lurie, who was excellent in the film, an equal to his two co-stars, Mr. Tom Waits and Mr. Roberto Benigni. I still find my favorite Jarmusch yet to be Broken Flowers, with a second at Coffee and Cigarettes, but I have more to see. Looking up Lurie, I find he also wrote the theme to Conan's show, and has composed many scores, including that of the decade-old Scarlet Johansson indie flick Manny & Lo, which I saw in theatres (as, what, an 11-or-12-year-old); I remember thinking, "I want to get the soundtrack!" It's queued up on Greencine, in order to relive and refresh my memories of the film and the music in the film.

Today in Amoeba, I asked a clerk, "Is this Manu Chao [playing on the hi-fi]?" He said, "No." He showed me the CD slip, which featured Malian pop music duo Amadou & Miriam and had a little star notice on the bottom right that said "GUEST MANU CHAO." The back said "PRODUCED BY AND WITH MANU CHAO." I perked up. I asked the clerk, "Do you have any used copies?" He said, "No," and the other clerk snickered, and then the first clerk said, "Lots of new copies though." The other clerk said, "Yeah, and we've been selling a lot, too." He added, "If I were you, I'd pick it up now, otherwise you'll be the last one on your block." I didn't really get offended at all this, despite the snarkiness involved; I was too happy that there was some new Manu Chao music for me to chew on, and not only that, but Manu Chao producing Malians! (A much more surefire bet than Damon Albarn producing Malians, no matter how much I've enjoyed Gorillaz and Think Tank.) This being said, for some reason I decided to buy In the Heart of the Moon by Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate instead, Malians produced by Nick Gold and not Manu Chao. It's wonderful, though. This weekend, then, it's Amadou & Miriam! (Then: the new Boris Kovac! Then, if I can somehow become convinced that it's worthwhile: the new Liberation Music Orchestra! Isn't it nice that so many people all over the world make music that's good enough to distract me from caring about my own? At least for ... a minute ... hmm, there's that tension again.)

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: Yura Yura Teikoku No Shibire, Yura Yura Teikoku

Another day/ in the bay/ wouldn't you say?

2005-08-30T01:46:00.000-07:00

I saw Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance tonight. It was a beautiful film with an incredible and sparse use of score by an avant Korean group called Uhuhboo Project. Almost no music except for all the parts where you'd never think it would count but, man, did it ever. When the music did come in, it was artful and thrilling, and expressed just the right intensity, featuring a surprising amount of eclecticism (even while maintaining thematic consistency ... !) for such a minimal amount of cues. Overall, a better film (with much better music!) than the still-excellent Oldboy. I'll have to track down Uhuhboo; in total, the pastiche of sounds was a bit reminiscent of Naked City, and I wonder if their work by and large resembles Zorn's (or Yoshihide's Ground Zero, another one I thought of).

Pitchfork ended up being right about some o' that "best new music" for the first time in a while. (New Pornographers is good, but 9 good?) The Kallikak Family's May 23rd 2007 is an album-in-total work-- no single track does it justice, nor does skimming the tracks to see if it's good. I like it a whole lot... so much that I'm sending my music to the record label he's on (yes, haha, the Family is one guy, isn't that absurdly wry and unexpected ... well, not if you've heard the album, which indeed sounds like the observant and patient brain of one artistic man) which is based out of San Francisco. They e-mailed me back saying that they would prefer to hear finished albums, because the album is important to them and they want to hear how I choose running order. Great! First time I've ever heard that and I'm happy about it!

The Avalanches' Since I Left You is, inspiringly, still unlike any other record. I bring it up because I just listened to John Cale's Vintage Violence for the first time all the way through (with mixed results, but enough stuff that pleased me to warrant future listens) and it gradually dawned on me, as "Ghost Story" gradually built to its finish, that said song was sampled by the Avalanches for the ending of one of my favorite tracks, "Two Hearts in 3/4 Time." Sampled well, in fact! The only thing I like more than discovering the origin of a sample (aside from discovering a song or an idea in a song that Stereolab has stolen for one of their own) is approving of the sample's use after considering its source. Since I Left You, though-- go back and listen to it. You will find it has not been matched in its genre, either in process or in quality.

Songs by Stereolab that are in part completely stolen from other songs (in the sense of "great composers steal"): "Cadriopo" from Aluminum Tunes; "Metronomic Underground," "The Noise of Carpet" and "Emperor Tomato Ketchup" from Emperor Tomato Ketchup; "Super Falling Star" from Peng!; "Animal or Vegetable (A Wonderfull Wooden Reason...)" from Refried Ectoplasm (and I think the part I mean has actually been performed as another song by the groop, the title of which I can't remember, but I think it's on ABC Music); "Jenny Ondioline" from Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements. I think there are more, but I can't remember them right now. Anyway, guess which songs they rip off (or say it if you know) and win prizes! (Some are more direct than others.) I love Stereolab! They appropriate ideas by artists they love in an entirely new context, thereby making them fresh! (Also, no prizes.)

Also: I posted my resume on Craigslist today with a specific angle (hence making it appropriate content for this blog). I got one response this evening, more than I expected to get at all, and I'm not going to respond in turn. It makes me feel hilariously ungrateful, but as it is a maintenance job at a rehearsal studio in Oakland that requires my presence from 6 PM to 12 AM five nights a week... well, let's just say I'm exercising the type of caution that my mom sometimes doesn't think I've got in me when I tell her about things like walking to the bus station from the Boardwalk in Santa Cruz at around 11 PM. I think she'd see the difference between that and taking the bus home from Oakland at midnight every night. Are you reading this, Mom?

Not listening to music. No number.

The Residents' Animal Lover. (#11)

2005-08-28T20:07:00.000-07:00

It is easy to spend hours, perhaps days, at RzWeb, if you're interested, revelling in the gleeful 33-year-old myth of their story, pretending it's all true, knowing only some of it is, being pretty sure what isn't. Feel free to do so, and the story from someone who has might start like: there they go again, confounding folks after over three decades of confoundment by putting out another impossibly different record. Another version could begin: grizzled old artists and obscure, seasoned professionals combine forces (likely somewhere in the Bay Area) to create a thoughtful, morbid electronic concept album using synthesizers, some rock instruments, vocal filters, gamelan, a violin or two... In both versions, the subtext of the story is the same: some people got together and made an amazing recording. The Residents' Animal Lover is, so far, the best record of 2005, and it will not be acknowledged as such by anyone you know.

A bit of Residents backstory just might work in favor of this brief article, anyway. Demons Dance Alone was one of the best albums of 2002, and this was even more unlikely than Animal Lover's success. Despite the refreshing half-triumph of Wormwood (great live set, spotty accompanying studio album), their '90s (and 2/3 of their '80s, not entirely in chronological order) consisted of mere curiosities and occasional missteps, as opposed to the glorious and bold experiments that marked their entire first decade as Nixon's favorite anonymous collective. Demons Dance Alone was accompanied by a press campaign claiming that the Residents are dead, and this is the debut album by "the people on the bus"-- in other words, the Residents' tour bus, the one that was driving them around Europe when a few thousand extra people died at more or less the same time in New York City. It was by far the most personal music the group had ever made, self-referential, sad, about humans, darkly humorous in the way they've always been but with a slightly gruesome twist. Accessible fables with dark morals. The melodies took a turn for the haunting and serene, but the variety of tracks was the most unpredictable it's been in some time: maudlin serenades coming up against bent art-pop that wouldn't fit in any time period but this one. For the first time, the new-music/rock ensemble from the Wormwood show really fused with the MIDI/loop orchestra they'd been cultivating since God in 3 Persons in 1988, and as surprising as the success was, it's unsurprising why it worked.

Listen to that album later. Animal Lover is the first post-1981 Residents record that I would recommend to new listeners about as excitedly as Fingerprince or Duck Stab (and, everyone kill me now, "Constantinople" notwithstanding, it's better than Duck Stab). "On the Way to Oklahoma" is an opening track that dropped my jaw. I do not want to describe it, because I had no idea what was going to drop my jaw until I eventually closed my mouth, and even if no one else has a reaction even remotely as awesome, it's a neat sound to be surprised by. What this track has in store that the rest also deliver, aside from more of that morbid disposition that carried Demons Dance Alone (with a twist that I will explain), is an absolutely stunning musical and sonic backdrop the likes of which they've never even tried before. The compositional maturity (dare I name Kurt Weill? probably not, but that might give you an idea), the mix's unusual approach to depth of field, and the arrangements, incorporating the kitchen sink and constantly appropriately morphing from one thing to the next-- ... Oh, it's all here, everything an avant-pop fan could ever want, with the added bonus of excellent musicianship throughout. (Not something a Residents fan always looks for, but it's a beautiful thing when it's called for, and it is highly called for here.)

The theatricality of the presentation-- something that the Residents have always held in spades-- is worth discussing. The cast of voices, with several different performers showing up now and then, appear both filtered and unfiltered. The voice treatments run the gamut, with nearly any post-Eno (or, in Another Day on Earth's case, post-Eno-Eno) vocal filter that you can dream up being used in both subtle and unsubtle ways. The result is creepy, alarming, sometimes goofy-- all told, inhuman, but not robotic, creating a contrast for the untouched vocal performances. They're as dramatically inflected as ever, and they work the way a good dramatic actor works, conveying the emotion of the stories by always hitting the right note with the right dynamic touch. What they're all singing about this time is the primal side of mankind-- its conflicts with animals, its own animal nature, and the Bergman-esque sadness, love, and self-destructive impulses that arise.

The Residents' best work has always had a quality that is "beyond me." This is why I am reluctant to go into too much detail, for fear of my inadequacy at representing it appropriately. I'll sum it up here. Animal Lover, like so many of those art-fuck works of excellence that they made in the last 3rd of the 20th century, is "beyond me," and it thrills me. What was once visceral is visceral again. They're not art-fuck champions anymore, though; what they are now is really, really unlike anything else. When the gamelan comes in, it dares not dabble in world music; when Nolan Cook's electric guitar does whatever it can do so expertly, it still doesn't even touch rock music; when an electronic beat shows up, I can't picture, just as I can't for any other instance, anything but the Residents. "Ten fucking stars," to quote Steve Albini on a record he loved to pieces, and I'd maybe even just slim it down to "awesome," if it truly meant what it's supposed to mean anymore, because I really am in awe of what the Residents are as much as what they have been.

As a postscript that I think is amusing: Freak Show (1990) is actually my favorite one from their non-classic/not-as-rejuvenated period, because (among other reasons) some of those beats, I swear, hit as correctly as the best mainstream hip hop from these oh-so-naughty naughts.

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: Animal Lover, the Residents

Who is Raheem DeVaughn? (#10)

2005-08-27T19:06:00.000-07:00

Congratulations on viewing the 10th (arbitrarily numbered) post on Maracatu Atomico!!! You have this information, free of charge, to share with whoever might be impressed or interested. Stay tuned for the next 10 posts. Maybe you'll learn another ... thing. One thing learned for every 10 posts, that's our proud motto.

I went and saw the Flying Luttenbachers last night in the most social occasion of my week, having met with Jeff Larson, Dan Keezer and Trevor Murphy (and his friend Amy, and another fella whose name I didn't catch). Take a look at these strapping lads. (The guy on the bottom right wasn't there.) One of my favorite non-musical aspects of the Flying Luttenbachers is that the man who started the band years ago, whose last name was Luttenbacher, left the group very early, and Weasel Walter (the man in the picture on top right) took over. He's masterminded the project ever since, composing every note that isn't improvised and commanding the drum kit. Yeah, they're powerful and exciting, but they've got singular compositional integrity from Mr. Walter to set them apart. The man can play polyrhythmic patterns on the drums like I've never seen a man at a rock show, and his players are right there with his every pre-determined twitch. Instrumental, modernist rock-- "brutal prog" as Walter has called it.

The Hemlock Tavern is a bar, so a lot of people there were drunk, and would not shut up, and would also mosh. This was obnoxious, and dealt with in good humor by the all-too charismatic Walter (yeah, he looks mean, but he's all fun and funny at the concert). Yet I still enjoy the Hemlock Tavern, mainly the space of it. The last show I went to, actually, was just over a month ago, also at the Hemlock (my first time there), and it was Ruins-- actually, Ruins Alone. This meant that the good Yoshida Tatsuya, another drummer that writes all (or most) of the parts for whatever band, played to a sampler with bass parts in it, singing along and generally kicking it tremendously well. Then he played with "local bass players" on Ruins songs and improvisations. One of them was Devin Hoff from the Nels Cline Singers, and he fit in just exquisitely, with a staunch stance but a wonderful facial expression that clearly communicated nothing if not "I am able to remain so still through years of discipline in the art of controlling the rock to achieve both maximum vitality and maximum technical virtuosity." The other was... well, well, Ed Rodriguez from the Flying Luttenbachers, we meet again... in the past! He wasn't really in his proper place here, unfortunately, especially when it came to a trio improvisation with Devin & Yoshida. Jeff Larson (who was there as well) put it nicely when he said he kept "trying to wrest control" of the improv; he was too chaotic and didn't seem to be responding as appropriately as the others. Rodriguez is perfect in Luttenbachers, though.

So anyway, I might be back to the Hemlock again tomorrow, as Weasel Walter's jazz quartet will be performing. I'll only go if I can be assured they'll finish early enough that I can take the BART home afterwards. Then next Friday-- oh, it's Merzbow Friday. Oh, lord, won't you bring me a Merzbow Friday? Good thing it wasn't the lord bringing it, or I'd have to go to church, you know, just to make the deal fair.

Ha, well, don't go pegging me as a Kanye fanatic just yet, as Late Registration is just a slight spotty, but I love some of the songs, I really do. "Crack Music" and "Roses" are clear highlights right off the bat. I feel like I know exactly what Jon Brion, co-producer, added to each song on the album; every time I hear electric piano, tack piano, organ, Mellotron, vibes, strings, any kind of psychedelic melange of melodies or effects... sometimes I know Brion's left his mark on a recording even when I was completely unaware of his work on it. I'm not sure I would have been so accurately observant in this case had I not known it, but since I do, it's just plain, and I like it; in fact, I think this is a great venue for him. As for Kanye, he's as winning as ever, with the occasional blunder (no, Kanye, I'm not ashamed of my self-confidence either, but there's a bit of awkwardness when you're complaining, in the worst track on the album, about why everyone won't leave you alone because you're the greatest). I like enough of this album so much that I'm downloading College Dropout again. No, I don't care what people say. I've also finally got my paws on that instrumental version of Common's Be. Maybe instrumental hip hop that isn't DJ Shadow's Endtroducing or a few Prefuse 73 songs from 2004 will finally entertain me.

In a similar vein, here are two things I learned at the Virgin Megastore listening station yesterday:

1) Kanye's production on Keyshia Cole's "I Changed My Mind" makes it a deadly track and an excellent single. Seek it out.
2) Raheem DeVaughn is an R&B singer whose label debut was just released this year. It's called The Love Experience. I liked what I heard enough to buy it used at Amoeba. Well, the second half is no good, but it's a 70 minute album, so... it's got about 35, 40 great minutes on it! Hooray! Same as R. Kelly's TP.3 Reloaded (another Jive/Zomba release), except with Kelly, the half that's bad is scattered throughout the album, so more listenable. DeVaughn is a very good vocalist, and one thing he likes to do is multitrack himself seven or eight times over, some of them harmonizing, others doing their own thing, thereby turning the song into this controlled chaos that's really compelling. There's even a slight Cody ChesnuTT feel to the title track, even with the weird breathiness in his voice, when he sings the line: "So to the woman who betrayed me, I think it's unfair how/ How you chose to deceive me; I thought that was my job." He doesn't come with anything nearly that engaging lyrically for the rest of the record, unfortunately, but his voice does the job nonetheless, as does the all-star-no-star variety of musical backers, the sugar coating on the Advil that is DeVaughn's "vocal production" (as the liner notes put it). Hereby warned with a reiteration: any praises here are generally directed towards, approximately, the first half of The Love Experience. (Okay, I also like two in the second half. Plus the last song, which is 5 and a half minutes of "thank you"s over some harmonizing and beatboxing. I can never be sure how sincere R&B/hip hop liner note "thank you"s really are, but if I just imagine them being said the way DeVaughn does it in this track, they'll all read as sincere as possible.)

The word of the year, which relates quite nicely to Feels by Animal Collective, is "underwhelming." Another word that relates is "pleasant," and a couple songs are "great," but give me Here Comes the Indian any day over this uneven Tongs-gone-electric. Yes, that's a bit too pejorative, because it's really a nice enough record, but I'm just trying to say I don't love it yet! Maybe I won't. Here's what I suggest you do, and by you I mean anyone reading, now: listen to Here Comes the Indian then make an album that I love just as much! Thanks, okay, I promise to write something focused next time, and congratulations on the 10th/12th post, love.

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: The Love Experience, Raheem DeVaughn; Cheap at Half the Price, Fred Frith; Dense Band, David Moss

Live, Memorex, or both? (#9)

2005-08-24T23:32:00.000-07:00

Ooh, here's a curious topic. What about albums that blend, to any capacity, studio performance with live performance? I think it's usually a rather nice effect. Let's just list some, to no great effect!

Yes, The Yes Album (1971)
I'm listening to it right now, the whole reason the topic even came to mind. The song "Clap" is Steve Howe playing a fantastic bluegrass-ish acoustic piece solo, in concert. I wonder the benefits of this particular one being included as a live piece. It might be as simple as the live version simply being a better peformance, because, well, it is; the studio version is included as a bonus track, and it's played altogether competently, just not as nimbly or with as much vitality. The bookends of the song being announced off-mic and the audience's applause are somehow natural inclusions. This is a darn good record, overall. Takes a nice 'n' close 2nd to Close to the Edge (although I haven't yet listened to Going for the One or Tormato).

Neil Young, Harvest (1972)
The one example that offsets a live recording from a studio recording on this album is responsible for one of the coolest moments in the history of album structuring. I would mention it, but people who've heard it know what I'm talking about, and people who haven't should seek it out in order to be very pleasantly surprised. (Yes, there are those people; I was one until just last year. I'm still not a Neil Young fan, but Harvest won me over. Trans, also. Never forget Trans. Perhaps a post about Trans is in the future. Perhaps I need to obtain the songs from Trans. Perhaps this is all madness.)

Prince, Sign O the Times (1987)
Here things kind of go awry. The album tries to come to a furious climax with a 9-minute live performance of a song called "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night." The intentions are good but the song is not strong enough to carry it off, especially over 9 minutes, and the whole Wizard of Oz thing is far too goofy for its own good.

Beck, Stereopathetic Soulmanure (1994)
This album is such a crashing mess that anything goes. "Ozzy" is mainly what I'm thinking here. I can't imagine what else would go in that spot, but I also can't imagine what else wouldn't.

Mekons, Punk Rock (2004)
Every other song is either live or in the studio, on this one. They're all versions of very old Mekons songs, which is really interesting, especially because the current Mekons lineup has almost nothing to do with the original. The product isn't as compelling as the concept, but "Dan Dare" is always a great song, and so are any other songs you like from the first two or three Mekons releases, 'cause they're just done nice and new and competent-like. It's still a nice addition to the discography, and gives the band more substance as a collective. Mekons are heroes.

Squarepusher, Ultravisitor (2004)
It actually took until this exact second for me to draw parallels between Ultravisitor and Aphex Twin's Drukqs; it really just occurred to me as an aside before I even began typing about the album, but I have to make a tangent about this. They're both the most cohesive statements that either has ever made, and they're also both incredibly long (Ultravisitor just nudging up against the single disc's limits, Drukqs being a full-fledged 2CD effort)-- and it could be about as simple as that, except conceptually they both tread similar paths as well. They each go for the more-or-less-every-other-track division tactic; Drukqs skips between prepared-Disklavier works and full-on synthesized "Aphex acid" (with such oddities as that delightful dungeon piece, and Richard's parents singin'im a happy birthday over the machine, just sweetening the pot), and Ultravisitor vascillates from solo bass & guitar workouts (recorded live in many cases) to examples of every type of song Jenkinson had done up until that point (rave-ups, lazy fusion tunes, and blocky noise aplenty). I love both albums, although Aphex has a slight edge. One of the nice parts about the live sound on Ultravisitor, though, is how audience recordings sneak into the non-live tracks every so often. It seems as if he realized the potential for the way live sound could modify electronic music back when he put out Do You Know Squarepusher (which features a particularly pointless live album as its second disc) but only cared to put the right amount of effort into it with Ultravisitor. Just a guess.

Isotope 217, Who Stole the I Walkman? (2000)
There's a bit of restaurant-and/or-club-sounding chatter (similar to the way Squarepusher uses the applause as texture, as previously discussed) in bits of this brilliant record, but it's kind of foreshadowing for the show-stopper, one track before the last. "Welcome back to the Isotope show," states a member of the group from the stage (or, if very small club, performance area), and he challenges the audience with the taunt that someone (whose name is hilariously obscured-- for security purposes?-- by an electronic effect) didn't think the crowd was ready to get its party on. The booty beat kicks in, and he leads the audience in a call and response: "I need to get my party on"/"That's what I'm talkin' bout!" The crowd chatter and chant is all live sound, but the booty beat is crisp and direct, and after just over a minute, the chant starts to get cut up and it's into the final movement of the record. I really love this album and that's always been one of my favorite parts-- it's not spoiled by description the way it would be with Harvest.

Honorable mention goes to Kraftwerk's Minimum-Maximum, which is a live album in total, but a Kraftwerk live album-- that is, with the exception of the vocals, it's performed entirely from a backing track. Not only do I prefer some of the versions to their album counterparts (and yes, they're total reworkings, I'm not quite that insane), but also I do happen to like listening to Kraftwerk songs as segued by applause. Maybe it queues up my fervently positive reaction to seeing them live at Coachella, but I think it also has something to do with a respect for their robot philosophy/persona; just hearing all those adoring fans cheering on the appearance of their favorite machine-men is a bit of a rush.

Less honorable mention goes to the Frank Zappa album Roxy and Elsewhere, which is so overdubbed it might as well be a studio album. Not ashamed to hide it, though, thank goodness. Still a very good set.

Oh, and here's a really good question. I don't think John Cale's Sabotage/Live is a real live album, and if it is, I think it's on a Roxy and Elsewhere level of fakery. I also doubt the authenticity of the conceit of the Make-Up's first album (again, if it's not entirely faked, there's a lot of obvious overdubbing). And! In fact! There was a third example! But while I try and remember it, the really good question is: am I an idiot, or might I be right about these things?

Any others? These are just what I could draw from memory and from my iTunes library, and I'm sure there are some I'm forgetting. I want to hear! ... and learn!

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: The Yes Album, Yes

What, what is happening? (#8)

2005-08-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

I have deleted a part of my history; can you guess which? Yes, it's the embarassing part. I thought I was above that sort of tactic, as a blogger, but it seems not. It wasn't even that embarassing, though, so don't worry about it. Maybe everything I've left up here is more embarassing. Depends on who you ask.

The first half of the new Kronos Quartet album of R.D. Burman's Bollywood tunes with Asha Bhosle? Like dynamite without the stick. I mean, the songs, they're so good, and the arrangements, they're swell! The rest of the CD is solid on more of a "pleasantly consistent" tip, but that first half is great, especially the one-two knockout that kicks it off. It's neat; the string quartet sometimes takes a back seat to synthesizers, pipa by Wu Man, and percussion by Zakir Hussain. Most instruments are generally played by the four, though, including some of the percussion to augment the master Hussain, so the quartet of people doesn't take the back seat, just their usual instruments. It has a nice, unusual tone from beginning to end, unafraid of very modest and tasteful psychedelic effects, and is worth buying if you buy music like this. These tracks make me want to hear the originals, just to see how heavily David Harrington chopped 'n' screwed it Kronos-like. (I know that's a real term that probably doesn't apply here, but I wanted to use it because it humorously makes the Kronos Quartet sound even hipper than they are.) "Relationships Grow Slowly" is the jam, for you single-song downloaders out there. I'll AIM it to you, if you want.

Of course I want to go to this, as a result. It's damned expensive. Probably can't afford it.

The only thing I knew about Asha Bhosle was that she was a popular singer in India, and you know how I knew it? Yep, "Brimful of Asha" by Cornershop, an outstanding song to this day. Turns out they put out an amazing album called When I Was Born for the 7th Time, and then, much later, a terrible album called Handcream for a Generation. Then they did a double A-side single for Rough Trade with the Indian singer Bubbley Kaur, "Topknot"/"Natch," and it was unbelievably cool! Didn't make any kind of splash in America, and in fact was not even released here-- except that "Topknot" was on a Rough Trade compilation of some kind. I've been able to find that online, but not "Natch" (which I heard a while ago, streaming from one of Rough Trade's websites). In any case, these songs are good enough to make me want to hear another album, and after Handcream for a Generation, I was sure I'd never care again. Very winningly funky, those chaps can be. (Why do I cringe slightly when I use the word "funky" in writing? It's even a bit awful to say out loud, for me. Some people can get away with using the word. Sometimes there's no substitute, I guess. At least that I know of.)

All this Luaka Bop hipster talk leads me into wanting to make a confession, which is that I am the only person on the entire planet who has enjoyed Geggy Tah's album Sacred Cow ... more than once ... over a several-year period ... in its entirety. In fact, has it been a decade? Almost. Criminy. I guess that's enough grounds for someone to decapitate the budding music critic in me. Anyway: next on my list is to get a lot of Asha Bhosle music, or at the very least, a definitive collection, hopefully with some of these songs on it. I've downloaded a couple of Jovanotti albums that I've missed out on over the last six years, one of which is fresh this year and does in fact feature the joint (hahaha, sorry) Ricardo played for me. Looking forward to those.

In terms of Bollywood vibes, there's this track called "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai," written by Sharukh Khan. We heard it in our Music of India class of our Freshman (excuse me-- Freshperson) year of UC Santa Cruz as taught by Deepak Ram, a wonderful bansuri player and all. (I say "we" and "our" because it's a class that a lot of my friends and I took all together.) I was able to download it shortly after the lecture in which it was played, and ever since then, Jamie, Libby and I (at the very least) have known it by heart. Not just the vocal melody, but all the swooping string arrangements and the percussion fills and keyboard parts. It's a breathtaking song, and I believe it's from the film of the same title, which Deepak told us means "something, something is happening."

Speaking of happenings, update on the 8-track is that I'm sending it back. It's broken. More waiting to make my next album. I don't even know what my music is going to be like. I've had so much varying input since the last one. Hopefully it'll turn out into something different, in a good way. Off to a job interview!

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: You've Stolen My Heart: Songs from R.D. Burman's Bollywood, Kronos Quartet & Asha Bhosle

The first post I've written without music playing.

2005-08-23T01:22:00.000-07:00

So it doesn't deserve a number. Especially because it will be short.

I spent a day in San Francisco with a small group of my extended family, of which two of the three, whom I met six years ago on a family trip to Italy, are from Sicily. (As this is a personal blog, I am too tired to untangle that sentence, or any others that may follow.) From and inspired by the teenager Ricardo-- a fun, friendly chap-- I learned some things about popular music. One of them is that Jovanotti is still popular; I bought a Jovanotti CD, Lorenzo 1999: Capo Horn, that Italian summer that I listened to several things, but mainly Capo Horn and the brand-new The Soft Bulletin over and over again. I still listen to that Jovanotti album sometimes, and now realize I should definitely hear some more, since Ricardo played me a curious track, presumably the hit, from the latest album. Another is that reggaeton is everywhere; a scan through the radio stations, as guided by Ricardo, stopped several times on some reggaeton tunes that Ricardo would often recognize. A third is that Gwen Stefani really is as popular as she seemed to be trying to act; this occurred to me when he sang along to one of the songs on the radio, and since I saw that she is playing in a massive Oakland venue on December 1, and it's already being advertised on the giant screen outside the Coliseum and next to the highway. A fourth is that "The Way You Move" by OutKast appears to be slightly outlasting "Hey Ya," which I find a bit unfortunate, but "The Way You Move" is much less anachronistic, so it makes sense.

I think there was more, but Kosher awaits in the morning. Oh, and by the way, the magazine that I'm going to write for (those of you who don't know will now find out) is called West Coast Performer. I've been assigned with The Marina Album by Sick Bees. By chance! It's nice that I saw them open for Built to Spill recently, with a much worse band (than both BtS and Sick Bees) called Ape Shape stuck in the middle. This gives me the "concertgoer" angle as well as the "recorded output" angle.

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: none

MOVIE SOUNDTRACK WHILE WRITING: I Am Curious: Yellow

"My grandma looks like Jack Palance." (#7)

2005-08-20T23:04:00.000-07:00

The above is a line from The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which I saw today after my job interview at the Metreon. (Review: pretty funny, lighthearted, universally winning kinda movie for everyone except CAP Alert.) I immediately thought of the Mighty Sparrow song "Jack Palance," which references a woman of 50 (and, in later choruses, 60, 70 and 80), who "could be [Mighty Sparrow's] granny," and, in the next line, has "a face like Jack Palance." I found the similarity almost too striking, and feel it's very possibly a reference. On an unrelated note, the character closest to a hipster wore shirts promoting albums such as Dirty by Sonic Youth, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy, and Liquid Swords by GZA. The typical-MOR-comedy-style score was by Lyle Workman, whose name I recognized without it being attached to any memories in particular-- until a Google search revealed his session work with not only Frank Black on Teenager of the Year and Cult of Ray, but also They Might Be Giants on Factory Showroom. I think there's a permanent place in my brain for all of the liner notes I've ever read at all closely.

Oh, as for my show, I don't have much to say after all. I'm glad that basically everyone who could come out did so. It was fun playing with the Owl Dudes and the Musical Healer at the Canvas Gallery. I manifested quite a lot of energy and I hope everyone enjoyed themselves. I know some people did. I hope to play there again, and, really, anywhere else I can get to. Made $40, too. John Hidalgo-Barnes of Powmod can be quoted as written on his website: "it was cool." You don't need much more info than that.

My new 8-track is here, and I've been thinking of changing the idea of the first thing I record on it from "The Finer Things" by Steve Winwood to "He's Misstra Know-It-All" by Stevie Wonder. Maybe a samba version with a wry lyrical twist. Boy, will it ever be wry. You'll have to trust me on this because I'm sure you'll never hear it.

AND NOW A SECTION IN WHICH I WRITE ABOUT MADONNA AND RELATED TOPICS AT A LENGTH THAT WOULD BEFIT A SEPARATE POST ENTIRELY:

One album I've been enjoying a whole lot these last couple days is Madonna's collection of 12" and dub mixes, You Can Dance, made after her first two albums. I haven't listened to Madonna, but I dig Like a Virgin for the most part; the songs from Virgin make kind of a poor show, though. Actually, the only song that's really from that album is "Over and Over," which is a very disappointing version, with dreadful minor-key (honestly) orchestra hits and far too little of a focus on the sweetness of the original tune. The 8-minute mix of "Into the Groove," the original version of which got stuck in the middle of the CD version of Virgin (incidentally, a bad place for it), has some nice sections but is marred by an amateurish piano solo that feels spontaneous in all the wrong ways. "Spotlight" and "Holiday" are pretty excellent. "Holiday" has a tasteful piano solo, especially by contrast, where some of the music from "Spotlight," without any lyrics, could very well fit into the score of something like, say, the game Waverace for N64 (and also has a good part with stereotypical Latin party piano and Madonna "ba-ba-da"ing along). Both versions of "Where's the Party," highlights in particular, are like very delicious candy to me. All of the simple and true joy I've ever gotten from playing with keyboard presets can be summed up in those 14 minutes of music.

One of the best parts of "Into the Groove" is a fairly prescient big beat cut-up section that's only a couple bars long and should have been longer; Daft Punk had to come along before entire songs could sound like that, I guess. Fatboy Slim is probably a better example, at least in terms of earlier popularization of the style, but Daft Punk are so much better. Even Human After All is better than any single Fatboy Slim album, and it sounds unfinished in comparison to Discovery.

There was also an embarassing moment today (but not embarassing enough, obviously, since here it comes) where I heard "Everybody" for the first time and thought, "Oh, no! Annie ripped this off lock, stock and barrel for 'The Greatest Hit' and nobody noticed! Well, I'll blow the lid off this sucker, that's for sure." It took me two seconds to find out that everyone, including Annie, was perfectly aware of this fact, talking all about it on MTV's website and the like. The truth, in fact, is that no matter how many times it was mentioned, I never once took note until now. Sometimes it's like I'm writing everything down in my brain just by reading it, and sometimes it passes me like an exit sign on a 300-mile road trip.

Ooh, ooh-- and "Holiday" uses the same keyboard sound as the keyboard solo from "Chameleon" by Herbie Hancock! Jesus, how long can I go on about You Can Dance? It's best I stop here.

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: Volume One, Mighty Sparrow; You Can Dance, Madonna

Passion of the lounge. (#6)

2005-08-19T16:31:00.000-07:00

Sarah McLachlan's "Sweet Surrender" played while I was eating a sandwich in Quizno's on Center today. I had a couple of "isn't it interesting...?" thoughts in response. Thoughts that would have stayed inside of my head... before, that is, the new age. Actually, my thoughts about the Lilith Fair are going to remain private, only because I don't have quite the confidence in my analytical abilities to make a cultural statement about something I observed merely as a "bad music fair" in my pre-adolescence. Something regarding "Sweet Surrender" being a song about surrendering to a man vs. the feminist empowerment of the movement (if you can call Lilith Fair a movement).

The better idea I had, though, was this: Isn't all the most bland, adult contemporary, "easy listening" pop music also about some of the most passionate emotions that exist? Surely the music motivates these passions in some listeners, but isn't the stereotype usually "music you can play at work"?

I also forgot to mention why I mentioned those lyrics, in the first place, two posts ago. Trevor said in his comment that Phil Elverum's packaging is just "words to explain more words." That's what made me play that Elvis Costello quotation, and write it here. I don't see a general problem with explanations of your lyrics; it's your prerogative, just as an artist statement is unnecessary but somewhat risky. Just as risky as not including one? Possibly, but it's a new risk. If someone thinks you've overexplained, or doesn't like your explanation, you've lost their appreciation, at least to a significant degree. You might get "pretentious" thrown at you, and might I add that often says more about the person's ability to articulate than their opinion. It's not that the word is invalid, it's just often misused.

This half-post will have to do, as I am about to practice for my show, which is tonight. I'll surely have something to pour out about that tomorrow, and then maybe I'll practice a few more record reviews. I've got, as always, an incredible amount of music yet to hear.

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: "Raw Hide," Ol' Dirty Bastard (with Method Man); "Clan in da Front," Wu-Tang Clan; "Famous Goodbye King," His Name Is Alive; "Blue You," The Magnetic Fields; "Lizard Lady," The Residents; "Banana Monster Ne Repond Plus," Stereolab; "Deusa do Amor," Moreno Veloso + 2; "Space Moth," Stereolab; "Amour et Souvenir," Diblo Dibala (with Loketo) (iTunes doing a bit of favoritism on the random today; the intro to "Space Moth" is also kind of eerily similar to "Blue You")

Garlic for the music mind. (#5)

2005-08-19T00:57:00.000-07:00

There are a couple things I have to type out before bed. The frequency of these posts could very well diminish by the time I'm writing for other things, or working a job, or recording songs. All these things are in the future. What's now is MISCELLANEA! MINUTIAE! Oh, exultant glory of such and the like.

Amoeba's new releases page claims this recent Tuesday for the release of the instrumental version of Be by Common. I got excited about this, as I don't particularly like Common's flow, but I found myself jonesing now and then to hear the beats. When I asked the clerk here in Berkeley, he couldn't find it in the database, and said that sometimes other Amoeba locations pick up on things before others do. For instance-- this was his example, and boy, have I been sitting on this rant-- everyone comes in to ask for Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, but they don't carry it. I held my tongue, but I nearly shouted a congratulatory something-or-other. The Onion AV Club just decided, in an aside, that no group is more deserving of Pitchfork's orgy of hype (paraphrased) than CYHSY. I won't link to the Clap website here; if you're interested, go search it out. They have some mp3s. I haven't heard a group less deserving of the attention it's getting in quite some time. They're not afraid to show their influences, man, but also they're just so damn original, you know? What a plucky bunch! The song (okay, fine, listen for yourself, I did the work) that I believe Ryan Schreiber claimed nearly forced him to piss himself? Something about "Just Like Heaven" by the Cure as fronted by a David Byrne sapped of all charisma came to my mind. I mean, this band can do whatever they want, it's fine, no water off my back, I'm just uncomfortable hearing about them. Maybe in concert they turn sweat into wine.

So they haven't had the Common thing (although I just Googled it, and it might be vinyl only, which would be sad for me, Mr. Turntable Free). They also haven't had some other selections that I've been keen on (Skuli Sverrisson and an Extreme Records compilation that he's on, Flipmode Squad, Gilberto Gil's 1971 s/t, Makigami Koichi's first album on Tzadik) and when pickings are like that down at the record store, I start to crave more product by my classic targets for completist fever. Where's the rare Elvis Costello? What do you mean, I have everything by him?! One time I found an entire album he wrote for Wendy James in the used section, there've got to be more things like that! In the new Bowie section, there's a collection of 12" mixes called Club Bowie, and I've also been skirting the idea of picking up some sort of comprehensive collection of his '60s work; I especially want to hear his earliest work, with the Lower Third and whatnot... but do I? Is "The Laughing Gnome" enough? Certainly it's a self-sufficient piece; I wouldn't dare allow you to infer otherwise, concerning "The Laughing Gnome." Dare not, I.

"John Jones" by Van Dyke Parks sounds a hell of a lot like John Cale from right around the same time period, and I mean the singing, too, albeit just a bit less outlandish. It was nice to see Cale the sophisti-pop-ster come out of the shadows of the VU and Dream Syndicate, I think, especially the Island/Eno years; I love Fear, Helen of Troy, and the first two songs of Slow Dazzle (oh, man, "Taking It All Away"...!). The song I'm thinking of when I hear this is "Barracuda," probably. Both of them have that Caribbean feel, but the difference is that VDP's got a Trinidad concept going here (on Discover America, that is). Calypso, steelbands and everything else related get mixed in with Parks's Americana a la tropicalia (that is, American music done with the combination of formailty and irreverence that tropicalia offered Brazillians), powerful arrangements with attention to incomparable detail-- in other words, a true focus on making it different. It's nearly indescribable, what Parks could get away with back in the day. If I had to compare this album to something in order to appease a friend who wasn't familiar with Parks, I'd call it Island-era Cale getting beaned in the head by a barrage of Oblique Strategies decks while trying to read up on the history of Trinidad, but Discover America and the previous, Smile-esque Song Cycle are really of their own kind, must-haves for lovers of permutations of pop.

Discover America actually starts with one minute of the Mighty Sparrow song "Jack Palance," taken directly from the recording, and that's how I heard of Mighty Sparrow, and how I just now discovered calypso outside of Harry Belafonte (whose Live at Carnegie Hall I recently bought anyway, in order to relive childhood memories of captivation at his version of "Hava Nagila"). I still haven't spun Volume One, but I picked it up, and it has the full "Jack Palance," which should be ... probably about three times as lovely as what I've heard of it so far.

When is The Big Bang by Busta Rhymes coming out? It took me forever to figure out that it wasn't July 19. This guy needs better press! So does OutKast! They need official websites! I have to hunt and peck for releases and Billboard articles for any info, usually not up-to-date at all. Busta was on fire in late 2002; who knew he would take so long to come out with his followup? Aftermath's website says September for Busta, and the latest Billboard news says that OutKast's My Life in Idlewild should roll out around ... fall? With another album, originally titled 10 the Hard Way, now titled The Hard 10, maybe coming out by the end of the year as well? Maybe? Wu-Tang's website is also teetering on the precipice of out-of-date information. Just a bit maddening. You can see what I spent my day doing before I started this blog (and what I do while writing it, too).

I'll just slumber off to the tune of Portishead's Dummy. Next time maybe I'll actually organize my thoughts. Chew on this for a while, something I found interesting. The complete list of artists they polled is on the bottom, half of which I've looked at. Elvis Costello did a list; meanwhile, he shows up on several others, including, surprisingly, Tom Waits's-- The Delivery Man, at that! Brutal Youth is the favorite of a member of Simple Plan. Finally, someone to help me support that criminally underrated record. Costello's been showing up quite a bit on this blog, hasn't he? He's basically just been occurring to me either at random or in odd places, is why. He'll slow down soon enough, I'm sure. Not in his career, that is. Just on here. Don't worry, everybody-- a couple jobs and an 8-track'll fix me up real good.

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: "In This Home on Ice," Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (my God, what I'll volunteer to do!); Discover America, Van Dyke Parks; Dummy, Portishead

Lyrics: the final (?) word. (#4)

2005-08-18T16:49:00.000-07:00

This song's about many other things, but that's where it starts. People are always asking, you know, what does that song mean? And if I could say it in other words than are in the song, I would have written another song, wouldn't I? So, you know what, I think I'll sing the song.
- Elvis Costello, after attempting to explain the lyrics of "All This Useless Beauty" to the audience as an introduction to the song, from the Costello & Nieve live set

Lyrics are a complicated beast for me. I often find myself saying to folks, "I don't listen to lyrics." This is not entirely true at all, but it's become the easiest way to defend my erratic listening habits. Sometimes a lyric (or even many of a song's lyrics) are indelibly marked in my brain from the first listen, and sometimes they all fade right away. A lyric in a song I've enjoyed on many occasions might occur to me for the first time on the nth listen! On occasion, I pay more attention to the words (or in most cases, the sounds of the syllables as I hear them) in music that isn't in English than the words in music that is. When E.C. switches to singing in Italian for a brief moment in this version of "All This Useless Beauty," that's when I immediately notice what he's singing. I think what happens is when I'm listening to music, the first thing to go into the background is what the words are. Maybe that's the best way to explain it.

When Mike Doughty was in Soul Coughing, he said he picked words for the sounds they make more than anything. I don't know how well I believe him, because I used to tell myself I do the same thing, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized this is untrue for me. It's true that the rhythm dictates the lyrics I write (since I have basically always recorded music and then written lyrics to sing to it), but within that I generally try to stick to words or phrases that evoke an idea that forms almost subconsciously along the way. Sometimes I'll go back to the beginning of a lyric to make the words better fit the direction the song has taken. But since lyrics are the first thing to go in the background in my listening experience, I'll often mix my vocals too quietly for some people. I wonder if I should just completely change this way of doing things. Time will tell when my new 8-track arrives. I'm planning for my first recording to be a cover of "The Finer Things" by Steve Winwood. In the meantime, just read this post from Trevor's blog about similar topics. It's more insightful and general, whereas I am rambling about my own thoughts, coming to relatively few conclusions.

Oh, and the Streets remind me about hip hop. Just before starting this blog, I was listening to Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers a lot, picking apart the lyrics, particularly with the help of the RZA's Wu-Tang Manual, which has a section that carefully analyzes and describes verses from some of the Wu-Tang's tracks as a group. I didn't used to pay attention AT ALL to lyrics in rap songs, unless they were very hook-like. Then I decided, well, if the lyrics are misogynistic and violent, I'm uninterested. This has changed drastically. I don't listen to Notorious B.I.G. on my own, but I respect his music in terms of the way it uses the form, and you'll hear the most "conscious" rapper talking up Biggie as one of his most important influences. It was probably Kool Keith, actually, that got me really interested in listening to rap lyrics. The only hip hop track I can recite a large part of by heart (aside from "Magpage" by the Spinto Band) is "The Girls Don't Like the Job." I tried covering it once and then deleted the results a day later.

Listening to The Sexual Life of the Savages, which is nice enough but as spotty as almost any compilation ever made. Souljazz does the Lord's work in quite a few ways, but in this situation, I'm basically just listening to music that I think is okay in the way that I think a lot of post-punk is just okay, except it's from another part of the world and only just now got around to being mythologized by Americans and/or Brits. It is more proof, though, that Brazillians were as on top of innovations in rock and pop as any of your favorite Anglos. But anyway, I'm off to Amoeba, and I don't think I will be buying the Nao Wave compilation there after all, although I will be picking up my Mighty Sparrow Volume One compilation. More on calypso later? Oh, god! More like "more on my very recent and shallow introductions to calypso." I'll probably actually just talk about Van Dyke Parks's Discover America, the first track of which is a minute long segment from "Jack Palance" by Mighty Sparrow. You know what, we'll just have to see.

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: "All This Useless Beauty," Elvis Costello (from Costello & Nieve); "Soft Serve," Soul Coughing; "Stay Positive," The Streets; "Nocturnes -- I. Doux et calme," Erik Satie; (iTunes random ends) The Sexual Life of the Savages: Underground Post-Punk from Sao Paulo, Brasil, various artists.

Mount Eerie's No Flashlight. (#3)

2005-08-18T10:20:00.000-07:00

I've read two reviews of this album, one overjoyed and one almost disgusted, and I'm amazed at what they don't notice. It's possible that my perception of the record has been altered so much by the simple fact that I downloaded it, whereas these people seem to have been overwhelmed by the packaging and liner notes. Whatever's the case, I have definitely noticed the difference between my analysis of this record and the analysis of my peers.

I will use this opportunity, just before I get started, to call out a specific mistake that Sam Ubl of Pitchfork makes, calling the production "laissez-faire." Never mind the complications of using the term in this context-- maybe it's meant to evoke more than describe, which would be kind of stupid-- but I can only start assuming what he means, rather than knowing, and my first answer is "an apparent lack of interference with the natural sounds of the instruments being played." I don't know, maybe use the term for Steve Albini, but not, ever, for Phil Elverum, and especially not starting here, either. Close mics, distorted percussion, the bass that opens "I Hold Nothing" being so distorted as to actually crumble into quiet-- even the simple fact that Elverum plays the instruments himself casts any potential "laissez-faire" qualities by the wayside. All I'm saying is that this is yet another carefully labored and crafted sound on yet another heavily multi-tracked solo effort by Elverum, and I don't know what Ubl is talking about. What he does say is that the music is boring, and that's a fine adjective, plain and it makes sense. I disagree here.

My main impression of the album is how unique and stubbornly consistent its sonic palette is, with some similarities to how the Microphones operated but ultimately a fresh approach. Layered, shimmery piano arpeggios seeping into the mix on "No Inside, No Out," the type found more than once on The Glow Pt. 2; songs finishing with extended clips of room noise; the big, cluttery and confusing rock on "The Moan;" and, of course, stereo, stereo, stereo, particularly on those very close acoustic guitars... sounds familiar, I hope. "I Hold No One," the opener, pulses along in that "Solar System" way, harmonium chords bleeding through. Elverum's voice does sound more tired, sad, slightly older-- phrases like "I've tried to repeatedly explain" have a weight-- and it's just as loud in the mix as ever, but the difference is he's actually singing quieter. There's more of a round slur to his vowels and "r"s. On "I Hold Nothing," though, the album really rolls out. Here we have Elverum singing for a minute over sound of the home-digital world attempting, and failing, to contain Sunn 0)))-sized bass tones, and then, the percussion. Neither of those reviews mention this percussion!

No Flashlight is a sad and thoughful album, its subtitle is Songs of the Fulfilled Night, and it oozes that uneven feeling you get when you've just contemplated the epic majesty of the universe and your significance in relation to it (Mount Eerie) and then you crash down to earth, and your social life, and you ask yourself, "Doesn't anyone get it?" This is clear even without the liner notes that supposedly attempt to explain everything to everyone, in the framing devices and asides alone. (Of course, there is humor on the album, and it isn't out of step with the man's persona, or the album's tone.) Elverum can't help but include something ecstatic, though, and here it lies in the percussion. It's great. It lies in the hands-- tapping and rubbing hand drums and, more likely, other resonant, percussive everyday surfaces (sometimes I'm sure he uses the body of the guitar). It recalls the precision of a programmed beat, but with more inviting warmth, since Elverum's attempts are just imprecise enough that you know they're not cut up. Latin rhythms abound, never played on recognizable Latin percussion. But on "The Universe Is Shown," oh my! It's really startling, the way the metal, bells and glass clang at you like an end-of-2nd-act moment of clarity, with deep, slamming end-of-the-film-preview toms and low battle-cry brass. The melodica is another good new idea for this track, and the voices almost summon up a fervent passion.

"The Universe Is Shown" is also one of three songs that end in a moan of Elverum singing the word "soooooooonnnnnnnnnnng," for at least ten seconds. It reminds me of hearing a quotation from him about his voice being his favorite instrument, and I get him; he's not saying he's a good singer, he's just saying he has a human voice and enjoys using it in music. The nuance of the extended vocal tones on the word remind me of that, and also of how deliberate his pronunciation techniques probably are on the rest of the songs. There's another triptych, too, found in "(2 Lakes)," "(2 Mountains)," and "(2 Moons)." It's a nice set, based on a very good, brief melody, and on a bossa nova rhythm which is left out in the third and final version. These, like the two songs called "No Flashlight" (yet another set of three, if you count the whole work that contains them), appear to sum up a statement that Elverum's been trying to formulate here, and they're best left heard instead of talked about, especially since there isn't a word that's hard to hear on this whole record.

The best song on No Flashlight is called "What?" The tuneful element of this album is most fulfilling here, and Elverum sings with the appropriate grace that befits the dramatic gestures of its particular percussive tactics. A low string of the piano is used in such a way that reminds me exactly why a piano is a percussion instrument more than anything else.

I recommend giving No Flashlight a try for anyone who has liked his work before, as well as anyone who has never heard it. I also recommend listening to the record before reading the liner notes; I haven't read them at all, and I'm not sure I ever plan to, and look how far it's gotten me! Of course, I'm familiar with all of his previous work, and his previous attempts at explanations, so maybe that's the baggage I bring with me on this particular voyage into the mind of (probably) the most creatively talented Northwestener that I've heard. In any case, I am not disappointed at all, and dare I say, with this short, thoughtful album, Elverum's made the single work in his catalogue that's easiest to replay and enjoy again. That doesn't mean it's his greatest achievement, more that it's quite worthy, and just right for something new.

P.S. Anyone who likes the album should try and download (or buy, if you're crazy) the Japanese version. It has four extra tracks, and they aren't out of place. Even though the album ends best with "(2 Moons)," it's nice to listen through them, as they have the effect of a good end credits sequence. "The Intimacy of the World in the World" is a thick, distantly Indian + Middle Eastern droning groove summing up the "ecstatic" nature of the percussive elements really well. "Where?" features the funniest lyric from these released sessions: "Where is the concert, and will it be all ages/ and what time are doors, and how much's it cost?/ The concert is nowhere/ There is only one sky."

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: No Flashlight: Songs of the Fulfilled Night, Mount Eerie

Today I am the master of my universe. (#2)

2005-08-17T18:29:00.000-07:00

So last night I'd already made up a kind of plan for the things I was going to write about in today's post. Then I woke up late for my internship, and thought, boy, I was starting to maybe get tired of this on Monday; this is going to be a long, uneventful day.

I'm, it turns out, exploding with newness!!

- I met a couple of really kind folks today at Kosher, one of whom, Melody, had her last day today, and another of whom won't be interning on the same day I am (Tuesdays), but it made for a great day and I'm going to be seeing them both tomorrow, and the one who's sticking around, Sam Sloane, from New Zealand, is going to be playing a show tomorrow night at the Starry Plough ... which I wanted to attend, but may not be able to, due to a sudden change in plans. Still, new relationships and network building are fun, fun, fun.

- I can't hold this in: I AM PLAYING IN SF! Here's where: the Canvas Gallery! It's $5, and it's at 9 PM, and I'll probably be first, and I want everyone that's in Northern California that has ever heard of me to come. I'm playing, apparently, with the Owl Dudes. Experimental art rap or some such. Why not. DO IT! LET'S ALL DO IT!

- Star of City of God and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Brazillian musician Seu Jorge, on his new album Cru, has a track called "Chatterton." I just heard it before writing here, and in the midst of a great, mostly very low-key album is this awesome favela groove where Mr. Jorge manages to break out some outstanding extended technique on the vocals! I'm talking some Yoko shit! Wow! I was already impressed by the man, and then he goes and pulls some life-affirming nonsense like this? Check it out! I would upload an mp3 but can I get sued for that? How do mp3 blogs do what they do?

- I just got a new contributor job for a music publication. I'll name it here when I'm sure it's good to go. I can't wait to start!

- Talented writer and friend Matt Robison of NYC is going to be starting a magazine called BOOK I READ. I'm going to be writing music articles for it! Each issue will have a theme, and the first will be "space." We'll see what I can whip up for that; I imagine the results will become manifest in the next couple months.

This all began last night, with the inauguration of Maracatu Atomico. So begins an era of productivity. Tomorrow (or, next, whenever that will be) I'll be writing more or less what I planned to write this time. This is just here, now, so this is this, now. Man, man, man.

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: Chavez Ravine, Ry Cooder (an album so good, it's just making me more excited)

This is. (#1)

2005-08-17T00:33:00.000-07:00

I'm currently listening to the soundtrack to Katamari Damacy 2 (thanks, Eric Gladstone, for sending it); just started it, and I'm pleasantly surprised to find that Dokaka is the man tagged for a version of the theme song. I've never played or even seen the video game, and I thought the first soundtrack only had a few great songs, but the whole enterprise seems fresh and eclectic, along the lines of Yoko Kanno & co.'s expert soundtrack work for the one and only Cowboy Bebop except more edgy. As for Dokaka, well, his situation's uplifting and amusing to me. I don't know how Bjork discovered him, but I'd like to think that someone forwarded her his website, she listened to the mp3s of him doing a capella versions of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "21st Century Schizoid Man," and then she decided to put him on Medulla. His talent isn't even in great singing, but more in the gusto and panache he brings to his entirely faithful arrangements. Dokaka: a great figure, a great artist, probably a nice guy.

The most recent creative thing I did: I played in Bird by Snow with Fletcher Tucker and Sean Smith on Monday night at the Make-Out Room in San Francisco's Mission district. I'm on Bird by Snow's latest LP, and have been the most regular sideman in live shows. We played well. I got to play melodica, a kids' bass drum (my latest percussive staple, more on this later), and sing a bit. Sean played dulcimer with us. Fletcher and Sean are on tour as of this show; they kicked it off here, and tonight they're in Davis, and all the other tour info is on the sites. I didn't go with them because I couldn't fit in the car. Sean's solo set was outstanding; he's an instrumental, acoustic finger-picker of original compositions (with only a few covers, one of which he played last night-- "Fortunately Gone" by les Breeders). He plugged in both the guitars he played, and the sound system gave the first one, in particular, some very great, crisp power and clarity. The bass tones were awesome (in a nearly literal sense of the word).

A couple of two-and-four-sentence reviews, then, related very specifically to Monday night's event:
Sean Smith, Sean Smith (Isota, 2005). Sean is almost obscenely talented at playing finger-picked acoustic guitar, and as I claimed at the show, he's a "set architect"; he knows how to put one piece next to another, and so I recommend this CD as a whole, even though some songs are obvious standouts, just for this reason. He's coming in on a very specific idiom, and displays discipline and skill doing it, excellently.
The Finches, Six Songs (Ulrike, 2005). I think you should see the Finches live, because I loved their set opening for Fletcher & Sean. Their CD displays some of their charm, but isn't nearly as winsome, and I feel (perhaps this is an illusion) that the interplay of the two acoustic guitars was more defined and distinct when I saw them play than it is here. The songs were also noticeably faster in concert, in order to fit them all into the set, and they were better for it. Still, I'm happy to have traded CDs with Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs, the singer in the guy-and-gal folk duo, as it will help me remember the smile that was on my face when they played these really quite lovely songs live for me, and everyone else.

Morgan told me he ran into someone in front of Amoeba in L.A. today who claimed to be England's first rapper. I have met this guy before, myself, and he did not make quite that claim to me, although he let me listen to his CD, and I thought it was mediocre. Morgan bought a CD from him. I must say how much I like to see hip hop musicians playing their CD for potential patrons, whether on a discman through headphones or on a boombox. I don't know if this trend ever died down and was recently rebirthed or if I just started noticing it over the last couple years, but I have the sense that this is more or less how hip hop started, and continues, and there are a couple recent things I've noticed that remind me of this idea. In Hustle & Flow, there's a picture of very personal levels of local distribution. Mainstream hip hop artists now make all kinds of "mixtapes," which are generally CDs, and these are done outside of labels, and, I presume, mostly bootlegged, as I've never seen some of them through any actual retail services; for instance, I have two Flipmode Squad mixtapes downloaded, both called Arsenal for the Streets, the second hosted by Rah Digga and the first hosted by Busta himself. They're made partially of new beats, and partially of already-existing hit beats hijacked by the Squizzad, with most of the tracks full of advertisements for Busta's last solo album (and the occasional plug for the never-released 2nd Flipmode album, The Rulership Movement, as well as the never-released 2nd Rah Digga album). They're really infectiously fun, and the choruses are what make them memorable in particular. The first Arsenal even features a version of Missy's "Work It" called "Reverse It," which is just the song with different lyrics but same structure, and (needless to say) the same 2nd-half-of-chorus-reversed device. Anyway, I can only imagine that the way this mixtape was distributed was even more street-and-listener-oriented than the p2p service I got it from.

"Reverse It" reminded me of "Universal Frequencies," the spot-on structural replication of "Good Vibrations" on Stars on ESP by His Name Is Alive-- who are working on a new record, might I add. That link will take you to their new, freely-downloadable Summer Bird EP, and I think it's great, a nice revisiting of the quasi-lush pop sound that has worked best for them with recent influences bleeding in. Revisiting-- a first for Mr. Defever.

The song "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," speaking of Hustle & Flow, is really good. The auxiliary guitar line and background timpani programming are examples of essential nuance that your average listener might not pick up on but contributes vitally to the track's texture. Plus I have to admire the almost bold tactic of the song's exactly 3-minute running length including a 11 second drum-fill intro (11 seconds is longer than you might think for this particular drum-fill intro).

Oh, and that drum that I was talking about? I can play a mean samba beat on that thing. Hoping to use that on my new album somewhere.

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: Minna Daisuki Katamari Damacy (soundtrack), various artists; "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp (feat. Shug [Taraji P. Henson])," DJay (Terrence Howard) from Hustle & Flow; "When the Sun Comes Out," John Wesley Harding (the only other song resulting from searching the phrase "hard out here" on my iTunes library-- from Here Comes the Groom, you see)

What is?

2005-08-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

For about a month and a half now, I've plunged into an interest in music consumption; general interest in the concept has always taken up a substantial section of my time, but this particular one has a new face. It probably started with R. Kelly and Caetano Veloso, and strangely enough, Lee "Scratch" Perry snuck in. With a sampling from my friend Trevor, music of the Balkans and the Gypsies (mainly revved-up brass ensembles) became another fascination. In the last week or so, a mutation has developed along the lines of the Wu-Tang Clan. The rich history of the genres and artists involved here has reminded me that-- while I may be a dropout-- I'm still constantly educating myself, and rarely does it take what feels like unnatural effort.

I'm on my own now, without a degree, and I'm trying to get a job that relates at all to what has been responsible for a large part of my social life and what makes up a massive chunk of my knowledge base. Having this M.O. on the brain for most of the day probably accounts for my starting a music blog. Pro-active identity creation and dissemination is key.

I'm gonna write reviews of stuff I either bought or downloaded, new and old, and talk about things in my day that had to do with songs, albums, musicians. I'm a musician, too, and so exploits of my own toils might appear here; in fact, some days I might record a song instead of write in this blog. It'd be nice to sometimes find time for both. It could happen. The links on the side generally have to do with my own music, in case you felt like deciding I was talentless after listening to some samples of my work.

"Music," by the way, is basically short-hand for "pop music," with "experimental music" as a footnote. I like to think I have the mind to appreciate and analyze art music and classical music, but pop (and experimental) forms are likely what you'll find here. You might as well replace "experimental" with "noise," for that matter, but that's a bit less essential; "noise" is my favorite word in English, so it's nice to work it in, is all.

Am I sounding okay? Is this thing on?

MUSIC WHILE WRITING: "Don't You Be the Judge," Danielson Famile; "She Don't Know What to Do with Herself," R. Stevie Moore; "Signal," Phew; "Smoke," Cornelius; "Sonic Brain Burst," Melt-Banana; "Diamonds," Kool Keith; "I'm Dancing in the Show Tonite," Ween; "52 Boredom (Club Mix)," Boredoms; "Charley's Girl," Lou Reed; "We Hook," Hanatarash; "Blue Jean," David Bowie (DJ: iTunes random... surprising amount of different Japanese music in that mix)