Emeralds Grass Ceiling
Kurt Vile Constant Hitmaker CD
Charalambides Likeness

Okay, Kurt Vile.... never heard of him before, but he's "Philly's constant hitmaker," a one-man band, maybe even a singer/songwriter, new CD on Gulcher, props from Tom Lax, okay I'll give it a listen, and what do I hear but 1980s-style one-man pop-rock, earnest strums over radio-ready drum machine, and for a second I'm not sure what's going on, but I think something's happening, something beautiful and home-recorded, and a few seconds in when he sings "I got a freeway mind!" into a reverb mist, it's practically the hook of the year, followed closely by the line "I've got a trumpet/I know where to dump it".... And indeed, the hits just keep (constantly) coming, there are so many excellent songs on here that I'm putting this right up there with all the other home-psych curveballs I can think of from the last decade... Jakob Olausson's Moonlight Farm... vintage lo-fi Guided by Voices... Flying Canyon (RIP).... there's even this hollow-but-bubbly electronic undercurrent (including a couple short avant interludes) that I'm tracing to, like, mid-period Cluster... I know, right? And I just now got the joke, that his name is a reference to Kurt Weill, that cabaret composer or whatever beloved by Tom Waits fans and anyone else who listens to NPR. No thanks, I'll take this Kurt Vile, the one from Philly... (and hey, in case you haven't noticed Gulcher is really on a bit of a roll with this Newline series....) Jeez, I've had two listens to this most recent Charalambides, both at work and not fully attentive, but I think this thing might be a masterpiece. You could say it's their most accessible album, with Christina taking her most traditional 'lead singer' role yet (every song has lyrics taken from old-time traditional songs), but at the same time more psychedelic raw nerve is exposed than ever before, mainly because they never really go for the loud wash-out, instead leaving everything still, sparse, trembling, and vivid. The vocal and electric guitar performances are totally heroic - if I have any complaint it's that the music is way too intense for the album to be 70 minutes long.

Led Zeppelin In Through The Out Door
Peter Green End of the Game
Gown For the Maples CD
Gown Preserved & Shared CD
Flaming Lips Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
Tony Allen "Ole" (Moritz Von Oswald remix) mp3
Kyuss Sky Valley
Keith Jarrett Koln Concert
Muddy Waters various songs
LOST season 4 episode 2 "Confirmed Dead"
Dettinger Oasis

Leadoff song "In the Evening" came up on the shuffle while walking to the train so I decided to just let the whole album play. Zep always played hybrid music but this album is just strange, recorded in December 1978, combining clashing elements like 1950s-style rockabilly goofing, a seasoned and subtle awareness of punk and new wave, John Paul Jones's elegant keyboard schmaltz, Robert Plant's angst over losing his young son to a respiratory illness a year before, some of Jimmy Page's grossest lead guitar playing ever, and quite a bit more - how else can you explain epic hybrids like "Fool in the Rain" and "Carouselambra"? The Peter Green album came on next so I let that roll too and MAN, like I've said before, what a monster rhythm section performance by Alex Dmochowski on bass and Godfrey McLean on drums. This album makes me think of punk too, because despite this rhythm section going off, Green just kind of hangs out over the top, intermittently spitting out these weird guitar leads, which reminded me of a review someone wrote that called this album "surly and indifferent" or something like that, and hey, that's punk! In 1970! I mean it's no Stooges or MC5 but still... (Actually it was allmusic.com and they called it "bitter and rambling"...eh, close enough.) Okay, now listening to the CD version of this new LP by Gown called For The Maples (it's one of those vinyl releases that comes with a free CD version as well, on the Three Lobed label). The backing band on here is Sunburned (I think they call themselves that now instead of Sunburned Hand of the Man), and I thought this album might follow End of the Game nicely, what with Sunburned's 'dark funk' past and Gown's shredding guitar capabilities. Not really, though - the style is more 'windswept dirge' than 'avant blues', and the first track has vocals that sound somewhere in between Alan Sparhawk and Matt Valentine. The rest of the album is instrumental, all of it moody heavy/washy psych not unlike the most recent Trad Gras och Stenar stuff or a rambling Bardo Pond style. It's good, I'll give it some more listens. Three Lobed has also released this solo Gown album called Preserved & Shared, currently available as a bonus for preordering For the Maples. It's a solo guitar album, maybe no overdubs, not sure, quite a bit noisier, pretty heavy but I don't remember much beyond that..... I'm officially done paying any attention to new Flaming Lips happenings but I love a good 4 or 5 of their albums and this Yoshimi album really is so good, their last great one... Thanks to a reader tip I checked out this Tony Allen track remixed by Moritz Von Oswald - he's one-half of the greatest band of all time, Rhythm & Sound, and Tony Allen you might know from the second greatest band of all time, Fela Kuti's Africa 70. So odds are pretty good, and once you get through the 'world music' sheen and the bassline and groove get a chance to sink in, oh yeah, it's more Basic Channel bliss.... the Kyuss album has a couple great extended instrumental workouts - I might start listening to this band again, I haven't for over 10 years.... it's been that long for the Koln Concert too. I had this on vinyl way back when and I thought it was kinda great, but years later, as bright and brittle mp3s, it's sounding a little corny and schmaltzy and far too ornate for where my head is at... whoah, now coworker is playing some Muddy Waters and jesus this is some punk music. Who's the lead/slide guitarist? Is that Muddy himself? Talk about a machine that kills fascists, this guitar is just brutal and tearing right out of these songs and jabbing you in the eye, ears, heart, mind, ego, essence, soul.... good LOST episode (purchased for $1.99 and watched on iTunes a whole week after airing, I never get to see it live because the kids are still up at 8PM and they don't get to watch violent TV shows), I'm liking these new characters, the producers/writers are confidently throwing a lot on the table for Season 4 and I'm looking forward to watching it play out.... So yeah, in my neverending quest to hear more music that sounds like Basic Channel, I usually end up listening to, well, something on Basic Channel. I certainly don't listen to Echologist, but here's something non-BC that fits the bill much better, Oasis by Dettinger. As minimal as say Pole and Pan Sonic or whatever, but I hardly ever listen to them either because, I don't know, it's just not quite house enough. I've gotta have at least some string patches and soul smears in there, the more subtle the better, and Dettinger obliges just about right...

Oubliette Self Hate CS
Funkadelic Hardcore Jollies
Funkadelic Electric Spanking of War Babies
Theo Angell Auraplinth CD
Scion Arrange and Process Basic Channel Tracks
Jimmy Giuffre 3 The Easy Way
Lilypad Twin Holes
Datetenryu 1971
Robert Anton Wilson Maybe Logic DVD

Sometimes a noise recording is best judged by the shut-off effect. Listening to side A of the Oubliette tape, a full-on super-loud squalling piece between 10 and 15 minutes long, I was zoned out and indifferent until the piece abruptly ended and the sudden silence became the most intense moment of the whole thing. The 10 or 15 minutes of noise music that preceded it is no longer shocking, contact miced pedal chained whatever, but the sudden realization of what we have become inured to is. If I remember right Side B basically just does the same thing again, 10-15 minute onslaught with awesome shut-off effect, which is cool. Not necessarily original music but it is a powerful tape, good artwork too, on the Teenage Whore Tapes label from I think Florida. Oubliette is from somewhere in Georgia. For a while there in my youth I was a rabid collector of Funkadelic albums, but after I had found about 10 of 'em I decided it was time to start digging for other things. Two albums I had always passed on and never did buy, thinking they were 'past their prime' releases, were Hardcore Jollies and Electric Spanking of War Babies. However, now that rampant album-sharing has reared its online head I just can't say no any longer, and I was definitely wrong about Hardcore Jollies - I think I had it in my head that they lost it when Eddie Hazel left, but what the funk was I thinking? Michael Hampton is awesome in his own right and this is a fine vintage Funkadelic album - in fact it's the last time "Original P" vocalists Fuzzy Haskins, Calvin Simon, and Grady Thomas sang with the group (they did still record with Parliament). My first inkling that I had misjudged was hearing its leadoff track "Comin' Round The Mountain" on Chic-a-Go-Go, and it sounds great here too, even without the visual of Ratso and Pedro Bell and a buncha other awesome people jamming out to it. Some confidently claim that it is Hazel and not Hampton playing guitar on "Mountain," but even if it's true the axe-wielding trio of Hampton, Glen Goins, and Garry Shider more than hold their own on the rest of the tracks, bringing a rumbling techno metalloid low-end that really isn't like anything else in funk or heavy metal before or since. The live version of "Cosmic Slop" sounds like it has about 14 simultaneous guitar solos. War Babies, on the other hand, isn't clicking like Jollies. It is after all from 5 years later with their best-selling stylistic change-up One Nation Under A Groove in between, but there is something weird going on here that is distinct from even the usual Funkadelic weirdness, and of course I'm gonna get both of these on vinyl anyway, for the Pedro Bell gatefolds if nothing else.... Further exploration of solo Emeralds stuff has led me to Lilypad, the solo project of "Big John" who is the "synth guru" in the band. And as much as I thought Steve Hauschildt's solo stuff (see previous post) sounded like it could be the whole Emeralds band, well shit, so does this, though I'm starting to see how the parts fit together and, more importantly, stay out of each other's way. Lilypad is more minimal and soft-drone oriented than Hauschildt, more of a straight-up early Popol Vuh style. Two long tracks, great album. Whoah, 1971 by Datentenryu (pictured) might be the single craziest Japanese rock album I've heard yet. Well yeah, except for certain Flower Travellin' Band, Les Rallizes Denudes, Magical Power Mako, Fushitsusha, Merzbow, etcetera, but Datentenryu do throw a serious curve ball in the form of insane ELP/Deep Purple/Young Rascals organ rock madness played with a nonstop searing punk soul attack. I feel like there were about 200 'indie rock' bands in the 1990s that would've loved to have sounded like this (Delta 72 come to mind)... Man, the Robert Anton Wilson DVD was pretty intense. It's not exactly a great production, kinda made-for-cable, complete with cheesy public-access-studio 'sci fi' effects during a couple segues, and it is disorienting to see how aged and infirm he was at the time of the filming, and then to have that filtered through a wry and fairly soft-spoken Irish Catholic Brooklynite demeanor, none of which I expected from his literary voice... but the various shortcomings of the human nervous system when it comes to dealing with these kinds of filters and presuppositions is just the kind of thing Wilson eloquently deconstructs, and after about 15-20 minutes of adjusting I could just relax and listen to the man's philosophy, and I like just about everything he has ever said. Glad he wrote books, because it's hard to keep up with all the ideas he talks about, especially when you realize that he talks about them rather disarmingly in person, a little out of the side of his mouth, Brooklyn style... there's plenty of RAW stuff on YouTube, here's a little taste to get started... I love his three reasons why people believe in conspiracies...



And in case you missed it, Pedro Bell 'interview' and 'performance' on Chic-a-Go-Go, followed by "Comin' Round The Mountain":

Fantastic Magic Witch Choir CDR
Steve Hauschildt The Summit CDR
Long Legged Woman Newtown Nights CDR
BabyGenius Night Night Classics CD
Fossils CDR
Monopoly Child Nightlife Band Pacific City Barbeque Pit Levitators Method (Levitators Anonymous) CDR

Funny about this Fantastic Magic disc. It came out last year on cassette, where it sounded like a murky and eerie dream. Now the same label Abandon Ship has reissued it for 2007 on CDR, and I am admittedly analog-biased but this sounds so bright and sunny it could practially be a Polyphonic Spree side project. I still think the first two songs offer some of the very best hook/vibe combos in the last 5 years of the much-maligned freak folk subgenre (you better believe it) but after that the disc loses me, where on tape it all just sounded pleasantly lost to begin with. There's a Tiny Tim vaudevillian undercurrent here that just didn't sound so obvious on the cassette, and I don't think I'm quite into it... But I can say that I still have no idea who Fantastic Magic is or where they came from and that's pretty cool.... Steve Hauschildt is a member of the Emeralds trio, and his solo disc The Summit is a revelation in that as a solo act he sounds a lot like a full-band Emeralds recording - while I listen I'm kinda forgetting what it is the other two guys might do. A somewhat long album, about 60 minutes of music, 9 tracks in the 5-7 minute range, with some of the deep and soft non-noise drone approaches that Emeralds perfects, but also with a lot of other progressive approaches - maybe like early Genesis instrumentals on 16RPM? And tracks like "Path Through A Bamboo Forest" and "Gumball Machine" make me think of Tod Dockstader and even Plux Quba by Nuno Canavarro. After Hauschildt the kids seemed to need something a little less 'internal landscape intensive' so I put on the BabyGenius classical CD, another one of those soccer-mom comps and actually one of the most crucial CDs of my last 5 years. The theme of this volume is baby bedtime and it's all soft gorgeous shit. I probably played it over 300 times in my son's first 18 months - we're talkin' ritualistic application of "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik", "Moonlight Sonata", "Gymnopedie #1," and more, night after night. And with that (goodnight kids) now it's time to get back to the merch I picked up at the Skaters/Axolotl/Lambsbread/C. Spencer Yeh/Animal Law/Binges show - at the gig I asked Spencer the tall Skater what I should buy of his off the table if I was only gonna buy one, and he said, "Oh, that'd be Monopoly Child Nightlife Band." "Okay..........uh, could you point that one out to me?" I didn't even know exactly what he had said and I assumed it was another over-the-top Skaters album title, but as he talked I realized that Monopoly Child Nightlife Band was the name of his new solo thing, and by then he was on to an extended rap about the Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta, and how one of his recordings (not sure if it was the one he was recommending or something more recent) had been directly inspired by corresponding Matta paintings that were "totally fourth dimension." It was kinda awesome and frankly I didn't know if the disc would live up to that conversation, because the last 2 or 3 Skaters things I'd listened to sounded kinda, uh, stuck in place (the cat-in-heat yowls were getting predictable!), but no, Spencer was right, this thing is great. One 31-minute jam that actually edits a few separate jams (I think he said it was four) into a suite/medley, and I'd have to say that the drum-powered soul-psych zoneout he's doing here just might be the one-man heir apparent to a piece like "Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda," and not a single copulating cat to be heard!

Henry Kuntz Speed of Culture Light 4CS box
Xul People CS
Iron & Wine The Creek Drank The Cradle mp3s
Magical Power Mako s/t mp3s
Rhythm & Sound s/t mp3s
Fricara Pacchu Midnight Pyre CD
Metal Rouge Calling Winter CDR
Binges/Animal Law/C. Spencer Yeh/Axolotl/Lambsbread/The Skaters live @ AV-Aerie, Chicago
Lorna Doom The Diabolical EP CD
Eagles "Lyin' Eyes"
Roxy Music "Love Is The Drug"

Dreamtime Taped Sounds from Belgium did the LP reissue of J.D. Emmanuel's Wizards last year, and here's another archival release that's like a little world opening up, a four-cassette box set by Henry Kuntz. I don't think I've heard of him before, but he's from the Bay Area, played on Henry Kaiser's 1977 album Ice Death, formed his own "free jazz troupe" OPEYE in 1986 (there's a rather Sun City Girlish live shot in the liner notes here that shows Kuntz "presenting bat masks"), has played lots of solo music on various instruments, travelled the world, recorded prolifically, etcetera. I'm just getting started here, and much like Ashtray Navigations' new triple LP release A Monument to British Rock that came in the mail last week, records like these are kind of like novels, you don't plan on finishing them in one sitting. Get your bookmarks ready.... so far I've just listened to side one but that's been plenty: a wacked-out solo vocal piece from 1982 that reminds me of the "transverse" vocal pieces by another Henry (Flynt) - a long section of "TRIO OPEYE" live stuff from the mid-80s, weird gutsy free improv for violin, ukuleles, "Mexican hollowed-out log violin" and more, not your typical trio instrumentation, a collision of AACM and Chadbournean sensibilities - a couple Kuntz solo pieces from 2001, a long crazed harsh whistling number for tenor sax and the other on that same Mexican hollowed-out log violin, a piece that gets pretty trancey while still sounding broken and ragged. I could listen to a whole album of THAT - maybe not a whole 4-tape box set, but hopefully there are more solo log violin tracks spread around here, I'm only 1/8th done. It really is a box set, a see-thru plastic box that holds the four tapes and a plastic dinosaur nestled in a bed of cotton, along with a rather extensive insert that says heavy Don Cherry-type shit like "The True People of the Northwest Coast are Nomadic by nature. Spiritual and Physical Travelers. World People. Universal People. They are residents of nowhere and Everywhere. And this is reflected in their music, a nomadic yet specific expression that is culturally open-ended and of their Cultural making. A True Expression of A True People." Which is an interesting sentiment to keep in mind as the next Dreamtime tape goes in the player, the mysterious C40 expression by the True (?) People known as the Xul People. The handwritten note in the package called this tape "African S.F.," and online the label says "the XUL PEOPLE are a tribe of people who developed a higher form of self and inteligence. it is believed that this tribe communicates with "higer lifeforms" or e.t. lifeforms... XUL PEOPLE allways have been a big mystery for both outhoroties and antropologists. maybe this tape hold some of the secrets and facts?!" What it sounds like is a tape of modern-day field-recordings of African drum rituals, slowed down just enough to make the chants sound like roars and groans and maybe, just maybe, possession by demonic "higer e.t. lifeforms." Then again the custodian here at work came in while it was on and said, "This is music from Angola." Either way, it's a weird tape...makes me feel strange....in fact it makes me feel like I'm getting a.....a.....STOMACH ACHE. (Clase como de un dolor de estómago, non oui?) (Update a week later: actually I keep thinking about this tape, it's pretty fucking scary and I haven't had the guts to put it back in the player.) Funny story with this first Magical Power Mako album... none of us here at work had ever heard it before when the shuffle pulled up "Open The Morning Window," a dreamy and sweet femme-sung piano ballad, and everyone was like "Let's listen to the whole thing!" So we did, from the beginning, and we got quite the opposite, a harsh collision of post-war shock and cultural spasm that may be Faust-inspired but doesn't look back so much as it does forward, to stuff like Psychic TV. There are a couple more dreamy songs tucked away for the intrepid but this album bad-vibed everyone out, even me...not that I won't take these mp3s back to HQ for further study...although it's pretty clear that this thing needs to be heard on vinyl, preferably an original, for proper context. Bet they cost a lot. And speaking of back home, tonight's dinner music is this new Fricara Pacchu disc, which suddenly sounds about 200 times more mental than it did the first time I listened - this thing is like Martin Rev on 78RPM with all kinds of other genres bursting out of his drumbox - the expected noise/psych/spacerock melange but also cartoon/videogame/thrift-score/mood/lounge/tiki/surf/thrash/pop-punk/industrial/lo-fi. The second track is like a 1990s Roy Montgomery 4-track piece being interrupted by the actual footsteps of Godzilla, right outside.

CHICAGO SHOW REPORT CHICAGO SHOW REPORT CHICAGO SHOW REPORT CHICAGO SHOW REPORT CHICAGO SHOW REPORT CHICAGO SHOW REPORT CHICAGO SHOW REPORT CHICAGO SHOW REPORT CHICAGO SHOW REPORT CHICAGO SHOW REPORT CHICAGO SHOW REPORT CHICAGO SHOW REPORT CHICAGO SHOW REPORT CHICAGO SHOW REPORT CHICAGO SHOW REPORT And after dinner I got a babysitter to put the kids to bed and took off to this insane show, a six-band bill where I actually intended to watch all six bands. Also my first time at the AV-Aerie, which is a great venue - totally chill no-frills bar, tons of room to spread out and mingle, acoustics are fine, high ceilings, huge windows opening on sci-fi nighttime cityscape, clean, organized - I won't go on, hopefully you'll get a chance to visit it yourself. First band was Binges, from Chicago, who I first heard of a year ago, but had not actually heard until this night. They set up on the floor and while the electronics/tabletop/gtr/etc dude got his patch chords together, the drummer set up facing him, his back to the audience, and started playing pitter-patter free-flowing warm-up type stuff which slowly began to take on weight and draw the crowd. It was clear they were underway when the sparse soundchecky electronic pings and squelches that had been intermittently coming from the table-top started coalescing into weird sparse loops that were playful and even a little funky. The two took this mellow/aggro vibe and moved it very nimbly into more spacious and downtempo rock feels as well. Second song was louder and more wall-of, good but not as memorable as that great first jam. I tried to buy a disc but they didn't bring any. Animal Law was next, a 'Chicago supergroup' of Mark Solotroff (Bloodyminded, Bloodlust! label, et al) on vocals, Jason Soliday (Jason Soliday, et al) on baritone guitar, Dylan Posa (Flying Luttenbachers, Cheer-Accident, et al) on drums, Blake Edwards (Vertonen, C.I.P. label, et al) on percussion, and Geoff Guy (Gary Glitter's Hard Drive, Gays in the Military, et al) on guitar - when I first heard they were playing together I thought "this could be good," then I saw on MySpace that they were playing in the style of "Swans, Khanate, Bauhaus, Harvey Milk, The Goslings, My Bloody Valentine, Flipper..." and I thought "this could be really good." And judging from this show I'd say that it pretty much is, although they definitely played too long for being the second band on a six-band bill, and they are still working some stuff out here and there. First song was a great spaced-out dirge that had Solotroff staring down the crowd with cold melancholy for a good five minutes while Soliday's thunderous ax and Posa's minimalist drums held down the riff, Guy did psychedelic stuff on top, and Edwards placed the judicious scrap yard accents. When Solotroff finally came in it was on the attack, in a screaming Bloodyminded style. A couple other songs had a disarmingly poppier approach, with Solotroff doing a fairly explicit Ian Curtis thing on one, and some quirky changes attempted and not necessarily nailed. The dirges were pretty exquisite, though - looking forward to hearing these songs recorded. After Animal Law the locals were done and it was time for the touring party to begin. C. Spencer Yeh (aka Burning Star Core) went first, I think the first time I've seen him play a real solo violin set, that is low on the FX pedals, no laptop, no backing at all, just loud and heavy instrument. I realized while watching/listening that the reason I always love Yeh's stuff is that, no matter how 'noise' and 'experimental' it is, he always plays MUSIC. The first violin piece tonight was a blistering free-improv arc that dragged a laser-beam tonic on the low end with ragged-claw scuttle and spider chatter up top (it was that droning humming tonic underneath that made it fully musical). The second piece was noisier and shorter, using two bows to make heavy dismantling sounds, and then the set was over, kinda like a tape from his Solo Violin cassette-single series - maybe a little longer, a 10-inch record or a 3-inch CDR. Of music. Axolotl went on next, a strong surprise replacement for the disappointing cancellation of Emeralds. He played music too, totally solo set, looking like he walked straight out of Over the Edge or at least The Bad News Bears, long hair/T-shirt/blue jeans/sneakers, down on the floor hitting pedals. It was real loose and shaky, especially at first. A violin was sitting there, and after awhile he picked it up and slowly sawed out a low drone, just long enough to loop it into a light glow that allowed the whole thing to finally start moving, and it got really loud and wallish and sheets-of-celestial... but only for two or three minutes, after which he shut it off and the loose shaky vibe came back as he started to hook up something else. Second piece I actually don't really remember... wait, was that when he was sitting on the floor holding his mic between his knees and wailing into it? I don't know, it wasn't perfect but it was a laid-back and convivial set with flashes of the intense glows we've heard in flashes on his records. And then came Lambsbread. I seriously didn't think they were gonna play, cuz you know, I had heard that they'd "broken up" and everything, but there they were just like it was early 2006 all over again. There were differences though - it's still total go-for-broke improv insanity, but the guitar is playing more riffs and less leads, more low-end and less high-end and it sounds great. Second guitarist seemed even more indifferent than ever to what she was playing, but it hit me that her role in the band is to play 'tampura' to the 'tabla' and 'sarod' of the other two. Hell yes this was a killer raga, all 7 minutes of it. And hey, only one more band, I will be home before 3AM! Sienko wasn't sure, saying "It's the Skaters, I could see 'em playing for two hours," and I was a little more optimistic, like "Yeah, but I could also see 'em doing like one 30-minute piece" and he was like "Yeah, and then saying 'thanks do we have time for a couple more?'" No but seriously folks, they only did one piece and it was about 30 minutes, but they did light about 20 incense sticks right before they started, which did indeed cause a little grumbling here and there, but I love the smell of incense and I don't get to light it at home because of the kids. It made the room seem ill and foggy, which suits their music too, especially at the beginning of the set, when they tore right into something involving a crazy conga loop and these great weird funky Casio SK-1 garbage keyboards, actually quite jazzy. Not quite sure where the piece went from there, I just remember Spencer the tall Skater pacing the stage in his huge straw hat and grunting into the mic in a pretty groovy way.....after that I kind of got lost in a couple conversations, lost in the fog, all in a pleasant way. Nice comedown. MERCH HAUL: Monopoly Child Nightlife Band Pacific City Barbeque Pit Levitators Method (Levitators Anonymous) CDR, Burning Star Core Fascination 2CDR, Burning Star Core Body Blues 7-inch, Steve Hauschildt The Summit CDR. CAR MUSIC ON THE WAY TO THE SHOW: The Metal Rouge disc is a great desolate drone-blues album that I've been listening to for over a year without writing anything about it. Perfect wintertime urban wasteland music - probably be good as summertime desert wasteland music too - in fact it reminds me of the wire music of Alan Lamb, straight outta the Western Australia outback, which all you Halana readers out there will remember, but Metal Rouge scores it for guitars and electronics... CAR MUSIC ON THE WAY HOME: Lorna Doom was perfect as it kept the party going a little bit... drop off Sienko and then over to the radio (97.1 FM The Drive) for the glorious bringdown of "Lyin' Eyes" - I'm no Glenn Frey apologist, but I've thought that song was gorgeous and heavy since I was about 7 years old... and jeezus, then "Love Is The Drug" comes on... you will not hear a groove like that anywhere else at any time on commercial FM radio.... you won't hear vocal phrasing like that either, still can't believe the way Ferry sings "limbo down" and "you can guess the rest"...

Sun City Girls You're Never Alone With A Cigarette: Singles Vol. 1 CD
D. Charles Speer & the Helix After Hours CD
Bran(...)Pos Coin-Op Khepri CD
Jane Coconuts mp3s
Planet Earth DVD ("Shallow Seas")
Ashtray Navigations A Monument to British Rock 3LP

There had been rumors of Sun City Girls releasing some singles compilations on CD, and the time is officially nigh - Volume 1 has a release date of March 4. But, as anyone following their Cloaven Cassette reissues might have expected, these aren't gonna be straightforward. For example, Volume 1 here bears the cover art and title of the band's 2nd single from 1990, You're Never Alone With A Cigarette, and reissues both of its tracks, including a 12-minute version of the B-side "The Fine Tuned Machines of Lemuria" (5 minutes long on the original), but the band's first single, And So The Dead Tongues Sang from 1989, isn't dealt with here, and their third single, the double 7-inch Three Fake Female Orgasms from 1991, is only half-dealt with, the first 3 of its 7 songs appearing. To round things out we've got three previously unreleased songs from the Torch of the Mystics sessions (including a fantastic version of "Amazon One" that I already prefer to one on the Live on Planet Boomerang), plus all 48 seconds of the "Harmful Little Armful (For Will Shatter)" track that appeared on the Bruce Lee, Heroin, and the Punk Scene 3x7" box set from 1993. See how annoying it can get, discography-chasing? Especially when the band has put together such a non-annoying and highly listenable album in its own right, capturing a time around 1987-1988 when they were fully evolving out of their raw so-called 'weird hardcore' beginnings into the highly singular and terrifying unit that recorded Torch and couldn't be so-called anything. The remastering by Scott Colburn has to be mentioned as well - the tracks sound fantastic. It felt like I was hearing opening track "100 Pounds of Black Olives" for the first time ever, which had me running back to my share-blogged mp3 rip of the original vinyl to see if it was even the same music. It was, but I won't be listening to it again now that this version exists... I took commenter Benjamin's advice and checked out the 'other' Jane release, Coconuts, and I think I do like it a little better than Berserker. The title track is probably their best thing anyway, a tranced-out drum-machine piece, more krautrock than techno. Track two did nothing for me, though... well, it did make me jump to another song before it ended.... New Bran(...)Pos CD on the C.I.P. label (Crippled Intellect Productions) - he's one of those Bay Area noise surrealists that have been going strong for awhile - see also the Resipiscent label and of course Brutal SFX. I like the first track, impossibly slow vocals over creepy yet somehow pleasant organ - after that it dives deep into total Bay Area-style weird-noise, squiggly, squeedly, surprisingly diverse, hard to put a bead on. I'll have to get back to you if I ever do draw a bead or two... Still working my way through the massive Monument to British Rock release, summary to follow.... so far I'm only on Side 3 out of 6... definitely some deep drony psych so far, more of a time machine to the 1990s tape-label scene than it is the rock gods of yore that are ostensibly homaged by the title, but we'll see what else emerges before this thing is done... it does look good with its ultra-wide black & white sleeve (no gatefold), on the Smokers Gift label...

Lambsbread Water Damage mp3s
Groundhogs Split mp3s
Echologist Explorations Vol. 1 mp3s
Harmonia Musik von Harmonia mp3s
A Tribe Called Quest Midnight Marauders mp3s
Stereo Motherfuckers scorpion CD mp3s
Jan Jelinek Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records mp3s
Kreamy 'Lectric Santa 7-inch
Ashtray Navigations A Monument to British Rock 3LP
Grouper/Inca Ore C40 mp3s

Lambsbread came up on the shuffle and at first I thought it was gonna be black metal and then I thought it was the Sun City Girls but then I figured it out because Lambsbread are pretty unmistakable. It is surprising how much this Water Damage release maintains a Sun City Girls feel - I don't think it's intentional at all, it's a very specific SCG feel, those berserker improv moments when Alan and Charlie are locked into a non-stop infernal lava-tsunami of bass-and-drum rumble while Rick shreds thin and trebly waaaay on top of it all yet somehow right in the thick of it. The Girls will usually hit this mode while hustling somewhere else, but Lambsbread do the shit for this whole entire 17-minute disc. It sounds like it has to be guitar/bass/drums, although I saw 'em live a few times and it was always two guitars and drums. Either way, the low end rumble is ridiculous and non-stop on here, with the drums, which are amazing live, buried deep within and practically unrecognizable until the end when he digs out a pretty jaw-dropping crescendo. (Supposedly Lambsbread is playing in Chicago this Friday (two days from now) with C. Spencer Yeh and Emeralds. Somehow I don't think they're gonna play, but fingers crossed, I'll let you know.) You know I've never really heard the Groundhogs before but I put on Split just now and it feels like I've been listening to it all my life. That first song has such a great hook when he sings "In the dying embers of a burnt-out day/When morning seems a thousand hours away/Dark prevails and the light gives up the fight to stay." Great bleak lyrics too.... I was on a techno blog and they recommended Echologist for minimal dub house type stuff, making it sound Basic Channel worthy, so I bit, but damn, Rhythm & Sound makes this shit sound like Harold Faltermeyer. Will not listen again... Ah, Midnight Marauders... even though I've heard the line a couple hundred times, I just lol'd when Tip said "Funky like your grandpa's drawers"... Jan Jelinek comes highly regarded in the minimal techno world, but when I first came across his music I was underwhelmed. Once again, I think I was just too deep under the spell of Basic Channel et al to branch out into other sub-styles, but tonight it really clicked. (No pun intended.) The real reason is that I got new 'studio style' headphones for the iPod - no more earbuds - and now I can listen to this stuff LOUD, to where I can hear every microscopic detail, every click, every shudder, every chilled-out micro-rhythm, and the shit is exquisite....

Les Rallizes Denudes Heavier Than A Death In The Family mp3s
Sweet Teeth From The Fourth Hand... CDR
Uke of Spaces Corners County So Far On The Way CD
Night Wounds Allergic to Heat CD
Lorna Doom The Diabolical EP CD
Stars of the Lid The Tired Sounds Of... CD
Henry Flynt Purified By The Fire CD
Suicide Half Alive mp3s
Grouper/Inca Ore C40 mp3s
Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler

I have heard some Les Rallizes Denudes tracks here and there, so I am aware of THAT SOUND, but this is the first time I've sat down with an album. Seems like a good place to start with the over-the-top title and #3 ranking on the Japrocksampler Top 50 and yeah, album opener "Strong Out Deeper Than The Night" could be the one signature Denudes track, really the ultimate post-Velvets sound in a lot of ways - "Sister Ray" length, utter dirge bassline that barely moves yet never stops, vocals and guitars so bathed in reverb and distortion that the twitch of a nosehair sends out enough shimmering waves of harsh electronics to derail the track - but it keeps on going, even when the guitars are fully whaled upon.... their sound is huge enough that it seems to trace an arc through all of post-War technological society, the early exuberance of rock'n'roll ("Stand By Me" bassline) as it is slowly overwhelmed and consumed by the chaos and isolation of the modern world.... The complete title of the Sweet Teeth CDR is actually From the Fourth Hand of the Buddha the Lotus was Born for the Seventh Time, although it only has one track and that is called "Morning Raga," so I guess the album could've been called just that - but I'm glad it wasn't. It's another one from the excellent Thor's Rubber Hammer Productions label, and hey it starts with some audible paranoid talk radio on the topic of chemtrails, a subject we just heard about on the D. Charles Speer album, and then the jam begins as the radio plays on. Despite the word "raga" in the title, this is not overtly Eastern-fetishistic which is nice, rather a melange of Native American drum pulse, some bubbling crude synth electronics, fairly searing shoegaze guitar, and soaring androgynous/wordless vocals, clocking in at around 22 minutes before fading out with the radio show still going. Always a nice touch when bands jam while the TV or radio is on, especially when the music is good like it is here.... The Corleone label has just put out a whole bunch of new stuff, including CD reissues of two LPs that were feted by the Siltblog (RIP??) in 2007. Remember that Ukes of Spaces Corners County LP, did anyone check that out? I picked it up for 8 bucks at Reckless and it didn't really do it for me. I mean the spaced country feel of the music was nice, but I couldn't get past the high-pitched straining-indie vocals. Now on CD I'm still not exactly loving it but I can't just ignore that spaced feel either - musically it's good. The CD looks good too, with a punk-feel xeroxed booklet with lyrics and art... I don't think I'm done with this one. As for the Night Wounds album, I liked it on vinyl and I think I like it even better on CD. I had kinda forgotten that this really is a rather special record. The aggro no wave skronk genre is not my favorite, but what I like about Allergic to Heat is how reduced and constrained it sounds. It's not messy and screamy, there are really no tantrums going on here. The vocals are agitated and come with the requisite distorted effect, but they are well-paced, succinct, and they never dominate. Same with the guitar and sax, which splatter and spray all kinds of garbage, but are always kept in check by the implacable groove. I like the way the drums sound like cardboard at times and at other times sound dubby, always driving the songs just right. Also from Corleone, Lorna Doom is a Providence hip-hop duo and although they come from a rather self-conscious indie/punk kinda background they have made a fun and exciting 5-song EP that bursts with homages and samples (wow, remember samples in rap music?) and references and production styles that are honestly worthy of the names they check in the one-sheet: Bombsquad, Prince Paul, and Cut Chemist... available on vinyl too... Tired Sounds is the only Stars of the Lid album I've ever heard and it's so deep and gorgeous and long that I'm pretty sure it's the only one I need. If anyone feels that isn't correct, let me know... Re: Henry Flynt, You Are My Everlovin' is the classic but I've put Purified in the Fire in the player at least twice as much. I love this album... digging this Suicide thing too, originally released as a ROIR cassette in 1981, a raw mix of live tracks and rough demos, seemingly a lot of songs that were on their 2nd album but I really can't tell because this thing is insane, mutated, and frenzied, with more Alan Vega bellows and war whoops than you could swing a steel chain at.... Octavia Butler's Wild Seed is set in the past (1690 says the first chapter heading) and I thought that wouldn't make it 'as good' as your Clay's Ark and your Xenogenesis and Parable series, but I forgot that when Octavia writes about the future she's also writing about the past and vice versa because above all she's writing about the biological and hiearchical drives that have defined and driven humanity in any era. Wild Seed has all of her usual 'harsh change' themes going on but it also brings more to the table than I expected, like magic realism, shape-shifting, telekinesis, not to mention nothing less than the Battle of the Sexes... it's interesting how little discussion there is about her books out there, and also how rarely they show up at used bookstores... I think they're just too heavy, people hold them close to the chest... maybe not literally heavier than a death in the family, but her stories do usually contain at least one or two of those, and she never pulls any punches....

Howlin' Magic The Dreaming CD
DJ Premiere Crooklyn Cuts (Tape A) mp3s
Wild Style soundtrack mp3s
Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour ("The Devil" episode)
Bach Brandenburg Concertos
Emeralds Allegory of Allergies mp3s
Dusted Destined 2008 mp3s
Sex/Vid live cassette mp3s
Don Cherry Tibet LP
DJ Afrika Bambaata Death Mix Live!!! 12-inch
Long Legged Woman Newtown Nights CDR

One last CD from the Lal Lal Lal batch, an act not from Finland but Santa Cruz, California, ladies and gentlemen, it's Howlin' Magic. I first heard Mr. Magic (it's a one-man band) a year or two ago via a couple self-released CDRs. They had nice crude psychedelic magik-marker artwork and the sounds were definitely blown-out psyched-out fuzz-drool, but I just couldn't get into the overall arc. There were riffs, and there was forward movement, but none of it seemed to interrelate to or interdepend on anything else. Seemed like another case of 'rad sounds/no songs'. Siltblog took him down harshly, but I never wanted to write him off completely, and it is kinda nice to see this new disc with more of the handmade psychedelic artwork, promising song titles like "Thanaton III", "The Oort Cloud", "Lord Jagannath", "Imagination is Power", and further elucidating that last one, a truly excellent "revolution" manifesto on the inside. (It's part of a longer post you can find on his blog.) I think I'm gonna keep the album for the artwork and the manifesto alone, but, although it is probably my fave of the (three?) Howlin' Magic that I've heard, the awesome sounds are still adding up to less than the sum of their parts.... I downloaded the DJ Premiere mix tape from a blog and it's hands down one of the best hip-hop mixes I've ever heard. So good... lots of names I've barely heard of, rugged NYC styles, and Premiere's mix is astounding, with the tracks blasted in the red, great intros, tricky segues... amazing... The Don Cherry LP was an impulse buy while at Dusty Groove because it was an $8.99 reissue and I'd always heard it was a good album. It certainly wasn't for the packaging - even though the album was recorded in 1973, the front cover of this edition features a photo of a suit-wearing Cherry during the early 1960s Ornette era, laid over a cheesy 'starry night' design, with a generic essay on the back about his entire career that DOES NOT MENTION THE ALBUM Tibet at all, let alone its personnel or dates! Then I listened to it, and uhhh... this thing could be packaged in a tupperware bowl with two lollipops and a Richard Marx poster and I would pay $8.99 for it.... this album is ASTOUNDING. They way it calmly dives right into such strange and rare "Universal Music" atmospheres via gongs, bells, plaintive and zoned thumb pianos, soft-noise crumple textures on rare percussion instruments, minimalist/maximalist piano exercises... Cherry doesn't even play horn on the whole thing. Now we'll just wait for someone to reissue this with the original cover art and title. (Because that cover art, a wild tapestry by Cherry's wife Moki, is well worth reissuing.) Also while at Dusty Groove on my already legendary Phil Cohran buying trip, I asked about Paul Winley Records and they had these weird Afrika Bambaata 12-inch singles for $5.98, in totally warped cardboard sleeves with super-crude paste-on covers on the front and back. Copyright 1983, does this mean Paul Winley is keeping all this stuff in print and cranking it out super-crude, or is this a bootleg? (Probably the latter.) Then again, it seems that it always was a bootleg, judging from the kinda hilarious liner notes by Winley: "I was the first to record Afrika Bambaata as a record artist, along with the Cosmic Force and the Soul Sonic Force. But I must admit I did not do my best in recording them, but I hope to make up for those mistakes by putting together this record of what I think are some of the best cuts and mixes by D.J. Afrika Bambaata himself." OK, so you're making amends for his bad experience with your label by putting out a live bootleg record of one of his DJ gigs? I don't know, I could have it wrong but that's what it sounds like - maybe this kind of thing explains why I didn't really know about Paul Winley until now - his business practices didn't get him any respect - either way, the meat of the matter is that this record is awesome and Bambaata was a bad-ass DJ. 19 minutes of music featuring all kinds of raw breaks, some live rapping, all apparently recorded live at "James Monroe High School, Bronx, NY." My favorite is when he loops the intro to "Fire It Up" by Rick James, the "we want Rick to funk us up!" part... I'll give Can't Stop Won't Stop author Jeff Chang the last word on this record because he nails it: "'Death Mix' features Bam, DJ Jazzy Jay and DJ Red Alert cutting up breaks and Sundance MCing sometime in late 1979 or early 1980. For all its hissy cassette-in-the-bassbin fidelity, it has the same real-deal urgency and immediacy of a Charley Patton or Robert Johnson recording." After Bambaata I pushed play on the 5-disc changer without knowing what was in there - Long Legged Woman came on and for at least five or six songs I was thinking it was Pocahaunted. Which is funny, because are LLW are two MEN and Pocahaunted are two WOMEN. They were using a lot of falsetto, what can I say, and there are some similarities in the way tracks are built out of repeating shoegazey strumming and floating vocals. Last track "We Learned To Survive (What Will Be)" is the one I would play on WBLSTD right now with its Velvetsy two-chord space-gospel organ part.

Kelan Phil Cohran & Legacy African Skies CDR
Coach Fingers "Molly Moonbeam" b/w "Johnny Thunder" 7-inch
Pigeons Virgin Spectacle LP
Carter Thornton Ten Fingers For Forefathers LP
D. Charles Speer & the Helix After Hours LP
Grass Magic LP
Pissed Jeans "I've Still Got You Ice Cream" video

Coach Fingers is yet another No-Neck Blues Band splinter group, this one led by guitarist Jason Meagher with Dave Shuford (aka D. Charles Speer...right?) on bass, David Nuss playing drums on the A-side, Robert "Moose" Gregory of The Helix (formerly of The Suntanama!) playing drums on the B-side... I thought it was gonna be more dusted cowboy rock a la Speer, but, although it is another 'straightforward' rock band, there is more of a British Invasion & Paisley thing going on here, with "Molly Moonbeam" so punchy and keyboard-driven that the phrase "new wave" actually popped into my head. Turned me off a little too, but I ended up listening to these two songs 4 times tonight (it goes by QUICK) and it's growing on me - it's no-doubt catchy and the acid guitar leads are pretty much fantastic. The album by new-to-me-and-probably-everyone-else Pigeons is a nice one, dreamy haunted little avant-music-box songs sung in French by a lady... the sound of new wave chansons (there's that "new wave" term again, hmmm) performed by a band that only exists in the reflection of a puddle of water on cobblestone streets...although for all this dream-fragility they are also a guitar band, and a rather noisy one at that, with side two being where the songs really start to fragment and dislocate. Pigeons are a trio of Wednesday Knudsen, Clark Griffin, and Carter Thornton, who also has a new solo release on the Black Dirt label called Ten Fingers For Forefathers - yep, Mr. Thornton got his start with the Sound@One collective as an album-title pun-writer. No but seriously, he has been playing in various NNCK splinter groups and recording solo works for S@1 for quite a while now, and although I did once see him play in the proto-Speer group Enos Slaughter while in NYC waaaaay back in like 2002, I have never heard one of his releases until now. And this one is a solo acoustic guitar release, improvised music, instant composition, sometimes with a spiky avant-jazz feel, other times with a rambling dusty Americana feel, plenty of vibe, a nice ruminative listen, no real ruts to speak of (like say the Bailey and Fahey ruts that so many others stumble into, nay, wallow in). So kudos to Black Dirt for kicking off the label with three excellent full-lengths, with the D. Charles Speer leading the pack (gave it another spin tonight, digging the "Contrails" song: "Johnny's outside videotaping the sky/Wants to know why he sees those jumbled letters/Before his very eyes/Thinks he might just know what the contrails mean/Latest phase of an ancient poisoning scheme"), all of 'em edition of 500, 180 gram vinyl, charming silkscreen covers, soulful stuff. The Grass Magic LP comes from Wisconsin and the 23 Productions scene (label is Earjerk)... it's a one-off jam that was recorded the night before the legendary Pasture Festival and Jubilee in August 2004, by a 10-person lineup that features most key members of The Davenport Family, both of The Skaters, Glenn Donaldson of Jewelled Antler.... it's a total jam and it sounds like it, but once Side A gets going it picks up a nice walloping head of steam and one thing that distinguishes both sides from the general mid-00s moanwave onslaught is the crafty psychedelic rhythms that snake underneath. Anyway, I'm glad they pressed this thing up (the cover is a thrift-store LP jacket turned inside out and silkscreened with stoner artwork, and some brief liners that name the lineup and include a rad quote from Rabindranath Tagore, stuff like that).

And before you go, please check out this music video for "I've Still Got You Ice Cream" by Pissed Jeans... the plotting and production style reminds me of when MTV used to occasionally play good music. Monty Buckles should direct more! (Maybe he has.)

D. Charles Speer & The Helix After Hours LP
Wu-Tang vids on YouTube

The fine folks at Black Dirt Studio sent along a vinyl version of After Hours to go with the CD version (on Sound@One) I listed last week - it sounds even better this way and it is indeed a pretty major work for the first quarter of 2008. We've heard the (supposedly) psychedelic approach applied to folk and singer/songwriter music plenty in these last couple years (with many hitting the mark, true), but has anybody really applied it to country/western/bluegrass music besides Mr. Speer? Does anybody else really need to? He's certainly doing a fine job - check out his 2007 LP Some Forgotten Country, a solo number in an all(or mostly)-acoustic backporch bluegrass style (note that The Helix are not credited), spaced-out and progressive, solemn and melancholy but usually played with what feels like a wise assuring grin. When Speer is backed by The Helix, as on his debut 7-inch and on this album, those traits are all still present, but the band is undeniably there to rock, all five musicians offering a key role. The lead guitar by Marc Orleans, piano & organ by Hans Chew, and bass by Jason Meagher do all the exploratory work out at the edges of the songs, while the drums by Robert Gregory and rhythm guitar by D. Charles Speer hold 'em down on the inside, rangy tunes played with a loose but strong hand that allows plenty of space for their stories and moods to get established. In fact, this LP version comes with a lyrics insert, so now I can finally tell what he's saying about Randolph Healy from psych ward room 302 on "Past Or Beyond" (as originally heard on the 7-inch - B-side "Canaanite Builder" is on the CD but not the LP). I had a feeling it was amazing, and it is, especially when delivered in his casual croon over the pleasantly resigned ramble of the song: "In the days 'fore you wore this prison garb/You dreamed of ruling Hong Kong/Armored junks patrol the harbor/But this vaunted private army never got too strong/All the times you ripped your friends off/In the name of getting kicks/You'll find a reminiscent figure/In Randolph's sermon on the tick/Sucking blood from the body of Jesus/Scheming death behind closed doors/If they taste cloven hoof in the soup/You know they feel so much better/Got to get back in the limo/I need that plastic feather."

Also checked these out from one of the key groups of the 21st Century:



.



Now for the raw shit, ODB at the absolute top and bottom of the game:




And you gotta watch this two-part interview at Park Hill:

David Crosby If I Could Only Remember My Name mp3s
Long Legged Woman Newtown Nights CDR
Semimuumio Vamos CD
Fluxion Vibrant Forms II mp3s
Cypress Hill s/t mp3s
Stop Smiling #33 (Jay-Z cover)
Jay Bayles Metabolic Eenhancement Waver CDR
Rhythm & Sound See Mi Yah Remixes CD
Maniacs Dream Turku Hold 'Em CD
Jay Bayles again while telling Angelina the Elaine Equi story
Fossils CDR

Nice blizzard all night and into this morning in Chicago - a good 7-8 inches and counting. It may be a California album, but because it's a 'bleak California' album, the David Crosby sounded really good while staring out of the windows of the train and then trudging through snowdrifted sidewalks, particularly the closing suite of "Traction in the Rain" into "Song With No Words" into "Orleans" into "I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here"... From Athens, GA, Long Legged Woman knocked me out last year with a disc called The End of False Religion. Two long tracks that kinda sounded like the entirety of Godflesh Streetcleaner exploding in slow motion. No riffs, no drum machine, I don't think any vocals, just blasted tape collage and guitar noise. Then I heard a track by 'em on a comp called Deeded To Itself: Athens Southernoise that was like weird folk, I guess, and good weird folk at that, with vocals. Both of these releases were on the Thor's Rubber Hammer label (who also brought us the raw-as-hell gutter-jazz Stoned and Zoned release from Owl Xounds in '07), as is this new one from the LLW duo called Newtown Nights. (I say "new one" but I think it's been hiding in the stacks for awhile - definitely also an '07 release.) It's leaning more towards the weird folk side than the exploding Godflesh side, but either way it's fairly unclassifiable - is it psychedelic pop? Bedroom shoegaze? Kinda like a softer-edged Sic Alps, or maybe a two-man Spectre Folk... short songs, short album, with an unformed/unfinished feel in places, maybe still stuck somewhere between soundscaping and songwriting, but I'm gonna keep up with 'em and see what's next...Lal Lal Lal week continues here at Blogstitude with another new CD, this one by a totally unknown band called...spell that for me again?....Semimuumio. I'm telling you, it's getting to where I just put the disc in the player with one hand and start scratching my head with the other...of course the artwork always keeps it goofy, the usual seemingly random hodgepodge of inscrutably domestic photographs and pop-art collage, a photo of a snow-covered car on the back (looks exactly like Chicago this morning), a close-up of really green plants on the inside, the usual dayglo/boho knicknacks/shelves snapshot, a close-up of a bed of straw with an owl in a sailor's cap collaged on top, okay, and the only text is like some excerpted internet chat in English about what to do in Helsinki... I give up, especially after hearing the music - it's like a goofy sampling album, stumbling pop-culture techno weirdness. It might be crude, but then it actually might be quite deft, I honestly can't tell even when listening closely. LLL website tells me that this is a solo project by one of the Tolvi brothers of free jazzish combos Lauhkeat Lampaat and Rauhan Orkesteri - wouldn't have guessed - and as usual they do the best (only?) possible job of describing this stuff: "Mostly sample-based partybeats for children and adults, probably not for teenagers. Call it emotional, adult-oriented beat (EMO-AOB)".... More wintertime music: this Fluxion stuff is sounding incredible. Minimal techno, dubby techno, don't know what this subgenre is officially called but it's the best. Score yet another for the Chain Reaction crew. If I had to choose one label (or label cartel) to listen to for the rest of my life, right now I would choose Basic Channel/Chain Reaction/Burial Mix/etc. I feel odd listing the Jay Bayles CDR because he's one of my best friends, I've known him for 14 years, in fact I've gone on tour with him, he's easily the best drummer I've ever played music with, etcetera. Jay has lived in Hastings, Nebraska for about 25 years I guess, and before that he spent most of the 1980s playing all kinds of music and generally whylin' among various art gallery/loft space/post punk/prog rock/garbage jazz scenes in San Francisco and Boston (where for example he knew the guy who made this killer video). [Ed. note: this was a liver As long as I've known him he's written and recorded songs, putting together cassettes and now CDRs of his latest batches and giving 'em to friends. I've got like 15 of 'em. Again, I feel odd about this because I know him, but it is of course outsider/loner material, would-be private press (except he has never actually pressed anything), and sure his music has a nice dislocated post-Oar one-man sound, usually built around stripped-down but active bass guitar and drums, embellished by who knows what - mostly acoustic and some electric guitars, but I remember a couple tapes he recorded with nothing but bass guitar, drums, and marimba. (For that out-of-nowhere Art Tripp feel.) His lyrics are always good, often cut up and resorted from various texts and poems (this CDR uses stuff by Elaine Equi, Georges Perecs, Blaise Cendrars, and Jay himself, who is more than capable of steady fractured surrealist prog word flow on his own). This batch may not be his greatest or most adventurous but it is definitely one of his most assuredly melancholy. Sure I'll go ahead and call it his On the Beach. Again, not to make him sound like some thrilling private press discovery, you might not like it or rate it or whatever, I mean he's got an odd singing style, troubadoury and not always on-key, maybe too high in the mix... the music also has a slightly proggy 1970s accent that might turn some off... sometimes the bass is fretless... either way it doesn't matter because who knows if Jay will ever put out a record, or even a CD, period. He does not have any desire to quit the day job, just to play and record in his spare time - I believe for some crazy reason like 'the love of music and art'. I think I'll probably end up posting this album as a zip file in the comments section so you can see what you think - watch for it if you're interested. AND I just have to tell a little story while I'm here - I had put on Jay's disc and kicked back on the couch to read this issue of Stop Smiling with Jay-Z on the cover, featuring interview after interview with all kinds of interesting people like Jay-Z ("On the streets, you have to have integrity, or you won't be there long. You can't give your word and then do the opposite. In business, people just run all over each other. It's unpoliced."), Lee Hazlewood ("I didn't know [Steve Shelley] at all. One of my daughters knew him. Or knew of him. But I didn't know the Electric-whatever-they're-called. I didn't know them at all...Sonic Youth."), Paul Verhoeven ("[Chicago] has a lot of New York things, and a great railway system and a certain sense of darkness like New York, and there's the beauty of the water around it. If you were to give me a city that is modern and gritty and is beautiful, then I think Chicago would probably be the best choice. But I have never been able to shoot there."), David Cronenberg ("If your movies are distributed around the world, there is the possibility they will be cut by censors of various kinds. But it hasn't really been a huge issue with me. The thing is, if it happens to you once, you never forget it. It really is a huge violation. And it makes you a huge champion of freedom of speech forever after."), Jimmy Breslin ("A column isn't a feature story - you've just got to go out and write and work and have an awful lot of writing and all facts, and somewhere in the middle, rising on strong, steel legs, is an opinion. You've got the opinion coming out of hard, long reporting. Stand in the rain - when you're standing in the rain, then you know you're in business."), Darryl Jenifer ("No one in Bad Brains was influenced by Jimi Hendrix. I never listened to a Hendrix record. I give respect to the pioneering brother, but his music to me was blues, and I wasn't a blues cat. When I heard about his records, I was into Black Sabbath."), Tom Araya ("But with 'Jihad,' he wanted to write the song from the perspective of the terrorist, and I thought that was a cool idea. We don't support terrorism or war. From a songwriting standpoint, it's an interesting perspective. It's a challenge."), and, right here on page 37, an intriguing poet I'd never heard of named Elaine Equi who lived in Chicago, now lives in New York, and writes some nice dreamy Creeley-esque verse. 30 minutes later I'm looking at Jay's handwritten liner notes to the disc I'm listening to and I see that two different tracks incorporated words by.... Elaine Equi. Apparently he just came across a book by her at the Hastings Public Library and checked it out on a whim. What can we say, life rocks.... Heard a bit of chatter about this Fossils group, I believe from somewhere in Canada, and although right now I'm not actively looking for more improvising noise/experimental collectives that have a cool one-word name and put out lots of CDRs and/or cassettes, this is not bad shit. Good acousmatic junkyard crumple aesthetic meets actual electric guitar, plus long small-noise drop-out sections which are the reason I keep listening to this, I can't figure out what's going on half the time, or if it's even still on. (That's a good thing.)

AND.... in case you missed the link in the text above, make sure you watch CALLING PLANET EARTH!

Fricara Pacchu Midnight Pyre CD
Jane Berserker CD
Magas Friends Forever CD
Galaktlan Constance CD
Philip Cohran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble Singles CD
Six Organs of Admittance Shelter From The Ash CD
LOST season premiere

Continuing with the Lal Lal Lal CD batch, we have a new one by Fricara Pacchu, a member of Maniacs Dream, and therefore 1/3 responsible for yesterday's Turku Hold 'Em endurance test, but this Midnight Pyre album, and his work in general (see the masterful 2005 Lal Lal Lal cassette Waydom) is definitely song-and-pulse-oriented compared to that endless MD blast-wallage. In fact, the Pacchu release after Waydom and before Pyre, another cassette called Space Puppet, saw him moving into what could be called dance/techno waters - this release keeps the techno vibe but makes something singular out of it, almost like high-speed computer-programmed surf-rock that unexpectedly plays when you open up your 4-year-old nephew's toy box. Yeah, maybe... Also from the Drastic Plastic 99 cent bin (see previous Jane Berserker post) was a nice find, the 2003 Magas album Friends Forever. Magas was one of my favorite Chicago-based live acts when I first moved here in 2001. Of course I already knew of him from the Ann Arbor no wave explosion of the 1990s and his bands like Couch, The Many Moods of Marlon Magas, and then, after his move to Chicago, the bad-ass 'no wave supergroup' Lake of Dracula with Weasel Walter and Heather M of the Scissor Girls.... but by the time I got here he had gone 'electro' (maybe even 'electroclash') and done it particularly well, with a great goofy but also seriously slammin' solo synth-and-drumbox live act, and this CD represents those live shows just about right. Before the kids came along I would see him play quite a bit, and poke around his excellent but shortlived specialty store Weekend Records & Soap - seems like he's slowed down the activity a bit but then again so have I. Either way, this is a good record, and hearing it I'm realizing that his electro persona actually has more in common with Lake of Dracula than I thought - sure his singing voice is more reserved and cool, but it is the same voice, and more importantly the songs have a real similar running-in-place bobbing-your-head drive - I think it's just Magas's internal rhythm and it was probably pulsing away before he discovered electro, no wave, and everything else. This Galaktlan CD has been kicking around the Blastitude HQ forever - I never listened to it but a coworker rescued it from the nevermind pile and started playing it quite a bit and shit, it's pretty nice. Lush space-techno from Estonia, possibly the only record I've gotten from there.... Finally caught up with the latest Six Organs of Admittance and I'm impressed. More electric guitar based than acoustic based, Chasny rips all kinds of wild psychedelic leads on here but the real news is the songs and arrangements. I wouldn't even use the "folk" word to describe what he's doing here, maybe something more like "shivering progressive symphonic guitar ballad mini-epics." Heavy album - when he sings about getting "shelter from the ash" it honestly makes me want to get some too. LOST was pretty great and I can't believe I get to watch another one next week. (Bummer about only eight episodes though.) The Oceanic Six! Naomi has a sister! Michael Abaddon is scary! I will not get tired of this show, no matter how ridiculous or withholding it gets.

Maniacs Dream Turku Hold 'Em CD
Far East Family Band Nipponjin mp3s
Fleetwood Mac Then Play On mp3s
Kelan Phil Cohran & Legacy African Skies CDR
Philip Cohran & the Artistic Heritage Ensemble Singles CD
Philip Cohran & the Artistic Heritage Ensemble The Malcolm X Memorial LP
Kuti #4
Kuti #6
Roctober #44

It looks like the Lal Lal Lal label of Finland is putting out real CDs now, which is cool... but this new Maniacs Dream is just absurd, flagrantly thumbing its nose at the editing required by 12" vinyl capacity with one 48 minute track followed by another 23 minute track with basically no variance whatsoever in method/approach/attack, just three dudes making as much in-the-red Hijokaidan-style gtr/electronics/??? noise as possible the whole entire time (except for the tiny break of silence in between tracks, which almost sounds like the whole band just stopping on a dime to take a collective breath before diving right back in, which made me laugh but it's a pretty small punchline considering it requires almost an hour of setup)... I personally like Lal Lal Lal music best when it works from a 'beertrance' backbeat/pulse, simple as that, but maybe, just maybe, this total blitzing metallic zonkerosity that not many can or would rival does indeed become its own kind of (anti)pulse, a monument to absurd excess too large to ignore... what an endurance test... I mean I will listen to it again, ha ha.... at least once, heh heh... I mean the noise they produce is very, ha ha, PSYCHEDELIC, ha ha ha....(looks around nervously)... the artwork is notable/weird/random as always, the usual inscrutable pictures of urban/suburban Finland life (basketball hoops, sweatshirts, a motorcycle, home decorations, a thanks lists longer than some hip-hop albums, a Basil Wolvertonesque drawing of a crazed dude taking apart his own head on the cover... scratch own head NOW).... I haven't seen Saint Julian's Japrocksampler book yet but he's got the shareblogs buzzin' and I've checked out some of his Top 50 Japanese rock albums that way - thumbs up for his #14 pick Nipponjin and its lush symphonic space prog with synths, strings, heavy guitar, spacey vocals, side-long epics.... even the four-minute songs sound like side-long epics...



I've been needing to make a Phil Cohran post forever. I keep getting reminded because he lives just a few blocks from me and I see him walking around, plus I see him play on Friday nights at the Ethiopian Diamond restaurant a few times a year, but it's hard to know just where to start with this guy - he played with Sun Ra of course, he was a founding member of the AACM, members of his group the Artistic Heritage Ensemble included awesome Miles Davis electric guitarist Pete Cosey and future members of Earth, Wind & Fire, he founded the Affro-Arts Theater Black Culture Center in Chicago from 1967 to 1970, he just turned 80 years old, he has 19 sons, 8 of which are in the great Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, and again, he still plays for free every Friday night at the Ethiopian Diamond (6120 N. Broadway Avenue, Chicago, also serving fine food, a little pricey but hey), he's got a MySpace page... Ah, but today I actually do have a place to start because some new vinyl-and-CD Cohran releases/reissues have come out, and I skipped lunch today and took the bus from work to Dusty Groove and bought what they had, the sweet Malcolm X Memorial gatefold LP on Mississippi Records and the Singles CD on a Japanese label called Midday Music. (They also have a new CD-only reissue of the self-titled Artistic Heritage Ensemble debut album, commonly known as On The Beach (on the Chicago-based Katalyst Entertainment label that also did a new CD version of Malcolm X Memorial), but I already have that one - when is someone gonna do it on vinyl?) When I got home, before listening to this stuff, I decided to go all out and set the stage with what is actually my favorite Phil Cohran album of all, African Skies. This has never been officially released, but Cohran makes a CDR version which he sells at the Diamond, which is where I bought it. The cover says "Soundtrack album for The Adler Planetarium Sky Shows," and apparently it is still played there every day, which may have something to do with the lack of an official release, I don't know. It doesn't have a recording date on it, but this page says it was composed in 1987, and the harpist on the session says it was recorded in 1993. Either way, this is magical floating music that easily evokes visions of Africa, its history and prehistory, the flora and fauna of its vast landscapes, and of course deep astronomical visions of the starry skies above. It doesn't have the heavy-brass soul-jazz feel that the Artistic Heritage Ensemble music does - this is something more meditative and haunting and beautiful that is closer to the solo music with backing tapes that Cohran plays at the Diamond. Seek it out! (Reckless has copies for mailorder (and for walk-in if you're in Chicago), along with some other self-released Cohran stuff that he recently brought in himself - am I gonna have to take the bus down there tomorrow??) And now on to the new stuff... the Malcolm X Memorial LP was recorded live at the Affro-Arts Theater on February 25, 1968, and it ended up being the follow-up release to On The Beach when Cohran pressed up 1000 copies in 1970. I've been hearing good things about this Mississippi Records label, and this reissue is very nice, adding a gatefold that features a great color photo of the AHE in action, as well as what is probably the best article on Cohran I've yet seen, by Nigel Ridgeway of Ground Lift Magazine. As for the music itself I can't believe how ambitious it is, telling the story of Malcolm's life in four parts, starting with blues and jump music on side one (to represent Malcolm's boyhood and years as Detroit Red), and then moving on to sweeping epic dramatic vistas on side two (representing his political and spiritual awakenings, his charisma and leadership, his assassination, etc). Great stuff, and according to his MySpace it looks like Cohran is going to play a version of this with a backing band on February 16th at the Heartland Cafe - I can walk there! I'll let you know how it is. As for the Singles release, it's great too. Unfortunately there's really no info at all on it - maybe if you can read Japanese there is, I'm not sure, can anyone tell from the label's webpage? I haven't come across any discographical background for any 45s that Cohran may have released, and it's kinda odd that there's 7 tracks on here and not an even number, right? Maybe he released a one-sided 45.... Not that I'm complaining too much because these tracks are great and I'm glad to hear 'em regardless. "The African Look" is "dedicated to all the sisters who are governed by European styles and the brothers who like it" and has a brassy and proud strut when the AHE ladies (Mrs. Ella Pearl Jackson and Patricia Ann Smith) sing "The African Look is beautiful!" Cohran's frankiphone (an electric thumb piano that he built himself) has such a burning sound on "Loud Mouth," you might just put away your Konono No. 1 records for awhile... two songs from the Malcolm X Memorial appear here as well, and might even be the same versions as the LP - same goes for "New Frankiphone Blues" from On The Beach... anyway, that's it for now, I think I'm finally done with my long-needed first Philip Cohran post... more to come I'm sure....



And to close out this post with some eyeball kicks/reading material, in this Lal Lal Lal package they threw in a couple issues of a foldover newsprint style graphix/comix mag called Kuti, and it's pretty exciting stuff. LLL label head, Avarus member, etc Roope Eronen is on the Kuti staff and contributes his own super-colorful weird-animal stories along with a bunch of other artists, and the whole thing pops with a ragged psychedelic feel that seems directly analagous to the Paperrad/Fort Thunder US scene. The comics are all in Finnish but English translations appear at the bottom of each... for more check their website.... and finally while at Dusty Groove I also grabbed the brand new issue of Roctober, the long-running mag by Jake Austen of the great Chic-A-Go-Go TV Show. I've barely dipped into it but highlights look to be interviews with Dickie Peterson of Blue Cheer, punk/horror artist/zinester Dennis Dread, and of course all of the ephemera that this mag always bursts with so charmingly. Also the editor's note is inspiring, in which Austen talks about how "as many of you know, the small press world is in pretty brutal shape these days" but concludes with "Basically, we have decided that we want to publish forever, and we're just going to have to figure out how to do that. Your subscriptions help, as does your love, so keep them both coming, tell your friends, and most importantly, enjoy the magazine!" Will do!

Paulette & Tanya Winley "I Believe In The Wheel Of Fortune" mp3
Devin the Dude To Tha Xtreme mp3s
The Band Music From Big Pink (Sony HF90 cassette dub)
Boz Scaggs s/t (Sony HF90 other side of cassette dub)
Donny Hathaway Live LP
Jane Berserker CD

Walking to work from the train stop I was blown away when the shuffle pulled up "I Believe In The Wheel Of Fortune" by Paulette & Tanya Winley. Have you heard this song? I hadn't, and I didn't even know it was on my iPod, I think I downloaded it months ago from some mix on some blog by some guy. It's sassy hip-hop street-funk sung by ladies, sisters it would seem. "I believe in the wheel of fortune/What comes around goes around/And I believe I believe what my momma used to say/What goes up must come down/And you know that/And you know that/And if you don't know that/I think you better learn that." As soon as I got to work I hit google and discovered that this was a 1982 track from the Paul Winley Records label, which had been around since the 1960s as a doo-wop label and got into the breakbeat game with records like "Smokin' Cheeba Cheeba" (1976) by the Harlem Underground Band and then hip-hop with the first releases by Afrika Bambaata. Winley was also the first label to record female rappers, you guessed it, his daughters Paulette and Tanya, who recorded "Rhymin' and Rappin'" in 1979 and "Vicious Rap" in 1980 (by Tanya recording as Sweet Tee). I realize this is old news to some of you, but hey it's new to me. (And I just read Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop, how did I miss this?) Back to the hip-hop of the present, this is the first time I've ever listened to Devin the Dude and I'm underwhelmed. Sounds real g-funky and I'd rather just listen to The Chronic for the 600th time. Plenty of nice grooves but it seems like he hardly ever raps. Co-worker wanted to hear The Band so I busted out this old Sony HF90 a former employee made, Big Pink on one side and the self-titled 1969 album by Boz Scaggs on the other! Big Pink sounded as great as ever ("Chest Fever" still #1) and the funky horn-rock soul by Scaggs, recorded at Muscle Shoals with the house band, sounded almost as good. Not quite the memorable tune-power that Big Pink has but a very good pairing by Mr. Taper. Back home put on the Donny Hathaway LP I just bought for 5 bucks in Omaha at the esteemed Antiquarium Record Shop. Loved this album ever since a co-worker played it a few years ago and burned me a CDR. Driving heavy electric piano soul, 10-minute-plus versions of "The Ghetto" and "Voices Inside (Everything Is Everything)", the latter with a GREAT bass solo by Willie Weeks, covers of "What's Going On" and John Lennon's "Jealous Guy"... side one was recorded in Hollywood and side two in New York City but this is bad-ass midwest soul music by a Chicago native.... the Jane CD was also picked up in Omaha in the 99 cent bin at Drastic Plastic (used to be absolutely crucial skater/punk record store, still not bad - it's been open for a good 15 years - it's where I first heard Black Flag when I went in looking for Misfits records because Metallica covered 'em - basically the whole world of underground music was opened up for me by the Garage Days EP - but that's another story - one that I basically just told, oops). I'm not really one to track down Animal Collective side projects but this one caught my eye with its digipak and nice silver & black graphics (I love digipaks) and on first listen, it seems like an excellent album - dreamy ambient music that sounds particularly influenced by minimal techno (and slightly delirious acid house on the third track), with Panda Bear's unmistakable vocal styles floating on top. A dollar well spent (although this 25-minute "extra c.d. track" called "Swan" is kind of an inconsequential drifter - get the LP).

Taj Mahal Travellers on Tour (1973, Matsuo Ohno), viewed on ubu.com

When I first heard the Taj Mahal Travellers, one of those live CDs with an early-70s year in its title, I couldn't believe the vastness of their music. It immediately made me picture four or five ancient old wizards perched on top of mountains in the blackest night, calling to each other across canyons and valleys, conjuring up a sonic spell that clearly had the power to move the world. When someone told me that this feature-length documentary film not only existed but had footage of them playing music outside by the ocean, I just assumed it was my vision, common sense be damned - that they were perched high on sea cliffs, plugged in and droning deep while waves crashed on the rocks below. I didn't realize how fully I believed this until watching the first 10 minutes of the actual film and seeing the reality - different, but not at all disappointing, because this is a cool-ass movie. Just watch the opening band-introducing montage w/title cards and beautiful Herzogian shots of the sea, and watch the rest too as they travel to Scandinavia and blow minds. (Actually I haven't watched the whole thing yet, maybe there is some kind of bad-ass finale at the sea with huge amps and a gas-powered generator....)