Bright Channel >> Were you scared when a chill touched your spine?

Bright Channel - "Airborne"

(Flight Approved Records, 2005)

Jeff's voice soars into a new realm of epic beauty in this song, easily one of the best songs ever made.  And I'd say it's one of the most atmospheric and Volplane-esque songs that Bright Channel has made.  His vocals are more confident and are mixed more up-front than ever before.  The delicate guitar arpeggios during the instrumental breaks are spine-tingling.  For someone like me, this is the kind of song that is truly life-affirming, because not only does it fill up my spine, heart and spleen with vigorous excitement particles, it's the kind of hidden gem that makes slogging through trillions of mediocre CDs, LPs, mp3s, etc. worthwhile.

In film noir fashion, he describes some unseen menace in vague terms, just as he sang about something chasing him in his sleep in "Night Eyes."  In the previously-mentioned interview, after I asked how he writes lyrics, Jeff said "My lyrics are usually simple and a bit abstract.  I build them from memories, dreams, déjà vu's, and subconscious / altered states... or whatever helps translate the mood of the music.  I never get too heavy or serious with the words.  I like to leave it fairly transparent and open, allowing more focus on the sounds."

I will be posting another amazing song from this album called "Out Of Focus," and I recommend checking out the great instrumental closing track "Interception."

Live at Little Radio Warehouse, Los Angeles., 4/21/06, opening for Brian Jonestown Massacre. Photo by Timothy Norris.

Creepy Azn sex supplement box found on the ground by the CAC last week

On Friday I saw a local band called The Honorable South do a free CD-release show at Euclid Records.  The singer told us she had cooked the macaroni & cheese (w/ bourbon), and there was also roast beef and sweet potatoes.  I got a few kickass Psychedelic Furs 7"s, including a picture disc of "The Ghost In You".

Planets with similar climates: The Church - "Chaos" (1992), Colfax Abbey - "Once In A While" (1996), Venus Beads - "Heaven And Back" (1990), Bailter Space - "Shine" (1992), My Bloody Valentine - "Only Shallow" (1990).

Bright Channel >> Shiny new castles made of mirrors

Bright Channel - "Final Stretch"

(Flight Approved Records, 2004)

Here it is, the first song on Bright Channel's first album, recorded in May 2004 in Chicago by Steve Albini.  It's one of the most unforgettable and badass opening songs I've personally ever heard, with a guitar sound that could melt glass from 100 light years away.  The funky bass parts mesh with the choppy drumming to make for an irresistible hip-hop-style beat.

It has been said that within a few years, "Final Stretch" will likely replace Europe's "The Final Countdown" as the go-to song during the closing minutes of every sporting event.  The lyrics are ominous and obtuse, making this come as a perfect theme song for a dystopian sci-fi flick.  The ending of Sunshine comes to mind as a great candidate:

I got this coupon insert in the mail last week and was immediately struck by what I saw:

Today a freak storm with hurricane-force winds ripped through the state and swept my greenhouse away right in front of my eyes.  I watched it tumble across the neighborhood, then went out to find it an hour later.  It had blown about 200 yards away, across Hwy. 20.  Imagine how readily an umbrella will blow away in the wind, since it's essentially a parachute, then imagine a 6x8x7' umbrella.  I dismantled it in this lady's yard.  She poked her head out and I explained who I was and what I was doing, to which she simply said "Okay."  So my greenhouse lasted all of about two weeks.  Maybe this is the wakeup call I need to help me quit my habit of growing desert plants...  I found some of them about 40 feet away from where they had been, and my 200 lb. birdbath was knocked over.  I won't sit here and complain too much, since I remember a few years ago when Matador Records owner Gerard Cosloy's house burned down; on his sports blog, he merely said something like "Well, my house burned down," and left it at that.  And I was positive I heard a tornado coming (that distinctive train-whistle sound that they always tell you to listen for), so I'm pleased as heck overall at how little damage I got.  Amazingly, my staghorn fern that I've had for 13 years was totally uninjured, as were my best specimen aloes and cacti.  I just wish I had gotten a pic of the greenhouse.  Unfortunately, it's totaled and I'm going to sell the steel scaffolding poles as scrap metal.  I guess it just hurts karmically because I went out of my way to raise even more plants than I normally raise, so you'd think Mother Nature would try not to inflict this kind of thing on someone like me.  One of my neighbor's purple martin houses got blown down, but I didn't have the heart to look inside it for dead birds.

Planets with similar climates: Bailter Space - "Control" (1993), Lucid Nation - "Fun" (1999), Plexi - "Ganesh" (1994), Bleach - "Headless" (1991), Big Black - "Kerosene" (1986), Deftones - "Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away)" (1997), The Sound - "Fire" (1981), Moonshake - "Spaceship Earth" (1992).

Bright Channel >> Someone's chasing me in my sleep

Bright Channel - "Night Eyes" (demo)

(unreleased, 2003)

So, back to what I was saying in the previous two posts... In February 2002, Jeff and Shannon of Volplane reassembled with a new drummer, Brian Banks, and a new name, Bright Channel.
In my 2003 interview I asked "How is Bright Channel going to differ from Volplane?"
Jeff just said "Slightly less wine..."
Shannon said "Not as loud for one (or as many amps to carry).  I'd say the Bright Channel sound is more streamlined and articulated than Volplane, with a little more power behind it.  To use a Bailter Space analogy, Bright Channel's more Solar.3 or Photon, where Volplane was more Robot World."  (In my previous question, I had asked if Robot World was a big influence on them.)
I secretly died a little inside, and thought about how every single shoegazey band that I loved soon abandoned that sound for a more "normal" rock sound.  Examples: Catherine Wheel, Verve, Lush, Bailter Space, Ride, etc.  And worst of all was Slowdive morphing into frickin' Mojave 3, jeesh.  So I honestly wasn't expecting Bright Channel's music to impress me, much less amaze me, but that's just what it did.  I have to say I disagree with Shannon's "less amps" statement, because B.C.'s music is way louder / heavier than Volplane's.

Anyway, back to the interview.  Jeff later said "Our music was designed to be as hypnotic and suggestively psychedelic as possible.  However, it was done at high volumes.  Volplane caused a great deal of hearing damage to ourselves and to fans.  I don't think we were able to capture the type of air movement or "wall-of-sound" effect we wanted on our early recordings.  Bright Channel, on the other hand, is slightly trimmed down and more focused.  Instead of multiple digital delays and amplifiers, we are using more organic effects such as fuzz and reverb."

This is a demo of a song that appeared on their self-titled 2004 debut album.  I prefer this version because it's a bit slower (hence 10 seconds longer), and the album version seems a tad too rushed to me.  This was sent to me by Smelly in 2003, or 2004 at the latest, after I asked her to track some Bright Channel songs down for me.  She is so cool that her RYM username is a fucking Swervedriver lyric.  The other demo she sent me was a crushingly heavy / amazing demo of "Ice Field."  Steve Albini produced the debut album, but I don't know if he produced (sorry, "engineered") the demos; I'm guessing not.  I could spend hours talking about why I dislike his production (sorry, "engineering") style, but I won't.  "Night Eyes" is a very subtle song, with the vocals starting off low and reptilian, and later going to a higher register and becoming more beautiful.  The guitar parts follow a similar path, like a loyal puppy dog tagging along with its owner.  The song has a weird overall marching-band swagger to it, driven by a mutant funk bassline and billowing clouds of guitar.  The drums suddenly go ballistic in the final minute.  It's only my 3rd-favorite song on the album, but it's definitely sui generis.  Rock music for people who are bored with rock music.

I know this is an early (2002 or 2003) Bright Channel pic, because I used it in my interview in '03.
Note the images of trees projected onto them.  L-R: Jeff Suthers, Brian Banks, Shannon Stein

This is a pic from the roof of the Ogden Museum of Art, taken by by sister when we visited it last week.  (See previous post.)  That's a kinetic Lin Emery aluminum sculpture on the left, the Crescent City Connection bridge in the middle, then some unknown black sculpture, then the water tower atop the Cotton Mill apartments, where she briefly lived.  This is direct from her camera to my email, not cropped or color-adjusted in any way.  Even the clouds are just perfect.

Most of Emery's stuff is in the same vein, and she has a similar, but larger and much more famous, statue right in front of the New Orleans Museum Of Art:

I was surprised that one of my favorite (one-man) bands, National Skyline, released a new album last week.  It's good, though poppy enough to maybe generate cries of "sellout" from longtime fans.  Garbs is still a master of catchy melodies, and a little bit of extra chillwave is fine by me.

Today I played hoops for about 3 hours in Thibodaux, which completely derailed an intended trip down to Houma.  Better luck next time... I lent my Del The Funky Homosapien CD to this guy so he could play it on his car stereo while we played, but it skipped on a few songs so he had to take it out.  There were around 25-30 people playing.

An amazing thing I found out about on the History Channel on Saturday: The Year Without A Summer.  Last night I watched the season finales of Dexter and Homeland, and tonight was the season finale of Terra Nova.  The ultra-intense Homeland is the best show no one knows about.

R.I.P. Christopher Hitchens, The Chris Paul era in New Orleans, and Kim Jong-Il

Planets with similar climates: DUSTdevils - "Neck Surfing" (1990), True Widow - "Skull Eyes" (2011), Bailter Space - "Hard Wired" (1989), Failure - "Heliotropic" (1996), U2 - "Bullet The Blue Sky" (1987), Idaho - "Crawling Out" (1994), Live Skull - "Cloud One" (1985).

Pteranodon >> Sunburst and snowblind

Pteranodon - "Adrift"

(Flight Approved Records, 2001)

Here's one of the best ambient / drone tracks I've ever heard, and it's even more impressive considering that it was created by "rock" people who were simply on hiatus from rocking out.  It really reflects the coldness and bleak majesty of the Colorado mountains, where I skiied a few times ('93 and '95) and where my uncle Mike and aunt Christy live.  You can even sort of get the sensation of snowblindness, which is when all the light hitting your eyes from the sky and the surface of the snow fries your retinas.

Not to brag, but for a blog that doesn't even focus on ambient music, I think this one has posted some incredible ambient tracks this year, and it feels really good to spotlight an essentially unknown artist like Pteranodon, since I doubt anyone ever has before in the history of internets.  In terms of quality vs. quantity, I doubt many actual ambient blogs have posted better stuff than Blowtorch Baby has.  This field of music has so many mediocre tracks / artists, and so few true gems.  Maybe I should've done a separate ambient blog, but I like combining it in with all the other song-based stuff on here.  "Adrift" is the most densely layered, and therefore the "warmest" or most "womblike," one on the album.  Most of the others are quite minimalistic and downright eerie.  I guess I got into this group in 2003, when I got into Volplane and Bright Channel, since Pteranodon is made up of the core duo of those two bands.  Not long after that, I bought Pteranodon's actual self-titled CD, probably on eBay. It comes in a cool silver gatefold paper case with some flowers on the cover.  At first I thought they were opium poppies, which would be fitting, considering the album's narcotizing effect on the lucky listener; but I think they might just be some kind of thistle or thistle relative.  Other good cuts from this album are "Periodic Rise And Fall" and "Distances."  (The latter might have been named in honor of the Flying Saucer Attack LP of the same name.)  "Adrift" just hits me with more emotional impact than any of the other ones.  As their bio says, "pteranodon is the brainchild of jeff suthers and shannon stein, former members of volplane and bright channel and current members of moonspeed.  in the fall of 2000, after the departure of volplane's drummer, jeff and shannon set out to pursue an ambient musical venture that combined their love of minimalist musical styles with their equal appreciation for maximum volumes. with only one organ and one guitar, pteranodon was designed to be a lush (but gigantic) listening experience, both live and on disc.  their self-titled debut album was released in 2001, with a follow-up appearing in spring 2005."

Inside view of the minimalist gatefold packaging

Click on the "sound" link over here to listen to each album in its entirety.  You can even play one song from each album simultaneously to make your own exciting Pteranoremixes.

Today my sister and I went to the Prospect.2 art festival.  I had gone to Prospect.1 three years ago, which was at least twice as big as this one, but this one was still pretty good.  We went to the Contemporary Arts Center, the Ogden Museum, and the Old U.S. Mint, plus some little new art studio down in the Holy Cross neighborhood.  Duane Pitre (a.k.a. Pilotram), former guitarist of ILYA, had an interesting self-generating ambient sound installation at the CAC.  The Mint was screening William Eggleston's famous and extremely overrated film Stranded In Canton.  We walked up on the levee and petted someone's three-legged dog, saw white pelicans, and saw a guy mooning a friend a few hundred yards away across the canal.  I also took her to American Aquatic Gardens, Harold's Nursery, and Euclid Records.  I bought an awesome picture disc 7" of Simple Minds' "Someone Somewhere In Summertime" at Euclid for only $3 and gave them two David Bowie 8-tracks as thanks for pricing it so low.  In the car we listened to Cleopatra Grip by The Heart Throbs, which I just bought this morning, and then to Pteranodon.  Check out the video for "I Wonder Why" by The Heart Throbs, a song which I would describe as Best Coast meets My Bloody Valentine.
Here's an excerpt from a cool 2-minute video I saw today at either the Ogden or the CAC; I think it was made by someone named Jeff or John, with the last initial G.:

Planets with similar climates: Rapoon - "Hollow Flight" (1997), Plexi - "Bunny" (1996).

Volplane >> It burns through me

Volplane - "Lost In Blue" (a.k.a. "I Want This Dream")

(Flight Approved Records, 1997)

I found out about Volplane when someone in AOL's Indie Rock chatroom told me about them in early 2003 and said I might like them.  I checked them out, loved the few songs I heard (including this one), and then almost immediately interviewed them for my online zine.  I was informed that they had changed their drummer and adopted the new name Bright Channel, so it technically was a Bright Channel interview.  The word volplane is a verb meaning "To glide toward the earth in an airplane with the engine cut off."

This song hypnotized my brain from the first few seconds, and still blows me away with its darkly creeping, trancelike menace.  For only a 3-minute song, it sure is a harrowing journey.  Singer / guitarist Jeff Suthers' androgynous, soothing vocals, crying out like an ant trapped in amber, are the perfect foil for the forlorn, hypothermia-inducing music.  The production values are pretty incredible for a self-recorded song, with a womblike warmth borne out of tons of reverb.  I like how the phrase "I want this dream to be" has no ending, so one is left to decide what exactly he is trying to say.  "Wash Away," "Two Worlds" and "Tear In Two" are my other favorite Volplane tunes, with "Wash Away" being particularly mind-blowing, easily one of the best pure shoegaze songs ever made.  According to their website, "From 1997-1999, Volplane forged ahead and spent the larger part of two years in their home studio recording what should have been two records that were never officially released: Volplane and Merlot.  In 2006, Flight Approved Records released a limited edition CD-R retrospective with some of the band’s favorite tracks from [those two albums]."  The retrospective is simply titled 1997-1999, is quite stunning, and can be bought on iTunes.  "Lost In Blue" (I seem to remember it was titled "I Want This Dream" when I downloaded it in 2003) and "Wash Away" were on Volplane.  The (proposed?) cover art for Volplane is identical to the cover of 1997-1999, but solarized (a reverse negative image), and with no writing at the bottom:

As a an obsessive fan of shoegaze / dream pop guitar styles, I can say without hesitation that Jeff Suthers is a master of this art, coaxing out some of the most spacey, psychedelic and eerie tones ever, all in the relative obscurity of Denver, Colorado.

Excellent photo with San Francisco as a backdrop; presumably taken at Kirby Cove in Marin County, ca. 1984. Compare to the top photo here.

Planets with similar climates: Bethany Curve - "Long Beach" (2001), Colfax Abbey - "Once In A While" (1996), Sonic Youth - "Shadow Of A Doubt" (1986), Juned - "Titanic" (1995), The Comsat Angels - "I Come From The Sun" (1992), Catherine Wheel - "Tongue Twisted" (1993).


Eating or drinking over the last week: Rouses eggplant parmesan; Synergy Mystic Mango kombucha tea; Alo Coco Exposed coconut water; Winn-Dixie cornbread; Rouses garlic rosemary red onion focaccia; Samuel Adams Black Lager; Flavors Of Greece roasted eggplant spread; Clowson Cotswold gloucester cheese w/ onions & chives.  And of course the Guinness Draught vs. Murphy's Stout comparison I mentioned last time.