Autumnfair >> Spring can really hang you the most

I can't believe it's still California Month, tremor #46:

Autumnfair - "Black Spring"

(Nate Starkman & Son Records Records, ca. 1988 / Mobilization Records, 2002)

"Black Spring" is a super-eerie ambient mindwarp, totally different from anything else this synthy post-punk / goth band ever released.  It's a shame they didn't record an entire ambient album.

This track originally appeared on a 1988 V/A compilation LP called The October Country, on a very cool label called Nate Starkman & Son.

This mp3 is from their 2002 compilation CD on Mobilization Recs. (a label run by Ethan Port of Savage Republic) with the truly horrible title 1986-1989.  The music on it is very impressive, showing fluency in all the key trends obsessed over by people with KROQ hair in the '80s, with charisma that was lacking in most of those bands, and some of the most mind-blowingly cool guitar textures this side of Sonic Youth or Plexi.  This compilation includes all six songs from Autumnfair's lone release, a 1991 10" called Glaciers And Gods on Independent Project Records, plus six more previously-unreleased tracks.  It does not contain "Naomi" from The October Country, though.  Some of them have (sonorously pleasant) male vocals and some have (rather grating) female vocals.  I highly recommend the song "Collide."  I was gonna post it, but the mp3 has bad clipping.  As you can guess, "Read My Lips" samples a certain George H.W. Bush speech.  Those boneheads Ministry of course later had a minor hit single by sampling GHWB's "New world order" speech.
Autumnfair was founded by Thom Fuhrmann of Savage Republic and Val Haller of Lords Of The New Church, making this band one of many noteworthy SR offshoots (Scenic, Fourwaycross, 17 Pygmies, Medicine, etc.).  Greg Grunke of SR apparently was also an auxiliary member of Autumnfair, but I don't know if he played on "Black Spring."

I'm really glad I stumbled onto this compilation recently, because I was worried I wouldn't have a good ambient track to post during this Californiastravaganza.  I'm not sure if "Black Spring" would make a good theme song for Black Spring Break, but there's only one way to find out.

Needing a title for this post, I resorted to making a lazy pun on a jazz standard that has been sung by countless dames of song; Ella did it best, in my opinion.  More recently, Jolie Holland wrote a catchy ditty called "Springtime Can Kill You".  Ladies, ladies...

Depressed, mopey humans can learn a lot from the will to live exhibited by plants and "lesser" animals of this world.  For example, see this photo I took of an elm tree stump regrowing along the Lake Pontchartrain bike path in Metairie, on 12/6/06.  Tree stumps only regrow from their edges, because the wood in the middle is dead.  Palms, being a more primitive type of plant called a monocotyledon, are the exact opposite, with the outside being dead and the center alive.  It took me a long time to notice that, even though I'm a plant fanatic.

Bloods, Crips, Juggalos?  FBI: Insane Clown Posse fans are gang

Planets with similar climates: Coil - "Dark River" (1991), Zoviet:France - "Thin Air" & "In My Secrecy I Was Real" (1990), Cluster - "Plas" (1972), Ennio Morricone - "The Watchers Are Being Watched" (1965).

Savage Republic >> I'm painting burning buildings

California Month continued, tremor #30:

Savage Republic - "Next To Nothing"

(Independent Project Records, 1982 / reissued by 4 different labels)

Well, by now you can see that California Month owes a lot to Independent Project Records, which has a bland name but put out some of the most challenging and texturally-interesting music of the early '80s to mid '90s, generally with an edgy tribal feel.

IPR pretty much only released stuff by California and Arizona bands, though I'm sure there were some exceptions in there.  Similarly, Dischord only releases stuff by Washington, D.C.-area bands and I think Red Eye only did Aussie bands.  This song has a nice combination of post-punk, krautrock, and industrial elements, held together by a poppy melody (a rarity for S.R.) and sick drumbeat.  It's from their debut album, Tragic Figures.  The stuttery drum break right in the middle of the song is very cool, reminiscent of a chugging train.  The lyrics are existential without being comical or depressing, and are delivered in sort of a disembodied, robotic way.  This album has been put out with something like six different cover designs over the years, so it can get pretty confusing.  This is apparently the cover of the original numbered-edition LP:

I don't know what that text means in Arabic (or Farsi?).  Like many such self-styled guerilla bands, S.R.'s sloganeering was not very subtle; for example, this album has a song called "Kill The Fascists!"  Fascists worldwide report that they were quaking in their boots on the day this album dropped, but I think they were just being sarcastic.

I had originally intended to post the pummeling "So It Is Written," which I first heard in '05 on a great Atavistic DVD called Twelve O'Clock High:

A guy on that YouTube page said "I directed this video on $50 budget in half a day! Shot on super8 film at show near L.A. Originally comissioned for a USA network show on NightFlight..."
So anyway, I plinked around YouTube and tried to find a different S.R. song, found "Next To Nothing," enjoyed it, and decided to post it, since it has better crossover appeal than "SIIW."


Played a few hours of basketball at Lutcher Playground today, got in two separate arguments with two different dudes calling me "Larry Bird" during two different games.  (Almost started a fight there exactly two weeks ago with yet another dude over this exact same slander.)  Ugh.  I never even admired Larry that much.  My favorites of the last 25 years would have to be Penny Hardaway (have three jerseys), Reggie Lewis, Charles Barkley, Dwayne Wade, Larry Johnson (have two jerseys), Joe Dumars, Akeem Olajuwon, Latrell Sprewell (have a jersey), Randy Livingston (went 90 miles to see him win the high school state championship with Newman when I was 14), Chris Jackson (Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf), Steve Nash, Sam Cassell, Chris Paul (have two jerseys), Jason Williams, Kevin Garnett (have two Timberwolves jerseys), Grant Hill, and Hank Gathers; and in the group category, Run TMC.

On the topic of burning buildings, things that are savage, and California, I vividly remember an incident one day ca. '84 or '85 when we were living in the Presidio.  My family had gone on some sort of a road trip, and my dad got me a Swiss Army knife, which is sort of a mind-blowing gadget if you're a boy.  I thought it was the coolest thing and swore to not cut myself on it.  Back home that night, a house in the neighborhood caught on fire and I climbed up a chain-link fence to get a better view, but slipped and got my left palm gouged pretty badly.  I made sure to explain to my dad that no, I hadn't cut myself on the knife.  I still have the sweet scar.

The always-hilarious Wonkette did an apparently dead-serious article claiming that Herman Cain got his much-discussed "9-9-9" tax plan from the video game SimCity 4.  Someone with the Wonkette username fartknocker made this great comment: "Rick Perry's plan is called '10-10-10.' It works out like this: Everybody but Rick and Anita shall follow the 10 Commandments; $0.10 of very tax dollar goes into the Rick Perry Special Enterprise Fund for his pet projects; and, Rick will execute 10 prisoners every month he's President"

Planets with similar climates: Sonic Youth - "I Don't Want To Push It" (1982), The Sound - "Fatal Flaw" (1981), Joy Division - "Wilderness" (1979), Simple Minds - "Sons And Fascination" (1981).


R.I.P. Thurston and Kim's marriage, the glue that held the indie world together all these years.

Scenic >> Get in the boat

Scenic - "All Fish Go To Heaven"
(World Domination Recordings / Independent Project Records, 1996)

I was lucky enough to buy Scenic's sophomore CD Acquatica in late '96, thanks to reading a glowing review in Rolling Stone, by David Fricke, I believe.  That was a really key summer & fall for me, because I also got stuff like Loveless (My Bloody Valentine), Cheer Up (Plexi), Confusion Is Sex (SY), Isn't Anything (MBV), Nassau (The Sea And Cake), Blue Bell Knoll (Cocteau Twins), Hi Fi Way (You Am I), Bakesale (Sebadoh), Scum (Napalm Death), Psycho Candy (JAMC), some Modest Mouse (I know... but they were actually good then), etc.  Scenic evolved out of the L.A.-based tribal post-punk crew Savage Republic.  I guess the short story is that a couple of the members moved to Arizona, ditched the vocals, and concentrated on evocative, wordless soundscapes befitting the vastness of their desert locale.  (Someone should send a copy to Muammar Gaddafi to see if he agrees; I read that dude brings around a huge tent in which he holds all of his speaking engagements worldwide, so that he will appear truer to his region's Bedouin class, which is misleading because he never belonged to it.  I did a report on Bedouins in 6th grade, which was my first real exposure to Arab culture, and now I'm kind of obsessed with it.)  The album is filled with mysterious ebbs and flows, and a tasteful, nuanced instrumental prowess.  The animated flute on this song is what really gets me right in my soul, and as an aspiring marine biologist, the title immediately grabbed me.  The whole album is an understated tour de force, though maybe too ambient and minimalist over long stretches, so it might not please today's "post-rockers," who tend to demand a lot of aggression and/or metal influence in their "post-rock."  Well, a flute is made out of /MetaL\, bro, and having a flute in your band shows that you have more cujones than the latest Mogwai or Isis clone*.  Anyway, Acquatica was one of the flagship releases in the post-rock invasion when it came out, in my opinion is still at or near the top of that heap to this day.  By the way, Scenic's first album, Incident At Cima, is kinda boring.


*Yes, I know Mogwai had some flute on their first album, when they were still relevant for about 5 minutes.  Bardo Pond has also used lots of flute, played by their singer Isobel, and of course there's Yusef Lateef.  So flutes can be cool.


Some press quotes from the sticker on my promo CD (I also have the regular CD) for Acquatica:

"A vivid mind-photo of the Mojave Desert in all its sun-baked wonder, rendered with peyote-dream guitars and sparse, elegant percussion." - Rolling Stone

"If Nick Cave had spent his childhood in the Southwest, this is the kind of music he might've made - a sweeping, swirling, somewhat Stereolab-ish drone that's full of both darkness and wonder." - huH

Update, Aug. 2011: Here is a show flyer and a ticket that may shed light on the origin of the phrase "All Fish Go To Heaven."  It was apparently the name of a series of annual festivals in Arizona of bands in AZ's "Beautiful Noise" scene, which I guess was a take-off of the shoegaze bands that was known as "The Scene That Celebrates Itself" in the early '90s.

Flyer

Ticket

Planets with similar climates: Dif Juz - "No Motion" (~1982), Juned - "Sisters Of The Red Sun" (1995), 7% Solution - "Your Kingdom, Your World" (1996), Tortoise - "TNT" (1998),  Southpacific - "E10 @ 182" (1999).

I don't like fishing, which makes me an anomaly here in south Louisiana, where you pretty much just have to take a boat out on any body of water and then duck as fish try to jump into it, some of them even bringing their own charbroil seasoning along, as though they are happy to fulfill their one duty in life at any expense.  I took down my mini 10-gallon reef aquarium a few months ago, which means that for the first time since about 1986, I'm aquariumless.  Well, I was for about a year after Katrina, which killed my 90-gal. reef tank, but not by choice.  I now think that keeping living things in a little enclosure for my own amusement is not all that nice, though they are kept free of predation, so it's a pretty good tradeoff for them.