Tortoise >> Millions now & beyond

Tortoise - "Glass Museum"

(Thrill Jockey Records, 1995)

Tortoise are one of the best-known bands in indie history, so I shouldn't have to say much about them.  I would post their genre-defining classic "Djed," but it constitutes about half of the album's running time.  "Glass Museum" is no slouch, friends.  It lives up to its name with elegant pacing, a waltz beat, and a shimmery, sun-dappled overall feel.  There's also a jazzy, subdued, impressionistic guitar solo at 1:13, and a pretty dramatic ramping-up of intensity at the 3-minute mark that always catches me off-guard.  I'd probably play this song for someone who has never heard this band before.  Before Tortoise went on autopilot and became Bonnaroo darlings, they were pretty great, at least on their 2nd and 3rd albums.  (I dislike their bafflingly overrated debut album.)  I think one unintended consequence of early Tortoise was that the vibraphone / xylophone became so ubiquitous that later post-rock bands disassociated themselves from it and tried to up the "intensity" levels and make lots of "climaxes" at the end of every song, which eventually spelled the downfall of the genre as it was once known.  (Though bands like The Six Parts Seven, The Mercury Program and The Dylan Group based their entire sound around hypnotic vibraphone.)  As All Music Guide said, after raving about "Djed," "The other songs on Millions Now Living are hardly afterthoughts, though; highlights 'Glass Museum' and 'The Taut And Tame' display the band quickly growing out of the angular indie rock ghetto with exquisite music, constructed with more thought and played with more emotion, than any of their peers."

In 1997, I was getting into this post-rock thing that all the zines were talking about.  I had first read about it in the Feb. 1996 issue of Guitar World magazine, which ran a long article on the genre, with a heavy focus on The Sea And Cake, Laika, Pram, and Long Fin Killie.  It didn't mention TSAC's sister band Tortoise at all, though.  Anyway, I bought Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die CD (in apparently-rare paper gatefold packaging) that summer as a birthday gift for my dad.  But I got antsy and opened it to listen for myself, which turned out to be a wise decision.  (Keep in mind there was no way to preview songs online back then.)  I also did the same for Jale's So Wound, and eventually gave him Guided By Voices' new CD.  That fall, I remember developing photos in Loyola's darkroom for my Fine Arts Photography class, and I heard "Djed" coming from a radio inside one of the private darkroom booths.  So I knocked on the door and he opened it and I asked if he was a Tortoise fan.  It turned out that his radio was playing WTUL, which is the radio station of the college right next door, Tulane.  I don't know if the guy in the room, Brad, was impressed when I told him the name of the track, but we ended up becoming something like friends, and we saw Macha in '99.  He later put out a solo CD-R under the name Sad Smile or SadSmile, which I have somewhere.  By late '97, anticipation amongst bespectacled indie rockers was building to a fever-pitch for Tortoise's next album.  To tide fans over, Option magazine even ran a two-page article about the recording process of it.  In the interim I bought Isotope 217º's stunning debut album The Unstable Molecule, simply because it was a Tortoise side project.  In March '98, I ordered and received this new album, TNT, a few weeks before it even hit stores.  I then saw them live, as mentioned in my previous post:

I bought a Tortoise shirt and tour-only 7" there, and there was a hip-hop / dub afterparty DJ'ed by a person or persons from WTUL's "Below The Basement" hip-hop show, but I think I only caught a little bit of it while milling about at the merch table.  I sold the shirt to my friend Andrew a few years later.

Fun Fact: I recently learned that Millions Now Living Will Never Die is a Jehovah's Witness slogan, but I always thought it was a reference to the school of fish on the cover.  (The school continues to the back cover when you open the paper case.)  In any case, it's a brilliant merging of title and artwork.

Fun Fact 2: After composing this post, I was pleasantly surprised to see that "Glass Museum" is Tortoise's second-most-downloaded song on iTunes; I had thought it was one of their more obscure cuts.

Fun Fact 3: I saw Modest Mouse & Califone the night before at a Baton Rouge club called The Bayou, where all the bar scenes in Sex Lies And Videotape were filmed.  There were a few dozen people who were specifically there to see the bands, whereas most of the crowd was apparently frat boys who were there to play pool and try to hook up.  The club burned down several years later and is now a Reginelli's Pizza.

The only thing I can say about Whitney Houston's death is that I'm still mad at her for derailing Bobby Brown's career trajectory, and I hope Maya Rudolph will still dust off her Whitney impersonation from time to time.  Please, folks, no jokes about the band Krackhouse that I mentioned a few posts ago.

I showed the above disques to my family before we watched the Grammys, and my dad mentioned that they must be worth a lot of money.  I didn't have the heart to tell him I got them all at various thrift stores for around 50 cents each.  My mom almost died when her favorite band, The Civil Wars, performed.  The only other collections of 7"s that I own that rival this one are probably of Madonna, Unwound, Janet Jackson, and The Police, with Simple Minds slowly gaining momentum.

After trimming some palm trees on a gray, drizzly Monday, I took this cactus I've had for 14 years to a few plant nurseries to see if they could diagnose what its orange spots meant.  (Probably a fatal fungal disease.)  I ended up stopping by Sunrise Trading as a last-ditch effort.  This is the local grower of most of the cacti & succulents that are sold in the New Orleans area, and my cactus was presumably grown by them long ago.  It's supposed to be only a wholesale operation, but I asked if I could look at the greenhouses, and the guy, Steve, said sure.  (Note the coincidental relation to the concept of "glass museums.")  So I went in and had my mind blown for about 2 hours, picking out kewl plants.  He said he didn't think my cactus would die, but I believe he just said that to make me feel better.  He told me some fascinating anecdotes about varieties of plants that are named after people he knew, and some of the lengths to which he has gone to ensure the survival of some of his specimens.

Tuesday was a pretty strange day.  I went down to Houma to exchange a Mammillaria hahniana cactus, buy this space-saver rack at Bed Bath & Beyond, buy a mini pitchfork for my mom, and play some basketball.  My Beyonding wasn't successful, but I did snag Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul on CD for only about $5.  They also had the latest Liz Phair dud, among other random albums.  Who knew?  While sizing up a photo of four birds in a bare tree, I noticed lots of chemtrails in the sky.  Two of the birds flew away when I turned the music in my car off, so I decided to aim upward and take a shot mainly of the sky instead:

Taken facing NE at 2:52 PM

These long streaks are each probably 20 or so miles long; regular-old vapor contrails from planes are only a few hundred yards long and evaporate quickly, whereas chemtrails stay suspended in the sky for hours on end.  Then I went and shot hoops about 10 miles away literally right under some chemtrails that I had just seen being laid down, kind of as an experiment to see if I would feel ill effects from them.  There was a helicopter making lots of suspicious trips back and forth through the area, presumably to check on the concentrations of the chemicals.

I was unable to part with the cactus, so I brought it home with me; at least it got to go on a fun field trip in my center console cup holder.  I shot threes at Gray Park for about an hour, then hit Rouse's in Thibodaux.  They were out of Guinness and Murphy's, so I settled for some Killian's Red, which I had never tried before.  That night at 9PM, I made a literally last-minute decision to drive to NOLA to see A Silver Mt. Zion, or Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, to be more exact.  I had bought their debut album at a Godspeed You Black Emperor show in 2003, and an EP in 2006, but otherwise had never paid much attention to them.  I was holding a cup of coffee (instant coffee in Lactaid milk) in my hand at the aforementioned time, and said to myself, "Well, if you drink this, you have to go, otherwise you'll be up all night for no reason."  So I chugged it and went.  By this time I had a massive headache and some brain functioning problems, but I couldn't figure out why; then I remembered the Houma chemtrails.  "Better living through chemistry," I said, and popped a Tylenol Extra Strength.  Zion is not the kind of band whose music I listen to very much, and their sample clips at online vendors' sites don't impress me, but I had a feeling that they would have a certain vitality live, and I went by the rule of "It's better to go to a concert and have it suck then to not go and wonder for the rest of your life if you missed a great show."  With my head exploding and right on the verge of falling asleep, I did the 50-mile drive in to New Orleans.  Getting stuck in standstill traffic for half an hour was the icing on the cake.  About a block from the club I noticed a restaurant called Vacherie, so I stopped in.  The bartender guy told me they were closed, but I asked for a menu and said "I'm from a city... well, town, called Vacherie."  I walked into One Eyed Jacks as the Zions were doing their first song (there was no opening act), so I had to chuckle a bit at my good fortune.  They turned out to be just as endearingly annoying and pretentious as I had expected, but in a good way.  The dual violins and upright bass made for an excellent sonic bed over which singer Efrim Menuck could yelp about various abstract problems and existential musings.  Efrim did some funny banter with the crowd during two Q&A intermission sessions.  Example: Someone in the crowd asked him his name.  He very casually said "Jack White.  Ask me again."  So the question was asked again.  "The Edge.  Ask me again.  I could go on like this all night..."

I took this during the encore, an extended rendition of "Horses In The Sky." 

I just noticed that the people up front were pretty nattily-dressed, whereas towards the back and middle there were lots of anarchist types with face tattoos, leather jackets, dreadlocks, etc.

Man stricken eating 'Triple Bypass' burger - "'It was no joke,' said Jon Basso, who promotes himself 'Doctor Jon,' his scantily-clad waitresses as nurses, and customers as patients."

Fox News commenters respond to Whitney Houston's death with deluge of hatred and racism

Megadeth lead singer Dave Mustaine endorses Rick Santorum - I knew this guy was a douche, but this shocked even me.  "Holy Wars" indeed...

Planets with similar climates: Tristeza - "City Of The Future" (2000), The Mercury Program - "Fragile Or Possibly Extinct" (2002), Isotope 217º - "La Jetée" (1997), The Dylan Group - "Running In Pairs" (1999).

Oval >> Meddling machine muzak

Oval - "Shop In Store"

(Thrill Jockey Records, ~1994-96)

I saw, and hated, Oval opening for Tortoise in May of '98.  Since the other dude from the "band" had recently absconded, it was now just a solo project of Markus Popp.  He stood there on the stage while staring dispassionately, and pretty much unblinkingly, at a Mac laptop computer, occasionally clicking it to adjust some algorithm or trigger a sample or what have you.  I exited the Howlin' Wolf shaking my head in disbelief after 4 or 5 songs, then returned about half an hour later to catch Tortoise's triumphant set.

"Shop In Store" is one of two bonus tracks added to the U.S. issue of Oval's influential third album 94Diskont.  For some unknown reason, despite hating Oval live, I bought it on LP in summer '98 from Thrill Jockey mailorder.  This U.S. LP comes with a bonus 12" of remixes by very hip dudes: Jim O'Rourke, Mouse On Mars, Scanner and Christian Vogel.  (To summarize, the German CD came out in 1995 on Mille Plateaux Records, and only has 5 tracks; the U.S. LP+12" came out in 1996 on Thrill Jockey, with a a whopping 11 tracks.)  Few of the tracks on the album have as much vigor as "Shop In Store," with most of them taking on a more aquatic, ambient feel, so you may be disappointed if you go buy the whole album after enjoying "SIS."

This album and Oval's previous one, Systemisch, pretty much invented the whole glitch genre, and "Shop In Store" introduced an undulating rhythmic quality to the genre.  It's a pretty revolutionary track no matter how you slice it.  Read some interesting info on 94Diskont here.  If you hadn't guessed from the music and the name of the genre, Oval made its music by literally flipping over CDs, scratching them up with metal implements, and then playing them and isolating little segments to create longer loops, etc.  At least that's how I've always understood it, though I'm sure I'm omitting some steps.  In any case, this kind of music could be described as both the literal and figurative destruction of music as most people know it.  And I remember reading somewhere back in the day that he actually used mainstream pop n' rock CDs, which makes the end result even cooler.  Alvin Lucier pioneered the concept of making music out of non-music with his piece "I Am Sitting In A Room" decades ago, and others have pushed the envelope further.  Christian Marclay intentionally scratched up vinyl records in the '80s and recorded / looped the skipping and crackling sounds they made upon playback.  Oval found a little niche and exploited it well for a while, but it cannot be denied that they were doing exactly what Marclay did in the '80s, albeit with CDs instead of vinyl.  (One kind of plastic instead of another.)  I think Oval is still around, but I stopped following them a decade-ish ago after buying the album Dok and realizing there wasn't much room for their sound to evolve within its self-imposed straitjacket.  Any chimpanzee or lemur could theoretically scratch up CDs or LPs and play them back and call it music, and I'm sure someday a record label will put out just such an album, garnering an insightful 7.4 review from a greenhorn Pitchfork scribe hopped up on a tall espresso.

The full album version of "Do While" is 24 minutes long; a music video was made for a drastically shortened version of it named "Do While ⌘X":

In 1995, Popp joined with Jan St. Werner of Mouse On Mars to form the very Oval-esque duo Microstoria.  I believe I got their remix CD Reprovisers in that same Thrill Jockey order in summer '98.  TJ also included a cool promo poster combining album covers by Microstoria (the Init Ding and _Snd album covers), Oval (94Diskont), and I think Mouse On Mars.  I'll have to dig it up and photograph it sometime.

An episode of the show How The States Got Their Shapes ran a fascinating bit last week about a proposed 51st state called Jefferson, which is apparently gaining a lot of momentum.

In addition to a card with an audio clip of the first 15 secs. of this Phil Dunphy quote from the pilot episode of Modern Family, my sister gave me the new issue of GQ for my birthday:

In the article, she mentions that her dad gave her Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground for her 12th birthday.  She then became legally emancipated form her parents at age 15.  Coincidence?  I tried reading that book a decade or so ago but found it too miserable for me to get very far.

On Saturday & Sunday I started putting in an herb garden in my mom's friend's yard.  On Sunday at Lowe's I got a sweet cactus which I believe is a Mammillaria celsiana or M. muehlenpfordtii, but I can't tell yet.  I also finished up a painting, my first one done on the new easel, during the Super Bowl.  The commercials were incredibly bad.  The Saints (boasting arguably the best offense in NFL history) would've throttled the Patriots (with arguably the worst defense in NFL history), let's not kid ourselves.  Pats diehard Maria Menounos lost a Super Bowl bet and had to wear a Giants bikini in Times Square, so thank you, Mario Manningham.

Planets with similar climates: Nobukazu Takemura - "Icefall" (1999), Replikants - "Agent Oranges (Fancy Mix)" (1994), O.S.T. - "Fe" (2001), Kreidler - "Cube" (1998).

Lee Ranaldo >> You are in my headlight, in my present tense

Lee Ranaldo - "Deva, Spain (Fragments)"

(Stomach Ache Records, ca. 1988; later released by Musical Tragedies, 1992, & Atavistic Records, 1995)

In honor of Lee's birthday, here's a short piece that I've put on many a mix CD over the years.  Apparently a lot of record label owners have liked it too, because it originally came out on a Mexican compilation 7" in 1988 (Bullets Wrapped In Sugar), on a U.S. compilation cassette in the early '90s(?) (Spill Your Guts, Friend), on a German split CD EP with a band called Something To Burn in 1992, and on Lee's career retrospective CD East Jesus in 1995.  It was more recently used by Lee himself as a component of his self-remix album Outside My Window The City Is Never Silent: A Bestiary in 2002.

The fact that Stomach Ache Records was based on Mexico says something about how far Sonic Youth's notoriety had spread by the late '80s.  I don't know if he also made a longer version, but hopefully one will see the light of day.  I like the line "You are in my headlight," which seems to specify the headlight of a motorcycle or train, rather than the headlightS of a car.  But it can also mean the light or energy inside one's head / mind.  Deep.  I mentioned three months ago that I had just gotten an LP pressing of Lee's baffling debut album From → Here Infinity, but I have to report that I still haven't played it.  I guess I'm afraid that the brief (a few seconds long) lock grooves on it won't live up to the enhanced / extended loops on the CD and cassette issues, both of which I've owned for about 10 & 15 years, respectively.

Note: This song has been variously titled "Deva, Spain Fragments," "Deva, Spain (Fragments)" and "Deva, Spain: Fragments," depending on the release it's on, but I have to assume they are all the same song.

I have a few more pics and videos from Prospect.2 to unload, so bear with me.  A painting (er, actually, it's credited as "insect screening") by Kathleen Loe, on an upstairs wall of a new facility called the New Orleans Healing Center on St. Claude Avenue:

Peter Pan's Shadow (84 x 132"; $3200)

She had lots of other helicopter-themed works on display, a few of which you can see here.  There's also a little grocery store co-op, gym, herb store, book store, and other cool stuff in this nondescript building.  For those not from New Orleans, Rampart Street is the north border of the French Quarter; it extends to the east through the Ninth Ward / Faubourg Marigny neighborhood under the name St. Claude Avenue, with lots of upstart DIY art galleries, bike shops, vegan cafés, and the like.  Not all of the residents of this gentrifying neighborhood are happy about these developments, as you can tell by this flyer I saw on an abandoned building a block away on the same day:

To the right of it was a poster paying tribute to the two African-American victims of the notorious Danziger Bridge shootings.

In honor of Spain, here are some Ricky Rubio highlights, since Pau Gasol is having an off year.  This was his first-ever NBA start, just a few weeks ago.  He effortlessly picked apart my Hornets as I tried to explain to my dad why Rubio is such a big deal:

I saw Gasol a year ago this week from front-row seats at a Hornets-Lakers game.  Our chairs were literally on the court.  Gasol humiliated us for something like 30 points in the first half alone.  At one point I wondered loudly "Why isn't Chris Paul in?," after which coach Monty Williams looked to his right at me from about 10 feet away, then hollered at CP3 to get in the game.  The Lakers won by only a few points, despite outshooting us 24 to 4 in free throw attempts, if I remember correctly.  And people wonder why the same teams get back to the playoffs every year... Gotta love that referee bias towards big-market teams.  I've read entire long, footnoted articles about how NBA refs have more control over the outcome of games than do the refs of any other major sport, and this game was a crystal-clear example of it for me.

Yellow Magic Orchestra - "Tighten Up" + awkward interview on Soul Train, 1980

4 ways to enjoy nature according to insane old magazines
Sample cover:

Planets with similar climates: Sonic Youth - "Satan Is Boring" (1984), Poem Rocket - "Saint Sebastian's Halo" (1995), Windy & Carl - "Kate" (1997).

Margot Mifflin >> Do you feel yourself to be capable of being manipulated?

Margot Mifflin - "Backlash"

(Arrest Records, 1992; reissued by MuWorks Records, 1993, & Atavistic Records, 1996)

This is on the tremendous and varied compilation State Of The Union.  It originally came out as an LP on Zoar Records in 1982, obviously without this song.  I have the 1992 CD version on Arrest Records and the dramatically expanded double-CD 1996 version on Atavistic Records, both of which do feature this song.  (I ripped this mp3 from the 1996 edition.)  The gimmick is that every song on all versions of SOTU is about 1 minute long, making each artist really strive to get to the point quickly, often with fascinating results.  See the full tracklisting of each edition by clicking the links under the "Notes" section here.  Some of the more well-known contributors: John Lurie (of the Lounge Lizards and an ill-advised acting career), Arto Lindsay (DNA, etc.), the late actor Spalding Gray, turntable virtuoso Chrtistian Marclay, Adele Bertei, Tuli Kupferberg (of The Fugs), noise rock producer Martin Bisi, Fred Frith, Borbetomagus w/ Voice Crack, drummer Ikue Mori (DNA, Death Ambient, etc.), God Is My Co-Pilot, Marc Ribot, John Zorn w/ Yamatsuka Eye, Nicholas Collins, Syd Straw, Mofungo, Henry Kaiser, John Duncan, Ui, PainKiller, Penny Arcade, Chris Haskett (Rollins Band guitarist), Maggie "Hey Baby" Estep, Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Kaye, DJ Spooky, Andrea Parkins, Sim Cain (Rollins Band drummer), Zeena Parkins, Lukas Ligeti (son of György), Kurt Ralske (a.k.a. Ultra Vivid Scene), M. Doughty (of Soul Coughing), and a Mars Williams / Ken Vandermark sax duo.  However, most of the artists are complete unknowns, with baffling and/or awesome names like Krackhouse, Grafted Media Devil, A Thousand Tiny Fingers, Circuit Redux, Pharmacy Lounge, Sonorexia, Babytooth, Jody Dunaway (she plays balloons... really), and Dim Sum Clip Job.  That was honestly not an attempt at keyword spamming.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, this song doesn't feature Mifflin herself on vocals, but maybe the intro yodel is her, or maybe the closing voice?  The song has an abstract feminist undertone that can be ascertained by the line of condescending questions asked by the sampled male voices; the female voice at the end ties it all together.  It's amazing that this was done 20 years ago, considering how many bands would be considered edgy and fresh if they were to put it out in 2012.  The layered mechanical drumbeat is almost industrial in some parts.

The bio on Mifflin's website says: "Margot Mifflin is an author, journalist, and professor who writes about women, art, and contemporary culture. The author of Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, she has written for The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Believer, ARTnews, and Salon.com. Her book The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman was published in April, 2009. An associate professor in the English Department of Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY), Mifflin also directs the Arts and Culture program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where she teaches arts journalism. Mifflin has appeared as a lecturer and keynote speaker at dozens of colleges, universities and museums, including Barnard College, Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design and Los Angeles MOCA. She appeared in MSNBC’s documentary “Women and Tattoo” (2001) and CNN’s “Women of the Ink” (1998). She was raised in a Quaker family in Swarthmore, Pa. and now lives with her family in Nyack, New York."

Here is a film piece called Atlante by Grazia Toderi that was being shown at the CAC (Contemporary Arts Center) as part of Prospect.2.  I think this is the entire thing, and I've read that it was shot in Portugal.  It was projected simultaneously onto two screens on walls that were slightly angled in towards each other:

On Saturday I stopped by at the monthly (last Saturday of each month) Arts Market on S. Carrolton for the first time.  Most of the art was pretty tourist-y.  Some freak wind gusts came through and blew some vendors' shit over, which actually amused me.  Then I went to National Art & Hobby to get an easel my parents had gotten me for my birthday.  (I've never owned one.)  I picked up a free flipbook-sized publication there, by some publisher called America Sutra.  It's simply titled Love Song on the cover, with no author name or publishing credits, and is full of intentional typos.  The back cover just says americasutra.com, and going to that site told me that their books are apparently by someone named Amit Desai.  I think this must be some sort of teaser for their upcoming book series.  Or maybe it's some elaborate hoax?  Very cryptic.  You know I love palm trees, hence you know I had to post this sample:

That line reminds me of House Of Sand And Fog, in which the main guy cuts down all the trees on his new property that block his view of the ocean.  After leaving the art store, I drove down Magazine St. a mile or so and then pulled over to check out a garage sale.  After picking out three CDs sans cases (Sade - Love Deluxe, Chet Baker - Let's Get Lost - The Best Of Chet Baker Sings, and Roberta Flack - Killing Me Softly), I found a dollar bill on the ground, and then went to pay for the goods.  "Just give me a dollar," she (I overheard that she's a photographer named Alex Bono) said.  Yeah, I felt a little guilty.  But factoring in the hundreds of CDs, tapes, records, books, etc. that I've given away to thrift stores over the years, I don't mind getting my karma returned once every so often.  The Sade CD was quite a coup, since I'd been wanting it for a long time.  Fun Fact: I could've also bought Public Enemy's Apocalypse '91 CD there, but just looking at the names of the terrible songs printed on the CD elicited a flood of memories and emotions, bringing me back to the day I bought it (namely, the week it came out in October '91).  I had to put it down and walk away.  Let some other shmuck waste 33⅓ cents on it.  Then I went to a Goodwill on the way home and came across what I always think of as a "suicide donation" or "death donation."  By that I mean lots of obscure albums by someone who must've been savvy enough to know he/she could get some good money for them at any used CD store.  Hence the presence of them in a thrift store means the person probably died, and his/her parents or spouse just gave the music away.  I got CDs by Christian Marclay, Black Box Recorder, Lync, Themselves, Furry Things, Morcheeba, Slowride (a pre-True Widow band), Lamb, Blackalicious, M83, Myshkin, and Breaks Co-Op.  There was even one by annoying drone merchants Pelt which I passed on.  I also passed on a recent one by Trail Of Dead, whom I used to worship back when they didn't suck.  Anyway, R.I.P. dude or dudette, and R.I.P. Don Cornelius.

Planets with similar climates: Negativland - "Methods Of Torture" (1987), Emily XYZ - "Put A Little Distance" (2000), The Art Of Noise - "Beat Box" (1983), Was (Not Was) - "Dad, I'm In Jail" (~1987), Kallabris - "Untitled (#2)" (1987), Public Enemy - "War At 33⅓" (1990).

Tagging Satellites >> Things that were stolen from me were never meant to be mine

Tagging Satellites - "Sun Damage"

(Mag Wheel Records / Recovery Records, 2000)

I bought this CD on eBay last June for next to nothing, after being impressed by the 90-sec. sound samples on iTunes.  I then listened to it over and over on a nighttime drive to Baton Rouge (to see a band called This Will Destroy You) the same day it arrived in my mailbox.  Singer Zera Marvel uses her "goth voice" on this song, though she generally uses a higher, prettier timbre on the other songs.  So this song is not really representative of their overall sound.  The Sonic Youth-y guitar squalls and cavernous "pendulum-style" bassline are like crack to my ears.  "I don't care if you don't wanna go, you're coming to the sun with me" is a pretty interesting / sexy threat.

This song was written entirely by Z.M.  Influential Seattle music mag The Stranger said "Like that dark-haired poet you had a crush on in high school, there's something mysterious and slightly dangerous about Tagging Satellites. The band's second album, Abstract Confessions, is almost a flashback to the moody, art school-influenced underground of pre-breakthrough Jane's Addiction L.A. – wonderfully detached, on-the-verge-of-a-breakdown female vocals paired with music that finds the middle ground between ethereal and the razor's edge."  Uh, what?  Jane's Addiction?  Huge reviewing fail there, unless he/she meant Psi Com.

Results of a poll done by The Stranger's online blog in April 2009

The Abstract Confessions CD comes with a bonus music video for the bleak, Codeine-esque "Time On My Halo," but unfortunately it's in RealPlayer format, so I can't upload it to YouTube to share it here.  So here's a clip of Marvel and her husband / bandmate / producer Graig Markel snorkeling:

Pic stolen from an eBay seller; this might be the exact CD I ended up buying.

Remember what I said a few posts ago about how most of my favorite bands end up ditching their shoegaze / noise / post-punk beginnings in favor of more low-key, parent-friendly music?  Well, Marvel put out an Americana-y solo album in 2009, completely forgoing any sort of experimentation or dark undertones.  Oh well.  You can hear the natural twang in her voice even in "Sun Damage," and she lived in South Carolina right before moving to Seattle to co-found Tagging Satellites in 1997, so she does have Southern credentials, and hence I'm not saying her current sound is a put-on, but still.

Last Wednesday at Delgado I saw a truly awesome experimental video projection as part of the Prospect.2 art biennial called Below Sea Level by Paweł Wojtasik.  Make sure to watch it in 720p:

I took that video when I went back to see it again on Friday.  Sorry for the constant panning, but that was the only way I could show everything that was going on on the approx. 350º circular screen.  The dude spent three years making it, so you can spend 15 minutes watching this excerpt of it.  It was deeply moving for me to see my nook in the world portrayed in such a hallucinatory, abstract way, and I'm sure this guy has a bright future ahead of him.  The ambient score is by someone named Stephen Vitiello.

On Friday I watched the 2-hour Chuck series finale, even though I'd never watched the show very much.  I laughed out loud at the scene where the bomb is set to go off as soon as the orchestra stops playing, and as soon as the last notes are dying out and you're bracing yourself for impact, this weird guy Jeffster busts onto the stage doing a keytar rendition of aHa's "Take On Me".   I have to say I wish I had watched this show more.  Today I sprayed some weeds and then played basketball for almost 4 hours at Lutcher Playground w/ Bruce, Chris, Meatball, and about 6 other dudes.  Today everyone called me "Larry" not as a Larry Bird reference, but rather because I was wearing a Larry Johnson Hornets jersey.  Then I watched Alcatraz, but I'm sure Fox will pull the plug on it as soon as the ratings dip by even one viewer, as Fox is notorious for doing.  So I suggest watching this show now if you have any desire to.

Well, this post pretty much had it all in terms of high-octane entertainment value.

Planets with similar climates: Bleach - "Can" (1992), Sonic Youth - "Ghost Bitch" (1984), Esben And The Witch - "Marching Song" (2010), Slint - "Good Morning, Captain" (1991), Warpaint - "Beetles" (2008).

A Place To Bury Strangers >> You make my dreams complete and then crash them down

A Place To Bury Strangers - "I Lived My Life To Stand In The Shadow Of Your Heart"

(Self-released, ca. 2006; Mute Records, 2009)

The band first put this song on a self-released CD-R EP, recorded in 2005 or 2006, and then re-recorded it for their album Exploding Head on venerable Mute Records.

Original 2006 version:

2009 re-recording:

The re-recorded version is over a minute longer and has much clearer vocals, sacrificing little of the feral intensity of the original version, so I think most people will favor it.
As I've seen some other astute fans point out, this song is heavily indebted to both of the songs ("Beach Song" and "Take Me Down") that comprise Slowdive's 1992 flexi 7".  (Yes, Slowdive used to rock pretty hard for a brief while.)  And it even brazenly has the lyric "I want to take you down," and they also have a song called "Missing You" which is not a cover of Slowdive's song "Missing You."  If you want to hear the lyrics very clearly, go listen to the synth-y Broken Spindles remix on the "I Lived My Life..." remix single (Mute Records, 2010), which has the vocals mixed up high and has most of the pesky guitars removed.  There's also a nice choppy industrial remix on there by Secret Machines.

Front cover of 2006 EP

Back cover or inner booklet of 2006 EP

2010 remix maxi-single cover art

I've seen APTBS perform this song live twice, in Oct. 2008 in Baton Rouge at Chelsea's Café and in Sept. 2009 in New Orleans at One Eyed Jacks.  They are known for doing an extended noise bridge during the middle of the song (starting at the 2:20 mark), like My Bloody Valentine infamously do during the middle of "You Made Me Realise," and believe me, it's amazing live. The first time was amazing, mind-shattering, etc.  The second time was actually even better, maybe because the sound system was much better and there were a lot more people there, and because I was amped up to go on that rollercoaster again.  They play live using lots of fog and strobe lighting, like all bands should.  While singer/guitarist Oliver Ackermann is obviously the main focal point, drummer Jason "Jay Space" Weilmeister is an absolute monster.  I mean, holy shit, he was killing it, in a savage-yet-jazz-informed vein not unlike, say, John Stanier of Helmet.  The bassist is no slouch either.  They launch immediately into each song without even a millisecond of pausing, which takes a ton of rehearsal and ears a band the title of being "tight."  They have absolutely no time for between-song banter.  If you want that, go see fucking Guided By Voices or Lil Wayne or Elvis Presley or something.  When people talk about great power trios, let there be no doubt that APTBS is right at the top of the (my) all-time heap, along with Bailter Space, Unwound, Poem Rocket, Hovercraft, and a few others.  Listening to an entire APTBS studio album, on the other hand, can be a bit difficult, due to all the distortion and the relentless sonic overload.  Ackermann also makes guitar pedals guitar effects pedals under the name Death By Audio, and is sometimes overeager to show off his wares on record rather than backing off and letting the songs breathe a bit.

Speaking of breathing, I was able to overcome steady waves of toxic fog to take this pic of them at Chelsea's Café on 10/16/08, using a long shutter speed to get intentional blurs:

As Plexi once sang, "When I was looking at you, I didn't mind your foggy weather"

I unknowingly got into APTBS by hearing about a band called Skywave all the time on the Blisscent mailing list circa 2000-2001.  The main people talking about Skywave at this time were apparently members of Skywave.  I got kind of annoyed by this, but bought their "Don't Say Slow" 7" in the mid-'00s, and later got their full-length CD.  APTBS emerged out of the ashes of Skywave, with a very similar sound, albeit with less (or zero?) synth.  (Skywave's album was titled Synthstatic, and I remember getting a chuckle when someone on Blisscent erroneously transposed a few letters and called it Synthtastic.)  Some other dudes from Skywave went on to form the Joy-Divisionally-monikered band Ceremony.

Anyway, here is the original (ca. 2006) video for the original version of "Shadow Of Your Heart":

The inferior 2010 video for the 2009 re-recording:

That second video was shot by the guitarist from Sian Alice Group, who were the opening act at the APTBS show I saw in '08.

The Joy Formidable + APTBS spring tour, guaranteed by Blowtorch Baby to be the best live show you see all year or else you pay me $20:

03/12/12 - San Francisco, CA - The Independent
03/13/12 - San Francisco, CA - The Independent
03/14/12 - Los Angeles, CA - The Music Box
03/17/12 - Denver, CO - Bluebird Theatre
03/19/12 - Minneapolis, MN - Fine Line Music Cafe
03/20/12 - Madison, WI - Majestic Theatre
03/22/12 - Bloomington, IN - The Bluebird
03/23/12 - Cincinnati, OH - 20th Century Theatre
03/24/12 - Atlanta, GA - The Masquerade
03/25/12 - Asheville, NC - Orange Peel
03/26/12 - Washington, DC - 9:30 Club
03/28/12 - New York, NY - Terminal 5
03/29/12 - Philadelphia, PA - Union Transfer
03/30/12 - Boston, MA - Paradise
03/31/12 - Montreal, QC - Cabaret Mile-End
04/02/12 - Toronto, ON - Lee's Palace

Apparently, hipsters are taking hints from the Amish now

Romney tax plan adds $600 billion to deficit, analysis says - "Though the Tax Policy Center said Romney’s tax plan would 'reduce federal tax revenues substantially, the budget hit isn’t as severe as some of his competitors. The same group previously said former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s tax plan would increase the deficit by $1.3 trillion and that Texas Governor Rick Perry’s proposal would boost the shortfall by $995 billion."

The final sentence. - A blog whose ambitious goal is to post the last sentence of every literary work ever published.  Good luck.  Speaking of books, I bought one the other day (My Brother's Gun by Ray Loriga) because it had a blurb by Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo on the back cover reading "Like the rush of an electric guitar riff charging up your spine, Ray Loriga's voice angles, beautifully desperate, to grasp our place in these chaotic times."  Here is the book's final sentence: "It was nighttime now, and then it would turn into day and all the planes in the world would continue passing through that very same spot."  That's translated from Spanish, so it's not his actual words, but it's pretty good stuff.

Planets with similar climates: Slowdive - "Beach Song" & "Take Me Down" (1992), My Bloody Valentine - "You Made Me Realise" (1988), Plexi - "Fourget" (1996), ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - "Ounce Of Prevention" & "Prince With A Thousand Enemies" (1997).

Junius >> That's some line between love and hate

Junius - "A Word Could Kill Her"

(Radar Recordings, 2006)

Yes, guitar heroics are back in indie rock, since post-punk kids in tight clothing have been rediscovering Dinosaur Jr., The Wipers, Soundgarden, and other axe-friendly '80s bands.  I prefer my songs to be driven by bass and drums rather than by guitar, but sometimes a band just nails a guitar riff, and this is one of those times.  Junius wear all black, which makes them look like anarchist ninjas, and are Very Serious about their bombastic forging of epic rock.  For this song, their guitarist came up with a hybrid surf-meets-goth riff that is as addictive as it is improbable.

The singer has said that his favorite album is Fantastic Planet by Failure, and does a good job of channeling Robert Smith, though I'd have to say the lyrics in this song aren't much to write home about.  I also recommend the very Joy Division-ish title track from this EP, Blood Is Bright.  I almost saw Junius in Baton Rouge in March '08, with a few other great bands, all of whom I ended up seeing separately over the ensuing few years: Ghastly City Sleep, Constants, Pygmy Lush.  Seriously, that's a jaw-dropping slate of bands, but hindsight is always 20/20, right?  Dangit.  It was a house show in Baton Rouge, and I didn't feel like hanging around at the house of someone whom I didn't know for 5 or so hours.  I'm excited to finally get to see Junius this March at the Circle Bar in NOLA, a venue the size (and temperature, since it lacks A/C) of a fireplace.  I've never posted tour dates for any band on here before, but I'm going to for this tour, and for another fine band in my next post.  I rarely post songs by bands that are currently active, so when I find one that's on tour, it's only logical to tell you folks about it:

02/15/12 New Haven, CT @ Bar
02/16/12 Washington, DC @ DC9 w/ O'Brother, Black Clouds
02/17/12 Boston, MA @ Brighton Music Hall w/ O'Brother, Ribs
02/18/12 Brooklyn, NY @ Knitting Factory w/ O'Brother
02/19/12 Philadelphia, PA @ North Star Bar w/ O'Brother, Val De Val
02/21/12 Pittsburgh, PA @ Stage AE w/ O'Brother, Sainthood Reps
02/22/12 Columbus, OH @ Basement w/ O'Brother, Sainthood Reps
02/23/12 Grand Rapids, MI @ Pyramid Scheme w/ O'Brother, The Soil And The Sun
02/24/12 Chicago,IL @ Beat Kitchen w/ O'Brother
02/25/12 St Louis, MO @ Firebird w/ O'Brother, Time & Time
02/26/12 Lawrence,KS @ Jackpot Music Hall w/ O'Brother
02/28/12 Denver, CO @ Marquis Theatre w/ O'Brother, Lucida Tela
02/29/12 Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court w/ O'Brother, Loom
03/01/12 Reno, NV @ Jub Jub's Thirst Parlor
03/02/12 San Francisco, CA @ Bottom Of The Hill w/ O'Brother, Happy Body Slow Brain
03/03/12 Los Angeles, CA @ Satellite (formerly Spaceland) w/ O'Brother
03/04/12 San Diego, CA @ Soda Bar w/ O'Brother
03/05/12 Las Vegas, NV @ Bunkhouse
03/06/12 Tucson, AZ @ Club Congress w/ O'Brother, Sleep Driver
03/07/12 Mesa, AZ @ The Nile Underground w/ O'Brother
03/08/12 Midland, TX @ Pine Box
03/09/12 Austin, TX @ Red 7 w/ O'Brother, Brother Ghost
03/10/12 Dallas, TX @ Bryan St. Tavern w/ O'Brother
03/11/12 Houston, TX @ Warehouse Live w/ O'Brother
03/12/12 New Orleans, LA @ Circle Bar w/ Steve Eck And The Midnight Still
03/13/12 to 03/18/12 Austin, TX @ SXSW

These U.S. dates are followed by a lengthy European tour, whose dates you can see here.  The New Orleans date is not even listed on their website, so hopefully noladiy.org got their facts right.  By the way, my next post will be about another band that is on a big tour.

Some reviews of Blood Is Bright:

"They wear their brooding Eighties swirling darkness on their sleeve, yet still manage to conjure something fresh, majestic and uplifting. The vocal drips onto a textured canvas of chiming echoed guitars and a throbbing backbeat reminiscent of Pornography-era Cure, with the bombastic crunch of My Bloody Valentine." - The Noise

"Breathtaking atmospherics and dark sensibilities deserved of being likened to The Cure's Disintegration punctuate this EP. Vocalist Joseph E. Martinez deadpans a brooding style that clashes at the perfect angle with the swirling sounds that rise around his words. Without straying into anything too heavy, Junius manages to maintain an intense presence that is as stylish as Interpol but carries a sincerity and distinction not found in enough young acts. This band seems to have borrowed just enough from previous decades to build and shape something all its own. This Boston-based quartet approach New Wave tendencies with a shield of spacey guitars and artistic vocal stylings to create something that is not soon forgotten. With high energy emanating out of a pensive sound, Junius punctures each track with unshakable singularity until it turns into something addictive and encompassing." - Exclaim! magazine (Canada)

"Genius as far as contemporary New Wave / cinematic Art-Rock goes... [an] epic audio masterpiece." - The Big Takeover

I had never experienced symptomatic sports-related heartbreak until the last minute of the Saints' loss to the Niners on Saturday.  It was almost identical to the ending of the Steelers-Cardinals Super Bowl three years ago.  To get over the shock, we watched a move called Flame And Citron and some SNL and an apparently-legenendary short film called C'était un rendez-vous.  I was also shocked that Lana Del Rey didn't sing her superb new single "Born To Die" on SNL.  The only reason I slogged through the whole episode was to see her do it.  She did "Video Games" and some other mediocre song, and was brutally panned by smug news robot Brian Williams, who called her perhaps the worst performer in the history of the show.  Ouch.

On Monday, the always-classy Spike network did the only thing any reasonable channel would do in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day: It aired a marathon of Steven Seagal films.  I was lucky enough to tune in and catch a hilarious fight scene in his 2003 effort Belly Of The Beast.  I looked it up on YouTube to watch it again, and learned that I missed an even more hilarious beginning part of this very fight:

1.) Is this the worst scene in the history of cinema?  Y/N

2.) Is this the apex of the S. Seagal canon?  Y/N

(Note: By answering question 2, you hereby admit to having viewed the entirety of the S. Seagal canon.)

I watched the pilot episode of a new show called Alcatraz, mainly because our dad used to always take us around Alcatraz whenever we'd go out on the little sailboat (The Green Toad) that our family briefly owned in the '80s.  The show was pretty good, but I was just totally enraptured by the lead actress, Sarah Jones. Just watch an episode and you'll see what I mean.

On Wed., I got a gigantic cheeseburger for only $4 at this little soul food place in Morgan City called Rita Mae's.  Before eating it, I played some hoops at this court a few blocks away situated directly under Hwy. 90.  There was a rail-thin tween biracial girl riding erratically around the court on a bike, lost in her own little world, warbling some song at low volume.  After she almost crashed into me a few times, I asked her what she was singing, and she said it was a song by Adele.  I remember it had "Rain" in the title; I just looked it up and it must've been "Set Fire To The Rain," which iTunes says is her most popular song at the moment.  She then sang "Someone Like You" and "Rolling In The Deep" at my request, like my own little rolling jukebox.  It was kind of like a scene out of Gummo or something, with the sound of cars rumbling up above our heads.  "She's kinda weird, isn't she?," I asked one of her friends, who smiled broadly and nodded her head as the girl pedaled away down the street.  Then I drove over two of the city's epic bridges as the sun set while listening to Poem Rocket.  Perhaps subconsciously inspired by C'était un rendez-vous, I filmed it:

Planets with similar climates: The Chameleons - "Return Of The Roughnecks" (1985), The Cure - "Burn" (1993), The Comsat Angels - "The Eye Dance" (1981), Juno - "All Your Friends Are Comedians" (1998), The Wipers - "Against The Wall" (1987).

Psychic Ills >> Your eyes looked gray in the rain

Psychic Ills - "January Rain"

(The Social Registry, 2005)

(Note: This is not a cover of the song of the same name by the Aussie band Hunters & Collectors.)  January Rain would be a great pornstar name, almost as good as Allysin Chaynes or Avy Lee Roth.  (The latter actually claims to be an illegitimate child of David Lee Roth.)  This is the poppiest song on their first album, and maybe the poppiest thing they've ever done, though I haven't really paid attention to them since seeing their second album.  I saw them live in spring '06 opening for the very mediocre Blood On The Wall.  They definitely stole the show.  I don't think I got any pics or video clips, unfortunately.  They opened for the Butthole Surfers at House Of Blues a year or two later, but I didn't even consider going, so deep is my loathing for the Surfers and for reunion tours in general.

I wish the Ills would do more songs like "January Rain" rather than the drugged-out meanderings that they are so fond of, though those meanderings are pretty thrilling live.  British bands are always singing about rain, so it's no surprise that a band with a lot of U.K. influences would do it too.  The opening lines of the song go something like "I saw you today, there was nothing to say / Your eyes looked gray (in the rain), I've felt the same way."  This is surely Psychic Ills' best-known song, since the Social Registry website has offered it as a free download since way back when the album came out.

Winter rain is really bad for cacti / succulents, since they essentially go dormant at that time of year, and excess water around their roots can lead to lethal fungal infections.  Hence the main reason I got a greenhouse: more for protection from the rain than for protection from the cold.

Undated (probably ca. 2006-08) live photo from TVPRTY.com, titled "Psychic Ills out in Bed-Stuy on Saturday night"; no PHTGRPHR is credited

Note: I added this pic of the concert flyer on 9/18/12

The Saints-Lions game last weekend, the one Saints game I got to go to the whole season, turned out to be pretty epic.  We went with the owner of Mosca's restaurant and his wife.  It was pretty much tied at halftime but we dominated in the second half en route to an NFL playoff-record 626 total yards of offense, breaking a 49-year-old mark.  Calvin Johnson is completely unstoppable, though, piling up almost 500 yds. receiving in his last two (yes, two) games.  He and Fat Matt Stafford could shatter every NFL passing/receiving record eventually.  I almost brought my Barry Sanders jersey along to try to sell it to some intrepid fan who had come down from Detroit.  (I actually passed a car on I-10 that day with Michigan plates that was being driven by a dude with a towering blue mohawk, so I have to give Lions fans props for their loyalty.)

Might I suggest that you download this photo (photographer unknown) and use it as your desktop image, like I am currently doing?

In regards to my recent touting of Guinness Draught, I have to put out an urgent do-not-buy alert in regards to the bottled version of it.  Guinness recently took out the nitrogen widgets from the bottled version, ruining its taste.  I guess they did it to save $.  So stick with the canned version, which still has the widgets and is of course much larger.  It's basically a health elixir like tea, since it's just a bunch of plant parts dissolved in water and allowed to ferment a tiny bit (4% ABV).

Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop, 30, Arrested By Madison, Wisc. Police

Planets with similar climates: Pearl Harbor / Puro Instinct - "California Shakedown" (~2009), CAN - "Oh Yeah" (1971), Catherine Wheel - "She's My Friend" (1990), Indian Jewelry - "Excessive Moonlight" (2010), Plexi - "Change" (1996).