Sympathy for the Devil

"Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 examines the dynamic relationship between rock music and contemporary visual art, a relationship that crosses continents, generations, and cultures. Since the late 1950s this unlikely hybrid of rhythm-and-blues and country music has had an undeniable impact on society while drastically changing with the times. Artists from the 1960s to the present have maintained a strong connection to rock, beginning with Andy Warhol’s involvement with The Velvet Underground (who released their Warhol-produced landmark album The Velvet Underground and Nico in 1967 -- the same year the MCA opened its doors). More recently, artists such as Slater Bradley, Raymond Pettibon, and Mike Kelley have created album covers and music videos for rock bands, while many noted rock musicians such as John Lennon, Bryan Ferry, and Peter Townsend have emerged from art schools. " at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art

Death Valley 69

Straight outta Starbucks!

Hip gnosis

"Sun: I've always wondered why hipgnosis was spelled hipgnosis [and is pronounced hypnosis].

Thorgerson: ...It was actually scrolled on our door by some passing narcotic person in the middle of the night. It was scratched on the door of our apartment, and it appealed to us. It's a nice word, but it was spelled on the door like that." interview with Hipgnosis designer Storm Thorgerson, creator of many famous Pink Floyd album covers.

From this weekend's Nutstock 5:

Make Music, Not War

I donated this autoharp to Operation Happy Note, a program run by a music store in Minnesota that sends musical instruments to soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. I figure this instrument is easy to play and I hope it will bring some soldier happiness and perhaps a few moments of peace.

Kill Yer Idols

Hats off to Paul Addis, whose prank at Burning Man resulted in him being arrested for arson. Does anyone see the irony in this?

Back in the bad old nineties my downtown LA scenester friends would make the pilgrimage to Burning Man, returning with stories of psychedelic binges and artistic freakouts. I always passed on attending because I prefer my desert empty.

"....she sounds less like Public Enemy than the Spice Girls" Brent Burton reviews the latest M.I.A. record.

Dog Daze Update

Welcome back sun!

New book about The Source, the commune run by Father Yod.

Trailer for a new movie about the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (via Magpie)

The Foreign Press plays Mt. Pleasant tomorrow...Spectrum on Sunday!

Just Married

newlyweds
Originally uploaded by stereogab

August 9th we tied the knot at the courthouse in Rockville. A happy day indeed.

wave farm broadcasting system

wave farm broadcasting system
Originally uploaded by BarrettJ

Drove the 730 mile round trip to Campfire Sounds at free103point9's Wave Farm this past weekend. It's an idyllic setting with friendly people and a hippy vibe. Nothin' wrong with that...caught some video footage of Sunburned Hand of the Man, who cranked out a heavy psychedelic jam in the summer afternoon.

Happy Birthday Jerry

Gone but not forgotten...

Astronomical Dominoes

Thoughts While Driving the New Jersey Turnpike

When are cars getting colors again? Every one is silver. And most of them are SUVs. There are lots and lots of silver SUVs out there. Why is everyone driving a silver SUV? It is because everyone else is driving a silver SUV?......At the rest stop there is a rock band in line at the Starbucks. Each one of them is a different rock band dude stereotype. There is the surfer rock dude, the new wave rock dude, and the heavy metal rock dude. Gab asks who they are and I say "Bon Jovi". The woman behind me gets very excited. I don't have the heart to tell her that I was joking......Do people from Scagsville get teased about the name of their town? Girls especially, I would assume. Or has no one thought of that before me? ......Flipping through the radio stations near Fort Lee we come across a hyperactive organ solo. A few notes in I wager it's Deep Purple. After another 30 minutes of drum solos and a 5 minute ending "crescendo" I revise my guess to ELP. Wrong! It's Deep Purple, live. Never second guess on the Jersey Turnpike.

Help Todzilla

from my friend Pat:

If I had a nickel for everytime somebody told me what a good friend toddzilla is, well, I'd have already paid his huge medical bill and I'd probably be rich!!! However, that isn't the case. In fact, toddzilla was involved in a hit and run accident and was left with two broken hips and internal bleeding. His surgery is set for tomorrow morning and is quoted at $6,000, hopefully nothing goes wrong.

The reason for this email is to raise money for toddzilla and his surgery alone. Illus ideas, inc., has created a completely new t-shirt that we will be selling for $40 dollars. It is being offered to men and boys in all sizes and in these colors: black, navy blue and forest green. For women and girls we are offering t-shirts in all sizes and in two styles: low cut neck and a regular cut neck, colors: black, navy blue and forest green. Pull-over sweat-shirts are being sold for $60 and are being offered in all sizes and in these colors: black, navy blue and forest green.

Please understand that todd is my best friend and if my art doesn't sell then he can't get his hips fixed and that just isn't right especially because he did nothing wrong, and whoever it was didn't even stop to check on him...

The Doctor who will be operating on toddzilla has told me that toddzilla will be ready to come home wednesday or thursday, and at that time i have to pay the bill. Please, if not for the cool shirt you will be purchasing, donate $40 dollars to todd's hip surgery fund raiser and you'll recieve a free t-shirt with choice of color and size (paypal: illusclothing at yahoo dot com)

Tortoise

Caught a great Tortoise show at the Black Cat this past Saturday night. I heard echoes of 70's-era Miles and Faust in their jams. Two drummers are always a good thing.

After the show I tried to go backstage to say hello but Black Cat security wouldn't let me and wouldn't send word back to Dan either. I wasn't the only one; not even Ian Svenonius could get back there. I know bitching about the BC staff's bummer attitude is old news but I have to point it out because it does nothing for the scene. If dealing with drunken twentysomethings is making you miserable then maybe it's time to go back to school and get that degree.

Yes!

Negative
Originally uploaded by dronepop

Happy Birthday!

pinkflower
Originally uploaded by stereogab

Kwik-E-Mart, Bladensburg, MD 7.1.07

Kwik-E-Mart, Bladensburg, MD 7.1.07
Originally uploaded by warrenjabali

Unbelievable...

If You Be My Dixie Chicken I'll Be Your Tennessee Lamb

28 years after Lowell George left his mortal coil in the nearby Key Bridge Marriot, I journeyed out to the pastoral splendor of Wolf Trap to hear Little Feat. I happen to like 10 minute guitar solos so their shows are my cup of tea.

Stereogab is demanding that The Aliens come to DC. So am I. So should you.

PJ has set up a blog for his Shanghai - Helsinki - Moscow trip next month.

Blind Bim now has a porch with a house attached.

Irish Poets Selling Cars

Made the mistake of watching a few minutes of network television this evening. Made an even worse mistake not muting the commercials. So I got to hear The Pogues "Sunny Side of the Street" playing over an ad for a Cadillac SUV. Now I know that song's far from their best, and I know selling songs for ads is old news, but it still sucks. It sucks because Cadillac sucks and SUVs suck and the whole finely-tuned consumer culture corporate juggernaut sucks.

The last line in the song goes: As my mother wept it was then I swore / To take my life as I would a whore.

Guess old Shane is just living up to his word.

Harold Johnson, September 30, 1918 - June 15, 2007

My uncle Harold Johnson died this past Friday morning. He was one of a vanishing breed. He was a farmer, like his father before him and like his son is now. He never traveled by jet and never had a desk job. He lived his whole life in the house where he was born. He was easygoing, witty, and had a love for the land and his place on it.

West Central Tribune obituary
WILLMAR — Harold Alexander Johnson, 88, of Willmar, died Friday at Rice Memorial Hospital.
The service will be at 11 a.m. Tuesday at Svea Lutheran Church. Burial will be in the church cemetery.

He was born Sept. 30, 1918, on the family farm near Svea to Axel T. Johnson and Emily E. (Bouska). He grew up in rural Svea and attended the Sunnyside School. On Nov. 19, 1949, he married Millicent Forsberg in St. Paul. For many years he farmed on the family farm. He was a former member of the Sunnyside School Board, the Svea Coop Store Board and the church council.

He is survived by his wife; six children, Rebecca Johnson of Lake Lillian, Deborah Johnson of Willmar, David Johnson of Willmar, Jennifer Johnson of Willmar, Barbara (and Wayne) Stomberg of Renville and Douglas (and Teresa) Johnson of Willmar; three grandchildren; a sister, Barbara (and Wendell) Jones of Ridgefield, Conn.

He was preceded in death by a brother and three sisters.

New Song

A new Leafy Green song for summer.

Also have to commend film maker Esther Robinson for her poignant documentary about her uncle Danny Williams, a film maker in Warhol's Factory scene who got lost along the way. Interviews with Gerard Malanga, Brigid Polk (aka "The Duchess") and Billy Name, among others.

Donovan is blogging! And check out this Modern Lovers bootleg courtesy of Parabells.

Opel

Originally uploaded by tsogy

clever flickr people

iGasm

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/ipod/apple-gets-its-knickers-in-a-twist-over-the-igasm-263184.php

Kick Out the Jams

Just started reading Guitar Army by John Sinclair and I'm already lovin' the agitprop hippy revolutionary vibe. It's along the lines of Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book or Jerry Rubin's Do It

Sinclair and the MC5 all lived and worked together in a collective called Trans-Love Energies. Guitar Army reads like a police log; one bust after another. Being a long haired freak in Detroit was not an easy choice (and probably still not).

Six years into the creepy American police state mentality, the overseas killing machine, and the deepening cultural rut, it's fun to read about people taking risks, openly defying authority, and trying to figure out an alternative to the status quo.

What I'm Diggin Lately

The new Clientele album is already my summer soundtrack, and it's not even summer yet (look, they have a blog)

The Holy Mountain, a tripped-out movie by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Twitter

60 Minute IPA

Riding bikes with Stereogab

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Kink Stones New York Doll

Media Mavens

Wow, what a day! Stereogab's commentary gets published and this video promo for the Open House project is screened at a press conference in Congress. That jangley song on the soundtrack? Pure Leafy Green goodness! Yowza!

Family Photo

jonesclan
Originally uploaded by stereogab.

April 2007, New York City

Free Fall at 614 Miles per Hour

This cool video for the Boards of Canada song"Dayvan Cowboy" uses footage from a skydive by Joseph Kittinger who "made the final jump from the Excelsior III at 102,800 feet (31,330 m). He was in freefall for 4 minutes and 36 seconds reaching a maximum speed of 614 mph (988 km/h) before opening his parachute at 18,000 feet (5,500 m)."

Later in the video there is footage of Laird Hamilton, big wave surfer extrodinaire (profiled in the movie "Riding Giants")

The Soft Machine

Lord Fuzzy has a great 1971 Soft Machine concert recording that's been making my Metro ride better lately. And there's footage from the UFO Club in 1967. And then there's Gong

More Ways to Spend Your Time and Money

Other Music unveiled their digital store (with the same clunky design of their original web site). I prefer Anthology Recordings, with their uber-obscure sixties/seventies titles and well-written descriptions. Don't know much about Klicktrack but they're the only ones who have this Charlie and Edsor release that I want after reading this post on Great God Pan. Still, nothing beats flipping through the bins of musty vinyl at Joe's Record Paradise.

Youtube continues to provideth, here with two clips from the same film on the hippy scene in London circa 1967. Opening clip shows The Who, another clip shows a Pink Floyd freak out along with goofy crowd shots.

love

gabislove
Originally uploaded by BarrettJ.

Love is in the air this spring.

New York Squeeze

Up in New York City for a few days, some wet, some dry. Saw Roky Erickson play the Bowery Ballroom Sunday night. I've been a 13th Floor Elevators fan for a long time now and it was great to see one of the last psychedelic renegades going strong and loud. Roky keeps the Devil at bay with rock and roll. It can save your soul, you know.

Speaking of rock and roll salvation, we said hello to Jimmy when we stopped at Trash and Vaudeville. There's not much left of the New York I roamed 25 years ago. Coming up on Avenue A I started getting nervous, because that used to be the final frontier. Silly me.

Oh yeah, there was a wedding too.

Here's a new song called New York Squeeze.

Since We Last Talked

They say in Web 2.0 that full disclosure is now the norm, although the phrase nobody sane strips down naked in front of their peers has me a bit worried....


Went to the Dean and Britta show last week. My fandom for Dean Wareham has remained constant since his Galaxy 500 days. This latest show was weak but I think it's admirable that he's trying a new direction (The Post's review was too nice).


I continue to slurp groovy tracks from the Neglected Stairways blog. The latest post contains a couple of songs (well, one and half, actually) from a Nick Drake Peel Session.



39 years ago this city was burning. Does a Giant supermarket or a Target (ironic name) heal the wounds? Still, things are changing despite the rednecks with rifles.

Dream

at Copal
Originally uploaded by BarrettJ.

Our home for a week

Happy Birthday!

yokohatgab
Originally uploaded by BarrettJ.

Happy Birthday to my best friend companion partner-in-crime soulmate! I hope you have a wonderful day and that the coming year brings fun, positivity, enlightenment, and fulfillment. I am sure that it will.

The bliss that condo ownership brings

yoga
Originally uploaded by BarrettJ.

Part of an ad for a new condo development on Carroll Street in Takoma.

Drinking at the Hirshhorn

This past Friday night, yours truly accompaniedStereogab to the Hirsshorn's After Hours (scroll down, their web site sucks) shindig. There was some art somewhere but our main focus (besides getting beers) was to check out Ian Svenonius on the decks (has anyone read his new book?)

The music was kinda low and the lights were way too bright but it was cool to hang out in the museum at night. It felt like a hipster office party, with all the security guards and tuxedo'd bartenders.

Arthur is Dead

Word is that Arthur Magazine has bitten the dust. Like the Beatles, or my first marriage, it starts out fun and ends up in court. Awhile back I got into an online tussle with Arthur publisher Jay Babcock over a CD that had been included with a recent issue. The CD was one of those creepy hip advertising things, a Tylenol ad campaign promo disguised as a "freak folk" sampler featuring bands like White Magic. Babcock argued that more advertising money was good for the health of Arthur but I saw it as a bad sign that the same folks who put out the Golden Apples of the Sun comp (also featuring White Magic....hmmm) would stoop to allow their name to be used to promote corporate ibuprophin. I now wonder if Laris Kreslins had similar doubts. But a five year run is about average for a rock band, a restaurant, or a magazine. Still, I'm sad to see Arthur go.

UPDATE: Arthur came back and is now available in select stores everywhere...

Forty Years Ago Today

On March 6, 1967 my mother,my father and yours truly departed from Dulles airport outside Washington D.C. bound for Saudi Arabia. My dad had been assigned to the American embassy in Jeddah. We did not know when we would return to America.

We flew on Pan Am 2 to London, then Frankfurt, then Istanbul, then Beirut. We landed in Beirut in a heavy rainstorm after lightning hit one wing of the plane. It took us so long to get our things together we went into the airport on the crew bus. We arrived in darkness and rain at the Phoenicia Hotel where we were staying. The next day we woke up to the beautiful Mediterranean sunlight.

You Did It!

You persevered, you didn't lose hope,

and you made it happen. This is just the beginning. Doesn't it ROCK?!

New Rare Psych Music Blog - Neglected Stairways

My friend Gunnar has a record collection that I envy, to put it mildly. Original monophonic 13th Floor Elevators albums, Velvet Underground bootlegs, long out-of-print Krautrock pressings, everything to put a psychedelic music fan into a state of covetous glee. Gunnar was kind enough to burn a few choice recordings to CD a couple years ago for me but now he has a blog where he is posting links to digitized downloads of some of the finest gems from his collection.

Syd Barrett Plunderphonic Fun

I cut up some footage of Syd and spliced up a track from Piper at the Gates of Dawn and this is what happened.

Galactic Zoo Mix Tape Club

Last fall I joined the Galactic Zoo Mix Tape Club. As a club member, I get 6 mix tapes over the course of a year. Last week number 2 showed up and, like number 1, it was full of crazy unknown garage bands, wobbly pop folk wonders, lo-fi space jams and all kinds of crazy sounds from the 60's and 70's. On this recent tape I only recognized two songs: "Who Dat?" by The Jury (which I have on an obscure compilation) and "Ramblin Gamblin' Man" by the Bob Seger Sound System (yes, that Bob Seger).

Plastic Crimewave (also known as Steve Krakow) is the man behind the tapes. He of course has a band (Plastic Crimewave Sound), writes and illustrates an art/music zine called Galactic Zoo Dossier, and curated the Two Million Tongues festival in Chicago.

Another Galactic Zoo Mix Tape Club membership benefit is a copy of the club's Manifesto, which is a really cool musing on the culture and experience of the mix tape. Thurston Moore got some mileage from praising the mix tape in his book but why would you read a book about mix tapes when you could join the Galactic Zoo Mix Tape Club and get actual mix tapes. Six of them!

The Best of 2006

2006 is almost over. I have a lot of good memories from this year. I also have some bad ones. But you can't have the yin without the yang.

I haven't seen as many Top 10 lists this year. And the ones I've seen have all been different. I think our culture is fragmenting into little fifedoms of art. I blame the internet.

Here's what I liked this year:

I liked the Modern Containment series, especially Hush Arbors and Kinski

I liked Terrastock 6

I liked seeing MV + EE and the Bummer Road at Wave Farm

I liked The Life Pursuit by Belle and Sebastian and I liked Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain by Sparklehorse

I liked seeing Comets on Fire live, and I liked their new record

I liked seeing Six Organs of Admittance

I liked the Feathers record

I liked A Scanner Darkly

I liked the Konono No. 1 show

I liked the Ray Davies show and the Bob Dylan show

I liked The Foreign Press shows and The Plums shows

I'm sure there's more that I forgot...

I also liked the earth ships outside of Taos and of course the leanto on the mountain in Vermont. I liked making friends with the pastor and the dentist (a.k.a. The Magician) at the community garden. I'm glad for those friends who found love and I'm sorry for those friends who lost it. I'm glad they caught my mom's cancer in time. I'm glad Brendan met Susannah. Gab's new tattoo rocks. I'm grateful to Hannu for releasing my record. And I'm grateful for all the good things in my life. And the bad. See you next year.

Notes From The Psychedelic Underground

With The Radio On

Take a look at this long article on Joanna Newsom in Arthur.

And another nice, in-depth article on Powell St. John of the 13th Floor Elevators.

An amusing little interview with Andy Partridge (XTC)

Over the past few weeks I've become addicted to Radio Blog

Rest in Peace, James Brown

Winter Arrives Today at 7:22 P.M. Eastern Standard Time

Got Sun ?
Originally uploaded by sirchuckles.

Happy Solstice!

Power to the People

EXCERPT FROM FORMER BLACK FLAG BASSIST CHUCK DUKOWSKI INTERVIEW IN ARTHUR NO. 25:

"The people in power don’t want to have places where young people can get together easily in any numbers, to associate and trade ideas and have some community besides the schools where they’re super-segregated and super-repressed. I remember when Chief Davis, the former LAPD police chief, said in an interview, ‘What you need to do is bear down on them when they’re young. You break them like a horse and then you can ride them the rest of their lives.’
"I think it was Davis, maybe it was his predecessor, but I remember reading that in the damn paper! Motherfuck! It was something that I, on the outside of things, had been thinking was going on, and now I realized that that WAS what was going on. We’d go do our [Black Flag] concert, come outside and see the cops beating up all the people who came to hear us. They’d bust them all up, breaking legs and arms. Just beating the crap out of people. It was all about keeping people down and showing them who’s boss before they get a chance to feel like they can do something with their lives.

"About a year and a half ago, I went to a friend’s party where he had these Jarocho musicians playing. The music is from the Veracruz part of Mexico, it’s a kind of music that’s African and indigenous. These groups are made up of extended families. So the whole group, this extended family, is performing in different combinations and different groups, from the oldest people to the youngest: everybody’s getting their little cameos, everybody’s playing support to everybody else or taking a moment where they’re the ‘star,’ so to speak. What was interesting to me was the breakdown of the ageism. Everybody was participating in it. I started thinking that this is probably closer to where people are coming from, naturally.

"The division by age is probably on purpose. There’s always a desire to divide and pit various groups in the culture against one another, and thereby weaken any chance of people getting together and coming up with alternatives to the governmental infrastructure for holding things together, and the giant corporations and things that hire them. It’s like at school, where they line everybody up by age, and then have them line up by height, or make them learn to march in lines: all of this kind of programming and dividing people up, and ultimately pitting them against one another, is so that they’re easier to control. It’s so much easier to take advantage of somebody who is denied the insights of their forebears. It’s so much easier to take advantage of somebody if they are robbed of the energy of their offspring. I think you need to keep everybody engaged with each other, and then the culture is rich, and has the life and vitality of the whole human family that’s there."

Gone But Not Forgotten

(thanks Hackmuth)

Freaky Sounds from the United Kingdom and Beyond

I recently purchased a compilation entitled "Singing at the Moon" from a U.K. label called Singing Knives. I hadn't heard of any of the artists listed nor the label so it was a bit of a gamble but it came recommended and was the price of a couple of beers (my standard metric for buying music).

My favorite track is "Santa Flauta" by the Michael Flower Band, who appear to be influenced by Angus Maclise judging from the manic hand drumming, droning organ, and that most psychedelic of sounds: the flute played through a delay pedal (other practitioners of this technique include Bardo Pond and Meat Beat Manifesto)

There are a couple of tracks I skip through but overall there's an interesting mix of sounds on this disc.

The Harder They Come

Last week after work one day I listened to the Jimmy Cliff song "Sitting in Limbo", off the soundtrack "The Harder They Come". I hadn't listened to the album in several years but that day the song kept going through my head. Back in the day this album was an essential part of every record collection. I remember sitting on a sand bar in the middle of the Wisconsin River on a hot summer day with a bunch of friends, coolers of beer, and a tape player with one tape playing the soundtrack over and over again (and with our wasted group singing along to "Pressure Drop"). Fast forward to last week; the day after playing the album I saw the obituary for Perry Henzell, who created the film. Chalk it up to cosmic coincidence...

Spiritualized

The other night I pulled out a copy of the Spiritualized album Lazer Guided Melodies for the first time in a long while. I found it just as good as ever. I started thinking about J. Spaceman's reputation and wondered how a strung-out junkie could have such a methodical approach to his music with such attention to detail. When I hear Chinese Rocks I don't doubt that Johnny Thunders was living from one fix to the next but Spiritualized has always sounded like the work of someone who is more together than his image suggests. In this interview, Jason Pierce shines a light on his current state.

Astronomy Domine - December 2nd

Thoughts on How the Music Business Sucks

The Wall Street Journal ran an article today about a PlayStation game called Guitar Hero. The game is sort of a karaoke approach to guitar playing where the player presses buttons on a little guitar to hit the notes of a song. The WSJ piece talks about how musicians such as Korn, My Chemical Romance, Incubus and other crappy bands play the game so much that they miss recording sessions and sound checks. If these guys were really into music, if they were really musicians and not manufactured celebrities, they'd spend their time furthering their craft, not playing a PlayStation game.

Also speaking of the music business, The Register ran an interesting interview with Peter Jenner, former manager of the Clash and Pink Floyd, where he talks about the stupidity of the current major labels and his ideas for new ways to make money making music in the new era.

And in this interview Ian Mackaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi, The Evens) share some interesting thoughts on the business of establishing ticket prices for shows and why playing shows in bars (or seeing shows in bars) is such a drag.

Jason Diemilio of Azusa Plane, R.I.P.

What if you were a musician and you lost your hearing? Jason Diemilio experienced this and made a sad choice. Michael Chaiken remembers him:

There are a few people in my life whose existence alone protects me somehow. Jason Diemilio was one of them. In the last years of his life he had become subsumed by underground, electronic, dance music. He traveled the world--visiting clubs in London, Spain and Ibiza. We spent several delirious nights together at a now defunct afterhours spot in the Tribeca section of New York City called Arc. Totally consumed by this music, Jason had envisioned carrying on the Azusa Plane--but in a totally new direction. He had begun teaching himself how to mix and produce, but his ensuing health problems forced him to stop, which was absolutely devastating for him. Not only was he unable to make music, but was also eventually deprived of his greatest single pleasure--simply listening to music. Jason suffered from a chronic and seemingly incurable pain. He had a seriously debilitating condition known as tinnitus and hypercusis that was brought about by extreme sound exposure; a result of playing in bands most of his life without protection for his ears. The nerve damage was severe and irreversible. Recently it had become even more acute. He held out for as long as he could and lived as he died. With grace and indefatigable courage. Jason was open to the simplest beauties of the world and never could stop being enraged at what fouled it. I loved him to the very core of my being. He will be missed. By many.

R.I.P. (listen to today's Drug Music set of his work)

And Climbing the Charts at Number 35 is...

me!

free103point9 Online Radio
August 2006 Top 40

1. Scanner with MCs from the New Horizon Youth Centre, Night Jam (Bette)
2. Edmund Mooney, The Eight Nerve (self)
3. Shawn Onsgard, Pachyderm (self)
4. Lycaon Pictus, Personal Disaster (Avant-God)
5. Various artists, Montreal Sound Matter/Montreal matiere sonore (Pogus)
With Chantal Dumas, Tomas Phillips, Francisco Lopez, and others.
6. Fluorescent Grey, Lying on the floor mingling with god in a tijuana motel room next door to a veterinary supply store (Isolate Records)
7. Fortner Anderson, Six Silk Purses
With Chantal Dumas, Christof Migone, and others.
8. Anla Courtis, Tape Works (Pogus Productions)
9. Sabir Mateen's Shapes, Textures, and Sound Ensemble, Prophecies Comes to Pass (577)
10. Judy Dunaway, Mother of Balloon Music (innova)
With Damian Catera, Flux Quartet, Ryuko Mizutani, and others.
11. John Blum Astrogeny Quartet, John Blum Astrogeny Quartet (Eremite)
With William Parker, Denis Charles, and Antonio Grippi.
12. Dan Joseph, Archae (mutablemusic)
13. The Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble, Drumdance to the Motherland (Eremite)
14. Carnival Skin, Carnival Skin (Nemu Records)
With Bruce Eisenbeil, Klaus Kugel, Perry Robinson, Peter Evans, Hilliard Greene.
15. Bitrate, NF3 (db Recording)
16. Bhob Rainey, Two Bites of a Bitter Sweet 7" (Evolving Ear)
17. Matt Rogalsky, Memory Like Water (XI Records)
18. Prana Trio, After Dark (Circavision)
19. Insects with Tits, Insects with Tits (804noise)
20. Lily Gottlieb-McHale, Car Harp '05-'06 (self)
21. Kidd Jordan + Hamid Drake + William Parker, Palm of Soul (Aum Fidelity)
22. Dual, Pyroclastics (Quodibet Recordings)
23. Michael Evans + Jeff Arnal, MEJA (C3R)
24. dreamSTATE, Between Realities (espace)
25. Peeesseye, commuting between the surface & the underworld (Evolving Ear)
26. Andy McWain + Albey Balgochian + Laurence Cook, Vigil (Fuller Street Music)
27. Rothkamm, Astronaut of Inner Space (Flux Records)
28. The Moglass, Sparrow Juice (Nexsound)
29. My Fun, The Quality of Something Audible (thelandof.org)
30. Pee in My Face with Surgery, Damnation Road (Chocolate Monk)
31. Various artists, Electricity is Your Friend (3pinrecordings)
DisinVectant, Sara Ayers, and others.
32. Laura Ortman, Tens of Thousands (self)
33. Ground Monkeys/Mouthus/Dosdedos/Tan as Fuck 7" (Heat Retention #7)
34. a.m. salad, toporific cd-r (Sloth Jinni)
35. Leafy Green, Leafy Green (self)
36. George Steeltoe Ensemble, Church of Yuh (Heat Retention)
With Michael Barker, Daniel Carter, Thomas Clark, Jay Dunbar, Lathan Hardy, Trevor Healy, Brian Osborne, Jeffrey Hayden Shurdut, and Marc Zajack.
37. Jeff Arnal + Seth Misterka + Reuben Radding + Nate Wooley, Transit (Clean Feed)
38. The Sky Drops, Clouds of People (Fridabear)
39. Various artists, 8 Sound Works (New York Society for Acoustic Ecology)
Works from free103point9's "Tune (Out)))side" show July 4, 2005 at Wave Farm from EA, Andy Graydon, mpld, Michelle Nagai + Mike Hallenbeck, Ben Owen, Andrea Polli, Vatic, and Edmund Mooney.
40. Negativland, It's All in Your Head FM (Seeland)

Halloween Death Trip

As October slides into the dark night of November we gather tonight to celebrate the onset of darkness dressed as skeletons, devils, witches, and, uh, beer cans.

Life, Death, and Record Stores

oldnow
Originally uploaded by BarrettJ.

As I type this post I see people walking by on the street below carrying yellow Tower Records bags. Those bags will soon be memorabilia as the chain is set to disappear. I bought my first record in a Caldor in Ridgefield, Connecticut. I'm pretty certain it was Some Girls, which was the latest Rolling Stones record at the time. I still have it, with the original cover, the one that includes all the photos of celebrities, before it was pulled. (No Beatles Butcher Block though). So I started this post to talk about record stores and wound up on a nostalgia trip. But it is kind of weird to realize that many of the stores where I once bought music are gone. And not just the stores have changed. Listening to music used to involve getting up and flipping the record every 20 minutes. Then you had the CDs that played for an hour. Now my iTunes library measures music not by hours but by days. So much for original album covers...

What You Bring Is Who You Are

The other day as I was packing for a two night backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail I thought about a post I'd read recently by Pete Townshend who talked about what travelers take with them when they travel. With backpacking you have to eliminate everything that isn't necessary because whatever you bring you have to carry on your back. Even the little things add up. Do you sense an analogy developing here?

Out on the trail, in a woods where the silence was punctuated only by the sounds of bird songs and rustling leaves, we passed a hiker listening to his iPod as he hiked. What he considered necessary seemed ludicrous to me. But obvious to him.

So what did I bring? Besides the obvious food-clothes-shelter? I brought a book. And a camera. I like books because the act of reading allows room for my imagination to play. And I like taking pictures for the same reason.

Afternoon in the Dream House

Yesterday I traveled to New York city to visit the Dream House, the sound and light exhibit created by LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela. I've wanted to go for years but never made it for one reason or another. The house is on a busy street in the Tribeca neighborhood. Young and Zazeela live in the same building, one floor above the installation.

I'm still in the early stages of learning about the work of LaMonte Young. I'd heard that John Cale had collaborated with him in the early 60's and I knew that Spacemen 3 were devotees but that was about it until fairly recently when I began to take a closer look at the New York avante-garde music scene of the early 60's.

Anyway, back to yesterday. I climbed up the stairs to the third floor where I removed my shoes and entered the apartment. Once inside, I walked down a hall to a large carpeted front room lit in magenta light with four speakers putting out a very loud range of drones. My first impression was that it sounded like a big engine. The really trippy aspect to this installation is that the sound changes depending on where you sit or stand. So if you move your head slowly, various ranges of drones will come in and out of hearing. It's hard to describe but fantastic to experience. When I left I was surprised to discover that I'd spent two hours in the room. I had no idea I'd been in there that long.

And just to give you an idea of the complexity of Young's work, here is the title of the piece that was playing in the dream house yesterday (which he's been working on for the past 15 years and has yet to complete):
The base 9:7:4 Symmetry in Prime Time When Centered Above and Below the Lowest Term Primes in the Range 288 to 224 with the Addition of 279 and 261 in Which the Half of the Symmetric Division Mapped Above and Including 288 Consists of the Powers of 2 Multiplied by the Primes Within the Ranges of 144 to 128, 72 to 64 and 36 to 32 Which Are Symmetrical to Those Primes in Lowest Terms in the Half of the Symmetric Division Mapped Below and Including 224 Within the Ranges 126 to 112, 63 to 56 and 31.5 to 28 with the Addition of 119.

Got that?

911

9.11 memories

Fire Purification Ritual

Comets on Fire finally blasted through DC this past Friday night, during the height of Hurricane Ernesto. I'd wanted to see them for years after I heard a track ("Beneath the Ice Age") on a Ptolemaic Terrascope sampler (POT-33) that was such a total Amon Duul II freak out it caught my ear immediately. They played the Ottobar in Baltimore last summer but I missed that show.

(Sounds of) Kaleidoscope opened. They used to have a mid-sixties Kinks sound. Now they sound more like Jesus and Marychain. I like both those bands (but I'll take "Waterloo Sunset" over "Just Like Honey" every time).

(Sof)K are loud, but Comets on Fire are louder. You know a band is loud when they wear earplugs onstage. I chose to bathe unprotected in the full sonic assualt. Molar-rattling volume puts me in an altered state (the Black Cat's pint glass rum and cokes probably contribute). Kevin Shields spoke of My Bloody Valentine shows where "...people would experience a type of sensory deprivation, and they would lose the sense of time. It would force them to be in the moment, and since people don’t usually get to experience that, there’d be a sense of elation...1/3 of the audience would always think it was really shit, and try to leave, or get as far away as they could, and the other 2/3 really liked it." By the time the set ended, the area in front of the stage was almost empty. But those of us who liked it managed to get them out for one encore. After that there was nothing left but a high-pitched ringing in our ears.