c is for cars

[Did I say back in 2016 that I was going to resume the blog shortly thereafter? Well, obviously I lied. Let's hope that this post actually leads to more frequent posting.]

First Daniel Johnston, then Eddie Money, and now RIc Ocasek. This one is the real bummer for me -- I was never a huge fan of Eddie Money ("Shakin'" was cool, I guess) and I found DJ pretty much unlistenable (sorry, guys) in addition to having serious issues with the way his mental illness intersected with the music business. But I've been a Cars fan since 1980, and I still listen to them on a regular basis. PANORAMA is one of my all-time favorite albums. So this is a real drag. Of course, living to 75 is pretty good, and he apparently went out of natural causes while asleep, so that's a good thing. Still... a major bummer.

Now I am compelled to tell the story of how I came to be a Cars fan. Plenty of people on my friends list have already heard this story -- in some cases, multiple times -- but now, as Devo once put it: "I know you've heard this all before / But now you're gonna hear some more."

In 1980, I was a dysfunctional 15-year old attending a very large school full of assholes (students, teachers, idiots in charge, etc.) and taking Geometry (which I hated with a passion not unlike the blazing of one thousand suns). It was there that I met The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. Her name was C____ and she sat two seats in front of me. The Geometry teacher was King Lord God Bu-Fu of the Kingdom of Assholes, so I generally ignored him in favor of concocting lurid fantasies about what C____ might look like with her shirt off. (Pretty goddamn good, I suspected.)

Naturally, it eventually occurred to me that maybe I should ask her out. Just one problem: my chances of getting her attention (beyond saying "hello") were close to zero. i was not only a short, extremely uncool nerd with bad hair, big glasses, and a whole boatload of personal problems, but I had just relocated from Tennessee, where I had spent four years, the last two of which I attended a tiny private school. I was still getting used to the idea of not having to wear a suit and tie to school (which only made me look like a well-dressed monkey), and I was still wrapping my head around the sheer size of the school, which was a huge campus filled with vast buildings and nearly 2,000 students in attendance. And even at that age, I grasped that girls like C____ did not date nerds like me.

Still, because she *was* The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, I continued to desperately think of some way I could possibly impress her, to no avail. Then one day she came to class wearing a Cars t-shirt from the PANORAMA tour. A very tight t-shirt, I might add. When I picked my eyeballs up off the floor, I had a new plan: I would go to the store and buy that album and listen to it, and then the next time she wore that shirt, I could wow her with my knowledge of the band, and she would be so impressed that she would want to go home with me to listen to it and then Things Would Happen. (I was in complete fantasy land at this point, obviously.)

So I did indeed buy the album, and I listened to it, and a funny thing happened: it never did help me get in C____'s pants (she was too buy getting all dreamy about the captain of the football team anyway), but I fell in love with the album from the first listen. I had never heard anything like it before, but the album's abstract lyrics and anxiety-riddled paranoia suited me perfectly. I could relate to songs like "Panorama," "Misfit Kid," and "Down Boys" -- their lyrics might have been opaque, but they still mirrored the unhealthy paranoia of my daily life.

So while I never did succeed in my addled mission to connect with C____, I did end up becoming a fan of the band for life. I still listen to them. PANORAMA is still one of my favorite albums.

I have no idea what became of C_____.

LISTENING: Blondie -- EAT TO THE BEAT
READING: Kristin Hersh -- RAT GIRL

p is for procrastination

It's been over two years since the last post? My, how time flies. Rest assured, more is coming in the near future. After a long hiatus, I intend to return to discussing music (mostly items from my own collection), albeit in a more informal manner than in TOTDA. (I'll also be theoretically writing more academic texts related to music and film, but those items will be posted somewhere else. More info on that as it develops.) Stay tuned....

LISTENING: Sleater-Kinney -- ONE BEAT

READING: Michael Connelly  -- THE CROSSING

zen and the art of loudness

For the uninitiated, I play in a couple of bands: Korperschwache, a solo venture that has been around long enough to celebrate its 20th anniversary in January (which in turn will coincide with my 50th birthday), and Patient O.T., a loud and strange band consisting of four very different people playing vastly different styles of music at the same time. Both are kind of an acquired taste. The methods and number of players may differ, but the goal is the same: to play strange, noisy anti-music at really high volume. Both bands are very different, but since I'm in both, that means a large no-wave influence is probably happening.

Earlier tonight, Korperschwache played at Cherry Park, a house owned by a few noise-friendly friends. They frequently hold noise shows featuring their own bands plus various others, usually between six to eight bands, all playing short sets (mine was probably no more than ten minutes, if even that). These shows are always a laid-back, casual gathering of like-minded people hanging out between sets of loud noise. House shows are the shows I like best. Playing shows at real venues like Club 1808 is fine, but they tend to have rules and issues that simply aren't present at house shows, at least in my experience.

Most of the people involved in Austin's noise scene, men and women alike, are young, in their 20s and early 30s, which means in a lot of cases I'm old enough to be (and maybe older than) their dad. I don't have a problem with this -- I don't care about age any more than I care about looks or whatever, and there are remarkably few assholes in the scene, so everybody's usually easy to get along with regardless of age. It does occasionally mean that I think of some of the musicians in the scene as the sons or daughters I might have had if I'd gotten around to that in my 20s, but I'm okay with that too. Music is always a great bridge over the age barrier; we might not all be the same age, but we're all more or less in agreement about noise and surprisingly varied in our non-noise music tastes. Justin Fritsche of Grandpa Lies Again drove us to the set we played last week at Trailer Space Records, and we had R.E.M.'s OUT OF TIME playing the whole way there. This this time on the way, it was drone and noisecore bands (imagine a series of brief bursts of noise and howling.). For people playing such a supposedly monochromatic form of music, we sure do listen to a lot of different stuff in just about every genre imaginable, and some that probably aren't. 

One of the things I like best about these shows is being in the houses of other people. Houses are kind of a novelty to me; the last time I lived in a house was 1983, and since then all my living has been done in small two-room apartments. The largest place I've lived since I moved out at 18 was 880 square feet. For many years now I've been living in places around 525-545 square feet; the current place is 535, I think. So being in houses, with so many more rooms and much more room to move around, is a nice departure from living in a shoebox. It's also really fascinating to see the different knickknacks, books, and art on display in different houses. Residents leave interesting things lying around, and houses eventually take on a personality that reflects its owners, so there are always interesting things to see.

A lot of people -- especially people I date, as it often happens -- find the noise thing inexplicable. I can sympathize with that; it takes a special kind of person to stand around in a room watching pasty white dudes (and dudettes) use various gadgets and big amplifiers to make loud, horrible noises. But for people into it, the appeal of noise is largely rooted in the fact that it's a form of music that anyone can play, and its very simplicity leaves lots of room to do different, interesting things. All you need are some noise-making gadgets, maybe a microphone, and an amp or PA, and you're ready to go. Noise is the one form of music that requires absolutely no physical dexterity or knowledge of fancy chords and shit to play. If you can turn pedals on and off, you can do it. Of course, with such a simple starting point, the real talent is in making versions of noise that sound different. That's more about imagination and picking the right equipment than being able to play conventional music with rules and scales and all that hoohah. 

It's also about tone. Noise shares with free jazz the attention to actual tones, sounds, and improvisational skills, and some bands (including Korperschwache, to a degree) are essentially free jazz bands with distortion pedals. This is the kind of music where how it sounds, how you got that sound, and what you do with that sound, are all way more important than anything as dull as actually knowing the "right" way to play something. Tone is especially important to Korperschwache live, especially during the guitar feedback parts.

The band's output varies wildly in style (although always with at least some noise content, and often really, really slow), but Korperschwache live is strictly about the relationship between a boy and his guitar, with a really loud amplifier involved. The amplifier in question is a 120-watt Crate that is very, very, *very* loud, especially in small contained spaces. It is turned all the way up. The guitar is a cheap Epiphone Les Paul knockoff that is very, very loud, holds much tone-shaping potential when turned all the way up. The amplifier vibrates so much that I can't leave anything sitting it on it, because it will vibrate across the amp and onto the floor. It vibrates so much that the floor and walls shake. All this happens while the guitar (laid out on a floor monitor or something similar) is feeding back at a volume that would drown out a fire alarm or, when actually played, emitting bass-heavy sonic waves or high-pitched wailing. Due to a bad back, over the years I've gotten used to playing all shows sitting on one corner of that amp, and when the guitar is playing, it's like sitting on the world's loudest vibrator.

While playing at this volume I often reach a surprisingly meditative state. The more I play live, the more I wish I could play this loud for fifteen minutes every day as a form of meditation. Maybe when I have real $$$ again I'll rent a lockout space at Music Lab and do just that.

p is for power monster

Power Monster -- NTH DEGREE cs [Industrial Collapse Productions]

Limited to 25 copies

Finally, a full-length release from Austin's other queen of noise, Alexandra Pharmakadis. Ali has been pretty regular about playing shows around Austin (she's in Providence at the moment, bumming out the locals), but this is only her second release in oodles of years, after a 2010 3-inch cdr. This cassette is a short (under thirty minutes) but potent avalanche of straight-up ugly power electronics, all crunchy walls of noise and screechy pedal-fu. The first side is one long track, "Enmity," which is a slow-motion avalanche of grossed-out noise hell, crunchy grinding ugliness that sort of passes for a rhythm, and bursts of harsh screeching and signifying of rusting mechanical filth. This is the sound of things being blown up and replayed in slo-mo while drenched in overmodulated deathfuzz. OOOO SO SUPER FUCKING CRUNCHIES

The flip side of the tape is pretty happening, too, with two songs, one ("Entropy") fairly long, the other ("End") pretty short. "Entropy" isn't quite as violent and far-ranging as the first side's epic, but it's super-crunchy and tinnitus-inducing, with harsh tones like someone frantically scraping blackboards with shards of broken plastic. Le super uglinesses happening here! So rude it will make your eyes water. This is the sound of metal being mulched. MMM MMMMMM YUMMY NOISE NOMS

The cassette's final minutes are taken up by "End," in which ass-shaking reverb and waves of noise that come and go, insinuating a vastness to the unseen arena from which these noises erupt like strafing waves of anti-aircraft fire. I greatly approve. This is noisy filth for the sake of filth, just the way I like my open acts of antisocial vandalism. Bonus points for boobies on the cover.

PWRMNSTR on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/pwrmnstr

s is for sky burial

Sky Burial -- PAS THE SARVERING GALLACK SEAS AND FLAMING NEBYUL EYE [Obfuscated Records]

Sky Burial's latest release, with a cryptic title taken from a line in Russell Hoban's dystopian novel RIDDLEY WALKER, builds on the expansion of sound and ideas found on the previous release THERE I SAW THE GREY WOLF GAPING. Spearheaded by Michael Page and originally intended as a dark-ambient counterpart to his industrial / noise project Fire In The Head, Sky Burial's sound has gradually morphed over the years into something far more complex than mere dark ambient drone, a notion made obvious by the first track, "Na Fir Ghorm," which announces itself with a burst of keyboard notes swaddled in ping-pong delay and a scratchy rhythm that eventually resolves into long keyboard drones and a synth-driven sound reminiscent of early Tangerine Dream. Piper Craig McFarlane and Nocturnal Emissions sound-sculptor Nigel Ayers also contribute to the sonic tapestry, which winds and unfolds into layers of sound that rise and fall against the bedrock drone. The title track, whose drone center is leavened with cryptic sounds from Page and several collaborators (John Balistreri of Slogun and Self, Pentti Dassum of Umpio and The Kali Ensemble, and the mysterious Stargazer's Assistant), is a bit closer to Sky Burial's original aesthetic -- plenty of unearthly sounds processed from unidentifiable sources, some rhythmic and some textural, all flowing through and around a dark cosmic drone.

The next two tracks -- "Vessel" and "The Longest Day Heralds The Darkness To Follow" -- take up the bulk of the album, with each one in the neighborhood of twenty minutes. "Vessel" begins with deep, bleak drones from the blackest realms of space, but that ominous sound is eventually augmented by elements of sparse, clattering percussion and high-pitched keyboard wailing, then by looped cyclotron sounds and a wide variety of shifting keyboard textures that keep the lengthy piece from ever becoming static. The next track continues the motif of the interstellar drone, but adds more rhythmic elements and an edgier sense of dissonance, along with intermittent explosions of sound just to keep you on your toes. The final track, "Fuligin Cloak," is a stacked ensemble of keyboard drones constructed with assistance from Andrew Grant (aka The Vomit Arsonist, whose name conjures up images you would probably never wish to have floating around in your skull). Those majestic drones are peppered with the audio equivalent of cosmic stardust, and the sound that results is as elegiac as they are haunting.

As always with Sky Burial, not only is the album itself excellent, but the packaging is worthy of its own attention. The disc comes in a beautiful spot-laminated digipak with original photography by Daniel Page, and its overall design is simple but elegant, with blue and white hues that nicely complement the album's mysterious, ethereal feel. Another essential purchase for the discerning dronehead.

Sky Burial

Obfuscated Records

f is for flaming fire

A wee piece written for the liner notes of the forthcoming new album by Flaming Fire:

FLAMING FIRE

Flannery O'Connor reinterpreted for Greek theater, pagan Americana by way of the bar room singers from THE WICKER MAN, unconventional spirituality channeled through pop music… these peculiar juxtapositions of genre and intent go a long way toward explaining how impossible it is to easily explain the phenomenon that is Flaming Fire, a musical collective from New York who combine elements of baroque music, Greek theater, performance art, and a traveling tent revival to create one of the most unique groups currently passing as pop music. Led by eccentric musical polymath / preacher man Patrick Hambrecht and a revolving cast of participants (too many to even begin to keep track of, although his wife Kate and Lauren Weinstein remain regular players), their sound owes much to the seventies new wave / post-punk era, inviting comparisons to off-kilter bands like Devo, Gang of Four, Romeo Void, and the Residents, just to name a few. What separates them from the rest of the pack is their lyrical focus on spiritual concerns, couched in a peculiar form of pagan Christianity steeped in the kind of archetypes and apocalyptic signposts common to Flannery O'Connor's vision of the South. Like O'Connor, their visions of the Holy Spirit are not without a certain level of black humor and irony -- reflected most intensely in the brilliant "Kill The Right People" and the equally creepy "Goddess of War" -- and while their approach is oblique and unsettling enough to make one initially wonder just how serious they are about anything (much less religion), they are certainly no strangers to the concept that a great and unknowable mystery is at the center of all religion.

While the band's religious underpinnings are unquestionably a focal point of their sound and vision, unlike a lot of God-centric bands, they have never allowed it to overshadow the music; they've never denied their spiritual roots, but they've never made a big deal of it, either. It just it is, present for you to take it or leave it. Their pagan take on Christianity -- strange as it may be for a leader who grew up in the Southern Baptist church -- makes it considerably more accessible for those creeped out by the more conventional (and judgmental) brand of evangelical Christianity common to most Christian bands. It also helps immensely that their lyrics are unencumbered by the tedious and predictable dogma of most Christian bands, and that the band's revolving roster includes members who don't even share Hambrecht's religious views. Their surreal pageantry, best compared to a psychedelic form of Greek theater, lends yet another layer of spectacle to their epic performance art.

Of course, the band's memorable songs, built around catchy beats and melodies and anchored by beatific singing, make it entirely possible to appreciate the band without even agreeing with (or paying attention to) their lyrics. Certainly the jaw-dropping spectacle of their whacked-out live shows provides plenty of entertainment even for those totally uninterested in their spiritual side, and this is the diabolical genius of the band's existence: the way they have couched their message and their belief in such a deceptively festive and theoretically ironic manner means that they are able to appeal even to those ideologically opposed to their entire existence. It doesn't hurt that they have been consistently listenable for over more than a decade as a band, with a thematically consistent vision that has not wavered despite a revolving door of players. One can only hope that the band will be plying their subversive form of theological performance art for another decade to come.

c is for cassette culture

Yeah, what he said: 

CASSETTE ANARCHY NOW!

HEARING: ZZ Top -- TRES HOMBRES 

READING: Ed McBain -- THE LAST DANCE