Heartwarming or Creepy, You Decide (note: there's only one right answer)

And here I thought you had to drive your Humvee over something unpleasant to end up a "flat soldier." Guess I was wrong.

"Where's Flat Daddy?"

[shiver] Hopefully nowhere the fuck near me. This is giving me flashbacks to when, as a kid too young to even know who KISS were, I inherited a huge cardboard cutout of the band. I don't know how many consecutive nights it took of these rock 'n roll heroes scaring the living piss out of me before they were ejected from my room, but I'll tell you it wasn't many. Easily countable on one hand. Or perhaps even on one torso (for the more corrugated among us).

Faggots of the world, unite

Reading the City Paper cover story ("Shell of a Town," about College Park) last night, I was overwhelmed with pride by the following passage (please note the context in which the f-word is used if it makes you uncomfortable):

There was a faggot sighting just the night before. Shortly after the bars’ closing time, a student was walking along nearby Princeton Avenue when a car drove by. According to Prince George’s County police, the driver called the student a faggot. The student kicked the car. The driver stopped the car, grabbed a crowbar, and attacked the student. They both ended up at the hospital. The faggot apparently put up a good fight.

Bless him. Any reaction that might make a casual verbal abuser think twice before shooting his mouth off in the future is a noble endeavor. Awarding him with a trip to the hospital and/or the body shop is just icing on the cake. But faggots, please: let's not get ourselves attacked with lethal weapons if we can avoid it. We're all worth more intact.

Joy of Toy redux

Fellow toy piano concert attendee David found this brief video clip of Isabel Ettanauer's performance. You'll notice that also on the page is a link that says, "Next Video: Sex Musem." Go ahead and click on that.

Overheard on the Pennsylvania Turnpike

So a friend and I are driving from my parents' house to Philly last night, and there's construction on the turnpike. Two lanes of traffic are crawling along equally at a negligent speed. Fortunately, we were paired with, if not the most amusing driver in the whole state at the time, at least the most colorful on the pike. For sure. Mid-late 30s man with what appeared to be a couple of daughters (tween or younger). This man was very upset about the construction, and was very vocal about it for at least a half hour. So while tailgating the car in front of him (we're all moving at 3-5mph) and once even flashing his high beams when it didn't move up fast enough, he spouted the following quotes with his windows wide open:

"IDIOTS!!!" (multiple times. many times. in various permutations, often audible from two or three car-lengths away. he's referring here, apparently to the entire crew of PennDoT for not posting a sign about the construction on the on-ramp.)

"I didn't pay to be inconvenienced!"

(and the kicker, again directed at everyone involved in any way, shape, or form with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation) "Bunch of white-trash negroes!"

No, I didn't make that up or mistype it. My fingers are too adept for the latter, and my mind is not amazingly awesome enough for the former. I must say that, without making any assumptions based on skin color, dress, hairstyle, or type of car, there might be a wee bit of irony in there somewhere.

It was pretty black and white in person, too

Pics from our Long Beach show recently posted on the Razorcake online zine...

The Joy of Toy

I spent my Tuesday evening at the Austrian embassy taking in a performance of Austrian pianist Isabel Ettenauer. In the past five year's, she's positioned herself as the world's premiere toy pianist, and her performance included four toy pianos, a grand piano, and "tape" (it's 2006, so actually compact discs). Good fun was had by all. She played John Cage's "Suite For Toy Piano," which is the earliest piece written for the instrument (1948) as well as a number of contemporary works written specifically for her. I picked up her cd The Joy of Toy, which is worth checking out - either through her website or through, um, a friend who might own it.

A saint he ain't

Actually, the latter 2/3 of Chavez's UN speech is pretty good. He highlighted the fact that the US (and others) sat conspicuously on their hands while Israel destroyed a neighboring country for absolutely no reason, and that the UN too often serves as a venue for an American dog-and-pony show whenever a thin veneer of pseudo-legitimacy for the crime du jour becomes politically unavoidable. And I think he is, in a way, serious about internationalism. But until he stops cozying up to every anti-American autocrat he stumbles across on his self-promoting trots across the globe and jettisons his own authoritarian tendencies, I won't consider him much more than a vessel for my skepticism.

I could mention that Chavez has actually done some good for the average Venezuelan, and that calling Bush a devil on his home turf is at least as amusing as it is goofy... but if I start to get too even-handed, the above pictorial editorial (which I conceived in an intense five-second brainstorm) will begin to...

lose air?






All week. I'll be here all week.

selected sounds vol. i

As promised, I'm going to try to start doing some record reviews here, and this is the inaugural installment. I'll probably stick to new-ish stuff, but who knows.

AGALLOCH Ashes Against the Grain

It's fitting to start off the review series with this release; it's my front-runner for album of the year. This is a metal record, but it's proabably not what you think. The band name and the overall aesthetic are suggestive of black metal, but, aside from the vocals (most of which are in the classic raspy BM vein), these guys can't be pigeonholed that way. The term they use on their website is "dark metal," which does the trick well, though I can't rattle off any other bands in that particular subgenre. The best description I can give is that large chunks of this record sound like Mono covering Cult of Luna with black metal vocals on top. Other bits sound like power metal on cough syrup. And there is one with a traditional 6/8 black metal feel. Anyway, the songs are long and generally slow (not doom-y slow, but slow) and effortlessly epic. It's just one great riff after another without any of that self-conscious "here's six minutes of a quiet part leading to three minutes of a REALLY LOUD part" stuff. If the first guitar riff in the first 30 seconds of the first track doesn't hook you, don't waste your time with the rest of the album. What makes this such a great record is that multiple songs have multiple memorable riffs, and the band understands that there's no such thing as playing a great riff too many times.

And did I mention that this is catchy as hell? Major indie-rocker crossover potential (in fact, it already got a glimmering review on Pitchfork). Along with a handful of ep's, this is actually the band's third full-length, though I haven't heard any of their earlier stuff (and I don't yet own a hard copy of this one, yikes! I'm trying to avoid that with these reviews). I would particularly like to encourage those of you (uh, all of you?) who aren't big metal fans to give this a chance. You won't like the vocals, but they're pretty sparse anyway. If you can't get into this record at all, then there's probably no hope for you.

Oh yeah - these guys are from Portland, OR, and really like mountains and trees and stuff like that.

Sonic Circuits DC

DC's annual experimental music fest is comin' up. I saw only one show last year; I intend to hit all of them this year. The SCDC website is almost entirely devoid of information, but the Warehouse, which will serve as this year's venue, features a current schedule of performances on its site.

Let them eat asphalt

Seriously . . . the Segway is the dumbest invention of the last decade. Maybe that's not fair: able-bodied people who have bought Segways are the dumbest people of the last decade. Seems now the machine can suddenly shift into reverse, causing serious injury to the rider and, additionally, dampness in the drawers of those fortunate enough to witness it. I now regret even more never having been chased by one of those chump Segway-mounted MPD officers. I saw another one today in Union Station. Definitely a great tool in high-foot-traffic areas. Well done, Chief "Dude, Where's My Car?" Ramsey. I bet the Segway cops are able to catch up to 50% of criminals too stupid to, I don't know, run up or down a step.

Remember how I said you can't fool the market?

Here's some "logic" you might want to sit down before contemplating.

No rest for the clever

After purchasing Banksy's newest compendium for my young (and hopefully impressionable) cousin a few weeks ago, my appreciation of his work deepened significantly. Since then, he's punk'd Paris and now Disneyland. More power to him.

In a bit of irony one should have seen coming a mile away, the alternative Paris CD's he distributed, in a hip ltd. ed. run of 500, started hitting eBay almost immediately. There's currently one going for $400 with four days left. I saw another one last week listed for a flat price of $2,200. You can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool the market!

Danger: helmets!

The double-edged sword of head protection.

Music for people

I don't think I've linked them here before, so I thought I'd turn your attention to an mp3 blog called Music For Robots. Some college friends of mine have been at it for a couple years now and have established themselves as a significant site in the genre. The postings are daily and come with varying degrees of written description. A lot of the music they cover falls into two camps, neither of which does much for me, to be honest: dance-oriented electronic music and what I would call upwardly-mobile indie rock. I have heard some good stuff there though.

downunder rapwonder

Macromantics is easily my favorite female Australian rapper. Ok, ok, that doesn't do her justice; she can easily hold her own outside of Kangarooland. Her vocal approach can be roughly described as a more mature Lady Sovereign if Lady Sovereign actually had anything to say (though the fact that she doesn't does not keep this blogger from being a fan of her pablum). I have her self-released cd Hyperbolic Logic and a remix 7" thanks to the good folks at aQ. I just learned that she's dropping her first proper album in a couple weeks and it will be brought to the North American masses via Kill Rock Stars, though this doesn't appear to have been officially announced on the KRS site.

You can head over to her myspace page to listen to the first single from the record plus another song that I'm guessing is on it as well, as it's not on the cd I have. Apparently there will be one track that features none other than Sage Francis. The new stuff is more produced than her self-released jam and may consequently lack some of the endearing quirkiness of her early stuff. Regardless, I'm a fan and am happy to help spread the word. And hey: she's vegan, at least somewhat political, and, according to her myspace, a huge black metal fan. \m/

Black and White and Red all over

The following is cribbed directly from the homepage of Stephen O'Malley (SunnO))) et al.). Amazing. I wonder how microscopically small my chances are of ever seeing one of these in person. Pictures follow the text.

In the USSR and Eastern Europe in the 1950s underground night spots would play music pirated from the west. The only media they had were recorders etched into discarded X-ray film. I've long sought some images. Researcher Camille Cloutier pointed me to these, collected and posted by József Hajdú. Here's what he says about them:

During the late 1930s and early 1940s the prevalent sound recording apparatus was the wax disk cutter. As a consequence of the lack of materials in the war-time economy, some inventive sound hunters made their own experiments with new materials within their reach.

I do not know the name of the inventor who first utilized discarded medical X-ray film as the base material for new record discs; however, the method became so widespread in Hungary that not only amateurs, but the Hungarian Radio made sound recordings on such recycled X-ray films.

I felt that those X-ray record albums relate to our contemporary lives in many ways, especially when considering such terms as 'multimedia' or 'recycling'. I copied the X-ray films with their engraved sound-grooves on photosensitive paper and made enlargements of certain details.

I was quite lucky to find a considerable amount of similar sound records in private collections. These are also interesting from the visual aspect. By utilizing different photographic processes, I created from them pictures meant to be exhibited in galleries.


In an online paper called The Historical Political Development of Soviet Rock Music, Trey Drake, at the University of California, Santa Cruz offers further historical perspective on this street use of technology:

Owing to the lack of recordings of Western music available in the USSR, people had to rely on records coming through Eastern Europe, where controls on records were less strict, or on the tiny influx of records from beyond the iron curtain. Such restrictions meant the number of recordings would remain small and precious. But enterprising young people with technical skills learned to duplicate records with a converted phonograph that would "press" a record using a very unusual material for the purpose; discarded x-ray plates. This material was both plentiful and cheap, and millions of duplications of Western and Soviet groups were made and distributed by an underground roentgenizdat, or x-ray press, which is akin to the samizdat that was the notorious tradition of self-publication among banned writers in the USSR. According to rock historian Troitsky, the one-sided x-ray disks costed about one to one and a half rubles each on the black market, and lasted only a few months, as opposed to around five rubles for a two-sided vinyl disk. By the late 50's, the officials knew about the roentgenizdat, and made it illegal in 1958. Officials took action to break up the largest ring in 1959, sending the leaders to prison, beginning an orginization by the Komsomol of "music patrols" that later undertook to curtail illegal music activity all over the country.

Music Vs. The Volcano

Or maybe you already knew about data sonification?

From the "not that you care" dept.

According to the Sub Pop site, Wolf Eyes (who's, like, the biggest underground band in the world at the moment) has been covering a No Fucker song live. "So what!" you exclaim. "I come here to be amused, not confused!" Fair enough. I mention this only because No Fucker is one of only three established US bands that I know of doing the blown-out Japanese punk thing - the other two being Aghast and Lebenden Toten from Portland. (We did play with a band in Long Beach who was doing this style as well, but I think they're new and I forget their name anyway.) No Fucker is from Utica, NY, and take their name from the thanks list in some Discharge record where it just says "thanks to no fucker" (get it?). They're an odd combo: one dude who's 35-40 and three kids in the 17-22 neighborhood. (The older guy recently lost a battle with a power saw and, sadly, can't play guitar any more, though he still sings.) We've played shows with them in Utica, Albany, and Richmond. They ape the long-running Japanese band Disclose, who in turn is Discharge worship with the distortion upped by a factor of 10. I like both bands a lot. Anyway, it's just odd to see such a small degree of separation between the world of Wolf Eyes/Sub Pop and our little uber-niche corner of the punk world.

Now, in fairness to you, the reader, I'll use this space to mention a couple of serial installments I've been thinking of laying down here that you might actually find enjoyable. One will be for reviews of new music I pick up. The other, which will be more labor-intensive (and hence, less likely to appear regularly, ha) would be a "my life in music" kind of thing, tracing what has been far and away the most important thread in my life from the age of four or five to the present. This may give you reason to stay tuned, even if you don't care about the likes of Wolf Eyes or No Fucker (your loss)...

Minimum Wage Studios, RVA

I took my camera with me to the studio when Aghast recorded in July. I didn't capture any moments from the actual recording process, but the studio itself (and a few objects just outside the door) proved to be excellent photo-fodder. I didn't mess with exposure times or alter any of these photos after the fact (photoshop, etc.) All blurred images are the result of my physically moving the camera as I was shooting. As usual, click on any pic for a larger version.

DRUM FORTRESS



SHRAVAN'S CORNER



HEADPHONES





ASSISTANT ENGINEERS



BLOODLESS SURGERY











HEADLESS SANTA WITH STUFFED DOBERMAN



MANNEQUIN

RIP in RVA

The Nanci Raygun is done. For now, at least. Aghast played our first show with our current lineup (second show ever) there in the summer of 2004 (first show ever was August 10, 2003 in Baltimore as a three-piece with our old bass player). We've since shared that stage with many good friends/bands.