It's been a few weeks since the show at the Church in McGolrick Park. Nevertheless, it's an event that I'm more than happy to take a look back at. It helps even more when you've got photographers like Rez Avissar to remind you how special of an evening it was. His shots in this phenomenal set that truly captures the cozy, communal spirit of the evening. Hats off to Rez.
Liam the Younger
Alex Bleeker and the Mountain Man Singers
Mountain Man
Eating moon rocks for breakfast and drinking syzurp for lunch may not be listed in the food pyramid as a balanced diet, but don't tell KGB Man, the subterranean alter ego of Dan Lopatin from Oneohtrix Point Never. Where OPN dwells in digital frequencies and the space station hum, KGB Man is right up in the club, shaking his dick on whoever the hell is next to him, probably pouring tranquilized cocktails down your girlfriend's ass crack. Think I'm kidding? Peep this mix KGB Man recently did for LIST. Not just a remix fiend, KGB Man produces his own brand of tweak yr brain club pop, and "Touch of Slime" is sure to do that. Don't say I didn't warn you.
While I've mentioned a few highlights from the Chocolate Bobka Church show a few weeks back, I've failed to mention No Demons Here's opening set, which set the tone for an amazing evening of acoustic slumber punk and hymnal folk. Luka Usmiani, the guy behind the moniker, has been crafting slow burning songs more akin to chemical fires than pop songs under the name No Demons Here for a while, all while playing bass in the live incarnations of Fluffy Lumbers and Big Troubles. His tape Boy Eaten By Thing In Water is one of three that I picked up this summer at the UP Showcase, and has been in consistently high rotation on the night stand cassette deck ever since. "Ten songs of not knowing what to do" and a side long sound collage find NDH dwelling in a burnt out bedroom in the bunker of an old fallout shelter. (Picture a charcoaled version of the home from the Brendan Frasier/ Christopher Walken movie Blast from the Past.)
A quarter pound of green beans, six candy canes and enough beers consumed for my parents to reconsider "creating" me, I came home last night, the eve of the birth of the little baby Jesus, to find the Underwater Peoples Winter Review nestled in my cozy inbox. It was drapped in swaddling clothes...whatever the fuck those are.
Ray Concepcion capturing Mountain Man at the Chocolate Bobka Church show two weeks ago. Amazing.
2009 was a big year for Kurt Vile. While shredding out with the Violators seems to be his prerogative these days, lately I've been returning to a live set captured by guys at Fan Death Records this past April at the label's annual DNA Fest in Washington DC. The Fan Death guys, who know a thing or two about Kurt Vile, said "as far as live recordings go, this is the holy grail..(so far...)." After four months of listening to this set over and over, I can wholeheartedly agree. It's a must own, and finds Kurt playing solo acoustic versions of soon-to-be-classics from Constant Hitmaker, God is Saying This to You and Childish Prodigy. In twenty years, your going to lie and tell your kids you were at this show.
Bogged down by a debilitating head cold, radioactive loogies jumping from out my throat, my head space is more than a bit congested. Sort of like when your flying and the pressure makes your ears pop, and then hep-C yellow goo starts flowing from your nasal cavity. It's nasty. Last night, hunkering down with There Will Be Blood, b-more buds and sound collagists Happy Family and Run DMT sent over a new mix they've been collaborating on. Less stoner QVC samples, more guitar droners eventually leading to chopped and screwed pulses and rhythmic spurts of fluttering songs played a million miles away. Going really well with a diet of bee pollen, tea, vitamin-C and the good herb. Sort of like Big Troubles "Sick Days", this one's got NyQuil in its veins. 
Deep inside the freak labs at Olde English Spelling Bee some serious Frankenstonian tweaker shit is going down. Besides expanding its web presence/digital footprint to its new blog/site, the higher ups at the perpetually zonked label are also set to issue another set of killer records this week, specifically a limited edition vinyl reissue of Grippers Nother Onesers (At Slimer Beach), which you may recognize as Lamborghini Crystal's 1992 Cool Runnings Holiday, which you may attribute to a certain dude who releases about 15 albums a year. Dedicated to Richard Ramirez, the vibe on Grippers is transmitted via a possessed transistor radio hell bent on scoring premium laced Sherm and hitting the town in search of the best Ice Cream-Pizza combo deal around, or as Lamborghini Crystal puts it, "I wanted the record to have the feeling of when you find a half empty bottle of anti-psychotics and just see the name of the owner and you wonder where that person is now." Tweak on.
Wafting digital sound waves in the dark are Oneohtrix Point Never's specialty. OPN reigns over the sci-fi fantasy realm of dark places and dark planets, crafting the sort of digitized mechanical hum I'd expect to hear coming from the control room on a spaceship docked just east of Neptune. Appropriately, the video, directed by Olde English Spelling Bee mastermind, and renowned man of mystery, Todd Ledford, compliments the song so much that together the two feel more like the pre-roll credits for a Blade Runner prequel than a music video, which I'm pretty sure is exactly what OPN (and Todd) were going for. "Time Decanted" can be found on the Russian Mind LP on No Fun Productions, as well as the Rifts 2xCD on No Fun Productions, where it's titled "Actual Air."
By now its apparent how much I love the songs of Marissa Nadler. Little Hells, her latest record on Kemado, seems criminally overlooked this year, despite great reviews, extensive touring and a masterful step forward in both her songwriting and production. Sort of makes me wonder, What if P4K had bundled that 8.1 with a BNM? Either way, like most of Nadler's output, its a daunting affair, one that resonates strongly with grey skies and dead leaves. There aren't too many records this year that I'd say are must owns, but this is one of them. Grab her entire back catalog, if you can, it's well worth it.
Anyway, a few weekends ago, on a cold dreary night in Brooklyn, Ray Concepcion headed down to the haunting Union Hall to capture Nadler in all her haunting beauty. The audio from this intimate set is extraordinary, as Concepcion bottles the essence of the Union Hall basement, filled with flora and fauna, taxidermy, and the piercing eyes of Grandmothers long since gone, through soft focus and a peephole perspective, sort of the visual equivalent of the way Willa Cather paints her novella A Lost Lady.
Molly from Mountain Man sent me a few tracks from San Francisco's Yes Please a couple days ago and they couldn't be more appropriate given the nature of tomorrows Holiday. Playful, earnest and introspective, Yes Please is the (former?) folk project of Lily from Grass Widow. While her more current act dwells in poppy girl group melodies and jangle fuzz, Yes Please is more akin to the trinkets that adorn window sills around the globe; glimpses of times spent with friends, ex-lovers, and books, the sort of intrinsically good stuff that can, for lack of a better term, turn that frown upside down. While certain songs invoke the sylvan wordplay of Joanna Newsome, Yes Please is most certainly a bedroom project, which finds Lily experimenting with anything she can get her hands on; loop pedals, toy guitars, the sounds passing by on the street. Her looping is majestic, invoking the spirit world much in the way Julianna Barwick does, though within a more traditional folk structure. Fans of Merrill Garbus, you will like this.
Going to be a special evening. Bring blankets, yoga mats to sit on. Baked goods will be sold on the premises. BYOB. Click here to see a large scale, beautiful rendering of the work, done by Mike Mahon.
Breaking down the walls of retransmission, it was a must to beam Julian Lynch into Monkeytown during CMJ. Fortunately, the needed technologies are embedded in laptop machines we carry in over-the-shoulder bags and so, presenting Julian Lynch live from the his bedroom floor in Madison, Wisconsin wasn't that big a deal, technically speaking. It was, if anything, essential, a must, and even more so in retrospect, as Julian's cosmic raga pixelated the air in the room until all we could see were molecules and molecules made up of molecules. This is what I imagine lucid dreaming to be.
For various reasons (stage fright, lack of funds, schizophrenia) some bands don't tour. Candy Claws, the Ft. Collins, Colorado collective, fall into that category, but I think it's because some of them are working on completing their studies, which is hard to knock, cause you know, you gots to be smart to dominate the game. (OK, I've officially been watching The Wire way too much.) While Candy Claws usually dabble in the sort of bedroom tomfuckery that can be extremely difficult to translate live, this live tour video finds the group stripping down, bringing a whispy, acoustic dream vibe to the transformative "Catamaran." Truth is, Candy Claws are in the midst of a virtual tour. In their own words:
This tour shall happen online, in the form of videos posted to music blogs of different cities and towns across the entire planet. The first ten dates will feature live footage of acoustic versions of each song on the album. The last ten dates will debut brand new music videos for each song.The band was nice enough to "fly" cross country in the middle of the night, losing sleep in the time zones, to play at Bobka Headquarters in Greenpoint, BK this morning. In all honesty, the acoustic version of "Catamaran" is exactly what I wanted to wake up to this morning. All the coy, LSD-25 saccharine sheen one could ask for on a cold, windy Thursday morning. Double exposure never felt so good at 9am. Candy Claws virtual tour continues tomorrow in Boston, when they "play" OnAFriday.com.
Young fuzz devotees and Geocities enthusiasts Big Troubles have only played a handful of shows since their inception in late July, yet they've managed to damage the ear canal's of at least two dozen attendees, which, I guess, is sort of the point. These guys don't know the definition of "too loud," and if the sound guy at Cameo Gallery had known this he probably wouldn't have said "the guitars are still too loud." Everyone in the room could've agreed, but instead, they laughed it off, popped in ear plugs and let Alex Craig and Ian Drennen, backed by Luka Usmani and Sam Franklin, speed up our inevitable deafness. No saxophone solos or doo-wop vocal arrangements here, just delectable melodies ensconced in enough distortion to blow all the wax out your ears.
