SOUNDTRACK: GARCIA PEOPLES-Hear Here Presents (2020).
Sometimes it takes a band you like to introduce you to something you didn’t know about.
Like Hear Here Presents, a non-profit studio in Wisconsin that records bands in a small setting with great audio quality. And there are some fantastic bands (and yes, many many more that I haven’t heard of) on their page.
The band just released their session from this live show on bandcamp.
Back in January, Garcia Peoples went into the studio at Hear Here Presents for a session.
I’m not sure how long the sessions usually are, but this one runs about 35 minutes and consists of two songs.
Up first is what they are calling “Hear Here Jam.” It’s 12 plus minutes of a jamming instrumental. It’s impression how tight these guys are that they can improv for 12 minutes and not only not step on each others toes, but actually make a composition that sounds interesting.
There’s a raging guitar section at around three minutes and an impressive build to a peak around 8 minutes before finishing up a few minutes later. Having the three guitar of Tom Malach, Danny Arakaki, and Derek Spaldo allows for terrific interplay and a depth of sound.
That depth of sound is really evident on the second song, which opens with the introduction to “One Step Beyond.” Of course, before they start that, there’s some tuning to be done, with some snippets of recognizable riffs: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, “Hey Joe,” “Sweet Child of Mine.”
But once everyone is ready, it’s down to business. It’s fun picking out which guitars are playing what in the complex intro to “One Step.” It’s impressive the way the three guitars can keep the looping melody original and changing while bassist Andy Cush more or less take a lead role.
It’s also important to keep an eye (or an ear) on drummer Cesar Arakaki because he can keep a beat and keep it from being dull as well.
Then after nine and a half minutes of intro, the band shifts gears into the rocking “Feel So Great,” a terrific song with a fantastic musical bridge. Ringing guitars and a super cool bass line propel the song before the chill chorus.
Not content to let a short, catchy song end their set, they proceed to stretch of “Feel So Good” starting around 15 minutes. Multi-instrumentalist Pat Gubler trades his keyboard for flute as the psychedelia commences. After some raging guitar work up until about twenty minutes, the band slows things down to ring to a close.
The only thing disappointing about this set is that when the song is over, you can hear them talking and someone says, “we can do another one,: just as the audio cuts out. What else did they play????
[READ: September 24, 2020] We All Die Naked [an excerpt]
During the COVID Quarantine, venerable publisher Hingston & Olsen created, under the editorship of Rebecca Romney, a gorgeous box of 12 stories. It has a die-cut opening to allow the top book’s central image to show through (each book’s center is different). You can get a copy here. This is a collection of science fiction stories written from 1836 to 1998. Each story imagines the future–some further into the future than others. As it says on the back of the box
Their future. Our present. From social reforms to climate change, video chat to the new face of fascism, Projections is a collection of 12 sci-fi stories that anticipated life in the present day.
About this story, Romney writes
[In 1896] Svante Arrhenius first calculated the increase in Earth’s surface temperature caused by increases in industrial carbon production — what we now know as the greenhouse effect. … As far as I know, James Blish is the first science-fiction writer to imagine an apocalypse caused by climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. It’s a biting satire, simultaneously bleak and gregarious, that catches the characters on the brink of catastrophe through climate change.
To me, this story felt a little preachy. But then, I’m reading it after fifty years of this kind of story already existing. I imagine it was pretty impactful back in the era of Silent Spring (if sci-fi ever had an impact on anything). And, indeed, it’s still pretty impactful given how many things he gets right.
The protagonist, Alexei-Aub Kehoe Salvia Sun-Moon-Lake Stewart, Sa. D., is forty and set in his ways. He is the General President of Local 802 of the International Brotherhood of Sanitation Engineers.
Blish was eerily prescient to 2020 in one aspect of the story
Adjusting his mask–no matter how new a mask was, it seemed to let in more free radicals from the ambient air every day–he put the thought aside and prepared to enjoy his stroll and his lunch.
But some things are more grim. The roads around Times Square, Wall Street and Rockefeller Center are all canals.
Flatlands like Brooklyn…were of course, completely flooded, which was probably just as well, for the earthquakes had been getting worse there lately.
He lived in a fifth floor apartment, the only habitable floor of what had once been a moderately expensive apartment building in the Chelsea district. He had to canoe to work and to visit friends.
Alex meets with his friend Fantastia ad Parnassum. Fan is fabulously wealthy for (among other things) inventing a
container for beer which, when the bottle was empty, combined with smog and dissolved down to its base to leave behind a cup containing one more swallow of beer, after which the base itself turned into counter polish.
Fan tells Alex that the world is coming to an end (again). Fan warns about the world’ junk problem becoming untenable. But Alex is on the front lines of this. He knows what’s going on and they are…managing.
Blish put some statistics onto the store, which I’m curious how true they are. In 1938, 35 million tons of glass bottles, jugs, and plastic containers: “indigestible, unreclaimable, nonburnable or otherwise indefeasible objects were discarded. By 1969, the rate was three quarters of a ton per year for every man, woman and child in the country, and was increasing by 4 percent per year.”
Then he projects:
By 1989 the total for the year had reached 311 million tons. None of it had ever gone away. The accumulation — again, in the United States alone– was 7,141,950,000 tons.
The next day he was to meet with Secretary de Tohil Vaca whose office was on the top floor of the Pan Am building [in 2020, it’s the MetLife building].
The building itself still sat over the vast septic tank which had once been Grand Central Station.
Alex and the secretary have always been at loggerheads as to who wielded the most power. At this meeting the Secretary believes he has the upper hand. He informs Alex that they have
tipped the geological scales against us. The planet is breaking up … and the world will be effectively uninhabitable before the next ten years have passed.
Alex says he is aware of the planet breaking up. That the Brooklyn earthquakes have been caused by residuum deep-well disposal.
Back around 1950, some private firms began disposing of liquid wastes by injection into deep wells–mostly chemical companies and refineries. Most of the wells, didn’t go down more than six-thousand feet and the drillers went to a lot of trouble not to get the involved with the water table. Everybody liked the idea at the time because it was an alternative to dumping into rivers and so on.
But then the army drilled one twelve thousand feet down near Denver. They started pumping in 1962 and a month later, after only about four million gallons had gone down, Denver had its first earthquake in eighty years. After that, the tremors increased or decreased exactly in phase with the pumping volume. There’s even a geological principle to explain it, called the Hubert-Rubey Effect.
He says once you cap the wells, the planet will settle down.
But the Secretary has worse news. It’s the greenhouse effect. The Artic Ice cap is already gone. This has changed the balance of the earth’s crust which means the the earth’s axis is no longer in equilibrium.
If you melt the ice and distribute its mass as water evenly all over the globe, where does that energy go?
It shows up as heat. Lots of heat.
And since they can’t extract carbon dioxide from the air. They expect fourteen months, tops.
We’ve changed the climate and that’s that.
It’s a little preachy for sure, but wow, what a compelling story. I wonder how it ends?
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