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Archive for the ‘Magazines’ Category

Maile Meloy–“Ranch Girl” (New Yorker, October 16, 2000)

Posted in Acid Mothers Temple, Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., Babies, Cowboys, Cows, Death, Horses, Japanese Music, Kawabata Makoto, Maile Meloy, New Yorker, Sex, Sexism, Short Story, Violence, Virginity (Loss of), 河端一 on September 13, 2019| Leave a Comment »

amazSOUNDTRACK: KAWABATA MAKOTO [河端一]-INUI 2 (2000).

a1729275931_16Kawabata Makoto [河端一] is the guitarist and mastermind behind Acid Mothers Temple. The band is hugely prolific. But he still had time to record solo albums. Often times without any guitar.

This was Kawabata’s second solo LP, now available on bandcamp

INUI 2 was the first widely available solo CD by this prolific Japanese guitarist/composer/bearded guru. Known primarily for his recent work with oddballs Acid Mothers Temple, Kawabata’s career actually goes back to the late ’70s and spans many styles, including solo guitar improv, electronics, folk, and, of course, the deranged acid mayhem associated with the PSF scene. Performed entirely solo on violin, kemenje, zurna, electronics, sarangi, taiko, gong, water, bouzouki, cello, vibes, organ, and sitar, the four tracks that make up INUI 2 are perfectly executed dream-music, equal parts delicately floating and heavily droning. There’s also one all-too-short modal essay for bouzouki that is amazingly beautiful.

“Mou” (9:56) has a drone underpinning the song as he plays a quiet keyboard melody over the top.  About half way through the zurna comes in playing its somewhat harsh melody (although it is less harsh here).  This is a pretty cool chill out song.  [Instruments: Violin, kemenje, zurna, electronics].

“Meii” (11:02) is composed of slowly plucked sarangi strings.  They ring out loud and are accompanied by thumps on the taiko and occasional crashes of the gong. There is also a high pitched feedback/electronic sound that rings out form time to time.   About midway through the bowing become s a little wild and improvisational until it settles back down again.  [Instruments: Sarangi, taiko, gong, water].

“Shi” (3:47) is the ‘all too short” piece and I agree that it is too short.  It features a quietly plucked string melody on the bouzouki that is very pretty.  It has mild drones behind it.  About half way through the melody changes, a faster more deliberate style but still quiet and pleasing.  I could listen to this one for much much longer.  [Instruments: bouzouki, cello, vibe, organ].

“Kan” (14:18) starts as harsh electronic drone with occasional blips of hi frequency sounds.   It’s the first unpleasant sound on the disc.  Although after 2 and a half minutes, the string drones enter and smooth things over.  At some point a pulsing possibly, backwards recorded series of notes comes in to give the drone some drive.  [Instruments: bowed sitar, violin, electric sitar, electronics].

[READ: September 10, 2019] “Ranch Girl”

This brief story was collected in Meloy’s Half in Love.

It starts with the fatalistic sentence:

If you’re white and you’re not rich or poor but somewhere in the middle it’s hard to have worse luck than to be born a girl on a ranch.

The unnamed protagonist grew up the daughter of the foreman of the Ted Haskell Running H Ranch.  Haskell’s brand was a slanted H–she had seen it all her life and didn’t know an H was supposed to be upright until she went to school. (more…)

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Edwidge Dantiat–“Water Child” (New Yorker, September 11, 2000)

Posted in Acid Mothers Temple, Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., Audrey Ginestet, Babies, Edwidge Danticat, Haiti, Hospitals, Kawabata Makoto, Marriage Trouble, New Yorker, Nurses, Parenting, Short Story, 河端一 on September 12, 2019| Leave a Comment »

New_Yorker_September_11_2000-2015_02_20_13_56_46-1000x1400SOUNDTRACK: KAWABATA MAKOTO [河端一]-INUI 1 (2000).

a2061426618_16Kawabata Makoto [河端一] is the guitarist and mastermind behind Acid Mothers Temple.  The band is hugely prolific.  But he still had time to record solo albums.  Often times without any guitar.

This was Kawabata’s first solo LP, now available on bandcamp

from way back in 2000 (about 100 releases ago, in Kawabata terms). Originally released by the mighty SIWA label in a tiny, hand printed edition of 300, this has long been the most sought-after Kawabata item, pretty much impossible to track down without a wallet full of ebay slush funds. The music, as on all of Kawabata’s INUI series releases, is intensely personal and introspective, with long tracks built up of soft-focus layers of mid-fi violin, sarangi, oud, sitar, bouzouki, etc.

And that’s what this is.

The credits indicate that he plays violin, sarangi, oud, sitar, bouzouki, lyra, shou, nei, and sings.

There are three tracks.

“Shin” (11:09) is a quiet drone of him playing any or all of the instruments mentioned.  I like the middle eastern drone style paired with a kind of lead bowing improv.  The piece ends with a fifteen second moaning voice.  The voice is French film maker and musician Audrey Ginestet.

Tai (9:45) is combination of drones and plucked notes.  He sings a melody along with a bowed solo, making this song very calming.

Son (21:45) is nearly twenty minutes of unchanging drones.  It can really make you feel transcendent.  After about 16 minutes his voice comes in, echoing and distant.

This album is not for everyone, but it can certainly put you in a different head space.

[READ: August 15, 2019] “Water Child”

Nadine is a nurse.  She has moved to Brooklyn from Haiti and is living by herself.

The story opens wit her receiving a letter from her parents. It is positive and warm and asks her to call them.  Nadine wants to call but does not. For days and weeks.  But she reads the note several times a day, marveling at the lightness of the airmail paper.

Nadine ate lunch by herself.  A fellow nurse, Josette’s lunch began when Nadine’s ended and they crossed paths every day.  But their conversations were brief and functional. (more…)

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Philip Roth–“Re-Reading Saul Bellow” (New Yorker, October 9, 2000)

Posted in Book Reviews, Chicago, IL, Depressing, Essays, Funny (ha ha), James Joyce, Mike Doughty, New Yorker, Philip Roth, Racism, Religion, Saul Bellow, Soul Coughing on September 10, 2019| Leave a Comment »

yorkernSOUNDTRACK: SOUL COUGHING-“Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago” (1994).

soul cI really enjoyed Soul Coughing’s output, and Ruby Vroom stands out as a great debut.  They had a terrific blend of great music played behind a more or less spoken word.  The idea wasn’t unique, but they made it work as more than a gimmick.

The musicians of Soul Coughing were tremendous and Mike Doughty’s voice has a wonderful resonance for telling is offbeat/absurd stories/poems.

This track seems especially appropriate when talking about Saul Bellow.

Starting with rhythmic guitar chunks, an upright bass plays a very cool rising and falling bass run.  It sounds like modern noir.

Then Doughty tells us “a man drives a plane into the Chrysler building.”  It’s difficult to hear it now, but in 1994 it was simply a fantastical image.   The drums come in as the guitar starts making shapes and slashes of sounds.

The chorus is a rather boppy moment amid the noise as things slow down for the recited “Is Chicago is not Chicago.”

Then the bridge(s):

Saskatoon is in the room
Poulsbo is in the room
Bennetsville is in the room
Palmyra is in the roomKhartoum is in the room
Phnom Penh is in the room
Pyongyang is in the room
Cairo is in the room

The song ends with a wonderful cacophony of guitar scratches and drum beats that definitively ends the song without it having to end itself.

[READ: September 1, 2019] “Re-Reading Saul Bellow”

I decided to read this article because I like Philip Roth and because I have never read any Saul Bellow.  In fact, although Saul Bellow is a name I was familiar with, I wasn’t entirely sure what he had written. So I was pretty surprised to read that he wrote The Adventures of Augie March, which I had without a doubt heard of, but which I knew very little about.  I was also really surprised to find out that he was still alive when Roth wrote this esay (Bellow died in 2005).

Roth knew Bellow, of course, and Bellow had once told him that his Jewish heritage led him to doubt himself as a writer.  This was mainly because “our own WASP establishment, represented mainly by Harvard-trained professors considered a son of immigrant Jews unfit to write books in English.”

By the time he wrote Augie March, he was prepared to open not with a line like “I am a Jew, the son of immigrants,” but “I am an American, Chicago born.”

Roth summarizes a few of Bellow’s works and talks about how he progressed as a writer.  Of course, he writes this re-reading as if we ourselves have read the books (so, spoiler alerts).

He more or less dismisses the first two novels Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) and moves straight on to The Adventures of Augie March (1953) saying how the transformation from the earlier writer to the writer of Augie is remarkable.  It won the National Book Award.

He especially likes “the narcissistic enthusiasm for life in all its hybrid forms” that is propelling Augie.  He cries out to the world “Look at me!”

What appeals to me about the way Roth describes this book is the “engorged sentences” as “syntactical manifestations of Augie’s large, robust ego.”  That sounds like a fun 500 page book to me.

Up next was Seize the Day (1956) which is a short novel and the fictional antithesis of Augie March–a sorrow-filled book about the culmination of a boy who is disowned and disavowed by his father.  Whereas Augie’s ego soars, Tommy Wilheim’s is quashed beneath its burden.  Tommy cried out to the world “Help me!”

Bellow seemed to alternate between comedy and tragedy and I would much rather read the comedies myself.

Next came Henderson the Rain King (1959) which contain an exotic locale, a volcanic hero and the comic calamity that is his life.  Henderson is a boozer, a giant, a Gentile, a middle-aged multimillionaire in a state of continual emotional upheaval.  He leaves his home for a continent peopled by tribal blacks who turn out to be his very cure. Africa as medicine.

According to Wikipedia, Bellow became very conservative and somewhat (or very) racist as he got older.  I hesitate to read this book although it was written when he was younger.  On the other hand, I do enjoy that Roth calls it “a screwball book but not without great screwball authority.”  So that’s a tentative maybe on reading this.

Herzog (1964) also won the National Book Award.  Moses Herzog is a labyrinth of contradiction and self-division. He is Bellow’s grandest creation.  Herzog is American literature’s Leopold Bloom.  Although in Ulysses, “the encyclopedic mind of the author is transmuted into the linguistic flesh of the novel and Joyce never cedes to Bloom his own great erudition… whereas in Herzog, Bellow endows his hero with a mind that is a mind.”

Much of the plot is given away in the review, presumably because a 50 year-old award-winning book is pretty well known.

Roth says that Herzog is Bellow’s first excursion into sex in a novel. Adding sex allows Herzog to suffer in ways that Augie March never did.  He also says that “in all of literature  I know of no more emotionally susceptible male, of no man who brings a greater focus or intensity to his engagement with women than this Herzog.”

In Herzog, there is barely any action that takes place outside of Herzog’s brain.  Roth suggests, the best parts of the book are the letters that Herzog writes.

This book sounds rather appealing.  Unlike Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) which also won the National Book Award (dang this guy must be good).  Roth gives it a rather short write up, but it appears to be about a man dealing with the culture around him.  It is a darker story, that sounds like a critique of the sixties.

That leads to Humboldt’s Gift (1975) which won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature [that is an impressive amount of awards Mr Bellow].  Roth describes it as the “screwiest of the euphoric going-every-which-way-out-and-out comic novels.”  It is “loopier and more carnivalesque” than the others.  It’s like the tonic that helps him recover from the suffering in Sammler.

Interestingly. Roth doesn’t really talk about the rest of Bellow’s works: The Dean’s December (1982); What Kind of Day Did You Have? (1984); More Die of Heartbreak (1987); A Theft (1989); The Bellarosa Connection (1989); The Actual (1997); Ravelstein (2000).  Rather he continues with Humboldt and talks about Bellow’s relationship with Chicago.

Roth says that in Bellow’s early books Chicago was barely mentioned–a few streets here and there, but by Humboldt Chicago infuses the book.

Perhaps Below didn’t seize on Chicago at the start of his career because he didn’t want to be “a Chicago writer” any more than he wanted to be “a Jewish writer.”

Roth does in fact mention The Dean’s December, but only to say that the exploration of Chicago in this book is not comical but rancorous.  Chicago has become demoniacal.

It feels like Bellow is no longer a part of Chicago.

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Louise Erdrich–“The Stone” (New Yorker, September 9, 2019)

Posted in Laura Marling, Louise Erdrich, Marriage Trouble, Musicians, New Yorker, NonComm, Short Story, Stones, Supernatural on September 9, 2019| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: LAURA MARLING-NonCOMM (May 18, 2017).

I enjoyed listening to the sets from NonCOMM back in May, so I dug into the archives and found out that a lot of sets are still available.  I was especially happy to see this one from Laura Marling.  The end of the blurb says:

You’ll have another chance to witness this fixating performance when Laura Marling comes to the TLA tomorrow night.

And that’s the show I saw.

After a hearty introduction from Bob Boilen, Laura Marling and crew swan-dived right into debut single, “Soothing,” off of her latest album, Semper Femina.

“Wild Fire” is an amazing example of her incredible voice as she speak-sings, whispers, coos and soars all over the verses which come together in the beautiful harmony of “meeeeeee” in the chorus.  This song has a bunch of curses in it, but she kept it clean for this performance.

With a piercing yet still somehow soft gaze cutting through the crowd (I don’t know how she does the thing, but it’s true), Marling unleashed her otherworldly vocals — flawlessly ebbing and flowing with the track’s funkier rhythm.

“Always This Way” is a beautiful song off of Semper Femina.  The guitar melody is delightful and, of course, her voice is outstanding.

“Next Time” has a simple, quiet, guitar melody which allows her voice to just wend all over this song.  When the backing vocals come it it’s quiet angelic.

“Nothing, Not Nearly” has some wonderfully fast vocals that are as fun to try to figure out as they are to sing along to.  It ends Semper Femina and is my favoirte song on the record.  From the main melody to her wonderfully high notes this song is amazing.

She ended the set with “Once” from Once I Was an Eagle, the album that introduced me to her.

This song is very different from the others, but it still sounded great.  When I saw her I wished she’d played ten songs from each album.  Maybe some day I’ll see her do everything.

[READ: September 7, 2019] “The Stone”

This was an otherworldly story about an earthly object.

As a young girl, the main character’s family drove to an island in Lake Superior every summer.  She was wandering in the brush one day when she felt sure someone was looking at her.  There was no one there, but then she saw the stone.

It was smooth and black, half the size of a human skull and rain had carved what looked like two eye holes in it.

She was spooked at first but then was drawn to it.  She brought it back to the vacation home and put it where she slept.  But then she was sure one of her siblings would try to take it, so she hid it in her sleeping bag.

She brought home after the summer and put it in her room. Her mother saw it as she was getting them ready for school in September. Her mom asked if she’d found the rock the summer.  She nodded and, after dinner, hid it in her room. (more…)

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Kate Walbert–“To Do” (New Yorker, September 2, 2019)

Posted in Canadian Music, Eating Out, Feminism, Kate Walbert, Nü Sensae, New Yorker, Orville Peck, Parenting, Sex, Sexism, Short Story, WXPN 88.5 FM--Philadelphia, PA on September 8, 2019| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: EATING OUT-Burn 7″ (2013).

Orville Peck has been getting a lot of attention lately.  In his act, he is a masked cowboy and his identity was (for a time) unknown.

It was fairly recently revealed that Orville Peck is actually Canadian musician Daniel Pitout (those tattoos will always give it away).

Pitout is in a couple of bands including Eating Out and Nü Sensae.

Eating Out plays a noisy grunge.  They have a bunch of one-song singles on bandcamp and this 7″ collects three of them.

Pitout is the singer (and he sounds NOTHING like Orville Peck).  I’ve felt like Orville Peck is a joke character because of the insane way he sings.  Hearing this, I’m evening more convinced of it.  But I’m glad he’s in on it.

“Burn” opens with a clean guitar intro followed by the biggest most distorted guitar around.  It’s certainly grunge and not metal and it runs through the verse and chorus.  The middle reintroduces the opening guitar riff and then the big distortion returns.  The song ends with that same clean guitar–it’s reall catchy–before crashing to a conclusion.

“Come Around” has two lead guitars (nicely fuzzed out) and a big fuzzy sound.  The sound reminds me of an updated version of SST bands.

“That’s My Man” closes the 7″ with a quiet intro.  Echoed vocals and a simple guitar melody.  It’s a poppy, almost do-wop melody with a bit of reverb drenched over the whole thing.  The song doesn’t change much, it just gets bigger as it goes along.  It’s probably the least interesting of the three, but it certainly shows Pitout looking to stretch beyond punk and grunge way back in 2013.

[READ: September 2, 2019] “To-Do”

This is a story about feminism, sex, and a woman’s relationship with her mother.

Constance is in front of a crowd of women at Antler’s Bar for Storytelling Wednesday.

She is telling them that her mother had been a beauty.  She had gotten a degree and was successful in a typing pool in New York City.  Although her boss told her that she had to cut her long hair and adopt the stylish updo of the time.  When she refused, her boss called her hysterical.  I can imagine her telling the audience: Do you know the origin of the word hysterical is the belief that the uterus could reach up through the body and and grip the throat.

The women in the audience seem agitated and bored.  Constance tries to win them over by reciting her mother’s to-do list, something she found in her mother’s effects after she died.

She tries to convince them of the significance of post its and to do lists in a woman’s life.

None of the women see it. (more…)

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Madeleine Schwartz–“Nell Zink’s Satire Raises the Stakes” (New Yorker, September 2, 2019).

Posted in Badfinger, Book Reviews, Corporate skewering, Fred Frith, French, Frith, Kaiser, Thompson, Funny (ha ha), Hakim Conrad Archuletta, Jonathan Franzen, Linda Thompson, Madeleine Schwartz, Nell Zink, New Yorker, Poetry, Poets, Political Humor, Religion, Richard Thompson, Ruins, Sufism, War on September 7, 2019| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: FRENCH, FRITH, KAISER, THOMPSON-“Bird in God’s Garden/Lost and Found” (1987).

The words are a poem by Rumi.   It is a slow droney song that is primarily drums from John French.  Thompson sings in his quieter style.

There are several different versions of this song. There’s an earlier unreleased version with Richard & Linda Thompson that is much quieter.  I especially like this version because after every other verse they brighten things up with a dramatic five note string riff (or maybe it’s Kaiser on the sanshin) that seems to come out of nowhere.

They spice up the middle of the song with a rollicking traditional Irish sounding fiddle melody from Fred Frith’s “Lost and Found.”  (Frith plays violin).  It adds a bit of zing to an otherwise dirgey song.

After about three minutes of the slow thumping there’s a wonderfully rocking instrumental section complete with fiddles and bass playing some wild melodies.

It was recorded on the album Live, Love, Larf and Loaf and also appears on Thompson’s collection Watching the Dark (1993).

[READ: September 1, 2019] “Nell Zink’s Satire Raises the Stakes”

I have really enjoyed the Nell Zink books that I’ve read. I’ve even read an excerpt from Doxology, the book that’s reviewed in this essay.

What I like about this essay though is the summations of her writing and her earlier books.

Schwartz says that Zink looks at life from the fringes.  She then summarizes her three impossible to summarize books in simple and amusing fashion: (more…)

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Tobias Wolff–“Class Picture” (New Yorker, January 6, 2003)

Posted in All Songs Considered, Cigarettes, Excerpt, John F. Kennedy, New Yorker, NPR/PRI/PBS, Patient Sounds, Poetry, Poets, Richard Nixon, Robert Frost, Set at School, The Angelus, Tobias Wolff, Viking's Choice on September 6, 2019| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: THE ANGELUS-“The Young Birds” (2019).

Every once in a while I like to check in with Viking’s Choice on NPR’s All Songs Considered.  Lars Gottrich specializes in all of the obscure music that you won’t hear on radio.  For this month, he did a special focus on Patient Sounds. a small label based out of Illinois.

[UPDATE: At the end of 2019, Patient Sounds closed shop. I’m not sure if any of these songs are available outside of Bandcamp].

Lars had this to say about the label

Matthew Sage, who runs the label, knows that dynamic drone, jittery footwork, oddball drone-folk, hypnagogic guitar music and cosmic Americana can exist in the same space.

The second song of the week is by The Angelus.  Lars describes the song:

Redemption often comes at the hands of something bigger than yourself, but as The Angelus’ soul-rattling doom-gaze reminds us, the love of young children will make you humble.

This song starts with crashing heavy chords–cymbals and loud guitars.  But then it settles down to a groovy death riff.  The surprise to me was when the singer began singing.  He has a soft melodic voice which totally changes this from a heavy dark song into a kind of melodic slow heavy song.  The chorus is surprisingly heavy and even ends on a kind of positive mood.

[READ: September 1, 2019] “Class Picture”

This story surprised me because it started

Robert Frost made his visit in November of 1960, just a week after the general election.  It tells you something about our school that the prospect of his arrival cooked up more interest than the contest between Nixon and Kennedy.

If Nixon had been at their school, they would have glued his shoes to the floor.

This is quite a lengthy story and there are a lot of components.  Wolff fleshes out this school very well.  So well, in fact, that I could see this being developed into a novel [It is actually an excerpt from a novel]. Although for the purposes of this story, the plot is dealt with fully.

It also makes me wonder if such a school could actually exist.  Certainly not in 2020, but even in 1960?  Because this school exhibited pride in being a literary institution. Glamorous writers visited three times a year and the English masters carried themselves as if they were intimates of Hemingway.  The teachers of other subjects (math, science) seemed to float around the fringe of the English masters’ circle.

The tradition at the school was that one boy would be chosen to meet the famous author who was coming next.  This year it is Robert Frost.  Each boy would submit an entry (in the case of Frost it would be poetry).  The author himself would select the winner.  And these meetings were a big deal to everyone on campus.

The narrator is very excited but he knows that his poems are subpar–he writes fiction.  He was on the school’s literary magazine board so he was familiar with the other great writers in his class.  There were three.

George Kellogg was a proficient writer of poetry, although the narrator found the boring.

Bill White was the narrator’s roommate.  He’d written most of a novel already and his poems were impressive.

Jeff Purcell was the third.  He was also on the literary magazine and was quick to dismiss others.  Could that translate to his own writing?

The one detour from the poetry angle is about smoking.  The school forbade smoking but a lot of boys did anyway.  The narrator said he loved smoking.  He smoked in storage closets and freezers, steam tunnels and bathrooms.  He even went out for cross-country so he could smoke while running in the woods.

If you were caught smoking you were expelled.  It happened every once in awhile.  A person was sent home just before the Frost Poem deadline.  This made the narrator quit smoking on campus.

The narrator wrote a poem for the occasion but he didn’t think it was good enough.  So he decided to submit an older one on the off chance that Frost liked it.

I won’t spoil the winner, but Frost did come to the school and he read some of his poems aloud.  During the Q&A that followed a master asked a question.  Interestingly he misstated the title of the poem.  He called it “Stopping in Woods” which Frost corrected instantly to “Stopping by Woods on a  Snowy Evening”  The master continued the question asking about iambic lines  Frost says “Good for you, they must be teaching you boys something here.”

The boys all laughed and Frost seemed pleased–had he made a mistake about the master or had he known all along?  The boys were surprised to learn later that Frost was quite funny.

The end of the story shows the winner of the contest questioning the value of his poem.  He felt that Frost mis-read it and that perhaps he won for the wrong reasons.  Should he blow off Robert Frost?  Is he crazy?

I really enjoyed this piece and found myself thoroughly engaged.  If this is part of a novel, I would be very curious to read it.  Turns out it is an excerpt from the novel Old School.

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Nick Hornby–“Beyond the Pale” (New Yorker, October 30, 2000)

Posted in Emerson, Lake & Palmer, King Crimson, Lou Reed, Neil Young, New Yorker, Nick Hornby, Radiohead, Sonic Youth on August 31, 2019| Leave a Comment »

oct30SOUNDTRACK: NEIL YOUNG-Arc (1991).

arcArc came with Neil Young’s outstanding live album Weld (and then later on its own).  It contains one 35 minute track called “Arc (A Compilation Composition).”

This album was recorded during Neil Young’s tour with Sonic Youth opening (MAN, I wish I had seen that tour).

Because it was 1991 and you couldn’t really look up this kind of information, I just assumed that Neil and Crazy Horse had created some kind of 35 minute jam (even though it doesn’t really sound like all one song, but how closely does one listen to Arc?).

Of course, listening to it now, it is pretty obvious that it’s pieces of shows strung together.  (the subtitle also gives it away, although I don’t think that the subtitle was on the actual disc).

Wikipedia talks about an interview that Neil Young gave in which he says he recorded a film in 1987 called Muddy Track

 which consisted of the beginnings and endings of various songs from his 1987 European tour. Young placed a video camera on his amplifier during the 1987 tour and recorded the beginnings and endings of various songs, and later edited them down into the film’s soundtrack. “It was the sound of the entire band being sucked into this little limiter, being compressed and fuckin’ distorted to hell,”

And in what makes 100% sense, on this 1991 tour,

Young then showed the video to Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, who suggested that he record an entire album in a similar manner. However, Arc was not recorded through video camera microphones, as was the case with Muddy Track, but instead was compiled from various professional multi-track recordings made throughout the tour.

So what you get is 35 minutes of noise (not so much feedback, as guitar rumblings that a band might do as a song slowly grinds to a rumbling halt).

You can hear snippets of vocals.  In particular, you can hear him singing “Like a Hurricane” and “Love and Only Love” in what definitely sounds like the end of a take–as the band’s instruments ring out.

There’s occasional moments where the rumble is interrupted by a burst of drums from Ralph Molina or you can clearly hear some of Frank “Poncho” Sampedro’s guitar and univox stringman.

There’s a little bit of audience response.  At the opening of the disc but especially at the 25 minute mark as a song feedbacks out and the crowd cheers before the band puts out  rocking drum-filled cacophonous ending.

At 28 minutes the “song” actually sort of turns into an actual song with Billy Talbot playing a simple four note bass line.  But that doesn’t last too long before another ending is tacked on.

The last few minutes has someone singing “No more pain” and then shouting a story that is somewhat inaudible although I think I hear “mom” and “post office.”

This is certainly not something to listen to much.  But I found it an interesting sonic experience today.  if nothing else, it made me really wish I had seen that 1991 show.

[READ: August 30, 2019] “Beyond the Pale”

I really like Nick Hornby’s music (and book) reviews.  He and I don’t share the same taste, but we have a lot of moments that overlap (he’s more traditional while I’m more experimental).

In many ways it is no surprise that he hated Radiohead’s Kid A, but the amount of savagery he does to it is quite astonishing.

He essentially compares it to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and Neil Young’s Arc.  Not in content, but in the giant middle finger he feels it is to fans of the band.  Although he does admit that Kid A is “nowhere near as teeth-grindingly tedious” as Metal Machine Music.

He feels that the album stems from the idea that fans are interested in “every twist and turn of the band’s career no matter how trivial or pretentious.”  Although a valid question is what has earned Radiohead its huge audience.  I have not figured that one out myself. (more…)

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T. Coraghessan Boyle–“Friendly Skies” (New Yorker, August 7, 2000)

Posted in Airplanes, Australia, Drinking, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, New Yorker, Short Story, Stonefield, T. Coraghessan Boyle, T.C. Boyle, Violence on August 29, 2019| Leave a Comment »

a1699739273_10nyorkerSOUNDTRACK: STONEFIELD-Bent (2019).

Stonefield is a band of four sisters from rural Darraweit Guim in Australia. Drummer and lead vocalist Amy Lee Findlay (the oldest sister) formed the band when she was 16. The band includes Hannah on lead guitar and vocals, Sarah on keyboards and vocals, and Holly on bass guitar (Holly was 8 at the time, and has turned 21 this year).

They are opening for King Gizzard And The lizard Wizard tomorrow night and I’m really looking forward to seeing them.

Bent is their fourth album and is full of psychedelic stoner rock.  But their songs aren’t epic (even though they sound epic).  The longest songs on the record are just over 4 minutes and the whole album is just over 30.

What sets their music apart is the inclusion of a retro 70s sounding keyboard.  Their songs work with big rumbling riffs; low bass and crashing drums are the name of the game for Stonefield.

Amy’s voice is often slightly echoey, and it works well as a contrast to the heft of the songs.  When the harmony vocals are added it sounds even better.

But it’s the keys that really display the sound.  The keys do most of the solos and many of the lead melodies (unless that’s the guitar pitched to sound like a keyboard).

Some of their songs are faster: “Dead Alive” even feels a little dancey.  Some have a bit more of a metal edge: the main riff of “People” throws in an unexpectedly dark note before propelling off with a ripping prog-rock keyboard solo.

A song like “66” is three and a half minutes long, but the lyrics are only present for a few seconds in the middle: a hazy chant of

Reflection of the one
Confusion has begun

The lightest moment comes in the 85 second “Dignity” which is a pretty keyboard melody accompanied by light drums.  It works as a kind of introduction to the very heavy “Shutdown” which has a surprisingly catchy chorus.

The album ends with the excellent “Woman.”  This is a great disc and I hope it becomes available in the States soon.

[READ: August 28, 2019] “Friendly Skies”

This is a story about a terrible flight.  Since it was written in 2000, it doesn’t ring entirely accurate for 2019.  Especially when one of the passengers gets rowdy.

Eileen is flying from L.A. to the east coast.  She is exhausted from the delays, a little drunk from the booze during the delay, and not very happy about leaving L.A.

She looks out the window to see that one of the engines in on fire.  She utterly freaks out, internally.  But the guy next to her is furious.  He starts banging on the seat in front of him and when the pilot says that they are returning to LAX, he flips out.

Obviously, Eileen is happy that they are going to live, but this guy is mad because he’s going to be late.  He is seething until the guy in front of him calls him an asshole and tells him to calm down.  The man then turns to Eileen–who ignores him–and mutters all kinds of things under his breath.

They land and it is a mad dash as the passengers are given their new boarding information.  While Eileen is heading to her new flight (a layover in Chicago), the obnoxious guy pushes his way past everyone and starts causing a scene because he doesn’t want to check his baggage.

She was sure (and I was sure) that she was going to be seated next to him again.  But no, they are separated by a couple of rows.

The plane was full, but amazingly, the seat next to Eileen was open. She slid into it when she thought it was safe, but at the last possible minute a man came in and  said it was his.  He let her stay by the window though.

Michael turns out to be a very nice person.  He is intent on doing his work, but they do talk a bit and have some things in common.

About half way through the story, Eileen thinks about Roy, a man she is trying to forget.  They were both teachers at a school.  Their relationship was serious.  Until he announced in front of the faculty lounge that he was sleeping with someone else.  And evidently some of the other teachers knew.

She tried to get him out of her mind.  But then the man from the other flight started yelling.  He was screaming for a better seat, “I paid full fare, I’m not going to teak this shit anymore.”  He stormed into the galley and returned with hot pots of coffee.

Flight attendants tried to stop him but he easily bested them, spilling scalding coffee on passengers until he got to the exit and started banging on it, shouting “you’re all going to die!”

Michael hit the man with his laptop which slowed him briefly until he turned and hit Michael over the head with the computer, breaking it and knocking Michael unconscious.

Eileen is fed up with men like this (like Roy) and she was going to act.  Maybe this is why the don’t serve metal flatware on flights anymore.

The story is exciting if not a little predictable..

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Alice Munro–“Floating Bridge” (New Yorker, July 31, 2000)

Posted in Alice Munro, Canadian Content, Canadian Music, Cancer as plot device, Death, Marriage (Happy), Marriage Trouble, New Yorker, Pee, Ra Ra Riot, Short Story on August 28, 2019| Leave a Comment »

coverSOUNDTRACK: RA RA RIOT-“Endless Pain/Endless Joy” (2019).

indexIn 2007, Ra Ra Riot released an album of chamber pop loveliness.  There were strings and lots of soaring melodies.  The songs were gentle and sweet and the lyrics were thoughtful.

Twelve years later and I would never have guessed this was the same band.

“Endless Pain/Endless Joy” starts with crashing drums and a fast bass line.  The lyrics are sung in his high register but they are almost whispered, or at least sound like they are far away.  After the first verse, the bass doubles down and the rumble grows.

When the chorus finishes, the guitars come clanging in, angular and discordant, playing a clash of sounds for a few measures before departing.

The second half of the song increases the urgency with the fast paced drums and bass, but it adds lots of backing sounds–synth stabs, guitar swirls and other noises until, with ten seconds left, that clatter comes back–crashing through to the end.

It’s largely the same band members, but wow, what a difference a decade makes.

[READ: August 20, 2019] “Floating Bridge”

Neal and Jinny have been together for over 20 years.  Jinny is 42 and Neal is 16 years older.  She always assumed she’d outlive him. Then she got the news.

The oncologist said the news wasn’t great.

Neal went to pick yup the girl who would be staying with them to help out.  He knew her because she worked in the kitchen of the The Correctional Institute where he worked.

The girls’ name was Helen.  She was tough but Neal tried to break through her shell–that’s the way he was. (more…)

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