Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Losing a staring context

This kid was a stone cold non-blinker. He had to go. Here he goes to the tune of some live Sun Araw.


Here's the full track:

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Hypermagic


Coming up is the ever excellent return of the spazz rock duo Lightning Bolt to the Chapel Hill throne (toilet). They'll be playing a show at the Local 506 on July 2nd with Clang Quartet and the email friendly In the Year of the Pig. Showtime's at 9:30 and you can get booked early through the 506 website. This one should be a mind melter, bring some ear plugs and some extra napkins for the blue cruor that will undoubtedly ooze from those aural detection devices. And PLEASE...behave...alright?


Friday, June 25, 2010

Dual hoof lover...L=f(D) with L=love and D=death



A video courtesy of Floris VanHoof:



I'm on slime time! Accordingly, this creature has too much energy but soon will come to us via Ultra Eczema. How sweet a gesture. Let's pay attention to this for my grandma who will be Elvis with bronchitis for Halloween. I would describe this as an absolutely inane karaoke occurrence.

Bill me here.

Tommy Wrinklebrows

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Milieu : is the word for environment in both French and Dutch.

Milieu - Phosphene Weather, some really beautiful minimal stuff here.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Robinsons of the East, and other tales of rock and identity

One of the less healthy parts of learning to program in Java - an unsavory fact that nobody tells you before you sign up for the class - is that having your code fail over and over again will drive you to drink and spend money online.

Last week, stuck in another failure loop, I veered over to the Cats Cradle website and was reminded that Unrest will be playing a 26th anniversary show there July 11th. After ponying up $33.80 for a couple tickets, I then proceeded to teenbeat.net and got a t-shirt (on sale now!) and a “deluxe vinyl” reissue of imperial f.f.r.r. (definitely not on sale).

I was introduced to Unrest by the first girl I almost married. She put Isabel on a mix tape and of course I was floored. In the mid-nineties, the idea of that kind of song just seemed so love struck bizarre and perfect for the transformations my teenage self was going through. Teen Beat indeed.

I found the CD somewhere, and I’d never heard anything like it before. The song Imperial is emblematic: it starts in a pop groove, lined with words that are beautiful or devastating when they stutter, and then devolves into these incredibly pure sounds that both aggravate my tinnitus and enchant me completely. This happens throughout the record. A high-schooler, it was probably the first album I owned that pulled me all over the lines between experimentalism and pop like that. And that’s still the feeling that’s at the heart of my music tastes today.

When I opened up the record, there was a note on the back of a 3x5 Teen Beat “partial catalogue” signed by “Mark.” I don’t know, but if I was the Mark Robinson that helped start Teen Beat, if there was some guy working in the mail room named Mark, I might ask him to sign his little missives a little more specifically, e.g. “Bye - Mark (i.e. not the one that started the record label).” So I’m going to go ahead and claim that Mark Robinson of Teen Beat and Unrest and etc. fame sent me a copy of a record which he made. As someone very wise once said, “I gotta say it was a good day.”

a classic, mine again from Mike Control on Vimeo.

But here’s the punch line. In 2005, I started working for a guy named Mark Robinson. Not in a mail room, but there were other similarities. My Mark was also a guitarist. In fact, my Mark was not only also a musician, but also a mid-Atlanticish East Coast resident, also in an experimental pop band, and also born late 60s-esque (I think). I don’t know if this ever happened the other way around, but my Mark got at least one gig through being confused with his D.C.-based counterpart.

Here’s a video of my Mark Robinson in 1994, in a performance whose lead character Lemmons the Shiny Clown (n.b., misspelled in the video titles) is definitely someone you should google after finishing the video. The performance was at "The Brewery" in Raleigh, NC for the pub­lic ac­cess tele­vi­sion show "Live Around Town" (Episode 15).

Laso Halo - Lemons the Shiny Clown

Craig Z | MySpace Video

The myspace user who posted this vid, Craig Z, has some other vintage RDU stuff on his page.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Scanlon


Outer Space is John Elliott from Emeralds, sometimes joined by Jeff Hatfield from Fragments and Field of Hats. This here's just a teaser from the upcoming LP on Arbor, this here's a custom vid for "scanlon" off of the upcoming s/t Outer Space lp:



I have high hopes for this, although this track already sounds much different from previous OS releases. This one sounds tinged by one Mark McGuire, kind of emulating his guitar channel with a synth pattern. I guess you should expect these impressionable youth to rub off on each other. Hell, they can rub me all they want. I trust this will work itself out. I certainly ain't cryin'. If in need, check out the chinese make out.]]

Palaz of Hoon


Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

-Wallace Stevens

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Rene Hell in Iowan Java House



Well well. Far far from your Occoneechee Mountain, somewhere in Iowa but reaching hands close in your heart for an outlook to the universe. Here's Jeffrey D. Witscher (aka Secret Abuse, Marble Sky, Deep Jew, Abelar Scout, Impregnable, Roman Torment) and his Rene Hell outfit. New release on Type is killer (methinks). Consider liking it...



Also has tapes on Agents of Chaos, Ekhein, Night People, & something soon on Arbor.

Additionally, check out Jeff's blog if you feel so inclined. He sometimes uploads unreleased tracks...Baroque Arcade.