Deep Cutz - [[Uncutz]]

Win Back All Their Fluttering Eyes

2012-02-15T14:15:00.000-08:00

In the bottom two preceding posts, I interviewed two singer/songwriters at crossroads - one making a concerted effort with his latest efforts, a "big" swing, if you will, with what could be his "last band" and the other deciding that he needs to take some steps back to figure out to where, exactly, he should swing next.

Steven McCauley (of The Walking Beat) spoke about buckling down and focusing with this band - a course adjustment from his last band, Scarlet Oaks' having jumped out to play too many live engagements too swiftly, without shoring up some proper recordings.

Jesse Shepherd Bates joked over how some Facebookers wondered if he was "retiring" when he said he didn't want to just play around in bars anymore... but Bates, like McCauley, just wants to be that much more sure of things...of creative commitments...

...which is what I'm about to do with this Blog. I'd said this out loud about six months - that I was only going to come back up on this thing for special/epic/personal rants or profound interview/features - and I think now I'm ready to try that... taking a step back, for a minute, buckling down and making just that much more sure of all the other stuff.

Vague eh?
But anyway, those two interviews got me thinking is all...

In the meantime, you can find ramblings here...
Like this Cover Story on Ypsi singer/songwriter Matt Jones in the Metro Times...
...-Who is putting out a new album in a matter of days titled Half Poison / Half Pure which is going to sound, to one extent, like this:

&amp;amp;lt;a href="http://mattjones.bandcamp.com/track/special-forces"&amp;amp;gt;Special Forces by Matt Jones &amp;amp;amp;amp; The Reconstruction&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;

...or another playful rant revealing the newest works of Detroit rapper Doc Waffles - How To Shoot Quails.

[photo^: Doug Coombe]

Or there's more ramblings to be found [here] - where some way-west-siders (like, Washtenaw County!) share their favorite things about the Metro Times Blowout.

[Weird cosmic slap back down to keep my nose at that grindstone was hearing Pedro The Lion's "Magazine" come on the radio mere minutes after I picked up a copy of that^...]

But I'll be back up on this ol' thing likely -at-least once-a-week, unraveling mad musings on local music...

Until then...

JSB On His Own Terms

2012-02-13T13:00:00.000-08:00

JSB: I think Jason (Stollsteimer)'s ready to get back into the swing of things...

Jesse Shepherd-Bates, local songwriter and perennial performer/collaborator, music-function facilitator, a familiar face... just joined the Hounds Below (fronted by Stollsteimer), in time for the recording of that band's first full length, at Big Sky Studios in Ann Arbor, with Geoff Michael.

Credits include: *Co-founding the Satin Peaches (who, if you haven't forgotten by now, released a 7" single back in December 2010 and left yet another would-be-recording unfinished before breaking up last year)... *Leading a band of inherently fluctuating-membership called the JSB Squad (which reached a zenith at Blowout 2011, with about 30-ish some-odd-people on one stage) and, most recently... *Writing and performing with fellow former-Peaches in Jesse & The Gnome.

His birthday's in six weeks. I've known him for one-fifth of his life and he's always had long hair, jet-black curly locks.

No longer. And that's just one change.

Milo: What are you ...ready for?

JSB: I have no idea... I've gone through some... ...I don't even know what the word would be... My views on music-making have evolved. I've evolved... ...I chopped off all my hair, (so), there's that much at least.

Milo: Tom (Bahorski - who also has a birthday in six weeks) said you were "....stepping...back."

JSB: I'm glad he put it that way. Everyone on Facebook was asking what was up with me retiring...

But all he'd said was he didn't want to play in bars anymore... ...it's that perennial ceiling that local musicians hit - what's beyond and how to get to it?

JSB: The day Jason called me, I was just about to follow up on an audition to play bass in a party cover-song band, like a Black-Eyed-Peas-type of music band...

Milo: Not a moment too soon, then...

JSB: And he asked me if I wanted to go to Europe...so, I figured that's a side of music I haven't explored yet.

So then... Jesse Shepherd Bates has now joined the Hounds Below and, essentially, put his most-recent project, - & The Gnome, on some kind of hiatus.

We should say: The exciting news here being that, if he's "retiring," he's going out with a blast - he'll be hosting a Birthday show for himself and Bahorski April 6th - featuring 16 bands (list below) playing 15 minute sets, blurred together, inside PJ's Lager House, on April 6th...

But back to the harder stuff... Suffice it to say that Bates came to that ton o' bricks realization that he'd put certain personal components of his life on hold for the chase of...

JSB: "...this 'dream,' if you will, thinking about the friends I've lost, the people I've ignored, the family I got detached from...I thought about when I was making music before, before I joined a band, with just me on a computer, that's really the last time it's been pure, and not tainted by money or alcohol or anything.

Singer/songwriter Steve McCauley admitted that he felt his newest band The Walking Beat, might be "his last band..." It's not uncommon for artists to take these turns, to take hard, eye-opening evaluations of their creative situations...but Bates, just like McCauley, will never stop writing and recording on his own... Both assure that they'll be continuing in that realm, even if its just them, a guitar and a tape recorder... (...or a lap top... posting updates on YouTube or busking out at ornate cafes).

JSB: This is just, like, taking control of my life again. The whole 'Peaches thing...
(In 2007, the barely-out-of-high-school band toured Europe, only a short time after Bates left the band...-though he would return again in late 2009).
...Almost getting there, getting the boot in the band right before all the fun stuff started, watching all that get going, and seeing that fall apart--then getting back in the band, trying to get that going again and then having it fall apart (again). Getting that close makes me think, that, what-?--do I have to try twice as hard or something? Really, it was more blind luck...

Bates said that his band, the Gnome, having gone through a series of spirited sets covering Radiohead, sufficiently messed with the grasp he thought he had on his own motivation - Their Halloween set at the Crofoot was, he said, the most fun he's ever had playing music - leaving him with this confusing (and he repeats the word later, confusing) deflated feeling, in the weeks after.

And then he comes to it... Not that this should sound as dark as it might be sounding, or ominous or bitter or jaded... No... he's quick to assure:

JSB: I still love everybody around here, I still am involved, I book shows now at Simon's downriver. This time away, I hope, is a way to bring people together that wouldn't normally be together...

That would be on a basis that isn't dependent on the 10:30-pm-ish schedule of a Friday or a Saturday in AnyBar, Detroit.

But, he comes to it... as any musician does, sometimes long after they turn 25... making music on your own terms. He uses the word "trapped..." and wanting to avoid that happening to one's musical pursuits, to avoid feeling like you're on a track in life. And to be wary of that gamble, that mad high musicians can get enchanted by, -really, the ticket-tearing, eye-bulging, sweat-beaded gamble...of "chasing that, if you will, 'dream...'" And whatever the hell that dream is...or is it some kind of answer?

JSB: Like you said, I should do it on my own terms. And it's cool to be in somebody else's band, this isn't my band. Jason is a ball of energy and these new songs sound great - no longer a 50's thing, very Two-Thousand-and-Twelve-ish...

In the end it's a positive trap...as JSB sees it...
JSB: I'm still stuck being completely in love with music.

Sweet 16 - April 6th - PJ's Lager House

Ungrateful Daughter
Sound and Fury
Pewter Cub
Ronny Tibbs and the 305's
Patrick Davy and the Ghosts
Citizen Smile
FUR
Phantom Cats
The Kickstand Band
The Hounds Below
The Ashleys
Lightning Love
Jesse and The Gnome
The Handgrenades
Good Cop/Good Cop
Passalacqua

Word Stew [sic 002]

2012-02-12T12:22:00.000-08:00

My body felt like it was leaning... a phragmite in the wind (my disheveled look wrought from self-applied shortenings of sleep patterns making me feel like nothing else but that same immortal weed)... the breeze of Phreddy was seeming to push my body to the side, like I was impelled to fall, like, in fact, I wanted to fall, onto the nearest desk's edge, gaunt wrists stabbing forth so that these purplish fingers could start tumbling away on the keyboard, merry marimbas...

photo: [sic]

Phreddy was pointing a gun to someone's head...with his pointer and his thumb...up near the front and his guttural growl into the mic mushed up to his lips felt like a gale. It was the music of words.

Every break in the paragraphs, here, I take another quick sip of the coffee. Can't let it go cold.

But see, I really wanted to just get up there and join in... stir the word stew with him up there - jam out a song of words...
...to pick up a rickety four legged wooden stand that was probably made by the hands of a carpenter who lived off his trade and fed himself with splintered hands and hammered his utilitarian treasures inside a factory that's either been closed, now, for a generation or has even been toppled by steamrollers...
AHH... I wanted to grab that small wooden stand and disregard my own befouling of its antiquarian essence by setting up the glistening, glowing lap top computer (that I use to write on before it died) and start churning away with him, letting myself get lost in the knotty, serif-prickled jungle of these taunting types, unwinding words snapping off like a disenchanted, cloud-hungry kite.

[Where did all that gristle over some imagined carpenter come from? That guy is everywhere. The ghosts of Detroit are watching us shuffle around and sometimes squat within the ruins of the world they used to operate inside on a daily basis...and here we are, now, inside the charming but hauntingly worn-upon ambiance of Omnicorp, listening to the beautiful assemblage of words, scraped up from diaphragms... ] Why am I fixated, so suddenly, on transience?

The mind goes a mile a minute listening to these words - but it doesn't help that I've downed so much coffee and that now I'm listening to some local music.

<a href="http://newfortunerecords.bandcamp.com/track/decomposer">Decomposer by The High Strung</a>

Phreddy read from his new Chapbook last night. So did Ivan Grass and Mike Lala. Brooklyn based poet/writer/spoken-word performers Amy Lawless and Allison Paty also came to read. This is part of [sic]'s Reader Series, an art and music -infused evening of words and disarmingly frank and funny and at points ferocious expression, hosted by the independent poetry publishers.

As the coffee runs out and as Phreddy's words still echo in my head (and still smolder next to me through the dozen printed pages of his [sic] published Chapbook (Estuaries) I come to some convoluted (and half-cocked) concretion of epiphany... or half-epiphany... coffee-deluded epiphany... I'm able to write about music because that's how these words, that I string and sew and saw through, off, and out onto the page, have always felt
beat
hook
weird droning noises modulated and reverberated
noise and bliss
sooth and spur
Writing has auto-tuned my horrible singing voice and perfected my ear for pitch - I'm some invincible, wait, no, brilliant...brilliant composer, here, when I'm making the music of an essay.

I only hope you've heard the melody. It's taxing to translate it, sometimes.

But the event last night blew me back down to these keys. It cleared away the slush on my windshield and I can see the flashing lights ahead again, coaxing me forth.

My head starts banging again and my fingers don't stop.

And, as of today, it's [sic]'s doing...

Find the four latest publications here or "...a bookstore near you."

Hold A Second (or Third) Time: The Walking Beat

2012-02-10T14:31:00.000-08:00

Blowout is, well, essentially... upon us. For some bands, this is their first Blowout...for others, their 12th...but for others, yet, still...it's their first show ever...

Like, for The Walking Beat... -first show as-a-band, rather.

Singer/songwriter Steve McCauley whirled his way through a year's worth of collaborative experiments in the wake of his main project, Scarlet Oaks' dismantling after three solid years...and two EPs...and three bassists...and two guitarists...and... Before that, he was playing with his brother Patrick in Fifth Period Fever.

"This time," says McCauley, "I feel like this...might be my last real band."

I raise an eyebrow and take an inquisitive drawn out sip from the coffee mug, waiting...

"Eventually you gotta grow up, right?"

McCauley will always put music first. He's continued to write songs through the years, splitting time between special acoustic engagements (paired with guitarist James Anthony) and the sporadic recordings and performances of space-pop quintet Computer Perfection.

Here's one now...

&amp;amp;lt;a href="http://thewalkingbeat.bandcamp.com/track/long-beaten-love-demo"&amp;amp;gt;Long Beaten Love (demo) by The Walking Beat&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;

...which gave birth to this new band, called The Walking Beat - featuring his longtime friend and drummer Daniel Kanka on drums, Jesse Paris Smith (of Belle Ghoul) on keys and Matt Van on drums.

It took McCauley this long to get another proper band to back his own songs because he was searching for that right mixture of people who were putting music first in their lives... A specific blend of folks that never settled together in Scarlet Oaks.

"If it's my last band, I wanted to do it right..." And that includes staid strings of rehearsing and focusing on recording some songs before jumping into the live-show carousel (another somewhat regret of his, back when he first sparked Scarlet back in 2007).

"My worst quality is impatience..." Or at least, it has been. Over coffee and tea, on a chilly gray morning, just three weeks before Blowout, McCauley is sounding more sure than he ever has - perhaps he's gotten some soul searching done over this past year of recording (Computer Perfection in his home studio) and the occasional guitar-slung stool strumming set at joints like Steak Hut.

The rehearsals and song development have had a nice flow, each member is respectful but not afraid to offer constructive criticism. "So far there's a good dynamic, no one gets offended..."

Cuz you're all adults?

"...hopefully. -All real musicians, at least. In Scarlet Oaks it wasn't about being prolific, there were great dynamics in it, too. I've always liked music to be simple--who wants to hear a drummer just doing a solo? I've always had more of a punk rock take, -simple, stripped down; that's how it was in ScOk, except for James, who could play circles around me, but he didn't...which was really nice."

Everyone in this band "has always put music first in their lives." From every aspect, whether that's diligent rehearsals, impassioned songwriting, or amassing (and, sometimes selling-off-for-scratch) stacks of audio equipment.

And that lifestyle, "that's hard to do...you have to sacrifice a lot in terms of comfort and wealth..."

"...there's no wealth in music."

Whereas Scarlet dabbled in a dusky Americana sound and whereas he's been jamming on more of a traditional country-twang thing with James at the Steak Hut sets, McCauley says that the Walking Beat's been taking him more into the realm of rock n' roll. That...and it's just great to have a piano, particularly the talents of Smith, intertwining with the rhythmic sensibilities of Van and Kanka.

"I'm actually like the worst musician among the band," McCauley lets an easy, self-deprecating chuckle tumble out. "Everyone in this group is a real musician and it's been amazing playing with people like that..."

--So you're technically the lead guitarist?

"I know...hehe...it's terrible. But, I've been practicing. I never wanted a guitar-heavy band, I wanted it to be -rock- but not super heavy electric."

How do you not wind up with a traditional rock n' roll vibe when you're name is somewhat inspired by a Bill Haley (and his Comets)'s tune?

"I find it hard to write straight kinda' songs, straight mid-tempo songs; but I gravitate toward that sort of walking-tempo, that slow-swing, it seems to be where I write best. Though I've been trying to defy that; one has his own conventions and you want to defy those with every new song you write, you have to learn new tricks, but not get too away from yourself. That's the trick. You have to constantly evolve but not sound like you're pandering... I don't even know what's hip, I'm still stuck in the 60's or something, I guess..."

Oh, Steve, what's hip anymore? Everything and nothing all at once is all hip now...

"It does seem that way. I see young kids dressed in flannels with long hair and laugh, thinking that's weird, that went out of style when I was in high school... Everything's just a sub-genre, broken up into tinier pieces, tinier stuff."

All of it spread out across this city...

"Yeah, a lot of different things, all going on at once around here. I don't know where (The Walking Beat) fits, though..."

But again - if this is your last band, then do it right...

So a 7" single will be out in time for their Blowout performance (Wednesday, February 28th, at the Magic Stick, early). And then, whilst keeping an eye to getting out onto the road, they'll set down to recording their first proper album...

Belle Ghoul will perform that same evening (2/29) part of the Blowout Launch Party (more info here)
take a listen:

<a href="http://belleghoul.bandcamp.com/album/neighborhood-7">Neighborhood 7" by Belle Ghoul</a>

We're All Here - Thoughts from Blaksmith

2012-02-06T18:50:00.000-08:00

"I've never heard/seen anything like that before...."

Brent Smith (a.k.a. "Blaksmith") hear's this line at the end of many a' weekend's night - around 2 a.m., when he's stepping off a stage inside a local venue, sweat-speckled and breathless, having just rapped his head off via one of his two main performance outlets - Passalacqua or Cold Men Young.

And that's something the stalwart writer (and supporter of the scene) extends to many other local groups, including: Illy Mack, Sheefy McFly, The Ashleys, / Doc Waffles, / Ferndale Acid Scene, / Clear Soul Forces, / Pink Lightning, / Detroit CYDI

and...House Phone (formally known as James And The Rainbros).

When he got to that last band name, it triggered a poignant memory for Smith, who wrote to me earlier this morning, a bit from some of these bands/artists' backstory:

Blaksmith: "James (Link, singer--House Phone) and I met at a house party in Woodbridge in 2008...
One of those Democratic Society-Red Cup extravaganzas hosted by Michael Shallal, Katie Nolde and Aaron Petkov (now leading Occupy Detroit organizers). The basement was packed and the ceiling was low. James Linck, Ben Sturley on bass (Jessica Hernandez), Steve Kenzo on guitar (illy mack) and Dave Kenzo on drums...

Hear: James & the Rainbros - "Chase You"

...followed by a cover of Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke" stunned me. Reggae, soul, a brazilian afro, white kids giggin' to Stevie Wonder like it was a black family reunion...a cultural explosion! I had never seen anything like this before.

On a side note... Noman also played that night. It was Ernie's first time on bass with the band..."

Ernie (Erno the Inferno) Guerra...current DJ (and recording collaborator) of Passalacqua.

Smith, at this time, was promoting monthly variety shows at 1515 Broadway. Newly inspired from the Rainbros set, he set to organizing Hoodstock '09 at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit "a musical melting pot to unite fans of all genres, with performers coming from cities ranging from Rochester to Riverview..." realized as an eight-hour long show/fundraiser promoting "the many sounds of Detroit."

Smith says that "...Sectarian discourse with other organizers of the show prevented it from happening again" in 2010. "That's when I became more focused with Cold Men Young and later Passalacqua- both groups strving off of a new overture...brand marketing expert Steve Stout calls it "The Tanning Of America".

Our dialogue was inspired, firstly, by the Mardis Gras celebration, coming Saturday Feb 11th to PJ's Lager House, spearheaded by the Detroit Party Marching Band... Smith was, at the end of the day, reflecting upon the need for promotion and further unification (in/throughout the scene) in that regard.

Preparing for a show like Saturday's, one that is inspired by the DPMB's ethos of expanding the special inspiration of spontaneous music, is, Smith said, always exciting.

Seeing/experiencing the explosive rock-n-roll-tinged marchers can be a unique experience. Co-founder John Notarianni spoke of breaking down barriers tied to how we typically perceive a live show. "There's the visual barrier...a band on the stage and an audience down on the floor..." which is broken down by DPMB's inherent tendency to roam the entire space, take it over, spill outside and going down to "crash" another venue. "Then there's the auditory barrier...the music goes through wires into amplifiers and out of PA's...but, with DPMB, having the music actually happening right in your face," (with a trumpet, a french horn, or sousaphone), "how that sound feels, right up at you, is very powerful. Sometimes people will be watching this as a passive audience, and you get right up to them, push through them even, while you're playing..."

People respond to this kind of energy... which includes the energy of the likes of Charlie Slick, Patrick Elkins, Run Jit...and Passalacqua (among many others)...

"I will walk away inspired," Smith exclaimed. "Bryan (aka Mister, of Passalacqua) will walk away inspired. More importantly, the people that Passalacqua'll bring out will see that in this scene there's an inclusive process..."

"...We're all here."

~

More notes on that Mardis Gras celebration (click here...) - there might be a fortune teller...there might also be burlesque... and there's definitely going to be free gumbo and jambalaya (at least when the doors open... - 9pm at PJ's Lager House - 2/11).

Split Infinitives - Shadow Puppets and Marching Band Masquerades - Feb 11

2012-02-06T11:44:00.000-08:00

This Saturday, Detroit's notorious Party Marching Band will curate their own Mardis Gras in Corktown (cramming, with all their cacophonous glory, into PJ's Lager House, 2/11)...

Scan the freep this week for a, (hopefully), printed-out feature and brief interview with one of the group's co-founders, John Notarianni (a Q&A, I'll disclose, conducted over fancy, syrup-swirled tequila and magnificently mean gin-concoctions, from his day job at the Sugar House).

I first "met" the DPMB when they burst their way into the Belmont, during one of the nights of the Metro Times Blowout, 2010... Somehow, I became swept up in their mad, punk-brass riffing clamor, and began traipsing slowly behind them - as they, decked in their Craigs-list-catered uniforms (a present from a Tri-Cities IO high school) emblazened with gold olde English D's, trounced in, blurted, blared and musically-inhabited venue-after-venue-after-venue.

That's their thing - communicating the power of spontaneous music. More on that later...

What you need to know is: their Mardis Gras celebration involves a range of performers who embrace similarly provocative approaches to live performance - each on their own mission to shake things up for what traditional audiences might traditionally expect from a traditional ol' music bar...

One of them includes Ypsi/Arbor area conceptual performance artist Patrick Elkins - a blender of music and shadow puppetry whose written, assembled and performed a series of original shows as well as been integral in organizing that area's Totally Awesome Fest.

DPMB has played the Totally Awesome Fest in the past (this coming March effectively marks the 30+-member crew's third year anniversary) and Elkins took reverent note of their ability to conjure "amazing party vibrations." When DPMB co-founder/trumpeter John Notarianni asked Elkins to bring his quirky hybrid of surrealist puppetry and music to the Mardis Gras party, it was an instant yes. Making it even easier to say yes was that the line-up included Elkins' comrade (and former touring partner) Charlie Slick (with his funk-flared backing group Thunda Clap).

Elkins, noted not just for his songwriting (currently playing in Ypsi's Rainbow Vomit Family Band), but also for his creative puppet-characters and dark, dreamy, dazzling productions (some of which have gone on for 24-hours at a time), said that, for him, events that combine various mediums (DPMB's Mardis Gras will also have a fortune teller and burlesque) -have always appealed to him because they offer audiences the opportunity to experience things they don't normally get to see every day.

"I find," he said, "that audiences (and performers) seem to be more engaged throughout the event when they aren't watching the same type of performance the entire time. I think that variety and mystery are important elements in offering engaging public events...."

There's that, but also, Elkins said, "I tend to get bored with doing the same thing for too long. I'm always seeking out new spaces to perform in and ways to challenge myself through performance (i.e. such as the 24-hour puppet shows, organizing free all-ages events like the Totally Awesome Fest, Greyhound bus tours, etc.)..."

Elkins been in Michigan for most of his life, but he spent some of the early 00's in Olympia WA, and then, later, 10 months in Indonesia, both experiences having drastically impacted the way he thinks about live performance. Olympia brought him into contact with active artists organizing secret cafe shows, house shows and/or D.I.Y. benefits, while in Indonesia, he met native incredible native puppeteers, musicians and dancers ("as well as performance artists from all over the world who were there studying or conducting research in their respective fields..." all of whom "really broadened my ideas about the possibilities for creative expression and performance." He also, while there, wound up creating a form of puppetry.

Those two odysses, combined with his experience in Michigan's art scene and traveling the U.S., have informed his current fascination with shadow puppets. It also communicated "the potential for my participation with this medium. My goal with performing live, regardless of medium, is to offer people a unique and entertaining show that they won't experience anywhere else from anyone...."

"As I am interested in stimulating, entertaining, and engaging people, it always seemed like a safer bet to err on the side of the outrageous rather than the mundane when it comes to performing live." In this regard, he finds many, many brothers-and-sisters-in-arms, via the DPMB.

Elkins will be presenting a piece called "Split Infinitive(s)... an outer space/graveyard/ocean-themed story about a monster and a wandering star..."

Elkins recently toured the final chapter/installation of his puppetry/musical narrative exploration "Patrick's Weird Beard Goes Wandering," aided by puppeteer/voice actor/recording engineer Jason Voss. In the meantime, he's been preparing a new shadow puppet show: "Escape from the Return of the Night of Disappearing Pants", to be recorded for a forthcoming VHS-release.

Kit Oh Nine / Fri-Det & Fri-A2 / A Whole Buncha Rap

2012-02-04T14:15:00.000-08:00

Some thing I'm digging through, Internet-wise, this weekend....

Former metro-area musician Ryan Milligan, from locals like the Hotwalls and early incarnations of Duende, alligned with Graham Pawluk of Ancourage and Nathan Lelandais-Miller (also of the Hotwalls) to develop a batch of his songs that strayed a bit further into feedback heavy noise-pop - the result of which: KON! LP -an album title acting as acronym for the trio's new group Kit Oh Nein - recorded wtih Eric Hoegemeyer at Rust Belt studios in Royal Oak.

These songs are up and highly charged, most of them in and out in two minutes or less; dazzling statcy-snow-sprays of distortion, weaving toe-tapping, strummy indie-pop songs out of strands of dissonant yarn. There's hints of ambient-space-rock simmering at the sides, spilling in during the drifty/droney b-section of their quasi-theme-song ("Cloud Nein"), where the vocals intertwine with the humming synth and guitar-reverb, the delay pedals affecting their best dreamy disorientation. We can hear splashes of strutting glam-rock here and there, but things are never far from keying-back up to a rattling rock n roll kick...

I find this track particularly exemplary and highly sample-able:

But this is the particular personal favorite:

Milligan might be calling NYC home these days, but that hasn't kept him from continuing his work with the Hotwalls...so hopefully locals can see a live version of these songs some day/time soon... Find more songs here - (cassette, vinyl and CD versions are out there, though...or, at least, on the way)

~

Make sure you're Friday's are properly planned, whether you're in Detroit, or Ann Arbor,

But...two weeks from now, there's what's been dubbed "A Whole Buncha' Rap..." ...happening at the Old Miami (Feb 18) - And, indeed, the line up's packed - DC-fav's Ben Miles and Eddie Logix will do a set, as will notables like Magnum Opus and Hugo Biggs / Chozen Few / and Scav D facilitating the wheels of steel.

MC Warren Peace rounds out this line up - a rapper distinguished by his conscious-heavy, world-weary raps that delicately toe the line of social commentary and dazzle with their literate word play (the dude's also an 8th-grade spanish teacher). He's got a new album coming eventually -a follow-up to his debut EP From Detroit to Darabougou - but this writer was asked not to stream any of the newness, as of yet - Instead, familiarize yourself with this track, as it'll likely be made into a video fairly soon.

Bolstered by the beats of Mr. Eddie Logix.

Ears are anvils (and I'll pound yours to scrap)

2012-02-02T10:30:00.000-08:00

"You invite people to every show you have, but you never expect them all to actually show up..."

Ypsi singer/songwriter Matt Jones had a secret show last night inside Jim Roll's Backseat Studios... I was there with my sad-yet-noble digital recorder...but I won't have you suffer through its humble/shitty playback quality...

Flanked by the vibrant voice of Misty Lyn and the dynamic rhythm-saws and neck-taps of cellist Colette Alexander, Mr. Jones sung and strummed out a set that can only, quite unavoidably, be described as 'intimate...' what with its dangling christmas lights and the added air that we were witnessing some kind of steady unfurling, a blooming, an artist whose come to some profound re-realization, some rejuvenated muse...

The guy's falling in love with his songs again and he's putting out an album on March 1st -free, online - which will feature the full concert film produced/directed by Scott Allen, with Martin Thoburn, Adam Nelson and Doug Coombe...

Between self-deprecating banter suggesting that he'd already peaked on some fateful day back in 2007 when he wrote this song, this song and this song...all in one day, he charmed us with his cherubic chuckles and brow-drying head shakes that every song had some kind of mistake sutured somewhere between its spindly guitar plucks...

They even managed a cover of The High Strung song "Guilt Is How I'm Built," which was nice. But the most poignant moment came when he previewed the title track of his forthcoming album, airing the melodic confession:
"...there's something wrong in my mind / half-poison / half-pure... but not quite..."

"I know I should be having fun..." he sighs and chuckles after the third song... "and I'm so close..."
Slowly he started loosening up through the set...
"I definitely am (having fun) but it is very strange...but I'm liking it, I'm liking this a lot...

...and okay, moving on, this next song is called Jugulars, Bones & Blisters..."

Four Years

2012-01-31T10:40:00.000-08:00

This Blog's four years old now... and maybe that feels weird to think about, maybe it doesn't...

I've never really given this thing much thought beyond it being some fervent playground with lucid boundaries, upon-and-throughout-which I could bounce my over-thinking brain, with no tether... hopefully rolling towards some final, profound, destination of cracked insight.

The week I started this blog... I went to see a then-new-ish band called Prussia play inside the Crofoot's Vernors Room, February-something-or-other, two-thousand-and-eight.

Through 09 and 10, they were actually the top answer for me, whenever asked that yer-favorite-local-band question...

And now they're apparently breaking up.

What am I going to tell my mom...

It's weird feeling these passages... (so why linger?)

Still, this band's responsible for some of my favorite live-show/performance memories...

One still stands out - a stuffy, spilled-out show upstairs in the AC Rich loft, across from the Crofoot, with Prussia and The Silent Years. We escaped up there, sliding off of the smog-stricken main drag during the chrome-glistened mess of the Woodward Dream Cruise, back in August 2008...

And now one of those bands is broken up and the other...? Well... the lead singer (Josh Epstein) of the Silent Years was on national televsion yesterday and I'm sure most of us tuned in - watching his new band Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr (with Daniel Zott on guitar/vocals and Mike Higgins on drums) perform on Conan.

Cool feeling, right? Or...giddy/dorky feeling? Jealous feeling? Weird? Awesome? Proud?

It's all a swirl when you see the dudes who used to sit at your local watering hole up there on your tiny tube, glowing under expensive lighting and crooning through impressive sound systems... There they were... still singing through that same telephone receiver used in the very same AC Rich show... Only now glowing with the hysterical sanctity still provided by televised events!

<--... And shaking hands with this guy...
...stream it here.

(pictured, the work of Glass Action)

I think at the end of the day... writing about local arts / local music during a time like that, you feel what Sports Journalists must feel when they're home team is winning, or heading towards some potential championship trophy...

By writing about what's being created here, being seen and heard here...on a weekly basis, by everyone who lives here... you start feeling like you're ...I dunno... rooting for something?

But certain ideals, values and strange emotions always come into it... Who's the best? Who should get spotlights? Which bands should stay together forever and get more attention? The most attention?

Why do I love all these songs by all these people...

Oh, hell...

&amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;a href="http://prussia.bandcamp.com/album/girl-cops-single"&amp;amp;gt;Girl Cops single by Prussia&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;gt;

Last Show(?) - Fri, Feb 3 - inside the Crofoot's Pike Room - "PRUSSIA was born at the AC Rich. They are influenced by Motown, psychedelic rock, and 60’s girl pop..." -with: Dinosaur Bones / Joe Hertler / Seven Birds One Stone...

Anyways...

Had a recent chat with Josh Malerman of the High Strung...inside the Penguinarium at the Detroit Zoo...
(the meaty, mad words of which will be churned out in a forthcoming feature). We were talking about writing, the weighty non-stop-pedness of it all...and he wondered aloud: "haven't I written e-nough songs?"... to which I admitted that I often felt as though I could end this blog every day and any day and just walk away...

"But then..." he says. "Something happens again and you're back..."

And is it something as cliched as some perfect/memorable live show, or even just deep conversation shared on icy pavement beside an enclosure full of smelly alpacas and snooty flamingos... is it always going to be something as easy and cheesy as that?

Taking a break, here, for a week... to find out.

Perhaps I'll find it here...
in Ferndale, on Saturday night.

Or maybe I'll find it here...

***Or maybe I'll consider writing about the new Jack White material, a single is streaming here from his forthcoming solo LP, which he claims was some sort of accident, if not, some kind of blunder...

But that's already old-news by the time you've read this... Internet world spins much faster than it did back when I started this "blog..."

How about this? There's a new documentary about Detroit's reclusive psyche-folk singer/songwriter Rodriguez and it's won an award at Sundance...

We'll leave it there for now...

"A Magnet for Curious Souls" - Bardo / Strung - 2/3 - Library

2012-01-30T19:43:00.000-08:00

Those familiar with Detroit rock quartet The Questions' style will find a refreshing re-imagining of their characteristically dusky, rampant psyche/blues bellows when the groups lead singer Drew Bardo lets "these songs breath in a different atmosphere..."

...That atmosphere being: the Ferndale Public Library (for an early evening show, 7pm, Friday, Feb 3), joining the High Strung.

That evening, with his bassist Pookie Grech taking some time down in Brazil, Bardo will perform an acoustic set geared away from the "electric chariot" that the Questions have harnessed over the last several years. Bardo sounds like he's reveling in the bit of fleeting free time he's found, with Grech away, to excavate some of the hundred or so songs (from more of his "storytelling-"-angled catalog) that his band mates haven't even heard yet.

This is more purely Bardo's voice and personality, where as his full-band/electric side is molded more to the collective personality of the band (which includes drummer Will Linna and guitarist Chris Kreczkowski). Both sets of material can start the same way, an acoustic guitar and a notebook, but with the full band, Bardo said, "it's refined and surgically altered over time--- but here, I am just laying out material exactly as it sounds as I compose it. A naked honesty that many of the songs I write cannot do without. Some tunes don't work well at all when you attempt to plug them in-- so this show is a good opportunity for me to work some of these idea's out a bit to see what sticks."

Picture it akin to just sitting around a campfire, Bardo said, or a coffee shop for for close family members.

"For me, that's where all of it began. It's exactly what I've been doing since I was 14 years old, so that being said, it's business as usual. The first few years that I ever played music live was just me and an acoustic guitar. That's how I started, in coffee houses and house parties. That's how I met everyone in the early days that eventually became my inspiration to start the bands I've been in. So it's kind of getting back to basics for me-- Or going back home to a familiar place...."

The songs on display at the Library, this Friday, is a sonic outcropping of Bardo's materializing plans to develop a solo album to accompany his current book, hopefully to be published -late 2012.

"Some idea's are much stronger in the context of music-- and when I begin forcing them into my literary work out of fear of losing them altogether, that's when I know it's time to get artistically organized. With Pookie being in Brazil for a month- Will no longer able to play drums, and Chris & I eyeball deep in filming video's to promote "Chasing The Light", it's just a perfect storm for me to birth some of these songs that are emerging...."

So this former slam-poetry-circuit performer is coming to the library to help him take mental/spiritual/creative inventory... that sounds like it could result in quite an intriguing set.

It also helps me take inventory for The Questions as well- going through piles of idea's and figuring out which ones make sense in which particular projects-- it's a bit of a puzzle, but an exciting one at that.
The Questions are also planning to go into the recording studio and punch out the follow up album this late winter, Bardo said.

"I'm not getting any younger, and the world is not getting any more sane, so I guess I'm feeling the crunch to get as much material out as possible. Life is unpredictable and one ever knows when it is going to end, so when I sit here and stare at all these silent songs, I feel it necessary to give them a chance at life before it's all over for me. I'm really digging the chemistry of this project as well- it's really organic. Right now it's acoustic guitars, Violin, Mandolin, and vocals. Very simple. Very honest...."

...and on the subject of libraries ...in general...

"I'm all about the Library. I've been a regular at my local since I was a small child-- I feel they are the last great social institution. They are a mixing bowl for people who choose to be cultured. A magnet for curious souls, young and old. What's not to love?"

This is part of the Library's First Stop Fridays series
Find more info from the 780's and hear some High Strung songs here.

Oh Sees Hear Now

2012-01-29T12:00:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling it now... My hands want to come down on the keyboard like drum sticks... the ellipses ...necessarily...allow for me to pull away, to swivel around in this abominable office chair, cruel, cotton-upholstered maiden that it is...allowing me to jolt, to jitter to the beats...

Bouncing and scraping off of bricks and chipped drywall, sommersaulting down puddled alleyways and into dank venues given waning iridescence from the red and yellow bulbs strung to the ceilings, those guitars like malignant motorboat-blades humming and churning, majestic and horrible, a metallic banshee's moan while the delirious clatter of the drums, the clenching, cardio-kicked hits, the splintered hickory...keep you juking, jolting, jittering...wanting to just bring meaty fists down onto the thin plastic rectangle in front of you....

And you find that point... Asdf Jfkl ...where the effect of music becomes inexpressible.

Man...

Today's sonic lunch is a sandwich of strange bedfellows...
it includes switching headphone-dips between what everyone in the indie-music world seemed all a flutter-for over the last month... i.e. Lana Del Rey (and her new album Born To Die) and what this humble music writer would offer in its place, for everyone in the indie-music world to go all a flutter-for, in the coming month... i.e. Thee Oh Sees (and their new album Carrion Crawler / The Dream...)

It was over before it began. I'm biased as I have a history with Thee Oh Sees, having started in on this San Fran collective's 15-year-canon about 5-ish years ago; Carrion/Dream is their 13th full length (flanked with more than a dozen EPs and 7" singles).

Rey, meanwhile, is little more to me than the bearer of the voice, a very beautiful voice, that has bewitched my friends with her grandiose/understated, elegant/everyday ballads about video games and mountain dew. I'm only slowly getting into her songs, orchestral and grand... symphonic strings and samples of fireworks opening into deep booming bass and sequenced drums setting their stylish slow-dance electronica groove and this not so girlish but not so womanly voice kisses and coos but also cuts and croons about new anti-excess anthems... It's dazzling, no doubt. But, at the end of the day, over-hyped?

For me, so far, this feels like a forced dress up, the eccentric indie-songstress framed by musical aesthetics most befitting an opera house, while still maintaining the hints of electro-pulsed, dark-ambient pop; not that it couldn't work, or grow into working, for me...but for now it's not sweeping me away. (That said, "Off To The Races," if a bit awkward in its first few spins, starts to grow on me as precosiu

Then again, reread the frantic and abstruse ramblings of the first two paragraphs and you can see what listening to Carrion has done to me, in just the first two spins... It's been a treat to see this band pinball its way through a bodacious haunted mansion's worth of rock n roll sensibilities, to gothic-psyche-folk, drone-drowned Brit-pop mutations, garage-torching indie-ballads...gangly, gnarly, weirdly valiant...

While Rey sings with an ever present heaviness, love "till the end of time" and "sleeping through the tears" and heart "breaks" with every step she "takes..." Thee Oh Sees main man John Dwyer caws out alluring and nightmarish imagery, that is, if you're able to decipher his heavily-echo-fuzzed vocals; in fact, he's often more inclined to just treat his voice like an instrument, an instrument he seems to take about as much care of as his guitar, erratically swerving it up into falsetto "whoops" and riffing it out for wordless "ah-ah ah, ah-ah ah," choruses, as though his buzzy bleat is just a throat-housed second guitar.

It wasn't a fair match up to begin with...

In any case...both of their respective albums are out this week and I advise you to listen to both.

This post really never had a point...

But here's a point I wanted to get to... ...being curious about Chit Chat

An Ypsi-based band that I can't find a myspace or bandcamp link for... can you imagine? And the song someone sent me is an a file that doesn't agree with my dinosaur-desktop's Windows Media Player, so I have to wait for my lap-top to be rescued...

And so, yes, for those who want to sample from their desktops, their laptops or smart iDevices, you'll have to settle for this video from last week at Ann Arbor's Name Brand Tattoo parlor. The band put out their debut a little more than a month ago and it can be found via Cafe Ollie's Ypsi Music Shelf, among a few other endemically obscure outlets, as well, I'm sure.

More from Ypsi's Music Shelf?
<a href="http://secrettwins.bandcamp.com/track/hands-up-arms-down">HANDS UP (ARMS DOWN) by SECRET TWINS</a>

Have a good week, now...

Just So You Know

2012-01-28T12:00:00.000-08:00

I've heard a lot of things, but one morsel that I was never told

Is the apple of your eye will eventually mold...

And I find it kind of strange

That the writer and advice-giver are one in the same, but now I......
&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://dr-b.bandcamp.com/album/just-so-you-know"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Just So You Know by Mister Produced by Dr B&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;

Mister's proven to be, in my tweaked eyes, one of the more singularly inspiring (and curiously unifying) artists in the metro/Michigan music community. Or, hey, I dunno, maybe things are all just pushing themselves forward organically? Something in the air or the water... Anyway, at lleast that was the idea behind his raps, his stage show, and his work with Passalacqua...breaking down the cliquey barriers of genres...

Whatever it is - I've felt a different energy these last two years since he turned some rock scene heads a couple Blowouts ago.

I excavated interview notes from a chat we had back in November-2010:

"...I think, ya know, not to get too far off, but,...I think it's interesting that there's this massive Detroit Rock scene and this massive Detroit Hip-Hop scene...and there's such a tiny overlap...or not much at all."

...What a difference 18 months makes? Now we've got Passalacqua mingling with the Ashleys... House Phone backing Cold Men Young... Sheefy McFly & the Delorean... and then Mister is going to be rapping over some Duende recordings soon.

His Just So You Know EP drops Tuesday -1-31-12
Backing up Mister's mid-low/midwest rumbled croon and word-splurged articulations are warm, woozy brass, swaying this way and that, with steady strutting beats, and the subtle spry charms of vibes chiming over whooshed/whizzled vinyl scratches. A mostly chill, characteristically introspective aesthetic...

Mister (a.k.a. Bryan Lackner) clears the vaults of raps he's been sitting on for a few years, now, via Just So You Know... Elegant post-bop jazz grooves, and dazzling/smooth piano pours are cut-up by more eccentric bytes like on "Relationship Blues" (with Elemental), where the cold, uncaring voice that tells you your heart-wrenching cell phone messages are deleted or you're jarred by raspy riled up dialogue-tracks from 90's slacker/indie films.

Mister aims to take you out of the box, here and there, making sure you don't get too lost in the shuffling beats and unfolding the sleeve of his three-piece suit, little by little, to show you that initial heavy, contemplative heart that heaped him forward into his hip hop journey.

More info from Dr. B productions.

Magnificent Wails

2012-01-27T13:02:00.000-08:00

I'm still computer-less... lily-pad-leaping to a range of temporary devices, even potentially highjacking my friend's laptop while she's down in Kentucky... ...that doesn't mean I can't settle in and take in some music and then ramble about it...
~

Like, say, the gravelly guitars and spilled-about percussion of alt-rock revivalists Bobby Electric...

Low, raspy vocals croon out a breathy growl over intricate guitars that dance and dash from a pensive, tinny twang to all out fire-storm flare, while the cymbal-rattled drum slams and wavy bass lines bring it back to those post-hardcore days of deeply tilling percussion, that dark, cloudy and cathartic aesthetic of howly-ballads, slicing into ya with low, burly-fuzz grooves and tight snare punches... This northern-metro-area rock outfit have their debut album coming out tomorrow...and it's a fine survey of hard-rock sensibilities, if a little weighty at points, shunting forth past the five minute mark more than a few times...but they make it worth it those subtle shades of dreamier space-rock ambiance, like the closing drifts of "I Hate Echoes."

Their release show is Jan 28th in the Crofoot's Vernor's Room. Take a listen:
&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://thebobbyelectric.bandcamp.com/album/it-was-hard-to-meet-you"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;It Was Hard To Meet You by The Bobby Electric&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;

They're backed by Crappy Future and My Pal Val.

~~...and, since, who knows when I'll be back to posting regularly...I think I'll plaster a few more digi-fliers of noteworthy shows below...~~

The first being this fundraiser for the Michigan Humane Society (hosted by MotorCityBlog and Most People Are DJs...the former is an assiduous local culture blog and the latter is, yes, also kind of a blog and culture reporting entity, but distinguished by its podcaster/videographer/documentarian Mikel O.D., who filmed the video of FUR -streaming below... FUR being one of the featured bands on this bill. (Others: Phantom Cats / Satori Circus and his Cirquettes / I Love Lightning Bugs / Legendary Creatures...

...

And then there's this show, which I already technically wrote about here.

In The Shop

2012-01-26T13:30:00.000-08:00

My lap top's in the shop... ...like a race-car driver without wheels over here... So, posts might be fewer-ish and further-between--ish...

But, in the meantime, dig this new video from a DC favorite, War On Drugs (for a song from their latest, Slave Ambient, off Secretly Canadian).

The War on Drugs - Brothers from Secretly Jag on Vimeo.

They're still out their touring, but no Detroit dates on the horizon...

While I'm away...and stressing out...
consider marking your calendars...
Groundhog Day - ...Pupils...Crappy Future...Estuaries...Robin Goodfellow...
Feb 3rd - ...Drew Bardo (solo set)...The High Strung
Feb 4th - ...DJ Ice Cold Crissy...Robin Goodfellow (again)...Phantom Cats...GLOSSIES

Gimme Gimme Gimme

2012-01-25T09:36:00.000-08:00

Four bands... ...for the four bars in the iconic hardcore band's insignia, four cold, staid bars that hint at bellicosity and badassery...

HELLMOUTH
CHILD BITE
OLD GODS
GOLDEN TORSO

have thrown together their four respective Black Flag cover songs and are releasing them on vinyl - a one time pressing available to the first 250 people who come through the door (with $10 cover) at the Magic Stick Lounge on January 26th...for a live show featuring each punk-preserving participant.

The only way you get a copy is if you're among those first 250 attendees... The noisy internet "highly" advises you to find pre-sale tickets... either at the Garden Bowl in Detroit or UHF in Royal Oak. - More info.

Read more here...

~
**Still here? Still bored?
Seek some transparency and follow the helpful Fact-Checking of Obama's State of the Union Address via the Washington Post.
~
***While you're at it - why not plan a drinking game for your forthcoming Oscar Party... ...I've been ready to declare this ceremony a joke for years but the hopeless cinephile romantic in me kept holding back... I think I'm done... Thanks Slate.

Tapes

2012-01-24T17:19:00.000-08:00

Tapes came back last year... ...

And House Phone's getting in on it - with their latest release packing their recently-online-streaming Gift Catalog EP. They're throwing a concert to boot, featuring an eclectic blend of dazzling/dreamy indie-rock (Pewter Cub), literary/antiquarian hip-hop (Doc Waffles) and psychedelic vaudevillian beat-folk freakouts (Ferdy Mayne)... indeed! Particularly eager to see where the Ferdy Mayne project goes next...having recently re-charged itself over the late Autumn...

Sounds: Ferdy Mayne - "You Wearin' Dresses"

anyhow - that show's Feb 3rd at the Magic Stick Lounge... (Check it out - you can hear a live recording, on that new tape, of House Phone covering "Dear, Prudence..." -followed by some light Max-Daley-heckling after the applause).

Other tape stuff:
Stay tuned to Ann Arbor based Zen Tapes, they're consistently streaming intriguing new sounds...

Detroit-area experimentalists Food For Owls just put new spooled-sounds out via the Axis Mundi Collective...Stream some here.

Ginkgo (over in Ypsi) is cranking some out pretty steadily...too...
...and Gold Tapes, here in Detroit...

And they keep coming... Heck, I just found a cassette in my car that singer/songwriter Justin Walker passed me a couple months back...early long lost demos, if you will, of what's now become Brilliant Violence.

Anyways...
...More sounds:
House Phone - "1,000 Years"

Where Will We Be...

2012-01-23T14:34:00.000-08:00

...dug out from beneath my car seat today... some kind of note, crumpled up, that I'd left for myself before heading out into Hamtramck on the last night of the 2011 Metro Times Blowout...

~
2/29/12 - 3/3/12

Metro Times Blowout's line up will be announced any day now...
Last year's looked a little bit like this:

~
In other news... billionaire "Optimist" Warren Buffett serenaded the Chinese media for that country's new year today... with a ukulele... The Republican Race to be the nominee for President keeps getting more topsy turvy... Brendan Benson's got a new song for you to hear...
~

But...this weekend...at the Berkley Front:

Featuring a slew of psychedelic/noisy/mesmeric-melodious/avant-garde bands of the rock, ambient and overall-post-music variety...
like this:

Bands spread across two days in Berkley...Jan 28 + Jan 29
Windy and Carl
Oblisk
Indian Guides
Sunlight Ascending
Jura
Telecollision
St. Zita
Sea Turtle Restoration Project
Electric Lion Soundwave Experiment
Pewter Cub

Choice Notes: Matt Jones Recording and more...

2012-01-21T09:05:00.000-08:00

I've written quite a bit about Matt Jones over the last few days (for a forthcoming printed-feature-) so you'll forgive me if I'm sparse on the word-age here...

What you need to know is that, very soon, next month for sure, new recordings will be available from this Ypsi-based singer/songwriter...writer of such devastatingly beautiful lyrics. But that's all I can say...

The only more I can say is that he is also recording a live/in-studio EP to later compliment the still-forthcoming LP...
"We are still figuring out the logistics of this thing... and probably will be doing so up until we are playing our first notes. But i am even looking forward to the possible insanity of it..."

Lookin forward to it...

Video produced by Love Drunk Studio... ...more info
myspace.com/mattspainting

lovedrunkstudio.com

hearnebraska.org

....
While you're here, messing around on my site, enjoy this video, wholly unrelated to Mr. Jones...but notable... (this happened last Friday, at the magic Stick)

Also notable... pun-somewhat-intended...

Post-Deep-Cutz / Pre-New-Weird

2012-01-20T07:36:00.000-08:00

Sex Church - Dull Light by Load Records
....Good Morning... (Afternoon?)

As my extremities thaw and the coffee screws my mind up into some cerebral pep squad leader, I squelch the neurotic tinges in the back of my head, those echoing from the upper bleachers of my skull's gymnasium, that seem so eager to remind me of how fleeting these little words are, that I type out across the screen... I remember, always, to just live in the moment...

Don't question the validity or profundity of posting a new song by this group called Sex Church that I just started getting into, this morning, via a recent album review...and, hey, yeah, I definitely dig the track enough and I think you will too... ...Will I be rocking it in a week? Will I be stammering to you about the band and the song, next weekend, when you catch me at the bar?

Maybe. Likely not. But enjoy it now for what it is...

But then... how's this for a not-so-random MP3 posting - Detroit-area based solo ambient-pop composer Andrew Remdenok's latest work:
Hallo (Andrew Remdenok Remix) by andrewremdenok
...who, it turns out, just played the Magic Stick last night... glad to see the former-Prussia-bassist is starting to bring his own stuff out, now. Hopefully we'll see/hear more soon...

~
....Moving on: News from two adverse ends of the Industry spectrum this morning...Swedish-based bit-torrent site The Pirate Bay, a known facilitator of "illegal" downloading, is now using its evil influence to help promote independent artists. Sounds pretty cool, actually. It now offers a free advertising service called The Promo Bay - (read about it here) - as TinyMixTapes reports: "many out there in the vast ocean of artists are more concerned with getting their output to the people than they are with having their output stolen or pirated..."

Of course, a provocative entity such as The Pirate Bay had something to say about the whole SOPA/PIPA backlash this week...striking back against the outrageous lengths politicians will go to defend copyright, suggesting perhaps that, likely, palms have been greased... That's the whole thing of it though, ain't it, the big labels and the big Katy Perry types are having their intellectual properties stolen..., right?

But many in the music industry have given up on album sales, royalties, etc... as TinyMixTapes continues: "By creating a community of content creators who openly support the free distribution of their work as a means of exposure that will lead to people buying concert tickets and other merchandise, it increases the acceptance of such practices..."

It comes down to quality of product, TMT says, vs. quality of marketing... And marketing is what artists like Katy Perry (via EMI) has in spades...
...as NPR's Marketplace -Planet Money reports this morning...
Listen to the story here.
Read more here...
...breaking down the nuanced expenses of producing a blockbuster album like Teenage Dream that saw Perry become "the most played artist on the radio..." Producers, songwriters, cameos, artists' advances all add up - and then there's the cost of getting these songs on the radio in the form of "special promotions, free merchandise, and presents..." Or, what sounds to me like payola, alive and well.

The story above breaks down all the various pockets in which this money ends up - and why the inconsistent "batting average" of major labels is the big reason the music industry is struggling.

~

That all said... why don't we hit the town tonight and see, hear and be invigoratingly rattled by some live local music?

Up and coming rock trio Superbomb plays inside Ferndale's post-punk-boutique Hybrid Moments, along with Kommie Kilpatrick, Instant Party and Growing Pains... 9pm

This group roared out a tripped-out, sludge howl of a set inside the Library a couple weeks ago... ...I turned to a friend, mid-set, and found myself wanting to say the words: "post-grunge..." to describe what I was hearing...

It seemed to have the alluring gloom of the later-mid-90's-pre-reunion era Soundgarden, but also the cerebral, tingling bend and hazy-barrel roll of Spacemen 3...

Do they sound like any of those bands? No, not necessarily. You're reading a blog, fercryinoutloud, so be wary of how subjective I/we, can be... But, maybe if those two noted bands were playing a game of tennis...and Superbomb was the ball that kept striking off the netting... ....wait, I'm not sure where that metaphor's going...

Some Things by Superbomb

It's just got that growl, in the guitars and the vocals, that distant-rolling-thunder-esque muted ominousness to the drums and bass, and things are spaced out, often slowed down - this is music that wants to take it all in during the verses and then swing its axes into every branch, wall or car hood during the choruses...

"Post-grunge?" I found myself chuckling after I said it... Stopping myself. What does that even mean? What does any of that even mean anymore? We have such a fixation on classification so that we know what we're walking into -when we approach a piece, a work, an artist... We crave a whiff of familiarity, to have an inkling of what to expect, which can dictate your enjoyment or rejection ...I'm trying to work against that.

Like when Jeremy Peters tells me that Eastern Michigan's jazz radio station still plays "mostly post-bop..." my mind instantly leafs through a range of artists from John Scofield to Branford Marsalis to maybe even some later Charles Mingus compositions... And then Peters tells me about the extensive work put into that kind of genre classification by Allmusic.com-staffers like Greg McIntosh or Fred Thomas... I thought, in my younger college days, that that would be something I would love doing day-in and day-out but...I worry now that it would drive me crazy.

I have enough time of it describing bands here...

So I'm trying to get post-post-labeling things... and embrace the New Weird. People can get touchy about classifying art - or music, what-have-you. Shouldn't it be that it's an uncontainable element, something that can't be framed or described-to-a-tee? In a world where we're made so-aware-of art and art history by those whose task it is to document it, (this influenced that, this era begot that era...) it's important to remember the very minute flurries and excitations bubbling between the beats of any song, anywhere...

Doc Waffles rightly compared the artist's venture to that of Ishmael's frightening and enlivening adventures aboard the Pequod in Moby Dick... "...it's an essential metaphor for the artistic enterprise, to probe the depths and encounter what's down there it may be your source of livlihood or of great terror," (said Doc).

I've got to get back to probing the depths with the same literary flourish as Melville...

... Listen: Doc Waffles - "Three Minutes to Midnight"

Dudes Hast

2012-01-19T06:44:00.000-08:00

Viewables...

Premiering tonight at the Belle Isle Casino...Solid Dudes--#2

Solid Dudes Kitchen - Jimmy Buffet Trailer from Solid Dudes Kitchen on Vimeo.

Detroit Revealed on Film......Premiering later in February at the DIA

... ...aaaand... Premiering later in March at the DIA

Future Oldies & Ashleys & Pink Lightning & Pass-uh-Lack-wa

2012-01-18T06:33:00.000-08:00

......a conversation with Tom of The Ashleys - and his 5 other bands... wherein we discuss the possibility of a Scene Summit - the 16 band slam coming in April to the Lager House - and the 3 to 4 new albums that could arise from Passalacqua collaborating with the Ashleys, or just the Ashleys by themselves, or maybe from Pink Lightning...or maybe from another new band called Future Oldies? Or a new hip-hop group called Cool Island?

Find out...

Tom: Everything's been going really sweet actually...
Milo: Haven't heard that adjective used since like '98. It's how I used to breathlessly describe things like Mortal Kombat fatalities...
Tom: Let's bring it back, then...

(photo: Andrea Zarzycki)

.

~
Milo: You've gotten quite busy lately...aside from guitarring, singing, shredding and fashioning sun-glasses and feather boas with the Ashleys...you're now working with Passalacqua?

Tom: Pas-suh-lack-wah? Apparently I say it weird...Chris (Butterfield of Pink Lightning) busted my chops about it. I guess I say it like I'm from Minnesota or something. It's got Bryan Lack-ner in it, I figured it was Passa-Lack-qua...
Milo: Nah, it's like... Do Re Mi Fa So Lah-qua...
Tom: Real nice guys, fun guys. Apparently the Ashleys backing them came from you at the Library - when you read Nabakov over us jamming...Bryan said, literally, 'We should do something like that...'

~~
Milo: ...so...Ashleys, Passalacqua, and now you joined Pink Lightning...that's three projects. But I've been bugging you 'bout the other stuff you'd sent me, your solo, acoustic stuff...
Tom: Adam from Phantom Cats might join me and help make those into some-weird-music-band...Might just stay as a recording-only-thing, in case I write songs for a 10-piece band... We're only a trio now...I don't wanna end up playing these songs out live with my 10 pieces and just have 7 or 8 people standing there, waiting for us to get through the regular Ashley songs...
Milo: When you say "trio," for the Ashelys, we're talking about your longtime friend Keith...who joined the band on bass...who you used to blog with a bit...
Tom: Blogging's tough man...but, yeah, Keith, who works over there at the Ferndale Natural Food Patch...
Milo: I've been chipping away at trying to get them to consider changing the name to Carrots-A-Go-Go...and by the time they come around to it, I'll likely have patented it...then they might owe me.
Tom: Carrots-A-Go-Go sounds a lot better than Food Patch...
Milo: You feel like if you walked into that joint, and, ya know, it was like a movie scene, then there'd be a lot of Laff-In type zoom-ins and zoom-outs, hip-shakin' and tasteful splashes of multicolored siren flashes...Strawberry Alarm Clock might be the house band...
Tom: Let's get down to business; I brought my mobile studio...

(He lifts his digital 8-track recorder and headphones onto the rickety cafe table)

~~~
Tom: ...this is what I do everything on...I've got Passa-lack-wa demos on here...
He plays me combines a funky slide guitar and booming low end groove - rings like Funkadelic, somewhere between "Can You Get To That" and the fiery wail of "If It's Good To You..." Definitely distinct from the garagey-barrel rolls typical to most Ashleys fare to date...

Tom: Brent ("Blaksmith" of Passalacqua) already has a hook and some lyrics written out...and that's me on drums. It's not Steve (of the Ashleys)...does that one have horns on it?
I take off the headphones
Milo: Horns?
Tom: ...a horn 'effect'...they're fake horns...fake drums too...
Milo: So...live bands and MCs...House Phone backed up Cold Men Young a few times last year...now Ashleys are backing up Passalacqua...
Tom: That's the way it's looking...
Milo: ...a future career as a beat writer?
Tom: A Beat-man...selling beats by the side of the road.
Milo: From a Beet Stand
Tom: Only they're not beets, they're records...but also beets...

~~~~
Milo: Any difference in approach when writing a hip/hop track versus...
Tom: We've been dabbling in more off-color stuff, wait that's not the right expression...
Milo: Just not-rock-music...?
Tom: Yeah, for a while now. Steve's got a sampler, so we've been playing with loops and beats. I started a song from the opening bars of "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted..." for my own horrible rap project...
Milo: ...project # 5?
Tom: It was called Cool Island...we aimed to be the most offensive rap group in history. We wanted to play just one show...and only shoot off fireworks, for the whole set, no songs in actuality. We got the fire works, but they put the kabosh on the fireworks at the start of the show...

~~~~~
Milo: Birthday show is coming up in April... Sweet 16...with 16 bands?
Tom: It's getting pretty fun. At the Lager House, two stages, only 15 minute sets each...16 bands in 3 hours, it'll be like this crazy paintball thing.
Milo: What's it been like coming into Pink Lightning? And what the hell's the deal with Future Oldies?
Tom: I'd never joined a band that's been set like that before, but Future Oldies, doing that with Chris and Leo McWilliams (of PL) helped; I didn't know my role at first cuz they just same it out in rehearsals until they figure something out. That's mostly how we do Ashleys' tracks but usually someone at some point comes up with the golden ticket...but our songs aren't complicated, that helps... 'I've got this cool riff--put that in a song!' But, half the time, Pink Lightning guys wind up playing country type songs. We all have eclectic tastes. It's sounding good so far, practicing with them down in Eastern Market, cold up there, you gotta bundle up...

Milo: Future Oldies - you, Chris, Leo...
Tom: Steve (from Pupils/Marco Polio) and Adam (Phantom Cats)...we're on indefinite hiatus, until Steve gets a new drum kit...he had it stolen out of his car just one week before he had his car stolen in the same week he lost his job...that was a rough week... In Ferndale, no less! We just hung out all summer reinterpreting pop songs from this Golden Era rock n roll songbook that Leo had...
Milo: head-between-the-headphones "I'm hearing Bobby Darin's "Dream Lover"...and Roy Orbison's "In Dreams..." for starters...
Tom: It was really fun...
Milo: Maybe start up a kickstarter to get a new one?
Tom: Donate so that we can have fun...
Milo: By Future Oldies-having fun, listeners will, in theory, -have fun. Or your fun will be refunded. Guaranteed more fun than a swirly slide?
Tom: Whoa...more fun than a straight slide...less fun than a water-slide... We're still here, still on board.
Milo: Your recent update said: "New demos coming up on Tuesday..."
Tom: ...but we didn't specify which Tuesday... just "a" Tuesday...

~~~~~
Milo: Busy with so many bands and new demos...but you seem to have found a rhythm.
Tom: Not playing a bunch of shows is helpful. It got crazy over the summer. Hey, we got 6 shows, how we gonna practice? Then you don't and then nothing new happens... Then you stop and start writing/jamming again...We have to finish this (Ashleys) record before the world ends...
Milo: Get it out on the 20th of December, give em a day to listen to it...and enough time for me to write a review...That's not vain, is it? To daydream aloud that the world goes out listening to your record while reading my review...But that's the answer, reel back the shows; a lot of you guys, the satellites from the Brunch Rock summit... Pewter Cub, Jesse & the Gnome, Fur, Deadbeat Beat...reeled back all the shows after a busy spring and summer...your names are on the wall now, you can...
Tom: It just seems like everybody's already making really good music, what's the next thing to do? I've always wanted to do a soundtrack to a film...but I don't know how you get into that, do you know someone who's making a film? Do you have to make a movie yourself? Then you're busy making the movie...how ya gonna do music? What's next? Release an album,...then you tour...and then...?

---Milo: The calendar always hustles us through... Shows on the Weekends...then it's a CD release...then it's time for Blowout again... now we get into summer out door fests...then DIY...then Halloween... project project project... It's school-ish, cycle through your classes, hang out at lunch, see my show, see your show, smoke in the bathroom, do homework, go to recitals and proms...
...such great potential: Bands mixing in with each other, hip-hop and Roy Orbison...and "Cool Island!!" ...and bands getting together just to play 15 minutes in a cluttered set for that April Lager Show?
Tom: I think Jessica Hernandez is going to do it...we met at this show 2 years ago at the Crofoot, the Taco Show...with Shane & Jerry...that's where I met Brent (who, since then, has been the biggest spokesman for the Ashleys being the best band ever)...that show was like the king-maker...Hernandez went to Bonaroo after it, and Daniel Zott was playing it too, now he's on the TV...and Pass-a-lack-wa took off after that too...thought I might be next...? ...No...

He plays me an Ashleys track, more of a layered, atmospheric psyche-rock joint...longer than 3 minutes, nearing 5...
Tom: We're getting more instrumentation, with Keith. We were a two-person band initially just to play live shows easily. But, now, the network has expanded, you can have more people play, we start doing more intricate stuff. It's nice to know people.
Milo: It is... I think we need a Scene Summit
Tom: Scene Summit...
Milo: Like a Town Hall get together of band-folk and music-mavens and culture curators...
Tom: Like a convention...? Now recognizing the esteemed delegate from Woodbridge!??
Milo: The unkempt, shaggy-looking delegate who smells of cigarette smoke...
...but yeah...
Tom: Yeah...
Milo: We should put our heads together... Figure out what could be next...What should be next...

Next...

...then they press that distortion pedal down

2012-01-17T08:18:00.001-08:00

...updated ramblings are on the way...

There's also this, while you're here:

UMO - Thought Ballune from Jordan Blady on Vimeo.

Ashleys (Summit?)

2012-01-16T10:02:00.000-08:00

Currently having coffee with Tom, from the Ashleys...

We're talking about having a Scene Summit...some day soon...

What does that entail?

We're working that out as we talk... and down copious amounts of mind-tingling, blood-rattling coffee...

In the meantime, here's a song from the Ashley's 2011 album. (We're also talking about the Ashley's, now a trio, -inevitable follow up...

What happens next? We all wanna know...Tom's involved in four different projects right now...and I'll unwrap all of those in the next interview-post

More soon.

Connection

2012-01-15T12:21:00.000-08:00

I kinda went off some rails on that last post... I was actually intending to write some sort of quip about the Rolling Stones' song "Connection," a Richards/Jagger jangler about being hassled by transporation security...

As fate has it, a local group, Grand Rapids-based The Quaaludes, recently had their cover version of this song released via Gold Tapes' year-end compilation (download it here). Their version speeds up the drums to a pummeling pulse, blows out the vocals just enough to match the buzzsaw clang of the surging guitars and raps it up in about 40-seconds-less time than the original. (If you wanna dig deeper, this band's made up of members from another Michigan-based rock/punk group known as The Amoebas.

In any case, my crazy train rant was trying to reel in the contemplative kite that would question how deep of a connection we can make with music, when we are ever tumbling forth into-onto-and-out-of new albums by new bands at a rate unheard of in... hmm, can I put it this way, listener-history?

And just as soon as I think I've mined profound terrain in terms of musical appreciation, theory, history and its role (and impact upon) society (i.e., those same listeners...) then Phillip Glass comes along (stopping into Ann Arbor, no less) and puts things in perspective...
...while discussing with the Free Press music writer Mark Stryker, regarding one of the few-and-far-between performances of his groundbreaking avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach (Fri, Jan 20/ Sat Jan 21 at the Power Center (on Fletcher St))... the Koyaanisqatsi-composer bemoaned how behind we all still were, how preocuppied with the shock value of experimental forms...

"The music world has barely recovered from 'Pierrot Lunaire' of Arnold Schoenberg," ...referring to an atonal piece from 1912 that helped define the austere modernism that dominated classical music for decades after World War II. "Even today, people program Bartok as if it was new work. We're talking about work written 70 years ago, and the big revolution in music that happened when my grandfather was a young man. It's insane! It's unconscionably slow, glacial change in the music world...."

Stryker asks: "...isn't it a lot better today than it used to be?"

Comes the reply: "...Marginally."

Read on

And find out more from the U-M School of Art & Design (who held a talk, this afternoon, regarding Einstein on the Beach...even as I post this...)

More:

Golden Oldies and Torsos; Golden Eras and Future Slang (Future Landscapes)

2012-01-14T08:53:00.000-08:00

Become...Unbecoming...

I'm not the first to call for It's execution - but I think nostalgia ...should officially be eulogized, ...particularly in a world where the Beach Boys (and likely, too, the Rolling Stones) will be ambling through their 50th-anniversary tours...where Abbey Road is the top selling vinyl album for 2011... where Dexy's Midnight Runner's are being played on the "Oldies"...station?

I'm constantly over-thinking the role music plays in our daily lives - cerebral synapses surging the jittery fingers across the keyboard too swiftly and often without any second thought to those poor souls who take it for granted, the stuffy squares who nod it away as a lulling element from drug store ceiling speakers...

But don't we all, on varying and nuanced levels, take it for granted, now? But how can we not? -Not... take it for granted when everything we could capably ingest is so readily reachable - download-away!

Superstars of the 80's, a CD compilation, is currently spinning through my car stereo. The gooey, gaudy, cringe-inducing saxophones and wheezy synth wailing melodies of J. Geils Band's "Centerfold" or Human League's "Fascination"... the horrors of Starships "We Built This City" and the laughable slow-dance-ballad of Pat Benatar's "We Belong..."

Fodder for frivolity...

And I thought how quickly musical moments, genres, eras... are crumbled some-years'-later, by satirizing wrecking balls - when Pitchfork came to prominence at the start of the 21st century, it was the Grunge or Rap Rock or the teenie-bop revivalists who were in the crosshairs of repudiating, high-horse trotting hipsters.

But now that we're in 2012, with 2013 a mere 300 days away...will we look back upon the sanctified era of 2003 - the boom days of Animal Collectives, Liars, Strokes, LCD Soundsystems, Of Montreal, St. Vincent, even... - with the same malicious mockery...

"Like, gag-me-with-a-spoon, already...can you buh-leeeve that we learned all the words to the entirity of "The Past Is A Grotesque Animal?" -That we fell for the Bon Iver bandwagon or that we were posing as: -Black-Keys-fans-from-before-they-sold-out-Madison-Square-Gardens..."

In Internet world, doesn't everything just become passe at a quicker rate? I'm onto the next thing, already... You might as well be playing "Everybody's Workin' For The Weekend..." while you're playing that M83 track... (Right? Well...maybe...maybe eventually).

Best New Music... as Pitchfork once used as their kingmaking hyper link label...

What stays best anymore? That's all subjective... but...

but but but...

I guess what matters is what moves you... Whatever gets you through... (as the possibly-most-highly-sanctified rock icon, John Lennon, once sang)...

That's all well and good. Yes, "Midnight City" cheered me up and made me feel cool as I drove through a traffic-light-flickered, headlight-splattered metropolis, on my way to see dynamic people say momentarily profound things over ice-crackled cocktails before they slid up and began undulating and emoting with inspiring abandon, all across a splintered stage under dim lights, for an hour or so up until the clock chimed 12....

And, yes, I got up the next day and wrote something, like this...

Whatever gets you through... But, then, we shouldn't always be drunk on Kool-aid, zozzled by memories of perfect listens...rose-colored ear-buds...

Scales fell from my eyes - bless the still-yet-flickered sustainability of music writing... Tiny Mix Tapes tore into Guided By Voices... Indeed. Exit-Flaggers-fly at half-mast! Bronze stars for the robot boys... In an Internet world where we can be tuned into anything from Tinarriwen, to Kings Go Forth, to the reissue of CAN's Tago Mago or whatever new mixtape thing the Weekend is putting out, shouldn't we be ready, emotionally, psychologically, to be brutally honest with the bands that once adorned our bedrooms and dorms via posters and scattered CD sleeves? We have to be ready to write, shouldn't we??-- to judge properly? "...for those of us not indoctrinated into the Cult of Uncle Bob..."

I'm not saying that in the year 2023, we'll hear Animal Collective on some sad, fractured replicant of a radio-entity's broadcast and laugh at it with the same embarrased-yet-so-glad-I'm-cooler-now/delusion-of-grandeur that we, as music listeners, do, now, with 80's Superstars...

No, the way, it measures out, likely, is that last decade's crop of hipster-indie-superstars will be regarded the same way we looked back upon post-new-wave and post-punk icons like The Smiths or even the Pixies...

Maybe. (Hey, good thing the Pixies never tried recording another record, like GBV, huh? And--wow, what might happen with this whole Neutral Milk Hotel reunion...or At The Drive In, for that matter?--at Coachella)

But then there are those cases... The mega stars, the heroes, the icons - who, for a significant period impacted us, gave us substantial inspiration - whether it's Guided By Voices or the Wu Tang Clan...

...But there's no way we're going to be as replay-happy and reverent / box-set buying and kowtowing as we are to the Golden anniversaries of the Rolling Stones or the Beach Boys... as we were to GBV, not in that same sense, to that same level. We shouldn't be. Because nostalgia's fucking dead, now.

We're sluicing and surfing through wild, rickey cultural chutes, my friends... Oldies don't mean oldies anymore... And icon-- is just a word Amazon uses to sell you something by an artist for whom your worshipful torch has dwindled to bleary, nostalgic sparks...

We are ever in the moment now...

Brave orbiters of new space... Nothingnauts

What you've done, what you just did, the song you just uploaded... is beautiful. Has a beauty of it's own. But nothing is so sacred to be packaged as a press-release claiming something to be the absolute next revolution - or to be re-packaged and re-sold back to you as the return of that great era you loved so dearly...

The tracks above are all of this moment...and they do have beauty. But what the streaming-artists-above do next will be just as dynamic - forget that there will be no oldies stations...for these tracks to one day be-recycled-by... (no Future Oldies!... What a Crappy Future!) ...

If you can go everywhere and anywhere on this Internet music milleiu...if the playing field is completely level, then consider the musical fields of your own backyard, while you're at it...

Streaming Above:
Jah Connery

Brilliant Violence

Future Slang

Golden Torso

Pupils
and...
a preview of a forthcoming EP by K.I.D.S.'s Deleano Acevedo:
Libra Dreams/Future Landscapes by DeLeano Acevedo

Take It Easy

2012-01-11T10:23:00.000-08:00

In the news:

Passalacqua (dir. Tony Katai):

The War On Drugs:

Real Estate:

Real Estate - "Easy" from Tom Scharpling

...Wrapping up a lot of writing projects this week... I'll be getting back here soon with some characteristically charged-up columns -

In the meantime - consider going Headhunting this weekend...

And check this out: Shoegaze/psyche-rock duo Dark Red have a new single coming out this month on Beehive Recording Co.'s site - viewable below (dir. Dave Krieger)

...

And consider marking your calendars for this show - (save up some gas money, Ann Arbor ain't so far)...

Get to Know Mine

2012-01-04T13:53:00.000-08:00

Middle of the working week
and I've got things to throw your way...

Lists:
The Detroit side...
The Ypsi side...
Singles from Ypsi
and, then, some more ramblings about recently released songs...

Danny Brown made the cover of both local music/culture zines this week...

But these guys got an honorable mention for Real Detroit's Artist of the Year category

&amp;amp;lt;a href="http://tomandbootsy.com/track/ms-washington-bridge-card-hustle"&amp;amp;gt;Ms. Washington (Bridge Card Hustle) by Passalacqua&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;

And this band made the top of Brett Callwood's list
&amp;amp;lt;a href="http://theblueflowers.bandcamp.com/track/in-your-shadow"&amp;amp;gt;In Your Shadow by The Blueflowers&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;
~

Then, after all that randomness, -might you please consider this video - by burgeoning post-rock/space-jazz/power-pop collective Songs From The Moon: -
part one of part of a six-minute, three-song "punk EP" (called Get To Know Mine) that will likely be coming out within the next couple of months...

dig the credits and more info from the band's blog

Stop the World

2012-01-02T17:30:00.000-08:00

One thing I learned in 2011... make sure to check out anything involving Eddie Logix...

Like this track:

a preview of the forthcoming album featuring Logix and Mobil Home - featuring Metasyons & Guilty Simpson and DJ Soko.

~

Woodbridge-based cassette-cultivating label GOLD TAPES is celebrating a full calendar year's worth of existence - with 12 proper releases (of eps and full lengths) from the Hard Lessons, to Kommie Kilpatrick to the non-Michigan southern-types like Useless Eaters.

And many of these modest spools of magnetic tape have already sold out - but that doesn't mean you can't get an entire zip folder sampling the band's burgeoning clientele (including Deadbeat Beat, Pizazz and more!...like my personal favorite "You Showed Me" by Mountain Time (a locally-brewed Byrds cover).

Dig it. - Gold Tapes Comp

~

And, by the way - we're having a pair of local bands play the Ferndale Public Library (per Kelly's "First Stop Friday" showcase) - featuring a newer group called SuperBomb and recently re-revved Old Empire! (watch a performance from this year's Blowout, featuring the latter - HERE).

Below, artwork by SuperBomb's Steve Gamburd (depicting Greg Aubry).

And, if it's still Tuesday, Jan 3rd -as you read this, then consider heading to the Loving Touch (in Ferndale,) to see Old Empire's Gabe Dodson spin records with the Pop Project's Dave Lawson.

Start Again

2012-01-01T17:49:00.000-08:00

Here I am... ...listening.

Curses by Skeleton Birds

I don't live in coffee shops... I'm not tied to my laptop, my ears aren't glued to my headphones... I don't spend every Saturday out at a bar...

And yet...

It's not like I don't have a choice, not that I can't resist the warmth of the amps, the poignancy of the voice, the soft thump in my chest from those bass drums, pulling me...

...sometimes I choose to throw myself through it. Enjoy it, even. Whatever it is - it leads to more writing...
~

I was talking to a singer, to a writer... inside a coffee shop. I was asking about his band. This is what I do. And he told me that people might comment on the the vigor, the spirit, the spark, of his band's live performance.

Yeah, they, his band, bring all they can, when it comes to a live show, he said. But, actually, it was more that his band was just reacting to the pushed envelopes, broken tables, blown-out mics and messy aftermaths of other band's live performances.

One band gets a hang-glider... that means you gotta build a jetpack. It's a sweaty, somewhat aloof, maybe a smidgen self-deluded sort of pressure cooker we keep roiling-and-tumbling through together, up and over and on top of each other, off of each other and into...into new collaborations or repelling you back, from the stage and back into your abode, where you find yourself losing sleep again on an otherwise lazy Monday night, writing the next song... We're all mad here.

And then I start living in coffee shops and my ears get worn from the ear-buds, they ache for the proper headphones, they long for balance and for maximum volume. And I keep writing about all the bands that keep multiplying...

Each January I feel my muscles, my mind - screw up with self-imposed tension - appointing this year, the year before last, and last year too, and this brand new year - this year to be the year that I finally figure out how to properly tell the story of all the music around here...

But stories have to end. And how can their be finality when all these reactions keep firing off. Frontier Ruckus will have no idea how much they wound up inspiring a hip-hop MC, who, himself, would go on to inspire a psychedelic noise-pop performance artist, who then, also, by extension, leaves an impression upon me, when he falls on me, off the edge of the stage.

(whose ready for winter?)

Frontier Ruckus celebrate their sixth performance at Mittenfest this evening, (where said-MC saw them, years ago, back at the Elbow Room); they've played the Ypsi-based 826-Michigan-fundraising event each year of its existence.

Traditions develop. Modern day local-based "Classics" start to circulate with reverence.

Legacies develop. Local...modest...but still, some kind of legacy.

Timothy Monger^ and the Great Lakes Myth Society sang about Heydays passing... Those warm, sonorous guitars, that quieting steady strum and that low, ruminative bass... and Monger's voice putting it perfectly about those naive days-gone-by, "back then that was enough..." before that guitar soars in with sad valiance only to wind out slowly, a stretched out sort of clarion call for scenesters.

And yet the scene keeps feeding upon itself. Some kind of late 50's monster movie that can't be stopped; a beautiful blob, or a some eerie reptilian replicant from a dimension that could never be fully described, located, babbling lyrical languages that shouldn't yet be deciphered.

"Some years from tomorrow..."

...I'll have lost my mind, or my will... I'll be dizzy from too much running or worn out from too much time spent listening (tapping, writing,...staring at this screen as the words lurch and spill forth...)

Year's are chapters. Maybe. Spotlights drift. Definitely.

Some songs seem to capture it - sum it up and serve as the perfect rallying cry - or epitaph or maybe they're just pretty pieces of music, little time capsules to look back upon and marvel (or blush) at how weird, naive, noisy or inspiring we (you, rather) were...

To those who are still standing here...

Auld Lang Syne

2011-12-30T13:53:00.000-08:00

Be safe out there...
Hi-Speed Dubbing - "Stone Calendar (2012)" by DC/Milo
It may be the end of the world--albeit "as we know it..." - but let's all keep together, keep our wits about us... and keep on...

Later on, in 2012 - there's this, down at the Park Bar in Detroit

Watch Us Jumpstart

2011-12-28T14:30:00.000-08:00

Hey all...

I started writing (and rambling) about local music at this new zine called iSpy... (Ypsi-backwards, think Ypsilanti...and Ann Arbor... but likely I'll spill back onto Detroit goings-ons as well)... if you're not sick of my own words, there's more to find there... (every Tuesday)

Meanwhile - it's Mittenfest time again -

It's happening tonight, tomorrow, the day after, the day after that and then the day after that

find all your bands, schedules and what-have-you's HERE.

It's for a good cause...

and swing over here to download Mostly Midwest's free mixtape -for the occassion (featuring many Mittenfest players).

In The Bar(s) - NYE (WDET) - Scrumthousand '12

2011-12-28T06:57:00.000-08:00

It's Sights Day... right now... or, tonight...at the Magic Stick... or...maybe by now it was yesterday--depending on when you're picking up the feed of this rattled, bloggy, telegram...

It'd be easy too easy to prattle on about the Sights being these quasi elder statesman of Detroit's music, er, 'scene'... consistent and resolute weekend warrior types still slogging out the garage rock glory that once emanated regularly throughout this town's clubs, bars, dives and watering holes throughout the early 00's...

Like the Muggs, the High Strung, and, lately, even the Witches, (or if we wanna get technical, Conspiracy of Owls too), the Sights are one of the handful of those initial, early-decade-Detroit dynamos who've maintained a steady presence on the local scene - albeit, more than most bands, having gone through a considerable amount of member-shifts...and re-shifts...

Not so much a revolving door...but more like a club, an institution... some stayed long, some were barely there... As many past and present members that were available for tonight will be on hand, guitars/bass/organ/drum-sticks -in-hand, ready to run through a full set of songs - most (if not all) will be from their recently released vinyl of rarities, demos, and live cuts called Twelve in the Bar - the first proper release for Detroit's Fountain Records.

My point - it's good to see 'em still going - even better to get the chance to hear songs we've either never heard or refreshing, alternate renditions of old favorites...

Personally, I drifted toward the crunchy-clatter-roar bookending of an otherwise sunny strutting pop ditty called "How Does It Feel?" -an outtake, no less. Also dig-able was the disarming acoustic-reimagining of "Got What I Want," turning that punch-heavy, riff-heavy, tumble-heavy single from 04's Got What We Want into more of a midnight wanderer's loungy blues ballad while still retaining hints of it's initial shoulder-juking sneer. We also get demos from newer records, like the piano-prominent "Maria" and the quintessential heartfelt to hellfire brand of raspy balladeering characteristic to headwriter/singer, Eddie Baranek, via "I'm Gonna Live the Life I Sing about in my Song..."

Take a listen to "Better Off Being..."
and consider seeing them, tonight - Dec 28th - at the Magic Stick - with the Wrong Numbers and the SinBads...

~~~~
Anyhoo...
What are you doing New Year's...eve? ...out of a thousand invitations?
There's trouble and excitement, cheer, revelry and sense-stretching showmanship spilling all across the city on Saturday...
While you're driving around... tune in to WDET from 9pm to 1am... Writer/reporter Travis Wright will be holding court, a round table of musicians, music critics and label heads, discussing the year in local music...

New Year's Eve with Travis Wright from WDET on Vimeo.

And of course, there's this:

featuring this... Slufter Marco Polio and the New Vaccines Phantom Cats
Duane the Teenage Weirdo Lenny Stoofy
Creepy Crawlers Breezee One Deastro
Mobil V. Count Macula Sheefy Mcfly
Estuaries Jesse and the Gnome Bones Car Jack
Justin Carver Ayo Sniggs Dread Wings Trophies Mannikin

1314 Broadway...

Twenty Twelve

2011-12-24T16:30:00.000-08:00

Everything all the time...

The sound gets into my bloodstream, makes me type faster.

The song. The music.
The voice, its melody, spurs me to snatch words from some sudden ether, bumped and beguiled that I could be so moved by just two minutes of modest, taped-together noise; cute clatters and humble howls from dusty, cavernous basements, temporary inhabitants who write and record, their walls exposed and carpets torn, wires strung here and there, plugging in their beautiful burdens--their amps-a'-amplifyin'...

Song after song, from undergrad troubadours and blue-collar balladeers, the soulful kids who are galvanizing their punk side, from the hip-hop dudes who're savvying their new penchants for sleek electro-glitz pop samples; jazz players back up rappers, psychedelic rockers turn their ears toward soft ambient pop composers; while the rockers get weirder and the new abstractionist's seem, almost, to lap back around and seem right-way-round again - it's all Detroit, now... ...everything is everything...

Five years ago, when I lived in a neo-hippie haven, co-op housing on the outskirts of Michigan State, I used to invite bands from Detroit to come play house parties. A friend of mine, an integral ad-hoc roadie for those shows, who lived with me, had a characteristic farewell, whenever conversations ceased or we parted ways for class: "Take it slow..."

That sounds ludicrously sensible, right about now.

Augie, from the Hard Lessons... (who perform their traditional day-after-Christmas concert, Monday, at St. Andrew's) caught up with me, albeit through the fleeting, ethereal call-and-response of text-messaging, just yesterday.

"I see you're still writing about Detroit music..." was dropped in the middle of the characters...and no, he didn't put the italics in,... I did. Cuz I say that same thing to myself every eleven-days or so...and the italics are always there.

And I'm either in disbelief, disillusionment or appreciation...excitement even.

Because why stop now? How could I even hope to take it slow... New songs go up every five hours around this town - our ears dippinginto the motherboards of any of dozens of local songwriters, hearing their new songs... almost voyeuristic -if at least constantly-plugged-in...

The Rock Star died, indeed due to a considerable blow delivered by music pirates, kicking out the pillars of the industry rigged by major labels. But it also died because we could all start hearing each other so readily.

I'm listening, right now, to a brand new album from a band that's been kicking and singing around this town a while now - their latest work up and streaming upon the temporary transmittor of choice for our blurring times - the bandcamp contrivance
The Questions have slogged and soldiered through a helluva year to make the record of their lives - the most realized work from a born-poet backed by a full band of jazz-mutating, blues-stomping, psychedelic rock n rollers...

Broodish bass grooves and steady steppin drums, a trumpet lilting it's wheezy purr out under beautiful and blemished words, barbed and whispered, -an empowering and haunting indictment

Their currently slated to play the Lager House on Dec 30th...

And-anyhow, we're more than just a music scene anyway! We've got burgeoning filmmakers coming out of CCS, or cinema preservationists running movie houses like Corktown Cinema and we've got talented poets getting their voices heard through new publishing companies like SIC.Detroit .

But anyhow...
~
I used to tell myself that I was still writing about Detroit music because I was waiting for that day, that day where the scene would swell to the point where I could no longer take-it-slow, even if I tried...

What if we became the next Austen, was always the unspoken question...
But why would we want that?

As NPR reported this week - the actual musicians can no longer afford to live in the "live music capital" of the country because so many non-musician/listener/fans have flocked their - thus jacking rents up across town, propping up trendy condos, the listeners are pushing out the performers like invasive carp upon native sturgeons or trout...

That's one thing Detroit, in its current state of economic woe, doesn't have to worry about... just yet. We're in this strange middle ground, still yet ignored by big-time/national/mainstream press... But that's changing, little by little. Danny Brown's name is everywhere - and indie sites can't get enough of Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr... Phantasmagoria could be swept up any minute and in the meantime, and regionally- the typical cliques that separated genres, rock from hip/hop, are breaking down and giving way to healthy collaboration -

A, ...dare I say it..., new wave?

The reason I lose myself over local music - the reason I can't take it slow, the reason I'm still writing about local music, is the same reason anyone else like me (who doesn't play an instrument or who doesn't write songs ) keeps heading out to live shows - We're inspired in some weirder way, most likely fed by the tangibility of the-writers-of-these-songs---these-songs-that-get-into-my-bloodstream.

The Rock Star died because I can listen to these songs and then see the person who wrote it just two hours afterward, at the bar... talk to him about it. Touch them, either to shake their hand or shove them in the shoulder. The admiration, or at least, the appreciation, is crystallized when we have that tangibility.

I can't talk to King Creosote or Jon Hopkins so readily, I can't pick the brain of Cass McCombs or John Maus over coffee or even readily chat up Danny Brown, unless I set up a phone interview. But I'm going to see Eddie Baranek tonight at the Stick... and have coffee with Drew Bardo the next day...I can ask the former about his band's 12th anniversary and I can ask the latter about that line from the song: "holy jack rabbits fucking in the streets..."

There's something about being able to touch something in this vacuous, fast blurring internet-jumbled-deluge... To be able to actually catch that songwriter, and, indeed -take it slow, with them, a one-on-one over a pint or a latte, in a quaintly personable world outside of status updates, outside of MP3-streams and press releases about new tour dates...

Because unlike Austin, we're all still here, sorta... (Albeit scattered up and across the northern edges, some west, some east, and some way down in Mexicantown)...

i'm still livin at the old address / and i'm waiting on the weather / and i know...it will pass / i know that it's true / it' s gonna be a good year...

Still... writing about Detroit music. Because I can't not be hopeful for the next good year - with everything moving, happening,...so fast (no more taking it slow)...then that's an indicator of the potential velocity for innovation...some profound permutation... a new wave, yes.

Not that we've yet reinvented the wheel through music - but we could, within the hour, even.

But it's not like I'm waiting for us to become Austin - who wants to? We're already some kind of other thing - The New Weird, steadily reforming every day.

The Rock Star's dead because we no longer need to be blessed, as Austin has been for decades. Yes, we were blessed, christened, in the days of Motown... But we no longer need some columnist, some blogger like me, to tell this scene what it is or how great it is or how much it sucks...

You're all telling each other, every day.

And even those conversations are supremely secondary...

...to the song(s).

~~~
happy new year

Year

2011-12-24T08:54:00.000-08:00

This quote is all over the internet - so I'm not sure if, indeed, it can be credited to Physicist Dr. Ted McIrvine, whose voice uttered it during Friday's All Things Considered...

There's no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit...

And isn't it fitting, then, that Time Magazine would name it's Person of the Year: The Protester... A noun, not quite a person, not quite a thing. And not a one.

Who actually gets the credit for the Arab Spring, for Occupy Wall Street, for the protests, the resistence, the solidarity, and the calls against disenfranchisement in Athens and in Moscow...

Not a one.

Another heartwarming night, last night, packed with endearing performances from local musicians for a good cause (raising money for Coalition on Temporary Shelters)...

And here's a few other seen scenes... Days ago inside Hybrid Moments in Ferndale (a record/clothing/alt-culture shop that regularly hosts live music events inside their humble, cozy space):

Lists & Things: Sights (12/28), Lettercamp--Remix-able

2011-12-19T12:00:00.000-08:00

This was a year I'd gotten away from album reviews and deeper into interviews, essays, more narrative pieces... A year of reflection can mean, bluntly, that you weren't really allowing that much to seep in; you were too busy looking back, looking out, or trying to sum something up - I had to take the last week to do some intense listening/reviewing... it was fun but hectic.

I don't wanna say I have "favorites" this year, ... But a collection of local albums that I kept spinning / streaming / burning...there's no way I could bring order to this list

GLOSSIES - Phantom Films - (particularly: "On The Rebound")

The Juliets - Perfect Season...
Prussia - Poor English - ("What Am I Gonna Tell Your Mom?" probably got spun the most, but also--"St. Elmo's Fire Pt. II")

Zoos of Berlin - Pallaster Chant EP - (particularly: "Tamarind")

The Blueflowers - In Line With The Broken Hearted

Passalacqua - Zebehazy Summer - (particularly: "High Anxiety" (with Ben Miles))-- but also -"Sirens"

The Witches - single - "Stoned Cold The Grave"

The Questions - recently put up the entierity of their new album Chasing The Light -

--Where was I?

Looking forward to more material (maybe some kind of proper LP?) from Phantom Cats...
So far, you can only find demos... But I'd recommend: "Pulsations" - stream it here...

Phantom Cats seems to lead me into Phantasmagoria - who have a new LP coming out sometime in early 2012 - but for now, I'd recommend: "Take It To The Moon" (Interview here).

let's keep this stream of conscious going...tally tally tally - shout-out-shout-out-shout-out...

Bad Indians! ...they played this song in the scuffed and smoky ambiance of Kelly's in Hamtramck and it's been a favorite ever since...

And then there's Crappy Future - dashing and dynamic and dorky and welcomingoly doused with dazzling pedal effects...

Oh, but, then, swinging back over to Ypsilanti's scene for a minute...

Jehovah's Witness Protection Program had this jam called "Humans" that you should listen to - it finds the poignancy in punk.

Doc Waffles sang about Socks - but so much more

Doc Illingsworth sang about Bread - but, again, so much more...

WarrenPeace sang about fair trade coffee and Ben Miles sang about assurance of musical purpose, the meaningful work of songwriting...and performing.

Duende! sang about Barefoot Bandit(s)...from their Florence to the Mad Man LP

The Sugarcoats apparently were streaming this (via Cass) since late last December...but I didn't find it until May- so I'm counting it-- dig!

Ben Christensen (of Just Boyz) sang about Dracula's Castle (via his Bones project)

Then, of course, there's Legendary Creatures, who gave this song (a favorite from 2010) a proper mixing and mastering...

Legendary Creatures shares a member with Robin Goodfellow - who released "A Week of Wonders," as well as sharing that same player from the Computer Perfection ensemble... who jammed out a spacey "Thirteen Minute Theme"

But then there were the young guns:
Gold Tapes had a bevy of releases, including stuff from Kommie Kilpatrick and Deadbeat Beat. (I think, up next, for GT, is something with Duane).

Duane (The Teenage Weirdo), in the meantime, put something out with Beehive Recording Company.

But also... HandGrenades.... Citizen Smile... Jesse & The Gnome...

Johnny Ill Band fercryin-out-loud

There was House Phone:

And the Ashleys, of course...

of course of course... Pink Lightning drank fancy and Cold Men Young set off a time bomb.

Ryan Allen grew extra arms... ...and John Nelson went solo.

Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti stalwart folk-troubadours Timothy Monger and Chris Bathgate both had stellar releases this year...
...............
And I know I'm missing at least 14 other bands and maybe 17 other songs... and at least two or three other genres...

--
If you're still reading at this point? Might I direct your attention to more songs on the Internet:
Detroit's prominent electro-pop/dazzled-dance-rock quintet Lettercamp have a new single up:

"Oh Well" will be on their forthcoming full-length album (early 2012) -via Sweden-based label Substream (with whom they recently signed, --apparently their style/sound, coupled with a recent White Stripes cover has effectively caught the tastes/attention of the Euro-scenes, albeit, here, comparably, as well)...

Other recent news for this luminous, synth-n-bass-heavy band is the addition of renowned keyboardist Zach Shipps (of Electric 6) -
This track's already got a formidable amount of remixes offered on this EP, but you can take a spin on it as well - Sony Creative is offering a "remix contest" - via their site (http://www.acidplanet.com/.)...

--
Also in the news: The Sights are turning 12... (and celebrating at the end of the 12th month, at the end of the 12th year of this century... (12/28) at the Magic Stick in Detroit).

"Twelve in the Bar," a collection of rarities, gets released next week via Fountain Records. The group, helmed by Eddie Baranek, might be given that respectable title of "institution," a staple, a veteran, something like that... indeed ,the bluesy/garage-rock institution of the Sights has seen many players come and go, some staying longer and others sometimes just spending a few nights.

As many of those former mates that could be reached and were available will be joining Baranek on stage, that night - on a bill that also features The Wrong Numbers and the Sin Bads...

Take a listen:

Another thing that just popped into my head... (since I mentioned the Electric 6, ^ above...) that band is joining fellow tour-heavy gang Child Bite, to perform a handful of year-ending shows - you can see them 12/23 at St. Andrews (--after that, it's all-through Ontario CA).

And that note reminds me of one of my favorite memories of 2011:

Interviewing Child Bite through the production stages of their latest EP - which involved a St. Patrick's Day Parade complete with a gang of Star Wars characters...

That same weekend - I interviewed a dozen bands (and about 19 musicians) at once...over waffles. That was great.
~

That's about all for now...
There was also this from Johnny Headband...

Johnny Headband - Over There from Johnny Headband on Vimeo.

Okay, that's it... that's it! that's all I can handle for now - more year-reviewing thoughts may yet pop up...
for now...

Happy Holidaze...
...now, where was I?

Music = Cause: 10th Annual Sounds & Spirits (Magic Stick, Detroit) + Mittenfest VI (Woodruff's, Ypsilanti)

2011-12-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

COTS
Event site (line-up)

826 Michigan

Event site (line-up / info)

Random notes before year's end - 53dt--> GBV Split: Ryan Allen / Kickstand Band + SelfSays + Golden Memories

2011-12-17T13:00:00.000-08:00

The year is ending ...and the time has come to add up the numbers...

"-Once upon a time there was an idea to do a short run split 7″ vinyl series that featured cover songs of some of the artists we love and adore.

The series will be known from here on out as Disarm The Settlers..."

Local blog-born / 7"-single-happy label, Five Three Dial Tone Records trucked down to Dayton, OH, last week to offer that town some homegrown new singles, a couple of Guided By Voices cover-songs...

That mighta' made for interesting conversation down there, or perhaps raised some of their brows at its perceivable presumptuous, since, ya think about it, Dayton is the hometown of prolific-lo-fi songwriter Robert Pollard founder/leader of GBV, the birthplace of said-band (and many other notable indie-rock icons).

Well, anyhow... 53dt offered limited copies of their new 7" split single of Michigan bands covering songs by Pollard's revered-and-recently-reunited/recharged rock n roll band Guided By Voices. (Said indie-legend's newest album, a first in many years, drops at the start of the coming new year)...

The accidental formula/combination served 53dt well:
->...get one songwriter whose been in a fan of Pollard/GBV's work for his entire adult life and had it soundtrack his late teens and college days substantially enough to have even seeped, inevitably, as a formative influence upon his recent cannon of work... i.e. Ryan Allen (& His Extra Arms) - and on the flip side, put a scrappier, happier-go-luckier trio of mid-20-something's who probably haven't, if ever at all, listened to that much GBV in their initial days of local bar show circuits, i.e. The Kickstand Band...

You get the latter doing a combo of the lulling incantations of "Non Absorbing" into one of their most well-loved tracks, "Game of Pricks," with the former, that being Allen, doing another quintessential ("I Am A Scientist" off of Bee Thousand) into Alien Lanes charging anthem "Motor Away..." (listen here).

***And pick up your copy, at a forthcoming show in January - at Royal Oak's UHF Records...

~
That said... SelfSays--has been featured in yet another of his seemingly unending string of collaborations - recently dropping onto the Internet with (iN)sect Records' Starship 27 single series - rapping over a clattering, synth-ripping space-out jam by producer The Kone - listen here.

And...now that 2012 looms before us, it's got me thinking back upon some of my favorite live/local music moments were, this year.

One particular moment involves SelfSays, (aka Charles Vann,) performing at Sparklefest, inside Northend Studios. It was on a warm, wildly windy night in the middle of summer, Self, rapping, pacing around, half valiant, half shy, sharp yet endearing, in the middle of a cluttered room, some cavernous hollowed-out vestibule with strobe lights and cigarette smoke, the bass blaring, the huddled crowd grooving together... and fireworks in the background, over the skyscrapers, from the Tiger's game having just wrapped up.

These things happen sometimes...

Or, it got me thinking back to another moment... back to the Blowout - when the now defunct psyche-folk quartet Golden was playing inside the wood-paneled, '80's-sports-bar-smoke-soaked ambiance of Kelly's Bar, with ice and snow swirling outside the door and a literal sausage factory right across the street. With midnight setting on... And they decide to cover the Cranberries still-well-loved yet overplayed, epic, yodeled, softy-alt-rock anthem: "Dreams..."

To have 49 buzzed-to-drunken, coat-swathed hipsters sardine'd together inside that bar, upon slippery linoleum, howling out those closing bars of indecipherable chant/scatting...was invigorating...

To shout out together, where no one knew the words, really, no one could tell you the words, and no one could even understand anyone else's words, what with all the Millers and Vodka this pack had guzzled,... But it was warm and endearing, in its way...
These things happen sometimes...

Further thoughts on that closing "memory" - National Public Radio/WNYC's Sound Check had a feature on "Singing in Fictional Tongues," yesterday - whether Sigur Ros, Enya or mumble-tracking ala The Talking Heads. (listen here).
~

2011: The Year of Digital Zen

2011-12-16T07:24:00.000-08:00

Words: Tom Matich

"..And what the hell were you putting your faith in / something you could not, someone you look too / and now you watch it, always floating over / what you would long for, what you were born to" -- The Dodos, "Don't Try and Hide It."

2011 was about the truth. In the heavy sense -- if that's your interpretation. But having to do with music, truth in that you should honestly embrace the things you enjoy, no pretense is necessary. There are no barriers at this point and technology such as Spotify and turntable.fm only serve to enable more discovery and endless choices. But, I also went to a local album release show where the door cover came with a vinyl copy of the album. I've had my eyes on one of these, too.

I'm more open to the fact that there is all types of music I love and shit that I just can't get into. Good taste? Poor taste? Let's get over ourselves.

iPhone or phonograph - it doesn't matter how; just keep listening.

Here are some of my favorite musical things from 2011:

Album: Gang Gang Dance Eye Contact

I spent many Monday evenings this year in a warm, candle-lit room practicing Yoga. During my regular gym workouts, I would often escape to the wooden floors of the vacant Yoga studio for my own personal "Vinyasa" time. While stretching and bending, I would listen to Gang Gang Dance's Eye Contact on my iPod. Although it is an experimental electronic album, the soundscapes whisked my mind away to spiritual planes, with the mysterious coos of vocalist Liz Bougatsos hypnotizing me into a supernatural trance.

Eye Contact opens with a swirling, epic journey as the 11-minute "Glass Jar" transports the ears into an alien world of musical mysticism. From there, the album continues to take risks as it becomes some of the most delightfully strange music since 1970s jazz-fusion and ambient: Billy Cobham meets Tangerine Dream? Perhaps. The bizarre digital disco of "MindKilla" highlights the album's fascinating DNA: an advanced, hybrid creature dating back to the Jurassic era that crash landed from another planet into our digital frontier. But this thing is not a nasty Predator, more like a sacred warrior sent to free our spirits. Namaste.

Song: M83 "Midnight City"

Was this song on the Donnie Darko soundtrack or in a John Hughes film? The lead single from M83's delightful double album Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, "Midnight City" is an instant classic that accomplishes the rare feat of eliciting nostalgia while also sounding fresher than anything from the bygone era it makes one recall. Who cares if it was used in a Victoria's Secret commercial, its blissful crescendo of synthesized organs and romantic bouquet of bass will keep this beautiful track burning for ages.

Debut: SBTRKT (self-titled)

Aaron Jerome aka SBTKT makes fresh beats. Think of him as the feel good version of fellow London-based electronic maestro Burial. Groove heavy tracks such as "Something Goes Right" and "Right Thing to Do" make a case for dubstep flavored music being more complex and rewarding than the stereotypical "WOMP WOMP" heard in certain clubs. Moving beyond that to the bigger landscape of pop production, on "Wildfire" he supplies guest vocalist Yukimi Nagano (of Little Dragon) with a buoyant backdrop that elevates her to her finest hour -- and herein lies this kid's potential.

Mixtape: Curren$y Covert Coup

Curren$y is a very busy man. Between numerous mixtape and album releases in 2011, he made time to collaborate with producer The Alchemist for Covert Coup. Quickly gaining stock as the most charismatic rapper in the underground, Curren$y's butter smooth flow is reminiscent of Reasonable Doubt-era Jay-Z: street riches, being fly and living the Mafioso high life. Supplied with an arsenal of potent instrumentals from The Alchemist that coat the New Orleans bred Curren$y with a Manhattan flair, Covert Coup is as slick as a Navy Seal hit.

Although solo cuts such as "Success Is My Cologne" are ice cold, Curren$y is at his best here when sharing the mic with other rap titans, such as Prodigy of Mobb Deep on "The Type" and Fiend for "Blood, Sweat and Gears." The latter track features fellow New Orleans rapper Fiend, who some may remember from the No Limit Records hey-day of Master's P '97 hit "Make 'Em Say Ugh." Gone are his Mystikal growls, with Fiend now delivering a syrupy flow that crackles and burns over Alchemist's jazzy neo-noir. But, Curren$y's best duet is probably still ahead of him; he's remained prolific since Covert Coup, releasing another three projects and counting.

Remix: Lady Gaga "You & I" (Wild Beasts remix)

I'm not a huge fan of Lady Gaga and the band Wild Beasts never did much for me. That being said, this far-left remix by the indie band struck a chord with me, with its bombastic waves of echoes that make Gaga's excellent vocals shine. But the stellar, moody piano breakdown is what really puts this in the pantheon of a classic electronic track in the vein of late nite '90's radio.

Songwriting: Kurt Vile Smoke Ring For My Halo

The lyrics and even some of the song titles ("Peeping Tomboy") on Kurt Vile's fourth album, Smoke Ring for My Halo, tip-toe the line between tongue-in-cheek hyperbole to poetically profound. But Vile's playful sense of humor is what saves him from being another self-serious folk rocker boring us to tears as he strums sad, depressing shit on his guitar.

Amid the controversy surrounding one of the album tracks, "Baby's Arms," being included in a Bank of America commercial, Vile inadvertently gives a response to the OWS crowd on "Puppet to The Man," as he sings: "I bet by now / You prob’ly think I’m a puppet to the man / Well, I shout it out loud / Because I know that I am / Sometimes I’m stuck / And then I think I can’t unglue it / Will you help me do it?". It's a moment of brutal honesty on an record full of frank admissions. And in a corporate world, there is really is no escape unless one is Amish: those protesters are shooting video on their "Made in China" Apple iPhones.

Vile has stated his music isn't a venue for his political views. Smoke Ring for My Halo could've been made by a street busker, it has the sentiment of open mic nights and Greyhound Bus road trips. Fortunately, Vile has the musical chops to elevate this into a shimmering bar of AM GOLD you can hold in your hand. It's about the irony of the human experience -- the real and fake of it all -- to quote Vile: "In my time I was whack and wild / I was just being myself, damn."

Dance Track: Hercules & Love Affair "My House"

Blue Songs, the follow-up to Hercules & Love Affair's classic debut, was a criminally slept-on record. For one, it was released in the US after being available in the UK for over eight months. Perhaps it was the lack of this Moshi Moshi released sophomore album not having the back-up of DFA records that the first one did, or was it the strangely tepid reviews from critics?

But there's no denying the power of the record's first single, "My House." It thumps along with the ferocity of a techno classic, with newcomer Shaun Wright's vocals commanding rumps to the dance floor. Big Fun.

Top40 Single: Chris Brown "Look At Me Now"

With his latest album, F.A.M.E., and his recent media outbursts and personal issues, Chris Brown has become the new Bobby Brown of R&B. Brown has ditched his boy-next-door looks and embraced the bad boy image, dying his hair blonde and inking his body with tattoos. On a pop-culture level, the re-invention is interesting, especially since the music he's made recently has been very entertaining. F.A.M.E. has spawned a slew of blockbuster hits, from the Usher inspired "Yeah 3x" to the Michael Jackson/"Human Nature" tribute of "She Ain't You" or the addictive Benny Benassi produced "Beautiful People."

But the Diplo (yes) orchestrated posse cut "Look At Me Now," his most bombastic work since "Paper Planes," is definitely the highlight. Busta Rhymes murders the beat with his rapid fire delivery. Lil Wayne does his thing (personally, I can take or leave him) and Brown mixes clever braggadocios one-liners and ego-flexin' croons. One wonders what if M.I.A. would've had this beat instead... where is Maya, anyway?

Live Performance: Ryan Adams webcast concert on CBS' The Late Show with David Letterman

After marrying Mandy Moore and learning to play music again since being diagnosed with Ménière's disease (a disorder of the inner-ear that can affect hearing and balance), the notoriously prolific Ryan Adams returned with Ashes & Fire, his first album of new material since 2008's Cardinology. On his thirteenth record, Adams returns as a solo artist following the quiet dissolution of his tight backing band, The Cardinals. Ashes & Fire is a mellow affair, with Adams at his most tender and humbled. Embarking on a worldwide acoustic tour, he's applying a fragile touch to his catalog, armed with only a mic and guitar.

On December 5th, Adams hit the Ed Sullivan stage for a special webcast concert that ran for over an hour. David Letterman has featured Adams as a musical guests many times over the years, but this was by far his best performance to date - touching on new songs, tunes from Heartbreaker, a splendid version on "New York, New York" on the piano and even digging into some Whiskeytown tracks and covering Bob Mould. Stellar.

Collaboration: Raekwon The Chef featuring Nas "Rich & Black"

Forget about "Ni@@as in Paris," this long-due sequel to "Verbal Intercourse" has been many hip-hop purists Holy Grail -- well maybe that and Detox. Riding a Wu-Gambino inspired beat, the two New York rap legends trade swagger-dripped barbs. Although it won't go down in history like their Cuban Linx... collaboration (for one, Ghostface Killah is absent on this go-round), "Rich & Black" truly feels like hip-hop royalty commanding the throne.

Film Score: Contagion - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack - Cliff Martinez

In the vein of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' brilliant, Academy Award winning The Social Network score, Cliff Martinez has delivered this year's addicting soundtrack. Full of dark synthesizers and chilly atmosphere, Martinez has created a fantastic, stand-alone work that could've been a score to an Alex Jones documentary or an international spy thriller starring George Clooney. Even though you could hear these mysterious tunes on NPR or in a museum and not think twice, as someone who found Contagion to be perhaps the best film he saw in 2011 (Martinez also scored another one of my faves, Drive), Martinez does stay true to the biological nightmare of the film as I often recall Matt Damon's character caught up in the frenzy of a viral apocalypse, or a choking Gwyneth Paltrow.

Miscellaneous Honorable Mentions:

albums:
Bon Iver - Bon Iver
The Dodos - No Color
Ryan Allen - Extra Arms
The Antlers - Burst Apart
Holy Ghost! - Holy Ghost!
Tycho - Dive

tracks:
ASAP Rocky - "Peso"
SSION - "Psy-chic"
TV on The Radio - "Will Do"
Destroyer - "Chinatown"
Nas - "Nasty"
Kendrick Lamar - "A.D.H.D."

Whachya Listenin To?

2011-12-16T01:00:00.000-08:00

It's the end of the year...and I'm looking back, yes...but also looking forward... Fresh New Local sounds....

Whatchya Listenin To?
oh...
little o' this...

little o' that...

and some of this...

Heartbreak Dallas & the Unfaithfuls
Lightning Love
The Questions

Corktown Cinema - Instrument - "Ask All The Doctors"

2011-12-15T13:08:00.000-08:00

The word Weird comes up a lot while chatting with the Johnny Ill Band.

Johnny Ill sings about breaking his washing machine and how having his dirty clothes splayed around his room makes him feel weird...real weird.

A lot of people, in fact, think his lyrics and songwriting is “weird.”

Even Weird Al’s version of the Kinks’ “Lola” swirls up out of stream of conscious discussion shuffled across the dining room table, with organist Pete Steffy, drummer Chris Campbell, guitarist Paul Deroachie, bassist Matt Larson, and, of course, Ill... We're inside the home of Steffy, X! Records' head Scott Dunkerley and Corktown Cinema's Jeff Wise. (full article here).

Johnny Ill used to live with Craig Brown (Terrible Twos bassist/singer) and that, he says, could be weird at times... weirder still, that the Ill Band's earliest incarnation included an all-Terrible-Two's-back-up membership (recent Nashville-transplant Danny Bing played keys).

This current line up (that solidified in late 08, for the most part), tells me about how they recorded their new album Ask All The Doctors in a “weird sex den, in a Chelsea cabin…”

As we settle down to talk about music, Johnny snacks on Nutella spread; his band mates cast off hazelnut flavoring and he just shrugs, looking down at his shiny brown smear of toast...“it’s weird…”

Singing in front of people is weird, too.

Beyond that, it's also weird to all five of them that there seems to be more people regularly coming out to shows, particularly within the widening circle of avant-gardist rock and punk groups tied to the X! Records label...

Derochie (himself eager to get out into a music project since the disolving of Detroit-based Fontana) is asked what it’s like playing in the Ill Band and what it's like playing in Detroit’s music scene.

Of course, “…it’s weird.”

Alright...

When I first heard a Johnny Ill Band, I thought, lyrically-at least, that perhaps Mitch Hedberg's bemusing charm had been resurrected through the voice of this shaggy, Ypsi-bred, singer/guitarist. "...someone said it was 'New Detroit' but sometimes it's still real bad, and sometimes it still feels like 'Old Detroit' and you forget about the advancements in technology...and you might come home and someone stole your car...well, I live in the future but sometimes I for-get...cuz the world is bad..."

That's not exactly a melodic example, but it still captures his unique bead on these strange daily things we call -life. His mates help him visualize a raw, scuffed up space-pop, swirled with synth and gnarly roars of feedback, snarling bent-up guitars and shuffled along with sturdy, mostly minimalist rhythms.

Doctors gets its debut tomorrow (Friday, Dec 16th at Jumbo's in Detroit) - a dual-release party, including Sros Lords 7" single. Turn to Crime also performs.

...but back to that house, with Dunkerley and Wise. (read a Metro Times feature, here). ...A fine, and not-so-cluttered house, that acts as practice space for the Beekeepers, Ill Band, Frustrations and the Terrible Twos.

Dunkerley is back on track, after slowing things down, just a bit, with X! Records and his band, noise-rock trio Frustrations. Aside from moving, he wrapped up a degree in film studies. This was an industrious autumn for X!, just recently dropping a 7" single for the Ill Band as well as Frustrations newest LP Negative Reflections. A review of that album is up here. In a bandcamp/digi-world, Dunkerley is "still committed to that physical product" of vinyl, and indeed, as much as ever, excited and inspired by the music going on around Detroit. It's been a productive 8+ years for him and his label.

Also getting back on track is Detroit's underground film culture.

Dunkerley's band is performing as part of a fundraising concert for his roomate, Wise and his group of cinematic collaborators, otherwise known as the group behind celebrated (and recently closed down) movie house, the Burton Theatre. Well, that dream lives again, with Corktown Cinema. Feelings are joining the line up (with a suggested donation at the door) for tonight (12/15)'s performance at the Lager House.

Before the bands perform, the Corktown Cinema team will screen the Fugazi documentary -INSTRUMENT-

cheers.

Ask All The Doctors is out on Urinal Cake Records.

Not Another Boring Bone Avenue Evening

2011-12-13T13:30:00.000-08:00

An Interview, discussing the ..."bending and warping" of music... ~
~

It feels like my year (2011), started, properly, with Pupils...

It was cold. It was night. It was early January and it was in Small's in Hamtramck. The band had the side doors propped open so that they could simultaneously smoke their bar-banned cigarettes whilst swiftly traipsing in-and-out, loading their monstrous amplifiers in from the icy sidewalks.

Was it their first show? Probably wasn't... But, maybe it was? --This is how Internet legend is born.

Matt Luke (from Legendary Creatures) was playing with Jason Worden (of Red China), along with, then-drummer Scottie Stone (of Dutch Pink)...and letting Steven Puwalski (of Marco Polio & the New Vaccines) bark his throaty, interdimensional incantations, out atop their sturdy, post-post-rock, soulful-psyche grooves. It would be druggy if not for it's measured fits of lightning, it would be psychedelic if not for it's more heady blends of muddy post-punk and post-bop jazz rhythms, and it would be noise-rock if not for the specific hooks and tangible melodies adorning many of their, for the most part, straight forward 4-ish-minute jams.

It was what it was....and now it's become this...

"...I've got a story to tell...but I'm not gonna tell it yet, cuz we're gonna play this song first..."

The band recently welcomed drummer Dave Jennings (of Pewter Cub) as they celebrate their first full year together. They'll cap that off with the release of a recently wrapped 7" single (...hopefully in early February). "As far as we know," guitarist/bassist Luke initially responded, "(the title) is impossible to pronounce...-you can guess who's brain that came from..."

But, within a few days, Luke came back with a more solid answer "The final title is: Not Another Boring Bone Evening..." - recorded with Jeff Spatafora (of DevilFish). Luke said they parted ways with original drummer Stone "amicably," without "acrimony; Scottie's an amazing drummer and we were sad to part ways with him, but all four of us agreed it was for the best..."

Jennings, meanwhile has "really clicked; we gelled so well during that first practice that we decided that night to offer him the job. He's very much on the same page as us, creatively speaking, and he's already joined in in the writing aspect of songs, suggesting very Pupils-y ideas about bending and warping out parts..."

That writing chemistry is key, since the quartet writes all as-a-unit. "Sometimes," says Luke, "we lose track of which part is which so we name them: -Sarge, -Lefty, -One-Eye, etc... based on each part's personality."

Pupils songs are multitudinous... "many parts, often with changes that may seem counter-intuitive, so when a song is being written, we frequently are surprised to discover that what felt like an 18-minute prog-voyage clocks in at less than 3 -1/2 minutes..."

This, Luke says, is why they often describe their band, their songs and their sound as: "compact prog."

But, also, "Yes-Wave gets thrown around, because we never say no- to trying out new brilliant, stupid ideas."

Tuesday In The Forest - Dec 13 (with me) and Robin Goodfellow -

2011-12-11T10:00:00.000-08:00

a night to be filled with many questions (and, likely, very few substantial answers)...
Tuesday evening at the Loving Touch (12/13)

<--This is, mostly, how it works...

I'll be spinning a bunch of local vinyl LPs; a quasi-revue of 2011's releases from a random-ish crop of Detroit bands, joining Mr. Dave Lawson for his always charming DJ nights, hosted at the Loving Touch, in Ferndale.

Robin Goodfellow, at some point in the evening, will plug in and make some noise ^^sampled above... and likely be forced to answer a few questions from me, via LIVE Interview... We'll see what kinds of mind-altering musings we can channel...

See you there. 12/13. Loving Touch. 9 p.m.

New School(s)

2011-12-10T08:08:00.001-08:00

All that really mattered, at the end, was that we were talking about it.

Way too soon, then, in those moments following the set at the 3rd Street Bar, to even attempt to surmise just what it was, or what it came from…what it imitated, what it re-imagined… The impact was quantified in our questions.

And, perhaps, it's redeeming quality is that, whatever it was, we didn’t want to cast it off right then and instead let it linger. Welcomed it lingering, mostly.

‘It’…was Duane, “the Teenage Weirdo…”
more info on where/what/when to see-and-hear can be viewed here.

~~~ (more to come, later, in iSpy Magazine)

But, anyway, back to the original essay I wrote about scenes, cycles, weirdoes and inspiration... The New School(s)
~

I don't believe in new schools...

Per se...
Not at a time like now,

...when everyone seems bitten, cracked, pushed, goaded, and even somewhat self-mystified. Unquestioned inspiration. ...New dogs, old tricks - Old dogs, new tricks...

We're on the radio. We're on the Internet. We're on stages.

That we were cozily shunted into what used to be the billiard-hall portion of the Magic Stick last night, to host shows that would likely only draw a hundred or more bodies, made it that much more astounding, that there was all this ...energy compacted into one little, mostly insignificant space, itself a fraction of a larger complex inside an even bigger, whirling, indifferent city, a patch of mossy energy inside a shivered shell, throbbing with the thrum of synthesizers and quaking in spurts with the fuzzy thunder of bass amps...

"just one shadow on the wall...."

(Pictured above - Ann Arbor quintet Chrome Sparks, with Jeremy Malvin on lead vocals.)

New dance music from new songwriters... Phantasmagoria playing to a packed crowd last night. Some their friends. Some of them same-aged Wayne Staters, many of them diplomats from other bands... And this, only 14 months after I saw them play for 15 people at Paycheck's on a random Friday in the dead of late Autumn... This time, it was quite a different Friday...and Passalacqua, by themselves (or girded by the Babini's) made sure of that!

But it's not that I want to reach for grandiose delusions that dress these, what shall we call them, moments? as anything more than humans gravitating towards music as a means of galvanizing escapism... a therapy... to move, to groove, to socialize (dip, perhaps and to dive)...

But that 'have you seen them yet?' syndrome catches so easy, so quick... The new school - to what, size them up? Fervor has to be tempered, from time to time... else we lose ourselves... But then, how will we know our true potential, does the scene fly together, upward, synchronized like trapezists in tights, can we all catch the same swing? How do we know how much we can unveil, how much we can advance-and-transform music and culture, if we don't stomp the pedal, let it all boil over, get crazier together...

The kind of envelope pushing exhibited through the wild grace and showy strut of glam-pop star Duane The Teenage Weirdo...who performs in about four hours from now, tonight- at the Third Street Bar, alongside Human Eye, a band that, in bemusing ways, reflects his approach, his display, his delivery - at least in terms of, frankly, showing you something you haven't seen before - whether it's ebullient, flamboyofreak, avant-elegance -or if it's ferocious, punk-imploded space-rock decked with crude and disturbing props and oozy theatrics.

The HotSpotLite of local media gets cast around at commendably twitter-paced speeds these days... There may be those out and around who still echo the age old hawing-hems, Why such a to-do over them and not someone else...or not me?

That loud mess is, or at least should by now, decreasing...

(Phantasmagoria performing my own personal favorite Radiohead song...last weekend)

Yes, the new school is weird and exciting, curtained in surging synth fuzz and adorned to enticing perfection with indelible beats of chest-thumping amplifications... But we're all bitten, ain't we... -whether we're 22, whether we're from Detroit or Ann Arbor, whether this is our fifth band or if we're on some magazine's cover or if our Kickstarter got funded in 23 hours... whatever.

It's the energy. Here, or even in Ypsilanti...down to Toledo, even, or right over in Ferndale - age, style, clique, location - all of it is secondary to what we can all take heart in... the energy.

It's what keeps us sane, really. We release something at these shows, these moments, that may not be tangible. If you're anything like me, you walk away inspired, because you want to reflect the energy you just saw (felt?) emitted on that stage, in that moment, whether its from Duane or from Timmy Vulgar...or Jeecy & the Jungle!!

(video by Kelly Bennett)

We're each leaves spurted upward, nurtured by dynamism.

Or, we could be, I suppose...

Where was I going? Fred Thomas is still kicking ass, the Sights are turning 12-in-style, and Phantasmagoria is finishing a new album while Duane got signed to the Black Lips label; the Mexican Knives are sharpening by the week and Danny Kroha has embraced his penchant for blues with the Darleans while Lightning Love starts striking again with an EP and an LP on the way and Passalacqua and Eddie Logix and Detroit CYDI begin a steady intertwining of the hip/hop scene-into-the-indie-rock crowds...

As Phantasmagoria's Christopher Jarvis put it: "Everyone's feeding off each other's creative energy, its great."

Why question it?

Or as Duende's Jeff Howitt put it, earlier this morning, on the circuity of any/each community's percolating music culture: "...Was a guitar then a turntable then a keyboard now it's a guitar again... Hot funk.. Cool punk...Funny when you look back and didn't know you weren't the only one..."

And on...and now another...and we shall see what happens...

Ain't Their First Rodeo - "...still unclear what it is..."

2011-12-09T09:00:00.000-08:00

Honestly...
Some people deal with statistics. Their weekdays drain by... Some people have to worry about stocking their office supplies, their paper clips, their ink jets. Some people live for coffee breaks and smoke breaks and sit in awkward break rooms in uncomfortable dress wear from Target... eating cheetos...

I get to write about this...
Pink Lightning - Why I Drink Fancy (2011)

...at least I choose, to, anyhow... And I'm feeling pretty zazz'ed about it...

I caught up with Chris Butterfield, shook-up, suspender-strapped frontman for local rouse-rock quintet Pink Lightning ...concerning their current line up shift and their forthcoming full length album...

"Our sound is all over the place," he says.
"I'm still unclear what it is," he adds.
Finally, surmising, "...or, even, what I'm doing."

"I think it's a good thing..."

You think their facebook-profile's listing of Supino Pizzeria as their record label is some tongue-and-cheek, absurdo/esoteric Internet quip?
No, indeed... That's the chosen moniker for their self-releasing efforts. Will it be sustained as their own personal flagship label? We'll see... Since, Butterfield, there's a whole "EP's worth of new material, in-utero," waiting to come out after this album...Maybe there'll be another Supino slice? Perhaps some fateful label will start to tune in to their fierce, rickety flares of fuzzed-funk and sweat-sopped indie/soul... Maybe anything! Oh, Internet, and your numerous options and avenues...

"We're currently adding some finishing touches to what will be our first full length," said Butterfield.

Namely, "a brass section (Thomas Gilchrist - tuba, Stephen Bublitz - trombone, Evan Winter - trumpet)."

The song streaming above came out at the start of 2011, via their debut EP, First Rodeo, a valiant, if somewhat rough tumbler of songs, surging with inspiration and girded by the camaraderie of five fatefully-brought-together-dudes upon the stoops of Eastern Market's borders. They've been working on the follow up through the late summer and early fall but were tripped up by a couple of things, first being guitarist Matt Paw's departure, and second being the time spent learning an entire set of Michael Jackson cover songs for a Halloween set.

"One downfall of the Michael Jackson set," Butterfield begins, and I love that his phrasing suggests that there's more involved in that particular sort of tricky business, "is that it postponed development on the record...but there's a revived focus now!"

Revived focus! And a new band member. The Ashley's singer/guitarist Tom Bahorski has stepped in, bringing his bluesier, classic-rock/punk mutations in where Paw had once wrought a more funked-up space rock sensibility. We'll see...

"About Mr. Tom Bahorski," Butterfield says, "...the guy is a whiz! We like his energy..."

Energy is key with this band...The band's very much run like a baseball team, if you're not hustling, if you're not swinging...not throwing the heat... then you're benched.

"Plus, (Tom)'s got a Kroger Plus Card."

Again, key.

"We like to entertain," Butterfield continues, speaking to the live show. He, himself, is inspired by a curious mix of stand-up comedians and post/punk new-wave freak-out trailblazers like David Thomas (of Pere Ubu) - "Enhancing that live experience is key...There's also a hope that you'll be seeing us with horns, quite a bit."

Aside from helping to organize the Urgh! A Detroit Music War concert film, last June at the Lager House, Butterfield also arranged to have David Thomas perform a special in-house concert for a limited number of guests. "...that Living Room Concert tops my own list for the year," he says. "Organizing an event that brought a music hero to the Pink Lightning loft (in Eastern Market) for an intimate performance was a real thrill..."

"I'm happy with the run we had in 2011...We" (and by We, he means Neal Parks - percussion, Everette Rinehart - bass, backing screams, Bahorski, and Leo McWilliams - accordion)... "...performed alongside a lot of nice folks/good bands, which was deeply inspiring to us."

It's almost 2012... What would this post be without an end-of-the-year list? How about your "Top 2 Favorite Local songs?"

Hmm...
Butterfiield:
"My top two local songs of the year - and, as two favorite local groups, also:

Where Do You Live - Johnny Ill Band

Sunset City - Passalacqua
&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://tomandbootsy.com/track/sunset-city"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Sunset City by Passalacqua&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;

PINK LIGHTNING -@ Hybrid Moments Dec. 16th -in Ferndale - with OSCILLATING FAN CLUB + ELECTRIC LION SOUNDWAVE EXPERIMENT + CRAPPY FUTURE.....

These Things Happen Sometimes (pt. 1)

2011-12-06T18:04:00.001-08:00

I'm cursing that I haven't yet found myself an effectively heroic winter coat.
My hands are purple and my car is running out of gas and Michigan's imposing winter is rumbling off down the horizon, snickering with excitement for its impending arrival.

And I'm reading more Moby Dick, getting way too pensive about what lies beyond... And I start rambling with a friend - to the point where I declare:
that...
Profundity seems to have diminished into near nothingness.

I was considering seeking out where and when -profundity died... Likely somewhere, back, up the sloped digi-road, millions of hyperlinks, refreshes and status updates ago...

Everything is an event. In case you didn't know this was happening, it is, right now, ...or, it did already...? Well, in case you still wanted to know...

The use of this knowledge is still being determined. You're expected reaction is to like it.

What will you do with this knowledge, now that you're aware that this happened, that this human said or did this...Whatever it is... Will you retain it? Do you need to?

Does it effect what you do next?

Everything exploding everywhere at once. When all you should probably be concerned with is what you're going to do in the preceding moments.Likely, the most useful thing would be to not worry about where you could be - no sense in putting your own foot down on the accelerator pedal if the car's already rolling, in neutral, down the road to digi-madness.

Perhaps jump out of that metaphorical car. Stop at some idyllic coffee shop at the curb, halfway down this sloping Internet road where we tune out some of the new-norm-static.

Photographer Trever Long and I made the motivational mistake of performing such a stop-and-sigh, last night, at the art-decked Cass Cafe, wherein we asked ourselves, just why the hell we do what we do... (which, in some form or another...is a documentary of just what the hell is going on around here...)

What is the essence of inspiration? What is it that would motivate Trever to spend 20 hours on a photo shoot and me blowing whole afternoons over essays -just to, (however crazy it sounds), wind up reaping no financial gain, other than the love's labor-reward of being assured that we've framed something and shown it out, to the world?

We, like you and so many others, feel as though we fly in a nuanced holding pattern. I'm not quite referring to the overall stagnation we feel, that disenfranchisement that the Occupiers have marched-against; yes, here we are, as Millenials, trudging/dragging all Sisyphean through day jobs that start to feel like cross-country skiing while our parents talk of the good old pre-inflation days. That's unnerving enough.

But, our holding pattern concerns crumbling industries. Documenting the arts is like... I dunno, man, but sometimes the devil on my shoulder tells me I shoulda went into sports journalism. Eek...

The internet, blogs, zines, what have you, has shaken up our games. How does a photography scholar, someone trying to construct a canon of work, bolster a portfolio and one day, hopefully, steadily fill the walls of galleries for exhibitions, compete aginst the tyrannical attention-span-tearing tumblr's and a culture that's gotten dependent upon youtube's quicker, diriter, spoon-feeding's...

How do I compete in the days of an-already-long-dead print media... Long-dead blogs, even. We still feel ourselves cut, somewhat, apart from those who would write about music or take photos of bands for the reward of weekly paychecks. The hope is to do, or try, something more, something different.

We want to know you. Hear you out. Frame you proper... Something crazy like that... Beyond a phoning-in...

What inspires you? Anyhow...? (...and just then, there it was, luckily, that I got an Olivia Tremor Control song stuck in my head -
"...there is no growing / in knowing where you're going...")

To shorten this rant - if I wasn't writing this blog, I'd be trying to write a song. I'd be trying to paint a picture. I'd be trying to take a photograph. I keep writing because noise keeps churning from basements and living rooms in this city - thus, I'm heartened by so many other subtle-esoterics and charming-weirdos who have decided to dedicate their time to something, anything, beyond the bland and defeated who resign to watch primetimeTV and go to megamalls and the giant movieplex...

What it was... I wanted to make Facebook the culprit, the beast that put the bite marks of hinted jadedness into me, that dystopic doo-hickey that made me sound all curmudgeony about all these blurring updates and hey-did-you-see-what-Thom-Yorke-just-tweeted...and all such nonesense. (There are much more substantial and necessarily scary things going on in the world, dear reader, from rising sea levels to Detroit facing the potetial of being run by an Emergency Manager)...

The point is, I haven't left here yet because I'm bewitched by all of your potential... And, Trever and I being documentarians (of some kind), it leads us to ask all these questions, sometimes way too early, earlier than when the answer is fully formed.

Trever and I are all too ready to form epic memories - like Will Hermes' latest: Love Goes to Buildings On Fire - Five Years in New York that Changed Music Forever... Trever and I,...we're just inspired, is all...wanna shout all this out to the world, now, is all!

Like this...

Rising glam-revivalist Duane the Teenage Weirdo pairing up with explosive, slime-splattered punk avant-gardist Timmy Vulgar (via Human Eye) -as part of Saturday's show -with a welcomed appearance by the Terrible Twos ...along with Keep on Trash DJ's: Dave Buick and Johnny Hentch - - 3rd Street Detroit (4626 3rd)

It's line ups like that, -rookies and veterans- -glam and punk- that further fosters the verdant variety of this scene.

There's no need for bands to "make sense together" when they play a show - no need for 3 all/only punk bands, or all rock bands, etc...

Healthy variety
Augmented inspiration.

Question: What happens when Duane the Teenage Weirdo turns 20?
Answer: Yes, eyeballs do barf out toxic pastel nightmares^

Since I won't have time to write about it tomorrow... I'll write about it now...
One of my favorite albums of the year comes from Chicago's tumble-pop/indie-rockers Hospital Garden that being their Haunter LP (the title track from which can be streamed below...)

Hospital Garden, along with Columbus' Psychic Wheels, are coming to town, Friday night, at the Lager House, to synch up with their friends, Detroit-set shred-pop duo Secret Twins, who, it turns out, recorded a split 7" vinyl with the fuzzed-out-sunsplattered punk/pop trio DeadBeat Beat...

So that's something...

Hospital Garden - "Haunter" by DC/Milo

P.S. - Do you really wanna know what's going on? And actually have time to pore over it, take a breath, review, and take notes? Just check out Shelley's Michigan Happenings - for those in the-ever-running-know, that's the only blog you'll need to check...

P.P.S. - I'm not sure if I resolved how uneasy I can get at how much there is to consume, to take in, to review, out there, on the internet...

I'm still worried that profundity is dead. ---The Beastie Boys and Red Hot Chili Peppers and Guns N' Roses are in the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame...now (--or, at least, they will be...soon enough). What does that even mean anymore? The culture heroes of the past still retain the pedastols... Whether it's Axl Rose or the CBGB's troupe written about in Hermes' new book, or even the Steve F'in Miller Band on any ol bland, repetitive classic rock radio.

While bands around here are writing just as inspired (and often profound) songs as they, or anyone else, every other weekend...

Trever and I are just trying to tell people about it, I guess...

For now, I'm turning in...reading a bit of Moby Dick, then off to sleep...
"...This is much; yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound..." (H. Melville, Moby Dick)

Gift Catalog / Ill Band

2011-12-05T08:45:00.001-08:00

Local energies - percolating across the Internet channels...

House Phone is here... Man...sounding good so far.
There's new, heretofore unfounded fire to their recordings on the Gift Catalog EP - not yet fully realized on the initial demos and last summer's EP. Something just seems up, more lively, across all their elements, keys, guitars, bass, drum, high crooning vocals...
I think it's that scorched synth punch affecting some clawed-up space rock plow - joining in with the guitars on "1000 Years..." I can just hear/see that jam affecting a certain augmented poignancy at the next Blowout - In fact, its ever since last year's Blowout performance where this jazz-inclined soul-pop quintet backed up hip/hop MC collective Cold Men Young that this group has begun to noticeably hone their chemistry and electrify their on-stage presence/energy and delivery.With this EP...it's coming through.

<a href="http://housephone.bandcamp.com/track/smokey-robinson">Smokey Robinson by House Phone</a>

And then there's these guys...
.
...punk-charmers/noise-poppers/befuddle-rockers... For a band with a comparatively minimalist sound/approach, they manage quite an effect. More soon on them... For now, mark thine calendars-- for Dec 16th (at Jumbo's in Detroit) - as that's when the Ill Band releases their new LP Ask All T/he Doctors (Urinal Cake) along with Sros Lords -who'll be releasing a 7"...

West of Here - Wet Hair - Ways to Come Together - - Chrome Sparks and WCBN

2011-12-04T06:52:00.001-08:00

I have no perception of who reads (checks, scans, spits-upon) this blog...

If I'm guessing it's mostly those set into the SE pocket of the mitten, Detroit and what have you. So, then, please consider this westward-heavy post - where I look over to Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti...

I scribbled out a music column for an A2-based culture zine, recently, and thought I'd share some of those thoughts:

Chris Taylor said there needs to be more unity in “music community.” To raise and sustain a thriving music community, it “really comes down to supporting each other,” said the journeyman guitarist, who currently plays a blend of sci-fi-surf and psychedelic hard rock with Ann Arbor’s Blue Snaggletooth).

I spent much of my late autumn picking the brains of various local musicians, ruminating on the potency and potential of what it is, exactly, that we have here, together, as a “music scene,” or, “community.” It’s a tough, tricky conversational query…Not only is it hard to answer the: what-makes-a-scene-work-question; it’s often tacitly considered such a troublesome subject, that most refrain from even asking it.

And the answer can vary, depending on niche...

...The elusive element, however pie-in-the-sky-ish, would be “an across the board community of support” said Taylor, that binds the fractured “sets” of different styled musicians (scenes within a scene), to attain a bedrock of support. Indeed, what we have is commendable in itself, especially the local labels (ARBCO, Ginkgo,) or local independent businesses (record shops like Underground Sounds or local-centric venues like Woodruffs). The reason for any frustration (and thus our questioning of “scenes”) is that the push and pull of all these more distinct and sometimes erratic components have heretofore, seemed to help some bands (propped up to national tours) while leading others to fall through the cracks to, as Taylor put it, “languish on the local circuit…”

Shelley Salant (of Ypsi band Swimsuit and Ginkgo Records) noted that inevitably, we’d need more local venues; the hope being that more outlets lead to more local showcases, wider local fan base, clearer translation to other “gate keepers” (as Taylor said, “booking agents, local bizz’ owners, event organizers”) realizing the value (potential revenue) in live, local music. But then, that tips into branding one’s self, one’s scene… And who wants, really, to be “tagged” – folk rock, punk rock, etc…

The hope is, always, that everyone gets on board, supporting all local music. But still, there’s no clear answer. Presumably, no one listener will be up for attending the shows of every genre and you’ll probably never see noise rock bands at more folky art fairs.

Or will you? Conventional barriers and cliquey behaviors break down slowly – genres blend together and it leads me to wonder how much longer we stay separated. Rock bands like Jehovah’s Witness Protection Program synched up, recently, with hip hop MCs from Detroit, Mister, Blaksmith and Benjamin Miles, for a remix single produced by Ypsi-based raunch-rapper BUFFAY.

So why not blend other genres into this rock column? Ann Arbors’ Chrome Sparks (Jeremy Malvin) is an up and coming ambient electronica composer who’s released a steady stream of singles, EPs and albums. It’s likely you’ll see him mixed in with a handful of indie-rock bands on a bill

.........

~Piggy-backing off of that rambled spill - You can read more about Chrome Sparkes HERE.
You can also see Chrome Sparks performing this Wednesday (Dec 7), out in Ann Arbor at the Work Gallery (306 State Street) along with Iowa City-tied synth-swirled lo-fi psychedelia group Wet Hair, part of U-M's student run radio station WCBN's spotlighting of the School's first dedicated gallery space on central campus...This performance was funded in part by Arts at Michigan.

If you want to catch up on the history of Wet Hair, subsequently, there's an ample anecdotal digi-dossier to review here. - It was born out of Shawn Reed's Night People Records label...and you can only imagine if Young Marble Giants were roomates with Spaceman 3...with the dreamy-droon/croon articulations of an Ian Curtis...

oh, blogspeak

Stone Calendar / Is It Snowing Where You Are?

2011-12-02T07:41:00.001-08:00

Still sifting my way through the SubSprawl Holiday comp...

Favorites and curiosities, so far, include:
"Jesus Was A Gangster" - by MC Rallz
"Holiday Road" by Deadbeat Beat... nice touch
Paincakes...a perennial contributor to this list...
And with Child Bite mutating their own version of King Wenceslas ...crisp and even
and then there's this one, sounding like a college thesis paper -
"Facts Regarding the Great Halifax Explosion of 1917 and it's Effects on the Official Christmas Tree of the City of Boston" by Greatest American Beekeeper[
...dig in...

Make a stop at that site - (...and, inevitably...consider the fact that Quack Media slashed their prices in half - in case you wanted to take care of some shopping for the MusicHeads in your family... or, just, yourself...)

~

As the year winds down and I start looking back--as much as I start looking forward, ...there's one song that keeps ringing out in my mind...
Hi-Speed Dubbing's "Stone Calendar..."

"...2012...just might be the end"

Hi-Speed Dubbing - "Stone Calendar (2012)" by DC/Milo
~
^This is a forthcoming 7" vinyl single... from a subsequent forthcoming album, by this Detroit quartet of blues-punk amalgam rockers - This was one of their first songs, penned by Justin (Audio) Walker, (who also records as Brilliant Violence)... reflecting a hard-hooking, rip/roar/tumbler phase of his writing, back in 2008, as the band was just coming together.
That riff, wobbling upward, jerking side to side, sweetens up an otherwise fiery jam that, underneath the roar of the guitar, is haunted by earnest uncertainty... If this is it, after all...better make it worth your while... and better you shout your lungs out...
--more sounds here
~

Another song that always gets stuck in my head around this time of year is one that's a bit harder to find, out there on the Internet, in its original form...
But there's at least this charming (softly cacaphonous) video...

Saturday Looks Good To Me - Peg

PSL | Myspace Video

"It's almost winter time..."
Makes you nostalgic for the modern classics... like Saturday Looks Good To Me's Fill Up The Room...

I'll embrace stream of conscience: SLGTM ->Fred Thomas -> Ypsilanti.... -->and I arrive at: Mittenfest 6 - (happening in Ypsi's Woodruff's) ...and it's line up - and it's dates - 12/28/11--through--1/1/12

twenty-twelve.......

Decent Burr

2011-12-01T17:28:00.001-08:00

I'm growing more self-conscious...month to month, as we wind down, that tUnE-yArDs...might or might not be growing a bit polarizing? Only because it just seems like numerous, from Pitchfork -to- NPR^ have sanctified their 2011 release Whokil....

Whatever. It'll be on my year-end list. Judge away, Internet...

In the meantime, please visit Suburban Sprawl's web site...They have a musical care package of holiday/winter-themed songs from dozens of local bands. This is always an exciting collection... dorky and dynamic, nostalgic and heartwarming and noisy and...well, lots of things. 'Tis the season... Year 10! I'll write about it more, after some Nog...

Live, Eat, Sleep, Breath - Music: Melville, Bowie, Illingsworth and HurryCulture

2011-11-29T14:55:00.001-08:00

I'm here.
I might as well write...

The world moves too fast. I feel like I havne't gotten a chance to really sit with any records, properly. Not enough coffee to keep me keyed up... keying in... Breathing now... listening...Back to the Kinks first record, back to Bowie's Station to Station... Digging back into myriad pièces de résistance from handfuls of praised auteurs whose pedastols only get higher, year in and year out...

Like, Moby Dick... I'd never read any Melville before - and it's been rewarding stumbling onto such passages:"The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less... is here essayed"

When else am I going to find the time to read Melville, when Blog-World just wants me to keep lunging for what's next...

The new HurryCulture has created a strange filter - The well established legends, regardless of their level of legitimized profundity, whether they're Bowie, or Melville, or Big Bird, or Radiohead, Jay Z or Gary Numan, Michael Stipe or Michael Jackson... made it through before the Internet screen went up... And ever since, we've had ostensibly indie-acts coming up being pigeonholed as "buzz-bands..." The tacit suggestion being that said-buzz offers precious time...before you're sluiced back out through the filter.

And Ziggy Stardust and Captain Ahab's shadows grow taller and darker, on the other side.

BUT....but...but...

That's just one way of looking at it... (I shouldn't type straight out of the day job, on only half-doses of coffee...)

Another way to see it, meanwhile, would be to ask: when and how else would I have been able to come across a band like Thee Oh Sees...or Still Corners? Without my sloshing around the hyper-percolating, song-screaming/mp3-streaming echo chambers of the Internet...

Dig the London dream-pop-deconstructionists, bringing in warm organs and surfy-guitars onto an autmnal, hazy stovetop, where it simmers into near noise-pop crescendos of dizzy catharsis... (Their new album, which probably makes my '11-list is Creatures of an Hour on SubPop).

Or, Texas-punk-blues boys, of the Strange variety, are probably having a tough time from the music press since their album title Live Music ...is likely pronounced differently than any reader's initial inclination (...rhyme-it with "give..." ) Sound advice: LIVE music.
They stopped by Noisevox, whilst in New York, over Thanksgiving - and got interviewed... Watch that here, if you please.

Their latest (which, again, now that I think about it with a listen, is an '11-candidate) is available through Rough Trade.

But let's bring it back to Detroit.......
It's Wednesday (as I write this) and that means, that, like always (or, like such a notable amount of weeks-steady) local multifaceted/multi-quirked MC Doc Illingsworth, in all his shimmering, glistening glory, has posted another thoughtful, charming video... Wherein, along with Rufio Jones and Sean Uppercut, they come to terms with bread acting as legal tender for up and coming independent music artists... what a world.

Where was I going with this post, to being with, anyhow?

I'm going back to my Melville...
AVAST!

of All Time...

2011-11-29T06:14:00.001-08:00

I'm through with the major music press, folks...

It's fluff has caused me to hack...

I was pushed over, today, by my father's vehement disagreement with Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of all time...the feature list of their current issue. Dad doesn't really think that Jimi Hendrix is technically, judged by all measurements and beyond all doubts - the greatest guitar player of all time. Set aside my accentuated eye-rolling upon scanning the current issue of Rolling Stone (in which they have this all-time list of guitarists, which includes Sex Pistols' Steve Jones and not one Venutre? ...includes Mick Ronson, and yet not Robert Fripp? Paul Simon is also on the list...And why, dad asks, is Chet Atkins and Les Paul ranked so low?)

But it's more of the same; predictable and homogeneous - like Stone running a mirror-image feature spread on what they call "Rap's New Wave" to what SPIN Magazine profiled as: "The Changing Face of Hip/Hop" - you can find Yelawolf, Big K.R.I.T., A$AP Rocky and Detroit's Danny Brown spotlighted in both magazine's respective/repetitive features. And oh, look, the new Drake album got 4 out of 5... big surprise...

But back to that all time greatest guitar player list...

I love that part: "all time..." (A two-word phrase that updates itself with the same exasperatingly microscopic distinctions atop contrived rehashes as your typical college kid's Algebra II textbooks).

Lists, in/of themselves are inane, subjective and thus dubious. Best to take mild entertainment in that they still manage to stir up fracases between fans, why this guitarist over that one, etc...

It's because we all have our own lists, constantly posted on the push-pin-stabbed cork bulletin boards of our brains - we know our own hierarchy - subjected to the whims of our most closely clung-to inspirational figures. We all, not to stretch it too far, have our own Mt Olympus, packed with a rose-colored-lens-viewed Board of Guitar God Trustees (or, whatever cultural creator, author, actor, director, whatever...) We elected our own heroes, we have our own lists...

It's easy to get upset. Especially when you love the Ventures and Mark Knopfler as much as my dad... only to see Hendrix and Clapton get the spotlight once again...

~~But even then, maybe I am a bit wistful that I missed the deadline to contribute to this year's Favorite Albums of 2011 Year End List for TinyMixTapes (an online music zine that I contribute to, on occasion). But then, many of you will probably scoff at my short list... (Let's see, what was on it... tUnE-yArDs...Tom Waits...War On Drugs...Atlas Sound...Kings Go Forth...John Maus...Glossies...) What does it matter?

I woke up today assured that I'd attempt to make a list, myself...

The Most Important Moments in Rock/Pop-Music History...of "ALL TIME"

1. When the Beatles took drugs
2. When Iggy Pop rolled around in broken glass and the Ramones took their leather jackets on tour to England
3. When Bob Moog marketed his synthesizer
4. ...Kook Herc...Bambaataa...and Grandmaster Flash in the Bronx, early 70's,...the breakbeats, etc
5. When blues music gets mutated into rock n roll by white people who figure out how to sell it (with Elvis, et. al.) to poodle-skirted, lettermen blessed with disposable income (allowance).
6. Disco gets bastardized into Bee Gee/Saturday Night Fever glam, only to die, quickly, followed by a dance reformation of -House and -Techno

7. There's no way this list can be definitive

8. The day YOU realize that you shouldn't put any stock in any magazine, major music press or even a blog (this one included)... And that lists are just for fun.

Just listen.

Black Saturday

2011-11-25T13:39:00.001-08:00

Black Friday is ending as I type this...
...Hermited away, inside my bungalow, staring out at this eerily pleasant weather...
...Knowing, unsettled, that the masses are out their, bumping into-and-off-of each other, like ants in a glass-smushed-farm, unknowingly acquiescent to some cruel science experiment, poured from the blended beakers of Macy's and Roebucks, from car dealerships and Best Buys...
...coaxing your aunt and your other klatch of non-music-obsessed friends who may be less cynical than you... coaxing them out, out, into the gaping maw of the mega-mall, swallowed to shop, to churn through its innards and collect discounted debris from its bleached viscera... to store away the plastics and the diamonds and the woolen sweaters and the shoes, the toys and the kindles and the always-too-easily-broken bits...into closets for the next 30 days...

Some of us are shopping small. Like my mom, tomorrow, in Ferndale... or as part of a co-opted Occupy-Wall-Street thing

Some of us are just too damn busy today (like me...)

Some of us, though, just ain't got the money right now...

And that's the subject of Passalacqua's latest joint, a contribution to the Annual Suburban Sprawl X-Mas Compilation... (A free streaming gift, packed with dozens of season/holiday-themed tunes from a range of Michigan musicians - be they rock, rap, punk or random-one-off collaborations of weirdness...)

Doc Illingsworth (of Detroit CYDI) spits some bars on this track, along with Mister and Blaksmith. Passalacqua plays on December 9th, at the Magic Stick, with ambio/electro/space-pop wonderkids Phantasmagoria, and Ann Arbor-based digi-noise-scramble composers Chrome Sparks and fthrsn -

Head to Sub Sprawl's label site on December 1st for the new comp!

New sounds? Here's new sounds... (well...two-month-old-sounds, but still):

New videos? Watch Doc Illingsworth - discovering the Internet...

People Who Live In Paper Houses...

2011-11-24T19:16:00.001-08:00

Somewhat of an Interview - with the Ferdy Mayne:

...A new place to go for live music, The Paper House, will open its doors tonight, helmed by a handful of dudes who know what they're doing when it comes to lively, off-the-beaten-path-parties culling quirky, cool, iconoclastic performers.

Its places and nights like these that fuel the hyperbole of ad-campaign-esque sonnets singing the potential of this city, based upon its vigorous underground arts scene.

Just like ScrummageVision before it, (and various other Scrummage incarnations long before that, as well), Paper House could be the new music mill for those seeking out a refreshing revue of unconventional and avant garde artists who might be slipping under the radar of the bigger clubs. With ScrummageVision closing down two days ago, the Paper House, ostensibly inherits that torch, or at least is flecked with its embers. Much like the city's other alternative venues, past/present that have either thrived or blipped from within re- store-fronts, lofts or warehouses, the Paper House has its fire's lit by a batch of 20-somethings with -energy, -vision and -camaraderie. And, oh yes, potential.

But before I re-type that same old hyperbolic rave for our general edgey-ness, I stated typing out this blog post because of the new venue's first line up -

--which, included with up-and-coming post-space-rock/post-acid-jazz quartet Rough House, (who manage to impress even inside cramped living rooms), is headlined by the once dance-pop-pigeonholed/and-now-ever-evolving music project of Randy Chabot, i.e. Deastro, along with Scrummage-born electro/noise/rock-experimenters Lord Scrummage and Slufter. There's also The Kodaks, Butter Wolf, Palaver ...and a DJ duo...

A late entry to this bill was The Ferrdy Mayne, a name not as frequently plastered across ad-nauseum Facebook invites as other local bands, mostly due to the band, (spearheaded by vagabond-ish singer/songwriter Shane Firek) having spent the last year steadily re-potting his(/its) roots back into the Detroit music scene after spending a year or so down south in Nashville. For a minute there, they(/Firek) were a prominent element of the Ypsilanti music scene (coming up in 07 alongside comrades like Lightning Love), only to then fade in and out upon Firek's frequent returns. And now, again...

In a way, Firek's Ferdy-flares mirrored the all too fleeting (but often necessary/unavoidable) transience of these above-hallowed^ alternative venues. Which, having been swooned by the gristly, gargled swoon and gloom of his dark, twangy music, a whiskey-shot Americana, gaunt and profound but fractured upon its landing in the clotted cradle of urban gutters, made it that much harder to accept the band's somewhat start-and-stop status, heretofore.

But the band was never put on hold - as long as Firek wrote, it lived. And it was that writing, the lyrics, not just their throaty, quavering delivery, but the words, that can be the most striking about their songs. "It is an entity onto itself," he said, "(its) solidifying and we'll write more soon. It is fun. We enjoy fun."

Colin Birkett, Matthew Allen-John Mathis and Derek Scobie join Firek in this current incarnation. "The Nashville situation," as he calls it, "gave everyone that was involved in the project a time to grow and learn. I'm back because it didn't work out."

"(Paper House) is going to be big..." said Firek, "I'm proud of everyone and they work hard so they deserve a prideful high five..."

"Detroit is amazing," Firek surmises, happy to be back. "Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor are my home. Some play punk, such as Slaves to the Pavement and SNAFU. Others do what they please, such as The Real Spicolis, The Wolfs and Metemphycosis. Others are on their way soon, such as The Juliets and Lightning Love."

"...I love them all. They are all my best friends and I want to play as many shows as possible with them, you know?

Black Friday at the Paper House - 1314 Broadway, Detroit, MI....
Deastro
Lord Scrummage
Slufter
Rough House
Butter Wolf
Ferdy Mayne
The Kodaks
Palaver
DJs-- Jerry P. Vs. R. Childs

Reaching Through to the Other Side - Real Efforts (Real People)

2011-11-21T05:25:00.001-08:00

Could this be the foretold, fanciful something... or just another of the numbing nothings. Fleeting grins and mouse-clicked morphine shots guzzled quickly and forgotten just as fast -these quips, these videos, these digital bathroom stall one-liner philosophic-puns...

We have a forum here. What do we really want to start talking about... How about the fact that you all have a guitar, drum-kit, or at least one shoddy amp in your bedroom; ...that you're apart of some alternate-community, a bizarro block where you wear your true faces, true wardrobes, (and hopefully speak your true minds...) A potential cooperative...

I am ruminating on the wondrous and eerie workings of this great Influencing Machine... (...read more from On The Media's recently published comic-book hero / award winning reporter/media analyst Brook Gladstone)... The media and it's various evolutions, inevitably, leading me to hone in on the snippy snack-vending conveyor belt of every-little-thing's...known as Facebook...

In this new book, we are encouraged to play an active role in our media consumption; to become, as it were, netizens... "assemble(d) in networks of peers" drawing "attention to unreported information..."

This has worked, and continues to work, week to week, year to year, from effecting reforms of election ballot returns to spreading evidential indictments of tyrannical governments or brutalities committed by authorities that can thus spur the kinds of movements akin to the Arab Spring or the Occupy Wall Street's American Autumn...

Real Efforts... one might say... by Real People...

Fate would have it that, as I write this, I'm listening to the latest single by local singer/songwriter Ben West, who, under the moniker Real Efforts by Real People, has written a couple of EP's with fellow Great Fiction mates' Danny Zott and Kris Pooley; a delicate, organ-thrummed indie-pop sound, warmed with syrupy crooned vocals and decorated with a quieter, chill-er chamber-pop vibe, jangled with shuffling rhythms and a few surfy guitar flares; it glistens like the multitudinous sunrise-reflecting dew drops upon blades of mid-Spring grass.....kinda nice to hear it in the early winter time.

Anyway....

I'm not naive about my readership here... I'm assuming anyone picking this blog up is made up, mostly, by those already lassoed into a Facebook "group" recently put up called Club Cool. It comprises quite a considerable round-up of those persistently playing in / contributing to / collaborating within and continually galvanizing -the Detroit music scene... If, albeit, maybe more so heavier on the rock sound side of things...

But that's still a start. I mean, what are we doing here? You're on your computer right now because you don't want to be thinking about your day job - you're likely even at you're day job, killing time, and reading about your own respective local music scene, (Detroit, or elsewhere) -and daydreaming about the creative-arts-Xanadu it could one day resemble, further soothing yourself with the high you get from writing a new song or performing in front of your friends and that feeling, however deluded or substantial, you get... (is it true inspiration, is it mad narcissism, is it genuine and effective local pride),
...that feeling... that these weekly gatherings of local bands upon wooden stages under blue lights with loud music and people shouting into each other's ears per conversation while gripping plastic cups slippery with condensation...
...that these things are building something...building toward something.

Too much coffee...

Anyway - Facebook was integral in coordinating the recent demonstrations for Occupy Detroit. That's one thing.
Meanwhile, as you can read in December's Ann Arbor Current - in the Rock Column, I've been ruminating on the potential of music scenes. It's a painfully old and run-out question. But, seriously, not to get all jittery and bittery - not to get all real world pessimist like the sweater-vested dad who turns the stabbing white fluorescents back on to dash the dim dremay ambiance of your teenage basement dance party...

But ...what else are we doing, here? - save the heartbreakingly beautiful and by all means acceptable/commendable act of pure expression out into the void - When someone starts wondering what more we can do, beyond posting the next album on bandcamp... What, then, is the answer? (Cuz I don't have it, yet).

But, can't we find it together - and can Club Cool, as an ostensible "spontaneous network" of social interaction with which we can draw attention to... shit, man, anything... not just our music scene, not just the fine work of our many non-profits, or the multitude of issues facing our community, from education, to infrastructure... But to stir up echoes, amplify our sounds... One gigantic squeaky wheel for some kind of oil.
I don't know...

"Hindrances, distresses of substance / I turn them over / Is this something?"

I am also listening to Shara Worden's latest work, as My Brightest Diamond - All Things Will Unwind - an album of imposing baroque-pop elegance, wispy, operatic, autumnal dreamscapes - cleansing my palette of, by-comparison, overly-esoteric or experimental offerings and grand presentations from other songstresses such as a St. Vincent or a Bjork or a Florence... This, this is what I want to be listening to, in my hermetic living room scenes, to warm to, by an already crackling fire, as the skies become a carousel...
I'll probably write more about it later... as I know I'll be listening to it, more, later, as well... So why not?

"One foot follows the other / This stone, this finite place / Is it limitless? / / To touch the boundless / I hear a measureless rise" (My Brightest Diamond - "Reaching Through to the Other Side").

Read on: Yochai Benkler's "Wealth of Networks"
Brooke Gladstone / John Neufeld's "The Influencing Machine"

Until Then...

2011-11-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving in Detroit...
Busy busy bar's...
Small's is turning 12 years old this week...
And there's plenty of other shows where one can get their rowdy rock fix -

One suggestion? Jeecy & the Jungle ~ This unconventional, refreshing, garage-jazz/punk-blues power trio - who'll be at the Lager House -that evening (amongst an already stacked bill - go Facebook-it).

..............
...I'm taking the weekend off from this zany blog -
...back with more music musing's soon.

Ghosts, (the) Devil - and a Song for Spring

2011-11-17T06:46:00.001-08:00

I think the Internet killed that concept of a 'sophmore slump...'

No more Strokes, no more Weezer's... most rock/pop bands, now, it seems, aren't found or given fanfare until a fair time after their debut - leaking out onto blogs with their bio's substantially filled with past works and anecdotes of the scene's through which they matured...

Another case: Patrick Davy & the Ghosts - sounding bigger, more confident, more fully realized here on their 2nd LP (the recently released The First Cold Night) then on their debut from about a year ago (Albeit, some tracks repeat...still, this feels like the proper 'debut').

Not that they've stumbled onto some sort of quaking Eureka-esque spell of songs that profoundly shifts their style and sensibilities from their initial tract - no, no rap rock, funk or synthesizer-bolstered dance-tunes - it's just a clearer picture, a firmer voice... Augmentation, if you will - upon the dynamic guitars, winding and wailing out in squalls of fuzz ("Home"), while the bass and drums emit more character, more of a groove, fierce and up front with the "The Devil," but also flexing subtler sways and bluesy struts on "Song for Spring" - the latter acting as a nice, softer shaded counterpart to some of the more arena-reaching jams like "It Got Me..." itself enveloping what is, at heart, a fine pop/rock ballad, with, again, an augmented sonic vigor, double tracked vocals and these cathartic riff at the bridges, reverb spilled out to its edges and punched up percussion.

Now, mentioning Strokes and Weezer at the top might assure that the ghost of the late 90's might hang over this write-up - maybe that's fitting - since some of these tunes sound resurrected from the hey days of alternative rock radio - First Cold Nights tunes would be radio ready singles in the post-grunge era - but, then, Davy (with Will Shattuck (drums) and Adam Michael Lee Padden (bass)) are also early 20-something-sons of the Internet - their rock ballads are ones marked palpably by their home-base Detroit, i.e. subtle shades of garage rust, along with the similar quasi-preservation/revisioining of indie-rock -shared by the scene's contemporaries, like Jesse & the Gnome or Citizen Smile.

But 'ballads' is the key word - aside from a few tracks, like "I've Got Yours," Cold Nights aims for the highest bar on pretty much every track... But, improvement is showing - as even in the aforementioned track, a softer, melancholic musing as it is, showcases not just your singer's characteristic guitar howl, but your singer's voice....

Poppy Post Pop

2011-11-16T13:22:00.001-08:00

...been having too much fun excavating old interview notes... In honor of local culture/music photographer Trever Long (on his birthday), I dug up this transcribed exhibition - from a photo shoot (shot by Long, seen in self-portrait, below) inside the suburbo-rustic (and recently renovated) garage of Johnny Headband...

Our scene finds the band, the characters, in costume, while singer/keyboardist Chad describes the way the band works, in terms of members/collaborators...

...and...it just kinda goes from there...

Chad: "Our policy is: you can join in on what you want to join in on...either way, we're gonna do it. Whatever it is..."

Pan!c, (guitarist, suited up in a silver blazer, atop a ladder): "I'm kinda the straight man, I work it out so I can be apart of it.

And our discussion drifts to audiences for album's and contemporary listening habits in the TwitterBooked Tablet age:

Pan!c: "It's not necessarily that people don't have an attention span, it's just that there's too much...."

He furthers it, later, positing with an almost cryptic profoundness...

Pan!c: "I think all recorded music is dead..."

Keith (bassist): "I think we're dead right now..."

Chad: "I think in Japan...it's the future...-"

Keith: "I live a non-linear life..."

Chad: "We...we're...we're post-pop...we're pop-post-pop? We're poppy post-pop."

A moment passes...

Chad: "Hop Scotch!... I like the term 'Lover's Rock' - like Sade is 'lover's rock..."

Pan!c: "How can we start getting women in these photographs? What would make this photo amazing is a woman..."

Trever (photographer:) "Like...70's? 80?"

Keith: "Yeah... older women."

Chad: "...do I still look like a ninja?"

Keith: "A working ninja, a ninja with a job."

Pan!c: "Say, remember that Craig's List idea?"

Chad: "It's been done!"

And finally, Keith, skilled satirist of one's typical musician, leans in:

Keith: "Dude, just make us look cool..."

Trever: "Someone told me to make them look 'regal,' once..."

Keith: "...like Buick?

Chad (to Trever): "It's up to you, not up to them."

Keith: "Can you make me look like David Cassidy?"

Milo (you're reporter, to Trever): "...you gotta meet him halfway on that..."

Happy Birthday

Rollerskate ToastGhost (...read on)

2011-11-16T07:28:00.001-08:00

There's so much to write about today, dear readers - Occupy Protests are finally feeling the hammer, dropped upon them by encroaching police forces (who, they themselves are being pushed forward upon the chessboard by ostensible higher-ups, whether it's city mayors or some other shadowed influence of untold power)... Google search your news, or whatever you kids do these days, and stay tuned...

In the meantime, I'm still trying to write about local music...

As 2009 wound down, this Ypsilanti based pop trio started putting songs up on the internet - Ghostlady - a bit dark, very much dreamy, fuzzed with a bit of lo-fi charm but strung decoratively with instantaneously charming melodies - I thought I'd found the resurrection of Young Marble Giants or some new Michiganian answer to Yo La Tengo - sad/sweet purring from a farfisa, subtle, shimmied drum fills, steady booms of bass and ever-ready to open the window to let a bit of chilly atmospheirc feedback breezes in to flicker the pop candle's flame.

And it's ever that much more fully realized on Ghostlady's new full length Henry. Oh the sweet, hazy sway of "Calypsi' - the lovely lull and after-hours ear-echoed radiance of "Let It Down" - or the hard-hooking rock roar of "Snakes" - If you're wondering where fine, straight-forward lo-fi pop went, it seems to've all went into the heads of Ghostlady's three players.

Release show for Henry - Dec 1st - Woodruff's
...is it too late for a Mittenfest preview? Ghostlady played the Ypsi-based monumental Michigan-celebrating-music-festival last year, on the first day of 2011 (it's a New Year's thing - watch them here), though they'll miss it this year. I know that, because the line up is listed - at Mittenfest's main site. - It starts Wednesday, Dec 28th at 4pm and goes through until 2 a.m. (on Monday morning, January 2nd)
Mittenfest is a fundraiser for Michigan's nonprofit tutoring and educational outreach program, 826 Michigan, dedicated to improving/enhancing the creative and expository writing skills of students age 6-18.

Electropic Hipto-fuzznomical Releases with soul, with synth, with rhymes, with...

2011-11-15T06:26:00.001-08:00

Just firing off a quick blog post, dear readers, before I get to some other mad rant that, itself, may or may not see the light of day -

DIAL81 have a batch of left-field hip/hop blended to weird, fresh new takes on ambient/trip-hop and cerebral space-pop - yes - that's a lot - but you kinda get the idea, listening to a track like this:
RocK Climbing w Soft hAIR ft. AJ Sherman by DIAL81

Now then, DIAL81 (otherwise known as Blair French,) is releasing an album (er, "series" - the SweatSHopDeluXXXe series) - this coming Saturday - at the Magic Stick, paired with raw, funk-pop provacateur Beverly Fre$h (dig on "Half a Haircut" here), who, himself, is also releasing recorded work - Bed (LP on Vinyl)... French is also to be joined by musical contemporaries/collaborators: Level Jumpers, Dan Haddad, D.Allie, and Mobil... - - - But that's not all! See and hear these fine performers/writers/singers/rappers/musical-dabblers: Intricate Dialect / Sun Hammer, with a trio of DJs: Jefferson / Love Terrorist / Frankie Bank$!

~

But, then, that same Saturday - if you're not in Detroit - if you're out west - maybe in Ypsilanti or Ann Arbor? Might I recommend this young synth-pop atmosFuturoso composoer - Jeremy Malvin - otherwise known as Chrome Sparks - who will be DJing The Ball - a Dance Party hosted by The Vintage Twin & Vyne Records and sponsored by iSpy Magazine... Detroit's soul-ish, jazz-ish, hinted-hip/hop-ish amalgam otherwise known as House Phone will be performing along with Grand Rapids-based pop punk trio Midwest Skies -

It's in the back of the vintage shop - find your info here - and there'll be no alcohol, deal with it.

And listen:

Methinks

2011-11-14T10:08:00.001-08:00

I'm just looking over some old interview notes...

"...he gets a silly confidence, a certain swagger under the ninja costume..."

This is only a few lines after:
"...dog attack..."

and:
"he continues riffing and soloing, between takes, almost like he's working out and he wants to continue jumping jacks or running in place, staying in shape, getting that curious high from the endorphin splurge."
It's surreal to stop, here and then, now and again, and look over all the things you pounded into wordpads and abstrusely titled word docs -

I've been unable to focus, not one iota, this morning - and so I'm laggardly leafing through docs, begrudgingly under-caffeinated and trying to work out the charlie horses in my knees.

~Occupied Thoughts - ...And so I just wind up surfing around...reading headlines... Thinking, bemused and maybe a bit electrifyingly perturbed, to see so many arrested inside the assemblages of various Occupy Movements - notably in Portland and Denver, yesterday and today. - More on that: "How 'Occupy Portland' Made History This Week."

Going off of that news - Detroit has it's own Occupy Movement - similarly in risk of being shunted off their current spot of assemblage. - from the Free Press: "Occupy Detroit protesters to ask to stay in Grand Circus Park" -

and also, rumor has it there's a rally this evening to hold onto Grand Circus Park...

Going even further - from this week's Rolling Stone:- mixed in between worshiping the Stones' Miss You and a profile on Scott Weiland's Christmas album is some substantial Occupy-history: "...How a bunch of anarchists and radicals with nothing but sleeping bags launched a nationwide movement

~Drifting Thoughts: - Still yet unable to focus, I open up Moby Dick, to the page where I left off (that's right, I'm finally reading it!) and this is the 2nd line I read back to myself:

"Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance..."

You tell me.

Funnday

2011-11-13T05:08:00.001-08:00

A close-up to the far-out...
Charlie Slick (and Thunda Clap)'s Farout Indian

Get up in the morning / think of rock n roll / and it's the only thing to do when I am at work...
We come to your party / and we will play rock n roll / and it's the only thing i found that calms my nerves...

Sunday morning...and all bets are off... already awake despite running around the town last night...

Headphones and Charlie Slick's new album - and plenty of coffee...

~
“I wanted to show my range,” Slick says, for his newest album, Farout Indian, “I just happened to use electronic equipment (in song creation), I don’t prefer it, necessarily to acoustic instrumentation. (Indian) is my big movement towards not-being an electronic musician..."

Whatever the world, or Michigan, thinks of Charlie Slick, (glitter-soaked pied piper of wild, winsome laser light parties) doesn't seem to hold up against many of these nuanced space-rock tracks, much more fully realized and substantially layered with more eclectic instrumentation, here, on Indian. Less hyper -with heavier grooves, fuller grooves, with back up vocals bolstered by bass and synthesizers slowly shimmying together.

He tells me he wants to go for a Funkadelic kind of vibe here - and I can hear it on a track like: "Dance Like You're Ten..."

But all this is not a night-and-day switch, we'd seem some of these sides finally coming out on his last record...a steady "re-branding..." He'd gone into more of a funk side on Elron Hubbard (from last summer). "But, it was more like Rick James-esque funk," Slick says, "then, this record, I feel like I get closer to Prince or George Clinton...But at the same time, there's a lot of this weird guitar sound that I use (from an instrument he invented called The Jerk), which mixes in sort of that rock aspect..."

"Nomads On The Planes of Time'...that's the most mellow song on the record...it's a song that I wrote on the acoustic guitar and filled out with a lot of vocals and cool keyboard-y stuff. My friend, Johnny Ill, he played these rototom drums in the background, these little rolls on rototoms and I remember finishing that song and thinking: God, no one has ever heard this on a Slick album...

"...that comes right after the song "Funn" -which is this really funky and weird, dancey thing... And then Nomad is this washy, epic, almost like a prayer-type song...Then the very next track is an instrumental. And of course "Rush" is probably as close as I get to industrial rock.

And then there's "Man With the Keys" - the only time I've been tempted to use the words, haunting, grimy guitar-heavy, ballad -with a Slick song.)

This is the album where Slick opens himself up - not overtly autobiographical in lyrics - but displaying his musical breadth as a song writer, as a song imaginer...as he is an incorrigible tinkerer, dreamer, inventor (look at his guitar, look at his steering-wheel bass modulator, his light system)... Listening to this album is the chance to get to know, better, the man who's often not out at the bars, scene-ing it up...
"I think that it's no mystery that I'm not really apart of the music scene," Slick says, "I just kind of always do my own thing, in my own world. I'm in the basement, doing my own thing - there's good things and bad things about that."
"It's not anything on purpose...I'm just in my own world."

Spend some time with his tribe...and you might find you want to roll with him... - Nov 18 - Woodruff's in Ypsilanti - Album Release Show - with: Johnny Ill Band & GoLab

"I get into these things," he says, "and I just make it..."

What Is Yr Preferred Device?

2011-11-11T09:53:00.001-08:00

Ya know... You always imagine that these kinds of things will happen, eventually..inevitably... Still doesn't mean it's not surreal when it does...
"Report Claims Major Labels To Phase Out CD, Abandon Retail By End Of 2012"

More on that... "Music Via Subscription Projected To Grow More Than 300% in Next Four Years"
"Will music CDs be dead in 14 months?"

Death to the polycarbonate compact disc format...

And of course, in one way or another, the music lives on (and, hey, so does vinyl...)

Will CD's make the same comback, then, that cassettes have? -some dozen years down the line?

Anyway, have a good weekend...

Strange and Unproductive Thinking -or- You Tell Me

2011-11-09T19:39:00.000-08:00

The Internet is Too Much With Us…

Is this just my own way of gettin' wistful, or something... over some deluded psychosis, born from Internet-cooked paranoia and early-onset-curmudgeons, -that I feel rattled. Rattled. The table that was set with my friends at each chair seems to scatter itself clean. Steady temblors, ever-surging, up and around, from the digi-world, the taskmaster inside our crystal balls telling us of the next event, the next happening, all of it happening all at once –

-We have no chance, (do we?) no hope, to catch our breaths as we sluice down the cascade of status updates, leap-frogging link after link to keep up on what just happened, which famous person just died, what new lie the politician pushed, what new song that one new band just put out from their brand new album that more than half of your friends have already heard …and yet you haven’t yet… what’s wrong with you

– Not fast enough, friend, keep clicking; no, ...no sense in reaching out to grab your plate at the table, no sense in worrying how the place mats and platters and tea-cups of the friends around your table get slowly rattled out of place, out, away, along the thin, failing tablecloth and towards the edge, off of it, shattering down somewhere below – as they, themselves, your friends' smiling eyes morph into the two-dimensional avatars of profile pictures, their correspondences snipped down to two sentences…And maybe I'll check it on my phone, when I stop the car.

I’ve invited you to the event:
Come sit with me and listen to a record… Let’s listen together, share quips and appraisals of the sounds and lyrics, the ambiance and the effect. I am hungry to listen, made tired by what Daniel Burnham called "this great hurry of my life..." -by running to see, to hear, to see that again and hear something else now…
RUSH--
...
FURTHUR

Give me more to squeeze through, more than the crevice of time I have to shoulder-and-shimmy through, from one day job to the next, between grocery-grabbing errands and the gym, between family visits and, oh yes, enough sleep at night? More than just this amount of time to take in a work…more than just seeing you at the side of the stage… Hey, how's things?

I am over St. Vincent. I am over Florence. Wilco and Feist were already given enough smirks and snarky cast-offs by a laundry list of ostensible culture-zines and counterfeit critics that I let their latest albums dwindle down my playlists…Das Racist are on magazine covers and what should that mean to me? One of these days I’m going to sit down, proper, and listen to that damn Laura Marling album – but then, what about Lana Del Rey?--am I to fall for it and bite on that hype, ...will I be left behind when she turns out to be the real thing? And then there’s that new Future Islands album, the swayed fan in me is anxious to hear it – and why do I feel what could be the inklings of weird tears of half-joy and half-unhinged, when I hear supernatural/melodrama-freak-show director David Lynch singing, with an aching passion, over a techno-pop track… "I'm gonna have a goooood daaay today..."

~

How mad we all must be…
I feel for you musicians… On your end, there is the work, the writing and the recording…but then also, inevitably, the keeping-up-of-appearances, the shows, the concerts, the steady status updates to firm up your Presence… But then there’s the releasing… Look at how much, how fast, so many many many others are putting their stuff out there – how it must be a battle to not let that eat at you…as I, myself, here, am battling against a disenchantment born from the farcical flurry of hey-hey-look-at-this, this is it, the one you need, the best thing ever…across the boards, blogs and tumblrs...

The next thing, the current thing… Music news writing is just too much to reach for on a national scale. Turn on your crystal ball and type upon it – a cluster of gaseous glowing orbs, these blogs, are more than ready to tell you about the latest, the latest what – Odd Future? Skrillex? Or the 50^th anniversary of the Rolling Stones? It's already posted, friend. Check it.

Is the rest just noise?

Don’t call it a freak out. Don’t call it a comeback.

Just taking a nice morning, here, with some music… (listening to some new demos by Ypsilanti-based songwriter Matt Jones and his group, the Reconstruction, as they chop and churn out a warm, brisk ballad, tidal-wave drums, swooning strings and percolating banjos accommodating their howling chorus – “What’s it Say? What’s it Mean? I don’t know – you tell me!”)

So what then, this is just…a reaffirmation of an unwritten mission… to lose myself in whatever piece I can find – whenever I can find that time.

That song might be your song – I’m not going to stress out and try to coerce fate – if I tumble down to the table with my headphones on, at just that right time, -if I strut out into this infant winter air with my ear buds in and yours is the one – then I’m going to tune out all this, all of this worry and all of this digi-dread…and get lost in the work.

Some people go camping and sleep outside. Others go fishing. Some go to the movies and others might crochet.

I’ve just always listened to music. And tried to feel every sound, timbre, wave…

Tried anyway. Will continue to…

What’s it mean? I don’t know…you tell me…

The First Cold Nights...

2011-11-09T19:33:00.000-08:00

...are upon us...
and Patrick Davy & the Ghosts, though they'd sung of Summer Moons' earlier in the year, are making sure they're weatherized, settling in for winter, early, with the warming sounds from their latest LP, packed with their riff-heavy, Americana-flared, ballady indie-rock... somewhere between the theatrico-pop of Arcade Fire and the more scuffed, Rustbelt-marked guitar shreds of a Brendan Benson, lies the anthemic vibes of this up and coming Detroit trio... Their album release, for First Cold Nights, is this weekend at PJ's Lager House.... (it's also, subsequently, their bassist's birthday...)

Yes, Davy, and the rest of the new school of pop troubadours turn out to be harmony and hook preservationists (much like their bill mates for the release party of The First Cold Night, The HandGrenades), but unlike that more BritPop-leaning quartet, the Ghosts dig a bit more on intricate guitar flourishes for added atmospherics - which would align them to, again, another bill mate, the Ashleys.

Added to the line up is Jason Stollsteimer, more elder statesman in this bunch, with his Hounds Below.

That's Saturday - just when you thought things would stay quiet, what with Halloween over and Thanksgiving eve more than two weeks away -

Reaching Out...

2011-11-09T13:48:00.000-08:00

I listen to sports radio, I hear 18,000 voices slur in unison, "BAAH...BAH...BAAAHHH..."
and I think... my word, Neil Diamond is immortal.

Any sports arena DJ can drop old jams like "Sweet Caroline" and get the hoard to sing along... But an artist's universality - one's impact upon the culture through the terrorizing of every car stereo and jukebox with their #1 singles - has dwindled from decade to decade...

Joy Division is immortal on another, admittedly smaller level, than Diamond... or whoever...And I'd been musing on them recently, since seeing Detroit-based psyche-quartet Oblisk do a cover set of them, for Halloween.

And so then, will bands like Future Islands ever be immortal?

Will Oblisk? On what level? And in whose eyes? (Whose ears?)

Something to think about... ...as it was, that I missed Future Islands' Detroit concert, recently, since it was scheduled the same night as our big Halloween soiree (in which, instead, I took in some Joblisk-Division...) And it just got me thinking...

We're past that age when a manageable amount of artists, music superstars, culture creators, idols-if you will, are pedaled upon us, pushed to the top of your radio playlists, plastered onto the covers of your cereal boxes and blaring through the end credits of your favorite romantic comedy film...

Now, there's something everywhere, some band, some one, some song....

Now we have this glorious chaos - where anyone can stumble upon the digi-transmissions of Oblisk... or Joy Division... or Future Islands....
Dance to the radio...

Satisfied.... (+ "Why don't you just make 10 louder?")

2011-11-09T07:02:00.000-08:00

More proper posts forthcoming...
Gonna go kick up my heels and do some necessary headphone drifts, album re-spins and book-skimming

In the meantime, there's this... a video - for a song - from one of my favorite albums of the year so far...and I don't care how many TW-haters roll their eyes at that...

...This is like any other day for Tom... probably just strolled out to his backyard, hit record and told him to: "just do what you normally do..."

~

In other news - 11/11/11 fast approaches. And while most of square America just sees it as something to joke with their postal carrier about, or for half-out-of-their-mind 20-somethings to mark as their zealously-planned wedding day - it is observed in the music community with a certain nuance, tied to the immortal Mockumentary Spinal Tap -and that film/band's one Nigel Tufnel and his tweaking of his amplifier to "go to 11..." for power output.

Thus - at the Berkley Front, this Friday, local label Communist Day Care Center is hosting a Nigel Tufnel Day Show - the plan, aside from bringing together a bevy of local experimental rock artists (JFn'K, Red China, The Ashleys, Crappy Future, DandyLyon Whine, The Accidentals, Dinosaur Monster, Oliver Thompson, Artie Fufkin & His Bitch School, Nick Kish) is to: "release a tribute album to the best band ever SPINAL TAP..."

First 50 people at the door will receive a limited edition physical copy of the album...with downloads available for the fashionably late.