We will deviate from our normal policy of not gushing about music with hope of making it abundantly clear to you that this is a beautiful album.
Eide plays the lute. Abba sings. Another album which is not a collection of aural entertainments but eleven signposts in the dark on how to live, care, give thanks, and call out to a God who does not answer. One of Terry Riley's favorite albums, its sound is an excellent counterpoint to that of Tinariwen.
Both are heavy on drone and rolling percussion, but whereas Tinariwen is steeped in the dissolute and simmering fury of the blues, befitting a group composed of homeless, malodorous insurgents, Eide & Abba's music emanates from a near Apollonian serenity, most of all thanks to Abba's stunning voice. The youngish, female background singing deepens a sense of ritualistic, harmonious accord. Not to say that Eide & Abba lacks in urgency or uncertainty, as songs like "O Lord, Bring Apartheid Crashing Down!" can attest to. The contrast can be understood topographically. Tinariwen, guerrillas of the Touareg culture, sing of the desert, and their ceaseless wandering: "I've never seen enough trees to make a forest". Interminably traversing an inhospitable surface. The sound of Eide & Abba produces a vision of musical group, not a band, in both sense of the word, a group, maybe made in part of women from the neighborhood, a settlement, where no one for generations has had to scratch the earth on a camel and not bathe so much. The players sit in a circle and their voices raised together connect the human dwelling with the earth and sky. Meanwhile, the Tinariwen set up camp, clean their rifles, tune guitar strings, and wait for night to fall.
Editor's note: Only the Eide & Abba album is available here because it's out of print. You should go buy the Tinariwen and support them or they might come for you.
Track List: This mix is so minimal, the tracks don't have names. Except for the last track. The last track is "Computer Cowboy" by Neil Young. From his techno-inflected album Trans. Where he sings through a vocoder. (True). It is hard out there to be so minimal. In fact, I can't even hang that small. The fact that this mix verges into disco territory is testament to the great nimble delicacy needs to hang so small for so long - you need sushi-chef precision.
Jonathan F. passed us a remix of Animal Collective's recent single "Peacebone" by minimalist Pantha du Prince. It is a long minimal epic and its serious dopeness causes us to regret that we developed the So Minimal mix prior to encountering it. Consider it a supplement of the highest order.
2. The New York Review of Books' recent contribution to literary minimalism, "Novels in Three Lines" collects items written for the fait-divers in the French daily papers by Felix Feneon in 1906.
Something like having a writer of Flaubertian precision regarding sentence construction write the brief incidental items. The result is a haiku-like distillation of the daily accumulation of murders, fatal accidents, and assorted nefarious hijinks:
"Some drinkers in Houilles were passing around a pistol they thought was unloaded. Lagrange pulled the trigger. He did not get up."
"Napoleon, a peasant of Saint-Nabord, Vosges, drank a liter of alcohol; very well, but he had put in some phosphorous, hence his death."
"Lit by her son, 5, a signal flare burst under the skirts of Mme Roger of Clichy; damages were considerable."
"The former mayor of Cherbourg, Gosse, was in the hands of a barber when he cried out and died, although the razor hide nothing to do with it."
3. Further down the line of literary quotidian minimalism, Scottish designer and writer Oonagh O'Hagan maintains the website Flatmates Anonymous, which in a manner akin to the methods of U.S. publication Found Magazine, gathers written emphemera that serve as odd, funny accidental testimonies to the absurdities, frustrations, micro-dramas and general quotidian mayhem endemic to the sharing of living quarters.
Knowing that Oonagh is currently preparing an American edition of the Flatmates Anonymous book, we cannot imagine she would be disheartened if readers of this site were to visit hers and post their own related texts. For more visit Flatmates Anonymous
4. NYC blogger Self-Divider has written an enlightening post on 'infinite smallness' in Franz Kafka and Robert Walser, a Swiss precedessor of Kafka. He quotes Walser from his novel Jakob von Gunten: "to be small and stay small", and dismisses the idea that such a credo of smallness has nothing to do with modesty, humbleness or cuteness. This is not the smallness of a young polar bear cub.
In contrast, Self-Divider writes, "There is a disruptive element in [Walser's] writing which comes from a force that is more disturbing and radical: the self-destructive desire to vanish completely from society. From 'Helbling’s Story' -
I ought really to be quite alone in the world, me, Helbling, and not a single living being besides me. No sun, no culture, me, naked on a high rock, no storms, not even a wave, no water, no wind, no streets, no banks, no money, no time, and no breath. Then, at least, I should not be afraid any more.
It is a well-known fact that Robert Walser spent the last decades of his life in a mental institution. And that, on the Christmas of 1956, some kids in a town called Herisau found his frozen body in a field thickly crusted with snow."
Regarding Kafka, Self-Divider writes, "in the story “The Great Wall of China,” Kafka retells a Chinese legend to an unnamed “you.” He says that the dying Emperor has sent “you” a message via a messenger. In a gesture that mirrors K.’s oral recitation of a message to Barnabas that is to be relayed to the Castle (in fact, the short legend seems like The Castle condensed, reincarnated into an enigmatic parable), the dying king whispers his message into his messenger’s ear. Being a Kafka tale, of course, the messenger is mired in the infinite folds of the palace’s chambers and courtyards; he will never deliver the message. Thousands of years would pass. “But,” Kafka writes, “you sit at your window and dream [the message] to yourself when evening comes.”
Walter Benjamin tells us that it is not difficult to intuit that the unnamed “you” in the story is Kafka himself. And that Kafka has done everything in his power to make himself unknowable by making himself small.... Benjamin recognizes that Kafka’s smallness is not a contented smallness of a pleasing kind, but a reductive maneuver by which a writer can vanish, become invisible:
It is impossible to overlook the fact that [Kafka] stands at the center of his novels, but what happens to him there is designed to reduce to insignificance the person who experiences it, to render him invisible by concealing him at the heart of banality. And the cipher K., which designates the protagonist of his novel The Castle… is certainly not enough to enable us to recognize the person who has disappeared. The most we can do is weave a legend around this man Kafka.
For the full article and more literary commentary visit The Self-Divider
1. Michael Rother, played with Neu!, Harmonia, Cluster, and briefly Kraftwerk, is a prime stone-granite father of Krautrock. His first solo album from 1976, Flammende Herzen (Flaming Hearts) features Can's drummer, Jaki Liebezeit. Its romantic mood makes it a candidate for a new German electronic music subgenre, call it yacht-kraut-rock. (Das Boot rock?) We offer the track Zyklodrom based on the following insight from Rother from Herzen's liner notes:
"The beginning of Zyklodrom is slowed down. We often used to switch the speed of the tape machine to create a special atmosphere...It was quite normal to work that way. I think most music sounds better when it is slowed down. I experience that often. The music suddenly has a new magic. Maybe because the sound is further away from reality."
2. New York DJ team Rub-N-Tug's mix for the aNYthing clothing line. It is screwed. Unlike other variants of slow DJ music, however, like cosmic disco, this mix doesn't focus on slow in its drifting, soothing modality. There is no smooth sailing on a large, glistening vessel. This is slow in its queasy, decadent, grating mode. A teeth-gritting totter from side to side, waiting for the spell to pass. In a sense it's an electronic counterpart to RK's 'Adam'. It doesn't really have a beard, in the traditional sense. The beard of this mix is a wino scraggle. There also are no tracks listed. There is open debate as to whether this mix is curated or solely original material.
AC hereby issues a formal apology for not correctly uploading the much-touted rejected Fabric mix by French techno act Justice. Please find a new upload of this mix here:
AC would like to inaugurate a new AC feature in which we profile a band, quote Proust and Goethe, and with said band's consent offer up a new track of theirs and simultaneously offer up a very exclusive remix of the same track by Weekend Prince. AC is honored to focus here on Religious Knives. RK's new album, It's After Dark, is recently out on Troubleman Limited. They are founded in Brooklyn and tour and play often, recently opening for Thurston Moore at the Knitting Factory. They are closely tied to the community surrounding the yearly noise-rock heavy No Fun Fest, for which Maya Miller, RK's keyboardist, often pens images of slithering, malodorous trolls with floating potato feet.
Extra creative time is spent maintaining Heavy Tapes,a cassette-only distributor of underground experimental/noise recordings, HEAVY TAPES and producing visual representations of microcosms of melting, bleeding faces and spewing, gross things. MAYA E MILLER
Drawing for the inaugural issue of Showpaper, promoter Todd P's new venture which contains information on many all-age shows in Brooklyn, primarily of the Williamsburg-Bushwick loft circuit.
We feel the name Religious Knives is appropriate as their music sounds like monks slinking around in the dark waiting to stab each other, in chiaroscuro. RK has expressed to me their profound interest in 'downer psych', a neologism which well distinguishes their particular brand of chemical jam from other strands. For example, downer psych indicates you might be listening to Gary Higgins, but you are most likely not listening to Parson Sound.
I want to talk specifically about a track from It's After Dark that attracted me to remix it because I am attracted to songs like it for remix. This is the song called Adam. Many other songs on the album are of a more clamorous New Zealand noise-rock character, or a Psychic Ills track whose inebriated state has taken a queasy, stumbling turn and is about to fall sideways into some plastic trash bags. Adam is more restrained and downer, as if once you, while unpleasantly drunk, have fallen sideways into some trash bags, you decide that for the time being you are better off there, exposed to the night air and whooshing traffic sounds and your head in some old food, and you close your eyes and wait for sleep.
Here is what Mike Bernstein from Religious Knives has said to me about Adam.
"It's part of the song cycle on "It's After Dark" that deals with the brightest part of a summer day in the city, and it reflects the experience of the desire to bury yourself back in the ground only moments after you've managed to escape burial into freedom. The lyrics are collaborative and the song is meant to be hopeful and mournful at the same time."
I can't help but notice that the title says it's after dark, while there is a song cycle dealing with the 'brightest part' of the day.
The movements of escape and burial that Mike talks about are endemic to August in the city. One August, upon hearing me opine the loss of a girlfriend to another, an old British grifter who was my roommate, a rumpled struggling writer and proud chaser of foreign ass all at the same time, told me not to worry, "Everything falls apart in August. Nothing lasts. Wars get started." In Adam I think you can hear that paradoxical state of an urban August, after you have been set free for so long by the endless sunshine you no longer have anywhere to go, and you wander streets in the dark and in the stultifying soggy windless air and wait for the cold to come and bury you again.
In a passage from Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel also calls up some sounds of summer:
"I had stretched out on my bed, with a book, in my room which sheltered, trembingly, its transparent and fragile coolness from the afternoon sun, behind the almost closed blinds through which a glimmer of daylight had nevertheless managed to push its yellow wings, remaining motionless between the wood and the glass, in a corner, poised like a butterfly. It was hardly light enough to read, and the sensation of the light's splendor was given me only by the noise of Camus...hammering dusty crates; resounding in the sonorous atmosphere that is peculiar to hot weather, they seemed to spark off scarlet stars; and also by the flies executing their little concert, the chamber music of summer: evocative not in the manner of a human tune that, heard perchance during the summer, afterwards reminds you of it but connected to summer by a more necessary link: born from beautiful days, resurrecting only when the return, containing some of their essence, it does not only awaken their image in our memory; it guarantees their return, their actual, persistent, unmediated presence."
"The hammering of dusty crates, resounding in the sonorous atmosphere peculiar to hot weather" could describe a lot of RK's percussion, particularly 'Adam's' echoey thumps. The flies that incarnate summer retain in RK's case the aura of death and corporeal decay, their chamber music becomes a doom drone. Doom music is so often associated with winter, ice and cold, can there be a summer doom, or summer noir? Would "On the Beach" by Neil Young qualify?
In his writings on the morphology of clouds, Goethe makes a useful contribution to our understanding of Downer Psych. Regarding the metaphorical significance of cloud movements, he says: "redemption is a gentle heavenward urge, and the downward pull of earthly activity, our active destiny of earthly woe." 'Adam' is the sound of windless August, when the clouds are pulled from the sky and their watery weight surrounds us, encasing us in 'earthly woe.'
Elsewhere in speaking to his assistant Eckermann Goethe goes on a very spaced-out tangent regarding humidity and the breath of the earth:
"I imagine the earth with its circle of vapors like a great living being which inhales and exhales eternally. If the earth inhales, it draws to it the circle of vapors which approaches its surface and thickens into clouds and rain. I call this state the aqueous affirmation; if it lasted beyond the prescribed time, it would drown the earth. But the earth does not permit that; it exhales again and sends back up the vapors of water which spread into all the spaces of the high atmosphere and thin out to such an extent that not only does the brilliance of the sun cross through them, but that the eternal night of infinite space, seen through them, is colored with a brilliant blue tint. I call this second state of the atmosphere the aqueous negation."
The humid swamp of earthly woe is also the planet's inward breath. Adam, in some alley of the cosmic ghetto, lies on the ground and dreams of the end of summer, and with it the casting of water vapor out in space, and its thousand crystalline reflections.
Katt Williams explains the importance of good music supervision, namely by demonstrating how Rick Ross' "Hustlin" is appropriate for every situation in the world.
In brief: the London club Fabric commissioned Justice to do a mix for Fabriclive, one of its two bi-monthly DJ series. This mix was rejected, and has been recently leaked by them possibly.
In an interview with a Norwegian magazine, the following statements were made by Justice.
"We didn't want to do just another boring mix, so we put together a selection of tunes we absolutely love, mainly weird disco tracks and French novelty acts. But Fabric turned it down. They weren't ready for something like this. Maybe we'll put the mix out ourselves. People should really hear it, they'd be surprised."
"We love all the music that we put into [our Fabric mix]. I guess a lot of people will hate it. If you look at the tracklist for the first time, it can look like the worst tracklist ever. Especially for French people."
Track List
01 Sparks - Tryouts For The Human Race - Virgin 02 Rondo Veneziano - La Serenissima - Universal 03 Goblin - Tenebrae - Cinevox 04 Daft Punk - Ouverture - Virgin 05 Surkin - Next Of Kin - Institubes 06 SymbolOne - Love Juice - SymbolOne 07 Korgis - Everybodys Gotta Learn Sometimes - Angel Air 08 Midnight Juggernauts - Ending Of An Era - Mindight Juggernauts 09 The Paradise Ft Romauld - In Love With You - Vulture 10 Justice - TTHHEE PPAARRTTYY (Acapella) - Ed Banger 11 Chic - Everybody Dance - Atlantic 12 Frankie Valli - Who Loves You - Warners 13 Das Pop - Underground - Das Pop 14 Julien Clerc - Quand Je Joue - EMI 15 Daniel Balavoine - Vivre Ou Survivre - Barclay 16 Richard Sanderson - Reality - Barclay 17 Zoot Woman - Grey Day - Wall Of Sound 18 Fucking Champs - Thor Is Like Immortal - Drag City 19 The Rave - Mother - The Rave 20 Fancy - You Never Know - Fancy 21 Frank Stallone - Far From Over - Universal 22 Sheila - Misery - Warners 23 Todd Rundgren - International Feel - Warners
From a critical point of view, one of the most interesting things about a technological change in a particular medium is the kind of free-for-all atmosphere that almost inevitably arises at the point of the change's inception. The rise of electronic music is a particularly good example of this. Electronic music didn't create new genres as much as it began to take apart the idea of what a genre is. When a really, truly new thing comes on the scene, it leaves in its wake a hundred other new things, paths or ideas that never made it all the way, like the slower-swimming sperm that never reach the egg. The Beat Classic compilation, curated by J Saul Kane, documents how, in the early 80s, during the now Edenicized period of hip-hop's infancy, there were really no rules about what hip-hop was or how it should be made. The result is a bunch of really weird songs that at times are just as much techno as they are rap, except that their electronic influence is not really reducible to the canonized Roland 808 streamlined breakdance/electro sound. It's much denser and at times more abstract than that - check out "Shout", which samples the Tears for Fears hit, and "Never Satisfied", which interpolates lyrics from the Stones. This comp changed my historical understanding of hip-hop's origins, and paints a messy, vital, diffuse portrait of the diverse energies behind every revolution. ENJOY
1 B+ B-Beat Classic 2 Levi 167 Something Fresh To Swing To 3 Fantasy Three It's Your Rock 4 Rock Master Scott And The Dynamic Three It's Life 5 MC Craig G* Shout 6 Steady B Just Call Us Def 7 High Fidelity Three Never Satisfied 8 Disco Four Throwdown 9 Z-3 MC's Triple Threat 10 Ultramagnetic MC's Funky 11 Rammellzee Vs K-Rob Beat Bop
Tracks Fiend Discovered and Titles - Marc Wilkinson / Blood on Satan's Claw OST How to Get Rid of a Dead Body - Three Six Mafia They Bout to Find Yo Body - Three Six Mafia Nightmares - Clipse Poor Murdered Woman - Shirley Collins
ITEM ONE Contributor Wade Zamchek submits the following account.
I wished Eric a happy birthday and walked up the block looking for my car. I was convinced that I had parked it on Newell St, near the supermarket, as I do almost everyday. I call Anja and she confirms that she remembers me parking the car there. I begin to get nervous and call to see if my car is towed. I had gotten two tickets in the past week for expired emissions, but doubted that they would tow the car based on that. I end up getting connected to the 94th Precinct and they confirm that the car was not stolen. They ask me some details about the car, "year. make. model. color. 4 doors?" I give them the answers, "1996. Saab 900s. black. 1996. 2 doors. yeah and a trunk. a little dent in the bumper." They ask me to sit tight and they say they will send a car over to meet me. "226 Newell St, across from the Key foods. OK." Nervous and bored, I call several people to inform them of my misfortune. "Yeah I'm sure I parked it over here." Don't think I'm going to make it to the movie" I wait 15 minutes and am beginning to get cold. I call the 94th Precinct to ensure that they are in fact coming. "Things just got real hectic here. Accident in the neighborhood." I wait another 15 minutes and call. "I know that this isn't priority # 1 for you guys, but it is getting cold." "Sorry sir. We will have someone there soon. Sit tight." Another 15 minutes goes by and I spend it kicking rocks. It looks like there is glass near where I thought my car was parked. Is that window glass. Looks more like someone dropped a Snapple bottle. Its getting windy. Officer Suarez pulls up with his partner, Officer Peterone. They are both about my age and very nice. "I think there looks like there may be glass near where I parked" "Oh, that's not window glass" "You wanna wait in the car" "You look cold" I get in the back. "I last saw the car on Monday. 9:30." "Your wife have keys and took your car?" "That was meant to be a joke." They tell me that its standard to cruise around the neighborhood and look for the car. I ask why: "kids on a joyride?" "Most of the time someone just doesn't remember where he parked" "I'm 99.99% positive I left it over there" "Some cops are lazy and don't drive around looking." We get back to the site of the crime and fill out some paper work and wait for the boss. "You guys watch The Wire?" "No, but some of the guys back at the station say that shit is real good" "I remember I was down in Baltimore and I remember regretting not having my weapon on me." "Makes Brooklyn look like suburbia." "Its our last day of our week shift." "Got the day off tomorrow" How was the week?" "Man, we saw the grossest shit?" Officer Suarez, holds his nose and fakes a gagging sounds as his partner tells this story about them finding a man who had been dead for 3 weeks in his apartment in Greenpoint this week. they said the body had exploded (it does that after some time) and there was purple and black bile all over. "Dude, was a yellow cab driver. You never know who is driving you around in this town" Suarez tell me how the medical examiner made him change a light bulb on a wobbly table right next to the body. "Shit man, can you imagine falling face first into an open exploded body?" Officer Peterone said that the medical examiners are sick fucks. "We went to the 24 hour laundry mat and washed our clothes immediately after." "I wasn't going to bring that smell into my house" We waited for a while longer for their supervisor to show up. "Crown Vics are pieces of shit" "You got enough room back there" "You should see 3 drunk polish dudes back there. Ain't a pretty sight" Finally the supervisor shows up and they put an alarm on the car. They warn me that if I do find the car I should not drive it "unless i like being dragged out of my car by gunpoint." They drive me home and give me an incident report. I walk up the stairs and grab a beer. I call the insurance company and issue a complaint. "Saab. 900s. Black. 1996" After several minutes I get connected to another operater to find out information about my coverage. "Does my insurance cover theft." "No." Bummer. I call Eric. "Happy Birthday man" "Yeah I know it sucks" "Maybe they will find it" "Yeah I'm sure I parked it there" Eric and Sarah decided to come over for a beer. I could use another beer. I get some beer and come back to the house. After 10 minutes Sarah calls. "Is your licence plate CYF 1746" Turned out that I had parked it on another street. I forgot that i had gone to Justin's house the night before to watch the election results the night before. Man I felt retarded. I even made fun of people like myself with Officer Suerez and Peterone. I call the precinct and apologize for wasting their time. "I feel really bad." They remind me again not to get in the car unless I like getting dragged out by gunpoint. I thanked Eric and Sarah. They made fun of me pretty bad. Anja must think my brain is shrinking. I'm concerned about not remembering the day before.
The next morning Anja volunteered to move the car. She calls me as I walk to the train. "You got one of those boots on the car." "Shit, are you serious." "No, I'm just fucking with you."
ITEM TWO The New York Times reports the following incident in Hell's Kitchen:
Even for the once-notorious Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, it may have been a first: Two men were arrested on Tuesday after pushing a corpse, seated in an office chair, along the sidewalk to a check-cashing store to cash the dead man’s Social Security check, the police said.
When Virgilio Cintron, 66, died at his apartment at 436 West 52nd Street recently, his roommate and a friend saw an opportunity to cash his $355 check, the police said.
They did not go about it the easy way, the police said, choosing a ruse that resembled the plot of “Weekend at Bernie’s,” a film about two young men who prop up their dead employer to pretend that he is alive.
“Hell’s Kitchen has a rich history,” said Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, “but this is one for the books.”
There was no sign of foul play in Mr. Cintron’s death, he added.
The roommate, James P. O’Hare, and his friend, David J. Dalaia, both 65 and unemployed, placed Mr. Cintron’s body in the chair and wheeled it around the corner, south along Ninth Avenue on Tuesday afternoon, the police said. The men parked the chair with the corpse in front of Pay-O-Matic at 763 Ninth Avenue, a check-cashing business that Mr. Cintron had patronized.
They went inside to present the check, but a clerk said Mr. Cintron would have to cash it himself, and asked where he was, the police said.
“He is outside,” Mr. O’Hare said, indicating the body in the chair, according to Mr. Browne.
The two men started to bring the chair inside, but it was too late.
Their sidewalk procession had already attracted the stares of passers-by who were startled by the sight of the body flopping from side to side as the two men tried to prop it up, the police said. The late Mr. Cintron was dressed in a faded black T-shirt and blue-and-white sneakers. His pants were pulled up part of the way, and his midsection was covered by a jacket, the police said. While the two men were inside the check-cashing office, a small crowd had gathered around the chair. A detective, Travis Rapp, eating a late lunch at a nearby Empanada Mama saw the crowd and notified the Midtown North station house.
Police officers and an ambulance arrived as the two men were trying to maneuver the corpse and chair into the check-cashing office.
The two men were taken into custody and questioned. The police said they were considering charging them with check-cashing fraud.
Mr. Cintron’s body was taken to a hospital morgue. The medical examiner’s office said its preliminary assessment was that he had died of natural causes within the past 24 hours.
ITEM THREE Opening sequence to Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), in which a local farmer discovers a human skull with a gross eyeball in a field.
I was there when Daft Punk played the Velodrom in Berlin. The fact that 'Velodrom' sounds a lot like "Terrordome" or "Thunderdome" does not seem a meaningless coincidence. It is a large steel-girded arena which when it is not hosting insane laser shows DJ'd by French techno robots is a venue for BMX racing. It would not surprise me to find out that it also accommodates weekly German Gladiator death-matches, with a quaking, shuddering minimal techno soundtrack.
Every artist is a legislator. Every work is an act of laying down the law: now I say this combination of sounds or images or what have you is legitimate, is possible, sounds good, looks good. Daft Punk's legislation was to infuse techno with a rock dynamic. In the past two or three years, groups like LCD Soundsystem in New York have taken the opposite track, infusing rock with techno. James Murphy DJs too, but he stays pretty much in an out-disco or post-punk/dance territory. What the mix below attempts to do is take the form of a dj mix a little further into uncharted waters regarding how rock tracks can be collaged together - beyond the Velodrom.
There are several new strains of repetitive rock that are worthy of attention in this context. I almost want to call it trance rock - the word 'trance' being intended to indicate not the squealing 303s of the techno subgenre trance but the psychological state. You'll note there's no track by Can on here. I want to say this is on purpose, as it would be altogether too easy to bring in 'Paperhouse' or some other epic Can jam, and I was trying to challenge myself. The truth is, I forgot.
Warning: Consumed improperly, this mix may result in side effects such as but not limited to headaches, nausea, teeth-grinding, the shakes, the fits, the herp, and mud butt. If effects persist, consult a DJ.
Shimmer - Soft Circle Flextone - Liquid Liquid Danger - Pylon Race In - Battles The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack - The Liars Thela Hun Ginjeet - King Crimson New Feet - Brian Eno & David Byrne Health & Efficiency - This Heat Artificial Energy - Endless Grift Andexelt - Circle Driving This Road Until Death - Zombie Zombie You've Been Duplicated - Chrome ??? - From the Voyage Pan 001 CD curated by Turzi To Fix the Gash In Your Head - Place to Bury Strangers Golden Energy - William Judd Swastika Eyes - Primal Scream January Rain - Psychic Ills Honey Bee - Grinderman Not Bite - Red Transistor Macbeth - Sonic Youth Ross Ross Ross - Sebastian Wardance - Killing Joke Panic - Metal Urbain Doctor Please - Blue Cheer
This is just sick. Plus there is something very calming about watching manual labor, the routines, the repetitions, the sly almost invisible tricks, it could be a DJ or it could be that old dude who runs Di Fara's Pizza, who pours oil onto your pie with small metal gardening spout, cuts the herbs with scissors, doesn't wear gloves when pulling the pies from the searing hot oven, and whose assistant is a young gimp afraid of human contact and the light of day.
RELIGIOUS KNIVES, MV&EE, TALL FIRS, THE GOLDEN ROAD, THURSON MOORE - KNITTING FACTORY, JAN 8TH AU REVOIR SIMONE - BOWERY BALLROOM, JAN 18TH LIARS WITH NO AGE - WARSAW, FEB 9TH YEASAYER WITH MGMT - MUSIC HALL OF WILLIAMSBURG, FEB 14TH JUSTICE - MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, MAR 11TH, (TIX ON SALE THIS FRIDAY)
The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia - Alphonse Mucha
Acknowledged Classic enjoys it when the weather report calls for a 'Wintry Mix', as it gives Acknowledged Classic the opportunity to imagine, in place of, or rather as complement to, a sloshy aggregate of frozen water in manifold forms, a sonic sequence similar to the one available here:
Weekend Prince - Wintry Mix
Track List: Gestes - Pierre Henry Roll Up - Black Dice Contain - Plasticman Empyrean - Echospace Thru Metamorphic Rock - Tangerine Dream Ring Mutilation - Discodeine Grey Tigers - Endless Grift Every Artist Needs a Tragedy - No Age Glitter Pills - Health World Invaders - Pluton & Humanoid Valley of the Devil - Weekend Prince Untrue - Burial Samba de Morro - Chance Fallen Sun - A Place to Bury Strangers Souvlaki Space Station - Slowdive Greenland - Richard Pinhas Through You - Seefeel Kappsta - The Field
Recent album releases that are highly appropriate seasonal soundtracks: Burial: Untrue,
particularly for winding one's way through the subway system in a large metropolis on a sunless late afternoon. And Deepspace presents Echochord: The Coldest Season,
which additionally wins the gold star for the most Spinal Tap-like name in minimal beats, and true to cover art, is well built for the view out a window into a murky, monochromatic world of barren fields and skeleton trees.
Historical releases well-suited for this category include The Cure: Faith.
An album ripe for an album-length mash-up akin to Danger Mouse's Grey Album - but instead of the Beatles with Jay-Z, imagine Faith along with a handful of Raekwon acappellas. The album's mournful keys and stiff rhythms always seemed like Wu territory to me. Electronic funeral party jams. The attentive listener will note that 'Valley of the Devil' pairs the cure's 'funeral party' to a snippet of Project Pat vocals from 'Ski Mask'.
As any enthusiast or expert will tell you, an important part about Texas bbq is arguing about what it is. This is because the subject of an argument about Texas bbq is really Texas itself. The issue of bbq in Texas is that it occupies a strange space between its cultural diverse origins, via Mexican immigrants and day-laborers (barbicoa), German and Czech immigrants (sausage), cowboys, and others on the one hand, and Texas' grit-toothed hard-headed jingoism. Or in the words of Robb Walsh, author of "Legends of Texas Barbeque", "Texas bbq is a feisty mutt."
It is not surprising to find that bbq, a food with such a high gravitational pull for passion and enthusiasm, attracts in Texas a high-rate of tumbleweedy, mesquite-smoked poetic flavour, in expressions such as 'feisty mutt'.
In other words, BBQ is a place where Texas both shines with its biggest shiny-steel six-pointed hard-on about itself, and where it in danger of losing its footing about who it thinks it is. That's because food, along with music, is a cultural force that moves much faster than men's hearts. So when a group of foreigners create a sustained immigrant identity somewhere, their doner kebabs and curries and smoked goats along with their tangos and their infectious booty hits are often going to be their best or most pronounced cultural ambassadors.
Marlo and I drove to Lockhart, thirty miles south of Austin, to Smitty's Market. Where the pit is the first thing you see on the inside, the beautifully black, almost funereally somber pit, like a giant rothko painting that also makes pork ribs. Like if Sunno))) had a cook-out. In Druid robes, cooking a steer.
It is truly the pit of doom.
There is no sauce to be served at Smitty's. Unnecessary. All that is necessary is a knife, some butcher paper, and a small stack of white bread, and a whole avocado you can buy in the seating area, and some beers, and then some blue bell ice cream. And holy shit the pork ribs were good. And the brisket, holy shit the brisket was really good, especially the pork ribs.
A fitting soundtrack to the elegant doomness of Smitty's pit would be Earth's new record, which continues a kind of sonic voyage westwards for the group, a departure begun with Hex: or, Printing in the Infernal Method, which, it is not surprising to learn, was heavily inspired by Cormac MacCarthy's western horror gothic acknowledged classic, Blood Meridian. In fact, Cormac and Earth are such a pure and beautiful aesthetic combination, there should be a spoken-word mash-up between the two, like Burroughs & Kurt Cobain, "The Priest they Called Him".
That would rule.
"Bees Made Honey.." adds more of a spacey psych-rock Dead Meadow-type vibe to the sound, with some later tracks approaching the dusty somber landscapes of the Dirty Three, almost Nick Cave skeletal piano parts.
Over Christmas, Bob and I took Parmer to 290, and out to Elgin, TX for stage one of barbeque research. Elgin is renowned for sausage. Elgin sausage is referred to with great colloquial flair as Hot Guts.
At the outset our consumption plan emphasized discipline and restraint, so as to save room for offerings from the three establishments on our lunch radar. This failed. Almost immediately so, as Southside BBQ's sausage was delicious enough we had to engage in a kind of extended pep talk of self-control, the kind usually reserved for alcohol binges, record fairs, and porn-site downloads.
Southside is as much a well-branded bbq emporium as a market, it had the most t-shirt, homemade sauce, cookbook, branded gift shop bullshit of anybody. Its long wooden tables are highly conducive to birthdays, family gatherings, and by the looks of things, outpatient field trips as well.
Please enjoy this picture of a family eating below an entire stuff bear at Southside BBQ.
The scene at Meyer's:
After Southside and Meyer's barbeque, we were full in that slightly degraded, bloated way. At least I was. You must understand that my physical constitution stems largely from my mother's side, whose family tree is populated by a number of colicy, snivel-nosed, lillywhite brits. My father's side, represented that day by my brother, is in contrast populated largely by steel-gutted Irish folk who will live forever despite, or perhaps even because of, the amount of booze, grease, and general near-plastic crap they consume daily. I couldn't make it inside Crosstown BBQ, the third and final stop on our tour. While the parking lot of Southside was perfumed with mouth-watering mesquite smoke, the inside of Crosstown smelled like, we concluded, "a butt."
Leading to the impromptu declaration that we needn't push things over the edge for the sake of science, and to a return to Southside, winner of the day's pageant, for the purchasement of sausage links. I ate some bluebell ice cream and then threw it at some goats.
Weekend Prince: Dawn of the Flesh-Eaters / Central TX BBQ road mix for flesh eaters
1. Dreamer - Dennis Wilson 2. Whiskey River - Willie Nelson 3. Run and Hide - Weekend Prince 4. Food for My Soul - The Dragons 5. Make it Funky Pts 3 & 4 - James Brown 6. La La La - Segun Bucknor and his Revolution 7. Sunshine of Your Love - Funkadelic 8. Livin in the Ghetto - Purple Image 9. The Rain - Eddie Gale 10.O Lord, Bring Apartheid Crashing Down! - Khalifa Ould Eide & Dimi Mint Abba
or download the mix here: http://www.divshare.com/download/3332921-616
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