Thursday, March 28, 2013

Mike Huguenor - Bardamu


This is a pretty cool EP. The third and fourth songs have some total Built to Spill guitar moments which is really all I want out of my music. All other elements are superfluous. If you like this check out his other bands, Shinobu and Hard Girls.

edit: Mike drove to my house and personally delivered this 10" to me on Easter. Punk as fuck.


Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Pausal - Forms

"either peace or happiness,
let it enfold you"  - Charles Bukowski






(Sorry for all of the quotes lately. I'm reading again and starting to feel like everything is loosely connected.)

Monday, March 25, 2013

Rainbow Valley/Wind in Willows - Split


Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground" scares me. Every time I read it I find some new feeling, thought, or belief to which I can relate. I should find comfort in knowing that I'm not alone; that I'm not the only one to ever think the same thoughts as the unnamed narrator. But there's nothing comforting about exploring the dark abyss of the human mind.

(Play "Startide Whisper" and read the excerpt below.)


“Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn't I better end my "Notes" here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I've been writing this story; so it's hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it. Why, we have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. And why do we fuss and fume sometimes? Why are we perverse and ask for something else? We don't know what ourselves. It would be the worse for us if our petulant prayers were answered. Come, try, give any one of us, for instance, a little more independence, untie our hands, widen the spheres of our activity, relax the control and we ... yes, I assure you ... we should be begging to be under control again at once. I know that you will very likely be angry with me for that, and will begin shouting and stamping. Speak for yourself, you will say, and for your miseries in your underground holes, and don't dare to say all of us-- excuse me, gentlemen, I am not justifying myself with that "all of us." As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write more from "Underground."

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Duster - Transmission, Flux

My friend Jon put these songs on a mixtape he gave me a few months ago; I've been hooked on Duster ever since. I have no idea why I didn't listen to these guys when I was in high school.


Wednesday, March 20, 2013

NAH - Special Reality Mixtape part 7





1994! - FUCK IT


I saw this band play in a garage with Algernon Cadwallader and Snowing and they absolutely killed it. I think their drummer is one of the best I've ever seen and he hits super hard while keeping everything really clean. This album is really noisy and will be of interest to anybody that's into noise, math rock, gross noise, yelling, lo-fi noise, gnarly riffs, etc. The drummer has a side project called Nah that mixes a lot of the above adjectives with undanceable electronic beats.




Tuesday, March 19, 2013

The Shaggs


This may be more interesting intellectually than musically. The Shaggs are a band made up of three teenage sisters with no musical training or knowledge. Its unclear whether they even listened to music. Their father took them out of school and made them practice their instruments constantly because a palm reader told him his daughters would one day form a famous rock-and-roll band. They weren't really allowed to socialize outside of the house or interact with anyone outside of the family. I won't go too far into it but the story gets weirder. There's a great essay by Susan Orlean that describes their background and eventual popularity in the underground music scene. From what I can tell (and this is probably debatable), there's at least some evidence that suggests they intended the songs to sound this way. Highly recommended.




Saturday, March 16, 2013

Gnarwolves - CRU

I'm a sucker for this stuff. Thanks for the suggestion, Elliott.




Thursday, March 14, 2013

Dock Boggs


Here's a video of a dead white guy.




This song is awesome too:

Monday, March 11, 2013

Micah Gaugh - The Blue Fairy Mermaid Princess



Sure. This drummer played drums in Storm & Stress and Micah Gaugh participated in a way that is completely unknown to me.




Pavement - Brighten the Corners



Pavement is one of the first bands I got into after a early high school "music discovery" phase and I've listened to them pretty consistently for the last ten years now. That's longer than I've been driving and longer than I've had most of my friends. I'm fairly certain I've spent more time listening to Pavement than I've ever spent with any woman, or even the sum total of all women. It's a weird relationship to have with a band. I think I originally liked them because they made noisy music and their lyrics were about absolute nonsense. I also liked them because it really seems like nobody in the band actually gives a shit. There's a great Beavis and Butthead episode where they just keep saying "Try harder! You're not trying!"

That got me through the first 8 years or so. Lately (the last two years I guess) I've mostly been listening to their later stuff because the song writing is so superb. The lyrics are still absurd and it's still weird but overall everything is more polished. For whatever reason though (and I feel like an idiot for this) I've just never really listened to their second-to-last album, Brighten the Corners. It just got lost in the bigger picture or something. Well in the last week I've been playing it nonstop and I'm ready to admit that I've been living the last 10 years in ignorance. Every Pavement album has a couple of really terrible songs and this is no different (I hate "Stereo" and "Date with Ikea"). Most everything else is very solid though and mixes the typical Pavement slyness with stuff that really gets stuck in your head. A smattering of songs below.







Tuesday, March 5, 2013

VA - Let This Be Your Warmth



Here's a mix I did for Klankschap (means "soundscape" in Dutch), an experimental radio show based in Belgium. There's no particular theme to the mix; just a handful of some of my favorite tapes. It was recorded live on a cold day in December using two cassette players. Let this be your warmth.

1. Tim Coster - We (No Kings, 2012)
2. Kevin Costner Suicide Pact - And (Hooker Vision, 2012)
3. Hakobune - Whispering in their Presence (Sunshine Ltd., 2012)
4. Miracle Blues - Girls of Fullerton Avenue (Teen River, 2011)
5. Kyle Landstra - Full Spectrum Head Embedded Lifelike NIght Light (Sacred Phrases, 2012)
6. Albino Groupie - Untitled (Rotifer, 2012)
7. Kevin Greenspon - Waypoint (Bridgetown, 2011)
8. Tidal - Phoenix Follower (Chemical Tapes, 2012)
9. Lunar Miasma - Infinite (Moon Glyph, 2012)
10. Chris Rehm - ? (Self Released, 2012)
11. Sparkling Wide Pressure - Open C Formations (Paramita Recordings, 2011)
12. Torn Humorist - ? (Self Released, 2012)
11. González & Steenkiste - The Foot (Feathered Coyote Records, 2012)
12. Eternal Dreamer - IV (Calypso Hum, 2011)
13. Emaciator - Not Knowing, But Knowing (Monorail Trespassing, 2009)
14. No Mind Meditation - Feel What You Felt, See What You Saw (Paramita Recordings, 2011)





Quiet Evenings - Patience Folding Water


Will need this tape to get me through the day.



Monday, March 4, 2013

By Surpise - Criteria



Resolution 2013: listen to more emo. I'm doing my best. By Surprise's full length was one of my favorite albums of 2011 and I'm really happy that they're going to be making more music. This is a 3-song EP with some killer tracks that are already getting me stoked for summer. Today at work I came up with an excuse to leave for lunch so I could go drive around a bit and listen to this with the windows down. Great songwriting, sing-along choruses and great guitar parts that sound new and inventive without rehashing the same old indie/emo tropes that seem to affect a lot of these types of bands lately.




Sunday, March 3, 2013

Brainiac


I've had this band on my computer for a long time but never really gave them a proper listen. I hate when I do that, it's like I'm so close to finding something cool and I can't blame anyone but myself for not recognizing music that I would love. Brainiac is awesome! In doing research for this post (ie listening to a ton of music in my bedroom) I found that they have a huge cult following of people who leave Youtube comments like "this band changed my life" or "listening to this song affects me emotionally." Their early stuff sounds like Nirvana and their later stuff sounds like The Faint (except better) and everywhere in between they sprinkle histrionic screaming, fucked up modulated vocals, icepick guitars and lots of spooky synths. I would call this "weird" in that they pack a lot of unexpected twist and turns in all their songs. Super fun band to listen to.










Saturday, March 2, 2013

Quasimoto - Astronaut


Legit 10 minute EP from the Beat Konducta. Keep music raw.