#1 In a dim room in Nashville TN

Things that have happened so far.

1) My feet were freezing cold by the fire in Philadelphia. I carried a case of beer down the tracks. Davey and Dori came. Matt Betz came and had his dog Blue running in and out of the firelight.

2) We played Risk to prepare for our first show. In the kitchen Muffy & I worked on our set by drawing a diagram of it. On the refrigerator was an old to do list I’d made with nothing on it other than #1. Make a Shopping List. Jeff Melkerson won the risk game

3) Felt terrible and insane in West Philly as I drove past 47th and Baltimore. We played a set in a basement. I saw many familiar faces. We got paid 46 dollars.

4) Baltimore noise set with the dudes, all painted up, slept with paint on my legs, washed it off in the tile bathroom Max made, Max talking about being young and jealous of success and then getting older and just not caring anymore and just doing what you want.

5) The baby, Coal, in Asheville NC, three years old with his little tigger hat on, carrying a huge bag of recycling down the dirt path, growing up in this crazy grapes of wrath free zone that his dad is squatting, and building these sprawling and wild slipstraw clay houses. His little bedroom has a tiny drum kit and is the only truly warm room in the complex, which is up a dirt road, in the woods behind a trailer park, near a power line cutaway in the hills, on the true edge of town. In the other room is a tiny piano and a desk with a block from which nails protrude. “Now that he can drive nails,” his dad says, “I can’t tell him he can’t play with them.” He will be very formidable when he turns 18, I say. Or, says Muffy, he’ll be totally incapable of communicating with anyone or living in the world.

6) White haired old men in the anarchist bookstore. The gay bongo dude sweating so hard and singing the worst, stupidest lyrics to an empty room. “On the A… train. (UHH) Thinking of you. … Afraid on the… plane. (UHH) Thinking of you.”

7) The switchbacks in Tennessee leading to the dead mountaintop covered in snow. “GPS is wrong. No way to TENN.”

8) Was totally naked at the show in the weird bar last night because whatever.

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#2 LA smog

In LA at night the palm trees snag the smog in their hard fronds, and the smog in turn tangles the light from the night street. The palms glow in this eerie way, filled with luminous, misty bundles, like glowing egg sacks maybe. The palm smog light like a pregnant sticky membrane. These light nests even appear to be physically heavy sometimes, as if from their constituent light and mist there might suddenly spill bile or amniotic fluid, and then some  hard thing that will land living and rush off into the night streets.

You can’t see LA from above. We drove up into the hills and past the hollywood sign and down below the city is invisible, smeared, as if drawn in colored charcoal and then wiped away. The tallest buildings downtown appear to stand on the smog. From above the strange cloud’s blanket weight and obvious toxicity are upsetting, and I wonder how there can be a city under there.

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#3 In Oakland

Last night we pulled in. The crackhead dude at the party got super upset at the end of the night when the super drunk bearded guy started baiting his “no homo” thing by insisting on a hug. “I shoots fags where I come from,” he says as he leaves. There’s a Swamp Donkey piece on the door next door.

The space is a fucking disaster of a mess but so perfect. There’s mud everywhere, the dog has three legs, I’m worried the entire night about my shit getting stolen, dog shit gets on my sleeping bag. But it’s also beautifully lit in the morning, and the trash even on an overcast and humid day – the fog is in the mountains just outside of the city, the low clouds, and it looks beautiful, tearfully beautiful to be lying in a sleeping bag, a fucking new total disaster, every single day – is a still and fine picture, as if the cigarette butts, empty bottles, ripped couch cushions, and scattered electronics were composed for the space; the shitty peeling posters and modified objects stapled up to the walls in the familiar anarchy house hard work with mixed results way are soft reminders that this is all a decision, that this is all a way to live, and even though it all looks like total hell, it’s a hell of totally impudent joy, and it feels so good and I feel so lucky and blessed to be here, hungover.

In the kitchen there’s a door that opens wider on the top half. The lintels rise, and then turn out another foot, and then rise to the ceiling. Watching the morning light in the mountains through this portal while the dog tears up the garbage behind me.

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#4 Good sets I saw

- Mark Lord in Columbus. Definitive.

- TJ Drinkwater in Iowa City.

- Moment Trigger in LA

- Human Hands in LA

- Aether Jag in Nashville

- Slime Queen in Oakland

- Sword Heaven in Columbus

- Lazy Magnet in Providence. Masterful.

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#5 Food of Band Tour

In re: walking knee deep into the pacific on Venice Beach with my pants on and the water being nice and then drying off and talking on the phone barefoot walking down the way, man, nothing beats artificial summer. Despite everything good/bad/ugly that’s happened on this trip of mine, it’s totally undeniable that leaving town in the middle of the new england winter crusher to put on shorts for five seconds and eat a slice of pizza and cruise around as if it weren’t January is completely regenerative and worth every weird eleven hour car drive and night sleeping in weird piles of mud and cat hair along the “american noise music trail.”

It’s totally stupid and basic, but I realized on this trip that the group experience of winter in Providence isn’t my only recourse to dealing with the cold and dark, and that if I want to, I can just go to California or Miami or something next time around, and that’s good to know.

No secret restaurants anywhere along the trail, but food/drink moments have been abundant.

Best (no order) =

1) PIG’S EYE BEER in Iowa City = $5 12 pack, tastes like Bodington’s

2) Delicious hemp beer in Topanga Canyon outside of LA at Froggy’s Topanga Fish Market = kind of expensive, but drank it with two excellent mahi mahi tacos and sat by a huge fire eating/drinking, and a guy started asking me what I do in life, and then talking to him it turns out he did “additional music” for Malik “Days of Heaven” and “Thin Blue Line” and sound effects for the first star trek movie?! I was sort of thinking like “Dude buy me a beer” but obviously he was pretty much only interested in me as a foothold for talking to haley and sasha.

3) All burritos in LA, oh my god.

4) House-smoked brisket sandwich at ANCIENT WAYS CAFE in way rural new mexico

5) Lamb shawarma sandwich at ALI BABA’S GRILL in knoxville = Got a speeding ticket at this exit, and feeling totally dejected pulled off to try to find food. Millions of miles of taco bell/kfc/home depot/target/walmart/car dealership anywhere USA braindeath, but then I noticed this joint Ali Baba’s right on the strip with the rest of it. Totally weird middle eastern dude hangout zone, complete with a guy who tried to upsell me many times to “the special” ($12), claiming to have the best hummus in the world, etc., etc. But I mean, the sandwich was totally good!

6) Ethiopian vegetarian and meat combo platters shared with my ancient best friend in Berkeley Tasneem and her new husband who I’d never hung out with before, and it turns out he’s pretty cool (then we went to a climbing wall gym, and after that played settlers of catan)

7) In LA at the liquor store = “Hey man what can I get for not a lot of money.” “Natural Ice.” “But that isn’t disgusting.” “You like wine?” “Yes.” “Charles Shaw mang. And you know, put a little liquor in it, that makes it nice, IT’LL GET YOU DRONNNNK”

8) Blue cheese / mixed greens / hummus on baguette sandwich in the car in Wyoming, would eat this every day

9) Beautiful spread of cheeses and olives at a super fancy party in Santa Fe that we somehow ended up going to. Drank bombay sapphire martinis and maker’s on the rocks. Everyone was dressed to the nines except for me and two skateboard dudes. A guy with white pants on kept smiling at me and taking my picture, and I never talked to him or questioned it.

10) Drinking a huge pitcher of the bar’s homebrew with Jeremy Harris in Nashville

Worst (no order) =

1) Two slices of sausage slime pizza and a Naked Juice from the Casey’s General Store rest stop on I-80 outside of chicago.

2) Oakland groceries getting kind of gnarly by the upper mid west; the mixed greens getting slimy, the yogurt thickening up, the bananas turning black and frozen.

3) Papa John’s Pizza with an egg fried on it in Oakland for breakfast, total mistake

4) All coffee at Flying J rest stops

5) Grocery store free sample pig out at 10pm outside of Oklahoma City, booo.

6) $5 for a scrambled egg and toast with butter in Santa Fe, should’ve just ordered breakfast. Skateboard dude from the party was at the restaurant. I talked to the waitress’s boyfriend at the party about circuit bending. At one point he said “Oh your band sounds like noise music, I have a noise band!”

7) Totally rank dumpstered sushi from The Bank in Baltimore = eating it thinking “well maybe I’ll get food poisoning from this” and then throwing it out without finishing it.

8) Drinking Ancient Age bourbon in Iowa City. Not that I would ever not drink it again given the opportunity (obv.), but fuck that shit.

9) Getting paid in methadone in Nashville (girl asked for it back, we gave it back); getting paid in weed brownie in Oakland

10) We fucking went to Taco John’s for some reason one day.

11) Wanting to cook so bad all month but not being able to

12) 51 Grill in Asheville NC, east coast hippie capital. Don’t put “greek salad with mixed greens” on your dumb menu if you mean “pile of iceberg lettuce with fake feta”

And I mean very little of this touches on actual adventures/occurrences, or the list of the best dogs of tour, or anything.

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#6 Boosh list excerpt Jan 21

Guys so much insane shit has happened since I last checked in, I’m sorry, my internet scene on this trip has been so terrible, now I have to drive to Chicago so I can’t check in, buuuuut here’s a possible parable/karmic anecdote for your faces:

So I quit smoking marijuana a while ago and that has been great so far, and I’ve been refusing it at every turn since, but I mean, I know my brain, and I know that occasional horrible slime experiences will happen despite the fact that I’m pretty much not at all behaving like it’s 2006 anymore.

In Oakland somebody paid us with a weed brownie that had an alien sticker on it, about the size of a free sample piece of bread at east side marketplace, not exactly looking like a stunner, but a handsome dude with long hair and eyeliner on was like “split that with someone man it will FUCK YOU UP!”. I decided I wanted to keep this pot brownie because A) I could trade it to someone for beer or B) being on band tour and feeling insane and exhausted all of the time alters my decision-making.

In Iowa City last night after drinking six PIG EYE beers (so good, $5/12 pack, tastes like bodington’s!) I decided, because I was drunk and in this crazy touring mind-state, to eat the pot brownie, which I’d been fingering in my pocket in the car for the 2500 miles of horrible salt/snow/gray sky since we left CA, and it was kind of warm and crumbly when I took the shitty drug cellophane off of it, and I ate it.

The dudes we’re staying with (#1 lifestyle band in america TJ DRINKWATER = Jeff / Si / Tater = excellent hosts, excellent dudes, total maniacs) were on mushrooms and at like 2am after throwing the pool balls all over the bar and smashing the cues and getting into weird fights, they were like, “Come on let’s go break into the new squat.” And normally in Providence or certainly in Philadelphia at 2am kind of drunk I would 100% definitely participate in entering a weird building, but because I was extremely, sickly stoned from having this total aberration of a decision to eat a brownie with an alien sticker on it, I was like “Buhhhhhhhh” and couldn’t get up from the couch when they left. The dudes got arrested by five cops (who they repeatedly hilariously kept calling “big daddies”) with guns with laser sights on them, spent the night in jail, and have $500 trespassing fines. But because I chose to do drugs, I just had a kind of bad night’s sleep and got sort of dehydrated.

The important post script is that this morning they skyped in their friend from England to play a set for us while we ate breakfast, and their attitudes/spirits weren’t broken at all by their night. (“Totally TJ.”)

Okay I’m going to a mud wrestling party or something with Aaron later, more soon, back in a fucking week, overheard just now, 5:56pm, Janaury 21st, 2,010: “We’ll smoke the hash and we’ll do it. No we gotta do something chill. Let’s get hashed out and do it. And then we’ll walk to starbucks.”

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#7 Boosh List excerpt February 6th

Well okay, I’ll weigh in on this email thread, which is surely already the definitive document of the 2010 “thank god we have each other, because the world is so weird” zeitgeist.

A little atmospheric context = I’m listening to reggae, it’s 45 degrees in my house, there are sheets covering the windows, I just ate the best oatmeal, I woke up at 2pm, the kitchen and the living room are clean and still, we’re out of toilet paper.

I know I’m the odd man out as the guy on boosh list who isn’t “excessively prone to feelings” but I think maybe it’s worth adding a couple recent winter occurrences that made me feel okay about everything =

1) Walker scampers up to the car in Pittsburgh and then makes a killer breakfast after we walk through the rainy winter night cemetery, climbing over the wet stone wall, considering holes in the ground where rabbits might fall into tombs and never escape (“it’s a long drop”), and the changing silhouettes of angels and saints and statuary as you move past them; how they turn to follow you, like standing, wriggling shadows, at night suggesting images much removed from what their sculptors intended, and where I see what I think at first behind my rainy glasses are flashlights, but what are actually white tail deer, bounding silently away.

2) Sitting at Katy’s table the night I got back on the opposite side I usually do, drinking beer from a glass, just looking around the warm room, looking out over the street. There was a thing when I used to travel pretty much always where when I’d get home to wherever I lived and I’d feel like “Ugh the kitchen and living room in Richmond are better than this.” Upon returning to Providence, even from a t-shirt in breezy LA and strange Santa Fe, I didn’t feel this at all. Incredibly I’ve been here for a year now, and this is now where I live, Providence is now where I’m home. And since I don’t think it’s super evident from the above, my saying the kitchens of Richmond were better than the kitchens of Philadelphia was an evaluation of personnel just as much of space. I would rather be back and bundled warm and looking at the familiar low ceilings with my people here, eating pizza with Jonathan at Summer St, my head steaming in the morning as I come out of my sleeping bag in freezing Lockwood and have the first thing that happens in the morning (morning: 1pm) be that Walker asks me some question about where something is or how we’re going to do something on Friday, hiking around the butterfly farm, listening to podcasts in the eternal February 1st foodstamps checkout line at Price Rite eagle square. The weird corners and secret warm rooms of Providence have the filthy mud floors of Oakland beat. They have the true life-hating murder spirit of Nashville, the jolly, ugly aggression of Free Philadelphia, the sunny, easy shrugging bullshit of LA, the crystal drop-out free zones of Santa Fe, and everything else on I-40 and I-80 all beat. I’d rather be shrugging and freezing and UGHing in Providence because it’s Providence and because this is where we all are, as demonstrated at Katy’s table in a glass of beer, January 31st, 2010.

3) Making eye contact with Andrew in the night as he came in and I was about to go to bed, and we both smiled and I crossed from behind the big table, and got the good huggy shit. Susan referred to Andrew as being the only guy in “our posse” with a beard yesterday. I don’t call it a posse, I call it a team!

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#8 Excerpt to Ben Feb 18th

In my world I’m still doing this vegan secret restaurant with my roommate. In re: things being logical, sustainable, scalable, & self-perpetuating, it’s all of these, and has made it possible to not have a day job, if not quite possible for us to turn on the heat.

In re: projects, I just did a full US tour and only played eight shows with a new band, I finished my 14th mini drawing book and have a “best of 2009″ book ready to go that I’m trying to figure out how to print for less than $100), I’m working on a video, I’m manifesting my reality day by day, pushing with arms outstretched against the rough bedroom walls of reality, like in time bandits, and they continue to give, revealing long dark hallways full of blowing trash, and I’m hoping these too will eventually with persistence and finesse drop away, opening a portal that leads somewhere good and weird and different.

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#9 Bioburden

On Feb 17, 2010, at 5:49 PM, Susy Jones wrote:

> Bioburden

>

> Send a sample to the Berkeley Labs because

> I have a heart murmur now, not to mention

> My lungs are filled with dark romantic dander

> From the double-pawed posse of calico cats

> Who warded off sea monsters on trips to New Bedford,

> In between sleeping and catching fish for snack.

> Had a hunch Melville was a Leo, too,

> And so he is according to the wiki.

…

#10 Excerpt to Matt Feb 25th

Yeah okay I’ll send one more email today before I go to bed!

What’s in Rochester that you want to go there? This sick band PENGO was from there, might still be.

http://www.mimaroglumusicsales.com/artists/pengo.html

Jeremy Bailey went to grad school there too. Sort of useless except for bro hardcore though I always thought?

Joblessness = Insane life of leisure / life of worrying about everything falling apart in two months. I haven’t had a job in the normal sense for four months which is the longest I’ve ever been unemployed. But while it’s tough sometimes I feel like the stress of living at the far left of things and manifesting/sustaining my own reality instead of working in a super safe and riskless but kill-myself $10/h time render environment is a different and better kind of stress, and I’m actually pretty into having not left my house except when I want to for the past so long, and my “work” being listening to records, eating what I want, and cooking in my own kitchen. I think your actual objection is maybe Idleness is for the birds, or Being broke is for the birds (both true).

Melvins = First time I drank Patron was with Jello and the Melvins! I love LYSOL (download here = http://www.mediafire.com/?rpnxmn4k5sy) but that said, I’m not sure exactly if it’s a dichotomy or not, even though in my mind it is, but I’m more of an Earth dude than a Melvins dude. Put a beer in my 2006 hand and play LYSOL wherever whenever though.

OFFICE HOURS = I’m so bad at doing this but I know what you’re saying. Escaping the house/closed loop and getting into the world and being around other humans is mega important. Main thing I’m missing about “working” is not being in the public, good and bad parts of that equally.

Also = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD4EGN2MQjk

Tom Bubul

240 Lockwood St

Providence RI 02907

I’m going to send you more tomorrow. I feel like writing this now and sending it gets me started and it being out there will compel me to finish.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Gary Numan “Radio One Sessions”

Somehow nobody told me to check out Gary Numan until Adam played this in the car while he and I and Elaine were on the way to the last day of HBML and to see Ariel Pink in Boston. We listened to this almost every day at work in April.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Harry Pussy “You’ll Never Play This Town Again”

Gangbuster compilation of live/stray living-in-the-red tunes from the ultimate in hectic crews. I listen to this in the morning on my days off.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Olodum “Egito Madagascar”

Mike played this for me in Philly in early February. FMU posted it a while back with the plug “Listen with your sternum.” Totally. We listened to this on the way back after the first time we went to the Trader Joe’s in Warwick with Mikey and Walker, and then almost every day for two weeks while Adam cooked me omelette after omelette, morning after morning.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Peaking Lights “Imaginary Falcons”

Top honors to this one – I listened to it cooking dinner during the first few freezing cold weeks in Providence when I paced between rooms, cleaned, and spent all day looking for jobs on the Internet, and then on repeat the first four or five times I swept and mopped the Cable Car.

Cluster “Rosa” meditations via carpeted basement and wood paneling and drop-ceiling-staring/stars through a barn roof/blueberry picking on the night lakes played mainly (I think) on electronics/guitar/voice. This is the celebratory music that plays as I put a diamond ring on anarchy’s finger and then draw and do whatever I want from 1am until dawn on a Wednesday.

Rangers “Cassette Collages II”

Listened to this for the first time while me and Adam and Colleen cooked dinner in early March. We played scrabble and Adam won. I was digging on this super hard but I don’t think they were!

The sound is a novice in the Ferraro school doing his best to bust pop songs in the master’s all middles, all spliced together, tons of repetition, reverb, and shitty tape sound style. I’m down with the chorus of Osaka (with the AOL IM sound that plays at 1:45 and comes back in at 12:29) and all of Street Smell but especially with the lean-back moment at 12:44 where it plays what will be my ringtone in the afterlife where I get free text messages that can be up to 10,000 characters long. Best played loud on a stereo and listened to while in the other room.

If you’re reading this, and I know you are an internet guy, keep up the good work dude! I play your tunes at my coffee shop at least once a week, and at least one insane old lady who dumps coffee into the plants loves it!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Brainbombs “Burning Hell”

Evil fucking rock music like a Ren and Stimpy episode where all of the gross-out close-ups are of horrendous acts of deliberate violence perpetrated not with malice but with goofy cackling offhandedness. First time I felt sickened by music in years was listening to “Tired and Bloody” in the car this past weekend. Heaviest band and 100% favorite for getting stoked when I’m home from work to do something else.

US Girls “Live on WFMU”, “Me and Yoko” 7”

I’d been sort of feeling this for a while but it finally clicked for me after I saw her play at AS220 shortly after I got here. Swooning girl group desperation sound blasted through cracked boombox, sounds like sitting in a dirty house filled with garbage, surrounded by bugs and mice and vampire roommates, with all kinds of insane neighbors and drug zombies in the streets, but still trying to express living horror/ecstasy out a small window to a crawling night/glaring moon. “Me + Yoko” from the same 7” is probably the apex of this; “Bits and Pieces” and “Don’t Understand That Man” from the record/live set are right there too.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sun Ra “Universe in Blue”

Big Saturn’s return (pun so stupid that yeah, I am totally intending it) on the Sun Ra records in April care of this totally insane blog (find the link for the download there) that maintains links to uploads of most of his discography. Groovy/soft synth and band tunes bookend a slayer of a June Tyson track where it feels like a lion is going to come right out of her mouth.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Kurt Vile “Live on WFMU”

The #1 Philadelphia song man playing raw. Honorable mentions to the Hunchback 12” and the new solo record but of the new crop this has had the most play so far.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Oneohtrix Point Never “A Pact Between Strangers”, “Transmat Memories”
Infinity Window “Artificial Midnight”

#1 chillers in the neo-new age synth category all come from Daniel Lopatin’s projects OPN and IW. Insanely he seems to be the only dude yet capable of taking the Boards of Canada acid streaked summer sky/1970 warm winds/looking at and then going inside of a Polaroid with your old friends vibe that’s been around at least since ‘98 and doing something fresh and good with it. Really re: the BOC model, his mode is easy: he strips the beats, stretches the vibe way out, and there you go. Walk around an 80 degree afternoon in full midnight. Drink a cheap beer and become a god. Second track on Artificial Midnight playing at max volume while I mop at 4am, both OPN tapes on repeat for an age.

Honorable mentions so far to Group Bombino “Guitars from Agadaz, Vol 2″, the Fantastic Magic untitled tape I downloaded from a blog that is neither the CD-R or the 7”, the Sun Watcher tape, and Sun City Girls “Torch of the Mystics,” which I listened to as I drove into Providence on Day One.

#1: It was the Year of The Skaters

The Skaters – Dark Rye Bread
The Skaters – Physicalities of the Sensibilities of Ingrediential Stairways
Pacific Rat Temple Band – Tan Kim (Boa Paradise)
90210 – s/t
James Ferraro – Marble Surf
Vodka Soap – Un Chand Pyramidelier
Nirvana – Body of Consciousness/Uguiya to Jeep by Iguana Greenwave
Teotihuacan – Live Smokeshows from Inside the Ciguri Cave Hazed Diamonds with Windswept Hair

After three or four years of ambivalence toward the Skaters family, something severe ticked over in my mind sometime in February and I fell for them bigtime. The eight releases listed above constituted a basement work/neighborhood walk/long drive/crushing dawn routine that I probably ran almost a hundred times last year. The Pacific Rat Temple Band (vivid slow-marching torchlit underground worship sessions) and the 90210 (E.L.P. hanging out and playing toy instruments over an episode of Night Rider on the other side of the wall and KILLING IT) discs both easily saw three times more play than anything else during this horrendous year, a year in my many basements that very definitively belonged to James Ferraro.

#2: Utopia – Disco Jets

This came to me by way of Susy by way of Ben. In January I wrote this about it =

“This is the confusing and brilliant 70s VHS disco document from Rundgren’s band Utopia, that as the story goes, Rundgren found too embarrassing to release at the time. It’s filled with way, way over-saturated bulging-crotch leotard guitars and iron-pumping thumbs-up synths on top of ridiculously busy, crazily synched background racket. The compositions, mostly all driving and super bright (there’re covers of the national anthem and the Trek theme), are simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic – a confusing combination in the first place, but listening to them thirty years after the record’s recording in the actual future makes the effect downright weird. The particular 70s nostalgia documented here is no longer even vaguely relatable, and the 70s future vision put forth never came to pass. They wanted space travel in golden ships and they got Youtube. Who wins?”

#3: Kurt Vile – Constant Hitmaker

Killer Philadelphia space music. Favorite “songs” record of the year.

#4: Kites – Hallucination Guillotine/Final Worship

I listened to this almost every day from August through October. Perfect vision and portrait of working alone in the dark. I will someday write 15,000 words about Kites and post it on a blog that is only readable deep, deep underground.

#5: Horacio Vaggione – La Maquina de Cantar

(No A-side on the upload above but whatever.) Allen came through town and played me this in January; it saw regular play in my second room at Random House through maybe March. When I heard it I posted it elsewhere online and blurbed it with this:

“The A-side and title track is a jerky electronics frowner that never hits it, but the B-side, “Ending,” is a solid night out. Too dense and endless to call prog and with way too much movement to call drone, I rock hard and completely sink into it whenever it comes on. The first eleven minutes play out a wall of endless toppling synthesizers warping urgently in on themselves. As they approach the event horizon and nearly invert completely, the fever suddenly lifts, and in the goofiest change in tone I’ve heard since Arthur Brown “Fire,” they begin to play 1970s public television fundraiser bumper music. Then that, in turn, begins to warp, decay, and zoom endlessly in on itself, like a newspaper cartoon pressed into Silly Putty and stretched into oblivion. Simultaneously heavy, cheesy, meditative and disorienting.”

#6: Michael Hurley – Live 7/17/76

I listened to this for the first time on the drive up to VSC in September and then played it pretty regularly through Thanksgiving. Lonely road folk. “Break up music.”

#7: Bone Awl – Meaningless Leaning Mess

Relentless evil on smudgy disintegrating film.

#8: Fantastic Magic – Witch Choir

Loved this especially around when we went on band tour. Lysergic and dizzying/swooping island neon folk that’s somehow still precious/tacky and weirdly grounded – like The Tower Recordings’ lost Cancun record.

#9: Blues Control – Snowday b/w Paul’s Winter Solstice

The best band of 2006 and still the best band in New York’s Christmas record. I listened to this thirteen times in a row when I got it.

#10: Kylie Manogue – Fever

I painted a lot listening to this on repeat in March, and then listened to it at Work Group in September.

Honorable mentions =

ANGELDUST / M Ax Noi Mach / Big Ocean live in Philly
ANGELDUST when Kites played at PIFAS, M Ax Noi Mach at Bobo’s and Big Ocean at INC Philly = live horrors that loudly exclaimed what it is to live in that city.  AHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHH!

Ashtray Navigations – In Liquido Bravo
Ashtray Navigations – Srpls Provncl Hrbs
Generally I wasn’t too stoked on most of the stuff that came from UK drone teams this year, but these two Ashtray Nav releases hit it. In Liquido Bravo’s first track is an excellent spaghetti western slow jam and Srpls Provncl Hrbs finishes with Croak Song, which is like a tuned up version of the phase/flutter of How Can I Hand You a Diamond from Monument to British Rock, which I liked so much last year that I made a video for it.

Animal Collective/Black Dice – Wastered 12″
Man do I wish AC would go back to making slow, long metal bowl loop music with fried vocals instead of making songs.

Arthur Russell – Calling Out of Context
Played dominoes in New York with Julio and Leah listening to this. Haunting and shit-sweat karaoke vocals over sometimes groovy sometimes confusing beats.

Fennesz – Black Sea
Excellent record from my #1 of the year 2002. I haven’t spent a lot of time with it yet and don’t “love” it, but I did write this ridiculous/ecstatic thing to my brother when I first heard it: “It is like staring sunblind into a cold landscape through an elaborately frosted window, while a fire is burning behind you, someone is washing dishes in the other room, and you slowly fall asleep after eating an awesome dinner, and your mind moves through the frosted glass and explores the secret white worlds way down beneath distant frozen lakes.”

Ghostface Killah – Ironman
Ludacris – Red Light District
Most played rap records of the year.

Birchville Cat Motel – Seventh Ruined Hex
Natural Snow Buildings – Song for Laurie Bird
Pocahaunted and Robedoor – Mouth of Prayer
Honorable mention to these three high-flying repetitive guitar droners, all of which I listened to numerous times as I drove back and forth between Philly and Boston last January through March or April.

Portishead – Third
Things might have been different if this came out five years ago. Even so, I listened to it many, many times, notably with Davey and Mike on the way to Tallahassee on tour in April or May or whenever.

The last few months of work-work have been extremely productive (re: especially a near-complete redo of the Mark Dion site, which I produced a ton of work for and did all of the building with Lord Whimsy art directing; a game I did some video work on for discoverychannel.com; a Flash project I produced with Hall Media crew), but as my two main, long term office projects both coincidentally end exactly as camp starts, and as our project management and workflow methods have evolved to the point that there isn’t even so much sidebar/cleanup work for me to do anymore anyway, the time to call it a wrap seemed perfect. I enjoy my final Beer Thursday at Lime Projects after the Dion install on the 20th, and what a mighty and beautiful two years it’s been. My infinite thanks and debt and permanent salutes to Laris and Kendra from every desk and city I work at from here out.

In conjunction with leaving my job, I decided it would be productive to move out of the random house and see what’s up in the world. I’ll be in Philadelphia until June 30th and then will be traveling and at camp until the end of August. After that is anyone’s guess. Feel free to contact me if you need work done; pretty much wherever you are I can come to you.

I haven’t worked on very much of public interest since band tour, other than a slow moving book/cd project that documents that move. If you want a copy of it, it’s still in development hell (which really just means done by mid-July), but you can have one for free if you get at me before I print them up. Otherwise, I’m in the middle of a fellowship application for a writing program in the fall (marking the first time I’ve drafted anything in probably four years), and am generally enjoying the early summer via bike/Men’s Group as much as possible before the hot street doldrums and mosquitos roll in and I head out.

In normal totally boring recounting of the week’s efforts news, I spent Wednesday with Lexie at the bar, Thursday in Newark airport with Susy, Friday at my old house on 43rd with Jon and the Team, Saturday with Ben and Mike at the Wiese / D. Charles Spear shows and eventually the train bridge (word to Chris Bee Mask who lives here now and gave me his new killah tape), today at the Magnet City thing downtown and then in my slippers and long weekend yawns. Tonight I’m going to see Matthew from Charlottesville’s band; I guess those kids all live up here or in Brooklyn now.

Horizon items =
- Ospreys / Robedoor / Pocahaunted / Natalie Wiseblood / Woods June 28th.
- Ospreys / Wilde Stallions C60 on wether’s new label
- New book in July before I go, as above
- I will be in New York June 11th-15th on camp/nonsense business
- One or two new website ideas, maybe for sooner, maybe for later

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So yeah. I’ve just been out cruising the old roads, rolling around in my 1995, cruising hard with my hair blowing in my 2003, overdriving a pitched up White Album through some kid’s Peavey in Savannah while my friends think it’s funny to pretend to open the jar they keep their pet Black Widow in. This is a long one with pictures.

Dali king, Tufts Library

Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday

Yesterday while I was driving to work, local public radio baroness Marty Maas had local public radio mutt Dan Gottlieb on her show and she kept asking him if he was ready to die.

There’ve been oceans of blank these past three or four weeks. I’ve been whiskey-washed and soaked in beer five times over, straight wilin’ my way through the March. I shot beams straight through daylight savings time, ruptured the Internet, rearranged entire houses full of furniture with my mind and pretty much didn’t document any of it. I’m doing a horrible job of keeping a blog, but that I do keep one at all speaks, I think, to a need for me to mark time in the gray waste when there’s nothing going on more than to an impulse to document, keep track of, or explain the actual retarded goings on of my mid-20s “wild years.” It’s not like I don’t remember everything that happens anyway. (And double-anyway, I don’t know, who is this for anyway? My kids when they finally get up the guts to look up their old man on the internet wayback machine in the year of our wishing we covered our tracks 2028?)

Mike and I went to the Wissahickon and we drove back listening to that George Thoroughgood song everyone knows. I tell everyone that when I heard it for the first time on public radio when I was in fourth grade that it made me want to immediately go out honkey tonkin. This remains the case even now.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We drank a case of Mexican beer that Amber bought, two cases of yuengling and a case of delicious Magic Hat HI.P.A. before the wells ran dry. We’ve been godstorming in a more quality, less quantity way = Davey plays with us now, and Mark Price came and hung out the other night too. Susy calls this phenomenon Men’s Group. Meanwhile, dozens of 11×17 sheets get covered, I go into and out of the office, and life grinds on.

–+–

I had a long reverie the other day about an early argument I got into with my dad. I feel like I can figure out when it was to the year based on family vacation memories (maybe my mom will leave a comment and let me know) – it was the year of Altered Beast, when we went to the arcade every month, put a collective dollar fifty up in that machine, and rose from the grave to save Zeus’s daughter in two player mode. (Non-losers should maybe note that $1.50 is not a lot of money for two people to spend on a complete trip to an arcade, a fact I took weird pride in. We’d spend the rest of the $5 he changed to quarters on the skeeball, and I would buy plastic ninjas with the tickets. In the story that I told with them at home the black ninja with the two swords was the hero. He hid and watched the infighting between the reds and whites from on top of the ottoman and he swooped down on his grappling hook to finish them off when they’d worn each other down.) One Sunday that year, my cousins and I were playing Altered Beast in my gramma’s basement, and mimicking the wolf beast’s power, I did a lot of diving into the couches. When I got home, I said I could fly, and my dad told me it was impossible for a man to fly. I told him I had been doing it earlier in the afternoon. He got out an encyclopedia that showed a picture of a fish with wings (and I remember laughing and saying “Look at that fish with wings, that’s crazy” and immediately realizing that what I was claiming was, to him, exactly the same thing) and the text read “Man cannot fly.” We went back and forth and he eventually agreed to disagree. I asked him if he would read to me (we were reading this killer pink book of Norse mythology, with fucking Odin losing his eye to Mimir so he could know everything happening the previous week) and he said he wouldn’t because we’d wasted all of our time arguing.

Should I just scan my entire journal from 4th-8th grade, annotate it, and post it here? I feel like I should.

My brother emailed me earlier this month to let me know he was doing jumps from Australian cliffs. I miss him dearly and my wish is that he will run and take a leap and be surprised to find that he can carry himself up and disappear into the sun.

–+–

Kurt Vile

I went to see Kurt Vile + xNoBBQx a while ago. NoBBQ was horrible, Vile ruled. Going to see him with Sunburned and Davey tonight. Tomorrow I am working on my video all day. I think I am going to Assateague Island this Friday and then to my parents house for easter.

Mostly sure I mentioned already that Ospreys is touring with Davey or Tenspeed from the end of April through the beginning of May, our first tour in eleven(!) months, re: I went to camp, Mike bought a house and went on poster tour, etc. Massively stoked to lay down all manner of styles in all manner of territories. Definitely sure I mentioned that I’m working on a video. I was going to post a part of it here but seriously why would I do that when it isn’t done.

Dali spade, Tufts Library

Massachusetts

Me and Suzanne

Advice column

Wissahickon

Working on a video

Everything you can learn from yourself is already inside of you

And now on to the normal crawl, L.I.F.E. on a pixel, life on a bristle, life on a sheet: things I did, thought and ate, January 6th, year of our wonder and sorrow 2008.

While I made coffee or possibly lunch (Sunday meal plan = dinner: pasta with trader joe sausage sauce, lovely cheese, fresh onion/peppers/mushrooms; breakfast = granola + yogurt; lunch = ??; also had two glasses of tang, a sip of a root beer float, three beers), Bonsky said, “Tom, you thought it would take you twenty minutes because you have no sense of time.” We were talking about how I went to Kinko’s to make that zine up above thinking it would only take me twenty minutes to go in, print and get out, when it took upwards of two hours.

After reflecting on it (during Alphaville and Training Day mostly, both of which are terrible movies), I got to thinking that maybe the issue isn’t so much one of time lapse, but more generally of primarily storing experiences in impressionistic ways rather than in emotional or empirical ones. This seams to speak more fully to the ways I think about reading, listening to music, cooking, traveling, and so on. Not that I don’t perceive time in these things, but I do find that time (and emotional response, and empirical fact) often distorts around the more prominent forms of memory, i.e., light, color, temperature. We can talk about it maybe.

Asked for examples of my not being able to perceive time, Bonsky went on to point out that I often used to say I would be over “in a little while” and then not show up for three or more hours. I think this is more just my being socially untimely and cluttered than my not being able to understand time, but I’m including this point of his so you might form your own opinion.

At night I went to see the mighty Blues Control and everything shuddered back into place. I always know when I like bands and when I don’t, but sometimes I forget when I straight up love bands. Total jammers. Check these dudes outtttt!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ten years ago I was a creator on the Discworld MUD. I had just “met” Larissa Sky, while Jeremiah and I had already worked together on at least one major project. Good heavens.

Next in life = planning a tour to New Orleans and back.

I have an art show in three days that I am getting moderately stressed out about because I haven’t worked on anything in days and have nothing done.

I drove home to Philadelphia after eating chicken cutlets and gnocchi at my gramma’s (as before). I drank black coffee and drove as quickly as I could. When I got in, I unloaded my things into my room, cleaned a little and went to Mike’s. We had band practice. Ellen lives there now. Then we went to the show.

The show was us, Davey or Tenspeed, Morsbergers like Machine Guns and three units from Birmingham AL – Dick Neff, Important Eagle, Mugu Guymen. IE played tapes and reeds, DN played drums, a custom synth and a Chippendale vocal mask,  and MG played drums and distorto guitar. DN played a song with Davey at the end and that slayed. All solid dudes who we will hopefully visit. Our set was a little rugged – first one played on our micro amps setup at middle volume. Feedback and sustain didn’t work as expected and there were some weird mid-set problems as a result.

The difficult influence of Providence RI’s Fort Thunder art collective was highly apparent in the musical and visual styles the AL crew brought with them, possibly championed furthest by DN, who screened the green yellow and red bleeding monster crazy lines weird letters show poster with clear flying hard line crystals, and yeah, played fast drums with a loop dealie and a mask on. I’m not going to write an essay about this influence and its obvious continuing role in defining a certain branch of fringe art and music just now, but let this be a placeholder for when I decide to.

Also, let me be clear in that I don’t mean to front on DN or any of these dudes by calling them out or whatever on invoking FT in their shit, consciously or not (I mean, the poster for this show was still totally tight). It’s totally okay. My interest and concern is for what comes next (in noise music and young art) in this so-called movement’s path, since we can only (presumably) print bleeding ghost monsters with weird letters on our show posters for so long.

I ate one and a half odwalla bars at the show. We ate delicious burritos beforehand. At the show, Rosa and Pumpkin ran back and forth, back and forth, kicking up a royal racket. I drank organic orange juice and some odwalla strawberry juice and had a sip of coca cola even though I can’t stand soda.

Say it! Say… you’ll give me your… skin! :-)

Oh, no, no, please god help me! :-)

Columbus ruled, Emeralds is the best band.

All joking and whatever aside, the reason I’m bloggin is because I am running in a 5k in two weeks and I need to be able to finish it. I ran two miles a couple weeks ago and I thought this evening would be a good time to go train a little more in the cold cold night. I rode out to the alma mater and started going around the track, and lord if a crowd of dudes walking back from the basketball game didn’t laugh super loud and yell “Look at how gay that guy is running!” while they passed.
But, I say to those dudes (via Facebook if I ever choose to check it again): how many drone bands did you go see last weekend nine hours away from your houses? How many races are you choosing to run in which you will tie jingle bells to your shoes (totally serious) so that all of the neighborhood kids will think it is Santa’s sleigh out racing a 5k? How many hours do you spend watching youtube and playing internet scrabble every day? How many website projects involving modern artists and botanical gardens are you photoshopping and developing Flash for all day? Exactly.

I ate a nice pasta dinner and drank wine tonight. I listened to the Silmaril record a pile of times and started drawing some wallpaper for the kitchen, which Bonsky fixed up a little while I was away. My body sighs (farts) with pleasure at each bite I take that isn’t Taco Bell, Quizno’s, Waffle House, Subway, Denny’s and Papa John’s. So stoked to step it up and spend next fake tour eating nothing but Pizza Hut [Bistro] and Red Lobster.

What a life this is!