Month: July 2015 (Page 1 of 2)

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Poppies
‘Illuminations, released in 1969, was the sixth album by Buffy Sainte-Marie. Though most of the tracks did away with the backing she had used on her previous two albums, Illuminations had a completely different sound from anything she had previously done. From a basis of vocals and acoustic guitar, Sainte-Marie and producer Maynard Solomon used electronic synthesisers to create a sound that was much more experimental music than folk. Indeed, Illuminations was the first quadrophonic vocal album ever made.’ — ekr

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Little Wheel Spin and Spin
‘In contrast to her first two albums which were entirely acoustic with occasional use of her distinctive mouthbow, parts of Little Wheel Spin and Spin added electric guitar by Bruce Langhorne and string arrangements by Felix Pappalardi, or feature fellow Native American performer Patrick Sky on guitar with Sainte-Marie. This served to pave the way for Sainte-Marie’s stylistic experiments on her remaining Vanguard albums, where she covered territory ranging from country to rock to experimental music.’ — ArtMusic

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Now You’ve Been Gone for a Long Time
‘Her previous album Illuminations having sold so poorly as to lose Vanguard a considerable sum of money, the label placed considerable pressure on Sainte-Marie to come up with something that would sell in larger numbers. To this effect, She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina was recorded with guitar from Ry Cooder and Neil Young and assistance from the latter’s backing band Crazy Horse. There was also a change in focus of the material: covers of contemporary songs, which she had almost never recorded before, accounted for five of the eleven songs. Vanguard boss Maynard Solomon, who had produced her first five albums and most of Illuminations, surrendered production duties completely to Neil Young producer Jack Nitzsche, who was later to marry Sainte-Marie.’ — Chronology

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He’s A Keeper Of The Fire
‘On her misunderstood and gradually revered album Illuminations, American composer Peter Schickele provided arrangements to “Mary”, “Adam” and “The Angel”, whilst the four tracks “Suffer the Little Children”, “With You, Honey”, “Guess Who I Saw in Paris” and “He’s A Keeper of the Fire” were her first work to be not produced by Vanguard boss Maynard Solomon. Instead, they had a stripped-down rock sound and were produced by little known folk-jazz songwriter Mark Roth. Bob Bozina played guitar, John Craviotta drums and percussion and Rick Oxendine played bass.’ — New Weird America

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Cod’ine
‘Buffy Sainte-Marie’s It’s My Way is one of the most scathing topical folk albums ever made. Sainte-Marie sings in an emotional, vibrato-laden voice of war (“The Universal Soldier,” later a hit for Donovan), drugs (“Cod’ine”), sex (“The Incest Song”), and most telling, the mistreatment of Native Americans, of which Sainte-Marie is one (“Now That the Buffalo’s Gone”). Even decades later, the album’s power is moving and disturbing.’ — Allmusi
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Suffer the Little Children
‘School bell go “Ding! Dong! Ding!” / The children all line up / They do what they are told / Take a little drink from the liar’s cup / Mama don’t really care / If what they learn is true / Or if it’s only lies / Just get them through the factories / Into production / Ah, get them into line / Late in the afternoon / The children all come home / They mind their manners well / Their little lives are all laid out / Mama don’t seem to care / If she may break their hearts / She clips their wings off, they never learn to fly / Poor Mama needs a source of pride / A doctor son she’ll have/ No what the cost to manhood or to soul / Sun shine down, brightly shine / Down on all the land / Shine down on the newborn lambs / A butcher’s knife is in his hand.’ — BS-M

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Moonshot
‘After the very modest success of her previous album She Used to Wanna Be a Ballerina, Vanguard again teamed Sainte-Marie with renowned pop session musicians in its effort to improve sales and the amount of money she was making for the label. Although the album itself fared little better commercially than its predecessor, only spending seven weeks on the Billboard Top 200, an extensive promotional campaign by Vanguard and extensive AM radio airplay saw the closing track, a cover of Mickey Newbury’s “Mister Can’t You See”, become Sainte-Marie’s sole significant commercial success in the States, spending two weeks in the lower reaches of the Top 40 in late April and early May 1972. However, Sainte-Marie was very upset with Vanguard’s extensive promotion of the single and this was one reason why she only recorded one more album for the label before moving to MCA in 1973.’ — Wiki

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Now That the Buffalo’s Gone
‘”Now That the Buffalo’s Gone” is the first song from the 1964 album It’s My Way! by Canadian First Nations singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie. The song’s title refers to the near-extinction of the American bison and serves as a metaphor for the cultural genocide inflicted by Europeans. A classic folk protest song, “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone” has a simple arrangement with guitar and vocals by Sainte-Marie and bass played by Art Davis. The song is a lament that addresses the continuous confiscation of Indian lands. In the song, Sainte-Marie contrasts the treatment of post-war Germany, whose people were allowed to keep their land and their dignity, to that of North American Indians.’ — Biocritics

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Guess Who I Saw In Paris
‘Buffy Sainte-Marie’s album Illuminations is as prophetic a record as the first album by Can or the psychedelic work of John Martin on Solid Air. The songs here, while clearly written, are open form structures that, despite their brevity (the longest cut here is under four minutes), break down the barriers between folk music, rock, pop, European avant-garde music and Native American styles (this is some of the same territory Tim Buckley explores on Lorca and Starsailor). It’s not a synthesis in any way, but a completely different mode of travel. This is poetry as musical tapestry and music as mythopoetic sonic landscape; the weirdness on this disc is over-exaggerated in comparison to its poetic beauty. It’s gothic in temperament, for that time anyway, but it speaks to issues and affairs of the heart that are only now beginning to be addressed with any sort of constancy.’ — Allmusic

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My Country Tis of Thy People You’re Dying
‘”My Country ‘Tis of Thy People You’re Dying” is Buffy Sainte-Marie’s statement-in-song about Indian affairs. “My point in the song is that the American people haven’t been given a fair share at learning the true history of the American Indian. They know neither the state of poverty that the Indians are in now nor how it got to be that way. I try to tell the side of the story that’s left out of the history books, that can only be found in the documents, the archives and in the memories of the Indians themselves.”‘ — BS-M

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Starwalker
‘Coincidence and Likely Stories was the thirteenth studio album by Buffy Sainte-Marie but her first for sixteen years, during which time she had been raising her son and working on the children’s television show Sesame Street. The album itself was largely recorded at Sainte-Marie’s home before being sent to producer Chris Birkett for the final production and mixing in London. The album showed her continuing with the electronic music she had first developed on Illuminations and the tribal themes seen on Sweet America, her last pre-retirement album. Although the album received some very favourable reviews and was often seen as her best work since Illuminations, it failed to make any impression in the United States.’ — collaged

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The Incest Song
‘Word is up to the king’s dear daughter / And word is spreading all over the land / That’s she’s been betrayed by her own dear brother / That he has chosen another fair hand / Many young man had a song of her beauty / And many a grand deed for her had been done / But within her sights she carried the child / Of her father’s youngest, fairest son / Tell to me no lies / Tell to me no stories / But saddle my good horse and I’ll go and see my own true love / If your words be true ones, then that will mean the end of me.’ — BS-M

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The Dream Tree (performed by Owen Pallett)
‘On its initial release, Sainte-Marie’s Illuminations was an utter disaster commercially, failing to get anywhere near the Billboard Top 200 and being deleted and largely disowned by Sainte-Marie within a few years. However, in more recent times Illuminations has acquired a fan base quite distinct from that associated with any of Sainte-Marie’s other albums. In addition to being cited as a favourite album by a number of famous musicians, a number of critics have seen its twisted, eerie soundscapes as laying the grounds for the evolution of gothic music as well as having an influence on New Weird America. In 2000, just before Vanguard re-issued it on CD, The Wire ma
gazine listed Illuminations amongst its 100 Albums that Set the World on Fire While No-One was Listening.’ — collaged

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Universal Soldier
‘Buffy Sainte-Marie wrote “Universal Soldier” in 1962, a time when people fretted over missile gaps, Khrushchev and the H-bomb. Vietnam was still a couple of years off the American radar. She had been writing songs in college while studying Oriental philosophy. She hadn’t considered music a career. She wanted to be a teacher, a vocation still close to her heart. At the time, she wrote songs without thinking anyone would hear them. Then she got the record deal. Universal Soldier was released in 1964. It wasn’t long before the song became the anthem of the anti-war movement, despite the fact it was pretty much banned on U.S. radio. “It’s about the personal responsibility of all of us, ” she says of the song which is now in the Canadian Songwriting Hall of Fame. “Because we can’t blame just the soldier for the war, or just the career military officer, or just the politician. We have to blame ourselves too since we are living in an era where we actually elect our politicians.”’ — BS-M.com

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God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot
‘The greatest Canadian song, well I mean, I think the greatest song period of all time, is “God is Alive, Magic is Afoot” by Buffy Sainte-Marie and Leonard Cohen as it appears on Buffy’s album, Illuminations, and anyone who says otherwise is mistaken. It’s the best song that’s ever written. It’s kind of like a mission statement from Cohen himself, just underlining his sort of three sides: his Jewish upbringing and his, you know, Buddhist inclinations as an adult, and his sort-of Christian monoculture that kind of binds him all together with Buffy’s own sort of Cree history in this kind of ecstasy in which she performs it, the mantra-like qualities it takes on and added to that is just the innovation of the tape-loop effects — actually I’m not sure if it’s the tape loop or if it’s a Buchla but maybe it’s a combination of both. It’s technically innovative, it fits into both of their oeuvres, so it’s the summit of the mountain. Yeah, there’s really no song that touches that song that I’ve ever come across.’ — Owen Pallett

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p.s. Hey. ** Bernard Welt, B-ster. I can’t guarantee this is the real me, and, besides, ‘real’ … wha?! Well, that is all very interesting. I don’t know that Robin Williams film. Should I correct that? I think the only movie I’ve liked him in was ‘Secret Agent’. Maybe. Don’t hold me to that. I think we will be hunting for perfect pastries in a mere couple of hours, so I suppose I will save everything else I can of to say until then apart from saying, yes, you did blow my mind. Because that’s easier for me to admit in print than vocally. ** David Ehrenstein, If you were speaking in part to me, I do know that Straub film, yes. Excellent film. ** H., Hi. Lovely reaction to Ben’s post, thank you! I’m glad that you’re glad you invested your time in the new Ashbery book. He released a new poem, I think onto the internet/social media, a couple of days ago on his 88th birthday, and it’s a beauty. ** Steevee, Hi. Look forward to improving myself a little via your new interview. Everyone, Here’s Steevee’s interview with Stevan Riley, the director of a new documentary on Marlon Brando, and it’s on the site of the excellent magazine Filmmaker to boot. Man, you should really invest in an external hard drive and back up your stuff regularly. It would save you a lot of stressing out about that. ** Kier, Hi, Kier! Hi, buddy boy! Yay (said at the top of my lungs in a volcanic voice)! About the new apartment! Wow, so do you move in on the first of the month, meaning in two days? Oh, wait, you said beginning of next week, so, yeah, soon enough. That’s exciting! Give us a new house tour when you’re in the house! Please? I’m glad your work is good with and without electrical fences. Yeah, you did say you’re going to see Iceage! If you talk to them, say hi to Elias for me. Things are good here, the usual very busy. I think we finished the new film script, and we’re going to show it to some trusted people now for reactions. Doing early grunt work promo blah stuff re: our film’s premiere, which I’ve been ordered not to talk about until it’s official. Starting on the script for Gisele’s puppet TV show that Zac and I are writing. Other stuff. Things are good. Well, we should definitely eat Indian food together, of course! Mater paneer is amazing. The two main ingredients are mater (peas) and (paneer) Indian cheese. It’s all thick soupy and spicy and orange colored. Here’s a picture. You eat it with rice on the side and, in my case, cheese naan, which is, as you can imagine, seriously yum. When you visit Paris, Zac and I will take you to our favorite vegetarian Indian restaurant, and we will feast ourselves sick, or at least faux-sick. Hugs galore! ** _Black_Acrylic, Thank you so, so much again, Ben! It was supreme. And thank you even more than ever so much for the Belgian New Beat Day (!) which I will set up very soon and then let you know the launch date of. You’re the best, Ben!  ** Thomas Moronic, Morning, T. Have you gotten that new charger yet? Wait, it’s 9 am. Soon? Almost? Yep, agreed about sci-fi fantasy, although I don’t mind it and even am kind of drawn to that stuff sometimes in movies for some reason. Hm.  ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris. Loved the book reviews. I noted and will soon be all over the books there that I didn’t know and/or haven’t read yet. Zachary G. is rather private about stuff, yeah, so who knows? I was reading stuff about that new Drake thing yesterday. I don’t think I’ve ever even heard Drake, which is pretty weird, I guess. Maybe it’s his name. The name seems so wholesome or something. My day yesterday wasn’t bad. Work, a bit of a coffee and walk, more work, not bad. How was yours, man? ** Misanthrope, ‘Americans don’t like soccer’: generalizing much, ha ha? Maybe you’re right, in the grand scheme of things, but everybody I know in the States other than you who’s into sports at all is mostly only into soccer. And a bit of basketball. And a little baseball. Well, or I at least manage to fake knowing when you’re joking. But, no, I think I do know. In person, it’s easy ‘cos you put on your ‘joke’ face when you joke. You do. It’s subtle, but it’s there like the light in a lighthouse. ** James, Awesome about your excellent cover! I’m excited to see it! I am excited for the film’s premiere, but there’s a bunch of shit-work we have to do now to get ready for that vis-à-vis promo materials and blah, but so it goes. ** Cal Graves, Hi, Cal. Yeah, sure, that makes sense totally. I don’t know why my imagination isn’t very tweaked by sci-fi lit. It’s weird. I was quite into Cyberpunk, or the best of those books, back when it was happening, though. The literary canon makers are boring and anal in the bad way and as conservative as the bad justices on the Supreme Court. Their imaginations suck. They will die lonely and forgotten, ha ha. Way yum Indian food there. I want some.
But today will be all about hunting down scrumptious French pasties with and for visiting pal/d.l. Bernard Welt. I have an itinerary. I-bought-this-really-cool-and-ugly-cigarette-lighter-yesterday-that-looks-like-it’s-covered-in-snake-skin-but-isn’t-ly, Dennis. ** Okay. Today I am devoting a gig post to the very, very, very great Buffy Sainte-Marie whose work seems to be really weirdly undervalued these days for reasons that I simply can not understand. Anyway, I hope you enjoy. See you tomorrow.

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Duster Tropical Solution
‘There was no shortage of psychedelic listening options for the late-’90s space cadet; you simply had to navigate the substrata of drone-friendly bands such as Spiritualized, Flying Saucer Attack and Bardo Pond. San Jose, Calif.’s Duster flew closer to Earth, offering more structured guitar-rock compositions and the kind of muffled-yet-melodic vocals that hadn’t been heard since the (original) shoegaze era. For debut album Stratosphere, the songwriting duo of Clay Parton and Dove Amber recruited drummer Jason Albertini (an original member of Queens Of The Stone Age) and created a sound akin to Yo La Tengo playing beneath a heavy winter blanket. For an exploration of the pop side of the space-rock moon, Stratosphere is one place to start.’ — Magnet

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M.E.S.H Thorium
‘Piteous Gate, the debut full-length from Berlin-based artist M.E.S.H., uses the cinematic and all of its tropic tendencies to arrive at a statement of personal vision often hard to find within the social continuum of future-minded electronica or quasi-club music. That isn’t to say the record isn’t full of the social tropes common within the field; rather, the record uses those sounds — ephemera from sample packs, pirated VSTs, Ableton drum-racks loaded with Frankenstein YouTube samples, mecha, etc. — to contextualize the individual’s relationship to the largeness of spectacle. The album’s subtlety and abstract tendencies prevent it from becoming solely a work of stock collage or pastiche appropriation. Rather, in order to evoke the powerful, high-budget achievement of top-dollar soundtracks, M.E.S.H. incorporates trending audio into the prodigy of his own will to power, an act that reflexively places himself at the center of the discourse’s high-fidelity. After all, the individual artist’s own labor can become competitive with the machines that produce our most grandiose sci-fi. Finally, there can be indistinguishability between the sheer productive capability of capital and the loner armed with vision and software — one of the dreams of electronic music all along. This exchange between subject and massive infrastructure, between personal will and infinite resources, makes the space of Piteous Gate similar to a public space structured like a collection of multiple private domains. But, isn’t that just cinema, blown away/disappointed people sitting together alone in a public space?’ — SCVSCV

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death’s dynamic shroud.wmv 너 땜에 맘이 맘이 맘이 맘이 괴로워요
‘For anyone who may have written off vaporwave years back, please let Death’s Dynamic Shroud.wmv’s messy, marvelous new album pull you back in. Vaporwave went through some ugly years after its time in the spotlight. There were a lot of factors: over-saturation from a flood of less-than-inspiring releases; a pushback from its conceptually weighty origins; a few brick-dumb articles that introduced it to wider audiences as a punchline. In their own ways each of those contributed to creating an environment that was intensely, defensively closed-off to the point of asphyxiating itself. Yet lately there are releases popping up that show vaporwave growing and evolving in ways that are really exciting. That’s part of what makes I’ll Try Living Like This such a blast. It doesn’t try to subvert any of the current trends in vaporwave, it doesn’t try to hearken back to the intensely conceptual qualities of the early days. I’ll Try Living Like This does one single thing: it fucking bangs — hard and consistently — for a dizzyingly complex and immensely pleasurable hour, and then says good bye (the last track is literally called ‘Good Bye’). It feels like a part of this genre’s strange lineage, yet never feels tied down by it.’ — Fact Magazine

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Thighpaulsandra Paralysed
‘If you have heard any of Thighpaulsandra’s previous albums, you will know that you’d best approach this record with no fixed set of expectations, because once again he changes genres and defies easy classification, sometimes more than once within one song. Drawing on his long-time background as a key member in such diverse groups as Coil, Spiritualized and Julian Cope’s band (in each case arguably at the height of their creative prowess) and his work as producer and sound engineer for an even larger variety of customers, you’ll find classical passages next to hard rock riffing, krauty experimental work-outs turning into super catchy, almost radio-friendly songs and more. Many adjectives have been used to describe Thighpaulsandra’s work: epic, challenging, timeless, idiosyncratic, but certainly never predictable or boring.’ — Editions Mego

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Vince Staples Get Paid
‘Talking about the four, five, or nine “elements of hip-hop” is no longer fashionable, not because the art form has fundamentally changed, but because we have learned more about what it is. Why, then, is evaluating distinct criteria like “production” and “lyricism” still so much more common in rap criticism than in any other kind of music writing? Summertime ‘06 is privately nostalgic for songs like Sean Paul’s “Temperature” and Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’” and Beyoncé’s “Check on It” and Cassie’s “Me and U” and Yung Joc’s “It’s Going Down.” Rap songs from 2006 continue to affect us because they sound thrilled with themselves; there’s a sublime and overwhelming Gestalt to these tracks that transcends catchy hooks and smart lyrics, combining these with the affective realm of voice inflection and onomatopoeia to create an irreducible sum. I thought about this when Vince Staples told the Grantland NBA After Dark podcast that music in the era of digital piracy was about “creating moments.”’ — Will Neibergall

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Tallesen Emmel
‘Tallesen works full-time as a roof-top gardener in NYC. Since his day job consists of planting vegetation that he’ll (potentially) never see fully grown, gardening provides a good entry point into why his music sounds the way it does: as if it were a tree planted on a 20th-floor balcony whose growth can only be measured from a specific point in Central Park. Importantly, though, Tallesen wants to make his audience move. Because a lot of his music is audibly contorted and melted, stretched and stifled, etc. and etc., bodies tap or move (uncontrollably, even) to a potentially non-existent, perhaps constantly decaying rhythm. Yet, as Tallesen tries to shift both with and without this confinement of beat, there’s an insatiable twitch inside us that wants to move with one or all melodies, a fleshy desire for audible nihilism.’ — C Monster

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Rolo Tomassi Raumdeuter
‘Rolo Tomassi are the wild children borne of Converge and the Dillinger Escape Plan’s technical ecstasy, borne thousands of miles away but in full possession of that visionary collision between the atavistic and the exultant – that is the essence of the group’s totemic, visceral power. Those qualities are featured most daringly here on tracks such as ‘Raumdeuter’, and ‘The Embers’, their sheer assurance and sophistication a wonder to behold. Eva Spence’s vocal command remains one of the most potent weapons in extreme metal, a blade honed amid the aural contortions that it is relentlessly ground upon, never losing its razor-sharp capabilities. Short circuit guitar pathways scorch and suspend themselves alongside riptides of bright melodic arcs, their brutality landing as harshly just as surely as their melodic immediacy. But these signature aggressions are given nuance by the surprising yet welcome pools of evocative piano-centred pieces.’ — Kevin Mccaighy

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RP Boo Your Choice
‘Sonically, RP Boo is a modern-day Zatoichi samurai, cutting his samples in unorthodox ways. His sound remains unique. Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints contains both tracks made after his acclaimed 2013 debut album “Legacy” (“An album of scorching, scene-defining hits” SPIN) and older tracks. Highlights include “Banging On King Dr.” which sees him cutting up street numbers; the monolithic noir feeling of “Sleepy”; the subtle funk of “Your Choice” which may in some way be inspired by his Dad’s role as bass player for Prince; “Lets Dance Again” whose delicate soulful sound echoes deep streams of Chicago dance music history; the dramatic string-infused “Daddy’s Home” and the celebration of achieving dreams that is the closer “B’Ware.” Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints is the sound of an innovator reconfirming his place as leader with one of the most essential Footwork albums to date.’ — Planet Mu

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Slackk Posrednik
‘Slackk’s Backwards Light EP harbors the unshakeable sino-grime sound of yesteryear and mobilizes it, bringing it successfully into the current by combining it with a raving orchestration that fits well with its R&S; home. It’s a similar model to some of his previous work — the track “Three Kingdoms” from last year’s debut full-length Palm Tree Fire offered a comparable Eastern motif. But while that almost boarded on banality, Backwards Light is sharper and arguably more original. It’s difficult, by and large, to divorce Slackk’s music from a grime context. Indeed, Slackk — a.k.a. Paul Lynch — is regarded as invaluable to the genre, having previously ran the radio-rip resource grimetapes.com. Slackk’s re-imagining of grime, however, gives a dynamism that is lacking somewhat in the boxy square-waves and established rhythm patterns that are otherwise commonplace.’ — Stefan Wharton

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Flying Saucer Attack Instrumental 7
‘For over a decade, there have been few reported sightings of Flying Saucer Attack. A delicious run of albums in the 90s gave way to near-total silence at the turn of the new millennium, almost as if planned. Over time, the Bristolian experimentalists have been whittled down to a one-man band, consisting of core member David Pearce. You could call them space-, post-, avant-, or whichever prefix you might apply to ‘rock’ in order to emphasise the decentralisation of ego and retrospection in the context of otherwise traditional rock instrumentation. Whatever you call it, the urge to transcend is clear. Incorporating disparate folk and electronic influences, previous efforts saw Pearce revelling in the puerile joy of burying acoustic tracks in noise – sometimes white and mechanical, sometimes tailored to sound a little like the eponymous flying saucer. Today, Pearce’s vocal presence and melodic talent take a backseat, giving way to pure ambience. In light of the freeform discord of Flying Saucer Attack’s live recordings (see 1996’s In Search Of Spaces and 2003’s P.A. Blues), as well as a few reverential pieces named in tribute to Popol Vuh, the new album’s material is not unprecedented, but it is daringly funereal and earnest. A few whispers of flying saucer remain, but they are mostly subdued in the mix – less campy space-exploitation, more of an atmospheric tool.’ — The Quietus

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Seven Davis Jr Sunday Morning
‘George Clinton bestrides today’s music like an intergalactic Colossus. You can hear the Funkadelic and Parliament bandleader’s influence in numerous recent albums, from the most praised (D’Angelo, Kendrick Lamar) to more obscure efforts, such this debut from Californian DJ and producer Samuel “Seven” Davis Jr. Universes takes the tradition of Clinton’s psychedelic funk and feeds it through a modern beat-making sensibility, as with the combination of compulsively jumpy electronics and woozy Funkadelic vocals in “Welcome Back”. “It’s whatever you want it to be,” a voice intones at the start of the album, which is themed around the notion of space travel; focused production ensures the Afro-futurist trip doesn’t take a wrong turn into self-indulgence.‘ — ft.com

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White Poppy Confusion
‘How do you grapple with something that isn’t there? On her third full-length as White Poppy, Natural Phenomena, Crystal Dorval manages to erase almost all traces of herself. Her voice disappears into the ether with lyrics that are mostly indiscernible — when there are any at all. The attack of her guitar is blunted and nearly bleached out of existence in reverb and delay systems. And the minimal percussion employed tends to feel more like a kite bobbing along at the end of a tether than anything solid and grounding. To this end, Natural Phenomena reads like further notes on a musical history of disappearance and obfuscation. Roughly one third of the album is made up of lyrically-oriented songs, another third contains wordless vocalizing, and the remaining third is entirely instrumental. Because they aren’t divided up into sections as such, it gives a sort of watercolor impression of songs half submerged.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

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Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks [extract]
‘In a weird way (what other way could there be?), there is no more apt a group to perform Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch’s unmistakeable score for Lynch’s seminal Twin Peaks TV-series than Jamie Stewart’s Xiu Xiu. Like the show, their music is elusive, dream-lit with dark undertones. Commissioned by David Lynch himself, this is an immediately recognisable yet entirely new interpretation of the music of Twin Peaks; one emphasising its chaos, drama, fear, noise and sidelong leering glances. “The music of Twin Peaks is everything that we aspire to as musicians and is everything that we want to listen to as music fans. It is romantic, it is terrifying, it is beautiful, it is unnervingly sexual. Our attempt will be to play the parts of the songs as written, meaning, following the harmony melody but to arrange in the way that it has shaped us as players.”‘ — Jamie Stewart/Opera North

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p.s. Hey. Before I/we begin the day’s time-delayed interactions, d.l. H has a kind offer that applies to some of you out there reading this. Namely, H has some books that must be sacrificed due to an impending move to a new location, and H is offering them to someone here free of charge. These are the books in four groups/links: Books 1, Books 2, Books 3, Books 4. Now, I will let H explain the offer, and here H is: ‘[The] receiver [of these books] should be one real person. (Unfortunately, no organization/store/press…etc., because they resell these books which libraries here would do, which I don’t like…when I ship these with my cost, etc.) That person must be younger than 30 year old, and almost unemployed and unschooling, while wanting to be desperately, (ie. not living on wealthy personal or educational (art grants included) sponsor’s fund), book lovers, and aspiring writers, who are simply appreciative and humble about receiving the gift and will actually read these over some time for their studies and pleasure. Interested persons please email to Dennis Cooper, dcooperweb@gmail.com. He will choose an appropriate one if there are some candidates. If there’s no right person till this weekend, I will donate these to a university library here and my advisor who will keep the books so well. Thank you. ** Thomas Moronic, Whoa, awesome! Disneyland, or my pickings from the big D., did an escorts/slaves-type number on your magnificent imagination-plus-fingers combo. Superb, pal, and I am entirely humbled. No, I didn’t write any of those texts. They’re all lifted from here and there. Credit my writerly eye and pickpocketing talents or something, I guess, for their disconnections. Thank you, man! ** H, Hi. Thank you again for doing that. I hope I passed the offer and info on in a clear and appropriate way. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I know I went to Disneyland first when I was just this side of being a swaddled blob of an infant, but I don’t know when that was. I was two years-old when it opened. So, pretty early. ‘The Jetsons’ has a lot to answer for. ** Tosh Berman, I can’t believe you’ve only been to Disneyland once, but I’ve been … it feels like hundreds of times. I’ve been to Disneyland Paris a few times, and, in Tokyo, we chose to go to the second Disney park — Tokyo Disney Sea — instead. I’ve come to really like Disneyland Paris. It took me a while. And Disney Sea was quite nice. A handful of good rides and a super beautiful mountain/ crater smack dab in the middle that’s dreamy to look at and to ride rides within. But I’m really into Disney as a great artist, and I think the original Disneyland is his masterpiece, and it’s the only park that he supervised and designed/signed off on down to the tiniest details. All the others are attempts to replicate it, usually at lower cost, and always using a larger area of land to enclose the park, which changes the experience, design, everything. The last time I went to Disneyland last October, I was really struck by how small and tight and almost claustrophobic it is compared to the others. Even with the post-Disney alterations, it really feels like a one person’s artwork, and the others don’t have that feeling at all. ** James, Hi. Oh, I didn’t mean to “school you”. I just happened to know the discrepancy. Sure, I got humiliated by a teacher or ten back when. Horrifying abuse of power there. Ha ha, see, if that had been Disneyland-obsessed me getting my head stuck it would have been a highlight of my life or something, I think. To become, even for an embarrassing moment, a design detail in Disneyland sounds dreamy. But I am, as I keep saying, weird. Well, yeah, JC’s review was really obnoxious. It certainly didn’t help my opinion of his stuff. He really does come off as being very in love with his not anywhere near as brilliant as he seem to think self. That doesn’t help either. ** Steevee, Hi. When I was a young Los Angeleno, one of the big things my friends I did as often as we could was go to Disneyland on LSD. I did that a lot, and all he way up until the early ’90s, although, by then, I would go on Ecstasy rather than on LSD. Never had a bad or scary experience, but more than a few of the similarly drugged friends who came with me did. I’ll try the new Weeknd. They’ve never really grabbed me, but they’ve never put me off either. I’ve always felt on the verge of being seduced. ** Sypha, Hi. Among the later novels, I think ‘Pussy King of the Pirates’ is probably the most fun, if you want to delve into them. Yeah, I think you have to be in the mood to be exhausted with Swans, or I mean you have to get into their particular style of exhausting listeners, or something. ** Robert-nyc, Hi, Robert! Really, really nice to see you! I’ve never been to Disney World or to any of those Florida-based parks. It’s a massive hole in my Disney theme park fascination. When I was in high school and early college, it was a fairly common thing for guys and gals at my schools to take summer jobs working at Disneyland. They did have wild stories, more prank- and drug-oriented than sexual, but I can’t remember any this morning. I’m very good. We’ll probably be looking for a venue to show ‘LCTG’ in NYC pretty soon, or rather our producers will. Yeah, hang out more often if you can and feel like it. That would be nice. I hope you’re good, and you sound good. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Flamingo Land looks totally charming. I didn’t know about it. I’ll pen it in for a future theme park road trip. ** Postitbreakup, Hi, Josh. Thanks! There’s a scene in the next film that Zac and I are going to make that’s set in an amusement park. Maybe in Parc Asterix, but we’ll see. I don’t know those rides you mentioned, I don’t think. I only know the So. Cal, Paris, and semi-know the Tokyo parks. There are some pretty decent books on Disney’s art that have a good amount of stuff about Disneyland and its making, etc. in them. Good to see you! ** Misanthrope, Well, with the name LPS, he would have to be a funny guy, or, otherwise, he’d be raw meat for bullies. Thanks for the update about the mom thing. Sounds as complicated and stressful as ever, albeit closer to some kind of conclusion at least. That’s all it takes to be evil? Huh. That just sounds like ‘jerk’. I don’t even know who two those lads you mentioned are. I assume they must be comely and all of that. ** Kyler, Hi, Mr. K. I think it was just called Skyway. No, wait, when you were going from Fantasyland to Tomorrowland, it was called Skyway to Tomorrowland, and vice versa. Not an imaginative title. How’s it, bud? ** Okay. I’m presenting you with another gig of music I’ve been into lately for your auditory and, in some cases, visual perusal, and I hope your experiences in its regard are fruitful in some manner or other. Also, do get on H’s kind offer if you fit the bill and want some awesome free books. See you tomorrow.