taking a stab

The Stabs are hypothalamaic overdrive ecstatic doom punk in the finest Australian tradition. I suspect these miscreants stole guitars because they heard they are better sources for feedback than screaming into burning trashcans. Excellent music for sneering unnoticed at coeds while on a cross-campus walk to check out a J.G Ballard (RIP) book from the library. Dirt, courtesy of the fine fans of ongakubaka.

Elad Love Affair dealt in a more contained form of catharsis rock on this consciously titled album A Woman Gives Birth to a Gun and it Stabs Her (listen), delivered in female voice backed by a bunch of (I'm guessing) dudes that can likely jam in odd time signatures. It is overwrought in every aspect, she sings too much and with too much umph and urgh, they play too much on too many parts in a song too bifurcated to be a song anymore, and it is in this excess of excesses I find this to be kinda beautiful. Why hit an easy target when you can aim at the moon in hopes of shooting it down?

Arlo's Stab the Unstoppable Hero (listen) might be one of the only non-emo-gibberish albums on lala with "stab" in the title. Instead, it is a boundless power pop, a plywood ramp from which a thousand summer BMX's fly, not for stunt but to simply get airborne.

Working Title - Arlo

beneath the valley of the ultra blogs

I don't have any idea what is going on at 2 trombones and a crossbow, but I like it. Behold this video by Trio, possibly the best band in the world, they posted there over the weekend.



Rock this fusion-slow-jam-rap-adelic-mix "Music Kaleidoscope" by Karriem Riggins posted by PUT ME ON IT

Blog surfing like this is akin to butterfly hunting. I don't know what I'm going to get, but I generally know where the good butterflies are.

Horaţiu Rădulescu

Horaţiu Rădulescu, "Iubiri" from AnaBlog. The description and reprint of the liner notes on the blog will give you all the necessary data on this 46 minute bout of swelling, undulating Aurora borealis action, but featured throughout are the high whines and loon calls of the composer's sound icon, the harp of a piano turned on its side, played by running rosined nylon cords against the strings to make sustained sounds. I was once an ardent supporter of prepared piano (in brief: placing things on the and between the strings of a piano to get percussive effects) and playing around under the hood of a grand piano, but as I've grown away from being a categorical upstart, I find the pieces tend toward novelty over invention. This however, is action born of necessity, in fact it is the rattly percussion that attempts to take away from the solar flare action of the sound icon.

His Clepsydra, also discussed in depth on AnaBlog socred for an elephant herd of these instruments - imagine witnessing a staging of 16 upturned pianos being ardently flossed by earnest music students trying to figure all this out - is better illustrator of this instrument's capabilities. It sounds like an epic Slinky battle at first, and almost lost me until about 7 minutes in where the piece gives way to stretches and creaks and moans and overtones from the relentlessly caressed instruments. It is the sound of the swamp, the murmur of the city, the hum of Everything. Too much is happening to accurately discern a single sound; all you get is the occasional event bobbing up out of the surface before going back under. One submits to the enormity of it all and is helpless to do anything but watch it grow and hope/fear that that the whole thing goes supernova by the end.

Review of Restless Nights: Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati

Restless Nights: Selected Stories of Dino Buzzati by Dino Buzzati

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book was a lot of fun. In this collection of micro-stories - most lasting only a couple of pages - Dino Buzzati comes off as the visiting writer at some liberal arts college in the fourth dimension. Focused more on architecture than character, many of the stories involve the fabric of reality elongating, telescoping in and out, collapsing on itself and yet, he does this in an immediately readable and rather fun way. His protagonists often find themselves dumbfounded by the twists of time and happenstance and forced to roll with the weirdness, which is pretty much all we can do in any situation.



This is the only thing of his that I've read but I'm curious to see if he can maintain the Fibonacci scaffolding to support this kind of bent cosmology in a larger work.


View all my reviews.

game

Bonny Prince Billy's new album Beware was my purchase for Record Store Day. My daughter and I walked down to the local and she played around with office supplies atop a desk in the corner and with the cat that hangs out in there. Once I we went down there on an extension of our dog walk and they let us bring the dog in. It was like I was in Portland or Austin or one of those insufferably cool places you hear about. Except we are not those places, we are cool in differing ways.

My daughter looked at the CD cover and proclaimed with incredulousness "You bought a CD with an ugly guy on the cover??" but having witnessed Sweet William milling around the bar before a gig, the ugly guy has game. Once at the coffee shop, the barista saw my BPB shirt and said he was hitting on her in the shop before that show. "I told him to hang around a while, that I got off at 8, but he left because someone had promised to give him a massage before the show. Too bad, I woudl've totally given it up." Mind you this is not a barista with which I have a social relationship; this was the first time she said more to me than "Dark, Medium, or Mild" but it is in that way that this place is cool. People will tell you things.

I have not actually given Beware a proper listen because listening to music on physical media is kind of a pain in the ass to me now. I gotta load it on my computer, plug in my this, do that... It was like the one time at an apartment in Redmond, Washington I played an album for the first time from the 4K of albums I'd moved across country with nearly six months earlier. After rifling through the records (I hadn't gotten around to alphabetizing them even) to find Hot Rocks just to listen to "Angie" we deemed this an ordeal. "Who needs it?" Keep in mind there weren't even iPods then.

So, maybe out of guilt, I'm uploading Beware into iTunes to put it on my phone to listen to it while I walk the dog, and in illustrative pathetic fallacy, my laptop is taking forever to do it. I synced my iPhone to my work computer he other day so now its going to take extra forever to get this show on the road, but like a wax cylinder or player piano enthusiast, I am weirdly committed. His "alas poor Yorrick" skull sits trapped in darkness on the couch next to me. The dog is pacing, thinking this walk will never come, but I defiantly click "Erase and Sync" stubborn as a guy playing golf on a rainy Christmas morning.

OK, iTunes wants to take my apps off, and the dog has resorted to chewing on a squeaky toy in her cage. Two iPhone ads have cycled through, mocking me. Abort. One of these days I'll pop this thing into whatever arcane device will play it.

Edit: Technology wins! On the walk I remembered I have Simplify installed on my iPhone and laptop, allowing me to stream music from the latter to the former without it being loaded thereon. So I did get to listen to it. I like it, though I find it a little hokey, self-absorbed, and convoluted, not unlike the process I went through to experience it.

classic albums reimagined as Penguin Classics

and there's more... via Largehearted Boy

it only takes a minute, girl

Tavares - Live at the Roxy 1977 (at Wolfgang's Concert vault). There should be a lot more live disco bootlegs in the world. This one will make you wanna shout "MY NAME IS BROTHER POOCH! AND I'M A SCORPIO!" Even if you aren't.