dream + dream music

I had a dream last night that I was sitting in some university room - tile floors, bad lighting, and elaborate windowsill treatments - with a number of other guys waiting for something to happen, like in a work way; we had to wait until something finished before we could start doing whatever it was we were there to do. In the meantime, one of the guys there started singing something that wasn't a blues song but registered as such in the dream. There was a computer in the room that has this corny hippie graphic of a folk-art mermaid, sitting in a field, and while he was singing, we noticed that when we touched parts of the picture, it would change, and we did so until the mermaid turned into an equally corny guitar. Everybody was laughing and carrying on and slowly we got around to doing what we were there to do; not in an abrupt "get back to work" way but gradually slid into it.

Robert Pete Williams - s/t (listen) The thing I like best about the blues is the same thing I like best about dreams: subtlety.

Rub Me Until My Love Comes Dow...

Jake Berry - Brambu Derzi, Book Four, Part Two (9th Street labs) Jake Berry is a poet/songwriter/backwoods-but-in-town visionary from Florence, AL that I used to roll with (via mail, but we did meet once, which is another story) in the cassette culture underground in the late 80s ; supposedly there is a tape of me singing songs while washing dishes on his label, but really, it's OK if it no longer exists. Bramzu Drezi was a body of work he was exploring back then, and thankfully it has made it through the ether into the curatorial arms of YouTube.



Brian Harnetty & Bonnie "Prince" Billy - “Some Glad Day” I just found out about this, and wholeheartedly approve. One of my favorite albums ever is the similarly spectral Get the Fuck on Jolly, a live companion to Get on Jolly, a candlelit Ouija board session of a record between Bonnie "Prince" Billy and members of the Dirty Three, and this, featuring his highness and Ohio rustic alchemist Brian Harnetty (with whose work I will be becoming familiar) has the same fingerprints of the Godhead all over it. Children, bear witness!



Here is another - "Sleeping in the Driveway." They are both to be included on a forthcoming album Silent City on Atavastic. This concludes this press release rehash.

Sleeping in the Driveway from Brian Harnetty on Vimeo.

tired of listening to gossip

Various Artists - Natures Mortes - Still Lives (listen) More compilations should open with "Mr. Clarinet" by the Birthday Party. Not all of them; that would be tiresome. The song might become the new "Hallelujah" and no one wants that.

Mr Clarinet - The Birthday Par...

This little record is just the ticket. I wanted to hear some scurrying bleak new wavey things to brighten my afternoon - they work by absorbing darkness like cocky little sponges. E.g. the previously unmentioned (by practically everyone) Psychotik Tanks.

Let’s Have A Party - The Psych...

As a bonus, it has one of my favorite hum-around obscurities - Bauhaus covering John Cale's equally obscure "Rose Garden Funeral of Sores." Really, I have loved this wisp of a tune since high school, and sometimes sing it in the car by myself, and twenty years going, I still don't really know all the words. This poetic bit

Virgin Mary was tired
so tired
tired of listening to gossip
gossip and complaints
that came from next door

is more lyric than that bass line of a song can support.

Rose Garden Funeral Of Sores -...

I love how songs in this style and time are less played than they are suffered. The drums don't really fit the bass and neither fits the peculiar way the guitar player misplays his or her guitar and the singer is so unlovably unloveable against all of it. Candles snuffed, things choked back. Bats. Vague notions of Eastern Europe creeping into our hot Louisiana suburban teenage lives. Love this stuff in precisely this dose.

stock reduction

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stimmung (Copenhagen version) - I'm listening to this again this morning with higher volume and fresher ears. Last night I found it to be a seance bridging the spheres; in the light of morning, it primarily sounds like a circle of people going eeeeooooowwwwmm-weeeema-whoaaaaaama-wooooooooncha over and over, like what beam-down crew from the Enterprise would hear while spying on an alien ritual from behind a paper-mâché boulder.

Perhaps he could have scored a companion piece for six kids amusing themselves by singing into rotary fans.

Like everything I've heard by Stockhausen (admittedly just a fraction of his compositions), it is interesting from a phenomenological and conceptual standpoint, and I'm sure makes for great theater live, but just listening to it is not particularly moving. Is that the deal? I know you Stockhausen obsessives are out there, reading this from your Google alert; point me to the piece that will make me a believer.

library haul, oblivion edition

It has been ages since I did a "library haul" post, but I was having such a great library outing. I immediately spotted on the New Fiction shelf Wells Tower's new book of stories Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned that I've been really wanting to read (plus, what a name - Wells Tower... a story in itself) and found a two-DVD set of Stan Brakhage experimental films I'd never thought to look for there - as huge a Brakhage fan I am, I've only seen most of these on YouTube and sharp detail is the key with Brakhage. These three CD's caught my eye on the way out the door.

Ned Rorem - Hearing - I really want to like Ned Rorem; the idea of high parlor art, songs of simple form but high mindedness sung for appreciative listeners is better than the reality for this listener. I should just accept that I am a brute and move on.

Brian Auger's Oblivion Express - s/t - Especially since putting on this most arch disc of hard rock/prog/fusion gave me that "Now that's more like it!" feeling. I popped this on for the ride from the library to the pool and wished I was in enough to put this on the pool sound system. This kind of overblown excess rock is exactly what I want to hear echoing over the lukewarm chlorine expanse. I wanna see a line of little kids in goggles do infinite cannonballs during the knucklehead guitar riffs, earnest dad's swim another lap against the vaguely sinister organ.

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Stimmung (Copenhagen version) - Stockhausen is a composer whose biography I know better than his music. Most CD's of his work i've come across focus on his piano pieces, which are, well, nice modern-y piano pieces but nothing over which I get too fired up. Now this, a veritable seance of slowly unfolding vocal overtones (more details), is a different thing altogether. So human and yet so supernatural, an at-once pragmatic and metaphysical solution for a basic question of art: what can we do now? We can do things like this.

Radiohead's "Black Star"

spellbindingly covered by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings at Bonnaroo 2007



Brought to my attention by longstanding member of the singer-songwriter jihad Dorothy LeBlanc. When is Gillian Welch gonna get it together and record a new album? I'll take a live cover record if it comes out anything like this.

the heart likes the devil

At the chalk wall in the LSU Design Building, Maya stands unafraid of the baby-eating chicken.



I think I'm going to get t-shirts made of her two contributions: "Dream, slug, dream" and the ominously titled "The heart likes the devil for some odd reason; the mother doesn't approve."

100 words on Heat death of the universe

I was clicking and landed on the coolest-sounding Wikipedia page: Heat death of the universe. It explains in its coy dry Wiki way that this would be when the pervasive engine of the universe would run down, when no more energy is transferred and thereby all life (including everything non-living) is thereby unsustainable. The universe will become Nietzche’s last man, for whom nothing great is possible, apathetic, incapable of dreams because finality had been achieved. The universe will be a man standing alone in a universe that is himself that no longer functionally exists. Or something like that. Cool, though.

(image of William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (or Lord Kelvin), the happy fellow that came up with the concept of heat death of the universe, as well as helping to quantify absolute zero, which I found myself trying to explain the other day)