Showing posts with label rock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rock. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Radi0 Sh0ck Rocks the Block Smock!

Thursday, June 25, 2009
NOISE! 2009 in NYC

I couldn’t find the Ontological Theater. It’s inside a church, St. Mark’s Church I think, up formaldehyde stairs, past pale yellow and green walls covered with detailed signs. At the top, there is a black box and seats dedicated to being.

Which of the masochistic critics, at the beginning of the video game’s rise in the 1980’s from cultural leaving to entertainment overlord, would (or did; if so, I’d like their names…for a list of some kind) have predicted that the sounds and life-modes of the gamers would one day come to influence, and even structure Avant-Garde music?

Here comes RADIO SHOCK! One man, a cheap guitar, a tiny amp, and a table covered with gadgetry. Everything bares the mark, sometimes subtly, other times full force, of day-glow duct tape. It’s one voice on one night: one performance under a single white light. I was reminded of a teenage boy alone in a basement, gaming his way to private glory, in part because Radio Shock actually plays a Nintendo Gameboy as an instrument, and also because it incites emotional memory in me. At one time, before my parents, determined to quell a bout of semi-psychotic behavior, took my Super Nintendo away, I was that very boy. I relished long nights, weekends, and even weeks compiling memories from the rapid changes in flickering lights. I learned I had to push through the frustration I felt at repetitive movement in order to see the screen that said I had succeeded. In some sense, Radio Shock is the embodiment of the aftershock. After I was done looking at being successful, I would inevitably grow even more frustrated that I had done so much for so little. Then I would play more video games, screaming, “This is BULLSHIT” in my head. And I was never very good at them. Radio Shock is like all of that: obsessive, squirming, alone, screaming bloody murder but not expecting to be heard. Imagine a sentient android child set adrift on a spacecraft headed for deep space by a fearful humanity trying desperately to protect itself from its own creation. Imagine that child sing-songing to itself for all eternity with no one to listen.

The only real qualifier for being a field operative in the Avant-Garde is that one’s art must incite in those partaking of it the feeling or memory of newness. There is nothing new about any of the compartments of Radio Shock. All of the instruments come from garage sales, all of the songs come from the existential clutter in the mind that causes one to periodically jerk out of early sleep and scream “SPACE;” it’s all basically punk rock. But what spunk! (author’s note: what’s punk? Get it?) It was simply impossible to take myself seriously when I caught myself thinking, the way one catches one’s dog vindictively masturbating with one’s favorite golf shoes – feelings of shock and awe and horror and total embarrassment – that I’d heard any of this before. Radio Shock is an insane set of variations on an insane theme, and no one knows exactly what or why that theme is, but we’re all sure it’s there and breathing heavily in the dark. I think I’ve heard it all before? Well take this, I! Have I ever heard anything before? I cannot have. For the sense of NEW surrounding Radio Shock is palpable as the one I can remember surrounding the listening to Melt Banana I did in my parents kitchen: equally cynical, and convinced of the superiority of the listen, not the art.

The New doesn’t reside in the Text; the New resides in the Textee, periodically in the Textor, and in the country on weekends. The Avant-Garde therefore must bare the stupid burden of continual self-definition, a very popular Catch-22. It is also in the unenviable position of making sense of all the stupid crap in the rest of our lives. Truly, it must be at least revelatory, if not mind-blowing, to some of you that the Nintendo Gameboy can be an instrument of Sense and Wonder and Joy. But without that crap, I think we would all experience some kind of transcendent, boundless spiritual unity. Nothing new about that. It’s where we come from and we have access to it whenever we want. Great Art is all about giving us that access. Avant-Garde art is about sneaking in the back door, knowing no one will see, and donating friendly or fiendly reminders that there’s a big, transcendent universe busily transcending in the great out and about of the Hodge Podge.

Hodge that Podge! And learn more about the rock of Radi0 Sc0ck at www.radioshock.org

Sunday, June 28, 2009

A Report From the Field

Friday Night
The Wreck Room
Bushwick, Brooklyn
The band is Alien Whale
Alien Whale is played by Matt Mottel (Talibam!), Colin Langenus (ex-USAISAMONSTER), Nick (Necking)


There’s something inside my body that seems to prevent me from swimming like a whale. I think it would be like learning foreign grammar or belly dancing: teaching the hips something unexpected…I’d have to teach my hips not to exist. That’s impossible of course, but the humans in Alien Whale seem to have it done with the gusto of a rock fall.

1 hour back.
I’m bunched up, my chest one-third it’s usual size, on a desolate night-street near the basement of the bar in Fight Club. Somewhere nearby a plane is taking off unheard. I’m pressed by the ceiling of a maroon Dodge Caravan onto seventeen city-blocks worth of undelivered Vice Magazines. Traffic hisses outside and peace makes rounds like a nurse in the form of a pipe.

Periodically, I catch myself looking for snakes.

2 hours later.
I saw an alien whale
It spoke with itself without remembering
and then became a normal man

1.5 hours before.
Goddamn these men have their shit together. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m reaching for stars through a window. My hands have gone numb and I can’t feel the glass. Distribution? Income differential? Where, how, who to sign? I’m looking for signs and they’re goosing me like a flock of angry bats. Max Hodes got awful quiet, and then it all turned red.

It was normal social deference. I was ignoring the feeling of being tested. You know the average running-away-from-home-into-a-brick-wall feeling. It happens to most of you every day. It happens to me too. It’s probably just the color of the bricks becoming more and more interesting, but everything takes on a red hue and I can’t seem to breath enough, nor really take a breath. Time has stopped being behind me (so I know that the drugs have really kicked in. That’s still how I think sometimes: “the drugs,” as if they were a crowd of locals angry that I killed their god.) I forget my feet, loose my face running into a crowd ahead, and quietly rip my shirt open whimpering for sobriety to come back to the farm, like a dog missing its master.

“I wish I was having your experience.” Says Matt. He’s in the pack and misses no master.

Words are bones. These words are mostly a protuberant skull and hundreds of massive vertebrae. This could be the word of God. All experience is glorious, worthy, radiant, and to be shared. I think I’ve sown my lips shut. How would it be if I were instead a pressure cooker preparing to blow?

Only there’s no preparation. There’s no mind. There’s splitting open and there’s melting and there’s crisping in the hot sun and there’s the Ausberger’s squeeze machine and there’s the Rainbow Bridge, one hundred thousand miles long.

I don’t think about the whales. I’ve loved them all, humpback’s most of all, since I was conscious. I sanctified my love for cetations, the greatest of all creatures, with a serious of National Geographic documentaries on behavior. Breaching, diving, singing, breathing. Thereby, I found my spirit guide when I was six years old. And so I worshipped Moby Dick, the hero of whales, and I sang, and I held my breath under water.

0.5 hours thereafter.
One foot in front of the other. I’m silent, drunk in a tunnel, gulping down dirty water. Not tripping, but high enough to view everything as being utterly surreal. There’s a crowd of people who are not next to me. There’s one sadly fascist woman guarding the door, demanding X’s on my hands, or retribution in the form of $5. Her game is Sad Resolution. Not playing, not paying, not getting paid. She’s a volunteer and doesn’t see the use. She has beautiful lips.

A desert island ties off the room and there are mirrors behind me. Music schism and shining all over. Oh what will become of me Sad Shark says to Inflatable Girl. Nothing investigated so thoroughly as this journal. A sad bit of wisdom…forthcoming. Music from the PA: distant thuds timed oddly with broken kneecap salad. No windows or walls to speak of. Flattened rest-of-space-for-eternity. Just imagine that all space in the third, fourth, and fifth dimensions was compressed into a cube measuring 20x20x12 and that you reside at the very center, covered in musicians who have their shit together more than you ever thought you wanted to. One the one hand, its like swimming in an orgy of slugs. On many hands, it’s like being in school: like a punch to the heart.

The room says “Caught in a Trap” in the fine print.

The ground reflects the sky above like a sheet of ice. Harsh Captain of the Nazi Guard voices hiss and blow messages of exultant hatred. Get back you devils.

Then the DJ drops the beat. GOOD GOD! FUNK IS THE WAY OUT! EVEN ZAPPA-LEVEL FUNK BUGGERY DOES THE TRICK!

Pawn takes bishop; chatter takes clarity.

Sad and misfortunate weakness, says the weak, to be the showman. That’s me.

Twenty minutes have gone by.
Note #1, is like an ice pick to the forehead.

Freakish paranoia is as one leads oneself through a rocky tunnel.

I think I’ll call this “Reports From the Field.”

Greater sensations of floating. This is about suspension, off world in a greater way…but first! There are choices to be made. Feed back! I’m jamming back. Not I but WE! WE WE WE! Fusion ritual! Park! OUT OF THE PARK! Galactic tribunal to iron horses. Fireside chats with dad about venereal disease. Fuzzy disturbance in wave emissions of standing water. Rise feather light. Themassivemovements of a whale sped up, from human perspective, in the temporal perception of the slowly decaying beast. Coming to a rest can take the bat of a sun’s eyelid. My poor Yankee heart doesn’t know how to cope with riding into a dream like thunder.

AVAST ye great nothing! Stand astern may I yet be done with you in some more violent fashion. Here my call! THIS IS THE RIGHT TIME.

Almost. Its arrival is nigh. AND THERE’S NO PREPARRING YOUSELF. YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF IN THE END-TIMES OR THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING FAR MORE MONSTROUS AND DOWN!

Time. Now playing on me a dream of doubt repeating, like a string of stamps laid over one another.

JUMP! LEAP! STOMP AROUND FOR JOYE! In transient space and moral conflict, jump these bones out of contraction. Breath perfumed steel and the tarnish of ancient blades.

Could Colin Langenus be the next Hendrix?

A horde of excuses wanders in and settles into my lap. I take them in and feed them, and keep them as my own. What they came in for, I no longer remember.

They are playing the “I’m Missing It Blues.”

I woke up this mo’nin,
Tim had passed me by.
I woke up this mo’nin,
Time had passed me by.
But I said, “Time you Keep On faster.”
As I watched her flying by.

But wait! There’s hope for you yet!
But wait! There are no easy answers!

Slap me out lordy slap me out. Lift me down from atop this down n’ out. Bear my body. Shout! O lordy.
O
O
O
O
O
O…
Lordy.

Pull the string. The cow says the sign says “This way to the jam.” This is your time, if you want it.

Discord closes doors. Hit them running with the Jam or you fall away and produce a racket like this: baby birds pulling themselves back to the nest by the points of their soft beaks. Sometimes we’re lost. It can be like meeting long, lost family in a rotating restaurant. Togetherness comes on like a symptom as the lights go down. Wrenched gut, vomiting, shitting myself, bleeding out the ears.

The moral of the story is that one can give, give, give. “The love you take is equal to the love you make.” – the Beatles
Therefore, the new golden rule must be: make
















love!


Now, put them on the same page.

End music. End scene.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

NO MORE FOREVER: a eulogy for the USA Is A Monster

Through vacant caverns, taught highways, vast corridors of empty sky; wading in the flotsam of the open-sewer bars that sprout like pustules on the forehead of this American land; they were half-stack turtles, Taurus-pedal falcons, spare-change composers telling stories of the place in space/time they had cornered. These days, the high-desert wind blows through the couplings of radio towers and windmill generators. Rivers run black or red or not at all. The cities of the past and the cities of the future bare witness to a temporal expanse as craggy and unsure as a slice of brown bread on the branch of a high tree. And from the spiraling regurgitations of one cerebral cortex, to the story of a capsized canoe off the coast of isolationist Japan, two psychedelic warriors wrote a dream while staring out the window of a blazing wan.

I met Tom and Colin in the Rec Hall at Rowe Camp and Conference Center in late July 2002. They had been playing as the U$AISAMONSTER for one year or more. I didn’t meet their bodies that day, but I touched their souls through a spiky slice of loudness poetry. “Trippa Bobippa” blasted-off the top of my skull and made manic love to my corpus callosum. I sat quivering and suppressing questions. My skin melted. The experience fulfilled a deep wish, like a myth retold by firelight at exactly the right time. It was music that emerged from my heart, simultaneously living above and below my body, and as complex and terrorizing as a rediscovered bottle of my mother’s ancient milk. Oh the taste! Sweet almond! Human liver paté!

At that minute, the band was only Colin and Tom. They had emerged newly streamlined from a fire tribe 200 deep, like a dog shaved to become a seal. Who knows how many people were actually in that band of “ye olde?” How many records did they release? And when? 1000? 10,000 years ago? I know the “truth,” because I visited their website, which has the answers to these and other exciting questions listed with bullet points. However, to my mind, it’s better to let the tower of their myth stand: a roving band of noise pirates tromping on highways paved by Jimi Hendrix’s guitar acid, a full ship’s compliment nestled in an awkwardly landlocked house in the South Carolina woods. Anarcho-peace-punk-reality-punching-list-lighters were they. But by the power of starlight and arcane ritual, they flared like a match, and 200 ghosts become just 2.

Everyone got that? The band was huge! But the dream was small. Then the band was tiny! But the dreams were bigger than the plains.

Hey look! They’re waking up! Good gods what a mess. They’re totally soaked. Dripping and dropping all over Joshua Tree and married to a big brown van. They look up: two falcons in flight, one circling parallel to the other, both parallel to the earth. Shale crags and Joshua trees to the east and west. Rocky scrub sand rising between Colin’s toes and dancing in Tom’s moccasins. Coyote pushes play on a black box in a silver-lined road case. Sparkling red and green LED orbs switch places. The acetate tenses imperceptibly and the flux flies. Coyote licks the sand from the rollers. Two hundred feet away, houses are lost in the wobbling images of air and road dissolving in space.

Crumble! Spirit brothers sing to careening specks of iron.

Follow crumbled highways made of black stone. (They are issuing a command. Prepare thyself mortal; the things that may yet be require stern stuff.)

Swaths left open where once tall trees had grown. (Not condemning or condoning. There was love in those trees that died, like Bothans, to bring our love to you.)

Painted symbol marks the hidden place. (In our time of reverent modernity, we are mistaken when we believe all the markers of the past are cataloged and accounted for.)

Overgrown pile of robotic waste. (Just as in the future, when all we leave behind will be mysteriously disappearing. Who came before? Who is coming?)

DAH NAH! DAH NAH! (THE RIFF!)

2003. I’m in the Rec Hall again. I returned a CD-R wrapped in blue paper and chopped plastic to Kieran and mumbled my amazement. “Trippa Bobippa” was a roiling caravan of sausage sages flipping on their hot tin roof in 200-degree Moscow. And buttered! But CRUMBLE? The sad exhale of universal wisdom, body bottled, branded, beaten, barred from the inside by macho “reality,” but still shining it’s light through the window? Hell YES! You can’t be truth salesmen. The truth is not for sale. You have to stop buying the truth. Stop buying; start dying. Our only goal to break even? Just break. The crack is how the light gets in. Love love love.

And so I fell in love. I was in a tizzy. I grabbed Anna Meyer and ran howling mad in a whisper to the meager music rig in the Rug Room. Wheeeeeeeeeee are still alive. Still alive. Still alive. Still alive still alive still alive still alive still alive. Patient symbols. Patient symbols? I hummed the melody I remembered to myself. Being born? Melodies are inarchivable. They change everything about themselves every time, so I struggle to keep the love in my head. It’s just love. Just love. Just love. I can and will do everything to everything be everything. Finally! I got the damn guitar plugged in.

Slowly, miraculously, the gates of heaven parted and we rebirthed the first riff, wet and misshapen but beautiful and ours. Fifteen minutes it took me to get that far, and another five to synch up with Anna. How important it was to hit all the drums at once. How important it was to SLAM the last two hits. DAH NAH! And how joyous to play it over and over and over. Kieran walked in and I got all embarrassed because I had a crush on the song. Our intimate moment together was suddenly plain to see.

Colin was, for me, a new kind of guitar hero and a punk prophet. He poured forth riffs as the gods of the past poured forth the rivers. His guitar was an angelic choir turned up to ELEVEN. He wrote the truth as a rejection of itself, yet also as an affirmation of its purpose by creating text that demonstrates the imperfect self as a word set falling into its own psychotic dissonance. Acerbic and vitriolic words making out with a cliff face, foisted upon a moist ego and dogmatic evil: the rant became transcendent when he saw equal importance in the fragility of pure want and the need to destroy institutional oppression. “Glued to my mind, staring at a flame, dirt on my desk; playing that fast make my old broken bones ache. Riled and wild, rollercoaster runaway freight rails of endless steel bodies: slaughter highways. Fate born of nothing: my favorite subject? My favorite subject is me, plain or buttered.” AND! “All the world’s leaders must die.”

It’s hard to imagine a songwriter being more existential with less deliberation. Here is Colin flinging his ego bullshit into the air as one throws mud to the sky in celebration. The result of his catharsis is that a histrionic political credo about killing the world’s leaders actually seems sane after he temporarily destroys his vanity by exposing it to the light. I say temporarily because he is also wise enough, as demonstrated by the tone of his voice when he says “plain or buttered,” to know that light is also what makes vanity grow.

Please note that, for the sake of conjoining personal narrative with a testament to the band’s virtue, I am skipping effective descriptions of my favorite songs of the albums Wohaw and Sunset at the End of the Industrial Age. Since you asked, they are “Tecumseh” and “Sunset at the End of the Industrial Age.”

Northampton, at the house Kieran and Eli shared by the railroad tracks. In a few hours, Otto would be outside and I would try to be masculine while I shook his hand. You can’t ever take that shit back. Will was tenting in the back yard. What a perfect gathering. Hi Tom. I’m Colin. Oh shit. It’s okay. He had no shirt on. It was 800,000 degrees too hot and his torso was bronzing red, chest hair bleaching blond, scalp radiating something beyond my comprehension, blond dreadlocks as long as the River down his back, standing seven feet-tall. When I stand up just straight, my eyes met his nipples.

I was there to mix a Corndawg record. Rumor had it that I knew Pro Tools pretty good. I still had a crush on his band. A thirsty, brutal crush reset ablaze by a performance at Boston’s The Baseball Tavern; a show which should probably just go ahead and become legendary already. His favorite subject was him. I was there for free, sitting on pins and breathing-in hard in the heat of the pioneer valley. In a few minutes, I thought, I’ll be the pilgrim: a pioneer into a scene I’ve wanted to taste for so long. The gates of heaven opened and sight #1 was a pubic wishing fountain. I took a long drink of the water and tried to steal change with my tongue.

Do Not Read: (Algorithms: I jiggered this mix method from David Moulton’s book Total Recording. Put a sine-wave generator in an Aux track. Play the song and sweep the frequency of the generator down until you find the spot where it resonates best with the bass instrument playing the I. Multiply and divide by 2 repeatedly to make a table of frequency centers for the key of the song in all musical octaves. Do the same process for the fifth above the key. You will use these tables, for the key and the fifth above the key, to apply additive equalization to every track.

Apply VERY narrow boosts of 6-8 dB on the fifth and corresponding octaves, and 3-8 dB on the key and corresponding octaves. Apply to all instruments. A few general rules: it produces unfavorable timbre if one overlaps equal boosts of the same frequency on multiple tracks; the bass instrument wants the fifth accentuated far more than the key; vocals want very little of this treatment at all; avoid boosting so much you can hear a tone, unless you are one of those types. This technique is most appropriate for songs that do not modulate key (though one can always automate a DAW equalizer to compensate for modulation, doing do is doubly tedious, because one must, in addition to programming the proper simultaneous movement of an equalizer’s filters, generate a new table of roots and fifths for the new key), or songs that have recorded punk as fuck. Richer microphones and better recording techniques tend to like subtractive EQ for eliminating bad resonance, because, though it will compromise the complexity of recorded timbre, it does so to achieve a purer, more natural-sounding harmony. The goal of narrow-additive EQ is to, in essence, force the instruments in the tune to resonate more, and in key. This creates a recording that makes it’s studio-ness obvious. When EQ of this type is placed in a processing chain before compression, it creates a soft, harmonious, and highly listenable bed.)

That part you didn’t read explains how I came to mix Space Programs. But I’m getting ahead of myself. All these words and I haven’t properly spoken about why anyone should care.

The USAISAMONSTER is the greatest band ever. I’m not writing ironically, sarcastically, or hyperbolically. I don’t believe in objectivity, and I don’t claim to fully understand the band. I haven’t listened to all their songs (all of Weedblood for example), and I don’t believe that they are as virtuous or majestic or brilliant or dangerous or prolific or worthy of the title I’m bestowing as Springsteen, U2, the Beatles, the Swans, Ray Charles, Public enemy, Irving Berlin, or Beethoven. But fuck all that. This is the letter of a true believer. “Greatest” isn’t a quality. It is the sensation of love objection. Though it is related, it is not dependant on greatness.

Not to discount the value of greatness; they were nearly Great. The band’s reach was world wide (they went around the world ten times as total unknowns. As I write this, they touring Europe to give thanks for years of exchange, and to play the six new songs from their upcoming last record), their music incomparable and incompatible, their art always in progress and never mastered. Sometimes they shut their third eye and hung a mirror inside the lid, gazing longingly at a psychotic hot mess of grizzly bears on Technicolor swing sets. Other times they opened the cover of a leather-bound America and set out in the field, like wise men teaching us to see the spirit of the land, to find water, to remember Polly Watson, or rekindle the fires of the Yurok. They played guitars, feet-keys, drums and voices with the same functions, same purpose of action, but shifting clarity. The drums could carry melody, and the guitar might make the beat. The tension of the band reaching beyond the limits of our imaginations and never perfecting its art is great in and of itself. The only thing actually stopping the band from greatness was a lack of largess, and one cannot blame a band so authentically weird for not gripping the attention of the masses.

The virtue of the USAISAMONSTER, the reason that I love them so, is that they played music of the fringe. But I’m talking about the fringe on a great jacket, not the fringe of society. This fringe originates in Pre-European America, it is fluid, in love with gravity, absolutely not austere, opposed to nothing, there to share but hard to come by, pleasing to those against seizing, far from the mainlines but linked to the common thread: a true alternative to the styles we know and understand. USA ISA posed a challenge to everybody, never got it exactly right, never entirely beautiful, and never successfully ugly. They were completely alive. They belonged to the listener, but were free to all. You and USA ISA cohabitated with art in progress. You lived beyond chance – there was no chance for us – but lived for love. Our only goal: to break even. Born in total love, they were young gods.

But if you need further proof, consider the following. The band wrote “No More Forever,” which is comprised of what Wagner and Angus Young once agreed is nothing less than the greatest riff ever written.

Now is when I bring up Space Programs. Specifically, I want to talk about the pinnacle of Tom’s songwriting as it has been brought to bear on record thus far&. The song “Tulsa” not only epitomizes the focal point of all his songs, the recitation of obscure histories as keys to a Tolkien-inspired paradise, it uses avant-garde music as an allegory for it’s dissection and reassembly of the concept of knowledge. (Whoa.) Tom relates three stories in a single, deliberate narrative. There is no beginning to the story because he starts by saying “I have a friend in Tulsa, OK.” which tells the listener that the story is already in progress. With his choice of synthesizer sounds and their chipper inflections, he sets himself up as a Wise Man bestowing the fruit of his years on eager pupils, avoiding cliché by relating his story in the casual manner of one telling an anecdote over a kitchen card game.

The last time he was there, his friend, a Muskogee Creek woman at a basement rock show, made a fire and discussed paranormal phenomena, stimulating his imagination, keeping him from sleep. Through the night he lay awake, recalling her grandfather cursing white men, hearing distant women laugh, his eyes locked on a hanging photograph. The picture was of Mose Wiley, and Tom stayed awake reading an article in which the man described the way of life he knew as a youth, and that is now mostly forgotten. Tom sings his story over a repeating synth/guitar counterpoint. The song affects astonishment because it is not about its product, but with its strident presentation is clearly worth the telling. It is about knowing, but not knowing what for. It operates without the guiding Capitalist principle that there is value inherent in knowledge. Value is connected with Want as a defining attribute of the ability to produce. What Tom deliberately leaves out is what a narrative like this one is supposed to produce: the Truth. The significance of knowledge, Tom suggests, is just beyond comprehension, because it only exists when we cease dividing it into categories like Truth or Of Value. Without these categories, knowledge is too vast for humans. Then Tom gives us a mantra. “Sometime, I’m sure; I’m really quite sure that the ob-scure images have a great significance. Ice burg tip, the hull of the ship: there’s an awful lot of love that’s got to make a little difference.” We can’t rely on our knowledge, he says. The Wisdom of the Wise Man is that we must allow our knowledge the freedom not to do, but to let love make the difference, because it is all that ever has. There is no end to the story, just the massive unfolding of implication.

Career Retrospective!: Man is the Bastard on mushrooms instead of crack; psychedelic punks play squealing anti-groove madness; psychobabble and Black Elk Speaks; the call of the wind and the voice of the water; strong and wise like a lesson, and it’s hard to listen; vision farther than far; no-wave nonsense; then I mixed Space Programs (what a fucking blast); the uber-rawk experience; double the size, double the fun; pieces of timber visible from the ice-bridge; prog as fuck; chanting chanteuse; flower child playing orca chorus; monitor-lizard king on speed; the wise man’s Staff of the Punx; story songs written by distortion; drunken brawl on the deep sea trawl; genre is useless; combos are useless; live sights; recorded slights. They are dead in the future. They will die no more forever.

I’ve never written a eulogy before. I don’t think, now that I’m tits-deep in this one, that they are very useful. I’m not listening to this bald, bedecked-in-black jackass with the tears anymore. I’m quietly remembering myself and my loved one, and what I’d like to remember but don’t, and also what I’m going to remember one day, but don’t right now. I made the whole thing up. But it really happened. My favorite subject is me, plain or buttered.

I’m dry as a bone. The rock at the headland of Calypso’s island is stained white under the salt of my tears. I love you I’ll miss you. And thanks to you, I’ll keep up the fight. I’ll see the stars when my eyes stop at the orange sky. I’ll see the wave of darkness running with wolves on the highway when the western power fails. I’ll use my third eye as a mirror to signal the jet ways: it’s time to be hawks again. I will remember Tecumseh, Joseph, the Okeepa, the manatee, the vipers and snipers in the corner shoveling shit. The love. Forever.

The Usaisamonster releases records through Load Records.
http://www.loadrecords.com/bands/usaisamonster.html
http://usaisamonster.net/
http://www.myspace.com/usaisamonster

Sunday, March 15, 2009

The Last Scion PART 1

On February 28, 2009, the Scion car company threw a free metal fest in Atlanta, GA. This is the story of my journey there and back.

TRAIN

I awoke when the ground gave way. I was about to die. The voice in the ceiling garbled something assuring and I ate deference like a prisoner eats breakfast. It was mid-afternoon and the sun set above our heads as our plane descended into the murk over Atlanta. The clouds were so dark they looked like pavement. The land looked like Hell: the way the Land of Oz would look if it were on the north Jersey shore. The air above the blackened buildings was dust orange and seemed to breath. Even the tallest building, a black spike with an orange tip, looked like a hovel in the rain. It was worse than the airport, where even the walls shout at you and the ground speaks in tongues wagging in swallowing brown throats. Buy! Spend! Purchase! Just a friendly reminder. The rain stuck to my skin and congregated in the interstitial space of my clothing. This is the kind of town that makes you suit up to forget why.

Thankfully, I had dressed myself in Los Angeles. I had come to Atlanta to find meaning in the Scion metal fest by investigating the crafts of some thirty or so underground heavy metal bands. Among these were some of metal’s most revered artists. What did their audiences hear, and how did those explanations stack up against what the bands’ claimed they were trying to say? I wanted to find artistic merit in music that I loved because I believe that art is a high and beautiful calling. More and more I have come to regard myself as immature and small in spirit for my devotion to an art form that seems to espouse anti-intellectualism, nihilism, and pain. I can invent or name a nearly endless stream of value for the bands that I love, but this is because I so badly want to continue loving it. Most of the people I meet tell me that I am allowed to love that which I find appealing just ‘cause. But I say that’s not enough, and it does a disservice to the world to appreciate art for intentions or effects it does not have. Clear and good intentions, executions, and effects are a rare luxury in art only because we allow them to be. We are the audience, the consumer, the hypnotized, the apathetic, the passionate, the moved, the yearning, the spiteful, the hated, the joyous, the exulted, the godly, the low, the discerning, the sluts, the unseeing, the microscopic eyes and ears watching and hearing the wisdom of the mouths.

I stepped off the plane and walked for fifty miles. When I was finished, I got on a plane and returned to LA.

When I debarked the plane, I went into the first in series of brown and white throats made of howling mad adults. I hoisted my chest and prepared my pack for an exquisite and uncomfortably long journey. I knew no one and was staying nowhere. My plan was to drift towards the Masquerade (where the fest was to take place the following day) and discuss metal, life, and everything with the people in between. I managed to get a hundred feet from my flying tube when I spotted a gang of obvious outsiders. They were five men with varyingly average builds and short hair. The clumped together and would occasionally look at the tallest one, who was consumed with a few sheets of paper, and then stare around the terminal with five-percent interest. One of them dressed like an Appalachian mountain guide circa 1926. One had a familiar-looking tattoo on the front of his neck. I walked past without recognizing the group as being the band Converge.

Fifteen minutes later we were walking together in the halls. Thinking they were just cross-country metal heads looking to riot their fandom, I approached them. Then the way they flocked told me that these were not just fans. I poked my head into their lives like a gopher.

“Hey uh…” I asked the tall one, lowering my voice artificially and trying to minimize their slightly hostile eye-gestures, “…are you in a band?”

“No. I manage a band. These guys,” he said, throwing his thumb to the rear.

“Oh yeah? Who are these guys,” I said, with apparent interest.

“Converge.”

“THAT’S FUCKING CONVERGE?” I said, to everybody in the airport.

Converge is not a band of mainstream celebrities, but they are from Boston and have been dusky legends in all the underground music communities in which I’ve ever trafficked. My surprise was two fold: fold 1) a legendary band from my old stomping grounds was standing before me and shrugging off travel fatigue identical to mine; and fold 2) I didn’t recognize them at all. So I outed them to the squares milling around us. Sometimes I’m a real fucking baby.

Fold 2 should only be surprising because I’ve seen the band live once, and their performance was impressive enough that I declared it to be both fucking and awesome. I’m not a fan of the band. I own none of their records, and not because I dislike their music. They are just one of those bands that I never did, like Anthrax or Immolation. We’ve never been to the same parties or the same Dunkin Donuts’, but singer Jacob Bannon’s neck tattoo is as easy to read as a nametag to anyone who pays attention.

I smelled slightly of failure, so I took five minutes to walk ahead and shuck off my retreat into morbid delirium. One should not be stymied by one’s own retarded behavior, or one will remain retarded forever. I wanted to ask the band the questions floating around my head, so I went back to the manager, introduced myself, and asked about the weather in Boston. Boston weather is not actually exciting, but those of us from New England will sometimes pretend it is because we are impressed with the cityness of Boston. After a few minutes of small talk, I once again decided not to be such a fucking baby and asked the band if they wanted to give a short interview. The beleathered and tattooed boohoos genially agreed.

“What is good?” I asked.

“Puppies, kittens, soft things, things that taste good as opposed to bad.” It had been a long flight after all.

We had an awkward conversation, all of us settling in to something we had never practiced. I was playing the part of a reporter, except I was asking questions about the fundamentals of their band in place of the usual patter about influences or gear.

“Why do Converge?”

“Because we like making music, and playing music, and doing all those things…”

“What’s your art about?” I interrupted.

“You know: self-expression, personal expression, stories of our lives.”

It wasn’t a good answer, and because I didn’t press for anything deeper, it wasn’t much of a question either. Who let whom off the hook? Jacob answered that question with a tone of voice that suggested he was willing, to a certain extent, to contemplate the existence of his band, but that the answer to that question should have been obvious.

“Why make it sound the way it does?”

“Because,” Jacob replied, as though he were teaching a petulant ten-year-old about basic economics, “we are aggravated people.”

Am I fucked? Why would I be fucked? I’m not fucked! I am, sadly, almost never fucked.

The members of Converge grew up into the underworlds of hardcore punk and metal. Abrasive guitars and shouted vocals were accessible sounds, especially because, as bassist Nate Newton put it, they didn’t know how to play or sing. One of the greatest virtues of punk rock is that anybody can play. All you need to play punk rock music is the desire, and usually a guitar. Desire + reaction to music = band. Practice was over. We didn’t talk about anything else because we were all more interested in leaving the airport.

Jacob’s answers were unreasonably simplistic. The genesis of a popular art simply cannot be effectively reduced to “we like making music.” When he decided to devote his life to Converge, was he responding to a primal impulse to create? Did he want to live forever? Did he think he could explode the meaninglessness of his own life by proposing his ideas to the world? Was he trying to have sex with other people? Himself? His mother? Did he wish to stave off the pain of lost love? Did he wish to see in the world a reflection of God as he understood it? Maybe. He likes making music after all. Did I want to know any of that? Nope. “It’s fucking Converge!” after all. At that moment I was just a slack-jawed yokel with a microphone and a book in his pocket. I was not manifesting a profound and brilliant state of being, and Jacob knew it. The only moment of brilliance to be had was the moment where Jacob and I both ran aground on the limits of our interest in the existence of art. If either of us has a real reason to live, we will make something of that moment. This only counts as an announcement.

Then I took a train named MARTA through a muddy cascade of trees and low buildings illuminated by tiny harvest moons in fine mists. There were residents on the train, residents of the train on the train, harvest moons on the train, pale faces on the train, yellow windows on the train, portly business on the train, phantasmagoric personalities on the train, tire tracks on the train, silver plating on the train, pain on the train, my shame on the train, illusions on the train, growing sane on the train, hot wax stares on the train, weight-of-bears stares on the train, a thimble of thoughts on the train; then I got off the train. It took me a long time to get back on the train.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Shitadar Ep by Batshit. Mini-fictional review by Max Hodes

This week's post is a record review in a format totally new to me. I wrote 7 pieces of Mini Fiction as each song on the attendant EP was playing, and am publishing them here after tenderly washing them. There is a link to download the record, which is totally legal and totally free. Two high-school kids in Western Mass made this themselves because they couldn't tolerate their society's request to wait until you grow up to make great art.

In creating fiction out critical reactions to their music, we have created a meta-art work.


Download the Shitdar EP
Music by Simon Rackenbug-Loisel and Tom Erwin


Track 1. Artifaggot

Space is the place where we consecrate our lumbering node-head fleecy flock-a-down byes. Fry me, flay me and spay me old boy COME BACK.

[radio] “Watchoutnow! Watch-atch-atch-atch-atch-atch.”

Ship playing at church, giving itself call and response time, beginning to recognize it’s own reflection, layers of futzing, screaming circuits, excising limits and discarding terrestrial origins.

[radio] “Flap my digital wings baby,” and I’ll lift us to new heights with a probability of 99.94%. Pull me out. I’m done. I said I’m done now. Help me out. I want to get out of my body.

This is easy. This is so-o-o-o-o easy. I am hello to you are me my new friend. Cherrup cherrup nighty night and lick. Queepy sweet syrup licking juice notch and fire side chat monger MARCH! Shriek rush pull it up now. The anti-grav field is shot and we’re going to manual in fifteen. What’s the order. Quiet. Your orders captain. Be quiet. It’s coming back around. What is it. What am I looking at. What is that THING. O god do you hear that. Shut off the comms. It hurts. It hurts. Shut them down.

I can’t hear anything. Ratchet ratchet smack. Haldermann is… talking to me… but I can’t… …what you’re saying.

It’s still out there.


Track 2. Bloodlust Fighter Radar

Atomic cloak parted like reeds, space folds were just waves, skipping gravity wells and landing in the future or the past. They were with me and shouting so loud all I could do was choke.

Once I watched, from a great distance, a man set himself on fire and layed down to rest. Watching was of no consequence, though I couldn’t stop if I tried.

[Miller] It’s coming through the hull!

[Haldermann] Reyes, tell Ship to reverse polarity on the engine room sub-shields at random intervals between one and twenty milliseconds.

Reyes tells me. Bodies burning black and bright. Wretched and lovely creatures are making me a welcome of machines.

[Miller] SKIP the lock; it can’t matter.

Keep it out and it will come; wave it away like a sparrow. Bonesaws aplenty! Their heads will ring ring ring with light.

Goodbye.


Track 3. It’s Symmetry

Terra cotta hillside fantasy village in the air, clouds going to work in a magic crystal mine; It’s quittin’ time kitten, and even clouds go to sleep. Freshly mopped parkey floors and a stack of folded slacks.


Track 4. Sky’s Birthday

Our punk minute is up! It’s time for coral reefs.

“I listened to us downstairs at the Barger…yeah, they’ve got a studio down there, anyway I thought we were pretty good until Phil’s band went on… I’m saying that we’re sloppy…Yeah you too, but also me, also me….No…I mean me more than anyone. But yeah, you play a little sloppy. Are you listening? What?...NO!...hold it…one minute babe, it’s Dan.”

Good morning to fish. There are holes everywhere. Everybody is a bubble.


Track 5. Viper Salad

This is a bar where nobody’s dancing, and nobody’s drinking, and nobody’s talking because they’ve heard it all before. There are stranger stories than yours in this place, but good luck getting ‘em out. It’s got hanging lamps the color of a dealer’s visor, table-tops made of five kinds of wood, and the band’s on break forever. I’m thankful for that; bands only play to you unhappy. You walk in from wherever and just try to get a drink; they serve you sawdust on the rocks in a hi-ball glass. Get out friend. Just get out.


Track 6. Waves of Silence

The captain gave his customary directions to our happy, nauseated, obstinant, ebuliant, sleeping, and other passengers. I noticed the hiccup in the cockpit lighting before he did. It’s nothing.

35,000 feet and still climbing to our cruising altitude. We took off at 11:25 pm from Albuquerque on our way to Denver and then Chicago, rising through a layer of nimbus clouds and then deep into a heavy cumulostratus cover. There it is again.

We don’t know it because of engine noise and the communications chatter, but the passengers have been seeing bigger delays, bigger breaks in the lighting. The flight attendants neglected to inform us of the irregularity. Perhaps they are busy reassuring the passengers or themselves.

The captain is sipping his coffee and the cumulostratus layer is breaking into rings around the nose. It’s a red/green darkness until the wing-tip strobes open the cloud like a door.

I can hear the edge of a scream. The cabin has gone dark, the fasten seat-belt light is off, the oxygen masks have descended from the ceiling and no one knows how to put them on. I look to my left and the captain is sipping coffee. I face forward again and I see the Colorado Rockies pointing at me like fingers out of a broken glove.


Track 7. Wet Poodle

But Hey! It’s okay. Everything is fine today. Let’s go play in some hay with my friend May who has lots of things to say!

Say what May?
Needles for snoring?

Shut up May! [everyone laughs]