DAY OLD BAGELS

Hey Hun! We're Playing Ping Pong!

2008-01-06T18:08:00.000-08:00

Truly a victim of incessant laziness and copious amounts of procrastination, I've let this blog sit out in the sun since July of last year. Not without good reason though,the work side of things decided to put a deathgrip on any chance of me having a life outside of my office walls. 12-15 hour days, 6/7 days a week is now the norm, almost consistently since October. Not much else to say. Things are supposed to slow down in February. I so get Springsteen/Blink 182 now.

Surprisingly enough, I have allowed a few extra activities and thoughts to slip through the cracks. In no particular order...

-I GREW A BEARD. TWICE.

While not really a bold leap into new, uncharted fashion divaness and more just of a desire to perpetually stroke my face, I've been rocking a beard since mid October. I hear it's what smart people put on their face, so I figured I should get one.

-FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS IS THE BEST SHOW ON TELEVISION.

So I basically find it hard to function without this show. It's entered the recesses of my brain that help me accomplish basic tasks such as eating and sleeping, I once allowed myself only 2 hours of sleep just so I could get caught up on Landry's murder subplot. And at work I sometimes wonder... will Saracen and Julie patch things up soon? When is Smash going to have his career-ending injury (Feb. sweeps maybe?) Won't Tyra just run off with Landry already? Am I really watching my fourth episode in a row of this show?

These are questions one shouldn't grapple with, but suffice to say that there is nothing better on television right now than Friday Night Lights. Granted, I watch all the new episodes on NBC.com and the writer's strike has allowed shows like this to start airing without a double blink from anyone. Still though, while everyone seems to be going nuts about The Wire coming back on the air, FNL has been quietly building a pretty awesome season. Going off my initial reactions, I thought the show would be a soapy teen drama about sports and small town life and... it is... but... OH MY GOD you guys it's like so much better than that. The drama. The character development. The emotive post-rock guitar interludes! OK, in all seriousness though, I'm addicted. It's a really good cheeseburger.

-I LIKE DOGS.

This new bundle of energy does laps around the apartment and 4AM just to show off her class and spunk. She bites ears and pees on random people. Her favorite show to watch with me is Friday Night Lights though, so I can't fault her. She's pretty adorable. I'm a fan.

-I DOWNLOADED LOTS OF THINGS.

Apparently thinking a nuclear holocaust would strike soon, I stockpiled about 25GBs worth of stuff from these two indispensable torrent sites. When Brooklyn breaks away and starts to float out into the Atlantic, at least I'll have plenty of Nunsploitation and Jem Cohen flicks stacked for the trip.

-I MADE LOTS OF MIXES THAT I DIDN"T POST.

The so-called 'Pudcast' is on numero two now, but over the course of the fall I made probably 4 more that fell behind the couch in my mind. Here's one I drew up recently though:

PUDCAST #2
1- Collections of Colonies of Bees- "Flocks I"
2- Don Caballero - "You Drink A Lot of Coffee For A Teenager"
3- Talibam!- "Rambo's Passeggiata"
4- Matt Valentine & Erika Elder- "You Matter"
5- Grouper- "Little Gray Cat"
6- Robedoor- "Penitent Runes"
7- Labradford- "Disremembering"
8- James Carr- "Let's Face Facts"
9- Songs:Ohia- "Division St. Girl"
10- The Drones- "I Don't Ever Want To Change"
11- Mika Miko- "Sleepover Slumber Party"
12- Times New Viking- "(My Head)"
13- The Clash- "Lost In The Supermarket"
14- John Cale- "Buffalo Ballet"

Download it here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?di91gyxkvgi

-I SHOT A MUSIC VIDEO.

Still in the editing stages at the moment, but I'm tickled pink from what I've seen so far. It's a video for Marissa Nadler, a wondrous folk angel who allowed me to make a video for her cover of Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat."

The video was shot in a mind-bending weekend right before Christmas around Manhattan, Central Park, and in particular my well-meaning but beyond small Bushwick apartment. I shamelessly forced people onto my couch to drink alcohol and pretend to have a good time for four hours while I barked out orders to my cameraman Spence to make the visuals look more cool n' shit.

Despite my failed tryout as a future David O. Russell I think the crowd had a decent time mucking it up and playing Apples to Apples. The footage turned out beautifully and has since made it difficult to not do a 90 minute version of the video. I'm not sure if these will end up in the video or not, but here's some stills from the 'party' scene section of the shoot c/o Adam Brown...

Clearly drunk on his own power.

PUDCAST#1

2007-07-14T15:25:00.001-07:00

Since I waved bye bye to KRUI nearly a year ago, I still occasionally get that college radio DJ itch. The kind that scratches at you when you're listening to a song and think "this would go great before a station ID!" Constructing playlists was always one of the more geeky indulgences I devoted time to before Noise Kitchen aired, and since its demise I've been relegated to screaming on street corners t strangers about new music.

Now I know we don't need more young 20 somethings occupying more blog space ranting about music (oops...), but I promise you that I'll do my best to keep what I post here as interesting as possible. I'll just be posting my current digs, and I generally keep my musical interest pretty varied (I like hip-hop, rock/pop, AND country, ya know).

AND if you're interested in hearing some audio from the mind blowing Boredoms 77 drum performance last weekend, the podcast opens and closes with, respectively, the opening and closing sections of Saturday's show.

Tracklist and download link below...

TRACKLIST

Boredoms- "77BOADRUM (Excerpt)"
Crooklyn Dodgers '95- "Crooklyn"
DJ Scotch Egg- "Scotch Grime"
Men's Recovery Project- "The Mayor is a Robot"
El-P- "The Overly Dramatic Truth (Instrumental)"
No Fucker- "No Flesh Shall Be Spared"
Magik Markers- "Body Rot (the no nude mix)"
Times New Viking- "Teenage Lust!"
GHQ- "Varunani Night Wave"
Ike Yard- "Night After Night"
Derek Bailey (w/ Keiji Haino)- "Aru Kanashika No Juni"
Kim Doo Soo- "19th Street Blues"
Githead- "Jet Ear Game"
Boredoms- "77BOADRUM (Excerpt)"

ZShare Link

GREG'S SUPER AWESOME FIRST POST ABOUT NEW YORK

2007-05-16T22:15:00.000-07:00

omg you guys, did you know mtv's in timez square now? i hope i see carson soon. and i can't wait to check out that funky lower east side and see all those trendy artist weirdos. they're so interesting! and duh of course i'm gonna get my picture taken at the statue of liberty.and empire state. and ground zero. and rockafella center.

Alright in all sincerity I find this whole quick move to New York very surprising, exciting, confusing, and various other superlatives that would aptly describe a sarcastic Midwestern kid being snatched off his parents' couch and thrown onto the L. Needless to say getting to my stop the first day was a challenge...

For the next six months I will be working as the office manager/post-production everyman for a documentary on the Senegal pop singer Youssou N'Dour. For the time being I'm crashing on the hard wood floor of Charles in Charge's subleased apartment off Manhattan Ave. Perhaps one of the most unexpected bright spots of this current situation is Charlie's roommates' amazing golden retriever Hobie, who never seems to tire of running ten feet in the backyard to fetch his deformed tennis ball.

(image stolen from Charlie's far superior blog)

I've already forgotten a million trinkets and anecdotes from my first week in New York, which means I'll have to start updating more frequently if I'd like this thing to have a shred of dignity. So far it's been a series of adjusting to my hour long commute to work, desperately searching for an apartment, and catching up with old chums from Iowa who've also made the move out to the East Coast. Yesterday I caught a show with Alison the featured Iowa City's favorite psych-noise scrawlers Raccoo-oo-oon at the art space Goodbye Blue Monday, a place that reminded me of the Hall Mall if it was overcrowded with handmade lamps and a junkyard in the back.

Last Sunday I had a triumphant day with Mr. Ryan Martin parading around Brooklyn and the East Village where we partook in our usual conversations regarding music gluttony, sassy Two Boots pizza servers, and why Grindhouse was the funnest movie of the spring. Before night fell we made it over to the IFC Center for a screening of Killer of Sheep, and while it was a little rough around the edges its poetic and cultural musings were unbelievably heartfelt and sincere for essentially a 70s film school thesis project.

We start the moving process into our new apartment this upcoming weekend, where Charlie and I will fly home, throw a bunch of crap into a van, and plow through nearly half of the country on a 20 hour Red Bull-fueled trek back to the city. Shockingly I'm quite satisfied with how great our place is already. We unofficially broke it in with Erin on Friday by running around the empty loft (we opened our beer bottles on the heat radiator! how industrial!) and taking advantage of the roof access, where my fear of heights took strong hold as Charlie mimicked jumping off the building.

TOP 5 THINGIES THIS WEEK

2007-02-04T12:49:00.000-08:00

1.)

How did I ever live without this? I'll admit that I'm extremely late in the game on this one. Since I've been home, I've been relegated to the local library and The Pirate Bay for the cinematic fixes. I joined up with GreenCine, a San Fransisco based online rental agency, but as great as it is to support the little guy, the time between deliveries is next to unbearable. I was hesitant to Netflix at first, thinking it was an online version of Blockbuster. I was incorrect. The queue list is already past 250.

2.)

Second viewing helped A LOT. I'm not going to waste time expounding on all the theories out there, needless to say there's plenty of others to do such. I tend to align with the theory of the Polish prostitute being the original star of the film and Laura Dern's Sue character dying symbolically in the gutter, realizing she is still trapped in some of that good ole meta-film commentary "this-is-all-a-mechanical-production" hoohaa, and shooting the Phantom at the end to free the trapped Lost Girl, thus making her pure again. Or something like that.

Sweet.

3.)

Album of the year. Probably. At least right now. Last release was 6 years ago, and "Refinement" picks up right where "Tired Sounds" left off. Absolutely gorgeous classical notes slowed down and stretch out and out and out and out. Underwater bliss. Desert drone. Sun scorcher. A wrinkle in time. Double sweet.

STARS OF THE LID- "AND THEIR REFINEMENT OF THE DECLINE"

4.)

When future civilizations are attempting to pinpoint the absolute lowest point in the 2000s, perhaps a symbolic image or moment where the lowest common denominators seemed to merge into one cohesive, beastly Frankenstein, I can think of no better image. You've got everything here. Francis is perhaps the one doing the most damage, as I lay in bed some nights wondering just how many 7-14 year old boys are watching Girls Gone Wild infomercials on Comedy Central night after night, becoming indoctrinated to this new level of acceptable date-rapist broseph lifestyle that no one seems to raise too much of a fuss about when compared with the mountains of criticism thrown at the effects that Paris's rich whore antics have on the female 7-14 market. Perhaps it's due to the knowledge that Paris will even survive the apocalypse. This is truly the couple of the future. Maybe Mike Judge is onto something...

5.)"Nothing frightens me more/Then religion at my door."

Here we go...

20+ Boris Albums

2007-01-12T00:28:00.000-08:00

After the ole ball dropped on New Years, I half-heartedly made one of my resolutions to be to cut down on the downloading. The breaking point was the 30-disc Stax Singles box set I picked up off Oink as my account was slowly trinkling towards death last December, and I've sadly lost count of how many gigs of untouched music that lurks on my external hard drive. Such is the plight of the obsessed.

The most flagrant contributors to my habit are the bands that release 30 or so CDs/CD-Rs/tapes/records every year, mostly those in the noise/psych underground. And as much as I want to hear John Olson and crew's Wednesday evening practice session on a limited edition lathe cut picture disc 7", a man cannot live on Scoobie Snacks alone.

Nonetheless, one of the most consistent bands going right now that suffer from record leakage is Boris. Last year's Pink was a lovely grab-bag of the styles and genres the Japanese trio have dipped in and out of since their birth, and rightly catapulted them into the same notoriety as Sunn0))) and even kid-tested, mother-approved Wolf Eyes.

Luckily, someone at Hipinion.com has done all the dirty work of digging up a huge chunk of their albums and posting them in a thread. Not sure how long the links will last, but it's worth a shot...

20+ BORIS ALBUMS

TV On The Radio On The Wedding Video

2007-01-08T14:50:00.000-08:00

Perhaps it's just the circumstances of my current job, or my love of found footage, or that both are working simultaneously together to create one of the most simple yet best music videos I've seen in a while. In any event, there's not much to this except some looped video editing, early 90's VHS graphics, and truly priceless haircuts, but when paired with the song, it's surprisingly effective. Best of luck to Sherry and Mark...

Screw Old Man Winter...

2007-01-07T02:47:00.000-08:00

So now that the holidays are over, we have nothing to look forward to but winter. Not the fun, first snow-type winter, the one where it's ass-blasting cold out and the roads are a frozen tundra. It hasn't snowed here since early December, but with Colorado getting buried earlier this week, I imagine Chicago can't be too far down on the list...

1-Josephine Foster- "All The Leaves Are Gone"
2-Smog- "Palimpset"
3-Stars of the Lid- "Even If You're Never Awake"
4-W-S Burn- "Untitled #2"
5-Maitreya Kali- "Ice and Snow"
6-Ed Askew- "Mr. Dream"
7-Natural Snow Buildings- "Wisconsin"
8-Bark Psychosis- "I Know"
9-Jandek- "The Cell: Part One"
10-Es- "Pianokaari"
11-Patty Waters- "I Can't Forget You"
12-Taurpis Tula- "Blood Red Lights Across the Snow"
13-Matt Valentine & Eriks Elder- "Lost Lover Blues"
14-Grouper- "Black Out"
15-Axolotl- "Chemical Theatre"
16-Belong- "October Language"
17-The Goslings- "Blood A Necklace"
18-The Rolling Stones- "Winter"
19-Jasper TX- "All The Broken Birds Singing Winter Into Spring"
20-Swans- "Warm"

Sendspace Link

PANDA BEAR/EXCEPTER 12" SPLIT

2006-12-02T16:26:00.000-08:00

YouSendIt Link

It's no secret I'm a huge devotee of both these guys, and their new split doesn't dissapoint. Panda Bear's "Carrots" continues on from the UUAR 7 inch he released late last year in the same vein of harmonic chants and digital fudgery.

Excepter's "KKKKK" (which apprently stands for "King Kong Kitchie-Kitchie Kime") appears to be a chunk of some random live recording, staying in check with their recent Alteration disc from July. They're operating in a kind of drunk Throbbing Gristle mode which I enjoy just fine, except(er) I really REALLY dug the early stuff, particularly the "Vacation/'Forget Me'" 12 inch. I apologize extensively for that very lame joke above. JFR and co. also take advantage of the intraweb too it turns out, check out their streaming podcast.

With the exception of Young Prayer and Beserker, most of Panda Bear's solo output is scattered out over cd-rs and limited 7 inchers. "Comfy in Nautica" is a track I'm hoping makes it onto next March's full-length release for the Panda. I read somewhere that he wrote it for his newborn son, and it's not to difficult to imagine so. As with most Animal Collective lyrics, they're usually buried in the mix underneath garbles of reverb, but what you can make out are encouraging phrases like "try to remember always/always to have a good time." The cut-up percussion sounds gorgeous too, like the Melanesian tribe from The Thin Red Line performing in a gospel choir.

Comfy in Nautica

VILE VIDEO #1

2006-11-21T22:43:00.000-08:00

Click To Play

DO YOU WORSHIP SATAN ?

Alright, this is a long time coming. After numerous problems getting an .mp4 file to upload properly onto Ourmedia's network, blip.tv performs like a champ in two clicks. This is a small bit of a tenative compilation video I've wanted to do forever, currently titled Vile Video. I've been unearthing a goldmine of VHS treasures, including a wonderful 20-minute clip of four Iowa City freshman talking about FAC in an anti-binge drinking video that keeps me warm on cold winter nights.

Clips from #1 feature thrown-away promotional music videos from KRUI-TV, tv spots, Lost & Found Series, and an unexpected copy of Meatballs III that my eight year old brain was somehow smart enough to tape in between episodes of Monday Night Raw.

2006-11-12T23:22:00.000-08:00

I'm not gonna go and pretend that I'm the expert on this new fangled genre called "dubstep," but it looks like, or maybe already is the next grime. I have no judgement or radar on what's the proverbial hot shit in the UK clubs or underground soundsystems or whatever they're called, but the stuff I've heard so far that gets tagged as dubstep sounds pretty silky smooth.

Based on the almighty Wikipedia's entry on the genre, it seems to share space with the tradition of reggae soundclashes, but doesn't yet have the kind of infamy grime possessed right out of the gate (i.e. Dizzee Rascal getting shot before his album dropped stateside). Musically, I'd go with saying that it sounds a tad like an instrumental version of grime, but I'll go one better (or worse?) and admit I couldn't help but think of trip-hop stalwarts like Massive Attack/Portishead/Coldcut, etc etc etc. Hopefully dubstep stays on the righteous path and doesn't succumb to the oversaturated blandness of trip-hop, like showing up on Starbucks mixes and Global Mega Chill boxsets.

Below is what I guess is a rather well known dubstep track called "Midnight Request Line" by Skream, whose like 19 and a big mover and shaker over there. Also, the track "Glass" by Kode9 + The Spaceape totally reminds me of that downtempo Rockers Hi-Fi song used in the Topher Grace freebase scene from Traffic, so therefore I still think it sounds really cool and futuristic.

Skream- "Midnight Request Line"

Kode9 + The Spaceape- "Glass"

2006-11-01T19:07:00.000-08:00

HOTOTOGISU

Finally just started to get some homework done on this band. Most of my love of all things drone can be traced back to the Kranky label and in particular the dreamy atmospheres of Stars of the Lid, but once those VU meters start to hit red, I usually lump it into the noise pile. I guess you could call Hototogisu a concoction of amplified ambient drone, buzzed psychedelia, and doom-minded improv. If I were to belittle the music by breaking it down into film analogies (which happens a lot), it sounds like Ira Cohen directing a remake of some kind of Japanese cyber punk movie.

Hototogisu is a side project from Marcia Bassett of the Brooklyn-based outfit Double Leopards and the ever-prolific Matthew Bower. Named after a Japanese songbird that signals the approaching summer, it's not too hard to imagine the deep cuts from the group's first effort Floating Japanese Oof! Gardens of the 21st Century soundtracking the dog days of late August, reclining on sticky asphalt with sweaty eyebrows. Flousrishing in the deep blue end of the psych/drone pool, the first cut from side A offers gently-plucked tone guitar, distant radio transmissions creeping in and out, and chimming silver bells, all undercut by wandering feedback that threatens to takeover at a moment's notice.

Not that it's a bad thing, but Floating appears to be an anomaly when examining the entire Hototogisu discography. Albums like Prayer Rug Exorcism and Green are shrouded in heavy blankets of abstract guitar blasts, veering more into Sunn 0)))-type levels of low-end, gutteral noise, ultimately akin to turning a Double Leopards record up REALLY FUCKING LOUD.

Hototogisu's latest blast can be found on Important Records, a sizable East Coast label that will hopefully allow the group's notoriety to expand for those only moderately familiar with Bower and Bassett's day jobs.

Official Site

Hototogisu- Side A Track 1 (from Floating Gardens)

Hototogisu- Ascend on Blackened Wings (from Green)