Four Years

This Blog's four years old now... and maybe that feels weird to think about, maybe it doesn't...

I've never really given this thing much thought beyond it being some fervent playground with lucid boundaries, upon-and-throughout-which I could bounce my over-thinking brain, with no tether... hopefully rolling towards some final, profound, destination of cracked insight.

The week I started this blog... I went to see a then-new-ish band called Prussia play inside the Crofoot's Vernors Room, February-something-or-other, two-thousand-and-eight.

Through 09 and 10, they were actually the top answer for me, whenever asked that yer-favorite-local-band question...

And now they're apparently breaking up.

What am I going to tell my mom...

It's weird feeling these passages... (so why linger?)

Still, this band's responsible for some of my favorite live-show/performance memories...

One still stands out - a stuffy, spilled-out show upstairs in the AC Rich loft, across from the Crofoot, with Prussia and The Silent Years. We escaped up there, sliding off of the smog-stricken main drag during the chrome-glistened mess of the Woodward Dream Cruise, back in August 2008...

And now one of those bands is broken up and the other...? Well... the lead singer (Josh Epstein) of the Silent Years was on national televsion yesterday and I'm sure most of us tuned in - watching his new band Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr (with Daniel Zott on guitar/vocals and Mike Higgins on drums) perform on Conan.

Cool feeling, right? Or...giddy/dorky feeling? Jealous feeling? Weird? Awesome? Proud?

It's all a swirl when you see the dudes who used to sit at your local watering hole up there on your tiny tube, glowing under expensive lighting and crooning through impressive sound systems... There they were... still singing through that same telephone receiver used in the very same AC Rich show... Only now glowing with the hysterical sanctity still provided by televised events! 

<--... And shaking hands with this guy...
...stream it here.

(pictured, the work of Glass Action)



I think at the end of the day... writing about local arts / local music during a time like that, you feel what Sports Journalists must feel when they're home team is winning, or heading towards some potential championship trophy...

By writing about what's being created here, being seen and heard here...on a weekly basis, by everyone who lives here... you start feeling like you're ...I dunno... rooting for something?

But certain ideals, values and strange emotions always come into it... Who's the best? Who should get spotlights? Which bands should stay together forever and get more attention? The most attention?

Why do I love all these songs by all these people...

Oh, hell...

Last Show(?) - Fri, Feb 3 - inside the Crofoot's Pike Room - "PRUSSIA was born at the AC Rich. They are influenced by Motown, psychedelic rock, and 60’s girl pop..." -with: Dinosaur Bones / Joe Hertler / Seven Birds One Stone... 

Anyways...


Had a recent chat with Josh Malerman of the High Strung...inside the Penguinarium at the Detroit Zoo...
(the meaty, mad words of which will be churned out in a forthcoming feature). We were talking about writing, the weighty non-stop-pedness of it all...and he wondered aloud: "haven't I written e-nough songs?"... to which I admitted that I often felt as though I could end this blog every day and any day and just walk away...

"But then..." he says. "Something happens again and you're back..."

And is it something as cliched as some perfect/memorable live show, or even just deep conversation shared on icy pavement beside an enclosure full of smelly alpacas and snooty flamingos... is it always going to be something as easy and cheesy as that?

Taking a break, here, for a week... to find out.

Perhaps I'll find it here...
in Ferndale, on Saturday night.

Or maybe I'll find it here...

***Or maybe I'll consider writing about the new Jack White material, a single is streaming here from his forthcoming solo LP, which he claims was some sort of accident, if not, some kind of blunder...

But that's already old-news by the time you've read this... Internet world spins much faster than it did back when I started this "blog..."

How about this? There's a new documentary about Detroit's reclusive psyche-folk singer/songwriter Rodriguez and it's won an award at Sundance...

We'll leave it there for now...

"A Magnet for Curious Souls" - Bardo / Strung - 2/3 - Library

Those familiar with Detroit rock quartet The Questions' style will find a refreshing re-imagining of their characteristically dusky, rampant psyche/blues bellows when the groups lead singer Drew Bardo lets "these songs breath in a different atmosphere..."

...That atmosphere being: the Ferndale Public Library (for an early evening show, 7pm, Friday, Feb 3), joining the High Strung.

That evening, with his bassist Pookie Grech taking some time down in Brazil, Bardo will perform an acoustic set geared away from the "electric chariot" that the Questions have harnessed over the last several years. Bardo sounds like he's reveling in the bit of fleeting free time he's found, with Grech away, to excavate some of the hundred or so songs (from more of his "storytelling-"-angled catalog) that his band mates haven't even heard yet.

This is more purely Bardo's voice and personality, where as his full-band/electric side is molded more to the collective personality of the band (which includes drummer Will Linna and guitarist Chris Kreczkowski). Both sets of material can start the same way, an acoustic guitar and a notebook, but with the full band, Bardo said, "it's refined and surgically altered over time--- but here, I am just laying out material exactly as it sounds as I compose it. A naked honesty that many of the songs I write cannot do without. Some tunes don't work well at all when you attempt to plug them in-- so this show is a good opportunity for me to work some of these idea's out a bit to see what sticks."

Picture it akin to just sitting around a campfire, Bardo said, or a coffee shop for for close family members.

"For me, that's where all of it began. It's exactly what I've been doing since I was 14 years old, so that being said, it's business as usual. The first few years that I ever played music live was just me and an acoustic guitar. That's how I started, in coffee houses and house parties. That's how I met everyone in the early days that eventually became my inspiration to start the bands I've been in. So it's kind of getting back to basics for me-- Or going back home to a familiar place...."

The songs on display at the Library, this Friday, is a sonic outcropping of Bardo's materializing plans to develop a solo album to accompany his current book, hopefully to be published -late 2012.

"Some idea's are much stronger in the context of music-- and when I begin forcing them into my literary work out of fear of losing them altogether, that's when I know it's time to get artistically organized. With Pookie being in Brazil for a month- Will no longer able to play drums, and Chris & I eyeball deep in filming video's to promote "Chasing The Light", it's just a perfect storm for me to birth some of these songs that are emerging...."

So this former slam-poetry-circuit performer is coming to the library to help him take mental/spiritual/creative inventory... that sounds like it could result in quite an intriguing set.

It also helps me take inventory for The Questions as well- going through piles of idea's and figuring out which ones make sense in which particular projects-- it's a bit of a puzzle, but an exciting one at that.
The Questions are also planning to go into the recording studio and punch out the follow up album this late winter, Bardo said.

"I'm not getting any younger, and the world is not getting any more sane, so I guess I'm feeling the crunch to get as much material out as possible. Life is unpredictable and one ever knows when it is going to end, so when I sit here and stare at all these silent songs, I feel it necessary to give them a chance at life before it's all over for me. I'm really digging the chemistry of this project as well- it's really organic. Right now it's acoustic guitars, Violin, Mandolin, and vocals. Very simple. Very honest...."


...and on the subject of libraries ...in general...

"I'm all about the Library. I've been a regular at my local since I was a small child-- I feel they are the last great social institution. They are a mixing bowl for people who choose to be cultured. A magnet for curious souls, young and old. What's not to love?"

This is part of the Library's First Stop Fridays series
Find more info from the 780's and hear some High Strung songs here.

Oh Sees Hear Now

I'm feeling it now... My hands want to come down on the keyboard like drum sticks... the ellipses ...necessarily...allow for me to pull away, to swivel around in this abominable office chair, cruel, cotton-upholstered maiden that it is...allowing me to jolt, to jitter to the beats...

Bouncing and scraping off of bricks and chipped drywall, sommersaulting down puddled alleyways and into dank venues given waning iridescence from the red and yellow bulbs strung to the ceilings, those guitars like malignant motorboat-blades humming and churning, majestic and horrible, a metallic banshee's moan while the delirious clatter of the drums, the clenching, cardio-kicked hits, the splintered hickory...keep you juking, jolting, jittering...wanting to just bring meaty fists down onto the thin plastic rectangle in front of you....

And you find that point... Asdf Jfkl ...where the effect of music becomes inexpressible.

Man...

Today's sonic lunch is a sandwich of strange bedfellows...
it includes switching headphone-dips between what everyone in the indie-music world seemed all a flutter-for over the last month... i.e. Lana Del Rey (and her new album Born To Die) and what this humble music writer would offer in its place, for everyone in the indie-music world to go all a flutter-for, in the coming month... i.e. Thee Oh Sees (and their new album Carrion Crawler / The Dream...)

It was over before it began. I'm biased as I have a history with Thee Oh Sees, having started in on this San Fran collective's 15-year-canon about 5-ish years ago; Carrion/Dream is their 13th full length (flanked with more than a dozen EPs and 7" singles).

Rey, meanwhile, is little more to me than the bearer of the voice, a very beautiful voice, that has bewitched my friends with her grandiose/understated, elegant/everyday ballads about video games and mountain dew. I'm only slowly getting into her songs, orchestral and grand... symphonic strings and samples of fireworks opening into deep booming bass and sequenced drums setting their stylish slow-dance electronica groove and this not so girlish but not so womanly voice kisses and coos but also cuts and croons about new anti-excess anthems... It's dazzling, no doubt. But, at the end of the day, over-hyped?

For me, so far, this feels like a forced dress up, the eccentric indie-songstress framed by musical aesthetics most befitting an opera house, while still maintaining the hints of electro-pulsed, dark-ambient pop; not that it couldn't work, or grow into working, for me...but for now it's not sweeping me away. (That said, "Off To The Races," if a bit awkward in its first few spins, starts to grow on me as precosiu

Then again, reread the frantic and abstruse ramblings of the first two paragraphs and you can see what listening to Carrion has done to me, in just the first two spins... It's been a treat to see this band pinball its way through a bodacious haunted mansion's worth of rock n roll sensibilities, to gothic-psyche-folk, drone-drowned Brit-pop mutations, garage-torching indie-ballads...gangly, gnarly, weirdly valiant...

While Rey sings with an ever present heaviness, love "till the end of time" and "sleeping through the tears" and heart "breaks" with every step she "takes..." Thee Oh Sees main man John Dwyer caws out alluring and nightmarish imagery, that is, if you're able to decipher his heavily-echo-fuzzed vocals; in fact, he's often more inclined to just treat his voice like an instrument, an instrument he seems to take about as much care of as his guitar, erratically swerving it up into falsetto "whoops" and riffing it out for wordless "ah-ah ah, ah-ah ah," choruses, as though his buzzy bleat is just a throat-housed second guitar.

It wasn't a fair match up to begin with...

In any case...both of their respective albums are out this week and I advise you to listen to both.

This post really never had a point...

But here's a point I wanted to get to... ...being curious about Chit Chat


An Ypsi-based band that I can't find a myspace or bandcamp link for... can you imagine? And the song someone sent me is an a file that doesn't agree with my dinosaur-desktop's Windows Media Player, so I have to wait for my lap-top to be rescued...

And so, yes, for those who want to sample from their desktops, their laptops or smart iDevices, you'll have to settle for this video from last week at Ann Arbor's Name Brand Tattoo parlor. The band put out their debut a little more than a month ago and it can be found via Cafe Ollie's Ypsi Music Shelf, among a few other endemically obscure outlets, as well, I'm sure.

More from Ypsi's Music Shelf?

Have a good week, now...

Just So You Know

I've heard a lot of things, but one morsel that I was never told

Is the apple of your eye will eventually mold...

And I find it kind of strange

That the writer and advice-giver are one in the same, but now I......

Mister's proven to be, in my tweaked eyes, one of the more singularly inspiring (and curiously unifying) artists in the metro/Michigan music community. Or, hey, I dunno, maybe things are all just pushing themselves forward organically? Something in the air or the water... Anyway, at lleast that was the idea behind his raps, his stage show, and his work with Passalacqua...breaking down the cliquey barriers of genres...


Whatever it is - I've felt a different energy these last two years since he turned some rock scene heads a couple Blowouts ago.


I excavated interview notes from a chat we had back in November-2010:


"...I think, ya know, not to get too far off, but,...I think it's interesting that there's this massive Detroit Rock scene and this massive Detroit Hip-Hop scene...and there's such a tiny overlap...or not much at all."

...What a difference 18 months makes? Now we've got Passalacqua mingling with the Ashleys... House Phone backing Cold Men Young... Sheefy McFly & the Delorean... and then Mister is going to be rapping over some Duende recordings soon.

His Just So You Know EP drops Tuesday -1-31-12
Backing up Mister's mid-low/midwest rumbled croon and word-splurged articulations are warm, woozy brass, swaying this way and that, with steady strutting beats, and the subtle spry charms of vibes chiming over whooshed/whizzled vinyl scratches. A mostly chill, characteristically introspective aesthetic...


Mister (a.k.a. Bryan Lackner) clears the vaults of raps he's been sitting on for a few years, now, via Just So You Know... Elegant post-bop jazz grooves, and dazzling/smooth piano pours are cut-up by more eccentric bytes like on "Relationship Blues" (with Elemental), where the cold, uncaring voice that tells you your heart-wrenching cell phone messages are deleted or you're jarred by raspy riled up dialogue-tracks from 90's slacker/indie films. 


Mister aims to take you out of the box, here and there, making sure you don't get too lost in the shuffling beats and unfolding the sleeve of his three-piece suit, little by little, to show you that initial heavy, contemplative heart that heaped him forward into his hip hop journey. 

More info from Dr. B productions. 

Magnificent Wails

I'm still computer-less... lily-pad-leaping to a range of temporary devices, even potentially highjacking my friend's laptop while she's down in Kentucky... ...that doesn't mean I can't settle in and take in some music and then ramble about it...
~

Like, say, the gravelly guitars and spilled-about percussion of alt-rock revivalists Bobby Electric...

Low, raspy vocals croon out a breathy growl over intricate guitars that dance and dash from a pensive, tinny twang to all out fire-storm flare, while the cymbal-rattled drum slams and wavy bass lines bring it back to those post-hardcore days of deeply tilling percussion, that dark, cloudy and cathartic aesthetic of howly-ballads, slicing into ya with low, burly-fuzz grooves and tight snare punches... This northern-metro-area rock outfit have their debut album coming out tomorrow...and it's a fine survey of hard-rock sensibilities, if a little weighty at points, shunting forth past the five minute mark more than a few times...but they make it worth it those subtle shades of dreamier space-rock ambiance, like the closing drifts of "I Hate Echoes."

Their release show is Jan 28th in the Crofoot's Vernor's Room. Take a listen:

They're backed by Crappy Future and My Pal Val. 

~~...and, since, who knows when I'll be back to posting regularly...I think I'll plaster a few more digi-fliers of noteworthy shows below...~~

The first being this fundraiser for the Michigan Humane Society (hosted by MotorCityBlog and Most People Are DJs...the former is an assiduous local culture blog and the latter is, yes, also kind of a blog and culture reporting entity, but distinguished by its podcaster/videographer/documentarian Mikel O.D., who filmed the video of FUR -streaming below... FUR being one of the featured bands on this bill. (Others: Phantom Cats / Satori Circus and his Cirquettes / I Love Lightning Bugs / Legendary Creatures... 

...

And then there's this show, which I already technically wrote about here. 

In The Shop

My lap top's in the shop... ...like a race-car driver without wheels over here... So, posts might be fewer-ish and further-between--ish...

But, in the meantime, dig this new video from a DC favorite, War On Drugs (for a song from their latest, Slave Ambient, off Secretly Canadian).

The War on Drugs - Brothers from Secretly Jag on Vimeo.

They're still out their touring, but no Detroit dates on the horizon...

While I'm away...and stressing out...
consider marking your calendars...
Groundhog Day - ...Pupils...Crappy Future...Estuaries...Robin Goodfellow...
Feb 3rd - ...Drew Bardo (solo set)...The High Strung
Feb 4th - ...DJ Ice Cold Crissy...Robin Goodfellow (again)...Phantom Cats...GLOSSIES

Gimme Gimme Gimme

Four bands... ...for the four bars in the iconic hardcore band's insignia, four cold, staid bars that hint at bellicosity and badassery... 

HELLMOUTH
CHILD BITE
OLD GODS
GOLDEN TORSO

have thrown together their four respective Black Flag cover songs and are releasing them on vinyl - a one time pressing available to the first 250 people who come through the door (with $10 cover) at the Magic Stick Lounge on January 26th...for a live show featuring each punk-preserving participant.

The only way you get a copy is if you're among those first 250 attendees... The noisy internet "highly" advises you to find pre-sale tickets... either at the Garden Bowl in Detroit or UHF in Royal Oak. - More info.

Read more here...


~
**Still here? Still bored?
Seek some transparency and follow the helpful Fact-Checking of Obama's State of the Union Address via the Washington Post. 
~
***While you're at it - why not plan a drinking game for your forthcoming Oscar Party... ...I've been ready to declare this ceremony a joke for years but the hopeless cinephile romantic in me kept holding back... I think I'm done... Thanks Slate.

Tapes

.

Tapes came back last year... ...

And House Phone's getting in on it - with their latest release packing their recently-online-streaming Gift Catalog EP. They're throwing a concert to boot, featuring an eclectic blend of dazzling/dreamy indie-rock (Pewter Cub), literary/antiquarian hip-hop (Doc Waffles) and psychedelic vaudevillian beat-folk freakouts (Ferdy Mayne)... indeed! Particularly eager to see where the Ferdy Mayne project goes next...having recently re-charged itself over the late Autumn...

Sounds: Ferdy Mayne - "You Wearin' Dresses"

anyhow - that show's Feb 3rd at the Magic Stick Lounge... (Check it out - you can hear a live recording, on that new tape, of House Phone covering "Dear, Prudence..." -followed by some light Max-Daley-heckling after the applause).

Other tape stuff:
Stay tuned to Ann Arbor based Zen Tapes, they're consistently streaming intriguing new sounds...

Detroit-area experimentalists Food For Owls just put new spooled-sounds out via the Axis Mundi Collective...Stream some here.

Ginkgo (over in Ypsi) is cranking some out pretty steadily...too...
...and Gold Tapes, here in Detroit...

And they keep coming... Heck, I just found a cassette in my car that singer/songwriter Justin Walker passed me a couple months back...early long lost demos, if you will, of what's now become Brilliant Violence.

Anyways...
...More sounds:
 House Phone - "1,000 Years"

Where Will We Be...

...dug out from beneath my car seat today... some kind of note, crumpled up, that I'd left for myself before heading out into Hamtramck on the last night of the 2011 Metro Times Blowout...

~
2/29/12 - 3/3/12

Metro Times Blowout's line up will be announced any day now...
Last year's looked a little bit like this:

~
In other news... billionaire "Optimist" Warren Buffett serenaded the Chinese media for that country's new year today... with a ukulele... The Republican Race to be the nominee for President keeps getting more topsy turvy... Brendan Benson's got a new song for you to hear...
~

But...this weekend...at the Berkley Front:

Featuring a slew of psychedelic/noisy/mesmeric-melodious/avant-garde bands of the rock, ambient and overall-post-music variety...
like this:

Bands spread across two days in Berkley...Jan 28 + Jan 29
Windy and Carl
Oblisk
Indian Guides
Sunlight Ascending
Jura
Telecollision
St. Zita
Sea Turtle Restoration Project
Electric Lion Soundwave Experiment
Pewter Cub

Choice Notes: Matt Jones Recording and more...

I've written quite a bit about Matt Jones over the last few days (for a forthcoming printed-feature-) so you'll forgive me if I'm sparse on the word-age here...

What you need to know is that, very soon, next month for sure, new recordings will be available from this Ypsi-based singer/songwriter...writer of such devastatingly beautiful lyrics. But that's all I can say...

The only more I can say is that he is also recording a live/in-studio EP to later compliment the still-forthcoming LP...
"We are still figuring out the logistics of this thing... and probably will be doing so up until we are playing our first notes.  But i am even looking forward to the possible insanity of it..."



Lookin forward to it...

Video produced by Love Drunk Studio... ...more info
myspace.com/​mattspainting


lovedrunkstudio.com

hearnebraska.org

....
While you're here, messing around on my site, enjoy this video, wholly unrelated to Mr. Jones...but notable... (this happened last Friday, at the magic Stick)



Also notable... pun-somewhat-intended...

Post-Deep-Cutz / Pre-New-Weird

Sex Church - Dull Light by Load Records
....Good Morning... (Afternoon?)

As my extremities thaw and the coffee screws my mind up into some cerebral pep squad leader, I squelch the neurotic tinges in the back of my head, those echoing from the upper bleachers of my skull's gymnasium, that seem so eager to remind me of how fleeting these little words are, that I type out across the screen... I remember, always, to just live in the moment...

Don't question the validity or profundity of posting a new song by this group called Sex Church that I just started getting into, this morning, via a recent album review...and, hey, yeah, I definitely dig the track enough and I think you will too... ...Will I be rocking it in a week? Will I be stammering to you about the band and the song, next weekend, when you catch me at the bar?

Maybe. Likely not. But enjoy it now for what it is...

But then... how's this for a not-so-random MP3 posting - Detroit-area based solo ambient-pop composer Andrew Remdenok's latest work:
  Hallo (Andrew Remdenok Remix) by andrewremdenok 
...who, it turns out, just played the Magic Stick last night... glad to see the former-Prussia-bassist is starting to bring his own stuff out, now. Hopefully we'll see/hear more soon...

~
....Moving on: News from two adverse ends of the Industry spectrum this morning...Swedish-based bit-torrent site The Pirate Bay, a known facilitator of "illegal" downloading, is now using its evil influence to help promote independent artists. Sounds pretty cool, actually. It now offers a free advertising service called The Promo Bay - (read about it here) - as TinyMixTapes reports: "many out there in the vast ocean of artists are more concerned with getting their output to the people than they are with having their output stolen or pirated..."

Of course, a provocative entity such as The Pirate Bay had something to say about the whole SOPA/PIPA backlash this week...striking back against the outrageous lengths politicians will go to defend copyright, suggesting perhaps that, likely, palms have been greased... That's the whole thing of it though, ain't it, the big labels and the big Katy Perry types are having their intellectual properties stolen..., right?

But many in the music industry have given up on album sales, royalties, etc... as TinyMixTapes continues: "By creating a community of content creators who openly support the free distribution of their work as a means of exposure that will lead to people buying concert tickets and other merchandise, it increases the acceptance of such practices..."

It comes down to quality of product, TMT says, vs. quality of marketing... And marketing is what artists like Katy Perry (via EMI) has in spades...
...as NPR's Marketplace -Planet Money reports this morning...
Listen to the story here.
Read more here...
...breaking down the nuanced expenses of producing a blockbuster album like Teenage Dream that saw Perry become "the most played artist on the radio..." Producers, songwriters, cameos, artists' advances all add up - and then there's the cost of getting these songs on the radio in the form of "special promotions, free merchandise, and presents..." Or, what sounds to me like payola, alive and well.

The story above breaks down all the various pockets in which this money ends up - and why the inconsistent "batting average" of major labels is the big reason the music industry is struggling.

~

That all said... why don't we hit the town tonight and see, hear and be invigoratingly rattled by some live local music?

Up and coming rock trio Superbomb plays inside Ferndale's post-punk-boutique Hybrid Moments, along with Kommie Kilpatrick, Instant Party and Growing Pains... 9pm

This group roared out a tripped-out, sludge howl of a set inside the Library a couple weeks ago... ...I turned to a friend, mid-set, and found myself wanting to say the words: "post-grunge..." to describe what I was hearing...

It seemed to have the alluring gloom of the later-mid-90's-pre-reunion era Soundgarden, but also the cerebral, tingling bend and hazy-barrel roll of Spacemen 3...

Do they sound like any of those bands? No, not necessarily. You're reading a blog, fercryinoutloud, so be wary of how subjective I/we, can be... But, maybe if those two noted bands were playing a game of tennis...and Superbomb was the ball that kept striking off the netting... ....wait, I'm not sure where that metaphor's going...

Some Things by Superbomb

It's just got that growl, in the guitars and the vocals, that distant-rolling-thunder-esque muted ominousness to the drums and bass, and things are spaced out, often slowed down - this is music that wants to take it all in during the verses and then swing its axes into every branch, wall or car hood during the choruses...

"Post-grunge?" I found myself chuckling after I said it... Stopping myself. What does that even mean? What does any of that even mean anymore? We have such a fixation on classification so that we know what we're walking into -when we approach a piece, a work, an artist... We crave a whiff of familiarity, to have an inkling of what to expect, which can dictate your enjoyment or rejection ...I'm trying to work against that.

Like when Jeremy Peters tells me that Eastern Michigan's jazz radio station still plays "mostly post-bop..." my mind instantly leafs through a range of artists from John Scofield to Branford Marsalis to maybe even some later Charles Mingus compositions... And then Peters tells me about the extensive work put into that kind of genre classification by Allmusic.com-staffers like Greg McIntosh or Fred Thomas... I thought, in my younger college days, that that would be something I would love doing day-in and day-out but...I worry now that it would drive me crazy.

I have enough time of it describing bands here...

So I'm trying to get post-post-labeling things... and embrace the New Weird. People can get touchy about classifying art - or music, what-have-you. Shouldn't it be that it's an uncontainable element, something that can't be framed or described-to-a-tee? In a world where we're made so-aware-of art and art history by those whose task it is to document it, (this influenced that, this era begot that era...) it's important to remember the very minute flurries and excitations bubbling between the beats of any song, anywhere...

Doc Waffles rightly compared the artist's venture to that of Ishmael's frightening and enlivening adventures aboard the Pequod in Moby Dick... "...it's an essential metaphor for the artistic enterprise, to probe the depths and encounter what's down there it may be your source of livlihood or of great terror," (said Doc). 

I've got to get back to probing the depths with the same literary flourish as Melville...

... Listen: Doc Waffles - "Three Minutes to Midnight"

Dudes Hast

Viewables...

Premiering tonight at the Belle Isle Casino...Solid Dudes--#2


Solid Dudes Kitchen - Jimmy Buffet Trailer from Solid Dudes Kitchen on Vimeo.


Detroit Revealed on Film......Premiering later in February at the DIA



... ...aaaand... Premiering later in March at the DIA

Future Oldies & Ashleys & Pink Lightning & Pass-uh-Lack-wa

......a conversation with Tom of The Ashleys - and his 5 other bands... wherein we discuss the possibility of a Scene Summit - the 16 band slam coming in April to the Lager House - and the 3 to 4 new albums that could arise from Passalacqua collaborating with the Ashleys, or just the Ashleys by themselves, or maybe from Pink Lightning...or maybe from another new band called Future Oldies? Or a new hip-hop group called Cool Island?

Find out...

Tom: Everything's been going really sweet actually...
Milo: Haven't heard that adjective used since like '98. It's how I used to breathlessly describe things like Mortal Kombat fatalities...
Tom: Let's bring it back, then...

(photo: Andrea Zarzycki)






.




~
Milo: You've gotten quite busy lately...aside from guitarring, singing, shredding and fashioning sun-glasses and feather boas with the Ashleys...you're now working with Passalacqua?

Tom: Pas-suh-lack-wah? Apparently I say it weird...Chris (Butterfield of Pink Lightning) busted my chops about it. I guess I say it like I'm from Minnesota or something. It's got Bryan Lack-ner in it, I figured it was Passa-Lack-qua...
Milo: Nah, it's like... Do Re Mi Fa So Lah-qua...
Tom: Real nice guys, fun guys. Apparently the Ashleys backing them came from you at the Library - when you read Nabakov over us jamming...Bryan said, literally, 'We should do something like that...'

~~
Milo: ...so...Ashleys, Passalacqua, and now you joined Pink Lightning...that's three projects. But I've been bugging you 'bout the other stuff you'd sent me, your solo, acoustic stuff...
Tom: Adam from Phantom Cats might join me and help make those into some-weird-music-band...Might just stay as a recording-only-thing, in case I write songs for a 10-piece band... We're only a trio now...I don't wanna end up playing these songs out live with my 10 pieces and just have 7 or 8 people standing there, waiting for us to get through the regular Ashley songs...
Milo: When you say "trio," for the Ashelys, we're talking about your longtime friend Keith...who joined the band on bass...who you used to blog with a bit...
Tom: Blogging's tough man...but, yeah, Keith, who works over there at the Ferndale Natural Food Patch...
Milo: I've been chipping away at trying to get them to consider changing the name to Carrots-A-Go-Go...and by the time they come around to it, I'll likely have patented it...then they might owe me.
Tom: Carrots-A-Go-Go sounds a lot better than Food Patch...
Milo: You feel like if you walked into that joint, and, ya know, it was like a movie scene, then there'd be a lot of Laff-In type zoom-ins and zoom-outs, hip-shakin' and tasteful splashes of multicolored siren flashes...Strawberry Alarm Clock might be the house band...
Tom: Let's get down to business; I brought my mobile studio...

(He lifts his digital 8-track recorder and headphones onto the rickety cafe table)

~~~
Tom: ...this is what I do everything on...I've got Passa-lack-wa demos on here...
He plays me combines a funky slide guitar and booming low end groove - rings like Funkadelic, somewhere between "Can You Get To That" and the fiery wail of "If It's Good To You..." Definitely distinct from the garagey-barrel rolls typical to most Ashleys fare to date...

Tom: Brent ("Blaksmith" of Passalacqua) already has a hook and some lyrics written out...and that's me on drums. It's not Steve (of the Ashleys)...does that one have horns on it?
I take off the headphones
Milo: Horns?
Tom: ...a horn 'effect'...they're fake horns...fake drums too...
Milo: So...live bands and MCs...House Phone backed up Cold Men Young a few times last year...now Ashleys are backing up Passalacqua...
Tom: That's the way it's looking...
Milo: ...a future career as a beat writer?
Tom: A Beat-man...selling beats by the side of the road.
Milo: From a Beet Stand
Tom: Only they're not beets, they're records...but also beets...

~~~~
Milo: Any difference in approach when writing a hip/hop track versus...
Tom: We've been dabbling in more off-color stuff, wait that's not the right expression...
Milo: Just not-rock-music...?
Tom: Yeah, for a while now. Steve's got a sampler, so we've been playing with loops and beats. I started a song from the opening bars of "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted..." for my own horrible rap project...
Milo: ...project # 5?
Tom: It was called Cool Island...we aimed to be the most offensive rap group in history. We wanted to play just one show...and only shoot off fireworks, for the whole set, no songs in actuality. We got the fire works, but they put the kabosh on the fireworks at the start of the show...

~~~~~
Milo: Birthday show is coming up in April... Sweet 16...with 16 bands?
Tom: It's getting pretty fun. At the Lager House, two stages, only 15 minute sets each...16 bands in 3 hours, it'll be like this crazy paintball thing.
Milo: What's it been like coming into Pink Lightning? And what the hell's the deal with Future Oldies?
Tom: I'd never joined a band that's been set like that before, but Future Oldies, doing that with Chris and Leo McWilliams (of PL) helped; I didn't know my role at first cuz they just same it out in rehearsals until they figure something out. That's mostly how we do Ashleys' tracks but usually someone at some point comes up with the golden ticket...but our songs aren't complicated, that helps... 'I've got this cool riff--put that in a song!' But, half the time, Pink Lightning guys wind up playing country type songs. We all have eclectic tastes. It's sounding good so far, practicing with them down in Eastern Market, cold up there, you gotta bundle up...

Milo: Future Oldies - you, Chris, Leo...
Tom: Steve (from Pupils/Marco Polio) and Adam (Phantom Cats)...we're on indefinite hiatus, until Steve gets a new drum kit...he had it stolen out of his car just one week before he had his car stolen in the same week he lost his job...that was a rough week... In Ferndale, no less! We just hung out all summer reinterpreting pop songs from this Golden Era rock n roll songbook that Leo had...
Milo: head-between-the-headphones "I'm hearing Bobby Darin's "Dream Lover"...and Roy Orbison's "In Dreams..." for starters...
Tom: It was really fun...
Milo: Maybe start up a kickstarter to get a new one?
Tom: Donate so that we can have fun...
Milo: By Future Oldies-having fun, listeners will, in theory, -have fun. Or your fun will be refunded. Guaranteed more fun than a swirly slide?
Tom: Whoa...more fun than a straight slide...less fun than a water-slide... We're still here, still on board.
Milo: Your recent update said: "New demos coming up on Tuesday..."
Tom: ...but we didn't specify which Tuesday... just "a" Tuesday...

~~~~~
Milo: Busy with so many bands and new demos...but you seem to have found a rhythm.
Tom: Not playing a bunch of shows is helpful. It got crazy over the summer. Hey, we got 6 shows, how we gonna practice? Then you don't and then nothing new happens... Then you stop and start writing/jamming again...We have to finish this (Ashleys) record before the world ends...
Milo: Get it out on the 20th of December, give em a day to listen to it...and enough time for me to write a review...That's not vain, is it? To daydream aloud that the world goes out listening to your record while reading my review...But that's the answer, reel back the shows; a lot of you guys, the satellites from the Brunch Rock summit... Pewter Cub, Jesse & the Gnome, Fur, Deadbeat Beat...reeled back all the shows after a busy spring and summer...your names are on the wall now, you can...
Tom: It just seems like everybody's already making really good music, what's the next thing to do? I've always wanted to do a soundtrack to a film...but I don't know how you get into that, do you know someone who's making a film? Do you have to make a movie yourself? Then you're busy making the movie...how ya gonna do music? What's next? Release an album,...then you tour...and then...?




---Milo: The calendar always hustles us through... Shows on the Weekends...then it's a CD release...then it's time for Blowout again... now we get into summer out door fests...then DIY...then Halloween... project project project... It's school-ish, cycle through your classes, hang out at lunch, see my show, see your show, smoke in the bathroom, do homework, go to recitals and proms...
...such great potential: Bands mixing in with each other, hip-hop and Roy Orbison...and "Cool Island!!" ...and bands getting together just to play 15 minutes in a cluttered set for that April Lager Show?
Tom: I think Jessica Hernandez is going to do it...we met at this show 2 years ago at the Crofoot, the Taco Show...with Shane & Jerry...that's where I met Brent (who, since then, has been the biggest spokesman for the Ashleys being the best band ever)...that show was like the king-maker...Hernandez went to Bonaroo after it, and Daniel Zott was playing it too, now he's on the TV...and Pass-a-lack-wa took off after that too...thought I might be next...? ...No...

He plays me an Ashleys track, more of a layered, atmospheric psyche-rock joint...longer than 3 minutes, nearing 5...
Tom: We're getting more instrumentation, with Keith. We were a two-person band initially just to play live shows easily. But, now, the network has expanded, you can have more people play, we start doing more intricate stuff. It's nice to know people.
Milo: It is... I think we need a Scene Summit
Tom: Scene Summit...
Milo: Like a Town Hall get together of band-folk and music-mavens and culture curators...
Tom: Like a convention...? Now recognizing the esteemed delegate from Woodbridge!??
Milo: The unkempt, shaggy-looking delegate who smells of cigarette smoke...
...but yeah...
Tom: Yeah...
Milo: We should put our heads together... Figure out what could be next...What should be next...

Next...

...then they press that distortion pedal down

...updated ramblings are on the way...

There's also this, while you're here:

UMO - Thought Ballune from Jordan Blady on Vimeo.

Ashleys (Summit?)

Currently having coffee with Tom, from the Ashleys...

We're talking about having a Scene Summit...some day soon...

What does that entail?

We're working that out as we talk... and down copious amounts of mind-tingling, blood-rattling coffee...

In the meantime, here's a song from the Ashley's 2011 album. (We're also talking about the Ashley's, now a trio, -inevitable follow up...





What happens next? We all wanna know...Tom's involved in four different projects right now...and I'll unwrap all of those in the next interview-post

More soon.

Connection

I kinda went off some rails on that last post... I was actually intending to write some sort of quip about the Rolling Stones' song "Connection," a Richards/Jagger jangler about being hassled by transporation security...

As fate has it, a local group, Grand Rapids-based The Quaaludes, recently had their cover version of this song released via Gold Tapes' year-end compilation (download it here). Their version speeds up the drums to a pummeling pulse, blows out the vocals just enough to match the buzzsaw clang of the surging guitars and raps it up in about 40-seconds-less time than the original. (If you wanna dig deeper, this band's made up of members from another Michigan-based rock/punk group known as The Amoebas.

In any case, my crazy train rant was trying to reel in the contemplative kite that would question how deep of a connection we can make with music, when we are ever tumbling forth into-onto-and-out-of new albums by new bands at a rate unheard of in... hmm, can I put it this way, listener-history?

And just as soon as I think I've mined profound terrain in terms of musical appreciation, theory, history and its role (and impact upon) society (i.e., those same listeners...) then Phillip Glass comes along (stopping into Ann Arbor, no less) and puts things in perspective...
...while discussing with the Free Press music writer Mark Stryker, regarding one of the few-and-far-between performances of his groundbreaking avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach (Fri, Jan 20/ Sat Jan 21 at the Power Center (on Fletcher St))... the Koyaanisqatsi-composer bemoaned how behind we all still were, how preocuppied with the shock value of experimental forms...

"The music world has barely recovered from 'Pierrot Lunaire' of Arnold Schoenberg," ...referring to an atonal piece from 1912 that helped define the austere modernism that dominated classical music for decades after World War II. "Even today, people program Bartok as if it was new work. We're talking about work written 70 years ago, and the big revolution in music that happened when my grandfather was a young man. It's insane! It's unconscionably slow, glacial change in the music world...."


Stryker asks: "...isn't it a lot better today than it used to be?"

Comes the reply: "...Marginally."


Read on

And find out more from the U-M School of Art & Design (who held a talk, this afternoon, regarding Einstein on the Beach...even as I post this...)

More:

Golden Oldies and Torsos; Golden Eras and Future Slang (Future Landscapes)

Become...Unbecoming...



I'm not the first to call for It's execution - but I think nostalgia ...should officially be eulogized, ...particularly in a world where the Beach Boys (and likely, too, the Rolling Stones) will be ambling through their 50th-anniversary tours...where Abbey Road is the top selling vinyl album for 2011... where Dexy's Midnight Runner's are being played on the "Oldies"...station?

I'm constantly over-thinking the role music plays in our daily lives - cerebral synapses surging the jittery fingers across the keyboard too swiftly and often without any second thought to those poor souls who take it for granted, the stuffy squares who nod it away as a lulling element from drug store ceiling speakers...

But don't we all, on varying and nuanced levels, take it for granted, now? But how can we not? -Not... take it for granted when everything we could capably ingest is so readily reachable - download-away!





Superstars of the 80's, a CD compilation, is currently spinning through my car stereo. The gooey, gaudy, cringe-inducing saxophones and wheezy synth wailing melodies of J. Geils Band's "Centerfold" or Human League's "Fascination"... the horrors of Starships "We Built This City" and the laughable slow-dance-ballad of Pat Benatar's "We Belong..."

Fodder for frivolity...

And I thought how quickly musical moments, genres, eras... are crumbled some-years'-later, by satirizing wrecking balls - when Pitchfork came to prominence at the start of the 21st century, it was the Grunge or Rap Rock or the teenie-bop revivalists who were in the crosshairs of repudiating, high-horse trotting hipsters.

But now that we're in 2012, with 2013 a mere 300 days away...will we look back upon the sanctified era of 2003 - the boom days of Animal Collectives, Liars, Strokes, LCD Soundsystems, Of Montreal, St. Vincent, even... - with the same malicious  mockery...

"Like, gag-me-with-a-spoon, already...can you buh-leeeve that we learned all the words to the entirity of "The Past Is A Grotesque Animal?" -That we fell for the Bon Iver bandwagon or that we were posing as: -Black-Keys-fans-from-before-they-sold-out-Madison-Square-Gardens..."

In Internet world, doesn't everything just become passe at a quicker rate? I'm onto the next thing, already... You might as well be playing "Everybody's Workin' For The Weekend..." while you're playing that M83 track... (Right? Well...maybe...maybe eventually).

Best New Music... as Pitchfork once used as their kingmaking hyper link label...

What stays best anymore? That's all subjective... but...

but but but...

I guess what matters is what moves you... Whatever gets you through... (as the possibly-most-highly-sanctified rock icon, John Lennon, once sang)...

That's all well and good. Yes, "Midnight City" cheered me up and made me feel cool as I drove through a traffic-light-flickered, headlight-splattered metropolis, on my way to see dynamic people say momentarily profound things over ice-crackled cocktails before they slid up and began undulating and emoting with inspiring abandon, all across a splintered stage under dim lights, for an hour or so up until the clock chimed 12....

And, yes, I got up the next day and wrote something, like this...

Whatever gets you through... But, then, we shouldn't always be drunk on Kool-aid, zozzled by memories of perfect listens...rose-colored ear-buds...




Scales fell from my eyes - bless the still-yet-flickered sustainability of music writing... Tiny Mix Tapes tore into Guided By Voices... Indeed. Exit-Flaggers-fly at half-mast! Bronze stars for the robot boys... In an Internet world where we can be tuned into anything from Tinarriwen, to Kings Go Forth, to the reissue of CAN's Tago Mago or whatever new mixtape thing the Weekend is putting out, shouldn't we be ready, emotionally, psychologically, to be brutally honest with the bands that once adorned our bedrooms and dorms via posters and scattered CD sleeves? We have to be ready to write, shouldn't we??-- to judge properly? "...for those of us not indoctrinated into the Cult of Uncle Bob..."

I'm not saying that in the year 2023, we'll hear Animal Collective on some sad, fractured replicant of a radio-entity's broadcast and laugh at it with the same embarrased-yet-so-glad-I'm-cooler-now/delusion-of-grandeur that we, as music listeners, do, now, with 80's Superstars...

No, the way, it measures out, likely, is that last decade's crop of hipster-indie-superstars will be regarded the same way we looked back upon post-new-wave and post-punk icons like The Smiths or even the Pixies...

Maybe. (Hey, good thing the Pixies never tried recording another record, like GBV, huh? And--wow, what might happen with this whole Neutral Milk Hotel reunion...or At The Drive In, for that matter?--at Coachella)

But then there are those cases... The mega stars, the heroes, the icons - who, for a significant period impacted us, gave us substantial inspiration - whether it's Guided By Voices or the Wu Tang Clan...




...But there's no way we're going to be as replay-happy and reverent / box-set buying and kowtowing as we are to the Golden anniversaries of the Rolling Stones or the Beach Boys... as we were to GBV, not in that same sense, to that same level. We shouldn't be. Because nostalgia's fucking dead, now.

We're sluicing and surfing through wild, rickey cultural chutes, my friends... Oldies don't mean oldies anymore... And icon-- is just a word Amazon uses to sell you something by an artist for whom your worshipful torch has dwindled to bleary, nostalgic sparks...

We are ever in the moment now...

Brave orbiters of new space... Nothingnauts



What you've done, what you just did, the song you just uploaded... is beautiful. Has a beauty of it's own. But nothing is so sacred to be packaged as a press-release claiming something to be the absolute next revolution - or to be re-packaged and re-sold back to you as the return of that great era you loved so dearly...
 

The tracks above are all of this moment...and they do have beauty. But what the streaming-artists-above do next will be just as dynamic - forget that there will be no oldies stations...for these tracks to one day be-recycled-by... (no Future Oldies!... What a Crappy Future!) ...
 
If you can go everywhere and anywhere on this Internet music milleiu...if the playing field is completely level, then consider the musical fields of your own backyard, while you're at it...



Streaming Above:
Jah Connery

Brilliant Violence

Future Slang

Golden Torso

Pupils
and...
a preview of a forthcoming EP by K.I.D.S.'s Deleano Acevedo:
Libra Dreams/Future Landscapes by DeLeano Acevedo

Take It Easy

In the news:

Passalacqua (dir. Tony Katai):


The War On Drugs:


Real Estate:

Real Estate - "Easy" from Tom Scharpling     

...Wrapping up a lot of writing projects this week... I'll be getting back here soon with some characteristically charged-up columns -

In the meantime - consider going Headhunting this weekend...

And check this out: Shoegaze/psyche-rock duo Dark Red have a new single coming out this month on Beehive Recording Co.'s site - viewable below (dir. Dave Krieger)

...

And consider marking your calendars for this show - (save up some gas money, Ann Arbor ain't so far)...

Get to Know Mine

Middle of the working week
and I've got things to throw your way...

Lists:
The Detroit side...
The Ypsi side...
Singles from Ypsi
and, then, some more ramblings about recently released songs...

Danny Brown made the cover of both local music/culture zines this week...

But these guys got an honorable mention for Real  Detroit's Artist of the Year category




And this band made the top of Brett Callwood's list

~

Then, after all that randomness, -might you please consider this video - by burgeoning post-rock/space-jazz/power-pop collective Songs From The Moon: - 
part one of part of a six-minute, three-song "punk EP" (called Get To Know Mine) that will likely be coming out within the next couple of months...


dig the credits and more info from the band's blog