Little stereos

At a Happy Valley yard sale last summer*, I picked up a very cute little vintage Realistic/Radio Shack stereo amplifier. I wasn't sure if I would have a USE for it, but it was only a couple bucks and it had the best aluminum knobs.** So I picked it up and found a place for it in my bike bags among my other finds.

Today I realized I wanted to give it a shot. Turns out it works super well (once I worked out all the dust from the potentiometers by sweeping them back and forth), and it looks pretty good. I picked up some super cheap speakers from the Mormon thrift store down the street, and for the price of a Costco pizza***, I'm in business.

I have set up so so many stereos over the years. Always a new apartment, always a new garage sale receiver, always fiddling with the speaker wires. Wires all over, my perpetual condition. Today I got out my wire strippers and triumphantly did some wire stripping. It is so satisfying. I could never be an electrician, but stripping speaker wire feels pretty good.

*Of course I went to a gazillion garage sales in this beautiful and bland suburb by e-bike, it was great, see my write-up from 2023
**I know, I'm a pervert for liking knobs and buttons so much
***RIP gluten, I miss you

Lines and rhymes 12/30/24

Lines that I've enjoyed in songs that are likewise great:

Aselefech Ashine and Getenesh Kebret "Meche Neow":
"Eager to see you return
I sleep facing in the direction you might be"
(just recently got this album from Mississippi Records, had known this song for nearly three decades ever since getting Ethiopian Groove: The Golden Seventies on tape from Merkato in LA before some G*ng W*z*rd show or other)

Cootie Catcher "Friend of a Friend":
"And you know that I could pick out your ears in a crowd"
(super catchy song, great video also, particularly with its awesome glitched-out closed-captioning):

I don't know any lyrics from this great post from Madrotter Treasure Hunt, but the second song is called "Badminton," and I'm trying to imagine what the lyrics might be about (great cover):

Trout Mask Replica Replica

The internet failed to alert me that someone had completed a song-for-song a capella cover of Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica. Like, note-for-note. Even if it's not something I'd return to for multiple listens, I have to admire the crazed dedication that went into it. Olympic levels of dedication. Like gymnasts. Five years in the making. What sort of madman. 

I can't not think of that remake of Psycho. Or Goat-Boy's dad recording endless Rush covers on his four-track over and over again. Or people making umpteen thousands of origami cranes. Or reading the OED from cover to cover. Playing "Vexations" for 24 hours straight. Or arcade games for 48 hours straight on a single quarter.

I will admit I'm not 100% sold on the aesthetics of the project. Dude(s) had previously done note-for-note covers of Negativland and the Residents, both bands that I wish I could like but don't actually enjoy, and there's some of that self-consciously creepy/woozy/offputting vibe throughout, particularly in the companion videos. I don't feel like Captain Beefheart was aiming to be self-consciously offputting. Challenging, sure. But of course his aesthetic vision, at least at this point in his career, was offputting to pretty much all of straight America.

But once again I reiterate: note-for-note cover of Trout Mask Replica. Every song. The songs that were originally solo a capella get new and lurid harmonies. The skits get redone. Every tic and stammer mimicked to the microsecond. What a world.

New best website ever, plus music notes

Previously I had tagged this comprehensive list of Atari-compatible joysticks as the world's best website, but I think it has strong competition from this museum of radioactive quack cures. While the basic idea behind this museum - the early 20th-century health fad of adding radon gas to water - is horrifying, there's also a lot of amazing graphic design and some great stories of American entrepeneurial pluck/fraud. And the writing has a strong voice, one with a lot of sympathy for its subjects. I love this story of using a radium emanator to refill the coolant in an overheating Toyota Tercel. In a slightly different life, I can totally see myself being in that situation.

On the virtual turntable recently:
Oregon Music of Another Present Era - I think the later 80sified version of this band played on my parents' adult contemporary/lite-jazz station and I remember not being super into it, but the original early 70s version was recommended to me and it scratches some free-improv/seeker itches. Great bass playing, and pretty cheap on Disqogz. This led me to look through a seller's inventory and, along with a couple Oregon albums, I grabbed albums by Fingerprintz and Bohannon. Neither one particularly cool, but both  satisfying.

Everything by Las Mosquitas. Why is it that I am seriously lukewarm on anything garagey done by dudes, but I love all-female bands like this? I guess this is an Ennio Morricone composition no less? Not ready to spend $30 plus on the reissue that came out recently, plus I can't help but have a visceral reaction to the LP cover (a very 60s-era cartoon of flies with mascara and fishnets). But it's delightful.

Bicycle Bad Idea Factory/L*p*rs on 45

I biked to the DMV in Gladstone on a cold but otherwise perfect December day. Getting a RealID for the next time I get on a plane (which could be a decade or so, given my track record).

On the way home I got a super deep song by the R**nch* Y**ng L*p*rs (technically R*p*bl*c*n Y**ng L*v*t*s, the RYL right-wing Christian music parody side project) stuck in my head. It was a weird moment. I hadn't thought about that song in... decades? As I got closer to home, my mind decided that it would be a really good idea to make a Stars on 45-esque medley based on the work of that group(*), setting everything to a constant disco beat. Could be a good idea, right?

Once I got home and got off the bike, I realized, wait, this is in fact a terrible idea. I mentioned it to my wife and she concurred that this was just a death-defyingly bad idea. But for that brief shining moment on a brief shining December day on the Interstate 205 multi-use path, it was a spectacularly good bad idea.

Here's the 12-inch Stars on 45, itself just a terrible idea. Maybe it will give you a bad idea of your own?! Maybe you will actually go through with it?!

 (*) the L*p*rs, not the L*v*t*s, who only recorded four songs, not nearly enough for a L*v*t*s on 45 mega mix

Music notes 11-29

The other day I was driving back from dropping the kid off at non-school-day care on a foggy morning. I plugged my phone into the aux jack and had YouChoob Muzik tell me what I wanted to hear. The results:
1. Song from Leya's lovely new EP I Forget Everything
2. Another song from Leya's lovely new EP I Forget Everything
3. Side 2 of Hüsker Dü's blarrgh-ultracore Land Speed Record (probably their best album)
It worked better than you'd expect. I got home just as "Let's Go Die" ended and "Data Control" started.

Good Morning's The Accident just came out, and I like the 8-minute single "Soft Rock Band." Their MO is to make smarter-than-usual background vocal-fry coffeehouse pop, which they usually pull off well, music to put on and ignore and then occasionally catch something weird or wild. This song, by dint of being eight minutes long, is structurally difficult to ignore, and then I catch that the lyrics are more pointed than usual, and I like the fact that they pronounce the phrase "Soft. Rock. Band." as the molossus it has always wanted to be rather than a slurred creaky-voice afterthought.

I am glad that KISN 95.1 continues its low power dominance of the airwaves within visual distance of Mt. Scott in outer Southeast Portland and unincorporated Clackamas County. The other night they played "Love Will Keep Us Together." Of course JL and I danced to it in the kitchen. One must. I have a history of ironic Gen X appropriation of that song and album, but I also kind of really love it. Solid construction, goofy synths everywhere, a bridge that actually works, and just when you want it to modulate up, it modulates up.

Which reminds me that I need to find and digitize the cassettes of my mid-90s "Love Will Keep Us Together" digital manipulation frenzies and fuzzbox freakouts. It was definitely a returning theme. And maybe I should return to the theme with thirty years of, um, wisdom?

 

Orangutan Breaks into Car and Steals Beer

The SMU Jones/WFAA archives are always a good deep dig. Here's a delightful slice of 1975:

 "Tonight, as it sits in protective custody, the animal can consider what it did."

Also, SO MANY CIGARETTES