Back in the 90s I would spend time at the Cypress Swap Meet and there was a booth where someone was selling tube socks. This vendor was always playing these outlandish synthesizer versions of old hit songs from another country. Maybe Korea? Memory can be weird like that when you are trying to remember nostalgic retrofuturistic versions of old songs being played by tube sock vendors in a parking lot thirty years ago. I do remember taking in that music while eating a swap-meet churro and thinking that it was a good moment.
Good old Madrotter posted a recent album that Madrotter has dubbed Oscar Young and that YouChoob Music has credited to 奥斯卡音乐. Through the magic of the algorithm I found out that this artist has approximately a trillion albums of outlandish synthesizer easy listening covers. Some of the songs I recognize, some I don't, but mostly I want to imagine being in a doctor's office in 1976 nodding my head to this stuff.
Over Labor Day weekend I flew down to Southern California - Mike L was having a wine party and we were going to record music and play games. After getting spousal permission I bought tickets. Good call.
I biked to the Portland airport, took a nonstop to Burbank and then took trains down to Long Beach. Travel hack in Southern California: take the train, even if everyone thinks you are crazy to do so. I get to Mike and Michelle's charming new place and drink wine.
The details are a little fuzzy at this point, but the next day we drive up to record Kanq Qixarth music in Linus's studio, aka a garage in a morning-glory-strewn back yard:
I've played music with these guys for three decades!!! Mike's son Linus and his super talented bandmates join in. Someone gets the bright idea to write a song based on a Rick James song:
Give it to me baby Give me that sweet funky stuff
but with the opposites of everything. Being the walking thesaurus of the party I come up with a lot of the words:
Take that from you daddy Return that sour orthodox ether
Needless to say it ends up being a super noisy 20-minute funk song. Ridiculous. Now I want to hear it.
Wine party later in the back yard. Everyone is talking about everything. Endless wine and endless talk about wine. The mosquitoes get one whiff of my blood and tell all their friends. I hold grandbaby Charlie and my old baby-holding reflexes kick in instantly, and we are fast friends. Conversations about digital activism, kids in college, babies, music of course, graduate school. I forget. It's a lot.
I play a show in the garage and it is surprisingly good. Previous wine party shows of mine have been legendary in the disaster sense, but this time I play good songs somewhat competently (!), including a cover of this one after introducing everyone to it at breakfast that morning:
Linus's band Kiss Hello plays afterwards, complex and rich sophistipop, almost prog, Matt somehow live-triggering my beloved old drum machine the Boss DR-110. Positive words about their album Summerdata to follow soon enough. The night ends at some point, I guess?!
The next day Mike says he's never going to do one of those parties again. I've heard that before. We play Agricola and jam surprisingly quietly in the front room.
L. takes me up to someplace near Pasadena or something to catch a train to my Erbenb in North Hollywood. I'm not sure it saves me any time, but it's a good ride and it's good to catch up. I take the train, and when I get out of the subway the sun is going down over Lankershim Blvd. I walk and walk in the dimming light and dodge cars and walk. Eventually I get to a room with bright lights and a television. I drop my bag and head out to try to catch the pupusa truck before they close. It drives away as I approach. Some sleep happens.
I wake up super early to walk to the airport. 100% would recommend walking several miles to the Burbank airport at 4:30 a.m. after not sleeping. A gas station playing "Take My Breath Away." Ladies setting up roadside desayuno carts, bacon smells in with the night eucalyptus and traffic smells. Transmission towers tingling in the night. The sun just starting to rise over the airport.
Back in Portland. My bike is still there. I ride it home. The next day my kid starts third grade. We are back in the world.
I sequenced all the bass lines and a lot of other things and used general computer wizardry to make a pop album. Mostly. Features songs about watching Password Plus while washing the dishes, finding kitchen accoutrements on the side of the road, inventing new alphabets during Lutheran confirmation, missing Verlaines shows and falling asleep on the train home, electric pencil sharpeners, and riding a cargo bike in 105 degree heat.
What happens if I decide to make an album where every track has prominent ring modulator? This is it. Songs about buying orange drink from a vending machine, falling asleep on the highway, falling asleep to Maya Deren films, buying expired produce, and ancient printing technology melting during the heat dome.
If you would like physical CD copies printed on an Apple //c-ImageWriter II combo and an IBM Wheelwriter 5 respectively, drop me a line. I'm done selling things (well, aside from charging $1 on Bandqlamp) but we can work something out.
In August we had half a mind to fly somewhere but didn’t have enough PTO. So we stayed in the Northwest and drove the Wondermobile to Centralia, WA.
What a weird place! We stayed in the charming, lovingly restored Centralia Square hotel (formerly an Elks lodge) and our boy looked out at the non-stop trains with religious zeal. The place is just starting to gentrify - the McMenamins hotel, far inferior to the Centralia Square, the foot soldier of gentrification - and now there are retro arcades, natural-food shops, goth gift shops with a salesman wearing a monocle. The trains constantly roar through Hub City. My son delighted in telling me which one was an Amtrak and which one was a freight train, even before they showed up.
The Centralia Rollerdrome. With a name like that it has to be awesome, and indeed it is. Largely untouched by time and beautifully kept. My rollerskating spouse was in total heaven, and thanks to the bouncy house, our kid was too.
I bought a copy of Margo Guryan's Take a Picture at the Amazon-returns bin store (who returns that?!) and now "Sunday Morning" is stuck in my head forever.
After that we drove down to the central Oregon coast to escape a heat wave in Portland. Good idea except that everyone else was doing the same thing, so we hung suspended in an eternal traffic jam in Otis. But when we got to our destination it was twilightly and cool and misty. Despite not sleeping the first night (no thanks to the drunken bros falling asleep with the TV on at nuclear volume above us) we got to swim in Lake Marie and walk in the mist and drink good wild cider and listen to sea lions ork-orking and walk and watch the fierce surf on the rocky shore and walk. It was good and surreal and necessary.
I love trawling the CD sections at library book sales. They're cheap, buying things supports the library, and sometimes they have great albums that were withdrawn after not getting checked out enough. Among them: Wreckless Eric's _Le Beat Group Electrique_, thanks to whoever purchased it for the Ledding Library. Great stuff, recorded quietly in a living room with a cardboard box for drums. Warm, low-stakes, charming:
Also useful: buying trashy 80s CDs that I want to listen to but that I know will follow me forever on the algo. So instead of having YouTroobpf keep asking me, hey, do you want to listen to Bleears for Flears's _Songs for the Big Blare_ again? Remember that time in August 2025 when you listened to it twice? Instead, I can put my laser vinyl into my laser vinyl machine and experience the shiniest version of that shiny 1985 sound without being hounded about it. It is weird to hear it at the correct speed - I was genuinely expecting the first song to be a full half-step lower, thanks to my crummy mid-80s tape deck and its unreliable dubs - but still kind of a pleasure, especially "Heed over Hells," whose bass line I had not paid sufficient attention to the first time around.
Yesterday we went to the eternally rapidly gentrifying Foster Road for the Foster Soiree. Always interesting to see what's coming in and pushing out the sketchy businesses that dotted the area when we lived there. We got to hang out with Friend of Tape Mountain Alison D, whose Xtreme Twee business empire continues to get weirder and greater, get very nice kulfi-flavored ice cream (dairy for JL, non- for me), check out a new record store (not my thing) and the new-ish book store Word Virus (very much my thing).
Today I did Bridge Pedal, in which one bikes across most of Portland's bridges and tries not to crash into bicycles in front of one. Today JL and the boy also did the kids' ride - he needs a bigger bike very much - and I was able to catch up with them after I finished the main ride. I was so proud of how well he was keeping to his lane and not running over smaller children. It felt good.
People had speakers on their bikes, which is... a choice. Here are my awards for best and worst songs overheard:
BEST: When I got to the finish line, someone was playing Shonen Knife's "Cycling is Fun" (the original and better version) Obvious choice, right, but a delightful song and the timing couldn't have been better. I shouted "hey!" along with them and startled another rider.
Left-field choice: Someone was playing Buffalo Springfield's "Broken Arrow" on the Marquam Bridge, a mysterious twisty banger from my dad's record collection, and somehow not among the top search suggestions on YouChoob:
WORST: Mötley Crüe's "Girls, Girls, Girls," the audio equivalent of shitting in the pool.
