In honor of Catherine O'Hara and the immortal "fruit wine" gag on Schitt's Creek, we shared half a bottle of the 2024 Emergence blend from Art + Science NW. Muscat and quince, weird and wonderful. They are maniacs with a dream. If you are a cheapskate explorer like me, they are currently running a closeout case sale.
This week at work has involved a lot of squinting at fine-grained detail in numbers and punctuation, so to keep my brain alive I went on a musical rabbit hole journey. It started with this lovely makaaruyen number from Madrotter - hold on until the whistling starts:
I wanted to know more, so I hit the dark alleys of YouChoob and found this lengthy playlist, which brought me to this lovely number: This sweet and pretty video set in an unfamiliar countryside reminded me of the similar homespun videos coming out of the huayno scene in Peru/Bolivia (also a rabbit hole I've gone down), which brought me to Esther Suarez's awesome La Bolognesina.
Then I was listening to my library on shuffle and went down the Azerbaijani Gitara rabbit hole. Volume 2 in particular.
The boy (9 years old now) and I were looking at his car collection in a Hot Wheels game we checked out from the library, and I was talking to him in the voice of his duck puppet. As one does.
One of the cars was a vintage Packard. I dropped the dad/duck joke: Oh, ducks drive a Quackard. I thought that was pretty good as dad/duck jokes go.
His response: Oh, I thought you would say it's a Pochard.
I gave him a blank stare and then looked it up at m-w.com: Pochard : any of various rather heavy-bodied diving ducks (especially genus Aythya) with a large head and with feet and legs placed far back under the body
We had a work potluck. My coworker brought more tamarindo than we could consume, so I brought a bunch home and gave it to the boy.
"Is it spicy?" he asked. No, it's not spicy. It's more like Kool-Aid. Blank stare. Uh, kind of like Capri-Sun? He pauses and tries a sip. "Oh! It's like an aguafresca!" Of course I should have led with that.
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All three of U.S. Saucer's albums are great (as is their odds-and-ends collection), but the wintry dark vibes of Tender Places Come from Nothing are where I'm at right now. I listened to it while making soup. Just gorgeous. I've listened to this a million times and, given the right solsticey soup-making environment, it is a beautiful clear pool to fall into.
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Speaking of limpid moments from the past: A bit of a guilty pleasure, but Fleetwood Mac's Future Games. "Woman of a Thousand Years" isn't so dissimilar from the song above, and the title track is pretty awesome even if its lyrics and delivery are a little whoa-man. It sounds good along with the dim light at mid-day.
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Speaking of limpid moments from the past: I was talking to another coworker about my love for the DOD Punkifier effects pedal. One thing led to another and soon I was listening to some old unreleased recordings from Yuma Nora, a band for whom I played guitar and "specialty sounds" back in the mid-aughts. I'll have to escort those recordings into the world at some point, since in many ways they are farther out and better than what was actually released. But for now, here's a track from 2005 that you can listen to.
This crazed glove commercial from 1975. The disembodied green-screen gloves banging at a parking meter, the weirdly dispassionate narration saying "A fine gift," the library disco with horns.
80s:
A DJ on xray.fm played the Meat Puppets' "Up on the Sun" yesterday and that got it stuck in my head tonight, so I was singing it for my boy. He kind of flipped trying to figure out what it meant to sing "I turned to myself and said you are my daughter." "How is there an ocean up on the sun where the wind never blows?" he asked. Good question.
Those first three albums of theirs (bought second-hand in high school) find a way to sneak into my rotation every so often. Unlike a lot of things I've listened to a million times, they are still pretty fresh.
90s:
I found my old copy of Nice's self-titled album (well, technically I found my old iPud with a lot of old mp3s on it). This track always get me:
Incredibly, we were able to get this Australian trio out to my college in the early 90s. I remember being too prudish and poor to pick up one of their "Mobile Orgy" shirts. They had some sweet Casio bass pedals that I have never seen since. I remember not being able to figure out their interpersonal dynamics but liking their performance. Regretting not recording it on my Recording Walkman.
This Slovenly 7" from 1991-ish. (I had just unlocked access to the college radio station and spent hours there going through stuff from the Trouser Press guide. Magic.) Sometimes Steve Anderson's vocals kind of sat on top of their instrumentation, but here he digs in hard.
It is still hard to believe that I created the album Gelatin Duplicator. I listened to it on headphones and, yes, I'm the one whose mouth is moving, but it's hard to believe that I committed to that particular sound so diligently.
Speaking of which, I have this entire album I'm the One Whose Mouth Is Moving that I somehow forgot to release a decade ago. When my work gets less crazy I'll have to work on my Digital Legacy, maybe sign up for a DystroKyd account or something, and get this stuff off my hard drive and into the universe.
LISTENING:
Juana Molina's new one DOGA
Heather Leigh's eerie and singularThrone - finally bought a copy
Mostly lots of 70s stuff:
YouChoob episodes of The Midnight Special while washing the dishes - the Don Cornelius-hosted one is awesome, particularly the Whispers' "Bingo":
The Joan Baez-hosted one an episode later is just so-so, but my jaw dropped when I heard her song "Children," in which she lists the names of a bunch of her kid's friends in 1975. Amid one verse comprised solely of J names, she says "[my name] and [my brother's name]" in that order. Were my parents listening? Is this an Easter egg they left for us to uncover fifty years later?
I bought a bunch of smooth jazz/funk albums at the library used book store for a dollar each. Some are boring, but Luther Rabb's Street Angel is pretty sweet, particularly "Seattle Disco's Groovin' Tonight" which apparently also existed in a version called "Seattle Sonics Do It Tonight":
READING: Several things at once. Slowly making my way through Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff's crazed Your Name Here. If you happen to have a flight coming up and an interest in extreeeem metafiction and learning to decipher Arabic characters, highest recommendation. I read it on the plane on the way home from Boston recently and was completely losing it. Apologies to my fellow passengers.
Here at Tape Mtn. HQ we have been listening to a lot of the newish Kiss Hello* album Summerdata. I got a chance to see and play with these guys on my most recent trip to LA and now the album is here in massive digital form. Take it in slowly.
Certain themes come up repeatedly - loss, love, loss of love. Lyrics pop in and out and are repurposed. "Summer" is in the title (good title), but the vibe is autumn melancholy to my ears. Holding on. A data dump about past summers more than experiencing summer in the moment. "Someone's Life Has Just Begun" explains this vibe better than I can say it.
There's some really impressive musicianship here. How-did-they-do-that moments like the prog-adjacent epic "Western/Whatever." Over-the-top guitar solos when they are called for.** Detail to get lost in. Some moments of wabi-sabi that I appreciate. It gets genuinely dark in spots.
I have some theories on album sequencing that I've been working on since I was in elementary school:
One of them is that the next-to-last track on an album needs to be the most vulnerable one, the track where you've established trust and you need to get it out and take the most risks before wrapping things up with a bow on the final track. This album does not disappoint on that front. Penultimate track "Awful Bliss" is the sound of the protagonist falling apart and melting in the rain, while
Final track "PSLGO" does wrap things up with a shiny pop bow sonically, but leaves the listener on the ostensibly unanswered question "You turned to me and asked do you love me?" Good trick.
One rule of mine that IS violated, however, is that the track "1717" is track #16. If there is a number in a track title, do what you need to do to make it work.
You may find that you enjoy certain stretches more than others. You may find that you are happier if you burn a CD with certain songs and listen to it that way. That's what I did. I treated it like Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch, with more than one acceptable path through the tracks.
Bonus points for Very Ned liner notes from Friend of Tape Mtn. Ned R.
*Obligatory conflict of interest note: I have known Friend of Tape Mtn. KH Linus for essentially his entire life
**The official Tape Mtn. Secret Blog position is that over-the-top guitar solos are a good idea
Recently whenever I've been driving people places in the Comfymobile, I always end up playing Spanish artist Lorena Álvarez's album Anónimo. Lovely, goofy, wild stuff, full of joy and ideas.
Thirteen years later she's put out one album and some EPs in multiple different directions, and now we are here in 2025 after a lot of everything and she has a new album called El poder sobre una misma. The trademark exuberance is still there in wonderful songs like "Increíble" and "Los pensamientos" but this one has a lot more contemplative moments. Not necessarily background listening for trips across Portland in an automobile or for doing office work, but there's a lot of introspective joy to be had. And the title track, a dorky polka about the joys of hitting rock bottom and finding a way out, is delightful, particularly when the million multitracked vocals hit at the end.
In the video for "Increíble," she gets to roll in tall grass, pretend to fly a helicopter, hang out with chickens and goats, drink a beer with her name on it, and climb a mountain. I guess I've done three of these things? I like it as an aspirational lifestyle video:
I can't seem to find a single way to legally obtain this album in the US. Montgrí won't ship to our backwards country thanks to our trade situation. Oh well, streaming it is.
