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

 

Ibon Errazkin / Tsai Ming-Liang

First off: ugh

Second: On a dreadful day amidst the wreckage of my inbox, there was an announcement from Elefant that Ibon Errazkin's new album Claros del Bosque is coming out later this month. His previous album Foto Aérea has also been a source of calm and clarity for me in weird times and I'm looking forward to seeing what he does as he continues to hone his obsessive craft. Here, watch the video(s):

He mentions at the end of the video that he was inspired by Tsai Ming-Liang's Walker series, in which people very very slowly walk across a landscape. Number one, not familiar, number two, must investigate immediately.

Computers: Expressway to Tomorrow

Sometimes you click around on Internet Archive and end up in 1983. I found this cache of feedback letters for the delightfully named "Computers: Expressway to Tomorrow" presentation that went around to high school gymnasiums in 1983, sponsored by Atari. It is interesting to see which IBM Selectric typeballs were in fashion at the time (Letter Gothic, always my favorite), how many ways the name Ronnie Anastasio can be misspelled, how high school administrators expressed themselves through people taking dictation. Other fun stuff too.

I like these bits of arcana from the dowdy 1980s, the 80s that happened in fluorescent-lit buildings in beige outfits rather than in neon leg warmers under bright lights in the aerobics studio.

Dumb cargo bike adventures part ???

 

I went to a rummage sale on the cargo bike today. I saw an upright vacuum and asked myself, hmm, will I be able to get this thing home safely? Answer: OF COURSE. And drivers, for some crazy reason, seemed to give me more room than usual! Memo to myself: always carry a vacuum cleaner on bike

"When the Song Begins"

Always interesting when something you did twenty-five years ago comes up on shuffle. This 10-minute number was recorded, if I recall correctly, on my blue Tascam Porta 02, probably using a single microphone. The title is the first line uttered, nearly five minutes in, and I like how the coda is actually kind of pretty. I also like how my guitar is borderline inaudible, but it is clearly providing invisible structure to the proceedings:

Not my favorite album by said group, but definitely the edgiest GW album cover, Wegman weimaraners photoshopped onto that infamous gun photo, with faux-Crass typography to boot. And in any case GW's albums don't necessarily function to be good or bad, they just are, they exist to propagate themselves in used record bins. This one was particularly good at that function since it was on what I recall being a pretty hip record label? And I appreciate how this particular song has a whopping 16 plays on YouChoob.

Early September / Herbie Flowers

I took the last couple days off work. Burning off some PTO. Felt good.

Yesterday I rode my bike to hike on Mt. Talbert, which I don't think I'd been to since my kid started going to daycare. It felt weird not having 25 pounds of snoozing toddler in a hiking backpack on my person. I felt free. The dappled sunlight, overmemorized paths, and hyperactive squirrels pleased me greatly. It smelled like September 10th. And now that I know I can bike there, hike from the bottom to the top, and get back all in an hour and a half, I may need to go more frequently.

On Monday I biked up to Little Axe Records, always a good time, both the biking part and the record store part. The clerk was playing his personal (original!) copy of Pari Zangeneh's The Series of Music for Young Adults, part of my soundtrack from Cargo Bike Summer 2023, and I was soaking it up. I bought a reasonably-priced copy of Jody Harris/Robert Quine's Escape (c.f. this blog in May)

I also bought a reasonably-priced copy of the Craven Fops' Pleasure. I love saying the name "Craven Fops" and it's a good record in the inconvenient 10" format.

I looked for anything on them besides the singles I'd heard previously. This ended me up on r/vintageobscura, which showed me that session bassist par excellence Herbie Flowers died a week ago. RIP to the man whose lateral-thinking downtuned floppy heavy bass solo on Nilsson's "Jump into the Fire" showed me that another world is possible.