Turntables, sibilance, nomenclature

I was listening to Unrest's lovely Imperial f.f.r.r. on my turntable* the other day while doing some work and I thought, man, this album holds up pretty well, but it sounds like Mark Robinson has a gigantic gap between his front teeth - the sibilance is crazy, especially on the song "Suki," which is pretty much just him saying esses over and over again. Maybe he does have a gap - I forget? But it never sounded that bad. So I took out my newer and relatively fancy Grado cartridge (hooray for the P-mount system making cartridge swaps quick and easy) and swapped in my cheap old AT92E cartridge, and all of a sudden he sounds like he just got back from getting his braces taken off.

So I may have to go down the cartridge rabbit hole. NOS P-mount cartridge impulse-purchased from that internet auction site. Spending money on stupid incremental quality increases seems like a good middle-aged way to close out this terrible year.

Side note: I have decided that I am going to go with the flow and call records "vinyls" because I am convinced that it will make me less of an old fart. I will ride this vampire energy while listening to my old-fart 90s indie-rock vinyls on my *super awesome Technics SL-M2 turntable that I bought at a Deadhead yard sale. Love that thing, at least now that I've temporarily sorted out the sibilance issue. Let's see how this time capsule obsolete cartridge sorts out my vinyls issues. I'll still fly the CD flag and choose to purchase compact discs, because it is stupid to have to spend more money to have more stupid things to worry about, but it is nice to have a good way to listen to all these dumb big vinyls that I have all around my office.

Elia y Elizabeth

Just a reminder that La Onda de Elia y Elizabeth is there and waiting for you to listen. You could be listening to those breezy Colombian sounds right now. Groovy, youthful, innocent, perceptive, both totally of its time and totally timeless. I have listened to this like a trillion times and it never gets old. I love it, my wife loves it, my 3-year-old asks for "Se oculta el sol, muere una flor" over and over again. Do it.

XWay Vision, Francisca Griffin

I found myself wanting to hear some New Zealand semi-rarity the other day (Chug's "Oozing" if you must know - some days you're just looking for a song that says "I've got a hole in my head and it hurts"). It turns out that Chug's best work, naturally, is not available on my streaming service of choice, but said streaming service DID point me to XWay Vision , a VHS video documenting a bunch of Xpressway artists in concert, which I have fond memories of watching back at my folks' place on the old RCA ColorTrak TV. It still holds up pretty well even if the video effects and camerawork are a little over the top.

Anyway, the unsung hero of this video is totally Kathy Bull, whose bass playing inspired me back in the day more than I realized. It's hard to tell given how bad the video quality is, but she's the left-handed one who isn't Shayne Carter, the one playing the bass. And she is definitely sitting down and possibly very with child in at least one of those videos? Pretty awesome if so.

So of course I had to go down the rabbit hole. Her name is Francisca Griffin as of the 90s (side note: I approve of changing names when the spirit moves you) and she has a great album called The Space Between that is ragged and windblown in all the right ways. Her guitar playing lopes and rolls according to its own internal logic. Reminds me a bit of Joost Visser or even Syd Barrett, as obvious as that comparison is? And listening to this album is making me go back, find my old Cyclops CD, Killing Capitalism with Kindness, of course Look Blue Go Purple, etc. Anyway, great stuff.

Skink Tank

Newish Melbourne (Australia) band plays a brittle little jangly thing for you:

Melbourne Water

The lyrics capture that weird luminous young-adult state of doing shitwork in the early-morning outdoors and somehow finding meaning in the bug bites and the repetition. It reminds me a lot of John Porcellino's   Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man in terms of content and kind of makes me think about those moments on Wimp Factor 14 records when things broke down a bit and there was space, maybe a small instrument strumming.

The rest of the album has yet to grab me, but I would love to hear more songs of youthful woe and wonder along these lines.

Joe Osborn

A little while back I read that Wrecking Crew book (a fun summer read if summer ever comes back). Gradually I put two and two together and realized that a ton of my favorite bass lines are the work of Joe Osborn. A couple from my parents' record collection:

• The Grass Roots' "Midnight Confessions"
• The Fifth Dimension "Go Where You Wanna Go"

The latter is also one of my favorite bass lines that isn't really in tune. I love love love realizing that a favorite bass line isn't in tune. My 3-year-old got REALLY into "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend," and after play 30,000, I realized that one of Dee Dee's strings was a little flat. An all time favorite of mine is Youth Brigade's "Waste of Time," which doesn't even PRETEND to be in tune.

Back to Joe. Turns out Joe Osborn also played the bass line on America's "Ventura Highway." I guess that song is a guilty pleasure of mine, but now that I listen to it again, the lyrics really are terrible, the melody is trite, the chord structure rides that fine line between cliched and just plain boring. But that bass line! That must have been why I liked it, not that dumb line about the alligator lizards or the part where they rhyme "sunshine" and "moonshine." That bass line goes all over the place, to the point where I can imagine this insanely talented bass player on take #579 saying eff it, stand back, here I go, just pinballing off the walls of everything. And they say yeah, that's the one, that's the take, the take that bought the hacks the mansions.

ORANGE and PINK: the best color combo

Short-lived WFL team the Southern California Sun. Why has this color scheme not been repeated, as far as I know? Hotttt!!!!!

(source: http://nflfootballjournal.blogspot.com/2016/05/wfls-southern-california-suns-color.html)

Most RCA Studio II cartridges. This short-lived, doomed videogame console rocked orange and magenta boxes despite being black and white on the screen. My theory: the worse the vintage videogame console, the snazzier the cartridge design. (c.f. Fairchild Channel F, Coleco Telstar Arcade)

(source: bleebay auction https://www.ebay.com/itm/VTG-1976-RCA-Studio-II-Home-TV-Arcade-I-SPACE-WAR-game-Program-Cartridge-18V400/254319957596)

Somehow in my youth I failed to notice that noted Charlie Brown Thanksgiving advertisers Dolly Madison were rocking this audacious color combo. Also, they had a product called Googles?!

(source: http://gbnfgroceries.blogspot.com/2013_07_01_archive.html)

Gate Crasher

 

[photo courtesy of this Ebay auction]

I had a Commodore VIC-20 in my youth, and I appreciate the fact that its game lineup was pretty weird (c.f. the eye-searing Garden Wars). But I had not seen Gate Crasher, which features these amazing lines in its description:

As guests look on in horror, he begins gulping caviar costing $500 an ounce!
Then he punches a dancer and grabs more caviar!

I haven't been able to find any information about this online aside from this bleebay auction. So all I have is my imagination, which is probably for the best.

Maximum nuclear burnt orange

(1) Some days you just want to listen to Captain Beefheart's "Sue Egypt" over and over again. Right? (1a.) There's some newish version of the Rooolliiingggg Stooooonnnnnee Finest 500 Collections of Muuuuuusic out there, and I read it, and I'm sure lots of ink has already been spilled over it, but two things I noticed: (1b.) Any Finest 500 Collections of Muuuuuusic list that does not contain anything by Captain Beefheart is automatically disqualified! I mean, for goodness' sake, get rid of some random Rooolling Stoooooones album that they shat out in some castle after jumping into a vat of drugs. No one will notice. There are a lot of them. Who cares. Add Trout Mask Replica at #499 right below, like, some Taaaaylor Swiiiiift outtakes collection, and all is forgiven. (1c.) So so many errors, spelling, fact checking. Ugh. It is one thing to overuse creative misspellings and fail to check facts creatively, but man, the errors made me hurt. So many.

(2) Bay Area combo Neutrals continue to show that they have my number by emblazoning their newest single with old computers, ridiculous typography, huge eyeglasses, and maximum nuclear burnt orange. Their show at the lovably ramshackle Firkin Tavern at some point before 2020 started out with me thinking, hmm, that sure is a lot of I IV and V chords - and this new single is no exception - but then they won me over with their unstoppable blast guitar sound - treble strum that is about ready to burst - and impenetrable but ultimately great lyrics. 

(3) It still feels weird to be paying $7 for a single, but then I went to an inflation calculator and realized that $7 is the equivalent of about $4 back in my youth, which I would have begrudgingly paid for a Dadamah record. Of course, I would RATHER have gone straight to the 4-for-a-dollar bin and picked up the likes of Prehensile Monkeytailed Skink, whose "I Am a Gorilla" is still clattering around my box of little records, not worth enough to resell, just waiting for the day that the tastemakers finally move on from stiff humorless post-punk records and bland pastel vaporwave city-pop gas clouds and foreign-language covers of, like, Air Supply songs, the day when they say, you know what we need? Really poorly recorded obscure punk-noise blasts like "Anarcy [sic] Is Stupid!" The more the better! Now I need to go nudge some algorithm into thinking I'm right.

Some Days are Diamonds, feelings of superiority, old baseball videogames

 Things I love:

(1) When the DJs on the invaluable local community radio station play things I love but get little details wrong and I feel like a supergenius talking back to my speakers. No, actually, the Chills were from New Zealand, not Australia! And no, Jerry Reed didn't write "Eastbound and Down," the legendary Dick Feller did! Right, Wikipedia?

(2) Of course I was right! But I was not aware that the writer of "Eastbound and Down" had transitioned and is now Deena Kaye Rose, and that she has written a memoir! Of course I bought it, being a big fan of her songs and overall attitude (c.f. the essay on the back of this record). It's a fun read, a little scruffy around the edges and probably in need of an editor, but chock full of heart, and she lays out the double meanings behind "Some Days are Diamonds" and "Any Old Wind that Blows." Both songs already really rich but made much richer for their hidden context, and even better that these coded messages went out to the world as hit singles through the voices of John Denver and Johnny Cash respectively.

(3) The whole "retrogaming" thing feels totally wrung out and stupid to me at this point, and I find baseball pretty boring in general, but every so often I still feel the need to play HardBall for the Commodore 64 (on an emulator, please). Now that my videogaming pretty much takes place in 30-60 minute chunks while riding an exercise bike, my needs are pretty specific. 

HardBall scratches a lot of itches. It is sports-y without requiring much sports knowledge or hand-eye coordination. It is nostalgic (I played it a lot on my Apple IIc back in the day) but also second-order nostalgic (I've been playing it on emulators way longer than I played it on floppy disc). And because the single-player game is really not that difficult, I usually win, which is important. No one wants to get off the bike after getting trounced.

Stacks of CDRs and _Marimba Themes_

There is something great about a spindle of CDRs separated from their cases, possibly forever. Grab one at random and put faith in an earlier version of yourself. Try listening. It's probably good. Maybe it's what you want to listen to right now.

This one has good artwork. Who was spraypainting CDRs like this? Put it in the player, 20 tracks, 66:48. Hmm, there are marimbas and some pleasing electronic manipulation thereof? I'm guessing this has to be something that Ryan did, maybe with Alyssa? Go to the Eet bwandqwamp page - no albums have 20 tracks. Maybe it was Ryan solo under the Ifsh name? Aha, "Marimba Themes"!

Now I am listening to it. Everything plays just fine despite being on a spindle for years and years. And it is perfect music for right now - just at the back of my attention, occasional plinks and blurps and glitches, delicate and very pleasing. Maybe you need it?

_The Muppet Movie_ Soundtrack

 My boy had been listening to "The Rainbow Connection" at daycare today, so I mentioned that I had the Muppet Movie soundtrack. After searching through my horrifying piles of hoarder vinyl, I found it - a really beat-up powder blue thing with my name written on it in elementary-school cursive and the call letters of KNIA, Knoxville, IA written all over it. I guess my uncle must have grabbed it from the station where he worked? Pretty sweet gift for young me.

 

Anyhow, this record has some miles on it. Scratches, skips, warps, you name it, but somehow it sounded pretty good on my boy's little record-destroyer turntable. We played "The Rainbow Connection" and that was sweet, but then he decided to play "Movin' Right Along" about twenty times in a row. It holds up fine. He'll probably wear a hole in this record. 

There's one spot toward the end where the bass player walks up to the 1 and it's the hokiest thing*, but it is played with absolute conviction. The sort of conviction that says, yes, I am recording this song that is a duet between a frog and a bear getting lost in improbable ways across multiple countries while driving a Studebaker, and, oh, receiving union pay for doing so. What do you want to make of it?

*(Same bass trick used to excellent effect twice in Prince's "Controversy". I am going to steal it for everything I do now.)

Naughty Bunny

 

Among my favorite opening lines ever:

The little bunny didn't mean to be naughty.
But he didn't try very hard to be good.

No es tan fácil

I've always liked jangly indie-pop, and I have often tried to create it, but I've always been too much of a monster to make nice, straightforward songs that people would actually, you know, like. I always have to find some way to ruin things.

The song linked above is by Spanish band Vacaciones. They make fine, fun, breezy indie-pop, and yup, we've got four chords strummed in sequence, head-bopping 4/4 time, but then they just randomly throw in one measure in 6! Wait, what just happened? Are things going to get weird? No, we head back to 4/4. OK, bopping head again.

Second verse, same as the first - wait, there's that measure in 6 again! And then back to 4/4 like nothing ever happened. The song jangles its effervescent and totally normal way to the end (less than two minutes long - I approve).

That weird little glitchy moment makes this unassuming song so so much better. That wait-did-I-just-hear-that moment. The reason why I find myself singing the rest of it.

I try to write a song like that and I end up with the following: an intro in 4. 4. 2. 7. 3. 3. 3. 4. 3. Because I am a monster.

1969

I realized that I was mostly listening to music from 1969 during today's workday.

I've been reading a bunch of Trouser Press magazines from their delightful and invaluable archive, and that sent me down a rabbit hole that eventually ended up in me listening to my dad's old copy of the Who's Tommy. Things I noted:

• I have strong memories of being terrified of the album cover as a youth
  
• There is some schmutz in the grooves that I strongly suspect is related to some sort of decades-hardened childhood spit-up of mine 
• I have fond memories of my dad singing "It's a Boy"
• I have fond memories of Eric Matchett being inspired by the bass line in "Go to the mirror!" and turning it into "Elevator Mirror" - maximum Activity Universal A E S T H A E T I C K as the kids say, recorded live on old eMac built-in microphone in my garage
  
• That said, the album itself is kind of an overwrought mess. Basically unlistenable in spots, plus depictions of child abuse are a big turn-off if not done with maximum restraint and delicacy. I guess I'll hang onto it and listen to it again in another thirty years.
  

Great album from 1969: Gilberto Gil's self-titled album from 1969, the one with "Cérebro Eletrônico" on it. I could listen to this one over and over again. So many crazy sounds, and some tape squeaks that I wholeheartedly approve of on the last song. I need to check out more of his stuff.

Culs-de-sac

Some people are early adopters of technology. Not me. But I have always enjoyed being an early scavenger. Do you remember how you were listening to music in the mid-aughts? I recently uncovered a stash of mini-CDRs with mp3s on them:

I owned a weird little Philips CD player that only played mini-CDs (talk about dead ends!). You could burn 4 or 5 albums on a little disc, then take the weird little CD player into your mid-90s Geo Metro, plug one appendage into the power/cigreet lighter, plug another appendage into the tape deck, and presto! You could be listening to your favorite Amon Düül II albums that you acquired... somewhere.

You'll note the names of several mid-aughts Portland bands in which I played. All culs-de-sac as well (in several cases, due to my own financial/emotional inability to go on tour/commit to the R&R lifestyle). All great though.

Ever since that weird little Philips CD player disappeared, these CDRs have basically been useless, so they've just been floating around boxes in my garage, naked, getting more and more scratched up. A wiser person would have just tossed them a decade ago, but somehow I never got rid of them. So yesterday I put them in my weird CD player that I bought on OfffrrUpp - whose main virtues are (a) being cheap, and (b) not being afraid to play any CDR, no matter how cheap or damaged - and they played. Just like that. So I've been having a weird third-wave pirated-media nostalgia experience, listening to old MP3s of, say, Ege Bamyasi, which I _had_ originally taped from my college radio station back in the 90s, but which sounded totally futuristic even then, and then I reacquired that music through the wonders of sketchy late-90s early-aughts internet, and now I'm in the future feeling nostalgia for multiple backwards vestigial technologies. What a world.
 

Space Nut Master

I love anything with the words "space," "nut," or "master" in the title, and I love groovy fonts, so it stands to reason that I would want to get this:

 (picture stolen from internet auction site user abwhit19)

That said, after a lifetime of thrifting, I do not want any more avocado green plastic items in my (very small 90s-era) kitchen. And I'm sure the old plastic would crack if you even just look at it, much less apply heavy pressure to nuts. So for my nut cracking needs (we bought a bunch of hazelnuts from a local orchard - largely because I wanted to hang out with their goats), I bought a much less exciting contemporary nut cracker. 

If anyone can vouch for the Space Nut Master's efficacy at cracking nuts, please create a blog post about how great it is. Someday I will search for this item again. We'll meet on the internet.

All I Feel Is Yes Friday

Bwoondqwoomp is doing their fee-free-Friday thing, so here's another All I Feel Is Yes chestnut:

Cleared for Takeoff

I play bass. Yours for free, or throw some ducats at us for the Rosehip Medics fundraiser.

Sky Juice

Loving the names of the percussion section on the Gladiators' _Sweet So Till_

Elton Britt

OK, that Elton Britt LP is a winner. Check out the virtuosic last minute of "Maybe I'll Cry Over You". Wow.

I biked to the record store

Today I took the afternoon off and took a long bike ride. It was a warm day even though the sun is starting to do that horrible thing it always does at the beginning of October at the 45th parallel. A young and glamorous couple was sitting in the sun in the yard of my wife's old elementary school, bare midriffs, smoking.  More bare midriffs at the used tire store. I grew impatient with people doddering in the bike lane, but at the exact moment I realized that I was going faster than everyone else, I was passed by a stealth bro, somehow going twice as fast as I was despite exerting zero effort. (Not an ebike.) With long hair flowing in the autumn breeze, he sat up hands-free and disappeared off into the distance, young and infinitely powerful.

I had a hankering to get some stuff from My Vinyl Underground/Jigsaw Records for the first time since the cooooooovid hit. I got a bunch of tapes (gotta love the $5-7 price point in 2020) and put them in my bike bag to head home. One of the tapes is a lovely thing by a couple Australians whose work has been there for me in weird times. I'll write about said work next.

Another thing I got was Elton Britt's Yodel Songs because the light this time of year always reminds me of my dad (it's almost been ten years) and because at one point when I was in high school, he and I and Bob from our church formed a yodeling country band for a talent show. My dad did the yodeling and he was good. We did a song called "That's How the Yodel Was Born" which is somehow not the same "That's How the Yodel Was Born" that is found on Mr. Britt's LP. Somewhere I have a tape. It was a struggle to keep my hyper young fingers playing I-V-I-V on the bass guitar, but somehow I did it.

Hooray for compact discs (and Possible Humans)

News: CDs are cool again! Right?! Just like blogs! Decouple your listening and social media from gross algorithms and the all-glowing all-seeing eye in your pocket. Give me a thing that I can listen to or look at anywhere, sequentially, in some sort of artist-determined order, nothing automatically added to my "next up" column or tracked by Big Data. Plus they play in my car, in my cheap little stereo, on my crazy person stereo in the office. I am totally ready for the CD comeback once this dumb vinyl thing burns itself out. The idea of paying $20 for some big clunky LP made out of dinosaur blood that I'll have to tote around until the end of my days is just ridiculous. (NB: Old cheap 45s from the 50 cent bin are fine. See previous post.)

Plug: I am glad that Trouble in Mind Records continues to indulge my love for cheap physical media by offering CDs of most of what they do (not CD-Rs - real CDs!), and in space saving cardboard sleeves no less. Everything that is bad about LPs is good here. Their recent reissue of the Possible Humans album is a case in point - that first song "Lung of the City" sounds so good on crispy digital through my crazy person speakers from the 70s. Not ready to give the entire CD a blanket Tape Mountain Approval yet, but what an opening song.

Preschooler jam of the week: M's "Pop Muzik"!!!!!!!!! More about that one later.

Preschooler jams: apocalypse edition 09/12

We're in the middle of these epic epic wildfires, the closest of which is closer to us than, say, the other side of Portland. We haven't opened the windows in days, and the horrific air quality (worst in the world!) is keeping us inside all the time. Boy's daycare is closed, so it's been all preschooler all the time.

Fortunately, we are pretty good at not leaving the house (song 1 here is a good example and a statement of purpose) and we've been staying inside. Boy is playing with cars and balls and, most importantly, playing records:

Top preschooler jams 9/12/20:

"Freaky Dancin'" - Cameo (the list of cities is of interest)

"I Want You To Want Me" - Cheap Trick (he sings along and claps his hands)

"Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" - Ramones (always a dance party)

He also got way into a couple songs from the Chills' Submarine Bells after hearing "Heavenly Pop Hit" on the radio this morning. Pretty good taste for a three-year-old.

Lately he has taken to the official Atari game of Gang Wizard, "Freeway." What a great game - the sole objective is to get a chicken to cross the road - and it's one of those games that can be explained in under ten words, sort of like Pong's "Avoid Missing Ball for High Score." "Cross Road, Avoid Vehicles." He gets it.

I bought a Braspberrby Bpi on that internet auction site - they gave me a $25 discount in honor of their 25 year anniversary, so I figured I would buy an item on which I could emulate the things that I bought and sold on that internet auction site 25 years ago. Totally circular. Anyway, I've installed Bretropie on it, and so far it seems pretty slick, but I think the thing I would most like to emulate is the amount of time I had back in the late 90s for futzing around with old videogame consoles. Time bought at the expense of not doing work for grad school, sigh (see song 13 here.)

 

New album available: Metal Remorse

The new album is here! Available for free download at Internet Archive:

Metal Remorse

33 new songs on this follow-up to Duplex Cremes. Part of a ridiculous life goal of creating a 99-track CD. 2/3 of the way there! Songs about poverty, regret, memory, failure, exercise, and the Tualatin Public Library. Full album cover (mimeographed on index cards) is available as a PDF - see associated files.

I like this album a lot. Certain themes come up again and again. I may have used a certain gimmick to come up with song titles. Whatever it takes to make an album come together. Most songs were recorded in brief, frenzied sessions in my cluttered garage before my songwriter's group on Sunday afternoons, since my life has been busier than ever during these crazy times.

The next album is well underway (1/3 finished at this point - so now I have 77 songs toward my 99-song goal).

I shot some footage for a video for "Trim Twist!" and may need to actually assemble that at some point. It is highly silly, as is the song, inspired by a piece of garage sale exercise equipment.

Anyway, take a listen. If you'd like an actual CD and live in the Portland area, I can arrange to get one to you. If you're outside the area, drop me a line. Email is on the main tapemountain.com page.

All I Feel Is Yes archival series

I was in a band called All I Feel Is Yes. This band is on permanent hiatus, but we had some good times. Here is one of my favorite AIFIY songs:

Idiot Spring

I am proud of my super honk prog bass line.

It's up on Bandqwamp for pay what you want, the "what you want" going to Rosehip Medics here in Portland.

"Burn Rubber on Me" and other preschooler jams

My 3-year-old boy loves music (always has) and so when we found a low-quality record player at a yard sale, we jumped. I brought out "the spindle" (a stack of crackly 80s earworms on 45 from a free bin) and grabbed a few more 45s from a local record store's 50 cent bin, a cheap seller on Disquogs, etc., and told him to have at it.

This could have turned out terribly if he'd been drawn to the terrible records on the spindle, but thankfully he has pretty good taste. His top jams this week:

 Gap Band "Burn Rubber on Me (Why You Wanna Hurt Me)"

I think he likes it because it is ostensibly about a car going fast, but the handclaps and synth bass seal the deal. Also, from my perspective, sweet video, and this stanza is just awesome:

You told me to go up the block
To get you a strawberry pop
When I got back to the flat
You had burned rubber out the back

Strawberry pop?!!!!

Other hits: Raydio "Rock On," Michael Sembello "Maniac," the Royal Guardsmen's "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron" and "Return of the Red Baron" ("Snoopy for President" went a bit too far).

He also loves the Ramones and can name every track on All the Stuff and More, both volumes 1 and 2. Some of the Ramones' more... esoteric interests feel a little weird to be discussing with a 3-year-old, but it is pretty great to sing "Today your love - tomorrow the world" along with him while he pumps his fist. 

Metal Remorse

Coming 9/9/2020 if I get my act together:

Printed on this:

Available on the world's most reviled format, mini-CDR, or on the world's second most reviled format, CDR! If you are interested in getting a copy, drop me a line and/or send me something delightful.

My act will really need to get together for the promotional video (!!!!!!!) to become a reality for the "single" entitled "Trim Twist!