Boo Hiss

There will always be a place in my heart for woozy wobbly samples falling apart sounds like this. Todd D. has been slinging 1s and 0s since Tape Mountain's blaze-of-incompetence years and his craft just keeps getting more and more refined. 

True facts about the Blogggder/YouChoob interface:

(1) Weird poetry in the search results for boo hiss sloppy on paper:

(2) After listening to this, the YouChoob algorithm automatically decided that I wanted to listen to Orange Juice's "Rip It Up" and a lot of songs from Nico's Desertshore. If you combine those two, shake things up, and squint your eyes, it's not the worst comparison.

Laser Floyd for Kids

No hits on Gwoogoo for "Laser Floyd for Kids"? OK, let's make one.

David Tholfsen

So David Tholfsen! His work with U.S. Saucer in the early 90s, both on record and live the one time I got to see them, was transcendent, totally singular. Their show at my fancy-pantsy college is still on my list of favorite live shows ever. I need to find that tape and upload it somewhere.

Mr. Tholfsen has a new album called Walk with Me which is apparently all songs he made up while walking, to be listened to while walking. His voice is a strong flavor, and the first taste, even for the initiated, is like, what on earth! And then you get used to it, like the water at a hot spring. Is this the activity music I need? It may be the activity music I need.

His lyrical skills have not diminished in the ensuing decades:

Din Plod knee Thrust 

Him Tod please must 

Win nod free crust 

Bin sod cheese dust

I have no idea how he is going to make this work live without cloning himself, but apparently he will be playing in Portland on April 9th at Turn! Turn! Turn! I must be there.

Jeanines, "Any Day Now," mind muck

The debut Jeanines album got a lot of play around this house. For one thing, its (short) length was pretty much the exact length of the drive from my mom's place to my own, so on days when she was watching the boy while I got some work done, I would often drive home with that CD in my car. The boy would fall asleep somewhere around "In This House," and then he'd always wake up when "Wake Up" played as I turned onto the bumpy Clackamas County streets near my house, and I'd curse my luck. Anyway:

They have a new album coming up soon. Their new single and its super-minimal video are kind of perfect:

although the title has the good-and-bad side effect of unsticking Ronnie Milsap's version of the song of the same name from deep in the muck of my childhood mind. Man, that dude was just like some sort of golden god on rural Iowa radio in the early 80s. They must have just played his five hits on a loop or something, occasionally throwing in some minor artist like Michael Jackson for good measure.

I suspect Mr. Milsap's work (side note: I did not realize he was blind?!) was far from the mind of the Jeanines braintrust when they wrote it, the lead singer being from New York and probably not having been born at that point?! That said, anything that ends up eventually getting "I Wouldn't Have Missed It for the World" stuck in my head is not such a bad thing.

 

Saccharine Trust/Flying Saucer

In a certain year beginning with "19" I was a freshman in college, amazed by everything, terrified of everything. 

I'd been reading the Trouser Press Record Guide obsessively in high school. Then I got to the campus radio station and suddenly everything in that book - every distant dream - was as close as the PLAY and RECORD buttons on my tape deck, so long as I could keep myself supplied with blank cassettes.

I remember listening to Saccharine Trust's Surviving You, Always, amazed, terrified. The first line on the record, "Circumcise me!!!!" Hard to think of a more amazing or terrifying first line on a record. Sitting listening to it on headphones in my triple dorm room, trying to make sense of it musically and theologically, never really being able to do so. Always skipping the Doors cover at the end, yuk! 

Endless little records scattered all around, some so obscure that you could see them trying to hide in the stacks when you approached. Somehow going through Dwisqogs recently I rediscovered this one:

Memorable album cover, right? At the time, I remember thinking, this is pleasant but also thoroughly minor, and I forgot about it. Now I'm listening to it again and thinking, this is pleasant and also thoroughly minor, and that may in fact be a virtue. Now for some reason I have two copies of it headed to my mailbox.

Maestro, or "Old Man Yells at Effects Pedals"

WARNING: EFFECTS PEDAL NERDERY

Today I was messing around with my Maestro Ring Modulator, a gift from C.A. upon my college graduation that I never expected and that has literally changed my life, probably for the better, and I realized that it is one of the few things that has been with me ever since college. The thing and I are basically blood brothers at this point. The new album that I'm working on has prominent ring modulator on every track. Let's alienate everybody!

Then I was poking around my RSS reader and a certain pedal blog alerted me that Gibson has relaunched the Maestro brand. The logo alone causes certain Pavlovian responses in your humble servant:

 That logo is etched into me. Not literally, but just seeing that makes me delighted. And then I see this:

What on earth! They jewel-toned and three-deed my precious logo? Added some sort of PETSCII vomit on the top, plus the knobs from the Maestro era I don't like as much, and then some sort of random logo in the corner?! How many decades of design are we attempting to cram together?!!! Plus these look like everything else on the market anyway?!!!!!!

Oh dear Maestro, all you need to do is make good clean small modern versions of your old classics and people like me will fall all over themselves to throw money at you. I don't even like buying effects pedals at this point, but I would totally consider buying, say, a smaller version of the PS-1, or a ring modulator to be a stand-in for my 50-year-old model. I'm not super poor at this point and I would be glad to replace my swap-meet things that never quite worked right!

The one thing you think they could not mess up is a T-shirt, but they did that dumb thing where they put a little logo on the front and a big logo on the back. Does anyone even like that?

Covoover Troix/Cœur-joie/Lid

Day six or seven of isolation time. Losing it a little, but feeling better aside from a few coughs. Getting stuff done. What else to do? Tempted to clean my office- CRAZY THOUGHT. 

 This song by Cœur-joie totally rocking through my head the last couple days or so:  

I love the lumpy bass, the irregular phrasing, the ploinky guitar, the way the strings threaten to destroy everything in the middle. The gorgeous video also resonates pretty hard these days, with my wife and I temporarily assigned to separate rooms, not so different from the protagonists' weird little dance in adjoining decaying bathroom stalls. Anyway, super-limited cassette still available from very nice French label Hidden Bay, or there's also a CD at higher cost from a different French label.

I knew the song reminded me of something - another song with lumpy bass, irregular phrasing, ploinky guitar - wait! That's it! One of my eternal favorites from the 90s that I don't think I actually discovered until the 00s, now forever clattering around in compromised fidelity on the YouChoob, lopsided and entrancing, Lid's "Hit the Silk."