Category Archives: Me

Deserts & Islands

Heading out of town for a couple of days for a foray  — my first — to scenic Las Vegas, Nevada. Posting will resume once I’m back.

When I was in Seattle last month, I caught a set from Javelin at the Vera Project. It wasn’t quite my thing — in the world of ramshackle DIY dance-friendly groups, I drift a bit more towards Tanlines* — but one song, a remix they’d done of a Future Islands song, caught my attention. Since then, I’ve been listening to Future Islands’ In the Fall somewhat obsessively — its songs prompt thoughts of breaking into a disturbingly visceral version of the running man while sitting at my desk. Their music is catchy, ornate, and a little ominous, and I’m quite fond of it.

This is their song “Tin Man”:

*-which is to say that I drift towards Professor Murder and affiliated bands & projects.

At Dusted: My Education, Reviewed

Up today at Dusted: a review of My Education’s Sunrise.

If you’ve read any recent think-piece about how the lines between rock bands and classical ensembles are blurring, you could pretty easily swap their name into the list of case studies provided without sacrificing accuracy. Besides recording their own compositions, they’ve also released their take on Arvo Pärt’s taut “Spiegel im Spiegel” and collaborated with the hip-hop group dälek.

You can read the whole thing here.

Sudden Realizations

The dangers of having one’s digital camera around while one is writing: one may take self-portraits.

Writing | May 2010

And learn that, sans glasses one resembles a dude in a metal band.

Writing | May 2010

“Dude, we’re totally gonna end up on Hydra Head with these songs!”

The Lonesome Crowded (North)west

Heading out of town tomorrow for a week and change in a trio of Northwestern cities: Portland, Eugene, and Seattle. While there, I’m hoping to see many fine people; take in the Stumptown Comics Fest, make some headway on my punk rock anti-romance short novel, see some live music and some soccer, and generally clear my head. Fingers are officially crossed.

Kollaps!

For Dusted, I reviewed Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s Kollaps Tradixionales.

Calling this Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s most accessible album should not be taken as an indication that we’re in pop-song territory, or even that most of these songs have a verse/chorus/verse structure. The group’s discography (and, for some of its members, their time spent in Godspeed You! Black Emperor) suggests a fondness for slow builds leading to fissures of noise, strings swirling and whorls of feedback from guitars.

You can read the whole thing here.

Artifacts.

It’s not long after midnight on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I’m at my parents’ house in New Jersey, my onetime bedroom now occupied by a pair of sleeping beagles.

I’ve spent the last two hours looking for two very random objects: a piece of sheet music and a photograph of myself circa winter 1994, in order to demonstrate exactly what my hair looked like at its longest. (This was, perhaps, not my finest stylistic hour. Or decade.)

So far, I’ve found neither. But the items I have found in assorted college-era containers are doing a fine job of cueing up a surreal set of emotions:

  • Numerous late-9os flyers for NYU shows that helped to introduce me to bands I still listen to regularly (Rex, Aislers Set, etc.), along with other odd items from the Program Board archive;
  • This seven inch, co-released by Douglas Wolk’s label Dark Beloved Cloud long before I’d met the man or read his work;
  • A letter from Jason Molina, responding to interview questions I’d sent for a piece that would appear in an issue of my zine at the time.
  • A photo of my dorm-room workspace circa late 1996, including plastic crates full of problematically aligned CDs and a Van Pelt Stealing From Our Favorite Thieves poster on the wall.

It’s made for a surreal, bittersweet kind of night. And one that, if I might tie in the holiday that just passed, makes me thankful for any number of things in a subtle yet strangely overwhelming way.

11.19: A Reading

I’ll be taking part in Vol.1‘s regular reading series this month — tomorrow (i.e. Nov. 19th), in fact. More information can be found here, and below.

Come wish us a happy winter break as we present our final Vol. 1 Brooklyn Storytelling of 2009. This month, we present two contributes to our site, and three newcomers to the Matchless stage.

:Porochista Khakpour
::Clay Mcleod Chapman
:::Tobias Carroll
::::Aaron Hartman
:::::Claire Shefchik

Hosted by Jason Diamond

David Ohle (redux)

A little while ago, I linked to my review of David Ohle’s chapbook Those Bones.

In the time since then, Calamari Press has released a collection of two novellas from Mr. Ohle: Boons and The Camp, provided in the increasingly-popular flipbook format. Both novellas are worth your time — they’re unsettling in both their imagery and their moral explorations, and each abounds in imagery that’s grotesque in the most compelling way.

My review of  the collection in question can be read on Volume 1.

Discussed: Curtis Harvey

My first encounter with Curtis Harvey’s music came via Rex’s C, around 1996 or so. Musically, I was starting to explore work that was outside the boundaries of the hardcore and alt-rock I’d previously obsessed over. It’s a fine, textured album that’s held up remarkably well, as has their followup to it, 3.

Rex vocalist Curtis Harvey now has a solo album out, called Box of Stones, which I’ve reviewed for Dusted.

David Wingo Talks Soundtracks, Ola Podrida

For Flavorwire, I interviewed David Wingo of Ola Podrida and numerous film soundtracks, including — most recently — Gentlemen Broncos. A number of questions, including some relating to Ola Podrida’s upcoming album Belly of the Lion, were cut for reasons of space; they appear below.

Where during this period of time did the songs for Belly of the Lion get written? The first album came out in 2007 — were the songs from Belly of the Lion all written after that?
There were a few that were holdovers. “Donkey” and “Sink or Swim” and “Lakes of Wine” had all been written not long after I wrote the songs on the first album. The rest of them, though, I did pretty quick. Going back to what I was saying about trying to focus, balancing the work — Gentlemen Broncos, there was kind of a stop. As I was doing the music last summer, I’d worked on it for about five, six weeks, and I knew they were going to do a bunch of re-shooting and some re-editing, but I knew that I was not done. I knew there was going to be about three months there where they were going to be doing some stuff, and I’d be coming back in three months. I did take that time knowing that I didn’t want to get any other jobs in the meantime, in case they coincided with Gentlemen Broncos. And I knew that after Gentlemen Broncos, I was going to be needing to get some more film work. Even though those three songs I mentioned had already been written, I took that time to do all the writing and all the recording of the accompanying parts. Writing the other songs and everything. Those three months, I was in New York at the time, I was living in Brooklyn — between sessions during Gentlemen Broncos was when I did almost that whole record. I was definitely proud that I was able to use that time wisely and keep working and make sure that I had another record to show for it once I was back on Gentlemen Broncos.

You’re credited with playing most of the instruments on Belly of the Lion — was that how it was for the first album as well?
Yeah. The first record I did all on my own. I started a band [where] the guys I started playing with were all good friends of mine. And then, it was a very long time when I did the initial recording, before it came out. So I didn’t find a label and I didn’t go mix it until a year after I’d written it. And at that point, playing with a band, we’d changed up some of the songs and worked up some things. Robert Patton, our guitarist at the time, and Matthew Frank, our drummer, went back in. [We] redid some of the songs with them playing on it. With Belly of the Lion, though — with that lineup we had, we’d worked up five new songs, none of which are on the record. They’re definitely different than the record. As a band, we’re definitely going in a different direction than that record. We were a five-piece band, so it sounded like a five-piece band, playing more poppy, rocking stuff. We never got a chance to record those, and people slowly started moving, and that lineup ceased to be. Those songs are kind of lost in the ether for now. But I wrote those songs for that particular lineup, so I still have a grand plan — we’re all still very good friends — of getting everyone together for a couple of weeks to do their songs. Because I do like them. So in the meantime, I decided, if I was going to be doing another record on my own, I picked those three I previously mentioned. Those felt like songs I could do on my own rather than with a band. The rest of the songs that I wrote, whether it was intentional or not, were things I felt more comfortable working on on my own. And then Matthew played drums on five of the tracks on Belly of the Lion.

You also played on the Wooden Birds album that came out earlier this year, right?
[Andrew] Kenney’s very nice and gives credit where credit is due, but….I just sang backup. (laughs) I would have loved to have done more. I was living in New York at the time. We had always talked about me being more involved than I ended up being. I was going to come down to Austin and do some stuff. I was busy working on Gentlemen Broncos at the time, so… But I did do the backing vocals. (laughs)

Listening to both of the Ola Podrida records, it seems like Belly of the Lion feels a little more retrospective in terms of where the lyrics are going than the first album. That’s kind of an off-the-cuff observation, and it may not be entirely accurate… But I got the impression that this had more lyrics looking back a few years…
For sure. It is a record that is steeped in a sense of nostalgia, for sure. Lyrically, that was not a conscious decision. My turntable had been broken forever. I got a new turntable; so many of my favorite records, I hadn’t gotten to listen to in a while. A lot of it’s the stuff I listened to in college: mid-90s, early-90s shoegaze and stuff like that. When I started recording the record, that was what I was listening to a lot. There was a sense of going back and listening to music I had some of my favorite records [that] I hadn’t gotten to listen to in so long. That affected the music I was making, and I’m sure it put me in a headspace of thinking back to that time, probably. Yeah. It was not really an intentional decision, like, “I’m gonna make a record that sounds like the music I listened to fifteen years ago!”

Revisiting Rachel’s (by proxy)

In the summer of 1995, shortly before leaving my hometown for college, I went to a house party in Middletown, New Jersey — memorable in part because that was where I heard numerous bands who would later become personal favorites. Seam in particular, but also the Louisville post-rock ensemble Rachel’s. All of which is prelude to the fact that I have a review up today at Dusted of onetime Rachel’s member Rachel Grimes’s solo album Book of Leaves.

….say it three times, and quickly.

Featherproof has launched their TripleQuick application for the iPhone. Four sample stories — from Shane Jones, Lindsay Hunter, Paul Fattaruso, and Amelia Gray — can be read on Featherproof’s site.

Among the other contributors is, well, me. Writing at that length (the stories had a maximum length of 333 words) was one of the hardest things I’ve done; while the writing group of which I’m a member does a fair amount of flash-fiction work, it’s never been a style that I’ve been comfortable with. So getting a chance to take part in this was a challenge, and one I was glad to attempt — the result has a sort of density to it that surprised me.

Also, it was inspired by a fairly insane bit of industrial design that I see on occasion outside my preferred stop for coffee in Greenpoint. So, you know, there’s that.