Word comes via their website that the excellent San Francisco trio Gowns have disbanded.

They’ve posted their final song there as well, along with information on the members’ ongoing projects.

They will be missed.

At the Chicago Reader, Miles Raymer talks about how his take on file-sharing has shifted the release of Mannequin Men’s Lose Your Illusion, Too last year.

My experience with Lose Your Illusion was a big part of the reason my opinion about free music changed so dramatically over the course of this past year. It was the first album I’d been involved with that had a real label backing it up and covering the bills—all my previous records had been self-funded, self-released DIY projects—and as such it was the first one where the music didn’t “feel” free.

It’s something of a response to Chris Ruen’s recent Tiny Mix Tapes essay on filesharing. Also discussed are DJ Shadow, Amanda Palmer, and Flameshovel Records. It will not leave you with a happy feeling in your heart, I don’t think.

(And if you’re a fan of clamorous punk rock, you really should pony up the cash for one of their records.)

Given that I wasn’t entirely impressed with Crazy Heart’s take on music journalism, I’m glad to see that the fine people at New York were thinking along similar lines. And thus: this take on music journalists on film, past and present, which is worth a read.

At Dusted, my review of Retribution Gospel Choir’s 2 is up.

The Sparhawk heard here seemed to be channeling all of the emotions kept restrained in his more well-known group, and the rhythm section of Eric Pollard and Steve Garrington yielded a sound that left appropriate tribute at the altar of Neil Young. Retribution Gospel Choir’s drums pounded, the guitars raged, and there was even space for one cheeky “Amen” delivered as the song “Kids” came to a close.

You can read the whole thing here. And, from two years ago, I had some very brief thoughts on a SXSW show of theirs posted to this very space.

During my last year of college, one of my roommates was quite fond of the Seattle group Red Stars Theory’s full-length debut, an album called But Sleep Came Slowly. And while I was definitely impressed by what I heard, I was even more taken by the album that followed it, 1999’s Life in a Bubble Can Be Beautiful, which soundtracked any number of late-night drives once I’d moved to Brooklyn.

I have some thoughts on said album from the vantage point of a decade later up on the newly-redesigned Tiny Mix Tapes.

I’m perhaps spoiling the ending by saying that the last release made by this band—a seven-inch on Suicide Squeeze— includes a take on John Coltrane’s “Naima.” Having taken the default moody-guy indie-rock template as far as it could go, the band instead kicked through a wall, keeping their grasp of dynamics but working to create a sound all their own, one where atmospherics were key and the lines between the band and their guests were increasingly blurred.

You can read the whole thing here.

Via Sarah Lipstate’s Twitter feed comes news that the Free Music Archive has posted a Noveller performance from the Issue Project Room. Excellent? I think so.

News comes in via email today that Dead Oceans will be releasing the second Tallest Man On Earth album.

The link above will take you to a page where you can download the song “King of Spain,” which did a fine job of impressing me when I first heard it played in December of 2008.

The results of the Village Voice’s 2009 Pazz & Jop critics’ poll are now up; my ballot can be found here.

Also: Maura Johnston’s essay on “Stillness is the Move,” R&B, and the Dirty Projectors is well worth reading.

I reviewed Matthew Simmons’s A Jello Horse for Vol.1. Here’s a bit of it:

This mundane surrealism contrasts with a more vivid dreamlike imagery that arises throughout the novel in intervals, sometimes as a result of slumber, sometimes arising out of hallucinations. It serves as a bridge between the protagonist’s childhood and his restless twenties, and range in temperament from a massive lion tearing through bedroom walls to a tortoise “the size of a minor league baseball stadium” paying a visit to a rest stop. These are creatures that have stepped out of creation myths, dwelling in a book that takes as its epigraph a lyric from Mudhoney.

The full review can be read here.

This Wayne Curtis article on post-Katrina architecture in New Orleans is fascinating. Essentially, it discusses a number of groups’ efforts to provide affordable yet well-designed, hurricane-safe, and energy-efficient houses. It covers a number of issues that pique my interest, and I suspect that if you ever find yourself discussing urban issues, affordability in cities, or design in general, you’ll have a similar reaction.

That said, this quote from Andres Duany struck me as a bit odd:

“They have such a profound misunderstanding of the culture of the Caribbean that they’re destroying it. The heart of the tragedy is that New Orleans is not being measured by Caribbean standards. It’s being measured by Minnesota standards.”

Specifically, the choice of Minnesota seemed a bit arbitrary. But given that, say, the Twin Cities are also an affordable metro area with their own particular needs as far as harsh weather are concerned, I don’t quite know if this is quite as apples-and-oranges as Duany’s comparison suggests.

Interesting piece from Warren Ellis on the process of creating his Do Anything columns, complete with sample scanned notebook page.

I’ve enjoyed these a lot — essentially, meditations on assorted facets of comics, music, art, and culture in general,with Jack Kirby as a starting point. This one is a particular favorite, and includes some best-music-of-2009 thoughts from Ellis as well. (Between this and the interview with her in the most recent Yeti, I was inspired to pick up the Zola Jesus album The Spoils, with which I’m now fairly obsessed.)

(All of which also reminds me that I’ve been meaning to write something here about Shivering Sands. Also, this post about Scott Tuma, who some may know from his work with Boxhead Ensemble and Souled American,  is quite good.)

I may be somewhat unobjective about this (a piece of mine is mentioned in the piece I’m about to link), but this Jason Diamond essay on zines at the Rumpus is quite good.

I’m not sure if 2009’s quality crop of zines was a reaction to the sad state of print media, but it would hardly surprise me if that was indeed the case.  Through casual observation, a thumb-through of the Microcosm Publishing catalog, a walk through stores like Quimby’s in Chicago, or Spoonbill & Sugartown in Brooklyn, you see that a culture thought to be dead or dying is thriving.

There’s a bit of a followup to it over at Vol.1. Oddly, I picked up the same issue of Burn Collector a few days ago, at the fine Desert Island in Brooklyn.

For the last week of December, I ended up car-sitting for friends of mine who had gone further out of town than me. I haven’t had a car in the city since 2002; these days, Zipcar meets my occasional city-driving needs just fine. That said, there’s something I definitely miss about regularly listening to music in cars, and I was able to scratch that proverbial itch multiple times in the last days of 2009.

(As a digression, Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca has revealed itself to be a surprisingly driving-friendly album. I would not have expected that.)

Also? WFMU. Specifically, a fine batch of songs from Jason Sigal’s Talk is Cheap, as I sought out a parking space. Several of the songs he was playing, he noted, were available via WFMU’s Free Music Archive, and I subsequently sought two albums out there.

Titus 12’s Dig and Delve is solid, atmospheric hip-hop from the UK with a not insignificant dub influence. Good stuff, very listenable, and varied enough to warrant repeat listens.

The self-titled album from Orquestra Popular De Paio Pires impressed me quite a lot. They’re a Portuguese group with sound similar to a fair amount of Scandinavian post-rock outfits: they’d fit nicely beside the likes of Efterklang, Slaraffenland, or Under Byen, whether on a mixtape or a concert bill. There’s a smooth precision to their playing, but there’s also a sense of experimentation; not unlike the songs heard on Volcano Choir’s debut, they’re unafraid to pursue unanticipated directions at times.

Via Warren Ellis comes this link to Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, which looks to be a massively disorienting work of fiction:

At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself.

That there’s a China Miéville blurb on it doesn’t hurt, either. And it’s something I wouldn’t be surprised to see wind up mentioned on HTML Giant one of these days…

Highly recommended fiction: at Knee-Jerk, Amelia Gray’s excellent “Go For It and Raise Hell.”