Zero Bldg.
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Punk Rock Monkey
Pictured above is my tailor-made miniature doppelganger. Melissa made him. She even sewed my name on his butt. Note the black t-shirt.
I finally tracked down a copy of John Cale's Fear LP and yeah, it's pretty good. I'm still favoring Vintage Violence though, with Sabotage/Live coming in close second. I finally listened the latter all the way through this week and was pretty impressed at the rocking out. Then it got to "Only Time Will Tell" (the song that Deerfrance sings) and it was like the sound guy at CBGB just turned the "Rock" fader all the way down. Still a cool song, just very strangely out of place.
Also got Sufjan Steven's Michigan on vinyl. Good gosh is it a beautiful reissue: double LP, gatefold giving the gorgeous artwork room to breathe. The album proper spans the first three sides, with side D devoted to bonus tracks. I noticed though, that "Vito's Ordination Song," the album closer, is a different version than that on the CD release--sans drums. I kinda like the original better, but overall the record sounds great in this medium. Running the risk of sounding snobbish, this is really the way the album was meant to be heard--very warm.
I've talked to a guy who'll sell me a four track for $25, so hopefully soon the demo-ing can commence.
Later
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
No, I'm not done playing with this thing yet. Shut up.
Presque Isle, Marquette, MI (Upper Peninsula)
Presque Isle, Marquette, MI (Upper Peninsula)
Friday, August 06, 2004
I Have Upload Capacity. I Will Now Indulge Myself For The Delight of All Who May View This Bandwidth. Huzzah.
Me in my natural element though I don't live in this particular room anymore. Note the differing hairstyle.
Me in my natural element though I don't live in this particular room anymore. Note the differing hairstyle.
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
Ryan "Indian-Giver" Schreiber
I never told you that I was almost a writer for Pitchfork. Seriously. Last summer I applied with a review of the Wrens Meadowlands and got the job. I submitted a few reviews before getting the axe. I kinda understand--my style is/was still underdeveloped and I'm really too nice to be a critic. I'm all-too-willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.
But anyway, it occured to me that those reviews are still just gathering cybernetic cobwebs on my hard drive, so here's one of the rejected reviews. [Just for fun, here's the one they actually ran.]
Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, Ginger Brooks Takahashi and our friends
songs from the Black Mountain Music Project
K Records
I’m no mythologist, but I’d hazard a guess that the human fascination with mountains can be summed up in one word: ascendancy. Reaching a peak is the only physical way to keep one’s “feet on the ground and head in the clouds.” So it is no surprise that artists have perennially made for the hills. Hell, Phil Elvrum re-named himself after one. Carl Sandburg left his beloved industrial north for Flat Rock, NC so he could write and his wife could raise goats. And just 36 miles away, Black Mountain College saw Charles Olson lead the group of poets that bear the hills’ name, where Merce Cunningham danced along to the decidedly un-danceable John Cage. It’s in this artistically rich setting that Mirah and Ginger got together with some friends for a month to live and record some music.
Ascendancy requires simplicity of its actuator. What first struck me about this music was how well the spare Olympia sound translated to mountain music. The album opens with “lil bit (of baritone)” which consists of some inventive noodling around on a baritone ukulele. Then we are introduced to some of the surrounding bird life on the first of eight short interlude tracks that pop up in between most of the album’s ten proper songs.
The roomful-of-friends-and-noisemakers approach to songwriting that's been Mirah's bread and butter is fully intact here, blending in plenty of steel drum, ukulele, and banjo in neat, unobtrusive ways. Some sort of plucky instrument called a “dixie” carries “Life You Love,” which could be a long-lost Pete Seeger song. The two Mirah-penned songs here (the other being “While We Have the Sun”) are the most mountain-influenced (“mountain-influenced?” It’s just one of those things). In a guitar workshop with Caroline Aiken that I took, we discussed the ease with which a musician will pick up on a localized style given time and proximity, be it the blues, bluegrass, or black metal. “While We Have the Sun” picks up on the mountain lullaby, with lyrics like “live your life with a compassion you can be proud of/and let your last breath fade away with dignity and love.”
But it’s not all jug music and knee-slappin’. There’s the midnight tango of “Red Curtain” (which sounds suspiciously like Zoltar the Genie’s theme from Big), the sideways calypso shuffle of “The Party.” And “Knife Thrower” is a full on madrigal. “Pure,” arguably one of the best songs, belongs to Mirah’s sister Emily. It features some Arab Strap-tastic programmed percussion and the creepiest lyric in recent memory: “and I’ve stopped drinking/and smoking/and eating/and breathing/so I should be pure by now.”
The only real fault I found here wasn’t in the songs themselves, but in those interlude tracks. Sometimes they work incredibly well, like the far off train whistle that introduces the simply gorgeous, a capella “Rock of Ages” (worth the price of the album alone), and sometimes they just distract, like the jarring squeeze box notes that follow that song. I understand their function in illustrating setting, but by the end of the album they no longer seem as necessary. They should’ve just let “Rock of Ages,” which ends with some barely audible, swelling feedback, lead right into the lovely end-of-summer pop of “Oh! September.”
But they were right in ending the album with the sound of the night time cicadas—the same that backed up “Pure”—and in doing so, leaving the album to the mountain and the life that ascends it every day. Sara Marcus (who I’m just now realizing wrote and sang on “Rock of Ages”) writes in her liner notes:
The screen door shuts on the back porch and the animals sing on without us; they sing their hearts out to the silent mountains, to the cool clean sheets and the people who slip between them, to the tomatoes growing sticky and heavy on their vines. Their song goes on all night long.
I never told you that I was almost a writer for Pitchfork. Seriously. Last summer I applied with a review of the Wrens Meadowlands and got the job. I submitted a few reviews before getting the axe. I kinda understand--my style is/was still underdeveloped and I'm really too nice to be a critic. I'm all-too-willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.
But anyway, it occured to me that those reviews are still just gathering cybernetic cobwebs on my hard drive, so here's one of the rejected reviews. [Just for fun, here's the one they actually ran.]
Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, Ginger Brooks Takahashi and our friends
songs from the Black Mountain Music Project
K Records
I’m no mythologist, but I’d hazard a guess that the human fascination with mountains can be summed up in one word: ascendancy. Reaching a peak is the only physical way to keep one’s “feet on the ground and head in the clouds.” So it is no surprise that artists have perennially made for the hills. Hell, Phil Elvrum re-named himself after one. Carl Sandburg left his beloved industrial north for Flat Rock, NC so he could write and his wife could raise goats. And just 36 miles away, Black Mountain College saw Charles Olson lead the group of poets that bear the hills’ name, where Merce Cunningham danced along to the decidedly un-danceable John Cage. It’s in this artistically rich setting that Mirah and Ginger got together with some friends for a month to live and record some music.
Ascendancy requires simplicity of its actuator. What first struck me about this music was how well the spare Olympia sound translated to mountain music. The album opens with “lil bit (of baritone)” which consists of some inventive noodling around on a baritone ukulele. Then we are introduced to some of the surrounding bird life on the first of eight short interlude tracks that pop up in between most of the album’s ten proper songs.
The roomful-of-friends-and-noisemakers approach to songwriting that's been Mirah's bread and butter is fully intact here, blending in plenty of steel drum, ukulele, and banjo in neat, unobtrusive ways. Some sort of plucky instrument called a “dixie” carries “Life You Love,” which could be a long-lost Pete Seeger song. The two Mirah-penned songs here (the other being “While We Have the Sun”) are the most mountain-influenced (“mountain-influenced?” It’s just one of those things). In a guitar workshop with Caroline Aiken that I took, we discussed the ease with which a musician will pick up on a localized style given time and proximity, be it the blues, bluegrass, or black metal. “While We Have the Sun” picks up on the mountain lullaby, with lyrics like “live your life with a compassion you can be proud of/and let your last breath fade away with dignity and love.”
But it’s not all jug music and knee-slappin’. There’s the midnight tango of “Red Curtain” (which sounds suspiciously like Zoltar the Genie’s theme from Big), the sideways calypso shuffle of “The Party.” And “Knife Thrower” is a full on madrigal. “Pure,” arguably one of the best songs, belongs to Mirah’s sister Emily. It features some Arab Strap-tastic programmed percussion and the creepiest lyric in recent memory: “and I’ve stopped drinking/and smoking/and eating/and breathing/so I should be pure by now.”
The only real fault I found here wasn’t in the songs themselves, but in those interlude tracks. Sometimes they work incredibly well, like the far off train whistle that introduces the simply gorgeous, a capella “Rock of Ages” (worth the price of the album alone), and sometimes they just distract, like the jarring squeeze box notes that follow that song. I understand their function in illustrating setting, but by the end of the album they no longer seem as necessary. They should’ve just let “Rock of Ages,” which ends with some barely audible, swelling feedback, lead right into the lovely end-of-summer pop of “Oh! September.”
But they were right in ending the album with the sound of the night time cicadas—the same that backed up “Pure”—and in doing so, leaving the album to the mountain and the life that ascends it every day. Sara Marcus (who I’m just now realizing wrote and sang on “Rock of Ages”) writes in her liner notes:
The screen door shuts on the back porch and the animals sing on without us; they sing their hearts out to the silent mountains, to the cool clean sheets and the people who slip between them, to the tomatoes growing sticky and heavy on their vines. Their song goes on all night long.
Sunday, August 01, 2004
We confronted tragedy with... DANCE!
I took Melissa along to the EARL this weekend to see the final (?) show to be performed by Twittering Machine. A bit jazz, a bit chamber, a little tango, a small amount of cash--just download "Learn To Steal" and you'll know.
Just sucks--I finally find a local act that my girlfriend will brave a loud, smoky club for and they go and break up. Where's the accountability man?
But it was a good show. The couple times I'd seen them before, they were always a pleasant surprise in the lineup. First was at a Firewater show (which, if I'm not mistaken, are where the MP3s on their site are from, ain't I special), then they were mysteriously opening for Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (who, as I've mentioned before, rock like the very hand of God itself). I thought it was nice that they just kinda treated this like any other show, but the fervor behind even their subtlest moment broke the pokerface. The cellist's horsehair was all askew second song in, the jazz traps cracked and--yeah--rocked.
Which is why I like Twittering Machine. They had such potential to be schmaltzy, milquetoast Bat Mitzva vets, but nah--they were a band, not guns for hire. They claimed a type of music I never thought I'd genuinely enjoy and... well, now they're going away and making me write all this, so they done good.
There's a lot of power to be found in a woman wearing a cocktail dress and an accordion.
They've already recorded their second and final album, cutting it live in the studio over the course of one twenty four hour period. The world doesn't see many indie cocktail acts (Joey Santiago's Martinis notwithstanding), so you best seek these records out when and while you can.
I took Melissa along to the EARL this weekend to see the final (?) show to be performed by Twittering Machine. A bit jazz, a bit chamber, a little tango, a small amount of cash--just download "Learn To Steal" and you'll know.
Just sucks--I finally find a local act that my girlfriend will brave a loud, smoky club for and they go and break up. Where's the accountability man?
But it was a good show. The couple times I'd seen them before, they were always a pleasant surprise in the lineup. First was at a Firewater show (which, if I'm not mistaken, are where the MP3s on their site are from, ain't I special), then they were mysteriously opening for Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (who, as I've mentioned before, rock like the very hand of God itself). I thought it was nice that they just kinda treated this like any other show, but the fervor behind even their subtlest moment broke the pokerface. The cellist's horsehair was all askew second song in, the jazz traps cracked and--yeah--rocked.
Which is why I like Twittering Machine. They had such potential to be schmaltzy, milquetoast Bat Mitzva vets, but nah--they were a band, not guns for hire. They claimed a type of music I never thought I'd genuinely enjoy and... well, now they're going away and making me write all this, so they done good.
There's a lot of power to be found in a woman wearing a cocktail dress and an accordion.
They've already recorded their second and final album, cutting it live in the studio over the course of one twenty four hour period. The world doesn't see many indie cocktail acts (Joey Santiago's Martinis notwithstanding), so you best seek these records out when and while you can.
