how to approach an accident victim

Lawrence, Kansas has a treat for you. Drakkar Sauna are your friends. You may not know this yet but rest assured, they are. Encounter these two handsome gentlemen and your life will be for the better. Perhaps they will be camping in the site next to yours, they'll invite you over. You'll share some spirits 'round the campfire, play some songs, dance a jig for your amusement. Hand you a joint and they'll charm with tall tales of a ridiculous nature. Fishing pondside with a harpoon wearing nothing more than underwear, earmuffs, and boots in the dead of winter.

Perhaps they'll be the amazing travelling vaudevillians set up on the street busking. There is something to be said for portable bands and the Sauna are likely to set up anywhere with chord organ, mandolin, tambourine shoe, upright bass, acoustic guitar, and ad-hoc percussion. You hear them on your lunch break and love it. You come back after work hoping they are still set up. Wishing that they have a cd (and they do, on Marriage Records). Their old-timey folky tunes rub just right.

For the next few weeks they might be the unknown band that you encounter when you go out for a beer and a night out on the town. You might forget all about the real reason you went out and fall effortlessly in love as their songs play in the background. Plan your evenings accordingly and pour a stiff drink to go along with your grin. When on tour, we coaxed them into opening the night at the wonderful Replay Lounge and stood with jaws fully agape at their wonderfulness, sincerity and modesty. Do yourself a favor and do the same at one of the following:

Jul 23 - 8pm - Radio Cafe - Nashville, TN
Jul 25 - 10pm - Pilot Light - Knoxville, TN
Jul 26 - 8pm - New Street Gallery and Recordings - Decatur, GA
Jul 27 - 8pm - Tasty World - Athens, GA
Jul 29 - 8pm - Golden West Cafe - Baltimore, MD
Jul 30 - 10pm - Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar - Charlottesville, VA
Jul 31 - 10pm - The Arrow Gallery - Pittsburgh, PA
Aug 1 - 8pm - The Comet - Cincinnati, OH
Aug 2 - 7pm - On A Lark - Bloomington, IN
Aug 2 - 11pm - Bluebird - Bloomington, IN
Aug 3 - 8pm - Ragtag Cafe - Columbia, MO
Aug 6 - 11pm - Replay Lounge - Lawrence, KS
Aug 13 - 7pm - Headway Skate Park - Wichita, KS
Aug 13 - 11pm - The Anchor - Wichita, KS
Aug 15 - 8pm - Gaslight - Lawrence, KS
Aug 16 - 8pm - Annie Mae's - Manhattan, KS
Aug 18 - 10pm - The Brick - Kansas City, MO

And listen to their entire album available for download on their website!

Drakkar Sauna - Very Much Alone pt 2: the Coke Binge
Drakkar Sauna - Lessons to Teach a Child

la mi vida violenta

My Violent Life isn't nearly as hardcore/emo as their name suggests. Countless "death/dying/blood/etc" bands roll through my midwest, where I guess hardcore is still popular, but MVL are not one of them, and maybe that is why they seem to now be going by La Mi Vida Violenta instead. Instead, LMVV is from the east coast and have a new split EP out with Sentai.

LMVV's 'Oh Asbestos' could be a crazy remake of World Domination Enterprises' Asbestos Lead Asbestos if you took out the dissonance and darkness and substituted in horns and accordian; took out the venom and put in sugar. And lengthened the whole thing to a children's morning action-adventure television program. Does this make it the same song, I am not sure, but do they even know about the WDE song? Regardless, its fun.

They're leaving on tour right now for the Ruffian Records BFF Summer Tour and bringing Sentai and Hand Fed Babies along for the ride. All three bands should have you out of your seat and sweating up a double-storm in this summertime heat drench. Here is some pre-writ:

La Mi Vida Violenta is a huge and wonderful noise. With seven members and many more instruments (including multiple drum kits, percussion instruments, guitars, bass, saxophone, synths, flute, and cello) they play punk-afrobeat- funk-avant-garde-jazz-girl/boy revolution music. They've been expanding people's heads in DC and on tour with Q and not U and wherever else they go.

Sentai has a passion for the spazz and the noise but also have beautifully layered bits of sequenced keyboards, melodica, and toy instruments rubbing right up against the sections that sound like nothing so much as human musicians being tortured by robotic maestros. Think of it as the smart kids starting a riot in the asylum wing of the grade school and the sirens turning it into a party, or something like that.

Hand Fed Babies began when Hugh McElroy (ex-Black Eyes) started sampling old and odd records with the intention to create sample-based dance music. The intention still exists, however the music created falls somewhere in the middle of dub, early electronic experimentation, Central and West African rhythms, Go-Go, hip-hop and punk rock. Instruments include bass, samplers, thumb piano, a home-made dulcimer, synths, guitar, screws, PVC pipe, drum machines, pedals, and voices.

Check out sound files on both Hand Fed Babies and Sentai's myspace pages, they're quite good too, but I can't link directly to their songs... here are their tour dates:

Fri. 7/22 The Flywheel, Easthampton, MA
Sat. 7/23 Artspace, Gloucester, MA
Sun. 7/24 Studio 13, Glen Falls, NY
Mon. 7/25 American Legion Post 430, Cologne, NJ
Tues. 7/26 the Fire, Philadelphia, PA
Wed. 7/27 Modern Formations, Pittsburgh, PA
Thu. 7/28 Cincinnati, OH
Fri. 7/29 WIUS, Bloomington, IN
Sat. 7/30 Needle House, Chicago, IL
Sun. 7/31 Kansas City
Mon. 8/1 Slaughterhouse, St. Louis, MO
Tues. 8/2 Old Louisville Coffee House, Louisville, KY
Thu. 8/4 Nightlight, Chapel Hill, NC
Fri. 8/5 315 House, Charlottesville, VA
Sat. 8/6 Baltimore, MD
Sun. 8/7 Washington, DC

My Violent Life - Oh Asbestos

we are all prostitutes

Mark Stewart has been a progressive mind in music for over two decades. Firstly in Bristol, UK around 1978 at the tender age of 17 with the oft-name-checked but never reissued Pop Group. After a few years, he dissolved the Pop Group and joined forced with Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound crew to bring the New Age Steppers into being. Then came his collaboration with the legendary Sugarhill Records rhythm section (drummer Keith LeBlanc, bassist Doug Wimbish, and guitarist Skip McDonald) as the Maffia. These groundbreaking recordings would influence the sounds of Bristol to come (Tricky, trip-hop, etc). Unparalleled in its time, Stewart combined heavy distorted dub with scratches and rhythms of hip hop and funk alongside bombarding militaristic wailing and pink noise. Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto once stated that their initial aim was to make a record more extreme than this. Have a couple of quotes:

"When I say that dub is an attitude, it's like the old lyric: 'truth is a feeling, but it's not a sound'. I find dub's destruction of a structure a political as well as a musical statement. If you are trying to question things lyrically, you should also question musical orthodoxy."

regarding the Pop Group: "It was not punk. Punk had already happened. We were a year or two younger than the punk bands. And I'd always loved black music. I'd always gone to funk clubs… so I wanted to play funk. We really thought we were funky, but we couldn't play very well and we played out of time, so people thought we were avant-garde. All these old journalists would come up to you and start talking about Captain Beefheart. I couldn't stand Captain Beefheart. We thought we were like Bootsy Collins or something…"

Soul Jazz has done us all a tiny favor of compiling some of Stewart's best and most well-known tracks onto one handy little introduction. Kiss the Future is 12 tracks covering many of the years of his career and is the best you can get for the price until the rest of his material has been reissued. And I certainly hope that it does. Grab some more Pop Group and Stewart at the fantastic official blog dedicated to these artists.

the Pop Group - Beyond Good And Evil
Mark Stewart + Maffia - High Ideals & Crazy Dreams
Mark Stewart - The Lunatics Are Taking Over The Asylum

watch out for spiders

Tonight I play a first show with a new band. While that is certainly reason enough to be nervous, the fact that we're opening for two great bands makes it even moreso. One of them is the Bellmer Dolls, who I blogged up last week. The other is LA's Lion Fever.

Dim Mak Records put out their debut EP, Lustre last year and now they are back with a full length called Haunted Water and a new tour. Their sound is agression. Bluesy punk rawk from yesteryear like Blue Cheer, the MC5 or Stooges. But the difference lies in the vocals of Ms Jennifer Pearl. Channeling equal parts Siouxsie and PJ, she commands attention and gets it as she wails and moans both desperation and satisfaction.

Check out their new songs on their MySpace page or check out these tunes from their EP. Go see em live with another fantastic band, the Bellmer Dolls. See them tonight with first-timers Mosaic Fog or Village Panther or whatever we're calling ourselves currently.

Lion Fever - Everyone I Know is Getting Famous
Lion Fever - Slave

new lessons learned

Mike Tamburo is surrounded by ghosts. His music is the work of one man and it very much has the feel of sitting on the porch swing, midsummer, and listening to your new amazing friend play some finger-picked guitar tunes you ought to know. This part could very well be likened to Fahey or Jack Rose or 6 Organs of Admittance. Then every so often, from out of nowhere enter the strange sounds of electronics, singing bowls, organs and other insectian accompaniment. Perfectly arranged and gliding in and out, disappearing before you can say "Hey this ain't no folk rekkid!"

Tamburo has spent years honing his guitar chops, long ago with Meisha and most recently with the divine Arco Flute Foundation, who I had a pleasure of seeing a number of times before their demise. Arco channeled the stratospheres of the GYBE world in their own wonderful way and now have what is sure to be a great release, their appropriately named Everything After Everything After the Bomb is Sci-Fi which collects all of their material that was recorded after their final album Everything After the Bomb is Sci-Fi.

Grab Mike's new album from Music Fellowship and out on tour forever, but mostly with Louisville's (and perhaps the worlds) premiere experimental steel guitar player, Keenan Lawler.

Adam Tamburo - Adam's Fruit Temptation

saints or sinners

Bellmer Dolls are a new trio straight outta NYC, but don't hold that against them. They aren't interested in revisiting 70s rock or releasing improvised avant-noize jams on CDRs. (although both of these are noble pursuits...) Instead they choose to play at Nick Cave's Birthday Party which is hosted this year by the evil step-cousin of the Fall. This is what happens when too many people like Interpol- the real darkness comes out to play, men get drunk on absinthe, and knife-songs are written.

Formed from portions of a very impressive CV: Love Life, Universal Order of Armageddon, The Great Unraveling, Vanity Set, and Angels of Light

They've already played a whole bunch of live gigs with the likes of the Vanishing, Prosaics, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Enon, Lion Fever, The Starlite Desperation, Jarboe, Skeleton Key, and Jon Spencer. Did I mention they are possibly the best-dressed band in the world? Must be since the designer for Sinner/Saint is in the band...

Buy their debut 7 inch over at Dogprint, limited edition of 666 copies! On tour right this very second with Lion Fever.

07.15 New York, NY - Cakeshop
07.16 Lansing, MI - Mac's Bar
07.18 Detroit, MI - 2500 Club
07.19 Bloomington, IN - Church Of Sun Ra
07.20 Columbus, OH - High 5ive Bar & Grill
07.21 Atlanta, GA - Drunken Unicorn
07.22 Knoxville, TN - The Pilot Light
07.23 Baltimore, MD - Talking Head
07.24 Brooklyn, NY - Trash
07.26 Pittsfield, MA - Berkshire Artisans
07.27 Boston, MA - Great Scott
07.28 Delaware - Pirate's BBQ

Oh and in case you were wondering about the name, Hans Bellmer took hundreds of photos of sexualized dolls in the early 1930s in part as a protest against Germany's Nazi regime, and in part out of an expression of erotic feelings.

Bellmer Dolls - The Diva
Bellmer Dolls - Oblivion

polyfusion

Upon reading a recent essay on PFM entitled The Lost Generation, I was left with a very strange feeling. What the author described was almost identical to what I experienced in my formative college years of music geekdom, my 2nd wave if you will. This nearly 5000 word document scanned my CD racks and followed me through the shoegazers and into Too Pure and into american post-rock (thanks, Simon Reynolds) and beyond. I knew every single release he talked about, every single person, all of it. I am not bragging, I am scared. Does this make me typecast? An intriguing read nonetheless on a typically eye-rolling website. Check it out.

One of the many bands mentioned in his treatise was Seefeel. And here listening to their debut LP, Quique, some 12 years later it still sounds fresher than ever to my ears. The essay calls Seefeel the midpoint between the ambient works of Eno and the modern laptop-gazer of artists like Ulrich Schnauss and thats not a bad concept really. AMG describes the album as such: They squint by staring into the geometric refractions of light and record the results. This is an even better descriptor. Its Neo-Minimalist Post-Shoegazer Future-Dub? (hah!) Maybe its one of the many lost MBV records that got scrapped over the years- during Kevin Shields' early Warp obsession. In hindsight it is pretty damn doped out futuristic loop-based minimalism (Reich, Riley, Glass), much akin to another artist mentioned in the essay, Insides (esp their Clear Skin EP, a 38 minute instrumental mindbender!). Put on your headphones and peel the thin layers of your brain back to fully embrace the pulsar at the very center of it all. Music for laying on your back with your eyes closed and slowly gliding around another solar system..

After Seefeel released a few albums and EPs, the members went onto other projects. Mainman Mark Clifford went onto solo project Disjecta and collab Sneakster. Others went on to Scala and more. Clifford also now has his own mini-label at Polyfusia Records. Apologies for my absence, a big loss of data on my work machine has kept my brain more than occupied unfortunately.

Seefeel - Polyfusion
Seefeel - Plainsong

the unbeatable dream

The NBA season is now over and the draft has taken place. My local boy went to Minnesota at 47th (although he is still a fool for leaving a year early) and the chump that pissed me off by not going to his hometown school that his father won the national freaking championship at got his ego dented by going 13th (he'll still be a millionaire though).

Now, its high time to look back at the amazing record cut by Akeem Olajuwon in 1987 as a promo for Etonic. The song was written and performed by Hurt 'em Bad and a few lyrics were even dropped by the Dream himself! You will definitely notice the lack of flava and dopeness when Akeem takes the mic... On top of all this, portions of the profits went to the Lupus Foundation!? No joke.

Seven foot tall with a basketball he slams like he's insane
Grand-Master of the NBA but just a novice at the game
Dripping with sweat & soaking wet ETONICS on his feet
His name's Akeem but he's called the Dream,
And I won't accept defeat.

Unbeatable - Undefeatable - He's Unbelievable - Unbeatable

From Africa Olajuwon means striving to the top
Twin Tower number 34 The Dream cannot be stopped
A warning to the competition throughout the NBA
He's going for the MVP, So c'mon make my day

Unbeatable - Undefeatable - He's Unbelievable - Unbeatable

With ETONIC shoes & inside moves he powers to the hoop
He takes a pass high above the glass for the one-hand alley-oop
And you won't survive on the dribble-drive cause he'll steal it from your bands
Think you're hot? Then take a shot and he'll slap it in the stands

Unbeatable - Undefeatable - He's Unbelievable - Unbeatable

Akeem is back with shoes that match in his red white and gold
And if you wanna be Number 1 then this is what I'm told
Work up a sweat get soaking wet keep striving like Akeem
And put ETONICS on your feet, And be just like the Dream

Unbeatable - Undefeatable - He's Unbelievable - Unbeatable
(Fastbreak!)

Akeem - The Unbeatable Dream

crows over a parking lot

The Weirdos were part of the original wave of American punk rock from Los Angeles in the late 70s. They were DIY to the bone and not afraid to experiment with ideas of how things were supposed to be done. While purely inspired by the punk rock of London (and NYC), they did not choose to merely follow that path for their whole existence. Warhead was the short-lived experimental side project of John and Dix Denney, the brothers who founded the Weirdos and boy is it ever a wild departure.

Much like the Residents or Einsturzende Neubauten or music concrete, their's was not a music of instruments as much as it was of sounds. Washing machine percussion loops, tape slices, dying synths, and feedback. And it seems they had an agenda as well. The LP artwork is a chaotic black and white collage of weaponry, corporation, and slices of modern life reassembled as Wheres Waldo's nightmare. Song titles like Hey Big Oil, Warhead, and Destruction makes it sound like they weren't all that please with some things going on in the world. The LP was put out by Contagion Records in 1981 and the album title of If-Then-Else hints to the dystopian robotic future philosophy where emotion is stripped out and we only follow computer logic. Okay, maybe this all is taking it too far, but what do you expect on the 4th of July in America? Gentle, kind reminders of yesteryear? Grandpa at the war memorial with his red, white and blue ribbon? That's what Sweet Georgia Brown is for...

Warhead - Hey Big Oil
Warhead - Warhead
Sweet Georgia Brown (made more famous by the Harlem Globetrotters)

saturday night gallop

Hockey Night is from St Paul, Minnesota, which might have given them a slight Replacements DNA boost from the twin city, but they may as well hail from Stockton, CA. Seriously, vocalist Paul Sprangers has the starring roll in Being Stephen Malkmus. And I am perfectly pleased with that.

For Guys Eyes Only might start with a guitar lick, but really it is the first track on the first great summer bubblegum mixtape of 2005. Towards the end sprouts a little Sesame Street / School House Rock kind of jingle and it makes you believe in youthful indie pop again. Great hooks and ideas pop out and surprise from every new corner. Cooperation is more anthemic and less lazy than the Slanted and Enchanted ones. Even to the point of having a rawkish solo thats ripe and ready for your own personal Mascis air guitar.

Somehow they got hooked up with Lookout Records, who is putting out their cd, Keep Guessin'. (Vinyl version on Eenie Meenie). Check out the extended tour about to start soon:

07/06 - Vaudeville Mews - Des Moines, IA
07/07 - Mojo's - Columbia, MO
07/08 - Second Story - Bloomington, IN
07/09 - Comet Bar - Cincinnati, OH
07/10 - Black Cat - Washington, DC
07/11 - 169 Bar - New York, NY
07/12 - Talking Head - Baltimore, MD
07/13 - Koko's - New Philadelphia, OH
07/14 - Gabe's Oasis - Iowa City, IA
07/15 - Metro - Chicago, IL
07/16 - Big V's - Minneapolis, MN
07/22 - 7th Street Entry - Minneapolis, MN
07/23 - The Patio/Midwest Music Summit - Indianapolis, IN
07/24 - Cowboy Monkey - Champaign, IL
07/25 - Brew and View - Rock Island, IL
07/26 - Replay Lounge - Lawrence, KS
07/27 - Outland Ballroom - Springfield, IL
07/28 - Opolis - Norman, OK
07/29 - Rubber Gloves - Denton, TX
07/30 - Emo's - Austin, TX
07/31 - Gypsy Tea Room - Dallas, TX
08/02 - Launchpad - Albuquerque, NM
08/03 - Plush - Tucson, AZ
08/05 - Howie and Sons - Visilia, CA
08/07 - Spaceland - Los Angeles, CA
08/08 - 12 Galaxies - San Francisco, CA
08/09 - Berbati's Pan - Portland, OR
08/10 - Crocodile - Seattle, WA
08/12 - Grant's Brewpub - Yakima, WA
08/13 - The Bouquet - Boise, ID
08/14 - Monk's House of Jazz - Salt Lake City, UT
08/15 - Larimer Lounge - Denver, CO
08/16 - Knickerbocker's - Lincoln, NE
08/19 - Seaport Music Festival - New York, NY

Hockey Night - For Guys Eyes Only
Hockey Night - Cooperation