our space is strictly limited!

I really took a laugh the other day reading this fine spam email about a hot new website called onemillionbands. It is the next NY Times cover story, the next playground to network with "multi-platinum selling artists." Though "space is strictly limited!" And only costs $0.10 per pixel.

Anyhow, no real need to read further about it, thought the message is reprinted below. Instead, just take a view of this YouTube wonderful bop jam from Ornette Coleman Quartet in 1974, Roma, with James "Blood" Ulmer twisting his scales in a perfectly, chopped dimension. Fine. Fine. This is right before he formed Prime Time. Shame this quartet didn't cut an album, or a duet with Blood and Ornette on violin.

Ornette Coleman Quartet - Roma 1974 #1

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
From: James Napier [onemillionbands@hotmail.co.uk]
Mailed-By: hotmail.co.uk
Date: Aug 13, 2006 10:58 PM
Subject: Promotional opportunity from OMB - not spam

Hello all,

Here’s a unique opportunity to promote your artists and your label. One Million Bands is a brand new musical project aimed at creating extremely affordable advertising and maximum publicity.

Along with multi-platinum selling artists around the world, we’re also networking through the huge MySpace community, providing unsigned bands with an exciting place to promote themselves.

Unlike other advertising mediums (magazines, radio etc) which only host your information for a limited time, One Million Bands will be around as long as the Internet is, giving your bands and your label a permanent advert and a
permanent place in history.

We’re also negotiating advertising slots with major festivals around the world, including but not limited to: Leeds & Reading festivals, Download festival, V festival, Isle of White festival and T in the Park festival in the UK, Summerfest, Ozzfest, Chicago Blues Festival, Aspen Music Festival, CMA Music Festival to name but a few in the USA. Can you imagine the
publicity?

Many other festivals around the world will be subject to our attention for 2007/2008.

‘Our revenues have increased 40-50% since placing online adverts this way.’
- James Callaway, President, DS Laboratories, USA 2006

Sold a million records?

Haven’t sold any?

Doesn’t matter. Be a part of history at One Million Bands. Pop over to the site and have a look at our FAQ, or drop me a line at james@onemillionbands.co.uk for a chat.

Best Wishes,

James Napier
Founder & musician, OMB

P.S Our space is strictly limited!

www.onemillionbands.co.uk

hepyouth

A traumatic Allan Kaprow astral projection would be tumbling out of oak trees and hurling folding chairs with Hepatitis (B) Youth. The loosely rooted Bloomington collective have issued Day Tour 2005 DVD, a complete 30-minute document of one day small town upheaval. Performances are spontaneous of the crew -- 3/8 or so being Justin Clifford Rhody, Carlos Gonzalez, and Bridget -- rolling outta small sedans and setting up jack-rabbit style at Kroger, rooftop car garages, Chocolate Mouse ice cream shoppe, TD’s tiny two aisle record store, and other spots. Gonzalez strong arms a snow shovel to dig loose the start of each blast of one-to-two minutes which flips from near-melodiously, restrained tinkerings and blunt gnarled hacking. Carries the same confusion as Hurray’s recent LP, which I need to write up here.

I’ve seen the Hep – B, C and D versions -- and always feared getting bashed up over a good listen. The DVD, filmed by Jeremy Hogan allows for safe, at home absorption and is framed with some great before/after locations shots. Hogan’s minimal movement/zoom approach evens out with HepC’s constant movement. I’ve boiled down two parts of the DVD down to audio spots. Check it.

Hepatitis (B) Youth - Live Kroger Loading Dock
Hepatitis (B) Youth - Live Atop Car Garage

color coded

Been riding the third rail on Brooklyn’s, via SE Michigan, Awesome Color these past few weeks cause it offers up a conundrum I’m trying to shake: blitzing from the birth canal of The Ashton Bros. is noble, and yours truly is clearly guilty to a degree on it, but completely bellowing from their muscle-taught R&B/skronk just seems to damn green. Each time this CD spins I wanna stop it at the first bit “Grown.” And if so, tis a shame to miss out on “Free Man,” a fine jam for this quickly fading summer epoch that these three – Allison Busch, Derek Stanton, Michael Troutman -- are diggin in. But back to “Grown” – it just feels like the rabbit ear antenna’s to “TV Eye” – just a fub for first track. The southern’ harmonica drawl and full horn/synth on the rest wipes that away. The guest sax splatter from Wade Kergan and Busch’s minor drum fills throughout “Hat Energy” continual bang and propel forward and give hint to a surely doubly frantic stage set. Though AC’s high energy finds equilibrium in their slo-plow blues drawl that Stanton serves as if emptying a ginormous metal cotton-candy round. His continual spooling of notes (and shard coarse vox) fester into a circular whirl that shoots right down a day-glow drain. Think I’m set to dive with now...

Awesome Color - Grown
The Stooges - TV Eye (Take 5)

good touch

Niblock. Pointing out that Phill Niblock was born in tiny-town-Anderson is held back in my catalogue of tempting Indiana facts until a last ditch effort is required to convince a non-Hoosier that the we got root for some fantasma. Yeah, yeah. John Glenn or MJackson maybe, but Niblock?! Fug, yeah...

“Valence,” the first piece of the third CD on Niblock’s new Touch Three set, fills up the house with its steely center and gauzy undertow. All I can do is listen and be swallowed and saturated until its end. What else to do? Built from Julia Eckhardt’s repetitive viola notes, Niblock sewed each together to remove breathing spaces, leaving the natural decay of the tone, and the attack of the subsequent iteration of the same tone. Each note was represented by several repetitions, perhaps ten for each tone, of about 15 seconds duration each. Each piece uses a few tones.. If Richard Serra were to construct a Tilted Arc II off a corn-filed state route east of Anderson or anywhere really, Niblock’s work could be the vibrating essence.

Ulrich Krieger and Franz Hautziner, two of my favorite Euro-apoco-jazz players are sourced for a few pieces here. Ulrich's "Parker's Altered Mood, aka Owed to Bird" slightly alters itself as if you were cupping hands over ears. It feels weightless, unlike the rest of the set, almost as if the sheets of sound are incessantly falling from above. The earthy reed seems wholly celestial here. “Not Yet Titled” with Hautziner carries the most significant changes throughout its 22-minutes. Easily mistaken for an organ piece, a roaring low end appears three-fourths through and counters the high octave tone. As Niblock writes in the notes, One only hears the sound of the instrument... The microtones do the work.

Phill Niblock - Not Yet Titled (excerpt)

bag o' kaiser

Just got around to viewing Grizzly Man this past week and had forgotten, until the credits rolled by, Henry Kaiser wrote/organized the score along with Richard Thompson. The pieces projected an achingly bright North American outdoors vibe sorta absorbing the thematic gestures of National Geographic nature films with subdued backwoods country. Been awhile since I'd listened to any Kaiser at all. Despite years of blasting the John Oswald duo Improvised and With Friends Like These (a blue-print for six-string rethinking with Fred Frith). Surely it's just a tick in my head, but Kaiser continually falls to the back of the brain; he just never leaps forward. Clearly my issue. Though whenever I spin Outside Pleasure with its static waves and chordal obliteration, it feels right-on, especially the 4th side's precision group rock movements.

Immediately after this, I noticed that Bagatellen had Kaiser and bassist Damon Smith (also heard on the GM sndtk) posted for their monthly Listen feature. "Six Of Two" is wonderfully short vibration of strings and gnarled tree bark. All manners of slapping and flaking away.

Henry Kaiser & Damon Smith - Six Of Two

the nz backstroke

Super find yesterday (in the $1.99 rack of the local record mart) of a favorite loaned out some time ago and never returned home: Peter Jefferies & Jono Lonie's At Swim 2 Birds. Recorded nearly 20 years ago overlooking the Otago Peninsula, Dunedin, NZ, I find this as Jefferies most deeply moving gestures alongside The Last Great Chance in A Dull World. Sharply stark and open to bouts of sun rays and deep thunk movements (earth or mind), the two pass through violin, piano, guitar, drums, and tape splicing. Each piece seems fragmented and adjoined with and translucent orbs hovering between the notes. The incompleteness of this album is what makes it such a soul heavy listen. Another instrument or melody would sink each piece. As in all of Jefferies work, except eh... Two Foot Flame, the role of absence leads over his instrument choice and even lyrics at times. This ability lets him create such staggering instrumental albums... Drunken Fish reissued this version CD proper back in '97 after two previous tiny pressings LPs by Flying Nun ('87) and Xpressway ('89). Well worth the $1.99, though if anyone wants to part with an LP, ring me.

Peter Jeffereies & Jono Lonie - At Swim 2 Birds
Peter Jeffereies & Jono Lonie - Piano (One)