What I'm listening to: Cass McCombs & Shara Worden

So I've fallen prey to not-writing-anything-for-this-blog-itis again (as have my co-writers) and you are left hanging about any music we're experiencing. My apologies.

Currently I can't get over Cass McCombs' "You Saved My Life" (MP3) which is . . . well, I don't even know how to explain it. Like a slow dance, written to his wife (?), about the effect she's had on him. This song stuck out to me since the first listen, and I can't stop going back to it.

Other than that, I've been putting Shara Worden on repeat, partly because she provides some great creative fodder for the novel I'm writing about disappearance and the underworld. Her voice is the ivory centerpiece of Penelope by Sarah Kirkland Snider, and it's absolutely affecting. The album is like a strange sister to Hadestown by Anais Mitchell--like some strange inversion of everything that album does. Hadestown is an ensemble that explores the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in depression-era America; Penelope is a long monologue, Worden singing as the title character trying to get Odysseus to remember himself at the end of the weary journey in The Odyssey, set in modern times. The lyrics are fascinating and the arrangements beautiful. Highly recommended.

I think I'll be able to describe my experience a bit easier with some distance from the whole thing. I'll keep you posted.

Also, there's Worden's new album as My Brightest Diamond, "All Things Will Unwind". You can feel Worden's new life as a parent throughout: it's like a love letter to her new child, yet still very strange, very MBD-esque. I'm still not sure how I feel about it, but I made Chicken Tikka Masala listening to it the other night and started dancing randomly, so it's got something.

Here's an MP3 of my favourite song on the album, "Reaching Through to the Other Side" (MP3).

Keep on. Is there any new music that's affected you lately?

Un-Aesthetics: Sweeney Todd, Demon Barber

Sweeney Todd @ Drury Lane Theatre, Oakbrook IL
September 1, 2011

This blog is named “Aesthetic Experience” so I feel marginally bad posting about an un-aesthetic experience. But here it is, for your enjoyment or lack thereof.

On our first night back in Wheaton my junior year, my roommate Ryan showed me a filming of the original 1979 staging of Sondheim's infamous "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street". It was gross, offensive, and absolutely enjoyable. Len Cariou's portrayal of the psychopathic Sweeney was disturbing in his resolve, his vengeful strength incarnate in his forceful vocal work. Angela Lansbury's Mrs. Lovett, the cheery cannibalistic sidekick who gleefully serves customers human meat pies, was and continues to be a highlight. I'm not one to sing musical numbers, but I do remember singing "A Little Priest" with my friend Steve in the car while waiting for our friend at the airport (I was Sweeney and he was Mrs. Lovett, of course).

*sigh* Mrs. Lovett

Tim Burton's 2007 rendition of Sweeney Todd was also quite enjoyable. Johnny Depp is an amazing actor, and with Alan Rickman as the lecherous Judge Turpin and Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett, it did some sort of justice to the original production, though I know it didn't satisfy the theatre snobs out there.

I know it's not right to say, but I think

Johnny Depp & H.B. Carter should just have an affair

just so Tim Burton will stop making movies with them.

At the end of Blade and Alyssa's wedding rehearsal dinner, the waiter approached us with a handful of tickets. "Would anyone like to see Sweeney Todd?" he asked. I raised my hand, and he handed me ten. "Take your friends," he said. Hey! Free tickets. That's pretty great, amirite? I got several other friends together and we tripped out to the Drury Lane Theatre at 1:30pm on a Thursday. I sent the others in and waited for the one running late, so I missed the first half hour. The sounds were there--the opening dirge, the loud whistle, so loud I heard it out in the foyer area reading my Salman Rushdie book.

"Yes, I swear the piss is fresh."

We came in during Pirelli's presentation of his piss-mixture. My eyes scanned the stage for Sweeney Todd--he was in this scene, wasn't he? After surveying the crowd, I realised with dawning disappointment that the rather eccentric looking man, spare-framed and gangly, was in fact the infamous Sweeney Todd. His disposition, his performance, everything about him, was anything but imposing. The man--Gregg Edelman--was eccentric. He was a bit strange. And he had none of the charisma Len Cariou brought to the role. His musical performance was more than wanting: there was no purpose to his movement, no hubris, no conviction. This was no hero of Sondheim's Victorian greek tragedy. His skin, pale, his eye odd, and indeed he swung his razor wide in "Epiphany". Perhaps too wide. Considering Depp's acting in the theatrical take:



Edelman flailed his arms horizontally, then occasionally diagonally, with a dead expression, off-tune, hardly a barber, much less a demon. It was disappointing to say the least. What should have been a passionate, defiant, hateful scene was more or less bland and uninteresting.

I wonder what Villainous Assistant meat pies taste like.

Other members of the cast were more than tolerable, however. Liz McCartney gave a fine impression of Angela Lansbury's Mrs. Lovett, and Kevin Gudahl was convincing as Judge Turpin (though some heavy-handed directing made his contemptible lechery more of an eye-roller than it ought to have been). George Andrew Wolff's Beadle was hilarious and just the right mix of disgusting. When he wasn't attempting a Glasgow/Dublin/Faux-Scottish accent, George Keating's Pirelli was charmingly, alarmingly, endearingly effeminate.

"I swear, dearie: Innocence is overrated."

Yet these were minor graces in what seemed to be a breathless and tired reproduction. Jonah Rawitz, playing young Tobias, spent most of his numbers out of breath, as did most of the cast. Acting was ham-handed and lacked nuance, and Heidi Kettenring, playing the "Beggar Woman" was singing in a key all her own.

"Please, sir! Teach me how to sing!"

The set--adequately described as an "abbatoir" by one reviewer--was great, and went down without a hitch. For one of my friends, who had never seen Sweeney Todd before, this production was great. Sweeney Todd is by far my favourite musical, and the caliber of the music is evident despite the obvious tarnish here. Even a mediocre effort can yield a something, though the upsetting series of high school productions say otherwise.



Compare to Angela Lansbury's iconic--though here somewhat frenzied--performance (here with George Hearn rather than Len Cariou)



Some Sweeney is perhaps better than none, and I don't regret going, especially considering that the after-show meal at Culvers yielded a thirty minute conversation with friends exclusively deciding which of our friend group would fit in which Hogwarts house. Oakbrook, congrats for trying, but get a better, more in-tune cast if you want to do Sondheim's dark masterpiece some justice.

srsly folks it's not hard to act deranged when you have a razor in hand

*Images used without permission. Please don't sue me.

Bon Iver, Bon Iver (Take Two)

I tracked down a low-quality leak of Bon Iver’s self-titled album near the start of May. My internet connection was terrible—it was Southeast Asia—and I was sort of walking around packing, organizing for my move back to the US while I waited the requisite hour for the album to download. I wasn’t a fanboy of For Emma, Forever Ago despite the high playcount in my iTunes library, but I was intrigued, perhaps more by the thought of having the album several weeks in advance than by the album itself.

(My Living Room in Pakse) 

It was midmorning when I put the thing on, and I didn’t know what to make of it. “Perth” thundered out of my speakers and I was suddenly hooked. Really? This was Bon Iver? It didn’t sound myopic or frozen: it sounded like something full-grown, rich, green. It was warm where For Emma was cold; the affect here had expanded to become epic yet still personal. It was a Justin Vernon who finally sang in Hadestown, Orpheus who’d learned to trust others to sing the rest. The sound cut an easy path through my mind for the next half hour as I scurried through the house displacing boxes, organizing the last of my stuff. “Beth/Rest” made my jaw drop. I stopped and sat down on the couch laughing, thinking “Really? He actually wrote this song? Is this even happening?” It’s eighties melodrama at its absolute best—every time I hear this song I have to suppress the desire to redefine my relationship with whoever’s closest. It’s the least “Bon Iver” song on the album, but that doesn’t keep it from sounding amazing every time. And I mean. Every. Time.

(Colorado Summer) 

I recently began tagging albums according to their season in my iTunes library. M. Ward’s Transfiguration of Vincent is summer because of its warm, earth-yellow tones. Sonya Cotton’s fall-leaf album Red River is an obvious choice for autumn. I try to step back and really let the music’s tone and verve determine the choice of season rather than when I came to the album. I can’t place Bon Iver’s latest, though. It’s a warm, kind cycle of songs, but I couldn’t tell you which season they describe most. Justin Vernon lays waste to Halloween; he sings about iced highways and one-pieced swimmers. Is the album art winter defrosting to spring or a vibrant summer? I can’t decide.



In the end, I have to throw these classifiers out because this is, for me, one of those rare albums that I think—and hope—will be relevant in each season. Barbara calls them “life albums”. I’m such a geek that I’ve even made a list of these life albums—cycles of music that I keep picking up no matter the season or year, no matter how long ago I discovered it.

(Winter in Wausau) 

Along with seasons, there are images I associate with each album: images that denote place, state of mind, memory. I wrote a while back about Shearwater’s The Golden Archipelago and how it denoted the South Pacific for me. I see some of my favourite images of the Midwest, Wisconsin, duck-call lakes and reeds in Chris Kiehne’s Pray For Daylight, and long lazy trailer park summers in the National’s Alligator. I don’t yet have this for Bon Iver; I’ve walked desert paths in Colorado, and I’m sure I’ll see a number of snow-scapes that resonate, but I wonder if this album didn’t come to me a little too early—I wonder if this is something I’ll be carrying to Mongolia, if it will invoke the wind and plains more than anything else. Time will tell, I guess.

 --Duke

Bon Iver, Bon Iver

Sometime between my initial addiction to Bon Iver in early 2008 and now, the band got itself rather famous. I still refer to the band as “he” (as in Justin Vernon), which is beyond mistaken, as Bon Iver is comprised of a boatload of musicians nowadays, or so I hear. At any rate, For Emma, Forever Ago is a desert island record of mine—a record of which I will never grow weary, and which accompanies many happy memories of very specific days in very specific places. And so I find it quite fitting that Bon Iver’s latest, Bon Iver, Bon Iver (curse those journalists who call it simply Bon Iver) is, for me, bound up inextricably to very specific days in very specific places.

IRELAND

On June 19, dear friend Kristie and I departed L.A. for Dublin, Ireland. For five days, our group of fellow students took up residence at Glencree Centre for Peace & Reconciliation in the countryside of County Wicklow. A couple of days into the trip, when all three of my roommates were taking an afternoon snooze, I in my wakefulness plugged my newly-acquired Klipsch earphones (snob alert) into my boyfriend’s iPod and listened to Bon Iver, Bon Iver in its entirety. Although my noise-canceling earphones provided measly defense against the loud squeaks that emanated from the beds at Glencree upon slightest disturbance, a big part of me loves that even now I cannot listen to the album without hearing the echoes of those Irish bed squeaks.


A few days later, as our coach bus approached the ancient monastic city of Glendalough, and then a few days after that as our van sped across the northern coast of the island, Bon Iver inevitably provided the soundtrack. Even now, when “Towers” comes up on shuffle in my apartment in California, all in my mind turns to a rush of greens and blues and greys and the reflection of my rain jacket splashed across the bus window.

LAS VEGAS

Near the end of July, boyfriend Dave, friend Cody, and I travelled across the desert to Las Vegas for an Avett Brothers concert. Cody is a fellow appreciator of things Bon Iver, so naturally the new album garnered a few plays on the car stereo. Vegas, with its endless strip of factory outlet malls, fast food chains, $3.99 steak buffets, nudie shows, hot desert air, and all manner of indulgence could not be further removed from Ireland. Want to teach a child what the word “antithesis” means? Take her on a trip to Ireland, then to Vegas. Boom, word explained.

Somewhere amid the flood of not-so-positive emotions brought forth by my boyfriend’s spending habits and our friend’s texting-while-driving habits, I found in Bon Iver, Bon Iver an odd yet welcome antidote to the ridiculousness of road-tripping to Sin City to see a band I’d already seen twenty-two times.

PARTICULARITY

How odd, that an album filled with song titles like “Calgary” and “Lisbon, OH” and with a song like “Holocene,” in which Vernon sings of particulars—Milwaukee, 3rd and Lake, Lip Parade, Christmas lights—transports me to places very unlike those and very unlike each other: Ireland and Las Vegas. Or perhaps it just goes to show that the good artists are the ones who eschew vague appeals to “the universal” in an effort to embrace more fully “the particular.” After all, it’s in the particularity of holding a Compline prayer service in a German cemetery in rural Ireland with thirty-five people and thirty-five thousand midges, of riding in a Vegas-bound Honda Fit alongside a young man steering the car with his knees and in front of a young man with a penchant for Lacoste shirts, that we are able to catch, however near-sightedly, glimmers of the universal, of the little foibles of human nature that make life so interesting. Oh, and it sure doesn’t hurt to listen to some Bon Iver along the way.

--Barbara (posted on her behalf by duke)

Lead or Radiation Poisoning?: Ink Spots

With descriptions of Bon Iver’s self-titled album forthcoming (word is: you should listen to it if you haven’t) I’m wondering what to recommend. Or whatever it is that we do.

In all truth, I’ve sort of lost my hipster-cred since working overseas. What am I listening to, then? Ink Spots. 1930s-50s Radio fuzz. Maybe it’s M. Ward’s fault that the AM radio sound is so perfect. Or maybe it’s the fault of the Fallout video games.

Can you believe the apocalypse sounds like an old-timey radio group? I’m totally serious here. If there’s one thing the designers got right when dismantling Washington D.C., it’s that they threw American culture back to the days of lead-based paint and white picket fences, to Stepford wives and golly-gee schooldays.

My obsession with Ink Spots may also stem from my grandparents’ fiftieth anniversary earlier this summer. I found myself in Iowa, in charge of putting together a slideshow of old photos of my grandma and grandpa, a book-keeper and truck-driver who have made their house a kind of central meeting point for my family. Whenever we’re in transition, we seem to end up back in North Richland Hills Texas, for a little while or longer. They’re an amazing couple, and I’m in awe that they’ve stayed together for so long.

All that said: Ink Spots was all over that slide show. They’d put together a mix of their favorite songs and sent it in (under some ruse—they had no idea we were putting together an event). Seeing them, surprised, in a railway-house-turned-party-hall, with that music, with pictures of them young, aging, growing, was something special.

Having grown up overseas, I’ve lived in a world where TV was far away, where furniture was decades past its prime, and sat around reading racially-insensitive comic books from the fifties. I can just imagine turning on a radio years back to hear Bill Kenny’s soft voice drift out and turn the world to a hazy yellow. I can see parents I might’ve had dancing in the kitchen in slow time to this music. I can see a whole other world where time mattered less, where life unfolded at a less frenetic, less worried pace.

Of course, I can also imagine myself tramping across radioactive wastelands fighting for survival, with nothing to keep me company but a lonely radio with 3-Dog and the Ink Spots. Same difference, right?

--Duke

mp3s:

Ink Spots - We Three (My Echo, My Shadow & Me)

Ink Spots: I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire

Concert Review: Yuja Wang at Hollywood Bowl

Event: Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 + Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5

Soloist: Yuja Wang, piano

Conductor: Lionel Bringuier

Orchestra: L.A. Philharmonic

Venue: Hollywood Bowl

Date: 2 August 2011

Seats: Section H, Row 20 (“super seats”)

I do not play any instruments. I have not plumbed the intricate depths of music theory. I cannot tell you which recording and whose performance of such and such piece of classical music is the “best.” (Though a musically inclined friend of mine is convinced I have relative pitch.)

I do know one thing, however. Sergei Rachmaninoff composed music that, for me, constitutes the golden standard of aesthetic experiences. And so it should come as no surprise that when Rachmaninoff is being played in my vicinity, I’m there.

My boyfriend Dave accompanied me on this our first visit to the Hollywood Bowl, an outdoor venue situated in the hills of Hollywood. Its stage has hosted everyone from Frank Sinatra to Elton John (ala 5 grand pianos spelling E-L-T-O-N) to Dolly Parton. In the summertime, the LA Philharmonic Orchestra migrates to the Bowl from the usual venue, Walt Disney Music Hall. All of that is to say: I was beyond excited see one of my all-time favorite pieces of music, the “Rach 3” performed in such an unusual setting.

When 24-yr-old Chinese pianist Yuja Wang walked onto the stage in a tiny, firecracker red dress and 4-inch gold stiletto heels, gasps of delight (and of horror from the snooty types) emerged from the audience. Yeah, she’s hot, and she knows it. But how the heck was she going to pull off playing one of the most technically demanding piano pieces ever composed whilst wearing precious little clothing? Well, she did it... and she did it well. Of course I ‘bout died (in the good way) the instant she began tickling the keys, as the opening measures of the first movement are what drew me to Rachmaninoff so many years ago.

Wang demonstrated a strong yet elegant command of the keyboard—she managed to make even those thunderous, dramatic chords near the end of the first movement seem like child’s play. Of course, some folks in the audience clapped between movements (a pet peeve of mine), but otherwise it was an A+ experience from beginning to end. The famously epic finale was indeed quite epic—especially when Wang immediately leapt from her seat upon firing the final note. The audience showed their appreciation with a lengthy standing ovation. My favorite part? The fact that Ms. Wang did not take herself too seriously. She approached the Rach 3 with appropriate respect and sensitivity, allowing the piece to speak for itself. I think Ms. Wang knew that, in the end, even her itty bitty red dress and glitzy shoes could not overpower the profound beauty of this beloved piece of music.

Following the intermission, the L.A. Phil performed a rousing rendition of Tchaikovsky’s 5^thSymphony. Unfortunately, a very distracting “ticking” noise was emanating through the speakers during the performance, perhaps a feedback issue? But at that point, I didn’t really care, for I finally got to see the Rach 3 performed live.

Photo credit: Los Angeles Times

Timber Timbre

Everyone I know hates Timber Timbre. I don't know why, exactly. Spend time with this song and let it seep through your every pore. In my opinion, this is the perfect halloween music (accompanied by Sixtoes). Not that it's really that close to Halloween. On my way to the second largest Ikea in North America I saw a Halloween store open, its banner fluttering in the breeze like a flag in hell. So, in my opinion, creepy music is a year-round thing.

I've got some great memories walking down autumnal Wheaton on Halloween weekend 2009, letting Timber Timbre float along behind me. The experience was surreal, and I swear I saw a ghost on the walk, floating just behind this one tree on Madison. The elaborately decorated yards, the jack o'lanterns--everything about it was Halloween, and purely Halloween.

Timber Timbre - Bad Ritual from Arts & Crafts on Vimeo.

Is it Taylor Kirk's weirdly sensual baritone or the Inland Empire-esque lightshow that makes this little gem of terror so effective? I'll let you decide. Either way, I'm digging into the new album as I write this. And it's digging back. Like with zombie claws. And uh, stuff.

--Duke

Back in Black

Duke here. We're trying to iron out some details and get into a regular schedule of posting. We've been listening to some crazy good music lately and can't wait to share it with you!

Pray For Daylight Album & Lyrics

From Chris Kiehne himself, a link to Pray For Daylight. Included below are the lyrics, as well. Give it a spin.

(The Link)

http://www.mediafire.com/?69bjtkep3ama1ar

(The Lyrics)

SISTER BLACK MARIA
Shine on, Sister Black Maria;
let your raging dark be my holy home.
Seal my eyes with your storms and shadows.
Let me rest in the warmth of the scars that I’ve sown.

Shine on, Sister Black Maria;
I can still remember the night
that I found your beautiful grave
and how I sang from the shore
until the cold waters parted
and how you were dancing
like a rose at the bottom of the lake.

DIOMEDEA
They rose in the dark from the furious ground,
and, with their poisonous claws, they laid our fathers down.
There’s no hope for us there in that reservoir town.
The streets where we’d lived are scarlet rivers now.
Diomedea, come and carry us home. Brace our willow arms.

The wind off the lake comes and rattles her ribs,
and I hold back her hair. I do simple things,
but the whites of her eyes have turned black and red,
and the ghost in her veins speaks in silences.
Diomedea, come and carry her home on her wicker throne.

THE WALKING DEAD
(Instrumental)

RACHEL LIED
Baby’s the fawn at the vine.
Baby was shot down in flight.
Rachel was here, and she lied.

Baby was born with burnt eyes
and a razorblade cut for a smile.
Rachel was here, and she lied.

PHAEDO
Little One, I will lay your bones in the ground
and pull the atalanta out of your mouth.
All the silences will sound, and your body will turn.

Little One, there is dawn rising up from the night
and boundless swarms of sparrows born from the fire.

Little One, there are ghosts rising up from your eyes.
We will quit this bed of wires, and our bodies will turn.
Heather and fern, the breath of the wolf, the heart of the dove.

Little One, I will lay your bones in the ground.

PRAY FOR DAYLIGHT
From a house on the water, while watching the silences scar your perfect face,
I pulled the moths from your mouth. I collected their wings.

I had dreamt of your father, alive, with your brothers, wrapped up in sheets of flame.
When I awoke, your heart rang, but your colors had faded.

Hang on, Little One. The fever is not in your blood; it will break with the sun.

From a house on the water, we watch as their bodies rise up from out of the waves.
Their emerald eyes will not take you from me.

As they rage through the darkness, I beg for your silence, you shout their cursed names
and when I offer my arms, you call them your grave.

Hang on, Little One. The fever is not in your blood. It will break with the sun.

THE WIND THROUGH YOUR WOUNDS
The wind through your wounds will give us away,
and they’ll tear the breath from out of your body.

A burgundy grin and a ravening stare;
this town we’d loved is a cradle of bees
and we’ll all fall down in waves, like sparrows.
A hundred million bloodstained angels.

You would not believe the things you’ll do to me.

The darkening woods and the ghosts on your face
and the terrible things calling you towards the lake;

the merciless dawn will deny us its grace.
No mighty arms are going to save us.
We’ll all fall down in waves, like sparrows.
A hundred million bloodstained angels.

You would not believe the thing you’ll do to me.
Nothing is released.

A SPECIAL PROVIDENCE
I left you lying in the reeds.
The worm was at your skin,
and as your desperate, caterwauling screams
rose and silenced in the wind,

the blood crept out from you in wings.
The sparrows hit the sea,
and, though I’d said a million things,
I just left you lying in the reeds.

The rain fell hard into the church
as they hammered down the doors.
They barreled in and you were first.
You pulled me, laughing, to the floor.

You’d torn your dress out in the woods
and your teeth were caked with dirt.
You said, “I think you’ve lost the war,
but I promise this won’t hurt.
You’re still young enough to learn.”

SISTER BLACK MARIA PT II
Shine on, Sister Black Maria;
let your raging dark be my holy home.
Seal my eyes with your storms and shadows.
Let me rest in the warmth of the scars that I’ve sown.

Shine on, Sister Black Maria;
I can still remember the night
that I found your beautiful grave
and how I sang from the shore
until the cold waters parted
and how you were dancing
like a rose at the bottom of the lake.

A BASKET OF BONE
In a blanket of bone, I followed you home.
I watched as you slowly stepped out of your skin.
You slid round the room with the loveliest grin,
and your throat was slick and sweet.

You offered it to me.

We slipped into the woods and you took off your shoes.
You dirtied your feet in the October leaves
and we happily chewed all the bark off the trees.
You fed me honey wine and covered me in night.

In a basket of bone, I carried you home.
I fixed you a crown out of old chicken wire
and we sat on the shore as the river caught fire.
The freshwater ghosts carried into the night.

Your father was there.

He gave you his eyes, and you saw me as a boy.
Though I swore that I had grown, you knew it was a lie.

Creepy All Night 3

Story Time. My freshman year I joined WheatonImprov and, in one practice, I recall Brendon Culhane stopping a scene, shouting, waving his hands madly in the air. "No, no no no no! I want to see just ONE scene where you do something normal!" he yelled. I looked blankly at the corner of the room. He took a whiteboard marker and wrote "Creepy All Night" in the middle of the board, and then a line out, down to the lower corner. "See! This is where you are right now!" he said, pointing. "And this is where you WANT to be," he wrote in each corner "Real Life", "Human Experience", and "Meaningful Relationships".

Fast forward to the end of the semester. My soon-to-be best friend Steve was sharing music. I told him I wanted new music and he asked, "What kind" and I shrugged and, with a grin, he began to scour his iTunes. Within moments he had compiled a list of terrifying, haunting and appalling songs which, over the course of the proceeding summer, would sink me in a mire of creeped-out despair. It was a thick-lipped gem of subtle, slow-moving terror, consisting, amongst others, "John Wayne Gacy Jr" (which forever turned me off from Sufjan Stevens), "Song of Joy" by Nick Cave, and "Elephant Woman" by Blonde Redhead.

I was impressed. The mix has set a gold standard for me, by which all my mixes have been measured since. I created, within my limited ability, a "Creepy All Night 2" the year after, which was a much more aural, ambient creature, and altogether more "overtly" creepy, though vastly inferior to the original.

I've had a Creepy All Night 3 playlist in my iTunes since 2008. Songs have come and gone, and I've tried on various arrangements. For a while there was a "Carousel" theme that was (rightly) scrapped. I recently sent out emails to some friends asking for creepy songs--specifically "theatrically" creepy music, which yielded good results overall. As I set to compiling the play order, I messed around with themes--carnival, swamp, ambient, whatever. Several of the songs my friends sent me were so good, I knew I had to use at least a few. Eventually I settled on a Side "A" that was mostly voodoo swampy-sludgy southern-tinged tunes, and a Side "B" that, as it evolved, became a weird portrait of a serial killer. Rather than try to mash them, I've left them as Sides A and B, which works in my opinion, as a good mix should. I've even made album artwork.

Now, of course, to actually get this bugger uploaded with my crappy third-world connection.

Tracklist:

Side A

Danse Kalinda Ba Doom - Dr. John

Weight of the World - Patrick Watson

Swimming in the Swamp - The National Lights

Judgment Day - Beat Circus

One Morning Fair - Erland and the Carnival

Salt Sack - Ramona Falls

Mr. Grieves (Live) - TV On The Radio

Side B

Dark Eyes - Devotchka

Underbelly - Wild Beasts

The Reggae Song - SixToes

The Electrician - The Walker Brothers

What's He Building? - Tom Waits

In The Room Where You Sleep - Dead Man's Bones

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - Nina Simone

(Thanks Babs, Ryan and Blade for the tracks! I may or may not amend this listing. Keep posted for an actual link to a download SOON. And of course, comments expressing how intrigued or impressed you are will only make this more worth it.)

Chris Kiehne

(Originally on my other blog)

I want to tell you why you should listen to Chris Kiehne. As the one listener on Last.fm with (currently) about half of his total plays, I’d say if any one person has the right to do this, it’s me.

I was first acquainted with Chris Kiehne on some backwater forum that discussed the chilling and gratuitous The Dead Will Walk, Dear by The National Lights, a weird meeting of beautiful, quiet folk and, well, the bastard love child of Buffalo Bill and John Wayne Gacy, Jr. I followed some links, ended up on megaupload, and eventually had five tracks of the as-yet-unfinished Pray For Daylight, Kiehne’s first “full” album which, after a devastating hard drive crash, was more or less abandoned.

So, knowing this, I dumped them into my iTunes, plugged in my headphones, and began listening. What I found was something entirely beautiful, clean and unassuming. I’d had a similar experience with The National Lights’ album—yet the songs he’d written for Pray For Daylight didn’t mask or belie any sort of underlying vitriol. The album seemed, almost, to be mourning itself as I listened. Chris said that if The Dead Will Walk, Dear was about killing [and then eating/raping/burying] your girlfriend, Pray For Daylight was about trying to save her.

And it is. I latched onto the music, for whatever reason, and, in keeping with my mild OCD tendencies, I just put the album on repeat and let it grow on me. I ended up sending a message to Chris on last.fm, got to talking about his album, and found out he was thinking of going back and finishing the project. I asked him for lyrics and we started talking about the whole thing—what the album was doing, what it wasn’t, what it was about, and everything else. Pray For Daylight’s lyrics were surprisingly cohesive, building a strange picture of zombies, teen romance and loss. Yeah, zombies. Don’t worry, no brains, no blood—just scattered images, invocations of dead or undead love, and loads of beautiful guitar backed up by Sonya Cotton’s breezy, otherworldly voice. Kiehne paints marriage as an invasion--literally battering down the door--and love as a sickness amid the bloodied ruins of the American Midwest. It hurts so good.

All that said, Chris finished Pray For Daylight and released it on his website for a whopping five bucks. He’s currently working on The Western Throne—a denser, fuller body of work that, from what I’ve seen, has pushed beyond the territory of Pray For Daylight’s breezy, mid-tempo folk to more dynamic, literary material, drawing heavily on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, from what I’ve heard. He’s got loftier aims this time around and a lot more to say, which manifests itself both through his matured vocal performance and the busier song arrangements that populate the album.

Dunno when The Western Throne comes out, but you can bet I’ll post it here. Also, if I get his permission, I might stick up an mp3 somewhere. As it is, here’s the gorgeous Diomedea from Pray For Daylight.

Chris, man, you gotta coat this album in venom and stick it to those pricks at Pitchfork.

The 2009 According to Duke

Hey, all.

Obviously my year end is the best. I encountered a lot of music in 2009, though I don't know if any year will ever be able to compare to 2008 (in which I became acquainted with both Shearwater and the National). My year end for 2008 is a fire hose: way too intense. So be glad I'm not posting that here.

My year end rules are different from Steve and Barbara's. I limit the number of my songs by length: if it's long enough to fit onto an 800 MB CD-R, I can have thirty; I don't really care, so long as the play time is just under an hour eighteen.

You'll notice, if/when you open the mix that there are just fifteen songs. Initially there were twenty, but because I spent so much time meticulously tinkering with the mix, I found these fifteen produced a smoother, more unified listen. The extra five songs were admittedly a lot more energetic: I lost Blackdown by Patrick Wolf and The Cave by Mumford & Sons. But this set gets a lot more at how 2009 actually felt.

The ordering of this playlist is a play on Steve's (forthcoming) alphabetized form. More like a pantoume, if you will. I knew I wanted the first and last tracks to be 2008 and When I See You, which were perfect for an alphabetized ordering, but I didn't like any of the transitions. I took the alphabetized order and switched the second and second to last songs, left the third and third to last songs alone, then more, working inward. Therefore, were it nine songs:

1  --  1
2  --  8
3  --  3
4  --  6
5  --  5
6  --  4
7  --  7
8  --  2
9  --  9

Unnecessarily complicated? Check. But there is rhyme to my reason.

And I typically don't care if there's more than one artist, but there can't be more than one song on the mix from the same album. For me.

Blech. Here's the tracklist:

2008 - Hello Saferide
Werewolf - Michael Hurley
Castaways - Shearwater (it was an early single!)
Splinters - 16 Horsepower
Hi - Psapp
Southern Point - Grizzly Bear
O, Ohio - The National Lights
Oh No - Andrew Bird
Seven Dwarves - The Social Services
Mary Come Alive - Marissa Nadler
A Special Providence - Chris Kiehne
Finally - The Frames
Though I Have Wronged You - J. Tillman
Bellyfulla - Ramona Falls
When I See You - Steve Slagg

Download the mix here.

Oh, and the album artwork is a photo taken by me and my friends as a redo of the original Being Human TV Series promo shot

UPDATE: My dear friend Blade has provided some better album artwork. Enjoy?

Two Thousand Nine

Within the next few days we will be posting our respective 2009 playlists. Each of us has a unique modus operandi for determining which tracks make the final cut. I'll let Duke and Steve speak for themselves. Naturally my methodology is the best.

Barbara's Rules:

1. The mix must be comprised of fifteen tracks.

2. No artist/band is allowed more than one song.

3. The sequence is determined chronologically.

Note well that this is not a mix of my favorite songs that were released in 2009. Rather, it's a collection of songs that reflects or brings to mind significant events that occurred over the course of the year. Occasionally a song will make the final cut simply because I was addicted to it at the time. However, in the spirit of this blog's namesake, I have to admit that most of these tunes are tied to specific aesthetic experiences. And since this damn post is already sufficiently esoteric-sounding, I'll spare you the juicy details.

Barbara's 2009

p.s. You'll notice the name of my playlist is simultaneously original and memorable. Initially it was going to be Jesus in California but then I had a dream wherein I met Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler at a bar in New Orleans. Ouch.

Karin and Linford, silently judging me

Duke's Top Albums: The First 5

I'm posting my 20 favourite albums--I suppose you could say of all time. Maybe this reveals my geeky roots, but I'll freely admit it: I grew up listening to video game and film soundtracks. And Enya. What I've got here is my top 20--albums that have both meant a heck of a lot to me, which I will also defend on artistic grounds. I'll admit I've got some blind spots; if I were being completely honest, A Day Without Rain by Enya would probably be a lot higher. I've also omitted artists I have completely discredited and, in some ways, have left behind. Not to say that I won't take them down from the shelf for the occasional listen, but it's music I in which I can't place much value. That goes for most other Enya cds as well as Evanescence.


I can't be objective, but I've done my best to at least try to keep things in a broader perspective and not clutter up the list with music over which I've been recently obsessing/listening to. For most of these there's at least a blanket of a year's worth of listens. These are albums that have gotten under my skin and won't leave.

1 Palo Santo - Shearwater

As I've said before, it's a flawed work, but utterly raw and beautiful. The lyrics are continually compelling and paint a picture of a world left in shambles. The reissue brings out the greatest texture and showcases the band's scope and talent. The music has mirrored most any landscape for me as I've grown with it: on my better days it peels away the layers of the world to show me something new, and on the worse days it wraps me up in its weird narrative. I've written short stories based in the world Shearwater introduces on this album, some depressing, some not, though all of them contained the weird static twinge that opens and closes this piece.

2 Boxer - The National

This album is late night bourbon served with a side of middle class angst. It's every day I spent in a trailer home in my childhood, every night I spend awake thinking about what it even means to be American and human and screwed up. Unlike Palo Santo, I can't really place much fault with this album, though I'll admit the second half definitely sags before the quick whizz-bang of the two closing tracks.

3 Kid A - Radiohead

I won't echo the simpering fanboyishness of the pitchfork top album review, but I will say that this album is one heck of a sucker punch. I listened to it on one of the worst days of my life all the way through repeated again and again, and it paints a desolate landscape. Again, why is such a depressing album on my top 20? Call me a masochist.

4 Kirite - Yasunori Mitsuda

This is essentially a video game soundtrack, though it's to a book. Everything that I love about Yasunori Mitsuda is here: the violin, gregorian-ish chants, and etherial melodies. Yet it's an actual cd, not a soundtrack, with an arching storyline. As is the case with most of my favourite cds, the work done here is aural--a crafting of a sonic landscape. I can remember nights curled up in my first winter back in America listening to this cd.

5 Funeral - The Arcade Fire

Every time I put on this cd I'm reminded of sweltering manic afternoons skipping in time to Neighborhood 2. This was my sophomore year of college: all the hormones and pollen and the crazy plans to ship myself off to Norway with whoever'd take me with. Win Butler's lyrics are crazy, out of sync, and every verse is like a battle cry. I had to grow myself into this cd, though. It was very much a part of my own personal evolution as a music listener. I didn't understand why everyone liked this cd, but I was curious enough to put my ears through the blender for the first several listens until I got the idea.

6 Wind in the Wires - Patrick Wolf
7 Up - Peter Gabriel
8 Geogaddi - Boards of Canada
9 A Boot & A Shoe - Sam Phillips
10 A Day Without Rain - Enya

11 OK Computer - Radiohead
12 Chrono Cross OST - Yasunori Mitsuda
13 Pray For Daylight - Chris Kiehne
14 Andrew Bird & The Mysterious Production of Eggs - AB
15 Rook - Shearwater

16 Yankee Hotel Foxtrot - Wilco
17 The Dead Will Walk, Dear - The National Lights
18 The Mask & The Mirror - Loreena McKennitt
19 Lullaby for Liquid Pig - Lisa Germano
20 I Am the Fun Blame Monster! - Menomena

Turning Your Orbit Around

Though I'm certainly a fan of planned aesthetic experiences - concerts, vinyl listening parties, etc. - the best ones occur when they ambush you. I'll be taking in the specter-like beauty of swamps on an October drive through southern Louisiana and then... bam! the opening measures of "Jesus, Etc." envelop the car as strings give way to Tweedy's insistence that our love is all we have. Or I'll be sitting in my monastic cell of a dorm room junior year of college, trying my best to finish a philosophy of science paper and then... bam! the first movement of Beethoven's Emperor piano concerto begins to converse with the breeze billowing in through the curtained window. It commands my full attention even as it encourages me to focus on the task at hand. Two years later I cannot for the life of me remember the topic of that science paper, but the 'wound of beauty' remains, and for that I give thanks.

Technical Issues

Sorry, folk(s). We're currently experiencing an excess of lethargy amongst a few key members of our group. We promise we'll have something up soon!

The Golden Archipelago

Shearwater is my favourite band out there right now. I love every inch of their arty pretentious emotionally-fueled rock, and now we’ve found ourselves rewarded with their latest album, The Golden Archipelago.

2006’s Palo Santo was a raw affair, a concept album conceived by the band as they struggled to find their footing after Will Sheff’s exodus. While it featured what I believe to be the band’s strongest and most consistent lyrics, the sonic texture of the album was extremely uneven between the ambitious arrangements of the five standout tracks (1, 2, 5, 8, 10) and the slower songs like Failed Queen and Nobody. This disparity was made more acute with the release of the deluxe edition in 2007, which featured vastly improved recordings of the five standout tracks.

I’ll stand by Palo Santo; it’s still my favourite, though it’s a flawed record. When I write stories I find they typically reflect the sentiments and emotional timbre of the music I’m most attached to at the moment. I wrote a series of short fictional “dreams” based on seven different faces of the Tarot, though as the writing progressed it became increasingly clear that Shearwater provided most of the inspiration for the work.

I came to Shearwater through their 2008 release Rook. Where Palo Santo was rough and course, Rook was as smooth as glass. I can’t name a single weak song on the album: each one is well-constructed and minutely refined, like a delicate piece of stained glass or an ice sculpture. The whole album swoops, flutters, dives, much like its namesake.

And while I found Rook to be technically satisfying, breathtaking, I couldn’t help but find the textured sound of Palo Santo more compelling. I’ll freely admit that Rook is the “better” album, but Palo Santo got under my skin in a thousand different ways, and each time I listened through I found something new, some lyrical hook or link I hadn’t found before.

So far I don’t know what to make of The Golden Archipelago. I do know that, from listening through it dozens of times, the album manages to hone the band’s sound. The raw energy of Palo Santo meets the careful construction of Rook. The sonic landscape of the album is entirely new as well. Palo Santo sounded like an undercover transmission from across enemy lines in some war-torn wasteland, replete with an unsettling feedback interference that pervaded every track. The album is uncomfortable in every respect. Rook took me north to a landscape of craggy glaciers and moonlit wastes. The waterphone “South Col” impresses the image of a graveyard of wrecked ships captured in the ice, the wind scratching across their hollow shells. Take a look at Kahn & Selesnick’s most recent project, Eisbergfriestadt (from which the cover image was taken) and you’ll get a clearer sense of the sonic landscape Shearwater are building.

The Golden Archipelago journeys south to the Pacific. The album hits you like the swelling of some huge wave: the sea, the storms and the tide create the heartbeat of the album, which is warm where Rook was cold, welcoming where Palo Santo was alienating. Like Rook, The Golden Archipelago is all about the narrative and emotion, less about the strength of the individual songs, though each song possesses a singular and unique effect as each one did in Palo Santo. I can’t pick a single song I don’t like. That said, I’ve yet to be impacted by the lyrical content.

Having grown up in Nabire, a small town on the beaches of Western New Guinea, I find the album’s approach to be quite powerful. The Papuans, descendents of the Aborigines, have found their freedom hounded away by the constant press of the Indonesian military. As a people their very identities are being auctioned off to machine gun carbines and motorcycle smoke. Songs like “Uniforms” and “Runners of the Sun” embody the steady attrition of this people’s way of life. It’s an album of unimaginable scope and scale—encompassing every facet of the landscape I grew to love, from the slow moving glaciers up in the mountains to the humid chokehold of sea level. And always the sensation of wind and rain, the images of the sea woven throughout, the devastation of the tidal wave and the fury of a volcanic eruption.

Yeah, I’m all about the hyperbole. Shearwater invites these images, though. I remember when I first introduced my friend Josh to the band on the floor of my parents’ basement in Colorado (“La Dame et Licorne” from Palo Santo) he got this far away look in his eyes and told me this was the band he’d been looking for. Fire and water and earth and wind: it had them all. Shearwater gives voice to the unspoken fury and serenity of the natural world, a rage in the face of all we’ve taken for granted in the day-to-day ho hum of concrete suburban/urban life. Take this band up the mountainside or into the blanketing quiet of your bedroom and you’ll find yourself transported to a world with its own mythology and a pulse all its own.

--Duke


An Insular Life (My current favourite on the album--a dark little short story of sorts, all of it midtempo and very restrained)


PS: For Golden Archipelago lyrics, check out my blog. They're quite poetic.

Friends, Romans, Fellow Aesthetes . . .

We are three people who love music.  We write about the music we love and why we love it.  

Barbara coined the term "Aesthetic Experience".  It sounds kind of lofty, but for her it's an everyday occurrence--a moment when the music intrudes from the background and takes over.  Duke and Steve have adopted the term as well, though not without smiling when they say it.

We all love different things about the music we love.  Sometimes these differences have brought us close to the point of exchanging blows.  But we all recognize that, no matter much we may think we know about music, no matter how on top of the scene we may think we are, what it really comes down to each of us is that aesthetic experience.  It's very personal and very subjective. 

This blog is an attempt to share that personal, subjective experience of music with others.  We realize that even though we all have these experiences, we rarely talk about them.  Well, we will here,, with one another and hopefully with readers.  So join the conversation!