I guess the Minus Story and The Diskettes aroused no feelings in people, whatsoever! :)
The Bees - "Chicken Payback". And now the Bees do something completely different. I've expressed my Bees love before, but here they are again, doing something new that's old. It's grabby squawking funk that wouldn't be out of place beside James Brown & the JBs, ca. 1970. Well, they're a lot more white, and Vectians, but the group's fetish for analog authenticism is rewarded here: nothing's smoothed out, everything's live, a ragged voice calling with electric guitar for some pink-elbowed payback. The organ oomphs; the guitars toodle, jive and sing; horns send out zings between cheeky manmade whoops. And lyrically everything's rather silly. From the group's new record, Free the Bees.
The Amalgamated Sons of Rest - "My Donal". The ASOR are Will Oldham (Palace), Jason Molina (Songs:Ohia) and Alistair Roberts (Appendix Out) - in short, sad indie.folk dukes. In 2002 they released a gorgeous little EP from which I slip you this track, originally by the Scottish folk revivalist Owen Hand. It's a whaling song, mournful guitar over the lulling pulse of an organ. The whole track feels like an impending disaster, the shadow of a stormcloud (or a plane?): the organ tremor broods, waits, continuing on even as ghosts' voices rise behind Oldham on the last verse. Lovely and haunting, both (and available for a measly $9.00 at galaxia).
Alex has written an eloquent and meditative piece on the (im)possibility of silence, and John Cage's 4'33". "Thanks to John Cage I now know an answer to the famous koan "What is the sound of one hand?". In the morning it would be the birds singing. In a stormy autumn night the wind blowing..."
Fred Durst's secret blog.
I've only just now seen Marcello's take on Kanye West ("I suspect that The College Dropout might well be the wisest and best of hip hop albums"). I like Marcello's writing a lot - not just because he's unabashedly verbose, nor because he seems so damn knowledgeable, but because he's not afraid to assign motives, to make connections, to listen deeper. He connects Kanye's dopey skits to Sufjan Stevens; "Last Call" to James Joyce. So it's with great interest that I absorbed his perspective on Kanye's anti-scholasticism. That is, Marcello doesn't see any.
[I]n the wrong hands ["Lil' Jimmy"] could sound like a grumbling Sun columnist moaning about sponging students who never attended The University Of Life. But there’s an underlying sadness which reminds us of the subsidiary message – what kind of society is it where people with degrees end up homeless, and specifically what kind of society is it when black people with even one degree end up waiting at Cheesecake or slaving away on minimum wages at Gap?Which is a sadness I hadn't heard before - I had heard only frustration and an antagonism towards education that really turned me off. So now I'm listening again.
I've moved back to Ottawa for the summer. My concert schedule, then, as of right now (let me know if there's something else I should catch:
Tomorrow - Frog Eyes and Destroyer
May 12 - P:ano
June 6 - Gomez
June 11 - Matt Haimovitz
June 11 - The Microphones (double-booked... uh-oh)
June 18 - Jonathan Richman (?)
July 9-18 - Bluesfest, if I go (Huur Huur Tu, Tragically Hip, Keb' Mo', Manitoba, Jim Bryson, Weakerthans)
July 31 -The Arcade Fire