Nearing the end of the week, and while sifting through my backlog I happened across something I hadn’t gotten to yet. My dishwashing job is getting in the way of my listening time. If I’m not doing overtime then I’m trying to do something about the fact that my fingers, vital to my career here, are flaking off due to the dollar store bleach they’re making me rinse everything with because of some ”health department” thing. Typing stings when you’re missing a layer of skin, so, this one’ll have to be brief. Thankfully my predicament applies to this nearly forgotten piece of work from New Brunswick sent to me by someone named “La Fosse” which when run through Google translate means “The Pit.” Fosse wanted me to hear what he described as his “forest debacle.” It didn’t sound too promising, and in sounding not-promising I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

   Not much background to speak of for Champotón: Fosse stated in his email that he’d finished the “meat” of the recording in one take by himself and that the rest of the work was completed by his backing band whose names are all quite French: Jean-Lequel Morose, Poutine Rigueur, Tête de Violon (Whom I assume is the masterful violinist featured on these tracks) and Chaque Amanchure. Fosse apparently provided the vocals himself. The story goes, according to Fosse, that he intended to perform some field recording in the woods some kilometers out of Moncton by himself for a commercial label-distributed project. Thankfully for us he got, as he puts it, ”devilishly lost” when he confused his path marking system with someone else’s (He says it may have been elk hunters). To find his way back out before night fell he used his recording equipment and microphone to give himself directions. After he found his way out of the woods, not only had Fosse used up quite a bit of his expensive analog tape but his confused and muttered directions to himself were much higher quality than he’d expected. Not long into the tape he had begun singing instructions to himself. He was impressed with the results but unable to apply them to any existing project, and to boot felt embarrassed of his misadventure being proud of his outdoorsman roots. So he handed the tape to Jean-Lequel, who took the recording and added his own electronic ambience. Fosse then handed it over again to Rigueur who applied some guitar work, and then on again to Violon and to Amanchure who polished off the finishing touches on it with his studio tool set.

   In the end what you have is a startlingly poetic journey, a complete bountiful mistake, a piece of ambient work clearly accomplishing what it never set out to do. While I don’t understand a word of French I can still hear the nervous rattle in Fosse’s voice and his varying movements of emotion through the recording: relief, frustration, acceptance, the resurgence of hope, relief again and then back to frustration. The instrumental work done by the rest of the band cements his existential bumbling through a world he thought he knew better than he did and carries it out of the realm of a mistake and into the realm of real composition with intent. Imagine Jaques Brel muttering the rejected scribblings of Brian Eno being stalked by John Balance through a labyrinth made of materials provided by Eyvind Kang and assembled into twisting paths by William Basinski. Hums, thrums, wobbles, wibbles, tribbles, thweeps, wroops, nrim-rims, skeens, zizzies and mooples abound all woven like an itchy wool blanket wrapped around a man clearly out of his skin, worried out of his mind and lost out in the countryside trying to find his way through his life back into familiar territory.

  La Fosse specifically requested that I delete any evidence of A Cosmic Unconsciousness after sending it to me, threatening me with some sort of punishment that when put through Google translate came out as “sizzling on the wire.” Don’t worry Fosse, your secret is safe with me. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  May you find your way back home.

   Being a lesbian musician is hard. Harder than being gay and male and a musician, one might argue, but I don’t want to actually start any arguments. In a segmented world of music there’s very little room for cutting a mould that doesn’t fit a pre-prescribed audience. Lesbian artists in the 20th century had to either cop a man-loving attitude and hide their shame or cop a man-hating attitude and give more guff than they took. Thankfully artists like Teagan and Sara have given more room for lesbian musicians to show a sensitive side. A balanced side. A real side.

   Now before I continue, I need to stress that this girl’s moniker “Meat Puppet” has nothing to do with Phoenix Arizona, lysergic acid diethylamide or anyone named “Kirkwood.” She clearly outlines in a very brief manifesto that she included with the recording, sounding almost like a corporate vision statement, rewritten here verbatim:

   ”My aim in *being* Meat Puppet: is to one day expand the awareness of what we’re made of, how we’re made of it and what strings are pulled to make it do what it does through the refinement of the myriad sounds that represent being stricken with an acute case of cabin fever, whether stuck inside of a house or a living vessel.”

   Meat Puppet’s ideals seem to mirror the chosen lifestyle of another famous poet, the lovely and prolific shut-in Emily Dickenson. However, Meat Puppet doesn’t seem happy with her isolation. Accompanying her manifesto was a brief summary of her living conditions: a conservative religious household, the inability to record without secrecy (her father believes outsider music will exacerbate her “condition”), and her music being her only outlet for a smothered attraction to other women. An undercurrent of forgotten-dollhouse menace lurks underneath her breathy, rose-lipped natural mezzo-soprano that distinguishes her from such aesthetic contemporaries as Jasmine Ash or Florence Welch. Indeed, at times she seems to have taken a page right out of the Velvet Underground, but equally from Reed as Nico. The dual-spirit of man seems to reside within her as she sings, carrying up into the reedy heights of the feminine and then down to a buzzing masculine drone on her most anxiety-drenched of anti-ballads. She avoids openly singing of her romantic desires for her mutual gender on most of her sole makeshift EP/mixtape, but the theme of love being a difficult struggle to break free of, as she delivers in a line from track 3, ‘Morning Crust,’ the “calcification around the eyes of waking babes.”

   Puppet cannot help but evoke a sense of being homebound, surrounded by moth-scented doileys and porcelain statues of misshapen angels. Her simplistic chords on twelve-string hum like a harp as she applies found objects to provide a suggestion of collaboration. Three of seven tracks feature the snapping of cloth shears as an instrument, processed and reworked into what resembles a chorus of ghosts providing tap-dance from an afterlife just beyond the veil. “Cloaks” features a drum beat: the tapping of her own knitting needles as she wove a scarf for her bedridden grandmother who she cares for seven days a week. She describes the process of attempting to record and utilize the sound of sewing with needle and thread used on “Cribs” as “worse than picking at a shoelace knot.”

   ”You Got It There” is possibly the very first true “bedroom producer” arrangement ever concieved. There is nothing in this world that has sounded more like music that a bedroom would make and Meat Puppet is truly the avatar of the homestead. Anxiety, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, longing for love under the umbrella of shame, and most of all a sense of household resignation. It’s music from a cage of glass, balsa wood and starched dresses. Nothing can quite compare to it, and only the baseboards and doormice will ever provide an audience to what she’s capable of.

Anonymous asked: Not really a question, but a huge thank you for doing this. I saw you posted about this last month I believe on /mu/ and have been eagerly awaiting your return. Reading these is awesome and I hope you keep them coming. I can sometimes hear what the bands and musicians you describe actually sound like and its awesome and heartbreaking at the same time knowing they will never exist. Good luck, and thanks once again!

Oh they exist. Or, that is, they did exist. I delete all copies of the data and burn any physical evidence of them.

True music lives only in the performance.

Thank you for your support, though! I’ll try to cludge through my backlog hopefully one or two a day from here on out.

  Mogwai, a talented and over-recorded post-rock machine, said in 2011 that “Hardcore Will Never Die.” Mogwai also implied that death is an intevitability: specifically, the death of everyone reading their album title. I’m in agreement. Death is coming for fans and casual enthusiasts of Mogwai. Plath once said, “Life’s end, isn’t it beautiful? It’s almost tragic.” However, the inevitability of our own mortality doesn’t mean that we can’t ride the coattails of this immortal “hardcore” straight down the gaping maw of the reaper. Cascade Hop certainly agrees, as they’ve dedicated themselves to not letting go of their roots while keeping their unchecked aggression in-check. Those roots? Classic heartwarming pop country.

  According to Wheatgrass Puddles, the self-credited “heart” of Cascade Hop, there’s a story behind “They Are Wrong” and it’s deeply rooted in the rainy, frustrated melancholy of the rural Cascades. Their name is derived from the Cascade mountains and the cultural vacuum surrounding the major city centres of Oregon, Washington and No Cal. Puddles, who pre-emptively assured me “did not get a name change,” is from the high-desert pop. 46 town of Antelope. A brief Google Talk interview with him confirmed that he was indeed born there off of the official census.

  “It’s one of the smallest towns in the state. There’s a general store, the post office, the neighbour’s house down the road. That’s it. Every year a school bus would roll through carrying kids to visit different museums some thirty miles away. They’d get out, buy some candy, leave. I always wondered where they were from. I listened to a lot of Bing Crosby back then.”

  Puddles emancipated himself at the age of 15 and went to live with an aunt in Portland, where he continued to practice guitar and picked up fiddle, harpsichord and the band saw.

 ”Going to high school was a nightmare. Too many people. I’m still a bit agorophobic. I fell in with some punk kids. Having nothing to do for 15 years but listen to old country records on vinyl leaves you wanting to do something fun.”

  Cascade Hop formed out of this change of scenery. Puddles cycled through many drummers and players, including local punk troubadour Wolfgang of the short-lived No Heroes, until quitting his attempts in frustration.

  “Everyone wanted to be traditionally hardcore. Everyone wanted to drink beer and kick things over. I was trying to assemble something else. I wanted to make the kind of music I wanted.”

  In the end, after a year of difficult living and recording, Puddles put together They Are Wrong. His system for recording it involved hiring local buskers for their studio time, paying them out of his own pocket, so that they could play what he’d written for them. The result was intended to be a disjointed mix of collective sounds from PDX, and Puddles wound up succeeding. Every track introduces something completely new as Puddles attempts to get these amateur musicians to co-ordinate themselves. His small-town pent-up blues mixes with his frustration in recording such an ambitious project and winds up coming out raw, seething and bitter with raspy aggression. Track one, “Juggler,” opens with the searing yet twangy delivery of “Born/dusted off/spun around/skinned/aloft,” and as the song proceeds to showcase his pounding pedal-heavy instrumentation alongside the a capella claps and falsetto hoots of a diagnosed schizophrenic credited as “Christopher Aguilera.” No two tracks are the same, but there’s a striped pattern of alternation between well-intentioned Dean Martin-esque rootsy country and the bellowing mastery of fellow PDX inmates Fucked Up, and on every track a different busker is featured. The result is possibly the very first “hardcore twee” album ever produced. His soft side on “First Dangerous Love” is shown in these lines from the chorous, “Piercings and piercings/we’re getting worse at this/moment by moment/you penetrate fiercly/the nature of murder.”

  While Puddles might not be the most capable socially, his ability to bullwhip his guests into shape shows that he’s got great raw potential for future projects involving his throaty vomit of disaffected disappointment and whoever he can pick up off of the street for a dime and a sandwich. The G-rated red-light district of madhouse jangle-punk is out there, lost in a red haze of honky-tonk smoke, being himself without apology.

   This cassette was sent to me by an anonymous collaborator with one of the production assistants for the mysterious Steinvord project that has been dredging up so much controversy over the past few days. Questions about whether or not Steinvord is indeed Sonny Moore of Skrillex fame, a joke played on everyone by the legendary Richard D. James, or the possibility that the controversy was spun up to such a frothy potency that they’re all just playing along and that the lucky sucker actually behind Steinvord is sitting back getting putting his feet up and watching the publicity roll in. Now, this isn’t a primary concern of this blog. There’s many zeros and commas worth of blogs working for the hype machine. It is an amusing anecdote on the nature of the industry at this point, digitized and nebulous, and how fluidly gossip and rumour can change the facts. What are facts any more, indeed? If Steinvord is or isn’t Skrillex could depend on how Steinvord reacts to the rumour mill. What we know can change in an instant, and rumour can flex itself to resemble the truth better than the truth and even become the truth. Regardless, Usenet has nothing to do with Steinvord except for the fact that someone associated with the project e-mailed me this EP and called it good, along with a Readme.txt that outlined just who and what Usenet was associated with.

   Anyway, on to the review:

    “They Are Exctintion” is apparently a Bristol-Manchester-Russia project. Having been bounced between Dars, Parallax and Skam, Usenet could easily be called an international collaboration of mistakes. Daniel Raykhert, working alongside his partner-in-crime associate Stephan Kubrak, supplied the groundwork for what was intended to be a side-project from CellarDoor but, according to Dars, required a special something that only the Bristol sound could complete. So it was forked over to Anthony Merill (Maelstrom) for post-processing. Raykhert liked what he got back but disagreements over the final product with the label shoved Usenet into a sort of limbo. According to anonymous, the project was secretly handed to a third-party in the interest of reworking the track to get it in proper shape for release in the UK without the awareness of Dars. In comes Skam with their unscrupulous associate Mr.76ix (P. Wood) doing his magic, allegedly getting a hand from Kouhei Matsunaga and Alan Boorman. Rumour has it that the loofah-scrub sound of the recording was due to them re-recording the whole mess as faithfully as possible on antiquated analog and then remixing the whole bit digitally. Skam, unwilling to release the product themselves, handed it back to Parallax where it sat on a shelf for about seven months before Steve Aoki, of all people, snatched it thinking it was a spare blank cassette. He wound up working it into a set in Montreal where Raykhert, in attendance, recognized snippets of his own lost project. That bootleg was reprocessed, chopped up, fed back through and reassembled. Unsatisfied, Raykhert tossed what he figured was a lost cause to the ADD project who remixed the tape, added their own flair, and sent it to the label head who, again, refused it. Not because it wasn’t a good release, mind you, but because nobody could decide on who actually owned the rights to it, in which country, on what label. And thus, it was forced to be shelved indefinitely.

   The end result is far more Kraftwerk than UK garage, much closer to Psychic TV’s earliest low-fi tapes than underground London. A driving pulse reminiscent of Autobahn with the decaying, yet optimistic, fuzz of Silver Apples rolling off of the screwed remnants of Aoki’s slick production makes this pill an easy one to swallow, if not inscrutable and fractured in segments. One eye, one focus could have made this the discovery of the decade but, in effect, it ends up sounding like track 13 of the sum of its parts. Turns out too many cooks don’t necessarily spoil the broth, but they can certainly leave it a bit cooler than it should be served.

  When you think of noise rock, what comes to mind? Sweat, probably. Lots of sweat. Crusty, stained t-shirts. The politically incorrect “wifebeater” tank-top? Baltimore? Warm Schlitz on a Friday night? Probably not “Italy, Winter 1943” as the title of Magnum Force’s debut album might suggest. Crunching your boots through crisp Italian snow awash with blood and sweat? Battling a nasty European case of frostbite? Plugging your nose with grapevine leaves? Does the album title, do these images evoke the notion of “noise rock?” to you?

  It’s certainly no Excellent Italian Greyhound, but The Actual Battle of San Pietro lives up to its name. Much like a Tommy Gun it packs a lot of gunpowder into a compact, smooth caliber round of puncturing punk. Vocalist Joffries Tenner, unshowered and looking a lot like he never left grunge-era Seattle, is as good of a yelping guppy as David Yow on a sober day. His grunts, hollars and whimpers perfectly punctuate the ripped-jean underproduced fuzzbombs that his comrades whistle out without sounding too much like GVB at their most un-mellow or too little like Les Rallizes Denudes trying to swing a freebaser’s head-rush ballad. The combination of Jesus Lizard, middle-american rock sensibility and not entirely un-No Wave penchant for sporadic funk ends up piling up into the perfect sort of train wreck that Flipper would have become if they hadn’t gone the way of a tuna-canned dolphin. 

  The first side of the cassette whams past like a freight train in second gear. No time is wasted, maybe a five-minute break a smoke, then back into the fray they go. Jim Sandshore’s drumming is a bit too rat-a-tat-tat to call “Crover-esque,” but hints of that “ding-dong-chimy-chang” can be heard hidden under the reverb, especially once you flip the tape to take in the much slower, cuddly-grinding, possibly even sentimental side B. The GBV influence can be heard much stronger here: wandering riffs abound, fuzzy lamentation about wishing for more legitimate substance in lower middle-class life. The whole things plays through like a poor-man’s “Songs About Fucking,” or that is to say a “poorer man’s” SAF. Production values are deliciously low here, and the tape hiss only adds to the atmosphere of four guys getting mad about cheating girlfriends, busted sneakers, and the big-city cost of vegan cuisine having to shove them into a frustrated freeganism. Dive on, boys. 

  Keep reaching for that minimum wage dream.

Album reviews coming up next month, featuring the best artists you’ve never heard of and, hopefully, never will.

Keep the precious things precious, precious.

M O T H E R F U C K E R

via subatomicbrainfreeze.typepad.com

 Sleeping at a motel and I just heard some guy screaming from his room. I mean SCREAM from his room. Over and over.

 Still don’t know what it was. Aye bejeezus looks like I got some emails though

thanks for those

jesus what the fuck

indiethings:

Sean McCabe said he remembers when indie was truly indie. ”I spent my formative years going to record shops and spending hours hunting down obscure things,” the 35-year-old art director from New York said with a laugh. “It was indie on every level.”

But, McCabe said, things have changed.

The term…

 Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmno, Indie is not about “cool, creative and different.” Those words are broad adjectives and Indie is no longer a broad adjective. Its meaning has already been lost completely through frequent and confusing misuse. It is now most commonly used to refer to a lacquer-coating on music in reference to its potential to sell to a subculture known as “Indie.” It is also used to describe a series of fashion statements. The first argument anyone had about its definition strung it up by the neck as a word. And by that definition, of course, I am simply beating its corpse.

 But there is one more thing to say: not being represented by one of those giant record companies does not ensure greater purity of form, nor does it mean you do not have corporate financing. Being represented by a structure parallel to, but still emulating the model of, the mainstream music distribution/appreciation structure means that you have simply settled into a second mainstream. It is not you who changes the system but vice versa. Your promotional methods are just as shallow and your message is moot, if you even have one.

 Do not use words to describe things you don’t want ruined. As soon as the world sees it, written in plain letters in the light of day, it will be eaten alive.

(Source: weheartindie)