Widnoon

Delay upon delay will turn your sound to a muddy mess. A whole new product. A new delay besides my previous excuses:


That living nightmare is keeping me waxing poetic about my new bicycle, not to mention keeping me from riding it.

Here's a pic of my "new" bike frame from the Gitane '70-'74 catalog:
View image

Sorry to have been away for awhile. Massive upheaval due to budget cuts at work, and planning to move Steve across the country, and being forced to seek medical attention twice in one month after not seeing a medical doctor in close to a decade. Wootie. From chaos new forms emerge.

No rest for wicked ones. I don't know if I'm damned but I stretch good.

I've been meaning to write a blog about Scott Walker. How pedestrian is that. Perhaps it better i remain mute. In other news, I found utilitarian Gitane Interclub bike frame at a thrift store. Been seeking one of those for awhile now. After one trip for buy tools, I realized I need to take it to my local professional repair person. Hopefully won't cost me my left foot. I'll post pics soon and give love to local bike shop.

CIA is so fueling those election protests in Iran. Now I'm on a list. I stretch good.

Finally getting back to toying with the CMS I use to run this thing. Learning which templates override which etc. Would have been easier just to code the damn thing from scratch, but hopefully I will learn a few things. Notice all my widgets have vanished but ones I want will be back up soon. As if anyone... well, you do.

I threw my magick pendant in the pond at the Parthenon.

I'm home sick with kitty. Enjoying my fever haze.

Here's a longish but telling article about by guy that wrote the computer program that easily converts mortgages into bonds, aka, a major enabler of the housing market collapse et al.

What I find fascinating about this guy is that he wants exonerate himself on two fronts: 1) the housing market collapse was not his fault ; and 2) his is not an utter toad like the other wall street moral lepers he came in contact with day to day.

Where I think he get confused is whether not his moral culpability and subsequent toadiness are categorical. He seems to think they are. And of course he finds himself non-culpable and non-toady. Unfortunately sir there are shades of grey.

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/04/24/changing-icon-from-g.html

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The Internet as melancholy Christ?

Throbbing Gristle played their first U.S. gigs in over 30 years last week in NYC. It was their first east coast gig ever. Photos and videos can be found here:

http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2009/04/throbbing_grist_4.html

Chris Carter's personal photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_carter_/sets/72157615982120660/

Chris' rigs are only ones that give me gear-gasms. Some folks are grumblin' a bit, but no matter how much they paid for a ticket they had to know the NYC shows were just reversals for Coachella. A festival of that size has to be the largest audience TG has ever played for. I hope they used the opportunity to do something terrible. Something shocking. Maybe Gen will commit suicide on stage.

Regardless of the group's intention, its amazing an act I like when I was 15 is still making new challenging music. TG continue to challenge themselves, each other, and their audience. Few artists with a history as long as TG, as influential as TG, can make that claim. It also makes my day that my guitar hero is a female over fifty years old whose entire oeuvre has nothing to do with blues.

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Since TG is touring the USA, it might be a good time to have a midyear music round up. Here's a list of what is laying around my headspace in various analog and digital formats:

Blackalicious - The Craft

Captain Beefheart - Safe as Milk

Chris Liebing & Speedy J - Collabs3000: Metalism

Coil - Megalithomania!

Coil - Selvaggina: Go Back into the Woods

Current 93 - Dogs Blood Rising

Dabrye - Two/Three

David Bowie - Black Tie White Noise

Doubting Thomas - The Infidel: 20^th Anniversary Edition

Ellen Allien - Sool

Exxos - Dune Spice Opera

Frank Zappa - Jazz From Hell

Front 242 - 05:22:09:12 Off

Front 242 - Pulse

iNDEX01 (DiN label sampler)

Get Hot or Go Home: Vintage RCA Rockabilly '56-'59

GZA - Pro Tools

Harold Budd & Brian Eno - The Pearl

Iggy & the Stooges - Raw Power

Iggy Pop - The Idiot

Jessica Rylan - Interior Designs

Jocelyn Montgomery with David Lynch - Lux Vivens

John Cale - Artificial Intelligence

John Cale & Terry Riley - Church of Anthrax

Kool Keith - Spankmaster

Lil' Wayne - The Carter III

Lou Reed & John Cale - Songs for Drella

Lucinda Williams - Little Honey

Mahavishnu Orchestra - The Inner Mounting Flame

Maja Ratkje - Stalker

Mantronix - Mantronix

Matmos - The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast

Matmos - Supreme Balloon

Meat Beat Manifesto - At the Center

Muslimgauze - Emak Bakia

Not Breathing - Old Black Pueblo

Nurse With Wound & Cyclobe - Paraparaparallelogrammatica: Angry Eelectric Finger 2

Nurse With Wound & Irr.App.(Ext.) - Mute Bell Extinction Process: Angry Eelectric Finger 3

Nurse With Wound & Jim O'Rourke - Tape Monkey Mooch: Angry Eelectric Finger 1

Odetta - At the Gate of Horn

Ornette Coleman - The Art of the Improvisers

Pauline Oliveros - Primordial Lift

Peter Brontzmann Octet - Machine Gun

Scott Walker - It's Raining Today: The Scott Walker Story (1967-70)

Skinny Puppy - Ain't It Dead Yet?

Skinny Puppy - Rabies (remastered version)

Skinny Puppy - Back & Forth 2

Skinny Puppy - Brap: Back & Forth 3&4

Skinny Puppy - B-Sides Collect

Skinny Puppy - Puppy Gristle

Skinny Puppy - Doomsday: Back & Forth 5

Skinny Puppy - Back & Forth 6

Soma - Stygian Vistas

Speedy J - Public Energy No. 1

Speedy West & Jimmie Bryant - Stratosphere Boogie

Squarepusher - Maximum Priest

Steve Earle & Del McCoury Band - The Mountain

Sun Ra - Nothing Is

Throbbing Gristle - 32^nd Annual Report

Thurston Moore - sensitive/lethal

Vangelis - Bladerunner

Venetian Snares - Horse and Goat

Viktor Vaughn - Vaudeville Villian

Xiu Xiu - Knife Play

Xiu Xiu - Air Force

When I look back over this list and compare it to a list I made about a year ago, I'm struck by the similarity. Maybe I need to expand my horizons a little more. Stylistically, I'm not sure where else I could go without devolving into ethnographic "world" music cataloging. Such a practice which strikes me as somewhat racist. Perhaps I have it all backwards. Look above at all those anglo saxon white people making noise.

My clichéd closed mindedness aside, I've had some pleasant surprises this year. Coil's Selvaggina was well worth my personal wait. On that live set you can hear more proper versions of Black Antlers / Ape of Naples tracks which (I don't care what anyone says) were just demos. The Carter III is as good as everyone says it is. Reed & Cale's Warhol bio rock opera Songs for Drella brings me to tears every time I hear it. Jessica Rylan remains one of finest living sound sculptors. Everyone should seek out hir work. I've also be listening to a lot of Front 242 the last months. Far too often are they lumped into the regrettable secondwave of industrial bands. Their work has its own formal agendas that should not be ignored. European electro doesn't get much better than them. The best surprise for me though is recent months was Dabrye's Two/Three. I picked it up on a whim because it was release by Ghostly International, a label I respect but regretfully had paid little attention to recently. It's a slab of wicked minimal off-kilter hip hop. It's everything El-P was trying to do a few years back, and despite failing miserably at it, got heaps of praise for anyway. I'm glad someone else got it right. Not knowing of Dabrye before, I was pleasantly surprised to learn the guy has critically tongues wagging all over the place for the past few years. Other honorable mentions: Zappa Jazz from Hell, Xiu Xiu The Air Force, and Mahavishnu Orchestra The Inner Mounting Flame. (I'll be writing a separate blog later about Scott Walker who is someone who I'd shrugged off in past years as just another "rediscovered" singer songwriter.)

Then there are the disappointments: Ellen Allien's Sool, Matmos' Supreme Balloon (the first album of theirs I haven't loved), and Throbbing Gristle's 32 Annual Report. The last was a good concept as a live happening but should never have been released as a recording. TG's original work simply does not translate via the digital equipment they now utilize. That being said, TG's new recordings of all new compositions are wonderful. The single disc version of their reinterpretation of Nico's Desert Shore is one of my most anticipated releases. Another thing I seem to have to teach myself over and over is that Nurse With Wound and Current 93 simply do not resonant with me despite the penetrating vibration brought about in my psyche by their kissing cousin Coil.

Right on time for my last entry, Apple Inc has released it's new DRM free files via itunes, with a slightly different pricing scheme. Details can be found here. I must admit, this is a good move on Apple's part. At the same time, why still cling to their own AAC codec?