POTLUCK AT MY PLACE! (DON'T BRAISE THE MANDOLIN!)

Village of Spaces

Alchemy and Trust CD/LP

Corleone 2011

Whatsa friendly fool like this doin climbin my staircase? Get behind me, pretty! Honest to you, I can't recollect the last time such an autumnal tumble of leafy itch and scratch came over for some mead with the likes of me. These days, my heart pumps about as warm n sweet as a crushed crab apple, specially when it come to the work of sweatered and Sauconied faux-crackers like these folks.

Though, don't misapprehend: I done-sensed the creek-drunk waiver of Caethua not 5 steps in and I was right and all was better for it. Village of Spaces is, I take it, the Uke of Spaces Corners wearin another walk-in, and she's part. I spose Frederick Wiseman was right about Belfast, ME: ain't nothin to do but count the seagulls and freeze to death, so it makes sense they'd team up. Though, I don't know who's mum ponied for the trek to vibe with Hurley on that other coast. Road trip, brah! Much as I dig this (after-dinner-outside-hemp-bracelet-sweat-ring that it is), I worry the lost, trespassin Bozo Texino quality of, say, 06's So Far on the Way might near blink out by same time next year. You can still catch the quease and moan treatment on "Buoy Gong" and in the slightly listing harmonies throughout, but that's the rub, darlin: slightly.

Oh well, I'm just pickin nits to keep my finger out my nose. These are dire days for all of us. This is damn good! Maybe somebody'll get a new Volvo station wagon outta this goat rodeo. Well, a new old one.

ARCHIVAL SMUDGES: The Lost Fuck You Counselor Years

Dwarr - Starting Over, private press 1984
(Figgered I'd toss this one into yer lap, seein as Dwarr's follow-up just got reished by Yoga/Drag City sometime ago. Twas of the times at the time. But, you know, wine ain't gettin any colder. -Ed.)


Yikes! This is a goddamn goose chase. For some reason, this lp gets dunce-capped with the abysmal underground doom metal of the 80s, when this is really just super-moody borderline chamber-prog-folk. Yeah, Duane sings like Ozzy on a narco bender and there's the occasional Birmingham d-drop, but this has way more in common (albeit probably by stumbles) with Stan Hubbs covering Van der Graaf Generator. Do as you wish, fellow busriders, but every passenger knows when to ring the bell, ya ask me.

PERMANENT SHOTGUN

Weyes Blood & The Dark Juices
The Outside Room LP
Not Not Fun, 2011

The note left on the hotel window read, “I walk a lonely street.” He could well have been a record collector.

Record sluts like us contribute almost nothing to the arts aside, of course, from financial support in 10 and 20 dollar increments over a lifetime. It still seems like a ghastly descent into the hands of the artists, however much we love our dealers (and want them to love us). And, sure, when you consume at this quantity this urgently there are sure to be corners turned and miles marked. But look at me. I live like a memory junkie—sitting here, tipping back capfuls of Rabarbaro, listening to Lazy Smoke like I’m in some mid-afternoon TLC-produced reenactment of myself; a grim, flaxen-faced imagining of long-blown-out wilderness. In ear years, I feel more like 67 than 27. And when I start stuffing hearing aids in with wax- and dust-clotted fingers, I’ll know the buzz is over and a swamp of hum and crackle is beginning.

So, it is with the shake of a meth-wrinkled hand that I crook a thumb for Weyes Blood and the Dark Juices—though it’s probably more the shake from the initial unease of another Jackie-O Motherfucker alum spinning in my house. (Though, as Richard Belzer once recited, “Junkies will always pick quantity over quality.”—Ed.) This one beats the rap, though there were times I expected Hope Sandoval to hook a black widow nail around the corner and sing back-up. But it all worked out. Queasy waves of the dirty penny stench that emanates from all great heroin music are pooling all ‘round this LP and, for now, that’s all well and good. Hopefully, they’re just like me: shotgun, never steering. Nice to see Not Not Fun branching out into the Desertshore crowd!

ASSUME THE LOTUS POSITION AND COUGH

J. D. Emmanuel
Trance-Formation 1: Ancient Minimal Meditations
(Aguirre Records ZORN14)

Somewhere in the Midwest of the 1980s is a lawn chair beside a card table in a basement, waiting for J.D. Emmanuel, hoping he’ll roll a save or go chaotic neutral; stay a little longer for taco-flavored corn chips and cold grape Nehi; cups his cheeks while his friends put on Bo Hansson, Deuter and Harmonia at the wrong speed; maybe tip back the bottle they found in the cupboard, adjusting the level with water to avoid suspicion; discuss the upgrade to the 20-sided die. But no.

He had to go off to that retreat, where the floors are dressed in thatch rugs and the breeze is free of mildew and Irish Spring, and an old man plays a sweaty flute. To be fair, things didn’t go totally wrong. J.D.’s still J.D. somehow somewhere. I’m just not sure about the crowd he’s running with.

THE FLAMING DRAGONS OF MIDDLE EARTH - The Seed of Contempt

LP on Feeding Tube Records, 2010

Now that all the fogies have squirmed their way into the dirt, no longer body warm nor fire-brained, we can finally have some fun of our own. This LP, shmooshed together from years of home-recordings and rehearsals...
details, details--you know what? Who cares.

Need to know: This is everything great about the timeless combo of youth and volume; when rules are disregarded, not in an attempt to divorce from academic rigor, but because no one can remember them. Or maybe no one knew them to begin with. Isn't that basically what's also great about the entire story of contemporary music?

That being said, you think you know what this sounds like and you are so very wrong. It's much better, much more passionate and much less clever-clever collegiate misfit bong hit bonanza. If the word ever meant anything to begin with, then these kids "shred."

Don Van Vliet is dead. Long live Danny Cruz.

If you don't like this, leave me alone and enjoy what's left of your civilized world.

TOO EARLY (OR LATE?) TO BE SO PISSED, VOLUME 1

Autre Ne Veut - s/t (Olde English Spelling Bee)
"Hypnagogic-pop" is part of that latter-day parlancery trying to substitute criticism with description: if there's an umbrella for it, ideally invented on the Internet, it must be good. The cat behind Autre Ne Veut is more in the hypnopompic-pop spectrum (if I can fire the first semantic volley at y'all candy asses), rubbing his morning wood in a permanently groggy state while the late-80s Prince record he found on Itunes the nigth before becomes an inadequately remembered dream. Wait--it would be inadequate anyway.

All the Volcanic Tongues (Shame on Heather Leigh Murray & Co for self-deprecatingly big-upping this shit biscuit!) in the world couldn't lick this thing into consciousness. People who only feel things publicly in a post-ironic-ironic state of ecstasy will have much to ooze over, however. Ferinstance, the fond remembrance of making up pop songs in front of your mirror as a lad or lass, using a brush as a microphone--not because of how fun it was, or because those songs were so great, but because of how much they miss that Ocean Pacific shirt they were wearing. Not to mention the British Knight hightops.
If your sorry ass is interested, check here first. Or eat a madeleine and shut the fuck up.

RUSTIER, FURRIER, BUT PROBABLY JUST AS DRUNK - One last romp in Ol Bill's honor

Here I am again, yanked from the anonymity of everyday life back into the strange, detached anonymity of the Internet. Not that anyone was plying me with tenured positions, free records, or even a wank in the Aldi parking lot with a powdered glove. I'm here on a mission.
Granted, it's a mission adopted by scores of others all over the jernt in the past few months as the waves of year-end jizz have dictated. But no matter. The tide has subsided and there is, perhaps, finally enough room for my gargantuan ego to stand and say, "Yeah me, too."
At the same time, this was not an easy piece to write. All the other critics seem to harp on the violence, the destruction, so easily gleaned from a record made by one-half of Harry Pussy. They all kind of read like PR sheets, too, which is just as unsurprising as it is disappointing, because this is a pretty personal record. Slapping all that marketing rhetoric on it just ain't couth, if you ask me.
Then again, personal has become sort of a dirty word. By "personal" I do not mean "intimate" like Jackson C. Frank or "outsider" like Bobb Trimble. No, sir. I am talking about personal narrative.
Let us, then, begin at the beginning.
History is smeared all over the acoustic axe like cheap lacquer. It has as many instrumental brothers, sisters and cousins around the world as the drum or the horn. It is also, perhaps, the most cliched, most overused instrument in western music and, consequently, the least-likely to blow me away. It's been distorted, smashed, detuned, prepared, played with a towel and an electric window fan, and yet remains, unequivocally itself. I have, in that sense, as much respect for it as distaste. I heard a lot of solo acoustic records this year, like many years; some old, some recent, and some brand new; some impressive, some momentarily resonant, and some totally forgettable. Rarely do I hear a record whose relish and loathing for the acoustic guitar resonate so strongly with me. Because it is on that rich and storied history that Bill Orcutt meditates.
But let's get something straight: this ain't some post-Alan Watts, post-Axonda, sandal-wearing, raga-taking, Zen snooze button. Bill ain't poppin' a squat on an Indian rug or letting the breeze roll through his beard as he sways in a hammock. This shit is lllllllooooouuuuuddd. Even with the notch on the volume knob staring at your shoes, it's loud. Every kind of loud. It buzzes and snaps and shrieks, wrapped in the quivering aura of an actual room. An honest to Christ room! Engines start, phones ring, floors creak--all of which make the weight and breadth of Orcutt's playing even more miraculous because there is no artifice. It could be happening next door. It's heavy and fast, slow and burning, taut and rapturous.
Of course, what was great about Orcutt back in the day is still alive and well; those serpentine figures still mince the air into crystalline matchsticks like an unholy usuba knife and he still does brake-stands on the E-string like nobody else. But there are also koto-like vibratos and ragtime slides in all directions. I'd call it a clinic, but that would be give you the impression this was one of those stiff, Derek Bailey derivatives. And I'd call it a blues record if that, too, hadn't become such a dirty word.
So, what is it, then? A throwback? An homage? An attempt to write the acoustic guitar into the 21st century?
No. It's an exorcism. Orcutt has calculatedly--but no less passionately--coaxed out all the ghosts dormant in those Kay guitars out of the musty basements of every plucker in Thee United States and into the streets for one last amp-draining zombie rampage; ghosts so misshapen and worm-eaten as to be barely recognizable. That could be Blind Lemon Jefferson gnawing on a SK-54, or just Sharrock chewing Karen Dalton LPs; Arto Lindsay getting his head shortened by a Bell Huey, or an 18th century riti player clubbing Rowland Howard with a slab board Strat. (But now I'm mixing my metaphors.) Who the fuck knows. They all, in whatever hellish state, can be glimpsed in the fracas.
In the end, it's the inspiration that gets me. This isn't that impulsive, peristaltic kind that usually kills on contact. No, I'm guessing Bill's been teasing this hound for a minute now. If we're lucky, this and that here-today 7" (also released in limited #s on Orcutt's own Palilalia) are but the first of many snarls to come.
Here's to the ensuing mayhem. May it never quite put the period on the history of the acoustic guitar.
Stupid fucking thing...