Sunburned Hand of the Man, 11/11/08

Seriously, just fucking embarrassing. I assume they were all on the nod. Absolutely none of the drive and pulse that makes their records great. I felt pretty ripped off.

Just in case anyone was wondering . . .

This blog is on hiatus. I left Iowa on July 15th and won't be back until mid-October, when things will start back up again here. In the meantime, I'm blogging at www.japangetsred.blogspot.com.

Review - Uneven Universe: Nebula Blanket

I saw this band a couple weeks back with Trash Dog in Iowa City, and picked up this double tape. First off, lemme just say . . . a double tape is a lot of music. These are 47 minutes each, so it’s more than a CD would hold if you filled it up completely. Thinking about it one way, that’s a lot of sound for your money. On the other hand, what’s the first thing you’d think about an 80 minute CD?



Luckily, this is quality stuff. Uneven Universe use a saxophone duo setup to make some amazing, really haunting sounds, and the highlight is definitely when some sense of melody and change starts to emerge from the otherwise somewhat uniform wash of (perfectly nice) static. About halfway through the first side of the green tape they get busy with the sax, producing long, slow tones that build an immense sense of loneliness and weirdness. It’s the sound of whales after the apocalypse, swimming through the submerged ruins of New York, talking about sunsets.

Following is a segment of pulsing bass contrasted with the sounds of a lightly-touched, echoing stringed instrument. I’m loving the sense of space and difference here – “noise” doesn’t always have to be unrelenting walls. Not that Uneven Universe skimps on that, either – the top of Green Side B is super intense buzzsaw square tones, twisted and turned into an echo that’s ear-piercing. Even the saxophone gets harsh here, open-throated squawking that shows just how flexible good old analog is.

Then there’s a real piece de resistance – a really nice duet for . . . well, I can’t quite tell. A mix of saxophone and theremin? A tone generator? As we progress further in, there’s an organ in the mix, moaning, sloooooooooow and creepy. A real conversation – lots of empty space and skilled improvisation. It’s intense, again in a subterranean, poetic way. This is eminently weird shit – it really needs to be used as the soundtrack to a Lovecraft film.

I will say this section goes on a bit too long – one of the few moments “Nebula Blanket” might have benefited from some self-editing. Otherwise things move very nicely – and re: my earlier comment about the double cassette I guess there’s an important qualification – that ‘noise’ listening just isn’t like listening to other kinds of music. In one sense, it’s more passive – you just sit back and let the sounds wash over you. Of course in other ways it’s more active, since imagination is so necessary – what you bring to it yourself almost makes the experience. But it’s this passive aspect that makes really long releases more logical – it’s not like you’re going to get tired.

With that in mind, I’ll leave the second tape to your judgment entire – or non-judgment, as the case may very likely be. This is thrombosis jonesing, slow and deep, gently unnerving. Pick it up if you’re just sick in the head enough to think you like art.

Black Drink – s/t
SickSickSick #40
www.sicksicksickdistro.com



I don’t know much about this group, except that it includes someone from USAisamonster. It’s not important, though – this is crucial late-night trance listening, mixing elements of noise, free jazz, and world music to spooky, tense effect.

Side A opens with a ratatatat that quickly subsides to a subtly inorganic tone with cymbals, Zen bells and flutes that fold in upon themselves to feed back into a rising pulse. Something slow and heavy and not quite round starts moving around underneath your ears. There’s a taste of harshness – wheezing electricity playing off clattering drums. But everything is incredibly restrained, even when there’s static involved. Things are so nearly empty here – rainsticks gently drip and shake while UFOs contemplate, low to high. Things again very, very slowly pick up steam; there are metallic, toneless bells echoing against minimal plucked notes, things start to once again fold in on themselves, you get the sense that you’re going somewhere, chugging along, chugging, echoing, pulsing, whispers building on whispers -

AAAaaaand there’s where my sole critique of this release kicks in – the side change comes right in the middle of a buildup! I’d rather have a long silence at the end of side B than that kind of interruption in my listening, especially when it’s this kind of headphone-y music.

As Side B opens, we have the same tribal drums, simple, low, and the keening, funereal feedback from an electric guitar – toneless, just squealing, thin, quiet, a trance induction. The static and volume ebb and flow, massaging your ears, sounding like something between a whale’s slow cries and a transgalactic revelation. Then we get what may be either actual chanting –slow, wordless, monklike, dirgey – or some strange instrument that has managed to perfectly capture the contours of the male baritone. The latter becomes increasingly likely as the notes start cutting frantically, drums that still seem somewhere at a distance slowly pick up the pace and intensity, and a high tone begins to pulse.

This cassette is that rare thing in the land of noise – a manifesto of understatement. Like a great horror film, it shows little, and you imagine much.

Wolf Eyes, June 27th, Picador

The show was great for a few reasons. First and foremost, there was the the debut of Crackity Sax, the newest project from Kelly of Escape the Floodwater. This three-piece set the crowd of cynical hipsters into a frenzy with their completely straight-ahead take on "Minnie the Moocher" - you might know it better as "The Hidey-Hidey-Ho Song."



I have to shamefacedly admit that I was a little to preoccupied with photography to offer more than a superficial take on Trash Dog's set, but on the plus side I think I accidentally took a picture of Jeff's soul:



I think that means I control him now.

Finally, and maybe most crucially, the pairing of Lwa and Wolf Eyes really helped me pin down exactly what kind of creature Lwa is. Wolf Eyes is a serious frenzy of ramshackle energy and full-bore performance. Their guitarist - is that the right term? - really left it all on stage.



Lwa, even though they gesture towards an air of masculine menace with their single bare bulb and no shirts, are not at all the same kind of band. They're practically Japanese in their restraint, minimalism, and careful, slow development (and I'm not talking Merzbow here). They're also really coming into their own - this was easily the best set I've seen from them.

Altar of Flies – The Creeping Unknown

I just got a completely kickass trade package from Matthias, the man behind both the Swedish Hasten & Korset label (sinkorswim61@hotmail.com) and the Altar of Flies project. In exchange for an old CDR and a zine, he sent me three tapes, two buttons, and a completely kickass sticker – I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about who got the better end of the deal.

Even better, the tapes are really good, particularly this Altar of Flies record. It’s just the sort of nasty, crunchy, but strangely soothing low-frequency shit I loved to go to sleep to when I first started getting into noise, and would have gotten huge play on the original sleepnotwork radio show I did in college. It’s perfect 4am listening. There is no melody; primarily it’s low-frequency tones with a nice bit of grit to them. This is going to sound a bit too wholesome, but it’s the sound of eating granola – That is, of course, if granola occasionally started resonating at high frequency in your skull. There are small animals mewling in the boulders.

Review: Trash Dog “X-Dog”/ Zero Aggression “Anti-Life Equation=You Don’t Get to Live” – Detrivore Cassingle Series

Trash Dog are utter fucking garbage, with obvious intent and possible malice. It’s like that Marcel Duchamp thing where he wrote “R. Mutt” on a urinal, except this time around Duchamp is pissing in your ear while you look at it. The vocals here (by Witcher?) sound like Corky from Life Goes On covering some lost 60s bubblegum gem, while Darren Ho manages to sound like he just picked up a guitar yesterday, which I imagine took some genuine de-learning. Basically, this is for fans of the Shaggs, if they went to art school.

Zero Aggression may seem like the same deal on the surface, but is in fact a fundamentally different beast. First and foremost, Jack Gilbert is a dangerously demented freak, so hearing him screaming about how “you don’t get to live” is enough to send a chill down your spine – but meanwhile, thanks to some tight, sunny riffs, there’s such a pure optimistic epicness to it that you really want to be in a convertible with the top down.

Then we get a second movement, an unaccompanied disquisition about Horse Transport and Plank Manufacture, Gilbert’s menacing innocence turning some series of technical specifications into compelling Dadaism. By the time he shouts “Is everyone ready . . . for the transformation?” you believe this fucker can deliver, and you pause a little as you wait for the Rapture or . . . whatever this next-level shit will be. Then we get a tantalizing little treat at the end – the Stereolab-ish “remix” of the track, with a computer voice doing Gilbert’s vocals over an analogue(esque) wash of sickly-sweet glowing rainbow tones. The individual parts are great enough, but the movement between them makes this completely essential.

Review: Nimby “Flotation Device”/Dubdrip “Smoke-tinged Perception” – Detrivore Cassingle Series


Nimby is Brendan O’Keefe, who is also the man behind Detrivore, and therefore could have easily put out any old totally weak piece of his own. Instead, this track is about three minutes of damn-near-godliness, especially on a good system that lets the warmth really shine. Kicks in with a slightly echoey, laid-back groove, out of which blossoms these incredible bell tones sketching a melody loop. The melody throughout this is totally sublime, and I’m pretty unsure how he does this, since the entire project is based on drum triggers made out of margarine tubs. Anyway, a few moments in and suddenly there are some monstrous booms, like the rocket’s leaving for Marz – and congratulations, so are you.

Darren Ho is a friend of mine, and I love his work with Racoo-oo-oon, his techno-ey stuff (with Nimby) in Cuticle, and, based on what little I’ve heard, his Drip House solo tapes. He’s a really talented guy, and a dedicated artist. Sadly, this side as Driphouse does not represent him well. The Nimby side takes some of the best parts of dub –the echoes, the warmth – and puts an intriguing spin on it; by contrast, Dripdub pretty much takes off from the idea that reggae as a whole is a punchline; from the weed-joke title to the repetitive casio-preset baseline to the absurd fake-Jamaican accent of the vocals, the outcome is pretty tough to listen to. The track just feels incredibly tossed-off, and is frankly a bit of a disservice to the brilliant work that backs it up.

When I listen to this tape I pretty much just rewind the Nimby side repeatedly. It’s still totally worth owning.

Review: Lwa “A Softened Focus”/Secret Abuse “Release You Away; Towards Greater Pig Shit” - Detrivore Cassingle Series

The highlight here is definitely the Secret Abuse side, which really hits my sweet spot of slowly unfolding melodicism drizzled with a sheen of static dressing and punctuated with the occasional crunchy nugget of insane grinding feedback. The ascent from eno-esque melodrone to gently screaming banging-on-a-sheet-of-metal squall is absolutely sublime.

Lwa’s aesthetic hasn’t generally appealed to me as much when I’ve seen them here in IC – but this side has grown on me after a few listens. There’s only a minimal sense of progression or tension, but that’s got its place. These very ambient tones and echoing snippets of conversation will be the bees knees to some folks – it’s much more of an atmosphere than music. Very subdued, very analog. A heartbeat pulse, bells, cawing crows outro . . .

As you can guess from the name, the Exodus festival started life as an event for filthy hippies, but after losing a step and not happening for the past two or three summers (because I got high?) Exodus came back this year with a decidedly leaner, younger, and quite frankly cooler bent. The highlights of the show were, in ascending order:

Cuticle, which consists of the combined forces of Darren Ho (Drip House/Racoo-oo-oon) and Brendan O’Keefe (NIMBY). The outdoor setting wasn’t quite right for their brand of trippy, tribal, noisy techno – I wish they’d gone on a lot later, in the dark. Also, I can’t believe Brendan got that sweet vocoder out of a dumpster.



Twelve Canons are a band who have played in Iowa City for as long as I’ve lived here, but until last night I’d never seen them. It’s a heartbreaker, too, because their brand of otherworldly roots-inspired music is right up my alley. Their weird funereal wailing, intricate but battered fingerstyle guitar, and brutish, foot-pounding rhythms will make them the darlings of any fans of Clarence Ashley or Roscoe Holcombe. The show was augmented by two things – another local artist, three sheets to the wind, muscling up onstage to sing along, and a local idiot nearly setting himself on fire by carefully pouring lamp oil from the tiki torches into a pile of grass. These, plus someone behind the stage setting off fireworks, lent the set an eerie tension – something was going on, but no one knew just what it was. (For better or for worse, my camera ran out of batteries just as all this nuttiness was going down.)



Then came the indisputable climax of the whole festival:



That’s right, fire breathers. And juggling:


All with, as you can see, a band providing backup. The band played a series of hilariously over-serious Aerosmith covers. There was a sneer built into the gesture – those hard rockers aren’t nearly as hard as us fire-folk.

And that was, in a nutshell, the dichotomy of this year’s Exodus. The programmer/organizer was a young hipstress, and she invited a mix of her underground friends and the previously traditional jam/reggae acts to play. So there was a bit of a split identity going on. That’s inevitable in a festival, I guess – no one wants to see everything. But in this case the split was pretty clear, and the shift of focus (plus the hiatus) seems to have hurt the Festival – I’d say at best a third of the Magger’s farm capacity was used, and by the end of the night our hostess was soliciting donations, so I imagine she took a (relatively small) bath on it. Maybe it’s that pale subterranean hipsters were less inclined than dreadlocked rastas to go out to a farm and see music while worrying about rain and bugs. Hard to say, though – some of these Iowa hipsters are pretty hearty.

Whatever was keeping people away, I do hope the fest happens again next year – it was a great time - though that's partly because it was so sparsely attended. The porta potties were clean almost the whole 24 hours.

May 20th - Skye, Real Live Tigers, Some really good chick and Caleb Engstrom, Brown Birds
at 300 Kimball House

"Everyone knows Pablo Neruda, right?"

It's the thing only someone from Iowa City would say to a music crowd, and even then only if you're actually in Iowa City. Her stage patter, then, might need some adjusting. But Skye, half of Skursula, has other things right, soloing in violin and voice, plus some loops (all the rage these days). It's haunting minor keys, slow, trance-inducing, in other languages, as twenty-odd people sit around her in the living room of a house that sits alone on a dark, curving lane.

Then tearing into "a little bit of Bach" with blood on the bow, bright rennaissance melodies first edged with a slight anger, then suddenly plunging into some circular room on the edge of space. A bricolage of ramantic tendency. At the very real risk of trivializing it, this would be the weapon of choice for those new steampunk kids the Times is so gaga over.

Then Real Live Tigers - who is one guy with awkwardly robotic vocals, strumming a guitar, rather tamely. Objectively, it actually verges on the amateurish, and song titles like "Winter Blues Number One" definitely make me wish I could muster the kind of bitter commentary I used to be full of. But one thing Iowa City has taught me about is mercy, and faith - to watch, waiting to see what happens next.

He has a song called "Hidden Places." He says it's about house shows, places like the one we're in. The first lyric is "Fuck what you heard," sung in that suddenly-revealed-as-at-least-slightly-self-conscious seriousness. In a club I would probably ignore this. But in someone's living room, I couldn't, even if I wanted to. And once he gets the entire room singing with him, its not at all about how good he is.

(Also, I could have sworn I knew the guy - turns out he's from Austin. I'm pretty sure he was at KVRX back in the day. Can't all be winners.)

I forget the name of the next performer, so feel free to help out. She started off like a spookier, less self-exploitative Fiona Apple - Kurt Weil with an acoustic, orchestratic woozy swerves through oddly subdued underground barrooms. "Would you like me better if I had honey eyes? Would you jump up on me if I put up a fight?"

Caleb Engstrom joined her for a song or two with that falsetto of his. I'm not normally a huge fan of Caleb's - motherfucker can write a hell of a song, but he hasn't quite gotten past the point of just making good music to actually being interesting. He's still just a little too Acoustic Jawbreaker - Romanticism is one thing, but I think he sums it up himself: "I guess with all of this I'm trying to do something honest." Well, guess what - honesty sounds like bullshit 98% of the time, while art has slightly better odds.

I couldn't quite tell what some of the noise mavens were making of all the sweet melodies and romantic poetry - the crows was a bit of a weird mix. But if I had any doubts, things were made much more clear when Brown Bird came on - he had a beard, and a guitar, and a song "about building boats and trying to make babies." That's what's known as a Trifecta. I'll grant he nearly had the gravelly gravitas to pull off the melodrama of his sad-sweet template, and I can't tell you exactly what separated him from, say, Bon Iver
- but in his badman songs of iniquity and loss, the blood turned to corn syrup and food coloring. When you introduce something as a "love song for two women, but one of them is dead. Amelia Earhart." - then you successfully revive my cynicism. And when the central lyrical conceit of another tune is a metaphorical steamboat on "the river that runs through me," that cynicism comes to full flame.

I'll cut Caleb some slack because he's 21 - but if this guy is old enough to grow that much facial hair, he should know better.