Dan Deacon’s sweaty human tunnel

I’ve been on vacation. This is a little of what it was like.

Popped! fest, illadelphia June 21, 2008.

Noise is not dead…but we’ll publish books about it nonetheless

New York Noise–The book?

Yep, here it is: “No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980,” a visual history by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley. It got reviewed in New York Times and everything.

This is the kind of book that I sneer at (a coffee table book about underground music is almost as bad as a coffee table book about coffee tables) but actually am really excited about. Suicide! James Chance! DNA! Pictures of Eno hanging out producing while ”No New York“! Lydia Lunch ranting! Gah!

Lydia sums up her era like nobody else (go read rest of excerpt here):

Beneath the scowls of derision, the antagonism and acrimony, and the nearly unbearable shrillness that was our soundtrack, we were howling with delight, laughing like lunatics in the madhouse that was New York City, thrilled to be rubbing up against the freaks and other outcasts, who somehow, for some unknowable reason, had all decided to run to land’s end and all at once scream their bloody heads off.

—Lydia Lunch, July 10, 2007

picture courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan

Skip to 2008: Thurston getting a latte and rubbing up against the outcasts? Perhaps not. But Thurston is still cool, though. No, I’ll never knock Thurston on this blog. Speaking of Thurston, noise isn’t dead and his participation in the ongoing scene in the city proves it.  A few years ago in a loft in Long Island City I saw my friend Dom of Prurient and Hospital Productions play a show with Thurston benefiting some hipster/noise-centric magazine. It was a heavy bill. I was mesmerzied by one band playing in particular: Magik Markers. Lead singer Elisa Ambrogio was like a hyperactive child crossed with a less sexed up Lydia Lunch and screamed and cowered simultaneously. Thankfully they have not faded into complete obscurity but have actually begun to put on some highly listenable albums. Here’s a track from their new album BOSS, produced by, of all people, Mr. Lee Renaldo.

Taste: Magik Markers

Lastly, I do know some freaks who still live in Alphabet City and they don’t go to Starbucks:

Courtesy of David Rogers Berry (from O’death)–music from New Adventure Violence

Another Reason to Heart Seattle: Fleet Foxes Give Away Free MP3 Because They Feel Bad for Itoons Fuck up

I’m very, very, very into Fleet Foxes–a harmonious, chamber pop/neo-Freak Folk five-some from Seattle. In fact, they remind me very much of Seattle–pleasantly hip but hairy enough to be from the Northwest, natural but not without constructed elements, very 70’s looking and very joyful and soothing to be in (or listen to). Now, though I love Fleet Foxes even more as their label SubPop (that great 90’s label that just keeps getting better with the years, like wine or Gabrial Byrne) are offering a free download of “He Doesn’t Know Why” because of an error on Itoons. How nice! Seattlites are certainly nothing if not genuinely polite. And Agingsnob loves free things!

 

 

Unicorns: Horned Myth Creatures Get New Cred

ROME (AP) – A deer with a single horn in the center of its head – much like the fabled, mythical unicorn – has been spotted in a nature preserve in Italy, park officials said Wednesday. “This is fantasy becoming reality,” Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Center of Natural Sciences in Prato, told The Associated Press. “The unicorn has always been a mythological animal.”

Amazing!

Can’t get enough Unicorns? Here’s a best of list:

“Unicorns L.A” from my favorite new performance art troupe My Barbarians

 

Unicorn (noun): A term used to refer to a man who is so beautiful that he is neither gay nor straight, but otherworldly; often with regal air. (Coined by Claire Howard?) For example: “Roger Federer is a such a Unicorn!”

 

Planet Unicorn:

The Unicorns: popular band from the mid 00’s; now Islands

Magic the Gathering: Benevolent Unicorns!

The Last Unicorn: 80’s animated film with voice of pre-crazy Mia Farrow

 

Exile in Guyville: the album that changed a thousand indie girls and sorority girls alike

Sex positivity is not always all it’s cracked up to be.

Sometimes being sexually and intellectually free as a woman, or at least trying to be, can hurt like a bitch. No one expressed that better in pop music than Liz Phair did on EXILE IN GUYVILLE. I was late to Phair, but discovered her in my own indie-rock college youth. Like Phair shortly before she made this record a decade earlier, I was in art school (Phair went to Oberlin, a school perhaps even more obnoxious than my alma matter) and I was kinda slutty and kinda confused and had no idea why being “free” didn’t make me feel any better about myself or my body.  I also felt that horrible feeling of being left out of the K-Records-style boys club because I was a girl and therefore had no valid musical opinions.

But you don’t have to have had an indie-as-fuck youth like mine or dealt with being left out of the “Mission of Burma or Wire?” kind of bullshit conversation insecure college boys in Converse have (“I STOPPED TALKING AN HOUR AGO”–see Bikini Kill’s “I Hate Danger” ) to understand what Phair was talking about. This album made feeling lonely (“Whatever happened to a boyfriend?/The kind of guy who tries to win you over?”) and angry (“I love my live/And I hated you”) ok.  It was a sympathetic voice to all young women finding themselves in post-sexual revolution culture. Remember that time? When you were one part femme fatale (“Because I take full advantage/ of every guy I meet”) and four parts vulnerable …and it was all a mess. Yeah, Phair, she just got that. And then made one of the most important indie rock albums of all time.

Says Phair herself on the album:

I’ll just get really honest with you right now,” she says. “I was pretty good in bed at that point from the point of view of what the guys wanted, but pretty bad in terms of my own enjoyment. And yes, that made me angry. But it was my own fault in some sense.” As she matured into real sexual confidence, she says, the anger faded — in real life and in her music.

Looking back at Exile in Guyville, Phair sees a young woman struggling to establish some kind of control over her own life. “I kind of hear how unhappy I was. It makes my heart go out to the person I was,” she says. “It’s so clear to me now how unsure I was and how vulnerable I really was.”

It’s an album that hasn’t aged a bit, despite the very 120 minutes/My So-Called Life aesthetic of the videos and the art. Go listen to Liz Phair’s KICKASS interview on NPR about the 15th anniversary re-release of the seminal album. I’m gonna quote a dear friend here who says it even better than me:

I was a freshman in high school when this came out.  All of a sudden there was this album where this awesome girl was feeling the same things I was.  She wanted to understand sex, but she also wanted to understand it for HER. She felt like she made some shitty mistakes,  and that she would keep on making them.  She was inexplicably sad about something that seemed to be missing in her life, and she was explicitly sad about what she saw about her future as a woman.  It was so refreshing to hear someone else get angry about the things that I felt angry about, and, finally, to have my anger, as an emotion, be validated.  Someone else thought that it was okay to be difficult, it was okay to ask tough questions, it was okay to make demands and to want and feel things, that, as a girl (or a “lady”), I wasn’t supposed to want and feel.  Life altering stuff.

Life altering indeed!

(Buzzworthy! Can you believe MTV showed shit like this at one time?)

 

Invisible Conga People channel psych past and present at Issue Project Room

Last weekend, Bryan and I went to Gowanus performance space Issue Project Room to hear neo-Italo Disco/Krautrock-esque duo Invisible Conga People (go here to download one of their songs). It was hot as hell in the performance space, full of people wearing odd assortments of itsy bits of clothing, and the “liquid light show” dripped some of its liquids on us (which created a semi-permanent mark not unlike manic panic stains on skin). Still it was worth roughing these minor setbacks, as Invisible Conga People’s very original brand of kinda dancy, kinda druggy ambiance equals my kind of groove. I mean these guys make their own instruments (!!!) and feed everything through a guitar peddle, securing them a place  in that oh so wonderful gray area between dance and noise. (Make more records, Invisible Conga People!)  

Sad you missed it? Well, find more psych-ambient on Friday at Aladdin’s Garden, featuring A.R. Plovnick. Plovenick has his own projections to show you while he provides vibes of Eno-style bliss out.

And do also watch a very diy interview done by agingsnob herself with Plovnick and Aladdin’s Garden host Adam Watt at iheartbrooklyn.tv episode 3.

Hope is the New Black: Obama Clinches Nomination FINALLY

A New Chance: The Tough Alliance