As a child, I had a strong interest in the history and mythology of UFOs and aliens. Despite the many phobias that can afflict a young kid, I was never afraid of ghosts, bogeymen, or monsters — or even the supposedly very real threat of child predators, kidnappers, and serial killers. Instead, I was fascinated and terrified by the prospect of being abducted by aliens and experimented on. Why this terror developed — leading to many sleepless nights and pleadings with my parents to sleep in their room — is not clear to me. Probably a combination of the countless hours I spent watching syndicated episodes of “Unsolved Mysteries” and my youth reading list, which leaned heavily on science fiction. My appetite for material relating to UFOs was as insatiable as it was damaging to my young psyche; and to this day, although I’m a well-adjusted adult, the prospect of alien abduction still stirs deep emotions.
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Archive for the ‘ENGLISH’ Category
Reviews: Douglas Mesner, “Good and Bad UFOs” Cassette
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010After the Post Rock: Mountains, Tape, and Tim Hecker at the Unsound Festival in New York
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
Mountains, Live at Le Poisson Rouge, Unsound Festival, February 10, 2010.
The first major snowstorm of 2010 in New York City occasioned one of the most noteworthy nights of the Unsound Festival. The festival, which originated in Poland and is making its stateside debut this year, is a two-week series of concerts, film screenings, talks, and other special events in Manhattan with a focus on experimental dance and electronic music. Tonight’s concert took place at Le Poisson Rouge, a relatively new downtown venue that seeks to bring classical and experimental music to the beer-swilling masses in a club setting. LPR is relatively small with an impressive sound system suited to avant garde musics, which often hinge on subtle gestures and deep listening for success.
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Horizons: What, if any, are the political values of “lo-fi” indie music?
Monday, February 15th, 2010
Along with its fetching new face, Tiny Mix Tapes recently introduced a weekly debate feature in which writers drop a loaded question and readers respond with their two cents, the goal being to foster a public dialogue about music on the site itself. Editor Mr. P knows that Biomusicosophy’s Elliott Sharp and I always get all riled up whenever music and politics are mentioned in the same breath, so he asked us craft the magazine’s second debate question, which concerns last week’s exchange between The Guardian’s Ben Beaumont-Thomas and Chocolate Bobka’s McGregor on the politics of “blog rock,” or American lo-fi.
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Reviews: Doing the Dishes with Rhys Chatham’s “The Bern Project”
Friday, February 12th, 2010
One of my all-time favorite Dave Hickey moments in when the rock star art critic describes his first encounter with Andy Warhol, over the course of a remembered “Underground Flick Nite” during his college years in Austin, TX. He and his leftist radical friends had gathered at the Y on the Drag in the hopes of watching burning cars and group sex, but when Warhol’s movie finally came on the big screen, they realized they were all in for a big snooze. What Warhol called “a movie” was in fact nothing but a stationary shot of a guy getting his hair cut: why, Hickey asked, where they sitting there nodding off to the “clip clip clip” of barber shears when people in Third World countries were starving and market capitalism was still waiting to be overthrown?
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Portraits: Death Unit, Northampton Wools, Regression, Spykes, and Dog Lady at Coco66
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Death Unit at Coco66 in Greenpoint, January 29, 2010
At the midpoint of the last decade, it seemed possible that noise music was ready to reach an audience beyond a core group of hardcore scene aficionados, record collector nerds, other musicians, fringe Euro art enthusiasts, and Midwestern basement hangers-on. Wolf Eyes toured with Sonic Youth and released the epochal Burned Mind after signing with Sub Pop. Carlos Giffoni inaugurated his first No Fun Fest with a mind-boggling line-up of artists from all corners of the scene. Giffoni’s own No Fun Productions tracked the development of noise from 2005 onwards with a carefully curated selection of just over fifty releases in five years, a surprisingly lean number of offerings from a scene known for its sometimes comical prolificacy. Lightning Bolt was gaining some overground attention with a brand of hyper-charged punk that merged noise and thrash metal with the strong aesthetic appeal of the legendary Fort Thunder collective.
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Reviews: Whitehaus Family Records Mecha-Post
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Ad For “The Whitehaus Family Record Family Record,” coming soon on The Whitehaus Family Record
As we shift from the decade of America’s horse into the year we make contact, the Googleplex blogosphere seems to be rendering record labels pretty much obsolete as distribution networks. They are, however, becoming are increasingly important as aesthetic umbrellas, harboring like-minded projects as the latter blow their loads into the soil and sprout great froot. Of course, this only really applies to labels that can be considered “indie” or “DIY” in some way; the fact that a record is on Warner Bros. tells you nothing about it, whereas when you hear that a record was dropped by Southern Lord, Load, or Not Not Fun, you can usually make a pretty accurate guess as to what it will sound like.
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Reviews: Some Twerps from Australia Drop Self-Titled EP on Chapter Music/Night People
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
Lazy internet journalist types would have you believe that Melbourne’s The Twerps are the Australian Real Estate. This comparison may make sense in the hallowed halls of MP3 hype, but it doesn’t hold much water upon closer aural inspection. If dudes playing guitars and singing earnestly makes them Real Estate soundalikes, then we’re in trouble. Regardless of your entry point to The Twerps’ world, the group recently released their debut recordings on the lovely Night People label (in the perennially beloved cassette format) and Australia’s Chapter Music (in the increasingly popular 7” + Bonus CD format). The Twerps cover a lot of ground here in 25 minutes and 9 tracks, from the tossed-off spoken word of “Dance Alone” to “Drunk On Me,” an acoustic ballad which nails woozy high school relationship drama with uncanny precision.
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Reviews: Moon Duo, “Killing Time” EP, Sacred Bones
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009![Killing Time EP Cover[1]](http://www.visitation-rites.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Killing-Time-EP-Cover11-1024x1024.jpg "Killing Time EP Cover[1]")
With their/his new EP Killing Time, Moon Duo, a solo project from Wooden Shjips singer-guitarist Ripley Johnson, manages to overcome a slightly lousy band name and a potential first impression as a larky side project to emerge as the best thing yet to scamper out from Ripley and his Shjipmates’ collective womb. What we get is a 20-minute sl(ice)ab of reverb-y echo-y goodness, somewhere between Psychocandy-era JAMC playing NEU! covers on a hazy beach and a fetal Spacemen 3 jamming off on a Suicide tip in a gymnasium.
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Portraits: Interview with Julian Lynch on Tiny Mix Tapes, plus one question that was never published
Friday, October 30th, 2009
Describing Julian Lynch’s music is difficult, period. But it is even harder to describe his music without falling back on certain buzzwords, terms that have been so overused by music journalists over the past year that they seem to designate everything and nothing at all. We might say, for example, that Julian makes blissed-out 21st-century psychedelia, waltzing lackadaisically through the bottomless archive of musical references (Western and non-) that the internet puts at our fingertips.
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Horizons: Living Out Here on the Beach, Excepter-Style
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
Excepter’s music has always kind of reminded me of New Weird America’s evil twin, absconding from the wilderness to turn tricks in broad daylight on some street corner near 34th street-Penn Station, clad in a leather jacket and fingerless gloves. Like Sunburned’s, their sound comes across as the diegetic byproduct of some Manson Family-style ritual, frightening for the very reason that we really have no idea where that ritual comes from, or what the band’s members are trying to achieve. Even in the pit of industrial North Brooklyn, surrounded by concrete on all sides, they take rocks and sticks and animal-shaped talismans and try to hack their way slowly back to the earth.
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