Sam Meringue’s Matrix Metals project has been the extra cheese for pizza-sticky blogger fingers everywhere since Not Not Fun dropped it as a tape last spring, and pretty much everybody who writes about it has been singing the same tune: if all the artists in David Keenan’s h-pop pantheon got together and threw a party in a Malibu Hilton Hotel lobby circa 1985, Flamingo Breeze is what that party would sound like — plastic Piña Colada glasses, lopsided Monet posters, hallucinated DJ “take-overs” and all. And I used to agree entirely, until this new video by Luke Wyatt made me realize that the album’s closing track kind of pulls that swirling neon vision right out from under you. “Tanning Salon” is the killer hangover that comes with the dawn: we are still at the Hilton, but the ice sculptures have collapsed into puddles, the guests have all come and gone, and the hallucinated 45-year-old trophy wife who glided through the ballroom like an extra in a David Lynch film is lying inside the sensory deprivation chamber of a tanning booth, alone with her darkest thoughts as her 97-year-old husband takes a dip in the pool. Memories can really be quite horrific, when the last five years of your life get jammed in the VCR. And I’m afraid, Lady in Red, that you only looked real with your make-up on. (more…)
Today is a big day for Visitation Rites. After subsisting for months on expired Trader Joe’s enchiladas, spotty café internet connections, and 99 cent dreams, we are now to ready to step it up to the major leagues of grassroots music blogdom and strike out with our own “TV on the Vimeo,” which VR-consultant and “internet personality” Jon Williams christened thusly last night. And while it may be hard to believe, we didn’t have to suffer through months of flashing Aunt Jemima and belly-fat-reduction banner ads in order to pull it off, because we took those off the site a long time ago. Actually, all we needed was a video camera, a bedroom editing lab, and my very lovable roommate Brendan Toller who, I am finding out, just so happens to be the man behind I Need that Record, a documentary on the death (and possible survival) of the independent record store featuring the likes of Thurston Moore, Ian Mackaye, Chris Frantz, Noam Chomsky, and Lenny Kaye. (more…)
“I don’t know what my art is about. I don’t know what my life is about. My work just happens like shit. Shit isn’t moral. It just comes out.”
– Totally unrelated artist’s statement, discovered on the wall of a coffee shop in North Brooklyn on October 23rd, 2009.
It would have been nice to see this video for “Memories of Glaciers” floating around back when Alice Cohen’s Walking up Walls l.p. dropped on Olde English Spelling Bee last August, but the mid-January timing feels entirely appropriate. “Memories of Glaciers” is the cool and meditative blue to the frenetic summer neon of the “Landrunner” video she did for Ducktails earlier last year, even if the quivering, animated-scrapbook style forms an obvious line of continuity. Listening to this album closer by itself was enough to give me an inkling of it, but seeing this video in the flesh really does make me feel like I am back in my one-piece red snow parka, blinking my eyes against the glare of the sun on my first double black diamond. And all I can remember is how when my skis finally glided over that giant boulder and caught the air, what I actually experienced–for the first time in my life–was the sensation of total stillness. (more…)
I started feeling it coming on this past Saturday, at a holiday party in Bushwick. We were standing around blinking through a brown haze of Kennedy Fried Chicken grease and the evaporated alcohol of every single spirit ever distilled by man, laced with enough cardamom and cinnamon fumes to suggest that someone had gone ahead beforehand and rubbed down the entire apartment with a stick of Old Spice. We all agreed that the cloud, which got thicker and heavier as the night wore on, was supposed to be the cloud of brotherly love and holiday good cheer. But the room was too empty for that to really feel like the case, and if we stared through the mist hard enough we could see that what the host really wanted us to be looking at was a wall projection of zombies mangling each other in a Bavarian winter wonderland, the sight of magenta melting through snow, color-coordinated to match all the Gluwein … (more…)
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. (more…)
If The Skaters could do it with terrestrial surfing, and Ducktails could do it with a Disney cartoon, then somebody was bound to do it with a baseball team. From Texas. I do not know if San Francisco sound collagist Joe Knight actually took cues from the Dallas-Ft. Worth home team for the title of his solo project (“Rangers“), but I do know that he hails from Texas–and that his music reflects a parallel fixation with the tape reel as a cutting board for the psychic trappings of middle class American youth. Depending on how we listen through the fuzz, the chorus of “Deerfield Village,” a pop song off his forthcoming Suburban Tours l.p. on Olde English Spelling Bee / Future Sound, is either “I don’t want to go out” or “I don’t want to grow up.” (more…)
Some food for thought to accompany this gorgeous–and I find, very autumnal–new music video by Amy Ruhl, straight from an interview I conducted with songwriter, ethnomusicology grad student, and all-around good-natured fellow Julian Lynch this month on Orange You Glad, his debut lp: (more…)
Describing 
