Heat can be pretty psychoactive. I have suffered through enough late summer DIY shows in this city to know that it can make you feel drunk when you are dry, induce dizziness, lightheadedness, blurred vision, tunnel vision — and, on rare occasions, even predator vision. It can dull your experience of the most bad-ass jam you’ve heard all year while heightening its impression in memory. I am actually pretty glad that I missed Woodsman’s set at Monster Island Basement in Brooklyn last Friday because it don’t think I would have survived to tell the story. When they swung by Newtown Radio last Sunday, the station was probably just as cramped, but the free-standing air-conditioner wheezing dutifully in the corner lowered the temperature to a level that was pleasantly hallucinogenic. Each color and each sound was more saturated than usual, each beat went straight to the temple. Maybe it’s just that Woodsman is so percussion-heavy, but I couldn’t help feeling like was trapped inside my favorite Can video — minus the long and stringy hair.
“Underwater Visitations Episode #10: The Woodsman Episode
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This past Sunday was jam-packed, but I am glad that I got to stop by Newtown Radio for an hour and squeeze some sound files into this most musty and archival of Arthur Radio episodes. Among the transmission’s many mind-warping attributes, DJ Ivy Meadows (Camilla Padgitt-Coles) took a dip into her bottomless vault of spoken text recordings, which includes the sound of Freud’s own voice and a 2003 home recording by the legendary American poet/filmmaker/wanderer Ira Cohen. In the poem “Atlantis Express,” excerpted below, Ira provides as fitting an introduction to the episode as any:
Let’s take a silver train underground
to the back streets of Atlantis
thru the corrugated iron roots &
then to the peak itself, to the
saddle of the last ridge past strewn
boulders,
finally meandering thru cascading snow
wearing miner’s hats on the perpendicular
dark night &
going up to the edge of the Southern Cross
where we reach at last the pure white
glistening glaciers &
begin to chant over bones in rags
of Scorpio
Armless in the sticky substance how could
they ever have had a chance?
Permission will not be required
only poems of blood offered to
the memory of TREE
It is not ice which is eternal
but the fury of the absolute
separating the void from the spirit
of man,
uplifting like life when it is used
against itself,
that is, Radical Love — & again, we
are reduced to living beings
Caught by the instant
we are taken away
We live in the imprint of the flame
& we are helmeted within the internal
blackness
where the ray begins its passage
across the indignant sky
Vain clouds uncaring in a tangle of
crossbeams
culminate in the hermaphroditic mirror…
“Arthur Radio Transmission #13: Clouds in the Hermaphroditic Mirror”
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Sunday was a very special day for Arthur Radio. We never thought that co-host Hairy Painter would return to Brooklyn after spending a month building Mardi Gras floats and dancing to “sissy bounce” music in Nola, but he surprised us at the station door — out of breath, suitcase in hand — right when we were about to go on. And we never thought we would be able to cram one sound engineer, one baby, five DJs, half a dozen synthesizers, and all six members of Excepter inside the Newtown Radio studio, but somehow we pulled the whole production off without a hitch. Following the release of their new double album Presidence on Paw Tracks last Tuesday, (“Presidence Day observed”), Excepter graced the Arthur airwaves with a set so on point it caused unnoticed seismic shifts beneath a 24-hour techno-rave in Istanbul. Visitation Rites engaged Jon Fell Ryan in a wobbly Q&A, and Ivy Meadows and Hairy Painter piled on layer upon layer of wax ellipses to set the scene… (more…)
