This next piece comes from OOIOO, a side project of the Boredoms, one of Japan's more established noise rock bands. I am genuinely glad that I have no idea what the lyrics to this song are, nor what they might mean beyond that.

There are many uses for Bathrooms.

Stumbled across this a couple of weeks ago... Brought back memories of the glory days for sure for sure. I've been a gigantic fan of Califone since junior year of high school, and I can only barely convey how happy it makes me that they like to hang out in bathrooms too.

Plus the harmonies are really lovely, which is something this band has always done amazingly well.

Printers

I recognize that this next bit may be old hat for most of this blog's readers at this point, but I just stumbled across it and it made me very happy.



For me, this brings back all my fond memories of working in the library and waiting 20 minutes while the free dot matrix printers made their melodic screaming sounds into the text of whichever thesis I was working on at the time. Oh school. Oh obsolescence.

Meredith Monk was recently at the Walker Art Center, and by all accounts gave an awesome performance. I totally missed this fact and now kick myself daily for failing to go see it.

Luckily for me, someone has kindly posted excerpts from her movie, Book of Days, on youtube and boy are they weird. (Sniff.)

Republican Catholic Heavy Metal

I swore I wouldn't complain about politics in this thing, and by God I abided by it for a month... But this morning's paper has me riled up, and my throat has gone all sick so I can't complain at the parents about it, which leaves only you, dear semi-anonymous reader, as an outlet for my barely articulated grumblings.

Alright, two things:
1. David Brooks definitely definitely knows better than to write this. Definitely.

In fact, when it comes to Iraq, Bush was at his worst when he was humbly deferring to the generals and at his best when he was arrogantly overruling them. During that period in 2006 and 2007, Bush stiffed the brass and sided with a band of dissidents: military officers like David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and outside strategists like Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and Jack Keane, a retired general.

No. No. No. Do not, under any circumstances, encourage this administration's belief in the power of Bush's gut instincts. It's what convinced him Putin could be trusted, that Maliki was the right man to lead Iraq, and that going into Iraq in the first place was a good idea. If we were to total up the number of foreign policy blunders of the last eight years, at least half of them would be found to originate in Bush's gut, while those positive things that have happened are primarily the work of (a) luck or (b) Bush relenting on some policy his gut had told him to follow at some earlier date. Just doing whatever feel right is not how you do international politics; it's a startlingly effective way to fail on the grand stage. (Or in Chess, as Tzvi demonstrated to me yesterday)

Which is why I'm stunned to see Brooks claiming the apparent success of the surge as a triumph of the President's intuitions. Because that's the ONE thing it definitely wasn't. In fact, its probably the clearest example of the second category of Bush successes; the surge has leveled off violence precisely because it was such a radical change from the Rumsfeldian "take, hold, abandon" approach that Bush followed doggedly through the first three years of the war. Maybe Brooks is right about Bush defying his generals on this one, but that certainly doesn't mean that he's best while behaving like the failed businessman he is.

2. Nienstadt is forcing St. Joan of Arc to give up the gays. The bastard.



And now, here's Metallica defending Oasis:

Echo city makes wierd sounds

So Echo City is this improvisational new music group that's bummed around the globe for the last 20 years, building awesome sound installations and inspiring unemployed do-nothings like myself to get off their bums and start making neato widget devices.

Devices such as the following:

So cool!

There's a legend that Salvador Dali once went to see an art film made entirely from stock footage, became terribly enraged during the course of the film, and spat on the face of the director during the credits. Not because it was bad, mind you; Dali liked the film, but he was angry at it's creator for having the idea before him.

I now know how he felt.

Salvador Dali playing a Piano full of Cats in a Wig.

Strictly speaking, this is neither music (in any normal sense) nor Canada. However, it does contain things I understand, which makes it suitable content. Or something. Maybe.

But I'm not so sure about the Louvins.

These guys might be called Satan is Real, but it's impossible to tell given the information on their youtube page. Lovely harmonies though.




(Also, the fellow playing the Mandolin could be the guy who writes Stuff White People like.)

No really, I swear...

I swear this is the last thing I will write about people influenced by Bartok, and then I will get back to talking about things I understand (for example).

Gyorgy Ligeti is a phenomenal composer, and as I discovered looking at his wikipedia page, he also was a big fan of Douglas Hofstadter, author of Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid. In that book, Hofstadter showed that between areas as wide ranging as music, artificial intelligence, computer science, mathematical logic, the works of Lewis Caroll, and the drawings of M.C. Escher, we could find strange loops of self reference and repetition that have profound implications for all of the concerned systems. It's an awesome book that belongs somewhere in everyone's pile, and the fact that it found a home in Legeti's library makes this make so much more sense:

Trampled by Charlie Parr

Two of the best shows I saw last year were given by Charlie Parr, one of the upper midwest's better bluesman and recent honeree of the Star Trib's best albums of the year award. Never have I seen so many drunken hipsters singing about jesus as if they believed; never have I seen myself drunkenly clapping as I clapped that night. The crowd would have destroyed the Turf Club had he told us to, straight up.

So yeah. Charlie Parr is amazing. More amazing still is this hand shot video that makes the lighting look better than it probably was. (I was not at this show, which looks to have half of the TC's bluegrass scene on stage. Tear.)

Sally Potter and the Sqeezebox of Mystery

Well, as long as we're on the subject of pizzicato-laden music of ambiguously European origin, why not include this lovely clip of Sally Potter dancing somewhat stiffly with Pablo Veron in The Tango Lesson? The background music is Osvaldo Pugliese's La Yumba, which allegedly derived its name from the sound of air being sucked in the bandeon, the devilishly difficult squeeze box that provides the melodic backbone for most tango ensembles.



This was the background music for most of the period when I was writing my honors thesis... Listening to it now brings back only the positive memories, thankfully, rather than inducing the Pavlovian panic attack it probably should.

Bartok and Crumb

A few years ago, I went to go hear George Crumb (of Black Angels fame) speak at the McPhail Institue in Minneapolis, and he talked for a full ten minutes about how Bartok had influenced him in most of his early work, and how he was finally coming around to it again. I was reminded of that today I stumbled across this gem earlier while surfing in my pajamas:




Compare and contrast comrades! (If you don't feel like listening to a convincing musical rendition of human violence, skip to about 1:33, where the influence becomes a bit more obvious.)

Slam Jam

I remember listening to this man's music on an airplane while flying cross-country at age five. I didn't know until five minutes ago that he also has a big career in Japan. Like, huge.



Which reminds me:

Japanjo

And why shouldn't he play Gershwin at lightning speed in a style obsolete for over a century? (Shame the video cuts off before the end.)

Artikulation

Oh nontraditional scores.

Qbert gets sheepish

Were you not happy? You will be happy!

John Lee Hooker

The toe tapping is essential. So is the breakdown at 1:50.

Cyro Baptista + Yoshida Brothers = A severely beaten donkey.