Parallels.

Boubacar Traoré:

More sweet novelty

I have an extremely warm spot in my heart for virtuosic playing of obscure instruments. Here's Jake Shimabukuro, almost certainly the only Jimmy Buffet opening act who will ever appear on these pages, destroying the house that Tiny Tim built.

I want to stand close to you, I want to be your friend

Dear Jolie Holland,

It's been a while since I've written you. There's no excuse really, but then again, can you blame me for not wanting to talk if you're not going to also be writing letters that are poorly disguised reviews of my music, or being in San Fransisco when I'm there with the express intention of breaking your heart, or trying to pawn off my music on your parents? Never have you reciprocated any of my gestures, and its only rarely that you even acknowledge them. Love is a two way street, Jolie, a thing that takes hard work and mutual recognition, two things that our relationship has decisively lacked.

That's why I'm writting to let you know that I've now moved on from our (admittedly lopsided) love affair to something else entirely. I've met someone new: Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lappelles. I went to their album release show two nights ago and now know where my metaphorical affections lie. Which means we, my dear, are finished.

"Why are they a better fit for him?" you may be asking yourself. First off, they are a group of people, whereas you are one person. You may think to yourself, "ah that's silly, you can't be in love with a group of people, that's just no feasible way to get over the emotional and logistical hurdles it requires." But your mistake was to assume I want a relationship: indeed, the genius of being secretly in love with a group of people is that it will be literally impossible to profess my love appropriately outside of an online context, because getting them all together in private would be a public event attended by at least half a dozen people. Love without commitment, Daniel Johnston style. Pure genius on my part. Such a shame it will never be yours again.

Secondly, Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lappelles have discovered a very interesting balance between being a backing band and a large ensemble, something that you, being one person, could never do. Though there is definitely a sense of having a center of attention in Lucy's staggering weird and wonderful vocals, one was never left with a sense that she was the sole center of attention, or of musical interestingness. There were bizzarro cello solos, lovely harmonizations, and seemingly unscheduled sing-alongs from the audience. For several songs Lucy Michelle was not even on stage, being waylaid at an actual piano just offstage. It was wonderful.

Do you know what would happen if you were to leave the stage Jolie? There wouldn't be any music, and people would wonder if you weren't secretly Chan Marhsall. You don't want that. I certainly don't want that.

Thirdly and maybe most importantly, Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lappelles make me want to live when I am at their shows, whereas at your shows I find myself requesting songs like "I Want To Die," and feeling cathartic and more than a little drunk in the aftermath. I could never dance at one of your shows. But did I dance with Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lappelles, in styles I didn't even know I could dance to. It was wonderful; I have never sweated with such ebullience. But somehow I don't think that that, or anything I've expressed here, is something you would understand, since as usual you aren't actually reading this.

Anyway, I hope this doesn't come as to much of a shock to you. Somehow I imagine it won't. Au Revoir, in any case.

Cordially,
John

P.S. Here's Lucy with a smaller group of Lappelles from earlier this year.

Like Seurat, but with lasers

Radiohead has a new music video out. Since it was shot with lasers rather than cameras, it's kinda neat, and so maybe not surprisingly, the making of video is vastly cooler than the video itself. But the coolest by far is the tool Google has up where you can finally see what Thom Yorke's face looks like from the inside.

At last.

In which I try to justify linking to Newsweek

You know it's a dark day when Newsweek has become a major source for your music news. But then again, maybe it isn't; by the time an act is getting covered by Newsweek chances are it alread gone through the grinders of snobby hipster opinion and emerged relatively unscathed. Or, alternatively, it's about to be shredded to cries of "sell-out" that will force the informed classes to forget the act entirely, leaving you the last devoted fan on Earth, a position glorious and pathetic in equal measures.

So that said, I was super excited when I read this. It's about the Sparrow Quartet, a group composed of Abigail Washburn, Bela Fleck, and two other unnamed string players, who are travelling around China playing for the respective folk musics of both countries for Chinese audiences. Apparenty they will also be doing the first ever American folk tour of Tibet, which I imagine would be... interesting.

There are many, many angles to a story like this, where music is simultaneously functioning as a tool for cross-cultural understanding and as propaganda for two deeply ambivalent superpowers, each of whom has a very different understanding of what the music is and what it's presence means. Fortunately for me, I'm no longer under threat of academic destruction, and so I can leave those thoughts hanging for later posts. (Of which there are sure to be more.)

In the place of a more full discussion, please accept this extremely strange peice of modal awesomeness. (Yes, I know the vocals are less than ideal. But seriously, where else are you going to hear Bela Fleck pull a whatingodsnameisthat, as he does at 2:30. Obey, mortals.)

One of these things is not like the other

Dear Lord, I just figured out why recently arrested genocidaire Goran Karadzic's face looks so familiar!

First, the villan!

Fig 1.1
Gordon Karadzic
Responsible for deaths of thousands

And now, a stunning resemblence!

Fig 1.2
Fred Frith
Responsible for wierd noises

How better to escape war crimes than disguising yourself as an affable professor of avant-garde music! Brilliant! Major props to the Serbians for cracking the case.

(Actually, the truth is actually just as weird, if not more so. There's some excellent audio commentary over at the Times, for any interested parties.)

So, you mean like a letter opener, right?

In the mid-80s MTV had a show called The Cutting Edge, which starred Peter Zaremba traveling around the country and trying to find interesting things to broadcast, hopefully relating to music. Perhaps not surprisingly, the results were mixed; one of the show's highlights featured Daniel Johnston showing up unannounced at a sponsored barbecue and pushing his new tape, Hi, How Are You to a national audience.

Fig 1.1



More often the show became an theater of the contrived bizzarre, as best exemplified by the following interview with Dexter Romweber of the Flat Duo Jets, who lived in a dilapitated shack full of the collected cultural debris of the past hundred years.

Fig 1.2


I stumbled across this a few days ago, and I still can't decide if its ultimately a good thing or not. It's one of those cases where you have someone who's clearly not mentally alright pretending to be not mentally alright, with the entertainment value deriving from the tension between the two and the fact that anyone could live that way, regardless of whether its an act or not. Uncomfortable. (Though I suppose the same applies to Johnston's appearance as well, which I feel weirdly okay with. Hmm.)

The Daredevil Christopher Wright.

Written yesterday:
After an afternoon of laboring over French conjugations, H and myself drifted over the Kitty Kat Klub, where we arrived just in time to have The Daredevil Christopher Wright explode whatever preconceptions about male vocal chords we may have had:



It was quite a good show, though as is often the case when you get more than two high-voiced men in a confined space, they couldn't entirely escape the danger of castrati-chipmunkism. But no matter; the staggeringly hirsute leading men more than compensated for whatever loses they may have sustained in the masculinity department.

P.S.
In the future I will omit more unneccessary words, I swear by God.

How to Play Guitar Correctly.

Step 1: Don't play guitar. Play fiddle, then switch to guitar when it's no longer economically viable.

Step 2: Allegedly meet Charley Patton.

Step 3: Syncopate.

If you're succeeding, you'll sound like this:



(This is Bukka White, for any curious parties.)

And while I'm at it...

I figure I may as well review last night's excellent concert by Roma di Luna at the Mill City Ruins. Suffice it to say, they are very good and put on a very solid show despite being forced indoors due to threatening weather that never materialized. There was a secret part of me that was very happy about this; as much as I love outdoor music, the acoustics in the museum's courtyard are, uh, less than ideal and the interior, though unseasonably warm, is much much better suited to big, awesome Americana harmonizing. Which we got in droves, particularly towards the end of the show, when they busted out the driving "Bury me Beneath the Killing Fields," a song which, despite its totally death metal title owes more to the gospel-country tradition of "Down by the Riverside" or the better tracks off Will the Circle be Unbroken.

Here's a less than ideal video of said song that I wouldn't be posting if the band hadn't endorsed it by sticking it on their myspace. It does get better than its beginning would suggest:

Studs in G-Strings

What could be better than a cold beer, hot pizza, and a prepared piano after a long and often exhausting bike ride, I ask you?



Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Wait a minute, that's an Adorno reference! I'm going to think poorly of the author!

For anyone who may be a regular reader of this monstrousity, my dear friend K is launching a new music blog of her own, The Curves of the Needle,, which will likely be vastly more interesting than this one has been recently. Go look at it. You'll feel better.

I'm back! (And check out this Hat!)

Dear anyone who may be a regular reader of this blog,

I apologize for the last two week's absence. In penance, I offer you this amazing video with music by the Tin Hat Trio. It's a bit slow at the beginning, but it's well worth your while.



Sincerely,
John