Monthly Archives for February 2011

BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 18 (Sept. 2005)

first published in Arthur No. 18 (September, 2005)

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

Beautiful (in every which way) is the debut LP by Knoxville, Tennessee’s Picks & Lighters. TVA/Starvation (Living Room). The fact that it came out in 1997 does not detract from its glory one jot. A trio at the time of this recording, two guitars and one drum sullenly slam into each other with the lo-fidelity magnificence that so many strive for, but so few achieve. Rambling in a way that is almost incoherent at times, this is music made by humans and you’re never allowed to forget that for a second. It also has a cover that will make you slap your forehead and say ‘WHY THE FUCK DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT?’ Their new, eponymous, Picks & Lighters CD (no label) shows off the band’s latest incarnation. Expanded and regrouped, they make sounds that range all over the place, from further scum-blues dirt-investigations to disabled semi-acoustic ramblings that move around the sofa like Jandek at sleepytime. It’s all bitchen and comes with the highest commendations.

The great Tom Carter (Charalambides, etc.) pops up on a coupla fine fine disks this time around. The eponymous debut LP by Zaika (Eclipse) documents a duo project he does with Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards, etc.) and it’s truly puce. Two guitars shimmer and duck under each others’ beams with the lazy and luminous grace of twin zebras. It’s quite a show, and a beautiful production by every measure. Tom is also a member of a wild instrumental quartet called The Friday Group. Their eponymous debut LP (Beta Lactam) is a stunning ride through mountains of sustained-string/key blather. Filled with monumental creations of feedback and drone that stretch and swoop into imaginary sunsets, The Friday Groupi is an ethereal charmer. Prog rockers will dig its latter skysaw phrases the most! And as it’s part of Beta Lactam’s Records Are Not for Baking subscription series, it is accompanied (for subscribers anyway) by an additional picture disk 12”. On the bonus record, the Friday Group add percussion, which gives one side of this set the feel of Popul Vuh at their most tranced out. Brilliant stuff. Tom’s partner in Charalambides, Christina Carter, also has a comely new release. It’s the latest in My Cat Is an Alien’s set of split LPs (Opax). The MCIAA side features those feckless Italian brothers in their most masterful space mode—burbling like the sons of Tangerine Dream and then some. Christina’s side is a duo improvisation with Andrew MacGregor (aka Gown) and is really a kinda new thing for her, at least in compositional terms. She focuses a lot on small repeated figures (almost like Tara Burke in Fursaxa) while Andrew does some vocal moaning of his own, and splashes out small spouts of acoustic guitar. Packed in another cheery hand-painted cover, this is one for the archives.

A most valuable read can be had by picking up Sun Ra: The Immeasurable Equation, compiled by James L. Wolf and Harmut Geerken (Waitawhile). This hardcover collects pretty much every bit of poetry and prose that the great Ra scribed. Which means it’s no longer necessary to try and track down all the obscure pamphlets in which they originally appeared. Ra’s own material is appended by a buncha good (‘though sometimes impenetrable) critical and historical essays. Plus, there are some very swank snapshots. It’d be a dang nice present for someone special. Maybe even yourself!

The peripatetic Richard Youngs has a new duo LP with Andrew Paine, although it’s not being released under the band name Ilk (which is what we thought they called their duo). Regardless, Mauve Dawn (Fusetron) is a titillating space-out assemblage of keys and phases and tones that stretch from here to Venus. This one woulda nailed me to my dorm bed in ’74 or so, since it has a vibe that (in parts) reminds me of nothing other than the Gong tracks on the second Greasy Truckers compilation (which must be one of the great dorm-bed-nailers of all time). And hey—it still sounds pretty damn piercing now. Youngs has another excellent duo LP, Beating Stars (HP Cycle), he did with Alexander Neilson. This one’s a little bit noisier than the other, but it still fits into a virtual space-groaner bag. And the opening track—a killer noise-folk version of the traditional “Rolling in the Dew”—is guaranteed to slay anyone who hears it.

L.A.’s Trinie Dalton sent us a couple of very fucked up books she did over the past whenever, and they both have a very evil whiff of magnificence. Touch of Class is a disturbed visual rumination on the world of unicornology, including a very wild critical essay of the Eno’s early works, viewed from a unicornly perspective. Yikes! The other is Rodenta, which is a collection of art and essays about rodents as pets and/or pests. The crazy mix of low-art/high-art vibes here is pretty damn invigorating.

Stone classic punk rock action on Furthur, the debut LP by Chicago’s Vee Dee (Criminal IQ). You can hear moves nipped from The Nomads, the Misfits, Radio Birdman and other masters of in-your-face guitar snarl. Especially nice is the fact that they mix their aggression with lyrics that sometimes lean in a kinda freakbeat direction. Cool. More totally ace punk-shit arrives via the archival Karate Party LP, Black Helicopter (SS). This Sacramento band had only a small amount of stuff released in their lifetime, but their approach made a vast impression on the nascent A-Frames. Helicopter collects their known reelases and throws in a sweet load of previously unheard material, all of it in stripped down UK-DIY/Urinals/Middle Class chopper mode. Even the Devo cover. Honest. It’s a totally solid listening and head-frogging experience and should be “had” by “all.” Fave leftfield punk slab this outing must be Human Eye’s self-titled debut LP (In the Red). There seem to have been about a thousand people in the band, but the sound is basic, whipped quartet-scum-punk (Electric Eels style) with primitive art-damage hallmarks. These Detroiters even manage to toss some keyboard munge into the mix without making it sounds like revo-new-wave-puke. Nice choppers!

Klyd Watkins is not a poet we recall running into before, although we surely have, since he was involved in most of the Poetry Out Loud LPs. Anyway, he has a sweet new book of poems, 5 Speed (The Temple), that is about nature and desire and waiting around and going places and nipples and sortsa other stuff. His rhythms are very natural, his images have a soft, strong humor to them, and his voice is incredibly becoming. Seems like he has a buncha other stuff out as well. If you don’t check it out, we will. The publisher of 5 Speed is the great poet, Charles Potts. And there is a new splendiferous collection of his out as well. Kiot (Blue Begonia) is a selection of poems from ’63 to ’77 and includes a buncha (what we feel) is the most mind-battering work by this brilliant writer. The poems are arranged by the places in which they were writ, and the travelogue they present will allow you to roam across the belly of an underground (and of a natural world) that no longer exists. All Potts’ books are essential, but this one would make an excellent introduction for anyone. Even babies!

The Keep America Mellow LP by Montana’s Ex-Cocaine (Killertree) is one of the season’s more fascinating finds. The duo (guitars, some drums, some voices) is led by a long-time running mate of John Olson, and their sound is a unique chunk of basement invention. Parts of it are extendo-jam string-weaving, other parts are reminiscent of Robert Pollard’s dustiest early experiments, still others are some of the sweetest bongo/guitar-raunch duets you’ll ever hear. It’s very excellent to think that this was made in Montana (for some reason), and we can’t wait to hear more.

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A Poem from Dirk Michener

Trickle-Down Theory of Technology
by Dirk Michener

Rich people get the newest in technology
Poor people get the oldest
Then later, Rich people also get the oldest
Poor people get the not quite as old
Then later, Poor people get the almost newest
But not the Most New
Only Rich people get that
Also the very oldest
Only Rich people get that too
Poor people get shuffled around
Rich people get everything
Then later, Poor people get everything
But it’s shuffled around
So they forget that they have everything
But Rich people always remember
They have everything
Poor people forget
Poor kids and Rich kids
Like watching Betamax
Rich kids like watching poor kid movies
Poor kid like richie rich movies
Rich kid like lars von treier
Poor kid like jeff Foxworthy
Jeff Foxworthy had everything
But didn’t know it
Jeff Foxworthy had a Betamax player in his basement
But didn’t know it
Lars Von Treier had a Betamax in his guest bedroom
And he would sneak up there at night,
After his wife would fall asleep
And watch “The Prince and the Pauper”
Until the scene where they were found out
Then later, “The Parent Trap”
The original version
Not the remake version
Poor people movies made by Rich people
Everyone loves those best
Nobody likes John Waters
It’s where I first found out what “Emasculation” meant
John Waters Betamax tapes go for a lot of money
A Dike got her post-op sex-change penis emasculated
By her weirdo Mortville lover
In Mortville everything is backwards
Externally

BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 17 (July 2005)

first published in Arthur No. 17 (July, 2005)

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

It takes a lot for us to actually look at a CD but when we recently got a letter which began, “Dear Bull Tongue, Do you want to hear about my vagina?” we had to blow the dust off the laser and hear just what the hell this could be about. We were immediately stuck to our seats stunned and smiling as Jessica Delfino engaged us in tune after tune referencing her, and others’, vagina(s). Jessica grew up in Maine, took acid once in a while, but states she never became a hippie. In fact, she states this quite a few times, not in defense or in repulsion to hippies but…just so you know: she is not a hippie. But she is funny. And smart. And she lives in NYC doing stand-up comedy here and there, is an activist thrown out of 9-11 meetings (we know all this reading her blog). She also has songs, some of ‘em are great, particularly “Rock n Roll Pussy” which we’d throw on an Arthur comp any day, especially if that day ever comes (we’re working on it).

Way back in the early ‘80s when we first went to Germany looking for records we were led by a young German lad named Jochen Schwartz to a small store on a tiny street in Hamburg called Walter Ullbricht Schallplatten. The proprietor was a dark and serious man with a slight and somewhat sinister sense of humor named Uli. His store was a goldmine of weird European industrial noise and, with our limited funds, we were able to only grab a few sides of sick noise slabs like the infamous Desperately Seeking Suicide comp and the initial offerings of Japan’s Merzbow. Uli was one of those guys who saw that we had an appreciation for the deeper troughs of sound skum and generously heaped freebies on us. Some of these were sides from his own label such as Throbbing Gristle, Laibach and Werkbund. Through the subsequent years we’ve kept track of Walter Ulbricht Schallplatten (now Schallfolien, which translates to Sound Foils as opposed to just Records), particularly through the record label and distribution service of our young guide Jochen called Die Stadt.

Die Stadt has been releasing a steady stream of sound block aether by the luminaries Organum, Hafler Trio, Asmus Tietchen, Mirror and others. It was to our knee-jerk surprise that we saw he was offering copies of a new Walter Ulbricht label release and we snatched it and it’s excellent. It’s by a mysterious entity named Dietrich von Euler-Donnersperg. The LP is called Der Kleine Fritz in Klopstockland and the cover shows an anteater and a tiger both on hind feet grappling, with the tiger maybe getting the best of the anteater by chomping on his rather extended proboscis. This LP fits into a longstanding series of music and art releases that Uli refers to as Neu Konservatiw, a socio-political statement of regard towards order with a sly wink to inevitable carnage and human chaos. Anyway fuck all that, the music on this baby kills. Nice hard shards of shredding spike noise and found sound concrete blat. If that’s your schnitzel then this, truly, is your spatzle.

Marci Denesiuk read at the infamous Ecstatic Yod Montreal gathering a couple of years ago and really scorched the room with a story both savage and sensitive. We’ve been waiting for a real live book of hers to dig into and New West Press has answered the call. It’s a collection of stories called The Far Away Home and they all deal with the lives of women experiencing and processing daily violation and profound worlds of thought/feeling. Marci writes tough with a conscientious center and knows how to move a storyline. Recommended.

Coupla nice split LPs from Indiana’s Friends and Relatives label. The one by Impractical Cockpit and Nuclear Family rubs together two distinct, sap-soaked sticks ripped from the trunk of the American Noise Log (so called). IC are from New Orleans and produce a very namby kinda post-core glitch-rock that stutters like a room filled with gargling dentists. And they do it with virtually non-non-standard punk instrumentation and even songwriting. Which is a trick, and a good one. Nuclear Family are more like some sorta kids’ organization tinkling around in a high school music studio. The ganged vocals can make you feel like you’re praying. The little electro blips sound less like cellos than the actual cellos do, but there isn’t that much electronic stuff, so it’s not too confusing. The instruments and songs will make you imagine some lost early Teenbeat session. How cool is that? The split by Justin Clifford Rhody (of the great Mt. Gigantic) and Little Wings is hip, too, in a more overtly camp-volk bag. Justin’s side sounds like it was lathe cut onto rough leather by mice who work after hours in a cartoon shoe store. Which makes the Little Wings side sound relatively hi-fi (even the fake commercials, which remind me of when my friend Jeff got a tape recorder when we were in fourth grade). But you’ll still feel like you’re hearing the whole thing from inside a big pile of leaves. Which will either comfort you or not.

Sindre Berga has been running his label Gold Soundz way the fuck up there in Norway for a few years now and has dropped some very hep sides on us since. Last year we reviewed a series of 7”s which included delicate explorations of improv guitar/vocal sweetness by Christina Carter and the stoned camel slather of Volcano The Bear. Now there’s a new series of lathe cut 7”s which continue this fine curatorial goodness. Wooden Wand & Satya Sai Baba, which is basically Wooden Wand and one of its members, namely…Satya playing “Moray Elk Themes” live to tape in an arresting murk-o-phonic style. All the Wooden Wand releases will someday have to be collected in a fig-scented box as they tend to be scattered on every disparate label out there these days and each one is fairly incredible. If you see the name WWVV (Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice) anywhere just grab it, it will grab you back, and you will totally dig it, guaranteed. The other 7” is My Cat Is An Alien playing “Everything Is Here” in their now identifiable Italiano improvo manner. Patience and spirit-sense are the earmark of this brother duo and this offering, along with their “From the Earth to the Spheres” series of art LPs, is choice. The third lathe is a mystery—can’t decipher the text on the sleeve and there’s no other info. The Gold Soundz site has nothing there about it, hmmm… let me email Sindre and see what the fuuuhhhk is up. Until I hear from the Nordic brother let me tell you about his non-lathe actual vinyl 7” he released, a split from Crank Sturgeon and Gastric Female Reflex. This is a lot of goddamned record with Crank Sturgeon pot-busting sonik spazzola in all directions. Crank is from the netherland of Maine and has been slowly developing into one of USA noise’s great collage champions. His work has only continued to majesterially kick ass since we first heard him banging around the RRRecords bins years back. Gastric Female Reflex are a psyche/concrete sound unit from Toronto that has a few CDRs (mostly on Gold Soundz) and have been bending the ears and brains of anyone lucky enough to get near them. We look forward to hearing more and hopefully seeing these North Americans as their side of this 7” is enough to make you pee. Hot and free. Oh cool, Sindre has emailed this about that third lathe: “[It’s] Uton, a one man psych-army out of Finland. He has released plenty of CDRs of different labels (Jewelled Antler, Pseudoarcana, Gold Soundz etc). I think there’s a double retrospective CD coming out on last visible dog.” Izzat clear? Clear as mud, baby.

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BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 16 (May 2005)

first published in Arthur No. 16 (May, 2005)

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

One record we’d been waiting for a long time is the Black Noise Practitioner double LP (Apocrypha Totalus/Skul) by Electrophilia, which is Steve Parrino on heavy bass noise and Jutta Koether on strange keys. This duo has been playing around NYC for the last few years, mostly in art gallery-related scenes. Which makes sense as both members are recognized and well-regarded visual artists. The gigs we’ve been lucky enough to check out were always complete room crushers. Parrino’s monster bass blow-outs were some of the heaviest noise grenades happening in a city awash with such everyday sonix. Jutta, who relocated to the USA from Koln, Germany, sits at her large Casio straight and tall with long ironed hair and black aviator shades playing minimalist structures and rhythmic pokes. Here is what Jutta wrote about Electrophilia:

A music of resistant resonance – moving forward and from – a post punk existential – toward a megalith that collapses into a black hole joyously toward the void toward you not an end point but process – a supersession & pure expression of impossible range only the impossible is worth the effort – materialist music rendered with unconditional love – black psychedelic noise crashing minimalisms temporarily suspending all rules of sound – a virtual practice way of life – electrophilia a Fresh Aufhebung keeps occurring only in the present in the unconditional urgency of a Now.

Though they never really mingled into whatever inner noise circles there were in the area, all who saw them left with appreciative mind-zap. Parrino went on to release a few documents: seven-inches, CDs, artist books and mags (one recent book was No Texts, published through the Marianne Nowottny-related Abaton Book Co.) A notorious performance in 1979 called “Guitar Grind” was Parrino rubbing two electric guitars together, creating screaming insane feedback. Since the mid-’80s he was showing work that was at once abstract and slashing as well as graceful and sublime. Though part of the celebrated East Village Neo Geo scene, he was total punk rock. The tragedy here is that Parrino died in a motorcycle accident New Year’s Eve. He was 46, a good, good dude. We’ll miss him for sure.

Although certain heads took it upon themselves to warn me against the “stupid machismo” of Burmese, I think their herrings were red. Men (Load Recordings) is the third album by these San Franciscans, and they really kinda make that two-bass-and-two-drum thing sound like it’s a natural step in sonic evolution. Some mooks have commented on the static nature of this LP’s music, but it seems to me that the magmic core is fairly glistening with all kindsa post-core noise squantum. And it’s really kinda moving and emotional. For men, I mean. Sighting’s third effort, Arrived in Gold (Load Recordings) is pretty manly, too. But the spectral presence of non-rockers Samara Lubelski and Chris Freeman means that there’s a special kinda non-rock action going on admist the noise, too. Call it whatever you want, but I hear a new kinda freedom,baby. And it’s mighty upful.

As usual, there are been several blatches of greatness dropped from the poop hatch of Ed Hardy’s Eclipse Records label. First (perhaps) is the new Michael Yonkers LP, It’s Only Yonkers (co-released with Galactic Zoo Dossier). Yonkers is a legendary Midwest psych guitarist, interest in whom was revived by a crucial archeological de Stijl release a coupla years ago (which was reissued by Sub Pop). This new session is a blast—extremely raw loud guitar sprayed through classic one-man-band weirdness. Reminiscent of George Brigman or Horton or any of the other old school DIY heavies, with a cool Amerindian approach to rhyhms. Beautiful. Just caught up with Eclipse’s second Jack Rose LP, also. Apocalyps X/Raag Manifestos is another brilliant set of acoustic guitar inventions from this member of Pelt. Jack has really grasped a special place in the post-Fahey finger-master universe, and I just wish I woulda been able to catch his shows with Glenn Jones. Damn! There’s also the third volume of the proposed ten-volume set of double LPs reissuing the Sun City Girls’ cassettes. Fresh Kill of a Cape Hunting Dog/Def in Italy is crucial ’83-85-era stuff, and would be a very nice introduction to anyone who doesn’t understand how deep and wide and fast the Girls’ creative river runs. From pure mess to brilliant sharpness, it’s all here. Lastly is Puhalluspelto by Paivansade, one of those super-rural Finnish the-woods-are-full-of-acid-and-feathers bands. This is very pre-electric and stoned sounding instrumental madness. Perfect for late night glistening.

Something heavy happened in Finland again, this time in Tampere. Some float-head members of Tomutonttu and Uton connected in a basement and shared “bowed rainbow, contact-mic’d worm brains, boiling water, electric organs and shameless vocals” and created Hevoset. The cassette from this union is beautiful and amazing. Gorgeous love/sex trip organic zone flow. Co-release from the Haamumaa and Huutomerkki labels.

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BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 15 (March 2005)

first published in Arthur No. 15 (March, 2005)

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

80 Goddamn Good Things Of 2004

1/ ALBERT AYLER Holy Ghost box set (Revenant)
As Sun Ra so aptly put it, “It’s a motherfucker, don’t ya know?” Seems quite unlikely that there will be another release with such gushing importance and pleasure, mixed so sweetly, in our lifetime or the next.

2/ Here comes BLOOD STEREO cdr (Absurd)
Local Brighton UK housecleaners Dylan Nyoukis and Karen Constance (has anyone there reading this ever hired these guys? curious…) continue to amaze after years of startling da-da dropdead music as Prick Decay and Decaer Pinga. Now they are Blood Stereo and are even more deadly.

3/ MARCIA BASSETT Assembling box
Because I never actually sent her my piece I’ve never seen the finished thing, but Marcia’s tribute to Flux collectivism and correspondence art sounded like the Project of the Year to me, and I bet it’s fucking boss.

4/ JOHN OLSON’s stapled skull
Minneapolis summer slice. Seen a lot of fucked shit happen on stage these last few decades but seeing Olson whipping a knight’s mace over his head in sick noise frenzy only to have it shave a bit of cranio-meat and, hence, blood spoo all upon his tronix box and then keep on rockin for 40 more minutes was heavy.

5/ THURSTON MOORE nice war (flower + cream press)
Political shit box rattlers in non-prose form by a puissant who swigs where most swag. What’s not to like?

6/ BILL KNOTT The Unsubsciber (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Out-of-nowhere mainstream publication of work by the poet both Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine pointed to as an aesthetic signifier to their own vision spiel back in the early ‘70s. Knott has been making and issuing self-published staple books for years, all great, and this is an easy way to cach his drift—a remarkable humorist/tragedist balance.

7/ GARY PANTER Light Show with Joshua White at Anthology Film Archives & Jimbo in Purgatory (Fantagraphics)
The new Jimbo book is totally maxed-out, something like a core dump of everything Panter’s head has consumed for a while. A better Dante I don’t expect to read any time soon. And the lightshow collaboration with Fillmore veteran White (plus a variety of musicians) was a shotgun blast to every brain that saw it. Sweet!

8/ JOSHUA Life Less Lost cd (Spirit Of Orr)
Joshua Burkett at one time was a dragon slayer of noise insanity with the late great Vermonster but the last few years has him journeying thru wonderful folk/acoustic passages. This latest CD is killer.

9/ JULIE DOUCET Journal (l’Association)
Hilarious new novel-length, illustrated diary by this always amazing artist. Supposedly an English translation will be coming along soon, but this is a great read even if your French is perfunctory.

10/ DEVILLOCK/CHARLIE DRAHEIM 2xcs (Tone Filth)
The Minneapolis/Detroit nexus of suburban gore drone gets fully realized here with Minnieapple’s own Devillock (headed by Tone Filth label honcho Justin Meyers) and Michigan street rat Draheim. Cities on flame!

11/ SAVAGE PENCIL Trip or Squeak in The Wire
It has been a long time since the classic Rock & Roll Zoo strip, but Sav’s ferocious new comic strip has just been gathering strength and weirdness as it rolls along. For my money, it’s the best work he has ever done. Total crack fantasia.

12/ VALERIE WEBB & PAUL LaBRECQUE Trees, Chants & Hollers cdr
This fucker is sold out and we can’t sem to get a copy even tho these two kids live next town over. Having heard these two as The Other Method as well as their participation in Sunburned Hand of The Man we know how awesome they are. this CDR must be the shit as it’s just them—anyone got one? All reports is that it is “amazing”..damn…

13/ JOHN FAHEY The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick cd (Water)
Incredibly swank live Fahey sets from the Matrix in ’68 & ’69 with superb Glenn Jones liner notes and lovely packaging.

14/ BILL DWIGHT radio grapple
Waking up every school morning to Bill Dwight’s almost free radio show made 2004 that much easier to bear—but he was too good and they got someone who maybe tows the line more or something.—whatever—Air America wants him—here’s hoping he returns…somewhere.

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BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 14 (Jan. 2005)

first published in Arthur No. 14 (January, 2005)

BULL TONGUE
Exploring the Voids of All Known Undergrounds
by Byron Coley and Thurston Moore

Some new and excellent small presses have been rampaging across the USA. First up is Matthew Wascovich’s SLOW TOE PUBLICATIONS, which has been hellbent on issuing stapled 8.5×11 paper poetry screeds at a rate of almost once a month. Most of these are Matthew in conjunction with one or more other writers, either vintage heavyweights from his beloved Cleveland scene or underground noise freaks. The dude has an ear for who out there may be spilling righteous verbiage, such as Elisa Ambrogio and Pete Nolan both of blasted headcase rockers Magik Markers. Anyone who’s seen that group twist and spout will know that, yeah, they must have some kind of wowsville poetry wheel just going off in their heads n’ hearts. And they do. As does Tyondai Braxton, Dylan Nyoukis, Dead C’s Bruce Russell, Charalambides/Scorces’ Christina Carter, Valerie Webber et al. Don’t expect “rock” poetry, this is all way more out there and off the tracks. Wasco hears it with the same brain that has read the primordial greatness of the long-flowing history of Cleveland’s heaviest. Peeps such as Tom Kryss, Kent Taylor and Alex Gildzen, all constituents of the famed Asphodel Bookshop, where the recently and dearly departed Jim Lowell held court and where the visionary and law-hounded poet d.a. levy burst forth. Slow Toe has been slipping out a few CDRs lately as well, mostly of Wasco’s bent brain guitar expressions either solo or in group-mode as Real Knife Head.

There is something eternally appealing about women playing punk rock, negating (as it does) the testosterone monotheism that is so synonymous in the field. A fine new entry in this area is the debut album by Chicago’s MANHANDLERS. Their self-titled LP (Criminal IQ) is more like a vicious update on late period Runaways than some others inside the genre, since they don’t shy away from flash-qua-flash, or rely on the primitivist approach favored by the post-Riot Grrrl generation. The album is just slamming, high-speed, old school punk of the early OC variety. As such it is a splendid thing. Criminal IQ have another punk winner with the eponymous LP by THE FUNCTIONAL BLACKOUTS. It has been out for a while, but it’s really a world-class destroyer in classic CA punk terms. Filled with reckless noise owing small debts to bands like Crime and the Weirdos, but powered by lotsa pumice unique unto itself.

We’ve been languishing in the strictly female scribulations of NYC’s BELLADONNA BOOKS lately. This long running series of pamphlet poetry editions has been edited by the poets Rachel Levitsky and Erica Kaufman since the mid ‘90s, and is getting close to its 100th issue. Each zine is a succinct piece by a female poet, all of whom share a common sense of adventure and active consciousness. Great writing from Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Nada Gordon, Lynne Tillman, Lisa Jarnot, Rosemarie Waldrop and so many others. So if you’re in the market for deadly nightshade, this is the place for you. An adjunct press to Belladonna is Erica Kaufman’s own BOKU BOOKS, which is just getting started releasing some good new staplebound killers. Her own the two coat syndrome and Chris Martin’s The Day Reagan Died are verily hep.

Brooklyn label The Social Registry has also released a handload of jake new wax. THE ELECTROPUTAS’ 3 LP continues their strategy of investigating Can Groove Land, then blasting it with all kindsa crude noise hand grenades. I mean, just when you’re about ready to settle back into a ‘Turtles Have Short Legs” mood, the forest starts to melt around you. Pretty cool, and then some. Damn nice, also, to have vinyl on the new HALL OF FAME album, Paradise Now. Samara, Theo and Dan continue to kick out the smoke with their fourth, giving spatial folk stylings a disturbed urban underpinning. The way they layer rondelays of slithering acoustic muzz and scarily genteel vocals is as killer as ever. It’s good to see that the time Samara spent hanging with Jackie O Motherfucker didn’t spoil her campfire ghost-spirit. Dan’s is another story. Give it a spin.

Some really nice tactile offerings have been sloughing out of Woodstock, NY by way of SHIVISTAN PRESS, which is run by the charmed beard of local cosmo-poet Shiv Mirabito. Shiv is one of those cats who somehow manages to trounce back and forth from India a few dozen times a day. How he travels we’re still trying to figure out, but it’s certainly produced some groovy results. The Woodstock community remains rich in deep literary vibes with the likes of The Fugs’ Ed Sanders, nomad spirit seducer Louise Landes Levi, right-on Janine Pommy Vega and hard lovin’ Andy Clausen, all of whom have books pub’d by Shivastan. Meta-thought warrior Ira Cohen, famous for his mylar photo LP jackets of Hendrix and John McLaughlin, has a hip book just pub’d here. Like Ira’s prescient Bardo Matrix press, whose publications are as now rarified as god’s nipple junk, these books are all manufactured in Nepal utilizing Nepalese woven paper. The heft and olfactory sublimation put you in direct line with a strange bliss-out. A good place to start may be with the Woodstock mountain poetry journal series Wildflowers, but they’re all pretty tasty.

Got a really good booklet of poems called Birthmarks & Plastics (So & So Publications) by Bill Cassidy. Know nothing about the guy, except that he seems to live in New York, and has fine-tuned himself to the music of Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard, and a lotta other really fucking good NY poets. There’s a fake sonnet, a few aphorisms, and some really striking imagist writing about being young and adrift. Cassidy’s work seems untainted by the stodgy academic bullshit that holds so many back, and his stuff is revelatory without being confessional. And that’s pretty cool.
Aa (big a little a) has a very swank one-sided LP out on Narnack. It’s the first release from this Brooklyn combo, and has a very beautiful way of shifting its center in unexpected ways. The album is pressed on white vinyl, the jacket contains a passel of very righteous inserts by a buncha artists who are in (or are friendly with) the band, and the single side of music is a fat-shifting tableau of the kindsa sounds that young people should be making and enjoying in bistros from here to Kalamazoo. Having not espied them, it is not simple to discern their true nature, but what the fuck? Here they club out bite-sized hunks of neo-no, new-wave-electro-murk, disco-noise-readymades, French duck calls and a buncha other stuff. And it sounds quite pleasing!

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Obviously the answer is: get rid of industrialism!

A Conversation with John Zerzan

I recently spoke with John Zerzan, the leading voice in the Anarcho-primitivist movement, at his home in Eugene, Oregon. He is the author of several renowned books on green anarchy including Elements of Refusal and Future Primitive. Zerzan is well known for his association with the Unabomber but I wanted to hear what he had to say about the current state of primitivism and where it is headed. — Anthony Alvarado

(This interview has been shortened for brevity. Particularly a long discussion on the Paleolithic age has been cut from the transcript.)

In a nutshell, what do you believe in? I associate you with anarchy and primitivism. How do you define those?

Well, the stuff is called by those terms. Green anarchy and Anarcho-primitivism.  Some native friends of ours call it neo-primitivism, or anti-civilization, and there are some differences but roughly there is one common current there. And speaking of the anarchist part there’s a big split and it’s not just here it’s all over the map, between the more classical, traditional left, red anarchist . . . one of the most fundamental things is their approach is self managed production, self manage the factories – well our approach is against industrial life, against factories qua factories for several reasons: one is the suicidal course of things – we can’t just keep industrializing, so that’s obviously where the green part comes in. There is a big split. Like say Noam Chomsky is on that leftist side.

He’s an anarchist?

Well perhaps, he’s . . . I don’t know exactly what he is. He froths at the mouth when people bring this stuff up in an interview, and they do all the time now because it’s spreading I think. He just really, doesn’t get it, doesn’t like it, he won’t have any discussion about it. In other words it’s not just some sectarian squabbling it’s a very fundamental difference.

What criticism does Chomsky have as an anarchist towards green anarchy and primitivism?

Well one of the things he always brings up – and I use Chomsky as a kind of foil or reference point because so many people know who he is, and they think – well they’re all Anarchists it’s cool and so forth– he comes up with the 7 billion people thing and that’s a reality obviously. He says we are genocidists, he really get’s kind of  hysterical about it.

He’s saying “Well you guys have a plan to kill 6 billion people.” ?

Exactly! And consciously not just – that would happen as a result if you went that way but , I mean it’s quite amazing!  The way I would put it though, I mean I’ve been around, I’ve even been in India a couple of times in the last few years, when I look at those tower apartment block things where people have been forced off the land into cities and if and when this crashes they’re gonna be dead in a few days. They have no land. They have no . . .when the power goes off, the food spoils, they have no water . . . we’re concerned about that. If you ask me the genocidist thing is just ignoring that and plunging on as the crisis deepens in every single sphere.

So this idea of returning to a society based on primitivism, based on sustainability, critics would say well there is no way we could do this without these cataclysmic violent changes – do think that there are alternative ways of getting there from here?

It couldn’t happen overnight. And nobody’s saying that. And Chomsky knows that. Yeah, it would be a process of re-skilling people and seeing some kind of autonomy instead of just the hopelessness that we have now where everybody is dependant on systems of technology that are quite vulnerable but we just keep blindly going along.

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CHICAGO POEM by Lew Welch

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CHICAGO POEM
by Lew Welch

I lived here nearly 5 years before I could
meet the middle western day with anything approaching
Dignity. It’s a place that lets you
understand why the Bible is the way it is:
Proud people cannot live here.

The land’s too flat. Ugly, sullen and big it
pounds men down past humbleness. They
Stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and
terrible sky. In country like this there
Can be no God but Jahweh.

In the mills and refineries of its south side Chicago
passes its natural gas in flames
Bouncing like bunsens from stacks a hundred feet high.
The stench stabs at your eyeballs.
The whole sky green and yellow backdrop for the skeleton
steel of a bombed-out town.

Remember the movies in grammar school? The goggled men
doing strong things in
Showers of steel-spark? The dark screen cracking light
and the furnace door opening with a
Blast of orange like a sunset? Or an orange?

It was photographed by a fairy, thrilled as a girl, or
a Nazi who wished there were people
Behind that door (hence the remote beauty), but Sievers,
whose old man spent most of his life in there,
Remembers a “nigger in a red T-shirt pissing into black sand.”

It was 5 years until I could afford to recognise the ferocity.
Friends helped me. Then I put some
Love into my house. Finally I found some quiet lakes
and a farm where they let me shoot pheasant.

Standing in the boat one night I watched the lake go absolutely flat. Smaller than raindrops, and only
Here and there, the feeding rings of fish were visible 100 yards away – and the Blue Gill caught that afternoon
Lifted from its northern lake like a tropical! Jewel in its ear
Belly gold so bright you’d swear he had a
Light in there. His colour faded with his life. A small green fish…

All things considered, it’s a gentle and undemanding
planet, even here. Far gentler
Here than any of a dozen other places. The trouble is
always and only with what we build on top of it.

There’s nobody else to blame. You can’t fix it and you
can’t make it go away. It does no good appealing
To some ill-invented Thunderer
Brooding over some unimaginable crag.

It’s ours. Right down to the last small hinge it
all depends for its existence
Only and utterly upon our sufferance.

Driving back I saw Chicago rising in its gases and I
knew again that never will the
Man be made to stand against this pitiless, unparallel
monstrosity. It
Snuffles on the beach of its Great Lake like a
blind, red, rhinoceros.
It’s already running us down.

You can’t fix it. You can’t make it go away.
I don’t know what you’re going to do about it.
But I know what I’m going to do about it. I’m just
going to walk away from it. Maybe
A small part of it will die if I’m not around

feeding it anymore.

“One More Trickster Gone”: Eddie Dean salutes R.L. BURNSIDE (Arthur, 2005)

Originally published in Arthur No. 19 (Nov. 2005)

ONE MORE TRICKSTER GONE
Late-Night Thoughts on R.L. BURNSIDE & the Indestructible Beat of the Blues
By Eddie Dean

You have to meet your heroes whenever you can, so I accosted Shelby Foote a decade ago as he was leaving the men’s room at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.

The 80-year-old author of The Civil War: A Narrative, rightfully called our American Iliad, was minutes from delivering a lecture to a packed auditorium, and he was in hurry to get to the podium. I wanted to give him a story I’d written about an obscure country-music rebel named Jimmy Arnold.

Hailing from southwest Virginia, Arnold had transformed himself from a shy skinny mountain kid into a bluegrass-biker outlaw of Orson Wellesian proportions. He tattooed himself from head to foot like a Celt warrior of old (including a panther on his cheek, a lion on his forehead, and Christ on his throat) and recorded a sui generis concept album about the Lost Cause, Southern Soul, before dying at age 41 of heart failure. I figured Foote would be interested to know that Civil War buffs came in all shapes and sizes.

I didn’t want to battle the post-lecture autograph crowd, so I figured now was the time for the hand-off. He took the package graciously, and I never expected to hear from him again.

Several months later, though, came his reply, in the same dip-pen cursive scrawl that he’d written 500 words a day for more than 20 years to finish his masterpiece. He thanked me for the story and the cassette of Southern Soul I’d included, “both of which made me deeply regret not having seen him [perform] live while he was still with us. Pretty soon, I fear, we’re going to run out of people like him & we’ll be much poorer for the loss.”

His words came to my mind when I heard that R.L Burnside had died in September.

R.L. was another hero of mine, and we’re running out of people like him. He was a trickster figure right out of Southern folklore, full of mischief and uncommon mettle. His signature, “Well, well, well,” was at once bemused and menacing, an open declaration of war against easy sentimentality and crap romanticism.

R.L was a realist, and as such took it as his beholden duty to tell the truth as he saw it. The witness to disaster—his own and those around him—must do something more than simply mourn. He’s got to testify. And must not only endure, as Faulkner put it, he must prevail. R.L. had his own way of saying it: “Hanging in like a dirty shirt.” It was an art that arose out of sheer stubbornness as much as anything else. He took the shit that life threw at him and tossed it right back, again and again and again.

When I got word of R.L’s death, it hit extra hard, because Shelby Foote had died only a few weeks before. I recalled our second, (and final, exchange. I’d written a brief reply of gratitude to his thank-you note, telling him that I rated Skip James higher than Robert Johnson as the ultimate bluesman. I knew he was a Johnson fan all the way, which his post-card reply confirmed. I also threw in a mention that John Keats was my favorite poet, and he agreed, adding, “Keats is my man too, I only wish he’d lived to be nearly 80 like Robert Browning.”

Thinking of these two old lions now gone, these two neighbors (they lived just 40 miles apart, Shelby in south Memphis, and R.L in north Mississippi hill country) of a South long dead and gone, it hit me that R.L. was the Browning of the blues, a late bloomer who gained more power and force with time, that rare musician who burns brighter as the years go on.

The late writer and record producer Robert Palmer “rediscovered” R.L. in the early ‘90s and his liner notes to the Fat Possum classic, Too Bad Jim, bears repeating for its insight into R.L’s love of chaos as a philosophy of life:

“One of the most productive album sessions began on a rainy Sunday afternoon with a rapid-fire sequence of disasters. A bass literally fell apart, a drum kit broke into pieces and finally a heavy glass door fell out of its frame for no good reason and was prevented from smashing the recording board only through the timely intervention of the producer’s skull. Far from being deterred, R.L. was positively beaming. He seemed to enjoy these incidents immensely, and by the time we’d cleared away all the damage he was in an inspired mood, ready to rock.”

As good as Too Bad Jim is, A Ass Pocket of Whiskey is better. Recorded two years later with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in a rented hunting lodge, it is, among other things, the hardest-rocking album ever made by a 70-year-old. It has been described as a party record, which it is, in the same way that the Stooges’ Funhouse is a party record. Even here, instead of grandstanding and showboating like every other elderly bluesman has done at one time or another (and you can’t blame a single one), R.L. will have none of it. He is a conduit, a cosmic joker talking trash and invoking the chaos of the universe. The band doesn’t let him down.

A few years after Ass Pocket of Whiskey made R.L. a sensation on the underground rock circuit, I went to see him at his home in the hill country near Holly Springs, MS. It was early January, in between tours, and he was nursing a cold. Even so, he was cordial and full of good cheer, as he must have been with a hundred other journalists who tracked him down in his final glory years.

Inside his small brick house, a dozen or so family members and hangers-on were crowded around the TV set, watching the western Tombstone starring Kurt Russell on cable. Nobody paid any attention to either myself or R.L. as he ambled back to the kitchen to make me a drink. They had seen this interview scenario many times before, whereas movies like Tombstone held up to repeated showings.

R.L, sank into a couch in ante room off the kitchen, and I took a seat opposite. He was tired, he needed the rest.

After a while, a party of young musicians came through the front door. It was the North Mississippi All-Stars, here to pick up R.L.’s son Garry in their van. Garry was playing with them that night at a show in nearby Oxford. The bandleader, Luther Dickinson, ended up into the back room where we sat talking. He’s a young dude with long hair and a quick smile, and, when he saw R.L., his smile got bigger and he went over to say hello.

Luther seemed to sense R.L.’s fatigue, and he knelt down so he could listen better to what he was saying. All I could hear of their conversation was a lot of ‘Yes sir’s” on the part of Luther and a lot of chuckling from R.L. I am no stranger to Southern ways, and I could understand that Luther was a well-brought up young man, but this was something much more than mere respect for your elders.

It was a beautiful scene, the young acolyte at the feet of the sage, paying tribute and also gleaning the kind of sustenance that can’t be found in guitar instruction manuals. I will always remember the glow that came over R.L’s haggard face as he bantered with another of his sons, this one adopted, who will carry on his ways, to not merely endure, but to prevail: Hanging in like a dirty shirt.

“Siphon Your Way to Financial Freedom” by Dave Reeves (Arthur, 2005)

Originally published in Arthur Magazine No. 17 (July 2005)

illo by Greg Cook

Siphon Your Way to Financial Freedom
by Dave Reeves

1. Pick your siphon
Get a clear hose, six feet long and at least an inch in diameter. Make sure you get a thick-walled hose because you are going to have to push it all the way down the gasshole of an SUV. Hardware stores sell them for about a buck a foot. Get a five-gallon gas can while you are at it.

2. Find a target
SUVs’ 40-gallon tanks are the most profitable vehicles from which to liberate gas. The sense of panic the SUV driver feels when his behemoth gets less than the normal ten miles to the gallon is an added benefit.

Try to pick a full one and don’t be deterred by silly gas tank locks which are merely cosmetic and can be turned with almost any key.

Donut shops provide great gas hunting because it’s like a law that police cars have to be all the way full all the time.

3. Sightlines
Getting caught siphoning is not cool. So pull your vehicle next to the target and open up the doors to make a little room where you can do the deed unobserved. Put your gas can on the ground in between the doors. If someone eyeballs you pretend like you are changing clothes.

4. Hose pushing
Push the hose down into the target tank till you think you hit the gas.

5. Start sucking
Start sucking on the hose and get the gas going. If you were smart and got the clear hose you’ll see the copper-colored nectar coming and be able to get the hose out of your mouth and channel the flow into the intended receptacle. If you sleep on this step your breath will smell like west Texas for no less than three days.

6. Drain the pain away
Once the siphon gets going it will flow steady and strong into your gas can.

The “Siphon Effect” can be explained with all sorts of scientifical facts about how “atmospheric pressure” maintains the vacuum you created when you sucked gas from the higher “gravitational potential energy” up in the vehicle which seeks to stabilize itself by flowing into the can on the ground, but all that bullshit obscures the fact that the “Siphon Effect” is actually just magic.

I can get five gallons in four minutes flat. That’s three bucks a minute, and you can’t make that at Walmart.