Good morning. Pretend for a moment that this is not, in fact, the Spring of 2012, but rather the Spring of 1982, now thirty years past. We’re in England. New Romance is budding. Rocky Horror is a’rockin’. The likes of Gary Numan, Spandau Ballet, and Klaus Nomi rule subterranean radio.
Under the banner of SHOCK, two young London lads with very excellent bone structure and pop ‘n’ lock skillz named Tim Dry (who would one day become Tik from the robotic mime duo Tik & Tok) and Richard James Burgess (who would go on to produce all manner of sophisti-pop) have joined forces with two young London lasses with very large hair and dovelike coos called Carole Caplin (who shall one day become far better known as the tormented fitness and fashion consultant to Tony and Cherie Blair) and Barbie Wilde (who is soon to be immortalized in celluloid as the creepyhot female Cenobite from Hellraiser II).
“I think every person has the ability to effect change. I think we’re often led to believe that it’s just celebrities [who] have some ability to effect change, but I think that what’s important for us to realize is that everyone of us affects the world constantly through our actions, through our every smallest action, through our every thought, our every word, the way that we interact with other people… we’re constantly affecting the world.”
“Today I give thanks to those who fought and died for my right to party.” ~@RichardRushfield
An official statement from the Beastie Boys:
“It is with great sadness that we confirm that musician, rapper, activist and director Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch, founding member of Beastie Boys and also of the Milarepa Foundation that produced the Tibetan Freedom Concert benefits, and film production and distribution company Oscilloscope Laboratories, passed away in his native New York City this morning after a near-three-year battle with cancer. He was 47 years old.”
MCA, we love you. You can’t, you won’t, and you don’t stop.
Fellow mourning comrades, you are warmly encouraged to post your favorite BB jam in comments.
In addition to providing an overview of both the documentary and vogue ball culture (both past and present) the NPR feature includes testimonies from Big Freedia, Light Asylum, Zebra Katz, Del Marquis, and many others. A quick, great read. It’s also exciting to discover that the documentary –which has been, for decades, fairly difficult to track down a decent copy of– is now readily available on iTunes and Netflix Streaming.
The realm of Paris Is Burning: resonant and radiant as it ever was.
If you’ve already experienced Will Sweeney and Steve Scott‘s animated psychedelic 2009 music video for Birdy Nam Nam‘s tune “The Parachute Ending”, look away. Or, hey, don’t. Because you know it’s trippin’ AMAZEBALLS and you probably won’t mind watching it again over a nice morning bowl of strawberries ‘n’ Special K.
Most Birdy Nam Nam-related things tend to be –in this blogger’s humble opinion– pretty thoroughly amazeballs. The BNN DJ crew is comprised of four fabulous Frenchmen known as Crazy-B, DJ Need, DJ Pone, and Little Mike. They joined forces in 2006 and has been steadily gaining notoriety ever since thanks largely to their novel and challenging style of music-making: they take thousands of samples gleaned from various sources, press all of the beats and patterns into towering stacks of vinyl, and then assemble/spin these kaleidoscopic collaged elements live. It’s bleepybloopy bonkersbrilliance.
Edmund Welles, 2010 press photo. Aaron Novik, Jeff Anderle, Jon Russell, and creative mastermind Cornelius Boots in the foreground.
Confession: I’ve been meaning to write a feverish and swooning rave-up of Oakland-based musician Cornelius Boots‘ absurdly beautiful and strange and intelligent and mischievous and sincere and meditative and heavy-as-fuck bass clarinet chamber music group, Edmund Welles*, for years now.
It certainly isn’t for lack of reverence for Boots or his compositions that I’ve lagged. When suffering from blogger’s block, my editorial purview tends to be “when in doubt, crap it out.” But occasionally, there are those subjects that you can’t just casually hork up. You want so badly to do them every justice– to elevate and praise them to the highest and most lofty of misty, Middle Earth-worthy mountaintops. Boots’ ouvre definitely lives in that non-horkable category. Well, then! Having unburdened my guilty conscience…
Edmund Welles.
Yes, Cornelius Boots and friends make music that I want throw a parade for. Or, alternately, throw my frilly undergarments at. While his group Edmund Welles definitely is not everyone’s cup of tea, it’s 100% my cuppa, and hopefully, it’ll resonate with Coilhouse readers who also love waaaay-off-the-beaten-path-no-srsly-bring-your-machete-cos-we-be-bushwhackin’ music.
Edmund Welles [...] has the distinction of being the world’s only original, composing band of four bass clarinetists, they invent and perform heavy chamber music. The bass clarinet has a five octave range and a huge span of tonal, melodic, and rhythmic capabilities.
Drawing virtuosic precision from the classical realm; innovation and texture from jazz; and power, rhythm and overall perspective from rock and metal, the quartet’s sound is characterized by a thickness of tone, a density of texture, absolute rhythmic precision, and the extreme use of dynamic contrasts: a dense, pulsing sound capable of expressing and reflecting the full range of human emotions.
They ain’t foolin’. It’s a massive, meticulously structured bass reed sound like nothing else you’ve heard. (Parallels have been drawn between John Zorn’s more recent works and Edmund Welles, for sure, but Boots’ steez feels simultaneously more West Coast and Far East-steeped.) Weirdest Band in the World‘s assessment is pretty spot-on as well: “The bass clarinet is an inherently weird instrument. Put four of them together in one group, and it sounds like a chorus of demon cats in heat fighting over a chicken bone. A demon chorus whose eerie caterwaulings just happen to occasionally assemble themselves into passages from Pixies and Nirvana songs.”
In 2005, they put outAgrippa’s 3 Books, which offers up original compositions by Boots that reflect his abiding interest in the occult and his talent for interpreting uber heavy spine-crunching metal. (Hilariously, Boots calls this stuff an attempt to create “Muzak for conspiracy theorists.” ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!) Additionally, there are Sepultura and Spinal Tap covers. Not to mention the most bewilderingly esoteric and brilliant liner notes you’ll find north of a Trey Spruance solo project. (Buy the goddamn CD. Seriously. No, seriously. Totally worth it.)
Edmund Welles’ second album is called Tooth & Claw, and it’s comprised predominantly of original composition that are as bizarre and heavy as anything Boots has ever written, but with more nuanced elements of avant jazz and modern classical woven into the dense sonority.
Levon Helm died today at the age of 71. Here’s a spectacular photograph of Helm that Siege made at the legendary musician’s studio, The Barn, in Woodstock (for Rolling Stone magazine) a few years ago:
There’s never been a voice or a soul quite like Helm’s in popular music, and there never will be again. (He was, of course, a very generous and intuitive drummer, too.) Here’s a transcript excerpt from The Band’s concert film The Last Waltz, directed by Scorcese –a film which Helm later famously decried (though, comfortingly, his longstanding feud with bandmate Robbie Robertson appears to have been put to rest shortly before Helm’s death)– but the quote’s just too perfect:
LEVON HELM: Bluegrass and country music … if it comes down into that area and if it mixes there with the rhythm and if it dances, then you’ve got a combination of all that music …
MARTIN SCORSESE: What’s it called?
LEVON HELM: Rock and roll.
Pure and good and true. Thank you for that, Levon Helm. Rest in peace.
It’s hard to believe Dick Clark is gone. Is it safe to surmise that secretly, many of us kids who grew up watching him on the boob tube decided long ago that Clark (or, at the very least, legions of indiscernible vat-grown clones of Clark kept in a top-secret underground facility located a few miles beyond the city limits of Fresno) would be Rockin’ our Eves for centuries to come? Alas.
In (somewhat oblique) honor of the departed (and because NO halfway decent excuse to feature the Mael Brothers on Coilhouse should ever be passed up) here’s a fabulous performance of “Pulling Rabbits out of Hats” by Sparks on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in 1984, followed by a unexpectedly sweet and silly “interview” between three very disparately distinguished gentlemen. SO GOOD.
Previously on Coilhouse:
“This Town Ain’t Big Enough For the Both of Us” Top of the Pops, 1974. (A very old post, wherein I get grumpy about Bedford Ave. hipsters and the SPARKS energy drink. Ignore that bit. S’all about the MAEL LURVE.)
For the past two years, Kevin McTurk –a world-renowned cinematic effects artist– has been hard at work on a breathtaking personal project called The Narrative of Victor Karloch. McTurk describes it as a ”Victorian ghost story puppet film”.
Featuring the voices of Christopher Lloyd, Elijah Wood, and Maurice LaMarche, Karloch combines bunraku style rod puppets, shadow puppetry, and an array of traditional in-camera effects to present a tale from from the journal pages of one Victor Karloch: weatherbeaten alchemist, scholar, and ghost hunter. This film, very much a labor of love for McTurk and his crew, was made possible by grants from Heather Henson’s Handmade Puppet Dreams Film Series and from The Jim Henson Foundation.
Photo provided by Kevin KcTurk.
As you can see from the above preview, it’s a stunning piece of work. And did I mention that the film’s score was provided by Zoe Keating, Lustmord, and… our very own Meredith Yayanos? Yes!
This Thursday, April 19, at Meltdown Comics/NerdMelt Theater in Los Angeles, McTurk will be holding a sneak peek/wrap party reception. There will be a live marionette performance by Eli Presser (one of the film’s key puppeteers) and limited edition Narrative of Victor Karloch t-shirts (designed by comics legend Mike Mignola!) available for sale.
Congrats to all involved! Attendees of the wrap party are enthusiastically encouraged to report back in comments.
Above you’ll find the official video, directed by David Lynch, for the title track of his new album Crazy Clown Time. It is officially a thing that exists. In it, Lynch narrates a series of Lynchian events at a Lynchian backyard barbecue as they transpire on screen in a manner sort of like singing but not really. It’s as if a film student set to work to reconstruct a David Lynch movie as related to them by someone who had had a few too many drinks. It may be the best David Lynch parody ever made.
