You know, there’s really nothing I enjoy more than banging my head to relentlessblackmetal. Unless it’s making and consuming baked goods. Fucking A, dude, I love cookies. In some parallel universe, a far more brutal and satanic Mer than I is seated on an obsidian throne atop a baronial mountain built from the bones of her enemies, gorging on bottomless trays of red velvet cupcakes and snickerdoodles while truly epic tremolo-picked riffs reverberate through the charnel canyons. Occasionally she pauses to issue forth a soul-rending shriek. Dark chocolatey death spews from her corpse-painted mouth. HAIL.
Yet even this nightmarish Mer incarnation would grovel in terror before a certain gastronomical overlord known to worshipful initiates as All-Devouring Megan the Bae Korr. Megan currently resides in this world (in Oakland, California, no less! I must find her and become her minion!) and recently started a baking recipe blog called The Black Oven. It is kvlt as fuck. An excerpt:
Boiled down to its very essence, metal is nothing more than a mixture of molasses and alienation. By that definition, these cookies are black fucking metal. Packed full of grim and evil spices, they will leave you feeling despondent and isolated within their stronghold of flavor.
Make it:
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup molasses
1/8 cup honey
1 egg yolk
1 cup crystallized ginger pieces
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
1 1/2 tblsp cinnamon
1 to 2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp nutmeg
Preheat oven to 350 degrees
Cream together butter, sugar, molasses, and honey. Beat in egg yolk and ginger pieces.
Sift together flour baking soda, baking powder, salt and spices.
Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients in thirds.
Chill for an hour.
bake 8-10 minutes
DO NOT OVER BAKE. To do so would not be brutal.
Enjoy, and sacrifice one to Space Odin.
I’ve just made a batch of her “Where the Chocolate Beats Incessant” brownies. Doom never tasted more delicious. Megan, I raise my fist and my flour sifter to you!
Quiet, everyone. Ruhe, bitte! Teacher’s in and you must make room for her hair. Today’s lesson is a crash course in German. Your aids will be Kraftwerk, a parrot and the color red. Sharpen your pencils and brains as you pay close attention to this 80s TV treasure.
Perhaps if my French classroom had been black, and my teacher were Nina Hagen, I’d be fluent by now. Alas.
A while back, my talented chum Danny Cantrell landed a gig composing all of the music for a new animated children’s show, and he enlisted me to fiddle for it. The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack is the cracked brainchild of Thurop Van Orman (previously a writer for Powerpuff Girls). I’m at a loss to describe Orman’s vision properly, but if you were to picture Ren & Stimpy style shenanigans unfolding in a beautifully watercolored Treasure Island setting, you wouldn’t be too far wrong.
Flapjack is an innocent young cuss with an unquenchable thirst for adventure on the high seas. He’s being raised by a somewhat overprotective blue whale named Bubbie, and his best friend/partner in crime is a scraggly, no-pants-wearin’ pirate with two peg legs who goes by Captain K’nuckles. Hilarity and high jinks ensue.
In addition to being gorgeously drawn and painted, Flapjack is rife with non sequiturs, uncomfortable silences and gross-out humor, so I thought you perverts might appreciate a heads up. We’ve been working on –and giggling over– this weirdness for months now. (Wish I could show you the Tentacular Lovecraftian Horror episode. So warped.)
Nothing says quality children’s programming quite like a pair of hairy, floppy, tattooed man teats. Unless it’s fart noises. Flapjack has plenty of both.
The first episode premieres today on the Cartoon Network at 8:30pm, EST. Folks with cable and a hankering for “ADVENTURRRRE!!!” are encouraged to tune in and report back.
Whenever anyone I love is feeling especially gloomy, I have one very reasonable, reliable cure-all recommendation. It’s not exercise, or sex, or drugs, or comfort food. Simply this:
These are the joyful and uninhibited sounds of Shooby Taylor, the Human Horn. It’s my opinion that anyone who doesn’t at least crack a smile listening to this singular scat musician is probably beyond all hope and should be taken out behind the barn and humanely dispatched.
Born in 1929, William “Shooby” Taylor lived in Harlem for the majority of his life, toiling as a New York City postal worker for 21 years. From a 2002 article in the NYT:
[His music] can be difficult to digest. As he tries to approximate the sound of a saxophone solo with his voice, he hits sour notes. He spits out nonsense syllables like a machine gun, communicating in a private language nearly impossible to imitate. And he rarely meshes with his background music, whether it is the skating-rink organ in ”Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” songs by the country singer Christy Lane or Mozart.
…In homage to his hero Babs Gonzales, who died in 1980, Mr. Taylor began honing his scat stylings in the mid-1950’s after serving in the Army. After his shift at the post office ended at midnight, he frequented jam sessions at Manhattan clubs, but most musicians shunned him.
For decades, Shooby persisted in following his dream, enduring endless ridicule and rejection. One day in the early 1980’s, he walked into a vanity-press recording studio called Angel Sound. Located in sleezy, pre-Disneyfied Times Square, the studio had seen its share of feisty characters. Shooby proved one of the most memorable, laying down 14 smokin’ vocalese tracks ranging from jazz to country to show tunes to… unclassifiable…
Impeccable live sound, eye-poppingly elaborate costumes and hot ladies - what more could you ask of a Japanese visual rock band? Alright, so the ladies aren’t exactly ladies, but blast it, can they shred! These days, most old school visual bands have, for better or worse, abandoned their frills and velvet for a more modern and somewhat more masculine look. I didn’t think I’d ever get to personally witness the kind of gloriously indulgent showmanship as I did last night.
Versailles in full regalia. Click image for a large version.
As it turns out, while Japan’s visual rock scene’s been winding down for a long time now, some goodness is yet to be reaped. Yesterday this was proven once and for all at a sold out show here in Hollywood. My jaw hit the floor when Versailles, a supergroup formed last year from ex-members of Lareine, Sufuric Acid and Sugar Trip, entered the stage. I was a wee kid in a candy-shop as this straight out of an acid-tinged Anne Rice cosplay vision appeared before the shrieking audience. The hair? Huge. The outfits? Hand-beaded and perfectly gaudy. The singer? Oh yes, he wore a cape. And pantaloons. And heels. Where the hell was Poppycock?
They had this “visual” thing, undisputedly, down. It did not end there, however. Unlike another supergroup I saw live last year, Versailles worked it. There was no phoning it in for these poised professionals; not a missed note, cracked heel or torn hem - the show was excellent from beginning to end, powder breaks and all. Between Hizaki and Teru’s metal guitars, Kamijo’s crooning and intense cape maneuvering I was reminded of Barry Manilow, Las Vegas and Lestat in all the right ways. Watch the ten-minute opus below and be transported to a darquer side of French royalty (had French royalty been Japanese and used flatirons) as you bask in the grandeur of Versailles.
Zucker’s considerable talents as a dj and curator tie directly into more personal reasons why I adore the guy: I’ve never met a better listener or a more relentless seeker. It has always seemed to me that Zucker’s primary ambition in life is to make this lonely world more beautiful –and therefore more bearable– through tireless creative striving. His latest, arguably most stunning offering yet is A Room Forever:
A Room Forever is an art project realized as a curated series of limited edition 12″ record LPs. Packaged in a custom-made box with high quality digital c-print covers and letter pressed inserts, each record features and original musical composition on one side and a field recording on the other.
Pressed in one-time editions of 300, A Room Forever takes a unique and personal approach to the vinyl record LP. Conceived as a physical manifestation of the Roadside Picnic Radio Podcast, the project draws upon the rich history and mythologies of audio recording to produce a final object of art that will resonate uniquely within each listener.
More than anything, A Room Forever is inherently about the act of listening.
My copies of the first three records arrived in the mail today. Machinefabriek & Matt Davies (EVP - 001), Svarte Greiner (EVP- 002) and Koen Holtcamp (EVP-003) are all huge talents working in relative obscurity, but with worshipful cult followings. Each edition is beautifully designed and printed, featuring exquisite photography by Kurt Mangum and individually hand-stamped/numbered.
Cover for EVP-002, featuring work by my favorite Norwegian, Erik Skodvin (under his Svarte Greiner moniker). In keeping with Zucker’s fascination with the haunted history and mythology of audio recording, the abbreviation for this series is “EVP”. A wee hint to those who already own one the records: look closely for the mysterious messages etched into the vinyl. My hair stood on end when I realized what they were.
The LPs are selling out very fast. Order them now from Aquarius Records, Boomkat, Other Music or Forced Exposure. Painstakingly well made, rare, and imbued with a sense of mystery and longing, A Room Forever is one of the most collectible limited edition vinyl runs you are likely to see for years to come.
Pardon me, are you part shark? What I mean is, if you don’t constantly keep moving, exploring, and devouring, does it feel as though your organs might implode from sheer doldrums? Do unfamiliar smells and sounds intrigue rather than offend you? Are you an incorrigible know-it-all, scoffing openly at poor, unwitting souls who declare Mike Patton’s work to be the utmost pinnacle of musical wackiness?* Would you enjoy traveling to an exotic third world locale with nothing but a ukulele and a homemade shank?
Recently, Jesse started a podcast feed for the benefit of everyone who’s not living in Boston or near a computer each Wednesday from 6 pm to 8:00 pm E.S.T. So “tune into the sounds of the Finnish Underground, Tuvan Rock, Asian Psychedelic, Russian Lounge, and Inuit beat boxing” and be ready to shake your tuchus.
*Dear rabid Bunglers, please do not hurt me. I give mad props to Mr. Patton. But the world is vast and strange. I implore you: venture bravely beyond the Tzadik catalog on your next record-buying excursion.
Barnyard Dadaist Adrian Munsey and friends performing live, 1979.
Adrian Munsey, you’re my kind of alt. It takes a brave and strange fellow to combine field recordings of sheep with elegiac chamber music; an even braver, stranger fellow to appear on nationwide telly with sheep and elegiac chamber musicians, straight faced and bleating in tune/time. I salute you.
Cover of original Lost Sheep 7inch. (Just so’s ya know, my birthday is coming up…)
You’d think that a violinist and theremin wrangler would be more comfortable with the high-pitched, squeaky side of the musical spectrum than anything else, wouldn’t you? In my case, that just ain’t so. Turn down the treble, gimme BOOM, THUD, CRASH. Establish a strong pulse and make sure there’s plenty of low end. The deeper that connection with the rhythm section, the more blissed out I’m gonna be. Bang the drums.
I bring this up because May 16th is the whelping day of one of my favorite peeps in de’ whole wide world, Brian Viglione. He also happens to be one of my all time favorite drummers.
I first met da’ Vig and his brilliant partner in cabaret crime, Amanda Palmer, many years ago in the basement of some tiny Boston club. I’m not sure Brian was even of legal drinking age back then. My first time watching the Dresden Dolls perform (for an audience of maybe 15 people) I was thinking dang… that kid plays like the radioactive lovechild of Elvin Jones and Brendan Canty! How is that even possible?!
They both seemed larger than life. I remember turning to one of my own bandmates and asking “is it just me, or does it feel like they should be playing a much bigger room?” Funny how things go…
Brian tearing it up at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta, 2006. (The Dolls are playing a sold-out show at the Filmore in SF on Sunday. I’ll be joining them on a song. Really looking forward to it, as always. Whether they’re playing some dive bar, a swanky supper club, or opening for NIN, it’s always hugely satisfying to work with these guys.)
In honor of the birthday boy, in no particular order, here is some choice footage and brief blurbage of 20 (give or take a few… I sort of lost count) bliss-inducing percussionists who have, each in their own way, inspired me to be not a only a better musician, but a better human being. I know several of them are on Viggie’s list as well. Many happy returns, good buddy.
Just when I thought it wasn’t possible to adore this gentleman any more than I already do, here is Tom Waits holding court at a recent “live press conference” to inform the public of his upcoming Glitter & Doom tour:
Waits hasn’t announced any new recordings. Bloggers are speculating that the tour is in support of actress Scarlett Johansson’s album of Tom Waits covers, which comes out later this month, and which I am about as likely to purchase as Chester Cheetah is to burst forth from my chest cavity in a scabby, florescent orange flood of processed cheese while singing “Jockey Full of Burbon”. No offense.
Tom Waits’ Glitter & Doom Summer Tour:
6/17 - Phoenix, AZ @ Orpheum
06/18 - Phoenix, AZ @ Orpheum
06/20 - El Paso, TX @ Plaza
06/22 - Houston, TX @ Jones Hall
06/23 - Dallas, TX @ Palladium
06/25 - Tulsa, OK @ Brady Theatre
06/26 - St. Louis, MO @ Fox Theatre
06/28 - Columbus, OH @ Ohio Theatre
06/29 - Knoxville, TN @ Civic Theatre
07/01 - Jacksonville, FL @ Times Union Center Moran Theatre
07/02 - Mobile, AL @ Saenger Theatre
07/03 - Birmingham, AL @ Alabama Theatre
07/05 - Atlanta, GA @ Fox Theatre
