Damn it, my laptop’s power supply cable just queefed and died. I’ll have to be extra quick with BTC this morning before my little external brain goes sreepytime. Luckily, I have just the thing cued up on my playlist:
Scrumptious promo image for HF’s first (and only) album, Battle Hymns For Children Singing. I can’t be the only one who imprinted on Kate Garner’s fashion designs. Stripey, stripey…
Ragamuffin pop duo Haysi Fantayzee *cough* formed in London in the early 80s. Typing out that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad name is like nails on a grammarian’s chalkboard, and the label “Dickensian Hillbilly Rasta” makes me cry blood. Still, I love these guys with a deep, doofy devotion rivaled only by the size of my permaboner for fellow Brit-fops Adam Ant and Boy George.
Performed by Jeremiah Healy and Kate Garner, produced by Garner’s then-boyfriend Paul Caplin, Haysi Fantayzee’s *twitch* UK dance hit, “Shiny Shiny” is quite possibly the most chipper song about the apocalypse ever written (short of Fishbone’s “Party at Ground Zero”). May the antics of these two sexy human fraggles help you dance your cute petudies all the way to work.
A couple more Haysi Fantayzee *gack* clips after the jump.
Bless you, O magical land of Belgium, for bestowing upon the world your gifts of fine chocolates, exquisite wheat beers, Rene Magritte, The Adventures of Tintin, and now this:
(Via Wil Wheaton, who says, “I’m not sure what the hell is going on here, but I love it.”)
More consternating Belgian Trekkie non sequiturs after the jump.
The quintessence of Lux. (Couldn’t find a photo byline for this. Anyone know?)
Oof. Lux Interior, lead singer of The Cramps, died earlier today of a pre-existing heart condition, aged 62. He is survived by his maximumrocknroll wife of almost 40 years, guitarist Poison Ivy.
The Cramps’ genre-defining “psychobilly” sound was unlike anything else to originate from the late 70s NYC punk scene –sharp, savage, sexy, filthy, campy, goofy, sometimes just plain sick— and Lux retained his gritty, untamed edge until the very end. From their publicist’s official press release:
[The Cramps’] distinct take on rockabilly and surf along with their midnight movie imagery reminded us all just how exciting, dangerous, vital and sexy rock and roll should be and has spawned entire subcultures. Lux was a fearless frontman who transformed every stage he stepped on into a place of passion, abandon, and true freedom.
Oh, Lux, we’re gonna miss you so much. A eyeball martini toast to you and your fiery spirit, with loving thoughts for Ivy during this painful time.
An unforgettable clip of Lux Interior in action from URGH! A Music War.
Click below for more photos, blurbs and video footage of The Cramps from over the years.
“Garland is a superb, crazily imaginative songwriter. Singing through a synclavier or banging on a piece of Styrofoam, he’ll sing about how insane the nightly news is, how painful true love is, how scary getting to know other people is, and it all quietly creeps up and hits you right where you live.” —Kyle Gann, Village Voice
Upon first meeting David Garland a decade ago in NYC, what moved me most was the man’s remarkable voice. David has what I’ve often referred to as an “NPR voice”: calm, gentle, assured, reflective of a deep and kindly intelligence. I could happily listen to him recite the phone book, or Goodnight Moon, or Nietzche’s “Wahnbriefe” for hours on end. It’s no coincidence that he hosts and curates one of my all-time favorite radio shows, WNYC’s Spinning on Air. (If you have any interest in off-the-beaten-path, non-commerce-driven music, you should bookmark that link immediately.)
Photo by Anne Garland.
David’s also a gifted singer/composer, infusing his “control songs” with all of the qualities mentioned above. He’s been keeping busy recording new material with everyone from Sufjan Stevens to Greg Saunier to Diane Cluck. Catching up with me by phone recently, he said he’d just finished shooting his first music video with none other than Amber Benson and Adam Busch. (SQUEEE!!) Here’s what David had to say about the events leading up to their collaboration:
My wife Anne Garland and I had been introduced to the joys of Buffy the Vampire Slayer by our son Kenji in the summer of 2007. Anne and I were happily working our way through the many seasons of Buffy,and had just recently seenAmber’s character Tara killed by Adam’s character Warren. We went out to an Indian restaurant for lunch and waiting in line just ahead of us were Amber and Adam. We got talking, learned of Adam’s band Common Rotation, and enjoyed one another’s company. We’ve done a few projects together since, and now this video. Adam and Amber are creative, generous people, apparently willing to get involved in a project just for the fun and love of it, and I’ve really enjoyed hanging out and making stuff with them. Amber really likes Anne’s Luminous Playhouse photos, and suggested the effective idea of mixing and comparing the miniature and full-size scenes as a visual theme for my song “Diorama.” We borrowed a super-8 camera from Ken Brown and in two intense afternoons shot the footage, Amber and Adam co-directing and filming.
David, it’s an honor and a pleasure to premiere that video here on Coilhouse. Thank you, as always, for your wise and beautiful voice.
Diorama from David Garland on Vimeo. Directed, filmed and edited by Amber Benson and Adam Busch. David Garland’s songs “Prelude” and “Diorama” from the album Noise In You on Family Vineyard. Featuring Anne Garland’s Luminous Playhouse Theater Company. Singers: David Garland, Diane Cluck, Sufjan Stevens, and Mira Romantschuk. Appearing in the film are David Garland, Kenji Garland, his friend Aurora Cobb, Viking Moses (Brendon Massei), Golden Ghost (Laura Goetz), and Anne Garland.
More Garland-related clips, links and images after the jump.
The Bloop is the name given to an ultra-low frequency underwater sound detected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration several times during the summer of 1997. The source of the sound remains unknown. The sound, traced to somewhere around 50° S 100° W (South American southwest coast), was detected repeatedly by the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array, which uses U.S. Navy equipment originally designed to detect Soviet submarines. According to the NOAA description, it “rises rapidly in frequency over about one minute and was of sufficient amplitude to be heard on multiple sensors, at a range of over 5,000 km.” According to scientists who have studied the phenomenon, it matches the audio profile of a living creature but there is no known animal that could have produced the sound. If it is an animal, it would have to be, reportedly, much larger than even a Blue Whale, the largest known animal on the earth.
OMG, R’YLEH?! But seriously. That is some mind-rending, scary-ass, dont-think-about-it-too-hard-or-you’ll-shit-a-squid kinda stuff, people! Forget about alien invasion from outer space. Our destruction shall come from the depths. I’m telling you.
Some kooky Thelemite going by the humble title of Frater Tanranin Uhcheek Gozaknee, 222 has composed the following “Cthulhu Meditation” using original Bloop sound files (as well as what sounds suspiciously like a human left-cheeky-sneaky thrown in for lulz) and put it on YouTube. Quite mesmerizing, actually! I recommend popping some ‘luudes and listening to it in the bathtub. With the lights on.
Some of the most brain-scramblingly brilliant clusterfucks in the English language come to us courtesy of the late novelist Kathy Acker. She was a small and potent leather-clad, post-structuralist prose-styling, sex-positive slip of a woman who, according to loving friends and resentful exes alike, moved through the world with the social delicacy of a class F5 tornado.
I bring her up partly because some retrospectives and conferences celebrating Acker’s work have started cropping up in NYC and London, but mostly because I’m having such a blast revisiting her books lately. Grove Press released Essential Acker a while back, along with some of her previously unpublished early novels: Rip-off Red, The Burning Bombing of America, and Girl Detective. It’s chewy, nourishing stuff, and her tales of rejection and redefinition are hitting me even harder the second time around.
2009 is a fresh, raw, hopeful year… the perfect time for an Acker revival! It’d be lovely to chat about her with anyone else out there familiar with her work. (I suppose I could drive over to UC Berkeley and try to ingratiate myself with a few of those scowling pomo lit profs, but I’m afeared. I’d rather gab with you guys.)
Jonathan Webster: “The most enjoyable thing about having a conversation with the gorgeous, post-punk, post-feminist, pierced and tattooed American novelist Kathy Acker, is that her answers to interview questions take on an elliptical quality. Just as in her novels, you are simultaneously thrown off balance and yet riveted, never quite knowing whether she is going to give you a straight answer or about to go off at a bizarre, but somehow connected, tangent”. (Photo by Kathy Brew.)
She was an obsession of mine as a teenager. Auntie Acker, the mentor I never had, the one who would have bought me beer and beadies and spoken to me candidly about orgasms and revolution when none of the other grown-ups took me seriously. A comics pal of mine insists that Neil Gaiman based his famed Endless character Delirium as much on Acker as he did on Tori. That would make a lot of sense, given her spaced-out, million-places-at-once style, and the giddy arc of her life story…
Who else here has a list (I mean an actual, tangible, ink-on-paper list) of places they want to go and things they want to do/see before they kick the bucket? Anyone? Care to share?
Near the tippy top of my own list is a visit to England specifically to witness massive flocking formations of starlings over the moors in the West Midlands. Hundreds of thousands of them gather each year to tumble together through the air at dusk, swerving suddenly, veering arbitrarily, always in perfect unison, never colliding, sometimes for hours before coming down to roost for the evening. Birders travel from all over the world to observe the phenomenon. Scientists have been studying their swarming behavior to develop artificial technology:
Before I die, I must see this with my own eyes. International Coilhouse field trip, anyone?
“Like a caged beast, born of a caged beast, born of a caged beast, born of a caged beast, born dead and then…” –Samuel Beckett
Stills from Olivier de Sagazan’s 1998 sculptural performance work, Eye and the Chair.
Joe Haskins just alerted me to this astounding piece of performance art by a man named Olivier de Sagazan, titled Return to Close:
Clayface, for real.
Olivier de Sagazan has an appropriately unsettling site with a wide array of stills and clips from his live installations, as well as an image gallery of sublimely horrific sculptures. There doesn’t seem to be much web content on him written in native English. If any of our French (or is it Belgian?) speaking readers have information about this fascinating fellow available, it’d be wonderful to discover more about the man and his singularly beastly, loamy work!
Coilhouse takes pride in not being yet another lazy link-dumping blog, but y’know, this is one of those times where the less said, the better. Just… just click the image below. It links to a very special place. Once you’re there, scroll all the way down to the bottom.
[EDIT 01/23/09: Hooo WEE! That one went viral so fast, it knocked the Gamu Toys website on its ass. Luckily, some smart fella over at wickedglee.com captured the site as a PDF before it disappeared. Here ya go.]
It’s hard to quantify the effects minimalist composer Steve Reich’s “phasing” meditations can have on average human grey matter. The best way I know to describe my own listening experience is a wonky, tripped out sensation of neglected synaptic channels in my brainy bits being seared open and reconnected to other brainy bits in new and unusual ways. Occipital, Parietal, Temporal, Frontal, Limbic… feels like they’re all getting a rigorous, interactive workout. If I listen long enough to this sort of thing, it’ll pitch me into a contemplative state not quite beyond reflexive thinking, but certainly more relaxed, more present, somehow. Kinda like toking, but without “I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER” side effects.
Clip via Ben Morris, thanks. I truly don’t think it matters whether you have a staid background in music, or math, or both. Whether you understand wtf Aidu’s doing here or not, it’ll stir your noodles. Drop into this stuff and stew for a little while.
This abridged rendition of Reich’s “Piano Phase” by Russian concert pianist Peter Aidu is literally head-splitting. The piece is usually performed by two pianists, one of whom repeats the same sequence of notes over and over again at exactly the same tempo, while the other player gradually speeds up and then slows back down, eventually returning to a unified BPM before the pattern starts again. That’s basically all phasing is. Sounds simple enough, right? But try playing one part of it and you’ll soon realize just how difficult it is to sustain. As for performing two separate parts simultaneously? Great googly moogly.
Aidu’s concentration is astounding. He’s got the hypnotized, slightly crazed expression of someone who’s gone to another plane entirely. (It’s a look I always envy on other musician’s faces. If I could, I’d opt to live “in the zone” all the time.) If you like the clip, be sure to grab the full 20 minute version on archive.org.
Detractors of minimalist experimentation with phasing and polyrhythm all say the same thing; the resulting music is boring, pretentious, cerebral, emotionless. I suspect they’re missing the point entirely. Personally I find the form to be an invigorating causeway to the same meditative state invoked by more traditional forms like gamelan and ketjak. What do you think?
Click below for more Reich-related audiovisual trip toys.
