Sad Souls - Silvered
The leaky ceiling made mud river on the floorboards. Silvered. “Silvered” is one of 6 new songs added to the now 15-track remastered Apeiron by Sad Souls.
She flattened herself across the floorboards and from leaky ceiling she whirled leaky muddy drizzle across the floorboards. The floorboard was tilted from too many feet and she giggled at it and it’s invisible humor. The giggling made the glass jars weep and the floorboards tilted more. Leaky ceiling plaster cannon-balled into her makeshift river, and she giggled at the plaster drowning river kids.
Caves - Eleven Twenty
They shook with shame, bruised knees, black magic, and ghostly fake gold ring finger rings. When You Were Partying, I Was Dying. “Eleven Twenty” is one of four tracks off of Caves’ When You Were Partying, I Was Dying. released today via Absent Fever.
They stripped their saintly ring finger rings with their teeth and spit at the shrew snake of dawn - they faded out of dreams and migraines and woke with the stench of hometown alleyways. They had run icy street ice-skating city rinks, knees bruised purple and black magic. The ghostly rings were fake gold - they confessed.
Mirror Lady - Roman Candles
The gray and ashy ones licked up the color spree like it was the Fourth of July - they blinked their beating bee eyes into the mirror white as the eye. They are mirror ladies and gents, who don’t get that the mirroring of tangerine highs and strawberry blushes, is white. Mirror Lady are LA based creators.
The color screens go faster and faster, turn up upon each other, around the necks of sweetness, touching and melting, falling like blessings. The color curtains peeling and bleeding, the shadeless socket of the scene seemed so cold and so numb. The ashy tongued and the gray handed were licking up the color screens like it was the Fourth of July - until they blinked and it was all white as the eye.
XXYYXX - Never Leave
My reflection won’t leave me if I angle over deeply. So it stays, and you’ll want to too. XXYYXX.
Angled over edges of bridges whose names I didn’t know I looked to the dead and wet liquid rivers and to the reflections in the dead water of smitten seducers. They were celebrating under the bridges whose names I didn’t know, as I was angled over edges of those same bridges.
Generation y Not
Below is the very first post I did for the newly launched DIT blog collective PORTALS that I’ll be contributing to :::
Punk bands like The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, Television, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, and heaps more pursued the conviction that “if nothing gets challenged, nothing gets changed”. Punk culture of the 80’s was the teenager opposed to the bourgeois - it was the outcasts and the isolated, the vicious and frustrated, the protective of their youth. Each youth generation opposes mediocrity; mediocrity is the explicit opposite of adolescent sentiments. While teenagers, like myself, are experiencing the affliction of discovering their identities, the pressures of conformity, and the trouble of expectations, a society of mediocrity feels fictitious. If the youth of the 80’s popularized the opposition to the bourgeois, I wonder what the youth of the present is repelling.
Youth will always be defiant of the adulthood they are expected to enter; but there’s a hugely significant difference in the vocalization of that defiance today. The distinction is the identical vocal opportunity of the present. If I’m 16 and my blog has the same readership contingency as anyone’s, then what implication does that have on the 16-year-old musician? The most prevalent bearing of that opportunity is in resources. The 16-year-old musician has the equivalent music production opportunities as his seniors on a fundamental level. This makes debatably the most colossal impact on the beat scene. An immense amount of what’s blogged about on sites akin to PORTALS is sample-based, and in synchronicity with that, teenagers make an apparent portion of the music blogged about. In my mind, that doesn’t seem aberrant in the least bit. To me, it feels conspicuous – but only because I was born into the generation of the accessible.
The idea of youth having the same volume of expression as adults is hastily becoming less and less an exception to the norm. Less and less are we identified as young and held within the connotation that we’re the atypical of the teens. Industries fetishizing youth and using age as a marketing tool is becoming less rampant in the music world – and more so in the blogging community where artists are discovered in the open playing field of the Internet. And so if the voice of youth is becoming more and more received, I wonder if the youth of today is repelling mediocrity or if we’re becoming that commonality. This idea of becoming what you’re contrary to is something that bands like Nirvana spoke of. Kurt Cobain said that the mass recognition Nirvana received in the consumerist world was unequivocally what they contested. I wouldn’t say though that the prospect of adolescents and adults being comparable in the music world is carried with such a negative connotation. I’d say that it’s an inevitable fate.
Because of the technology operated sphere my generation was carried into, it would be unfeasible for youth today not to have the inclination to share themselves on the internet. If young artists were not blogged about, it would be obvious that those who steer the music community were deliberately disregarding a group that compensates for a vast portion of music. I think that the larger music sites are just now beginning to honestly ratify young artists. While smaller sites tend to cover younger artists more frequently, likely because they’re less steered by those of the industry. The influx of youth involved in music is immense, and no longer solely as the consumer, but furthermore as the creator. The question now is what qualifies the legitimacy of music? My response would be that nothing qualifies validity; the validity in music is as unrestricted as its distributor, the Internet.
Below are 3 tracks by 3 artists who have been born into a generation parented by the internet:
Honeydrip - “I Know” (click the link to listen)
Caves - “1993” (click the link to listen)
XXYYXX - “Never Leave” (click the link to listen)
Marshall Trotter - Mono Y Mono
He’s a faint romantic with a nest of twisting fingers. Marshall Trotter’s a faint romantic who’s got jazz lulling in his eye pits as he watches his quiet dancer dance. This is a song to the dancer girl, off of a tape to come via Mirror Universe Tapes.
She’s a dancer, like one of those cut paper people, swinging and spinning and swooning over out the window rain. A figure skater who doesn’t become dizzy.
(Source: stadiumsandshrines.com)
MPSO - Playground Pt. 1
I’m the one who can’t get far past farewell but only hears the longing of things. Wisdom Teeth is a longing one, approaching getaway but not reaching. Wisdom Teeth by Daniel Gray’s project MPSO will be out digitally on the 14th.
I’m gonna trek off west, trail some backbones of spineless cliffs, laugh into a valley or two and see if the burst out my full set of teeth’s got any body, wave in and out for a while, I’ll pass some shrieking kids, and feel nostalgic, and turn back around to the jungle of the steel town and won’t ever make it out.
Nuojuva - Laakso
To the things that happen when we sleep. The meanwhiles and the alive. “Laakso” is the long suspended. Finland’s Noujuva is releasing his record Valot kaukaa this month via Preservation.
I dwindled into slumberland. While, meanwhile, an eyeful girl was still picking glue from her nails, still a grayer two collapsed papers in their fists, a littler kid traced wall fractures with lead, still an idealistic leg grazed the plane of another, a cynical folk eavesdropped on a smoke tower despite the leaves crawling in by the chimney, meanwhile an assortment of mismatched barely legals took a nude swim.
Welcome to PORTALS.
My co-run digital label Absent Fever and the physical label JAXART are teaming up to present a compilation highlighting the enormous influx of young musicians in LA. On April 3rd, Absent Fever and JAXART will be releasing a pressing of 1,000 CD’s which will be given away for free across the US, and also available online digitally. The compilation is comprised of 7 songs, one from each of the 7 artists who represent the city’s music community. The artists involved in the project are:
Caves ((whose cover of “Didn’t I” is above))
Absent Fever and Jaxart are also presenting a number of shows in LA to support the compilation.
Today, February 3rd we’re presenting a show with Gangi, Tuesday Glass, and Honeydrip:
On February 16th we’re presenting a show with Dreams., Chrome Sparks, Pageants, and a DJ set by Travis Thatcher:
Be on the lookout for much more news to come.
Running in the Fog - Know When to Run
The thought of electrocution makes me near nauseous, but I can’t help wondering what it’s like to be unable to run. Like some subway cry shivering through, and a madmen’s speechlessness, or radio hypnosis. I bet I’d think up of granite canyons, or an alleyway floor, some sort of successive coldness. It’d feel like some hiccup in the womb, or like snapping of machinery parts, or like grass balloon pops. If I’d be electrocuted I’d know when to run and how to pace my step faster than electricity’s. I’d damn sure know when to run, what a sanity trial that’d be. “Know When to Run” is a track by San Francisco’s Running in the Fog.
Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime
This post is the second part of the guest post I did for the blog Live for the Funk:
I’m off to take a wander and hop some rooftops, shake up some straight house. I won’t be back in a bit. My skeleton, that thing’ll be bursting like an incarcerated rhythm or some modern alchemy. I’m a nude sexless subway hopper with some soda pop and waving hands. I’m a city kid. Into the street with some devout laughter.
Fun Adults - ‘Til Sleep
This post is part of the guest post I did for the blog Live for the Funk:
Sounds by Britain’s Fun Adults can be found here.
The ghostly bare-feet of blues swing and dance danced atop broken inherited alcohol glasses in the company of anonymous boys and women who looked just like church colored glass goddesses. Well that was through and bored as ever. I danced quietly back to nowhere with the sweetheart plagues that lined night streets. Well fortunately dancing nowhere can’t be bored.
Albatross - Murder
Insomnia and mid-burn cigarette burns of widowers and window watchers. This sweet burning track comes from Sydney’s Albatross. Life Aquatic Records will be releasing Albatross’ Murder / Casper’s Theme, available for vinyl pre-order here.
With midwinter impulse and mid-burn cigarette burns, impulse had her stay in and window watch the night scatter with red eyed insomnia and ecstatic eyelash ballets. Mirage-gray’s and sex-ridden stairways that mounted into still more shadow, she watched through the windows the stairways of the widowers.
Absent Fever + JAXART present:::
Gangi / Tuesday Glass / Honeydrip
February 3rd. 8-10 PM.
Free. All Ages.
@ Space 15 Twenty (Hollywood)
RSVP HERE.
