why?

why haven’t i heard of dandi wind before?
i feel so out of touch.

if anyone can find me a copy of her version of “safety dance”, i would be grateful. it is by far one of my favorite eighties songs. here’s a crappy live video of it.

things have been a little quiet.

it seems that for the past month or so all i’ve really done is watched televsion, read books, and gone to a couple of movies. well, that’s about to change. over the next few weeks i have lots of shows and events planned. starting tomorrow when i go up to seattle for the radiohead show on wednesday. i cannot explain how excited i am for this. plus ginger has flown in from minneapolis for the show, it’s been almost a year since i’ve seen her.

i know radiohead are going to be awesome, i’ve been listening to some of the new bootlegs and they seem to be in top form. the setlists sound pretty good to, i don’t think they’ve played “morning bell” at all, which is a very good thing. “talk show host” has popped up a couple of times, keep you fingers crossed for me. i tried to stay away from youtube clips, but i broke down. this tour’s light show seems amazing.

here’s a shot from the a show in may.

my favorite bootlegs from this tour so far. big thank go to the people over at atease for keeping up with the bootlegs.

chicago 8-1-08 (this is missing “airbag”, but i am ok with that because of the superior audio quality.
http://www.sendspace.com/file/n8ts6j

mansfield ma 8-13-08
http://www.sendspace.com/file/l58njq

everyday at 4:30.

i am kind of at a loss for words to describe last wednesday’s show by matmos and wobbly at the aladdin theater. big thanks go to jamie for being my last minute companion replacement. thankfully she enjoyed the show, as a lot of you know it can be a huge risk to go to a show with me when you have no idea what it is.

wobbly opened the show, i was pretty excited to see him. his wild why album is a masterpiece of plunderphonics, so i was hoping for some crazy sample manipulations. like most experimental electronic musicians you never get what you expect. wobbly walked out and sat behind his mixing boards, samplers, drum machine and keyboard and produced a glitch filled piece full of broken beats that were constantly teetering on the edge of being danceable. two brave souls did dance in the large open space in front of the stage, i think one of them must have been a dance student becuase he could really move to wobbly’s disjointed sounds.

shortly after wobbly left the lights dimmed leaving only a bright flashing blue light. a theremin like sound seemed to be coming from somewhere. i heard some rustling in the crowd and noticed that m.c. schmidt and drew daniel, the adorable couple that make up matmos, were coming down the aisles with flashlights and laser pointers. they were shining the flashlights and pointers all over the crowd and the stage, after some study i realized that the flashing blue light was some kind of sensor and they were manipulated the sounds by hitting the blue light with varying degrees of lights. i knew we were in for something interesting.

when they made it to the stage they were joined by the honorary third matmos member (and a talented electronic manipulator in his own right) j lesser. together they performed matmos’s unique brand of electronic noise.  they played for a little over and hour with only two songs coming from their latest album, supreme balloon, including a slightly edited version of the 20+ minute title track. the highlight for me (and jamie) was a song off of the west, for which m.c.  and j lesser donned guitars and did some live sampling. also the version of “semen song for james bidgood”, off of the rose has teeth in the mouth of a beast, was amazing, they tweaked it just enough.

m.c. schmidt also handled all the video manipulations, i should say that they weren’t handled live, he made it no secret that he was popping in a different dvd for each piece. he approaches his videos with the same sampling and collage work that is used in the music. an interest he explores further with his (far noisier and abrasive) phase chancellor side project.

after their set was over they came back on stage for an encore this time accompanied by wobbly. this made me happy because their live album wide open spaces, made with wobbly, is one of my favorites. this improv was far too short though, i feel like they were just getting into it when suddenly it was all over.

i have only seen matmos once before and that was in seattle at the detestable venue the triple door. that was more of a pop structured show. this time it was more out there, seemingly trying to eschew traditional song structure. this was an amazingly satisfying show, reminding me why i like electronic music.

The infrastructure will collapse.

throw away your cameras, radiohead has shown us the future of image capturing with their video for “house of cards”.

this atease explains.

The Geometric Informatics scanning system employs structured light to capture detailed 3D images at close proximity, and was used to render the performances of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, the female lead and several partygoers.

The Velodyne Lidar system uses multiple lasers to capture large environments in 3D, in this case 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute, capturing all of the exterior scenes and wide party shots. Geometric processed their own data while 510 Systems processed the Velodyne Lidar data. The data was then manipulated by Union Editorial and the Syndicate to create the final result.

thom’s thoughts on the process.

“I always like the idea of using technology in a way that it wasn’t meant to be used, the struggle to get your head round what you can do with it. I liked the idea of making a video of human beings and real life and time without using any cameras, just lasers, so there are just mathematical points–and how strangely emotional it ended up being.”

i must admit that “house of cards” is not my favorite radiohead song, but that still means that it is better than ninety percent of what’s on my ipod.

here is a making of video, if your into that kind of thing.

Know it’s essential to my masculinity.

a video that matches the brutal beauty of xiu xiu, it’s for the song “master of the bump”.

i stole them from your mother.

thanks to morgan i got fantastic seats for antony’s show with the portland symphony.
september 5th needs to hurry up and happen now.

summer pop.

for all the esoteric noise and avant rock i listen to, summer always brings out the pop. so far these are my summer jams.

robyn:
“cobrastyle”

“konichiwa bitches”

santogold:
“l.e.s. artistes”

lykke li:
“i’m good, i’m gone”

and of course madonna:
“give it 2 me”

if you’re not for good then you’re for some bullsh*t.

two weeks ago i had a great little getaway that included two shows by the fantastic erykah badu. the first show was at marymoor park in redmond washington, just outside of seattle. i always get a little disappointed when artists i like play these silly temporary summer venues. the sound is never right and the crowd is generally there to hang out. i was still excited though, it was erykah badu after all. the group for the show gathered at rachelle’s house and we split into two cars, juan and i with status, and rachelle and bianca with loren. we had plans to meet up at a pub near the park that loren and status knew of, when we got there i was excited to find out that it was called the celtic bayou. i was endlessly amused by their concept of irish cajun food, or cairish as we deemed it. i ordered the northwest salad with cranberry dressing, no one makes a northwest salad like the cairish, juan also really liked his cairish pasta. don’t even get me started on their cairish nachos or veggie burger. i can’t wait till i get the chance to go back.

after the ironically delicious meal we headed off to the park. we claimed a space on the lawn right behind the chairs. the seated area was empty. we had about an hour to kill before the show, so we plopped down and relaxed. by the time the roots came on to open the show, there was still barely anyone there, including about three people in the seated area in front of the stage. one of those people was former american idol person, blake lewis, who was strangely by himself. that didn’t stop him from being the only one excited about the roots. this was the second time i’ve seen the roots, the first time also happened to be with erykah badu. i got the same impression from them, they seriously lack energy, you think that with a live band it would be easy. the band didn’t really gel, the members just played a loop for a while and seemed a bit bored. despite the best efforts by black thought and ?uestlove they just fell flat.

status and i before the show.

during the roots’ set the seated area filled up and the crowd moved in on us. we were all pretty giddy and were more than a bit antsy for erykah to come on. when the p.a. silenced and the band and back up singers came on we couldn’t have been happier. erykah came on wearing her huge afro and a red flannel suit, she was very small to us since we were behind the seating area. even with the distance i still felt that she had our full attention. the setlist focused mostly on new amerykah and worldwide underground, we heard “my people”, “amerykahn promise”, “soldier”, (a dangerless) “danger”, “times a wastin” were just part of the two hour setlist. of course she played on & on, but the highlight of the show was a fantastic afroacidhouse version of apple tree. every one was blown away by it. the song was twice the speed and had a killer drum loop that erykah produced on her drum machine. she pulled off an amazing show, her voice was top notch and the crowd loved her.

little erykah.

the next day rachelle, juan and i scooted up to vancouver to catch erykah at the commodore ballroom. we were all really looking forward to this show, it was indoors and a small venue. on the way up rachelle mentioned that she got an email that erykah added a second show after the one that we had tickets to and we decided that since we were driving all the way up there that we were going to try to go to that show too. we figured we would be able to ticket from a scalpler, more on that later.

before the show we hit the hotel’s bar, o’douls. for some reason i have a romantic notion about hotel bars, i blame movies and tv for making them look so alluring, when in reality they are full of drinking ugly tourists. after a drink we took our space in line outside the commodore. we only had to wait about half an hour for the doors to open, once inside we found the perfect spot, center stage about two feet back. thankfully there wasn’t an opening act, and the crowd was in great spirits. when the curtain opened we could hardly contain ourselves. the band and her (so over it) back up singers entered, followed quickly by miss badu. strangely she was wearing the same outfit as the night before in redmond. not only that but we got almost the same setlist, this time she added “tyrone” and “bag lady”. this was still a totally different show though, being inside and three feet from her made it an almost supernatural experience. she has a magnetism and charm that if it could be bottled would cost millions. she spent a bit of time mugging for the cameras, she seemed to love posing. miss badu was in amazing form, she just blew us away. you could tell she was having a blast, and loved every moment. at one point she pulled a girl up from the front and the girl spit us a few lines. she was pretty good, and had erykah impressed. miss badu played for two of the quickest hours of my life. looking back, it was some of the most fun i’ve had in a long time. the show was supposed to end at 9:30, she ended at eleven, i think she would have played for us all night long. once outside we discussed our plan to go to the second show, we all had brought extra money and knew our limit. we decided that we really didn’t want to go, we were completely satisfied.

rachelle and juan in line before the show.

miss badu.

i do have two small gripes though. i think that she needs to lose a few members of the live band. she is such a dynamic artist and i don’t think that a live band can match her. she needs to get herself a good live producer. her back up singers were so done being there. they looked bored and pissed the whole time. it was so obvious that i thought they might have been playing characters. if so, why?

we walked back to our hotel, to hit the bar. we were all in such great moods that we even tried to chat up the waitress, she wasn’t having it though. she gave us the cold shoulder several times and  didn’t want any of our gum. after a few drinks, we headed up to our hotel room and watched crappy canadian hotel cable till we all passed out.

i would like to thank juan for coming out.

i would like to thank rachelle for motivating this musical adventure.

i would like to thank erykah badu for being an amazing performer.

music to riot by.

this should have been up earlier in the week, morgan and i went to the m.i.a. show over a week ago. it has been delayed because (1) i went to seattle for the weekend, (2) i was really lazy on memorial day, and (3) i cut my finger and thumb on a broken glass at work on tuesday. the cuts would open up every time i started typing, they are much better now.

last friday we walked down to the roseland for the m.i.a. show. we wanted to get there a little early so we could get some good seats in the balcony. we were suprised that the place was already full when we got there a little after nine. the balcony of the roseland is also the 21and over section, and was already filled so we had to wait in a line while they let one person up for every one that came down. it’s a good thing that the bathrooms were downstairs or we never would of gotten up. morgan got up first and went to scope out the seats, i met up with him soon and we found the perfect seats in the front row on the right side. even thought the balcony was “full” the was really no one in the seats.

the opening dj, whose name i forget or never knew, did a great job of getting the crowd warmed up. the crowd was dancing, screaming and generally having a great time. then glass candy came on for their set. i have been a fan of glass candy since they still had the shattered theater with them. over the years they have evolved into a duo that focuses more on disco than garage rock. this was my first time seeing them, and i have to say i wasn’t that impressed. i enjoyed the songs, although it would of been nice to hear some of the older material. unfortunately their stage presence leaves something to be desired, which might be the answer to my question of why they aren’t bigger. they tried to keep the energy going but they just kind of fell a bit flat. being a local band they seemed to have a huge amount of fans in the crowd, so that helped them a bit, mainly though the crowd kind of stood there. i still am a fan of them, but i doubt i will go out of my way to see them again.

they made a huge mistake after glass candy ended, they left the crowd standing for almost an hour, listening to some sort of prerecorded mix or hidden dj. the mix of music lacked the punch of the opening dj’s set, even if it did contain several of my favorite diplo mixes. the crowd quickly got reckless. they should of saved the dj for that time.

all was forgiven when the lights dimmed and m.i.a.’s mao-esque revolutionary intro started. once that ended the (unfortunately close) strobe light started up and m.i.a. took the stage with “bamboo banga”, which i have to say is just the best first song ever written. it is also the first song on kala, it really sets a tone and the slow build up gets you ready for anything. joined on stage by the opening dj, one hype gal, and a male dancer, m.i.a. spent an hour and a half ripping through her set never stopping for a moment. my only regret of her performance was the jimmy was shortened and mixed into another song. other than that i would tell everyone that they need to see m.i.a., do not let a chance pass you by. she connects with a crowd like few artists can, and she can get you all sorts of riled up.

due to the almost constant strobe, this was the best picture i could get. m.i.a. is the sparkly blur.

a sea of nodding heads.

on sunday morgan and made our way to the doug fir to see clinic. we were pleasantly surprised by how much we both enjoyed the opening act, shearwater. they have been around for a few years now and i have never payed attention to them, i kind of regret that now. they kind of have a scott walker/leonard cohen/nick cave sound. and they did the (almost) impossible and got me not to hate a song with a banjo. also their drummer can do some interesting things with a bow and a xylophone. i’m gonna have to pick up their new album when it comes out next month.

one of the reasons i like the doug fir as a venue is their punctuality, clinic came promptly at 10:30. they told us they were going to do two sets, the first with songs from the new album do it, the second with songs from the first five albums. i am well aware that clinic is one of those bands that really only have one song, sometimes played faster than other times, but i am a big fan of that one song. on the new album they added a bit of reggae and free jazz influence to their krautrockish protopunk. the songs off the new album really shined live. the second set contained a couple of songs off each of the older albums, including their “hit” “walking with thee”. clinic is a great live band, bringing a lot of energy to the show. i miss the scrubs though, i’m not quite feeling the hawiiaan shirts.