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Will Hanson - "The UnGodly Hour"

[Site]

Μαριζα Κωχ - "Καροτσερη Τραβα"

Let this be a song of mischief. Of hands dusted in pancake flour, of missing pickles, and crumb trails. Let this be a song of spoiled surprises and bruised-lip smiles and loving welts. Of shirt-pulling, ear-pulling, drag-you-by-the-nose. Of forced confessions, time-out sessions, and whispers under doors. Of planned escapes, of late-night texts, of wishing it would end. Let this be a song of Old Country parents, of dress patterned hideous, of smoking uncle aunts. Let it be seen from waist-height, heard from small ears, just pierced, and sung playing in the grass, unable to guess what will be for lunch.

[via David Barclay's collection of Greek 'Neo Kyma']

(image)

CAVE - "Adam Roberts"

Roommates and classmates made for mad drama. I'm Wanda, she's Katie, we were both Psych majors, nerds, and stressed the fuck out. We were too competitive in school, but didn't want to admit it. So we were openly competitive at home, over shit that didn't actually matter. Everything was territory, space, and time. My responsibility-sherking. Her credit-taking. My space-eating. Her time-sucking. My stuff. Her shit. It was all little fights, all the time. And they always took baby steps.

"I washed your dishes," said while straightening the desk. "I hadn't finished my paper, I was going to do it," already putting on a coat. "Well, you can just dry them," at the wall. "They dry by themselves on the rack," hand on door handle. "But they don't put themselves away, plus it gets rid of spots," staring dead in the eye, don't you dare fucking leave me here alone. Pause. Lips pursed. "You know, somewhere in the universe, those dishes are already dry, and depending how you look at it, they're already put away." Unblinking, "You know, somewhere in the universe you're already dead, and depending how you look at it, I couldn't care less." A little raised eyebrow and a slam of the door. Her paper was probably shitty, cause she spent all her time, when she should have been writing, washing the fucking cups.

[album out sept 20 on Drag City]

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The wonderful Fulton Lights and the inimitable Ninian Doff have collaborated for a lovely and totally fun music video. A brilliantly clever idea, done perfectly. Also, fun fact: they met via the video contest back in 2007!

and don't forget to enter the newest contest, for a chance at winning Sappyfest tickets! See Sean's post below, and enter right now now now!

(image of Adam Roberts, and thanks to Bob for the story idea)

Fruit Bats - "Tangie and Ray"

The name on the credit card was "Tangerine". The driver's license was from Stampton, HT. The phone number was all 5's.

The arrest was supposed to be quick, Tangerine wasn't supposed to put up a fight. Morning light streamed into the black bar, The Cistern (called "the sisters" by the eye-patched bouncer). Tangerine was leaning forehead flat on the table, in a puddle of stunk beer. "You Lynne Buckingham?" said the cop as he walked faceless through the hard-lit dark, not removing his shades. Tangerine felt an ache under her right ass cheek, like she'd sat on half a rock all night. She had won at the slot machine the night before. After the text message. After she busted one of the tiles in the bathroom. After the shots of Major and Title Scotch. She had won 25$ in 0.25$ and she'd stuffed them all in her jeans pocket for safe-keeping. But as she looked up and saw a faceless cop coming towards her it suddenly wasn't safe enough. She grabbed as many of the quarters as she could and started stuffing them into her socks, they fell down into the edges of her Keds. The cop thought she was going for a weapon and drew his. The mop boy hit the floor and the mop handle crashed a BANG against one of the tables. The cop thought it was an ambush and started firing. The mirror, the mugs, and the Major, all took hits, and so did a scared-fleeing Tangerine.

The library card said VOID in big letters. The keys were marked "back way". The phone had a message: "I'm not coming"

[Pre-Order]

Lil Wayne - "Sorry 4 The Wait"

The spilled spellings of a blood-let sentence. A steady drip drip drip to a full-on rain. A paragraph pulled and hung open, words like guts and gusto and bounce. Everything is suddenly engraved, named, changed. A calf marked "veal", a thigh scratched with "heel", a waist called "trashy", a stomach named "kashi". Fingertips with "lightning" "spells" "money" and "klimt", eyelids with "even" "I" "suffer" and "split". [free]

Ennio Morricone - "Guerra E Pace, Pollo E Brace"

Since all drawings come to life, it's unsafe to leave doodles lying around the house. It's irresponsible to draw half a face, or a kitten with an alligator body. Be at peace with being inevitably hunted down by the army of your accumulated markings, and draw only the things you want to last see before you perish. [Buy]

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The funding drive closed yesterday, and it was an amazing success. We are humbled, blushing, awed. Thank you so much to all who contributed, and we'll be in touch soon.

(image of a mirror installation by Nicolas Grospierre)

Railcars - "The Big Sky"
Kate Bush - "The Big Sky"

The Organic Compound. All manner of pipe, reed, steam, and synth came here to find themselves, came here because for one reason or another, they were lost. Led loosely and lazily by their leader, the great and infamous windbag, Bandoneón. Bandoneón had recorded online videos of a masked and mysterious nature: For all those lost, without hope, without air, without resonance, I will show you light, breath, and harmony. And they came in droves, the church, the chamber, the calliope. Little melodeons and ancient tall pipes, great Hammonds and Moogs and MIDIs and hand-cranks. For a while, it was happy. They rejoiced in the singular teaching of the incorrigible Bandoneón: all noise together is music, and all music is the same thing, seen from different angles. This to them was perfect, heaven on earth, and nothing could make them leave the ten foot walls of the perimeter. Until through evasion of taxation and past indiscretions, Bandoneón was sought on charges of felony disruption, and the authorities attempted to enter the gates. They were met with bloody resistance, and the organs fought as one, great heaving whistles and throbbings of noise, their bellows and tweeters blown sometimes to bursting. Bandoneón was protected, but only by attrition, eventually the walls of the Organic Compound were compromised, and he paid his debt, publicly and forever. But none will forget, least the families and those left lone, the organs aplenty he brought to their end. [PWYC]

Body Parts - "Comfortable, Happy, Satisfied"

This was the music used on one of the floats in the Peter Falk Day Parade. A humble one, not the giant inflatable trench coat or the 9-foot glass eye, but just a group dedicated to the stewardship of his memory. They understand that Peter Falk was not perfectly great, and neither are they, but they love both him and themselves. [PWYC]

(photo of nude wedding under dinosaur, via The Smithsonian and Kathleen Phillips)

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LAST CHANCE FOR LOVE
donations welcome

And finally, the 2011 Said the Gramophone funding drive comes to an end tomorrow (DONATIONS ACCEPTED UNTIL 11:59PM on TUES JUL 12). This is the final reminder, the end of the ask, the proverbial "lid on it". It's been a wonderful thing so far, but if you still haven't given, give in. You can get the monthly mixes, the first-ever book, and the secret and silly 7". We'll keep going at this writing, this sharing, this work, and if it's something you enjoy, let us know.

Nuzzle into clothes, closed close, hugged in something like fear or longing. With these sewn bits of fabric, with this room, this sunlight, this bed, if it could all be squeezed into one thing, some kind of shapable paste, that would be success. For in place of something permanent goes the flesh of something always partly growing, partly dying.

Jennifer, Jenn, 2 n's, led the way. Sandy, y not i, fell a bit and blustery behind. She pushed the heavy cart and towels would fall off and the spray bottle swung obstinately on the handle, right in the place where the hands should go. "Come on! You gotta learn to work fast!" Jenn was already in 427, already stripping the bed, already humming a tuneless thing. "Get those dead flowers! Check the garbages and count the mini-fridge!" Jenn barked orders like a smiling seal, her chin up in the air, she clearly enjoyed bossing new trainees. She shouldn't be a mother, Sandy thought, but she's the kind of person who definitely will be. "Look at this shit," Jenn, having finished the bed, held up two passports from the bedside table, "Why don't people use the safe? We could fuckin steal these and go hog wild, you know?" Sandy wiped down the tub and thought about trying to cross the border with a new identity. Nothing to declare except my own genius, officer. The anti-stress body lotion on the rim of the tub made her smile. She held it up and read the back: for a woman, a flower, a goddess. "Are you almost done in there?" yelled Jenn, her voice fading in an unusual way. Sandy poked her head out the bathroom door, finally ready to bite back after all day of laying down and taking it. But when she looked, Jenn was gone, and the sliding balcony door stood open, the sheer white curtain, with ends slightly browned, flew waving in the summer breeze. She heard Jenn's familiar grunts, the kinds she made while lifting a heavy bag of sheets or moving a wrong-placed table, and Sandy went out onto the balcony. Jenn was climbing over the outside of the balcony to the next room, "Meet me in there!" "Dammit, Jenn!" but Jenn just laughed, an uptight trainee is always the same, can't take a little of the unexpected. Sandy ran around to 429, gathering the bucket and the vacuum and the cart and the fucking spray bottle. Her hair was beginning to stick to her forehead, making sharp brown bangs that looked like jagged spikes. She threw open the door, and then it hit her. The smell. Jenn stood unmoving behind the glass door of the balcony, waiting to be let in, staring at the room, at what had taken place. Both women looked, puzzled like birds, at the walls, the mattress, the floor. Spread human leavings, the scrape-off of metabolic processes, fluids and solids, all colours of the rainbow, all smells of the rancid palette, all tastes, to be sure, of the hellish. Dried slightly, like the tipped peaks of an oil painting, but blooming bountiful with scavenging microbes. Sandy threw down a bridge of fresh towels, double thick, and crossed to the sliding door of the balcony. Her and Jenn just walked, silently, out of the room and closed the door. They didn't speak for two more rooms, but in 502, in the bathroom, Jenn spoke, while looking half at herself in the mirror. "We don't have to clean stuff like that. You don't have to handle stuff like that. I mean, I'm sorry I was being a weird kook all day, making you think this job was harder than it is. It's hard, but everything is hard. You don't have to clean up something like that. That's a police matter. They have power washers for that."

[Sea Woof by Poland for free from Pocketclock]

According to Pocketclock music, Sea Woof uses Jack London's The Sea-Wolf as a "conceptual jumping off point". So if you'd like, read The Sea-Wolf novel in full.

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I wrote a story that appears in the newly-released Reverence Library Volume One by Sing Statistics. It's about Nikola Tesla, in winter, and I'm very proud of it. The book also has works by Luke Pearson, Lizzy Stewart, Meaghan O'Connell, and Joshua Allen.

Owen Ashworth, aka Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, got in touch this morning to tell us about his new musical project, Advance Base. They have a couple of new songs on a split 7" with Hello Shark which is available for preview and pre-order from People In A Position To Know.

Tom Scharpling, and The Best Show on WFMU, are finally getting much-deserved and long-overdue but always-exciting ink from places like New York Magazine and The Onion AV Club. And just one of a thousand highlights from the show, here's just two-and-a-half minutes of a three hour show, Tom at his underdog best, battling self-inflicted adversity from the tepid or stupid callers, to his associate producer and call-screener Mike, to the illustrator at New York Magazine.

Mountainhood - "America 2"

When Bob Dylan died it was junk food and weed. Shoes at the door, grass on the floor, the smell of breath, leather, and char. The hospital bed slung out to the end of its rope, its sheet edges and side-metal stretched back into kind of a smile. Pressed up to the window, a tiny square screened open, a plume of smoke puffed happily upward, and it was day. Before noon, even.

When Bob Dylan died it was harmonica drone missives. The way a dog will howl during the rinse cycle, or Matthew Barney will go to jail over a paint stroke, an unexpected bomb went off, people lost their shit. Harmonica drone grew in feedback loops across eight states, it reverberated through the jetstream, you couldn't hold a conversation outdoors. People smashed their guitars they couldn't play and Raiders ghosts swirled out, blue and scary and sounding like sirens.

When Bob Dylan died it was all-out war. Sleepy peaceniks kicked over new leaves, sick and peeved from the lifelong informational squeeze. Truth was given a monetary value, it traded public on the market, and once business was happy like a sleepy fed hog, it went to one-eyed sleep again, back patted and safe. But soon the secrets leaked like professional music, movies, and books, and they tried to put Dylan's corpse on trial for knowing the truth. The body was stolen, rescued, hidden and sealed. Nobody knows quite where. Twitter thinks Trinidad. I think New York.

[America 2 or Nahuel Huapa: A Saga, The Intense Vibes of the Rainbow, A Tale of Transformation of My Brother available for pre-order]

related: read Sean's infamous "After Michael Jackson Died", which has some of the best (and still going!) comments.

(photo by Andi State)