Archives : all posts by Dan

JEFF The Brotherhood - "Particle Beam Dream"

I bought a hurlabyte of space. external with 20F connections and WizzSpin transfer rates. I want to make my relationships with strangers LOSSLESS. I want to be able to go over every look, every turned away shoulder, every hurried step, every half-smile and over-tired grimace, every slight encouragement or hands-off attitude, at the end of the day, and really study it. I want to keep them all, in full resolution, no compression, for posterity. I think the electricity of my life deserves that much, to be remembered in high quality. Then when I finally meet the stranger of my dreams, I'll have a record, in perfect condition, that I've been storing up, that I can shoot straight at them, right out of my life into their chest, and see if they stand up to it. Particle beam dream. We can't get any higher.

JEFF The Brotherhood - "I Don't Need Your Tas-T"

Magic comes in waves, like nausea or dizziness. Driving or walking home or trying to fall asleep, or late on the phone when it's sticky against your face, your concentration goes blurry, the drone gets quiet so you turn up your ears to hear it louder, and suddenly the thundering smash slides in and magic takes over. Your eyes glow blue and some feeling like rage or excitement or hunger takes over and awareness slumps crippled below the horizon. You're blowing shit up, zapping shit, lasers come out your fingers and running just feels like floating, you can get hit by a car or fall down stairs and none of it hurts. I shudder to lessen the romantic notion, but it's like being drunk. But it actually is how you think it is and not how it actually is. Which is unmatchable.

[I posted "Tas-T" back in 2006, but decided upon re-reading that I did not do this song justice then, and am re-introducing it]

[Buy JEFF stuff from Infinity Cat]

Teeth Mountain - "Ghost Science"

Inoperable electric bicycles. Playing card designs on credit cards, paying the club with the Jack of Clubs. Bent wire hangers, so many they look like grey grass, wet. A new attempt at farming, shoveling with an old tired shovel. Hitting power lines, unsafely buried inches beneath the thin layer of ground. Unclear what this is made of, at least unclear from here. [MySpace]

MC Face - "MC Face Goin Solo" *EXPLICIT*

I bought an original "pressing" of the MC Face disc from a little table outside a Tom Green taping in Ottawa when I was in high school. The songs themselves are pretty throw-away, but the "interludes", where Face and Tom (both) would talk to characters from the show: Glen, Derek, Phil. And these are great, mostly Face making claims about the people that they deny. But today is not about them either, it's about an even more removed part of the album, the 8-minute gut-melting breakdown that Face has at the end of the album. Throughout the album, Face is insulting Tom for being a pussy or making bad beats, and eventually Tom says "okay fine", and leaves Face on his own. So Face records one more track, a cappella, and it's, in many different ways, completely amazing. First of all, it's a microcosm of Tom Green's whole career; making it up as he goes along, at times brilliant full of talent, at other times brilliant despite himself, ending in insanity, embarrassment, and pride. Secondly, it's a wholly cathartic, spoken-word self-flagellating, near-abusive listening experience. And thirdly, in reference to the narrative, it's the total embodiment of a certain "type" of creative experience. Like that feeling, if you're familiar with it, of trying to do what you thought you were good at and you realize that you're stretched so thin that you just want to collapse, and your mind goes to this MC Face muthafuckin' place, babble and spit and garble and choke. Gorgeous rotting mind ripped open, torn apart, spread on the wall, tried-to-be-eaten and dry-heaving on camera. My fuckin CD sucks. [out of print?]

image source

The Breeders - "Pinnacle Hollow"

I watched Daft Punk's Electroma recently. Which is the Gerry of robots. I'm listening to "Pinnacle Hollow" now, which is like the Gerry of guitars. In the sense that they wander, they walk, they peer, they don't speak, they are, they are, they are, everything and nothing. In the sense that you can do the same simple thing enough times until it becomes beautiful, and you realise that it was beautiful the whole time. In the sense that I love it, that I can keep it and name it whatever I like, that it's art as a gift. Like, the desert in pictures:

Up and down the road, up and down the road. [Download]

The Jacksons - "Goin' Places"

This song makes me believe in God. Is that weird? Not like, Heaven or anything like that, but in the way that I feel like I need to thank someone for something, for this. There's no way Michael Jackson can be responsible for this. No chain of consequences resulting from any human action could produce this. It needs to be God. You know? Process of elimination. [Buy]

Railcars - "Life of St. Edmond (ponds)" + "CASTLES"

In a bright and exciting future parallel, certain desolate images frighten the eye at first glimpse. USB cables with clothes hung on them to dry in the great wireless wind. Data blows like sand and rain, piled up in corners and dripping out of clogged eaves into troughs made by the heavy, constant dripping. You wipe your car clean every morning, the purple pixels sticking under your fingernails and caking in your hair and under your eyelids. JPEGs hurl like loose panes of glass, great spinning pictures at resolutions unimagined in present day. Images so clear they've surpassed sight, and can only be perceived, and by that right enjoyed by theoretical calculation. A bit frightening, yes, but still Earth, you understand. Still rapt conception of new ideas and white-knuckle, turnbuckle love. Still those who seek Truth and those who graze the valleys of others' experience. Still friends, still law, still breath. You'll see. The foundation is there. It's exploding, but it's there

[This is new stuff, but get the amazing Free EP here]

[Buy image]

Suckers - "It Gets Your Body Movin' (Alternate Version)"

That pressure, that push that I give on the steering wheel. You know the one where you kind of push it away from you, you make your arms straight, to kind of feel the strength of the car and stretch your arms out to show you're tired of driving. I do that a lot. And that is actually putting pressure on the recliner of the seat, since it can also go back if you want it to.
I'm doing 160, I know I shouldn't be, it's 5am, I'm rushing home to I forget what, trying to hold open my eyelids with inertia, out of coffee and I can see the deep colour of the sky swelling with a sunrise. I feel a click and now I'm looking at the ceiling. The light that is switched to 'door' and I wonder if that means the light is a door. Maybe it flips out and there's one thing behind it, like a locket holds one thing, or a false book. If I opened this door now, whatever's inside would just fall in my face, but that might be nice, it would wake me up a bit. I need to be awake, but I forget why. I find the dark trees look like a digital equalizer in my peripheral vision, like they're reacting to the music. All of nature and all those opposed to nature reacting to the same song in the same way: a weary lifting, sliding, and fall. [Buy]

Kid Congo & the Pink Monkey Birds - "Kris Kringle Ju Ju"

In line at the pharmacy. Rounding the corner out of sight. Driving past while you're waiting for the light to change. From the other room on the television. Across the street with the light on. The cause of a siren unseen. A half-ring of your phone. At another table, back turned. A faded, illegible address. A forgotten jacket. Red velvet with black leather piping and a thin fur lining. Cruel, cold, faceless, distant. Spreader of joy. [Buy from In The Red]

Intelligence - "Pony People"

It's Friday night, and I'm in line again for the bathroom. Unwisely, an unknown (to me) world government organization has decided, sometime in the last year or so, to toilet train the entire world. But, like, everything. Dogs and cats were the easiest, then rodents, birds, and bugs. Large mammals and large reptiles, bears elephants crocs and gilas, have all learned to use the bathroom in an anthropoid manner. Weirdly enough, this was effective in eliminating old notions of property, since you're constantly barraged with animals big and small, ringing your doorbell and politely asking to use the loo, meanwhile, 15 of their friends are sneaking in your window to hog the commode. Futurists are predicting the Toilet Wars will arise within the next year or so, erupting most likely, they say, from a breakdown of one of the very lines I'm currently standing in. But we all know, this won't be a war for Toilets, as the politicians will try to portray it, it will be a war for the hearts and minds of all dignified entities on earth, wishing to eliminate their waste in a dignified way. And that is something worth fighting for.

Arrows, and arrows, and arrows, and arrows. And eros. And arrows.

[MySpace][Released May 26][on the increasingly unstoppable In The Red Records][more from In The Red soon]

Bach - "Aria da capo (from Goldberg Variations) played by Glenn Gould"

Under the thick blanket of rain, not still falling but all fallen, resting in heavy dollops over everything, slightly dripping, I hear a sound. It's distant, different, haunting. I squint my senses and listen closer, my face scrunched in search of recognition. A wind, some traffic, a flaw in life's recording. No, this is something else. I think it's a voice. A voice so buried, so hidden, that it speaks a certain kind of truth, a truth you only get when really no one's looking. I hear it moan and sway and rise and yawn, it's grey and wet and cloudy, lasting only as long as this day.

[Buy]

(image source, I forget, I'm sorry)