Archives : all posts by Dan

Thom Stylinski is the mad master genius behind The Whiskers. On the records, he sounds like he's 7' tall, gaunt like an undertaker and with eyes like laser beams, or tractor beams. He's with us today to talk about some music.

Hi! I tried to think of a theme that connects three or four songs in an elegant sum-greater-than-parts way, but that's stupid so here are three songs I was humming at work today.

Jesse Stiles - "Places"

Jesse Stiles totally knows how everything works; it's easy. It can't be any more complicated than some sort of configuration of sticks and wheels and boxes, wires and electricity. Taking advantage of that concept, he makes music with lots of gizmos and contraptions, and then, taking advantage of his groovy brain, sings shit like: "Everywhere I've ever been, it was always bigger than me, because somewhere smaller than I am is the worst place I could be." It's lines like that that turn hums into words.
Jesse does the odd live DJ-dance-guy thing and is the only live DJ-dance-guy that makes me want to dance. His website is http://jts3k.com and his new record is coming out soon and I think it is a picture disc, which is one of my favorite types of discs.

Hot Gurl Party - "Hot Gurl Party Signs Your Yearbook"

Hot Gurl Party totally hate me. There are three members and I have spent time with all of them and they definitely don't like me, personally, as a human, yet I STILL listen to their music, because the beats are frickyfresh and the bass is tubular and the vox are singscreamed with complete indifference to the microphone and its function. This yearbook song here was twice as long when it debuted on stage, and it was glorious, but because HGP hate me, they cut it in half on the album. They have a myspace but they don't write, record, or perform anymore. The three members each have other bands but they only last a few weeks. Their album is really great but the case is covered in glitter and it gets on your hands and clothes and all over all your other CDs and it makes you think, "oh now what the hell."

Burl Ives - "The Donut Song"

Burl Ives is totally mental. This is, I guess, a children's song, which would usually indicate a happy or sad-then-happy story housing simplistic lyrics and themes, but Burl, dude, what the cuss are you talking about? I've had a few conversations about this song and its "watch the donut, not the hole" mantra, attempting to relate it to some deep philosophy or something. All those discussions lead to only one conclusion: He's actually just telling all the kids to literally look at things that ARE things, and to NOT look at things that AREN'T REALLY things.

Let's all hum more songs more often in more places thanks.

[thewhiskers.com]

--

(Previous guest-blogs: Silver Jews, artist Ariel Kitch, artist Aaron Sewards, artist Corinne Chaufour, "Jean Baudrillard", artist Danny Zabbal, artist Irina Troitskaya, artist Eleanor Meredith, artist Keith Greiman, artist Matthew Feyld, The Weakerthans, Parenthetical Girls, artist Daria Tessler, Clem Snide, Marcello Carlin, Beirut, Jonathan Lethem, Will Butler (Arcade Fire), Al Kratina, Eugene Mirman, artist Dave Bailey, Agent Simple, artist Keith Andrew Shore, Owen Ashworth (Casiotone for the Painfully Alone), artist Kit Malo with Alden Penner (The Unicorns) 1 2, artist Rachell Sumpter, artist Katy Horan 1 2, David Barclay (The Diskettes), artist Drew Heffron, Carl Wilson, artist Tim Moore, Michael Nau (Page France), Devin Davis, Will Sheff (Okkervil River), Edward Droste (Grizzly Bear), Hello Saferide, Damon Krukowski (Damon & Naomi), Brian Michael Roff, Howard Bilerman (producer: Silver Mt. Zion, Arcade Fire, etc.). There are many more to come.)

Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers - "Little Bitty Pretty One"

This background choir is exactly the sound of opening a love note in class. [Buy]

Chet - "By Night into Paradise"

A purple velvet curtain around a mining town. Like 20 feet high, made of a nice clean heavy velvet, thick and lush, and when sun edges it, it's shine is purple. And when you open it up, inside it's northern Alberta. Suddenly the gaudy cars, with giant suspensions and truck nuts, the regular people trying to get paid as much they can and get the hell out, the insane infrastructure that manifests when that happens, it's all suddenly part of the show. Not so unnerving to look at, or moreso, depending. But listening to the sound of it, that's very easy. It's easy listening. [Buy from Scratch]

[Image: Timothy J. Gattie, of Boise, ID]

Wild Beasts - "She Purred While I Grrred"

These two, newly married children, practically, stared each other down as they made their way down dirt roads, winding roads. An unlikely pair, absolutely. Like a fox and a swan, a mailman and a guard dog, apples and ketchup, nothing about them matched. Their stares met in the air between their eyes, met and flatly stopped. Regular just-got-married music played bubbly out of the stereo, but louder still was the gritting of their respective teeth, a mixture of hatred, stress, sexual withdrawal symptoms, and the kind of regret specific usually to ordering a bad meal at a restaurant. But for the rest of your life. They hurtled and rocked over swaying hilly roads towards their new home. A marital spaceship, their lives now scheduled to be spent in space, researching alien rock deposits and charting planetary formations of orbital bodies. Moons and asteroidal debris, real boring stuff. Together. Alone. Eternity. The sex and whatever opera CDs they had being the only thing to make it at all worthwhile. [Buy from Domino uk]

King Khan and The Shrines - "Land of the Freak"

In this montage sequence, we'll show our hero campaigning and winning the election. He'll be putting up posters, going to meet all sorts of clubs and organizations, shaking hands, posing for pictures, making speeches, phone calls, public statements. All while casting an eye to the object of his affection, who insists on taking no notice whatsoever. [Buy]

--

and like someone stealing the place you were going to play in scrabble, see Wild Beasts' "Devil's Crayon" at Fluxblog. Matthew, however, has been championing Wild Beasts since 2006.

The Grates - "Burn Bridges"

Going through your life is like brushing your waist-length hair in front of a mirror. Each year is a stroke of the brush, they mostly start at the root and work their way out to the ends. Some are spent working out a knot, but that's not the point I'm making. This song feels so familiar, like I've lived this enjoyment before, this hot summer-starting leaping enjoyment. The familiarity is so strong that I get nervous that I'm somehow being unoriginal by enjoying this song, as if I ought not to enjoy the same kind of thing twice, or perhaps that I ought to outgrow old tastes for something more...old? Anyway, that's silly, I'm just working over my same old taste, I'm combing through it, but it's still the same head of hair. And that decided, I can admit loud and clear and proud wild; this song is amazing. It's huge, it gallops, it jumps up and down in one place, jumps up and down and up and down.

[This is a rip from the MySpace]
[Buy old stuff]

--

Also: The Montreal Fringe Festival is going on right now. There are a bunch of interesting shows going on, lots to see, but if I had to recommend something to you, I have a few in mind. There's an improvised one featuring Sean Michaels called "Argument With A Dolphin", and there are two featuring me, one called "Blastback Babyzap", in which I have merely a cameo, and one called "Telegrams", which is a rotating program of short films, in which a film I made is included. The links provide showtimes etc because there's too much information to list in this tangent. If you live in Montreal, do consider it.

Next Tuesday, June 17th, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea by Silver Jews will be released on Drag City Records. It's an incredible album, it might be Silver Jews at their best, or perhaps maybe their best-dressed. It's album with made with true love, out of moments and truths and tall wild tales. We're presenting today an interview with David Berman; one of the best poets and songwriters of my whole life.

Said the Gramophone: Your poems and songs feel like very different creatures. How do you know what ought to be a poem and what ought to be a song? Do certain stories or feelings lend themselves to one form over the other?

David C. Berman: I think you're imagining the writing process inside out. The text doesn't arrive out of thin air. It's brought forward in the modus operandi. You're either writing a poem or writing a song. If I am in a song writing consciousness, it is a mode I am in for days or weeks, and while in that mode I try to let everything roll as closely by that unfinished song as possible. It is kind of like eyeballing a conveyor belt in your mind.

If I were to set out to write a good-sized poem, I'd "be looking at" anywhere from 5-10 days with no other mental commitments.

StG: David Lynch doesn't put "chapters" in his DVDs, because he doesn't want to encourage watching his movies in parts. If this is true, he probably has a very certain idea about how his movies "ought" to be experienced, which I think is a totally reasonable part of the process of creating a whole piece of art. Is there a certain way you imagine as the best way to experience this album?

DCB: Hmm. I think it has to be heard more times than other albums for it's wholeness to come out.

I'm thinking of records with "Play Loud" or "meant to be played loud" somewhere on the artwork. It always seemed a tinge futile. My feeling was always something like, "no, i will not play you loud".

I could print "Absorb Intently for Long Time Before Re-selling" on my products, but I'm afraid of pushing others around..

StG: Could you tell me about one of your favourite songs - by someone else? A song that evokes for you very strongly a story, a memory or a feeling?

DCB: I was just in Britain and I was thinking about that Pink Floyd song "Another Brick in the Wall", how I always hated it as a kid because the guys who liked Pink Floyd and AC/DC and whoever, were the worst people on the landscape. Anyway, I was a very shy kid, and I was completely intimidated by these assholes who were anywhere from 15-18 when I was 10-13, and i would find their campfires in the forest after they were gone. So anyway I didn't like this song especially for the sentiment "hey teacher, leave that kid alone", which struck me as a dirtbag bias against school, an element that has firmly taken root in redneck culture since then. My inner attitude was "shut up pink floyd. You don't speak for me. I want to learn."

I also despised my sister's 45 of Rod Stewart's "Da Ya think im sexy" for being mispelled.

StG: When I listen to "Candy Jail", I imagine the song's hero is innocent, but still appreciative of how nice the jail is. This isn't really a question, I guess, but it's there if you want to respond to it.

DCB: I guess he seems like me and most of the people i know who recognize the unhealthiness and emptiness of pop culture but make a silent deal with themselves to indulge in their own gluttonies anyway, while waiting around for things to change. The friend who died was perhaps unwilling to wait around unashamedly.

thanks daniel.

best wishes, DCB

[Pre-Order Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea]

(Previous guest-blogs: artist Ariel Kitch, artist Aaron Sewards, artist Corinne Chaufour, "Jean Baudrillard", artist Danny Zabbal, artist Irina Troitskaya, artist Eleanor Meredith, artist Keith Greiman, artist Matthew Feyld, The Weakerthans, Parenthetical Girls, artist Daria Tessler, Clem Snide, Marcello Carlin, Beirut, Jonathan Lethem, Will Butler (Arcade Fire), Al Kratina, Eugene Mirman, artist Dave Bailey, Agent Simple, artist Keith Andrew Shore, Owen Ashworth (Casiotone for the Painfully Alone), artist Kit Malo with Alden Penner (The Unicorns) 1 2, artist Rachell Sumpter, artist Katy Horan 1 2, David Barclay (The Diskettes), artist Drew Heffron, Carl Wilson, artist Tim Moore, Michael Nau (Page France), Devin Davis, Will Sheff (Okkervil River), Edward Droste (Grizzly Bear), Hello Saferide, Damon Krukowski (Damon & Naomi), Brian Michael Roff, Howard Bilerman (producer: Silver Mt. Zion, Arcade Fire, etc.). There are many more to come.)

The Slickers - "Johnny Too Bad"

I can't pretend to understand Johnny Too Bad. But this singer doesn't understand him either, that's for sure. This song would never get through to Johnny. It's like a cloud come down from a bright blue sky to just relax on an old lawn chair in front of a roti shop, before heading back up for the rest of the day. It's like that grinning head-shake that says no-no-no but means yes-yes-yes, go-man-go. If anything, it's enabling Johnny. This is a song sung after Johnny is long gone, long lost, it's an expression of grief. But perhaps that's all we can do for Johnny. Eulogize him. Johnny, you're too bad. [buy]

Destroyer - "Canadian Lover/Falcon's Escape"

In my backyard it's 1999, and this is the best song that's ever been written. It plays loud into the air thick as cake batter, it plays the sun right out of the sky, it plays the take-off to another night in August-and-a-half. It plays like proof, pudding, prayer. [buy Thief from Misra]

--

to anyone coming from betterpropaganda, hello.

Black Pus - "Land of the Lost"

When I used to be an actor on Degrassi Junior High (I never was) the on-set tutor taught me a lesson I'll never forget. Was it that blood is thicker than water? Yes. Was it the tawdry style of a black pleather mini-skirt and cream filk blouse? That too. But it was also, and only, that boring art is for geezers and wimps. I'm currently in training to start a graveyard shift, so I'm staying up as late as possible, and Black Pus is my private coach. With drums so pap-pappy that it seems like there are only skins left, and migraine guitars that are so needling it's like being stabbed in the ears with fondue forks, I'm left with only faint memories of actual pleasure and am left steeled to deal with the world that Black Pus has convinced me truly exists. I'm lost, beaten, brainwashed, I love it. [buy Black Pus 4]

Lovely Sparrows - "Prairie"

I'm sure I don't need to tell you the kind of pink pride and warm regularity that "Prairie" evokes. You can see it right there: power-saver bulbs, plastic singing bass, school photos, remembrance day poppies, cut-out articles about hockey, old glass art, and all that space, small as a closet and big as the sky. [not available yet]

--

[photo source]