Archives : all posts by Sean

Buraka Som Sistema - "General". Each of us have busy days, today. I have to wake up, clouds greying through the window, and get out of bed, and write this post, and work, and have a coffee, and call my grandparents, and research lodging & eating in Porto and Lisbon, and go to a workshop, and go to J's goodbye dinner, and then walk home swinging someone's hand. A car's got to wake up, growl to life, get driven across town and home. A nightclub's got to lay swathed in dark, then flickflickflick each lightswitch turned on, and swept, and cleaned, and then songs will play. A calendar's got to get flipped, if everyone forgot to. Get Out Of Jail Free cards need to get written. &c. [MySpace]

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Elsewhere:

Congratulations to the winner of our Insound Poster Contest, Emily Quinn. They shoudl be in touch with you.

As Dan advised, the Lifted Brow 4 is taking orders. The price ($25) is ridiculous, due to the Australian dollar and a pre-order discount. Also, the content is ridiculous: 2 CDs and a 300-page book, including original music and writing by Sheila Heti, Carey Mercer & Sydney Vermont, Wolf Parade's Spencer Krug, Tao Lin, Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg, Rick Moody, the Wrens, No Kids, the Lucksmiths, Neil Gaiman, Dan Deacon, Sleeping States, Frightened Rabbit, Goblin Cock, the Wrens and about a hundred more. Oh yes - as well as writing by our Jordan Himelfarb (with Joel Taylor), a song by his band The Cay, and a short story I wrote that is about the girl who caught the Moon. It's maybe the greatest collectible known to man. Buy it.

Gossamer Albatross - "The Ground Will Take Us Down". Maybe this song is about dying, maybe it's about gettin' down. It's probably both. And while "the flesh from your thighs" sound like words Jeff Mangum would sing, Gossamer Albatross hide more jubilance in their rattle & strum. Neutral Milk Hotel have Death's hand on their shoulder, Death's lips at their ear; Lewis Gordon's just got his lover's hand, his lover's lips, the perfume of flowers everywhere. I love even more the way they've deployed their cello & two violins: not to make things pretty, placid, but to provide a hungry drone, the scrape of skin on skin, dirt in fingernails.

[MySpace 1 2 / buy]

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Elsewhere:

I'm awed by the nerve of Chryde at the Blogotheque, charming a magical evening moment out of Bloc Party. Vincent Moon is missed behind the camera but there's something inarguable about a song sung under stars, everyone with toes crossed, wanting to be transported.

And a fellow called Cody has put together a terrific free compilation of many of Montreal's greatest emerging bands. Can't-miss for anyone who wants their finger to this city's pulse. And with great artwork from Tyler Rauman.

(image source)

Maps & Atlases - "Artichokes". It's hanging autumns on your walls. It's cracking kaleidoscopes on the sidewalk, spilling colours over your shoes. It's listening to a trillion leaves changing colour, shuttling like the lenses in an optometrist's machine, green|red|yellow|brown. It's a bejewelled baseball game, batters swinging at sapphires. It's boiling your dreams on the stove, waiting for paper to unfurl from secrets. [buy]

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Elsewhere, really enjoying Wavves at PopSheep and CatBirdSeat, and Conversion Party's "East River" at Bows + Arrows.

[photo by David Shrigley - source]

Jib Kidder - "Windowdipper"

Danny said, "Don't worry, Mom. Your computer is just a computer. It's safe to go on the internet. It's not going to learn 'artificial intelligence.'"

I told him I had heard about it on 60 Minutes.

He said I must have heard wrong.

So I listened to Danny. Of course I listened to Danny. We paid all that money for him to know the computer stuff. I plugged the telephone wire into the back of my Dell and "surfed the web". Carrie says she doesn't have time for it - she laughs and asks if I'm surfing for porno, - but there's lots of good stuff. Danny helped and I figured it out pretty fast. I looked up Jodie Foster on WikiPedia, and found a good cruller recipe at All-Recipes and saw great clips of Johnny Depp on You-Tube. I "surfed" all around. You can get really lost on there.

Then one day, Danny got on there to fix something or other, or to check something or other, and he said, "Uh oh."

And I said, "What is it?"

And he said, "What's this?" He pointed at some squiggly on the screen.

"An icon," I said.

"What program is it for? I can't click on it."

"I don't know," I said. "It's been there for as long as I can remember."

Under the icon it said WINDOWDIPPER.

"I think it's a virus," he said.

This made me nervous but not too nervous, because Danny knows all about this stuff. He ran some programs. They took forever. I started making dinner. Then I heard screams and yells and I dropped the casserole and went running into the den. Danny was flat on his back, the office-chair knocked right over.

"What happened?" I asked. His nose was bleeding.

"The PC gave me a karate chop," he said.

"Oh," I said. I looked at the computer. It looked fine.

I helped Danny to his feet. He wiped his nose with his sleeve. "Stop that," I said. I went to get him some tissues. While I was in the bathroom there was another yelp. I trotted right back. Danny was on the floor and the computer was playing some rap stuff. Really loud. Clipped and repeated.

"Motherfucker!" Danny yelled.

"Danny!" I said.

The computer said, "Yeah!" in a voice like dolphinsplash.

"It karate-chopped me again!" he said. "How the hell does a computer karate-chop?"

The computer stopped rapping for a sec and instead it gurgled. It showed a YouTube clip of Captain Picard on Star Trek. It showed a clip of John McCain laughing all crazy, clapping his hands like a seal. It showed a clip of Michael Jordan doing a slam dunk. Then it crashed.

Danny hit ctrl-alt-delete. We waited.

[All on Yall, Jib Kidder's delicious & dented album of, uh, gamelan crunk and betamax glitch, is out now.]

Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire - "Voice in Headphones".
Bjork - "Undo".

Writing about a song can make it less than it is. But I don't know a kinder way to explain the story of "Voice in Headphones". This is a song about how recorded music - particularly a song called "Undo", by Bjork, - makes Mount Eerie cry. He borrows "Undo"'s chorus, gathers friends to yearningly yell it. "Voice in Headphones" feels like two things: a why? and a thank-you. How does music have this power, every single time? "Who are you, voice in headphones?" And also, thank-you, voice in headphones. As with so many of Phil Elverum's songs, this song is an explanation, an explication, an articulation and working-through of a feeling. Elverum's gift is the way he makes these explorations beautiful. (As if Jacques Cartier or Ferdinand Magellan could move us to tears.) They are tender, wise, flickering. Mount Eerie's "Voice in Headphones" becomes its own object. We listen to this song, feel it move us, and we wonder - Who are you? We think - thank-you.

The album this song is taken from, Lost Wisdom, is by the way one of the best albums of the year.

[buy Lost Wisdom / buy Bjork's Vespertine]

Sol Seppy - "Enter One". I was flying back into Montreal, two months ago. It was night. Girls spoke in murmurs, boys dreamed. I heard the hushhhh of the engine and looked down onto dark fields, cloaked forests. There was no sky - just cloud, like fog, like the fog-wreathed edge of the sea, above us. Our craft was silver and in its way silent. I watched the clouds out the window and suddenly began to see these bright streaks of flash, these streak brights of flash. The mist was suddenly lit up, hotted and sparking. And still inside the airplane it was silent - murmurs, dreams, engine. I watched all these flashes, these lightnings, these bolts, and my heart jumped like a dial with each one. I ceased wondering about birdcalls, wind-whistle; I wondered just at the thunder I couldn't hear, the tiny thunders on the other side of the glass.

And then the craft turned and Montreal came into view, intricate as a coral reef, and a spotlight strafed the sky and I realised it wasn't lightning I was seeing, just the spotlight against the bottom of the clouds. A woman pointing a light at the stars & sketching accidental storms. One single person can do this, I thought to myself. From so far away, a person can touch another person, flash bright streaks across the clouds. Can send an incomprehensible message to a man in a flying-machine.

(Thank you, Marlisse.)

[buy]

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I keep forgetting to mention, but I will be in Ottawa tonight, Thursday, at a reading for The Art of Trespassing. It's an anthology of short stories by emerging Canadian writers, and it's good. I'll be reading from my story, "Bluebirds". If you can't make it to Octopus Books for 7pm, you can also buy the book here.

Unfortunately, the "economic climate" has also resulted in the end of my column at the National Post. If you are involved with a (paying) publication that might be interested in my work, I'd really appreciate it if you got in touch. Thanks!

Styx Tyger - "String Strikes". Styx Tyger found a synthesizer in the alley trash; couldn't get it to work. Then one spring afternoon they were doing an early BBQ on the back patio, listening to the Cute and chewing on fresh rhubarb and looking into the rainbows, using the synth as a rail for leaning - and oh oh oh, lookit that, found the thing ran on sunlight. Now that they had figured out the keyboard, Styx Tyger went back to the alleyway. They rummaged in shiny candy-wrappers for more stuff. They found a flower that flowered in sunlight. They found a caterpillar that wriggled in sunlight. And then they found a packet of guitar-strings, hard as steel and the colour of gold (i.e., gold). They strung their guitars and ring-ring-ring played them. Kids came from miles. Bluebirds and condors landed on their roof. Styx Tyger were no less melancholy but now they had sunshine. They threw away their Cure albums - they didn't need them any more.

Who are these marvelous Swedes!? (Thanks, Irre.)

[Styx Tyger MySpace / Song originally by Agent Side Grinder]

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If you, like me, hadn't seen this video - "the 2008 'Where The Hell Is Matt' video", - you should. Internet silliness but its ambition is ceaseless.

Caff/Flick Records has redesigned its website, making the entire Freak Paeans catalogue (previously) available for free.

And finally, friends in Scotland have just launched TEN TRACKS. A remarkable & awesome concept for exploring new bands and new songs. Each month, £1 gets you a bundle of 10 terrific tracks - Scottish indie/folk/pop or a set curated by the gurus at Optimo. Money goes to artists, songs go to you, and you can sample just in case, too. TERRIFIC.