Archives : all posts by Sean

"I would characterize my music as some cross between Bjork, Three 6 Mafia, and Pinback," he said.

Jamie Radford - "This A Break-Up Song". It's a sad song but it's too reassuring to be depressing. There's a motion, a comfort, a lope. A man suffering through a break-up who decided to stay up all night and make a song about it; he didn't need something to help him through his heartbreak, rather he uses the heartbreak to help him through a song. This doesn't mean it's vapid - far from it. But the emotion in this hip-hop track (a song of late-night humidity, iridescent sweat, swaying Georgia fields) isn't knife-edge vulnerability. It's breathing and progressing, the Bjork sample sounding every time like a beginning, not a farewell. Radford's accent makes him sound most to me like Bubba Sparxxx and he also shares Sparxxx's ability to sound steady on unsteady ground. "I'm broken up / I'm choking up," he says. But he says it with clarity. He's on top of things. While the mbira is tender, Radford's got certainty. This is how I feel. This is it. It reminds me more of Notorious BIG's self-assured "Sky's the Limit" than it does The Streets' aching "Too Late".

Jamie Radford - "You're So Warm". Athens is a very good debut, Bubba mixed with The Eels, glimmer with beat. There are emo-tinged rap tracks like the one above and then there are sparkling instrumentals like this one. It burbles and blushes, flushes and flashes, but while everything ticks and rattles and swoons it's the perfect lasergun kid-voice sample that gives this track its glue. "Boow-boow!" Like someone pointing at you and firing off an imaginary ray. Like a meteor breaking up in the sky. Like the first glimpse of a true, true love.

Listen to more from Athens at Jamie's website. It will be available for purchase soon.

Grizzly Bear - "Lullabye". The next Grizzly Bear album is called Yellow House and it is an album that rolls out like an army of giants, like a barrage of comets. Whereas Horn of Plenty is slow and swimming, Yellow House crunches villages underfoot, squeezes hearts in its hands, roars and flashes and fires. It's really fucking great and an enormous leap forward. They've been listening to Terry Riley, p:ano and the Polyphonic Spree - orchestral post-pop that you can fit in yr luggage. They've been teaching their garden to sing. They've been finding a drummer. "Lullabye" is a song of build and build and build, the Northern Lights coming crowding out of the sky while the bassline just skates on, impervious. It blows a balloon bigger and bigger, till you think it gotta explode, till the balloon just carries the blower away. A lullabye "Lullabye" ain't. Except maybe the Final lullabye. The one to send you staggering, crowing, climaxing all the way into the next world.

[Yellow House is out later this year. In the meantime you can hear another new song at Stereogum, and a third at the Grizzly Bear website]

Hamza El Din - "The Water Wheel". The Nubian musician Hamza El Din died this week. My knowledge of Hamza's music is limited to one record, Escalay (The Water Wheel), but that is an album which has given me long moments of peace. Hamza El Din was a master of the oud and the tar. I am not sure what he is playing on "Water Wheel". I think the oud, the north African lute. He sings only sometimes. Mostly this is strum and beat and resound. It's peace, like I said. It's progress and stillness and movement and pause. Hamza was trained as an electrical engineer, and in Sufi mysticism. His music sounds like these things - the work of an engineer, a mystic, a virtuoso. He uses the bones, the hair, the organs of the song. He uses every piece of the song. When the song is done, there are no parts left. When I mentioned "The Water Wheel" to J, he spoke of its minimalism. This isn't the busy "world music" of Varttina or Ladysmith Black Mambazo. This is peace. It's strings and voice and the dry, dry south of Egypt. A long horizon.

If it's dawn when you are reading this, put it on. Listen for twenty-one minutes and thirty-eight seconds. If it's not dawn, perhaps you should put it away somewhere. Onto a CD or an iPod. Into a pocket or onto a piece of string. Save it for a dawn, or a hot white day, or a moment amid greenery when you feel a fluttering in the air.

r.i.p.

[info/buy]

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The newest Contrast podcast is made up of songs that are longer than eight minutes. Some notes: (1) It seems Brian has the same favourite record as me; (2) Eric makes me laugh; (3) Green Day are pretty surprising; and (4) You can hear me mumbling an introduction to a Songs:Ohia song that will make you sigh.

The first time I saw Will Butler was at an Arcade Fire gig at Win and Brendan's apartment. They had stuck branches all around the ceiling, with apples hanging from twine. Win had the picture of an apple taped onto his guitar and Regine was handing out apples in the crowd. Lots of apples. And Win's brother was there, the famous brother, the kid from Chicago who had a spark in his eye and was playing his heart out on clarinet. Then he was yelling his heart out through a pylon, using it like a megaphone. There was something daring in him, this was certain. And although we hadn't yet exchanged even a word, I felt like I knew the guy. Like I knew the song "William Pierce Butler". Later I said hi, I said good show. Something like that. And he shook my hand.

Will: all my thanks. The rest of you: enjoy! -- Sean

Rock and roll has been bizarrely important in Czech history. Here’s a little bullet pointed list to sum things up:

• 1964: Beatlemania hits the world. Even the Communist world. Kids start playing in rock and roll bands. It’s exactly like the rest of the world. As the ‘60s progress, it’s also exactly like the rest of the world. Kids start wearing bell bottoms and mouthing off to their parents. They smoke pot and listen to the Doors.

• 1968: The Prague Spring. President Dubcek tries to lighten things up in the Ole’ Czechoslovakia: some reforms here and there, and the Soviets send in tanks to make the regime more oppressive again. The hippies and the kids into psychedelic music get really bummed. From this point on, crazy hippie music and the like becomes illegal. Well, sort of. Here’s a brief explanation of Communist legality:

  Some things are ‘legal’. Some things are ‘illegal’. And everything else is merely not ‘legal’ a.k.a. ‘We didn’t say you couldn’t do it, but we didn’t say you could do it. So you know, go ahead and do it if you want. Because it’s not illegal. Heaven forbid. We’d be a bunch of crazy bastards to make something like weird rock and roll music illegal. But we will arrest you for playing it. Maybe. I mean, maybe we won’t. Because it isn’t technically illegal, mind you. But we’ll look at you funny. I mean, sure it’s fine if you own like three or four Velvet Underground records. Be our guest. But your neighbors will rat on you. And then... well, we probably won’t arrest you. But if you do anything else... we might arrest you. And then again, we might not. Because it’s not technically illegal... mind you...’

  Just after the tanks roll in, this group called ‘The Plastic People of the Universe’ form. They start as a Velvet Underground cover band. They also play Frank Zappa songs and put on weird psychedelic art shows.

• 1976: The Plastic People of the Universe are arrested for "Organized Disturbance of the Peace". This is how it happened: as their brand of music was not ‘legal', they couldn’t get licenses to perform (you need a license for everything in damn Communist Czechoslovakia). So they would pull tricks like, ‘Oh, this is our friends wedding, and we’re just a bunch of friends playing music - we’re not putting on a show'. Or ‘This is just a simple fireman’s ball — not open to the public. It’s not a rock and roll show. Just a private party. Everything seems to be in order, right?’ And this weird little method worked pretty well, until 1976.

• 1977: Friend of the Plastic People, future first President of Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic), and then absurdist playwright Vaclav Havel raises a ruckus about the arrest. He organizes various intellectuals and artists around ‘Charter 77’ - basically a document calling for human rights.

• And now everything else: The Charter 77 group goes on to form the core of the intellectual resistance to the Communist government, which is ultimately toppled by student demonstrations snowballing into everyone demonstrations in 1989. They call the revolution "The Velvet Revolution" because it’s non-violent and everything goes so smoothly. And also because the leaders of the opposition were really into the Velvet Underground. I’m not kidding. Absurdist playwright Vaclav Havel becomes president and in his first month invites Frank Zappa to the presidential castle as a guest of state (US Ambassador to Czechoslovakia Shirley Temple Black (yes, that Shirley Temple) meets him at the airport and asks him how his daughter Moon Unit is doing). Later on in the year he has Lou Reed come as an official state visitor and play songs with the Plastic People of the Universe, who are totally stoked about it.
  

Here’s the underground Czech rock and roll I like best: Psi Vojaci (Psee Voh-yahtzee).

Psi Vojaci (Dog Soldiers, in translation) formed in 1979, and opened for the Plastic People of the Universe (out of prison by that point) at various illegal shows. They weren’t allowed a license to perform until 1986 - at which point really angry punk rock and roll was getting popular. The government figured it’d better cut its losses and allow weird music that wasn’t expressly anti-government—anything to distract the kids.

That reminds me — The Plastic People and Psi Vojaci and most of these bands didn’t really give a crap about politics. I mean, they weren’t singing diatribes against communism or against the government or anything. They just played dark, weird music. And that’s all they wanted to do. But the government only really approved of bland pop music or upbeat adult contemporary music. Not that the other music was illegal, mind you.

But here’s the music:

Psi Vojaci - "Psi Vojaci"

This is from Psi Vojaci’s first illegal album from 1980- Psi a vojaci. It was distributed by cassette tape - people making copies for their friends, etc. The lead singer and piano player Filip Topol is 14 in this recording. He sounds like he means what he’s saying, whatever it is that he’s saying.

Psi Vojaci - "Ziletky"

This is from their album Narod Psych Vojaku (Nation of Dog Soldiers). This recording is from the 1990s - Psi Vojaci went into a proper studio and recorded songs they hadn’t been able to record under the Communist regime and also re-recorded songs that they hadn’t really done justice to before (if you listed to the first song "Psi Vojaci," you can understand that they’d like to up the sound quality). "Ziletky" is pronounced "Zhiletky" and means "razors". "Zhiletky" comes from the word, wait for it - Gillette. The best a man can get. Truly the world's languages are a marvelous thing.

Filip Topol and Agon Orchestra - "Ziletky"

In 2000 the lead singer of Psi Vojaci worked with the Agon Orchestra (a fairly well respected Czech avant-garde orchestra) on orchestral versions of Psi Vojaci songs. This is a beautiful album. You can hear the clarinetist breathing. And you can hear his playing get ragged towards the end. These Czechs mean what they mean when they play music. This song "Ziletky" is the best stuff of Czech rock and roll. It’s really catchy, but not in a dancey way. The clarinet part isn’t that far off from "Take On Me" - but it’s melancholy and orchestral and Eastern European. And Filip Topol still sounds like he really means what he’s singing. Whatever it is that he’s singing.

Ex Orchest - "Kokend Asfalt"

And here’s a bonus piece of music: Since we’re dealing with avant-garde orchestral versions of European rock and roll songs featuring lead singers yelling their vocals and sounding like they mean it, here’s the Ex Orchest with "Kokend Asfalt" (A version of The Ex’s song "State of Shock" performed by The Ex along with a bunch of loud instrument people).

Have a safe and happy new year.

[more info on Psi Vojaci, and store links]

[Will Butler plays guitar, glockenspiel, synthesiser, clarinet, loudhailer, crash helmet, broken cymbal, and many other things with the band Arcade Fire. While studying at Northwestern, Will was program director at WNUR, which Spin in 2003 declared the best college station in the USA. He hosted a rock'n'roll show as well as The Lit Show, because he likes books. Arcade Fire released their debut LP, Funeral, in 2004. They are currently working on their follow-up with the help of a man from Seattle.]

(Previous guest-blogs, in and out of the Said the Guests series: 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.)

Update 1:41 EST: Mostly all mp3s should be working again.

Final Fantasy - "The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead (Many Lives Version)". A b-side from the new Many Lives -> 49mp single, here Final Fantasy takes a playful song from his debut and stirs it in with the string quartet work of He Poos Clouds. It becomes a much slower song, slower in tone more than in tempo, harmonies and dissonances rising like mist in a town of many towers. You can almost hear birdsong between the strokes of cello. The lyrics that stand out stronger: "bones", "alone", "never". At the end of the song - as in the original - there are these spiralling lifts of violin... But here they don't feel quite swift enough to escape the rest of the song's gravity. Too impulsive to get away.

[buy]

Pillow - "Mixologists and Waifs". The video treatment would start with a number. Which number? I think 8. 878. 8787878. Okay it would be 87878787878, repeating to infinity, just sevens and eights. And these numerals would roll slowly past, the eights maybe wheeling around a central axis, the sevens maybe leaning, and as the camera pulls back you would see the sea of 8s and 7s, the mass of them, the lines and the curves. I do not say "sea" lightly. There are waves! There is surf! There are storms! Further and further we go, the sevens and eights just dots, just points, grains of sand in the heave and crash. And what do you hear? You hear Pillow. An Italian called Luca Di Mira who is not a mathematician but rather a dj, someone laying strings and beats till the horizon recedes too far to remember, till you're floating and drowning at the same time, till you are lying on your back thinking only of Hood, and Sigur Ros, and the way a summer holiday might break your chest right open with pleasure.

[buy]

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A lovely new lovesong by Hello Saferide at Swedes Please.

The Long sisters, who dwell in New England, have made a video called "Suburbs With You", which is a song by Herman Dune. The song is the soundtrack. It has recorders and handclaps. It's awesome. But the important thing isn't the one or the other, the video or the song - it's the conjunction. At least one of the Long sisters is a Gramophone reader and it seems her eyes sparkle with all the same things that mine do, (that ours do?,) because this is the brightest thing I have seen all week - in a week with sunshine and lightbulbs and white birds passing slowmo over a night street. Dan's videos are black and red, they're fraught, (they're great,) but this here is different: girls and greenery, bubbles and flowers, smiles and a life so loose that anything can happen. It's a video that celebrates, celebrates, celebrates; joy to the max; the easy pleasure of friends and running and a neighbourhood you know well. Watch it.

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Montrealers, go see Dan's comedy show on Thursday.

Shelby Sifers - "Half-Naked and Knocking".
Shelby Sifers - "A Happy Love Song".

A good few weeks, these. The reasons are too many to count, but I can say that it was with joy I discovered the work of Beirut - and then more joy, less than a month later, when Shelby Sifers' Yeah And I'm In Love Too made its way to my door. The debut of this California songwriter is modest and unflashy, but absolutely beautiful. Gutsy and strange, and tender as fingers against your cheek. While Sifers' voice can often recall Joanna Newsom, it's Mirah's marvelous You Think It's Like This But Really It's Like That which these songs most recall. Love songs to find in your shoes in the morning, to sit with on a hillside.

"Half-Naked and Knocking" is something you need to nurse to adulthood. A few hard looks will be enough to wilt it away. So be kind, if you're listening; be kind. And if you are kind, if you provide sunshine and rain and maybe a little of your affection, if you sing clumsily along, something will sprout that's green as spring and fresh as kiss. The guitar-line is like something straight out of a Julie Doiron record, the duetting kid has been borrowed from a birthday party (does he have a schoolboy crush on the girl with the guitar?), and when the song does go toward the lonely - Sifers' voice louder, suddenly, and almost demanding, - it's an indignance that feels deserved. A hope that you hope for her too.

"A Happy Love Song" will strike you one of two ways. Either you will buckle under cuteness overload. Or... If you are in love, or something, then this song may feel not just appropriate but necessary - the only thing precious enough to express the googly gleam in yr heart. Sifers brings in some images you'd expect, and some sweet sounds you'd expect too, but then there's the gradual accumulation of shivery unexpected thoughts. Good thoughts, daring thoughts - a bravery to her love that feels far stronger than the twisty soft delivery. "And if I ever find another / well I still love you too! / And if you find another woman / well I'd move next door to you."

[buy yeah and i'm in love too for a disgustingly cheap $10]

(A few words on the complaint that "all [girl] singers sound like Joanna Newsom, nowadays". It's true to a point - out of the woodwork are all these women with unexpected voiceboxes, tulips twined with tongues. But whereas others hear aping, I hear just slightly strange singers. For years (indie?) rock's had male singers with unconventional voices - from Will Oldham to Isaac Brock, stretching all the way back to Bob Dylan or Neil Young, - but girls in general didn't have that liberty. There were pretty-voiced singers (from Jewel to Kate Bush to Rosie Thomas), and intense (mostly pretty) singers (from Janis Joplin to PJ Harvey to Cat Power), but that's it. With the critical and popular ascendancy of Bjork and, yes, Joanna Newsom, I feel like this is changing. Suddenly women with crooked voices are being heard out by kids, by critics, by labels, in a way they hadn't before. Yeah, there are similarities between Hanne Hukkelberg and Joanna Newsom, Conor Oberst and Will Sheff, but these are similarities in vocal style more than anything else. They don't sound like impersonators - just people experimenting in similar ways with their less-than-classically-perfect voices.)

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I missed it when it first aired a few weeks ago, but there is an outstanding episode of Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything (the podcast), with one man's tale of hating Conan O'Brien.

A new trailer for Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. Now with some dialogue! (Which actually makes me anxious.) But still - i cannot wait.

Gooblar - "Uh Oh". Okay this is a lovers' fight. One long table, a man standing on one side and a woman on the other. The man turns and says something sharp. He puts a pumpkin on the table. The woman responds with another sharp word. She sets down a large potato. He turns away and picks up a lump of red cheese. He puts it on the table. He says something. She gets a slab of steak. She says something back. A trout. A watermelon. Tofu. Upside-down cake. And so they back and forth, voices rising, angry with one-another, setting down raw groceries till there's a huge pile there on the table. Flotsam between them, in every colour and shape, glistening. If the scene had a soundtrack (which, oh look! it does!), it would be a messy soundtrack: guitars giving uneasy snarls, voices scratching and mixing up. A rising confusion that the man and the woman don't know how they created, it was just suddenly there, and they're holding knives, and the only thing to do is to start cutting through things.

[info]

Josephine Foster - "Der Konig in Thule". This is the first song I've ever posted that was composed by Schubert. Also the first that was written by Goethe. Not the first sung by Josephine Foster, however, nor the first in German. So it's a song of firsts and also not of firsts. It's a song not nearly as strange as it thinks it is, whose eccentricity could curl happily at my feet. Foster's operatic vocals are paired with furry, fuzzy guitars, like the theatrical tiptoe of a particularly large monster - inching his way forward to the vanity mirror where he can try on Foster's makeup.

It's a song about a celebration, and wine, and death. And also about silly, silly kings, with too much gold in their robes. It's the clumsiest and most beautiful thing I've heard this week. And I think it probably wears beetles in its hair.

[buy her new album of German song]

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The Knife/Trentemoller remix, at Fluxblog, is probably the best remix (of anything) I've heard yet this year.

Jordan and I have known Al Kratina for years. He's one of the smartest, funniest, and most horrible people I know. For at least ten years he has been spending his days watching movies, reading comics, and writing hate literature disguised as film and comic reviews. His horror films have been shown around the world, his sarcasm disguises a passion that rivals the world's greatest lovers, and I'm so delighted with what he's written for us here today. It's so good, it'll make you rip the heads off children. -- Sean

I hate music. Which is why I find it so strange that I compulsively read this site. I suppose I come more for the writing than for the annoyingly coy alt-pop songs sung by corduroy-draped guys trying to lay a girl in glasses who works at the coffee shop on open mike night. But really, I wouldn't know, because I never bother to listen to the tracks anyway. So, when I was asked to do a guest article, I thought I'd return the favor, and write about songs no one would ever conceivably want to listen to. If you do get through the whole thing, however, I promise you a treat.

The reason I hate music is the same reason that most people like it. It's familiar, predictable, and unchallenging, like a baby blanket you've had since you were born. I don't know about yours, but my baby blanket smells like piss and vomit, and I have no interest in reliving that level of familiarity. So, pretty much the only music I listen to is black metal. It's not that this genre is particularly innovative or inventive, or even all that good, it's just that the practitioners of the form seem to hate music as much as I do. It's as if they sat down, went through every record they could find, mainstream and underground alike, and decided to do the exact opposite of what they heard. Black metal songs have no verses, no choruses, melodies, or refrains. They shift tempos and time signatures seemingly at random, the music recorded as lovingly as you would videotape a snuff film, the vocals are usually comically obscured and mocking, and it's pretty much as deliberately far away from pop music as you can get while still using a guitar, bass, and drums.

Mayhem - "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas" [buy]

The first band I'm going to give you the pleasure of skipping over and not listening to is Mayhem. The band was formed in the mid 80s in Norway by a guy named Euronymous. The band mates, including 17 year old schizophrenic lead singer Dead, all moved into a house together, and had a great old time, with Dead occasionally dressing in rotten, worm-infested clothes and breathing in the fumes of a dead crow he kept in a glass jar, and Euronymous keeping himself entertained by constantly telling Dead that no one liked him and he should kill himself. Eager to test out Euronymous' theory, Dead slit his wrists and blew his brains out the top of his skull with a shotgun. In a moment of poetic irony, Euronymous found the body. Distraught, he did what any guilt-ridden friend would do, which is run to the store, get a Polaroid camera, take photos that would later become the cover to a Mayhem record, cook and eat pieces of Dead's brain, and make a necklace out of skull fragments. Later, in order to complete the recording of their first album, Mayhem hired session bassist Count Grishnack, which proved to be a poor idea, because Grishnack promptly stabbed Euronymous to death, and is now serving a 21-year jail sentence. Want to hear the song yet? Didn't think so. The song is, of course, fairly awful, but notice how it doesn't really sound like anything that you've heard before, unless you happen to listen to a lot of artillery. The drums are fast, but the song is slow. The guitars are ridiculously down-tuned, but they're playing high-notes anyway, which makes little sense. I like how there's no verse or chorus, but the deliberately off-time vocals do modulate between someone sounding like they're vomiting, and someone bellowing like a beached whale, then vomiting.

Burzum - "Spell Of Destruction" [buy]

The next song is from a one-man band called Burzum. The one man in question is Count Grishnack, whom you might remember from the previous paragraph. Before he was arrested for murder, young Grishnack was being tried for the burnings of three churches in Norway. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that these guys burn churches a lot. Like a lot. Like 93 of them in the past ten years. When Grishnack was arrested, he was found with 150 pounds of stolen dynamite and plans to blow up a historic wooden church on a religious holiday. Why you would need written plans to blow up a wood church when you have 150 pounds of dynamite is beyond me, but then again, I'm not a psychopath. This song, "Spell of Destruction", is slow and moody, and not particularly contrary musically. It's a very simple guitar riff that quickly morphs into a hypnotic drone, but despite its aversion to traditional structure, it's not the music that sets this song apart. The vocals, which sound not unlike a woman getting eaten alive by something with sharp teeth, are what really do a number on me when I listen to it. Like a Michael Snow film, the experimental work of Burzum isolates one element of a song, and tortures it to death. Enjoy.

Emperor - "With Strength I Burn" [buy]

Emperor, also from Norway, have always taken their music to a level of seriousness familiar only to Ph.D electro-acoustic students and Radiohead. Consequently, they don't have quite the same drama in their personal lives as do the previous two bands. Except that the guitarist went to jail for burning down a church. And the bassist tried to cut a guy's face off with a serrated combat knife, and while he was in prison, his daughter died from a 'Satanic curse'. And the drummer killed a middle-aged man in Lillehammer Olympic Park. But other than that, they're doing well. Along with Dimmu Borgir, Emperor formed the foundation of the 'symphonic black metal' genre, which seeks to several all ties with traditional pop and metal, and bases its structure on the classical music of Wagner and Greig, building the songs around movements and layered instrumentation. This is actually a genuinely interesting concept, and it's too bad that the music still sounds like a machine gun fighting a chainsaw while Gollum sings a lullaby. Emperor has always had a talent for making a whole lot of incomprehensible and unappealing noise, but all of a sudden having one strong, powerful melody rise from within, like Excalibur rising from the Lake, or a dead body with an erection, and this song is no exception.

Graveworm - "Losing My Religion" [buy]

There, that wasn't so bad, was it? Now, it's time for your treat, which is R.E.M... Horribly mangled, as it should be.

[Al Kratina is clinically depressed and lives on a couch in Montreal. He is also an award winning filmmaker and writer. Currently, he writes for The Comic Book Bin, the largest comic and collectibles website in Canada, as well as for his own, shockingly unpopular movie review blog, The 16mm Shrine. In 2006, he will be directing a spec TV pilot, and a music video for math rockers Officer Girl, as well as working on the feature film version of his short film, Alex, Vampire Slayer. ]

(Previous guest-blogs, in and out of the Said the Guests series: 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.)