Thank You For Telling Me Vodka is a Ponsy Drink

I Went and saw Xiu Xiu play last night. It was really great. You should buy their albums. The show made me all swoony like a schoolgirl. I got emotional. My medication was making me shaky. I talked to them afterwards, and made a dick out of myslef I think. But they were really nice. I talked to Angela about how music and writing destroy ego and Jamie about how other people's horrible stuff can make your horrible stuff feel less, becuase there's less lonelyness, some kind of community..... I'm not sure. I'm typing maybe kind of like Ariana Reines with some kind of naïveté and direct sentences, because I don't know how else to say things at the moment. I really like her writing but don't normally write like her. I hope it doesn't make me sound like a dick or a hipster. I don't understand the idea "hipster". The people who would be them hate them. It confuses me. I don't have enough money to be one I think. This writing is going nowhere. I really like Xiu Xiu anyway. Here are links to some of the songs they played.

Grey Death
Dear God, I Hate Myself
Chocolate Makes You Happy
Save Me, Save Me
Sad Pony Guerilla Girl
Fabulous Muscles
Crank Heart
I Luv the Valley Oh!
Boy Soprano

A Collection of Essay's by Bruce Russell

Bruce Russell launched his book Left Handed Blows: Writing on Sound 1993-2009 tonight. It's really, really good - and not just in terms of sound, but culture in general; production, resistance, the possibility of radical action; the understanding of one's position within a semantic economy. There's a lot of material in there that is going to be very helpful to me - I'm writing on improvisation and text at the moment, and one of my intentions (they are various....) is to look more at artistic economies as wholes - media-centred distinctions are counter-productive (as Bruce states in the introduction to the show Towards a Cinema of Pure Means currently at the Physics Room gallery).

I've got a review copy - so a write-up is impending. I highly reccomend it - and anyone who is not familliar with Bruce's work should look into it - here's his Wikipedia page.

Graham Lambkin on A Journey Round My Skull

Three Posts, with art. 1, 2, 3.

Graham Lambkin is a multi-instrumentalist, artist and author. He fronted the wonderful and enigmatic Shadow Ring, of which a retrospective is now available. Follow the links, and get me one while you're at it.

At High Street Project

Two Events.

the first:
TAKEAWAYS

Various Artists
22 January - 13 February
Opening Reception: Friday 22 January, 6pm.

The Second:

Velvet Hour, Slit The Throat Of The Assistant,
IRD, Jack Hooker


















23 January, 9pm
84 Lichfield Street
Entry By Donation.

I'm contributing some visual works to TAKAWAYS.
Scans follow.

Our Love Will Destroy The World

Sorry for the silence - will have real stuff within the next week or so.

However this just came in from the boys at aQuarius recOrds, so anyone out there who is in SF/Bay Area, go see this show. I've seen Cambell as both BCM and Black Boned Angel, and he's incredible. so thusly:

Hi folks,
> Sorry for the electronic intrusion. This one's mainly for folks in the Bay
> Area.
> Just managed to set up a last minute show on the THE BUS, aQ pal, and
> Andee's former bandmate John Benson's amazing Bus venue, an actual converted
> city bus, with a solar powered PA, an engine that runs on vegetable oil, and
> of course plenty of room inside to cram in a bunch of folks to rock out and
> bliss out, up close and personal with the performers.
> Some of you no doubt experienced the genius that was Finland's Circle
> performing live on the bus a while back, now we're excited to announce:
>
> OUR LOVE WILL DESTROY THE WORLD
>
> aka Campbell Kneale of Birchville Cat Motel and of course Black Boned Angel.
>
> Performing live, tonight, Wednesday, Jan 06th, 2010, on THE BUS. Show starts
> at 8:00 pm.
>
> The bus will be parked at 16th and San Bruno, under the freeway. You can't
> miss it.
>
> There should be a few other bands playing, who have also traveled from afar,
> we're just waiting for the confirmation, to find out more, keep an eye on
> the other aQ thingies, twitter, Myspace, all that jazz.
> But really, it hardly matters who else is playing, cuz we're just so excited
> to see OLWDTW!!!

Kevin Blechdom (USA) feat. Barnwave + Greg Malcolm & Jenny Ward

Kevin Blechdom (USA) feat. Barnwave

+ Greg Malcolm & Jenny Ward

Wunderbar, Lyttelton

Thursday January 7

$10

Kevin Blechdom is a musician from Tallahassee, Florida, whose solo and collaborative work – as a member of Blectum from Blechdom and Adult Rodeo and as a duo with Eugene Chadbourne – has appeared on labels such as Kid606’s Tigerbeat6 (DJ /rupture, Indian Jewelry, Quintron and Miss Pussycat), Kit Clayton’s Orthlorng Musork (AGF, Akira Rabelais, Ekkehard Ehlers), Sonig (Jason Forrest, Mouse On Mars), Shimmy Disc (Daniel Johnston, Ruins, Shockabilly), Les Disques Victo (Anthony Braxton, Kid Koala, Hijokaidan, Wolf Eyes, Cecil Taylor) and Chicks On Speed Records (Le Tigre, DAT Politics).

Blectum from Blechdom’s first LP won second prize for Digital Music at Ars Electronica in 2001), while the Wire magazine described the duo’s telepathic synergy as a ‘riotous departure from what they regarded as the tight, minimal and earnest tendencies of male-dominated electronica’, approximating the ‘most vivid and literal musical definition yet of the word ‘haywire’”. The 2005 solo album, Eat My Heart Out consisted of a topless Blechdom, clutching the drippy esophagus, heart and lungs of a goat, while the music within was seen as an enactment of this literal evisceration, a confessionalism that has continued to inform her recordings and live performances since. Widely regarded as a retreat from the musical derangements of her practice heretofore, 2009’s Gentlemania is just as harrowingly candid and more unsettling for its ostensible compositional simplicity. A bricolage of Broadway psych, show tune and hillbilly delirium and euphoric faux pas, the album was recorded with Warp label’s Jamie Lidell and stands out as a next-level treatise on interpersonal and inter-species phenomena. Blechdom is currently touring alongside Christopher Fleeger as the duo, BARNWAVE.

http://www.kevyb.com/

http://upfrontonline.net/kevin-blechdom/

http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/6239-kevin-blechdom/#at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSXpg_jp3sc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsSb14p3jzM

Greg Malcolm’s otherworldly abduction of the guitar and re-sounding of its grey acoustic matter has been witnessed across imprints like Kning Disk (James Blackshaw, Machinefabriek), (K-RAA-K)³ (Ignatz, Silvester Anfang, Es, Pan American), Table of the Elements (Thurston Moore, Tony Conrad, Captain Beefhart, John Cale, John Fahey), Interregnum (Robedoor) and Campbell Kneale’s Celebrate Psi Phenomenon. Malcolm co-axes his surgically changed instrument into abstract drifts and moiré-like projections, its implanted contact microphones and sympathetic strings embellishing the subtle dexterity and gleaming nature of his idiosyncratic playing. Malcolm’s duo with Jenny Ward is a radically wronged mutation of decadent alt-country and marginal cabaret, equally as virtuosic but extra-demented and as duplicitously innocent-disturbed as Kevin Blechdom’s recent work. Ward equips Malcolm’s pulp ostinato and cringing jackknife Trippelgitaristen reek-outs with a mélange of walkie-talkie soprano, prurient gargles and puppet-like double-entendre ululations, recalling the halcyon of their earlier days as the touring kid show outfit, Such n Such, albeit weathered by the onset of cynicism, genius and transcendental New Sincerity.

John Wiese
Adam Willetts
LA Lakers

Dec 8
Oxford Terrace Baptist Church
$10

More here

Morton Feldman on Art vs. Craft etc

Very nice extracts posted by John Gallaher at Nothing to Say and Saying it

Exegesis of Snoop Dogg

(a result of Owen's recent post on the sound of Sheffield's architecture - Depeche Mode bender. I keep forgetting how gorgeous this song is.)



(and this is new. Still beautiful.)

Would Ayn Rand like Radiohead? or: You Are a Target Market

Adam Fieled, in a post (largely( about WCW, concluded by saying someone found his blog by googling this question.

Weird world, huh?

However,I think she would.

(tangent - this is very, very cool)

Let me justify myself (while still being as voiciferous as is to be expected in such a situation).

Radiohead, in my view, are/were kind of like the Pink Floyd of the 90s, and are comprable to Sonic Youth in their appeal to an audience of disaffected middle class youth (often University Students - witness both band's success being driven by exposion on college radio) who are, by and large, disenchanted with capitalism though still heavily invested in the individualism that they have been (though the capitalist apparatus) intdoctrinated with. This paradox, plus this generation's (that's my generation, by the way) largely apathetic outlook on political action, spurred by a dissilliusionment with the efacacy of such, creates a situation where the anti-captialist (or more accurately ambivilant-toward-capitalist) sentiment finds unlikely bedfellows in the political apathy and individualism that are direct product of the capitalist aparatus, and this individualist ideology has it's logical (it's what we're taught) expression in consumption.

This means that the kids buy DVDs called Meeting People is Easy, with "You are a target market" plastered in large, uppercase type across the front cover, with mocking (and partial) awareness that this banner is true; and, i'll warrant, less awareness that they are behaving just as the trained consumers that they are looking down their noses at.

Watching all of this, Ayn Rand laughs.

Militant Dysphoria

k-punk has a great post on Margaret Atwood's surfacing:
Surfacing belongs to the same moment as Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange And Death, Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, Irigaray's Speculum: Of The Other Woman - and Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. Though it is A Thousand Plateaus that Surfacing most obviously prefigures - yet what separates Surfacing's "terrifying Deleuzian devenir-animal" (Jameson) from Deleuze and Guattari is precisely Atwood's refusal of affirmation(ism). At her moment of schizophrenic break-rapture, the narrator certainly sounds like a good Deleuzean: "they think I should be filled with death, I should be in mourning. But nothing has died, everything is alive, everything is waiting to become alive", but this febrile delirium is more in tune with Ben Woodard's "dark vitalism" than Deleuze, and what flows and stalks in the body-without-organs zone of animal- and water-becomings is something like Ben's sinister "creep of life". "I hear breathing, witheld, observant, not in the house but all around it." The place beyond the mortifications of the Symbolic is not only the space of an obscene, non-lingustic "life" but also where everything deadened and dead goes, once it has been expelled from civilization. "This is where I threw the dead things..." Beyond the living death of the Symbolic is the kingdom of the dead. "It was below me, drifting towards me from the furthest level where there was no life, a dark oval trailing limbs. It was blurred but it had eyes, they were open, it was something I knew about, a dead thing, it was dead."

This Militant Dysphoria, or Dark Vitalism,as a framework could contribute much to the discussion of poets such as such as Aese Berg, Ariana Reines, and Johannes Göransson; and as Dominic Fox has stated, in the Black Metal of acts like Striborg and Xasthur. Also worth considering would be the work of musicians such as Kevin Drumm, Campbell Kneale (as Birchville Cat Motel/Our Love Will Destroy the World and Black Boned Angel), Wolf Eyes, et al.

This Friday

Gallery Gallery presents:
Qu'ils Mangent de la Brioche (Let Them Eat Cake)

Charles [Charlotte?] Burgess at Goodbye Blue Monday

25th Sept, 10pm-12pm

Following (A reitteration)

___________________CHASERS

____________NIK GEENE & PATRICK LUNDBERG
____________6PM, JONATHAN SMART GALLERY
________________________160 HIGH ST
____________+
____________LIVE PERFORMANCES BY
____________xNOBBQx (AUS),
____________GRUNGE GENESIS WITH
_________________BRUCE RUSSEL
____________9PM, 84 LICHFIELD ST

____________FRIDAY 25 SEPTEMBER 2009
________________________(rsvp for catalogue)

[84 Lichefield being the new HSP location]

[BTW, there's a Joy Division tribite band playing at Goodbye Blue Monday tonight. There good.]

Two Events

___________________CHASERS

____________NIK GEENE & PATRICK LUNDBERG
____________6PM, JONATHAN SMART GALLERY
________________________160 HIGH ST
____________+
____________LIVE PERFORMANCES BY
____________xNOBBQx (AUS),
____________GRUNGE GENESIS WITH
_________________BRUCE RUSSEL
____________9PM, 84 LICHFIELD ST

____________FRIDAY 25 SEPTEMBER 2009
________________________(rsvp for catalogue)

[84 Lichefield being the new HSP location]

Why Sonic Youth Should Not Be

Belated, I know, by almost a month, but this post (Avant-Conservativism) over at k-punk is well worth the read.

Addenda:
"....there's a massive difference between being a person of good taste and being a great artist...."
"....It seems to me that Sonic Youth's very long career has been based almost exclusively on their being "people of good taste" - curators, in other words, who can turn a notionally ignorant audience on to cool stuff. I think this is subtly but decisively different from being a portal: a portal is itself intensifying, there is a mutual process of libidinization between the portal and what it opens onto, whereas SY now derive practically all their credibility from gesturing to artists more marginal than them...."