THE BLUES - "Vol I" - Tape - 2014

  I pulled up in front of the punk house last night and I could hear that THE BLUES was already playing in the garage. I locked up my bike and wandered in, but the room was so packed that I couldn't even stand in there, so I stood out back and shot the shit while THE BLUES wailed away. I overheard some bro-dawg say "Yeah, I don't know what's going on in there. It's like, just noise or something, but there's all these people, like, staring at them and just looking around like they're thinking really hard about it. I had to leave."
   When their set was over, I told their guitarist, Marissa that I couldn't get in the room and she said "Yeah, I looked up from my guitar and was surprised that we hadn't cleared the room yet." Max, the saxophone player added "Yeah. That's what happens usually."

   THE BLUES play something between noise and no wave and free jazz and skronky weird vibes, incorporating only the sounds of guitar and sax. I described it once as "like the financial district of San Francisco at rush hour" and "If you played this on a boombox in a crowded subway, someone might beat you up." I stand by that and I mean it as a compliment. The band has already put out a second release, which is an art zine (you can download it from them or maybe they'll give you a physical copy if you see them) and they have interesting future releases planned, which I will not give away.

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Keep up with THE BLUES on their website, which I described as "janky" and my friend Caitlin made fun of me. "How can a website be janky? You just click on things and it works right? That's not janky"

Members of THE BLUES also play in WET DRAG, STILLSUIT, UZI RASH, LAND ACTION and moreeeeeee.

VARIOUS ARTISTS - "Field Recordings From The Edge Of Existence. Vol 2" - Tape - 2013

   When I'm at my job, I rarely let down my guard to reveal details of my personal life to my co-workers because I feel like there's too many facets of it that are confusing or difficult to explain (I want to say that I also work with a lot of wonderful people who "get" me 100%. I have a lot of co-workers). For example, a nurse told me that she routinely spots me all over the city, riding my bike at all hours of the day. She explained, "I feel like I've seen you over 50 times in every corner of San Francisco, but you've never noticed that I'm in the vicinity." As I was coming to the end of a 12 hour overnight shift, I barely looked up from my paperwork and casually said, "I have to put on psychic blinders in this world to block out the constant barrage of bullshit so that I can continue to fool myself into believing that this city can be a beautiful and magical place." As those last words fell from my lips, I started to catch myself and glanced up to see the nurse looking both horrified and confused. I stammered "I'm...I'm sorry I didn't see you. Sometimes my best friends have to grab me to get my attention as I pass them on the sidewalk." It was too late. I revealed a little too much and that nurse gave me a look that simply said "Let's just not talk while I'm here, okay?"
   Sometimes, the blinders are on too much and I even miss the things that I should be looking out for. My friend Vanessa gave me a copy of her zine Asswipe (issue 5), which consisted mostly of interviews with Oakland bands that I had never heard of, even though I go to punk shows in Oakland regularly. I read through the interviews and felt all kinds of emotions. I was intrigued, annoyed, confused, enthralled and enlightened. Never bored. For the first time since living in the Bay Area, I felt completely and utterly out of touch with what was going on in a facet of the Bay Area punk scene. It was awesome. I think some people would take that as a sign to drop out or move on, but I found it to be exciting...like, there's still interesting and productive scenes thriving on the fringes. When I feel like I should take the blinders off, I think that maybe I should keep them on and venture further underground.
   I was handed this tape by Yacob in the backyard of an Oakland punk house and it showcases some of the bands talked about in Asswipe (p.s., one of the better Bay Area zines), as well as some non-local heavy-hitters. Almost everything on the tape was recorded live on a handheld tape recorder by Yacob in the Bay Area, so the sound quality is lo-fi (as hell) but still engaging in a totally fucked way. PATH OF RUIN start off the tape with a wild, noisy, violent stab of no wave and their recording trainwrecks into a live set by the BILL ORCUTT and JACOB HEALE DUO. Orcutt should be no stranger to any fan of noise and outsider sounds. The tape continues on with more harsh, (possibly) challenging recordings by KAREN, EXIT BAG, ETTRICK and more.
   Side 2 begins with a live recording of last year's phenomenal SF performance of SUN RA'S ARKESTRA led by Marshall Allen (I feel embarrassed now that I didn't include this on my year end top ten because it was one of the best, most transcendent musical performances I saw last year, by far) at the Victoria Theater in the Mission District. It's followed up by a free jazz performance by SF SOUND GROUP, who also played the ARKESTRA show. I liked the recording of them on this tape, but, honestly, I was unimpressed by their live presentation and spent their set drinking cheap beer on the corner of 16th and Mission while people-watching. I wish that this tape included the opening performance by HANS GRUSEL'S KRANKENKABINET, but this world is not perfect. The tape closes with the no-wavey improv (?) blanket of BAT MAGICK. Overall, this tape is challenging, interesting and does a phenomenal job of documenting the underside of the Bay Area's noise scene. Blinders on. Head down.

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Tape is not split into tracks...just side A and B, since everything runs together.

File is large. 203 mb.

I think this tape was released in an edition of 25, so it's probably gone. 

If you want to hear more from people involved in these projects, check out Albacore Records

TACHYCARDIA - CD - 2004

(I just want to start by saying this band is not from Alabama. Just bear with me)

   Often, when I tell people (who live outside of the south) that I grew up in Alabama, there are a few different reactions that folks like to cycle through. One reaction is embarrassing (for them not me): people seem to like to repeat the state name back to me in a faux southern accent as if to accentuate the fact that I come from a backwards, fucked up place and a southern accent can represent absolutely nothing besides ignorance and stupidity. Another reaction is a sense of shock followed by the usual reply of "That must have been weird." Yeah, of course it's weird, because all of youth is weird because you don't yet know what the fuck you're doing in life and you bumble around in an awkward haze. Plus, is it any less weird to grow up in a flat in Brooklyn, a bus in Bolinas or a tiny house in eastern Iceland? Still another reaction is a story of the one time that person drove through Alabama, got out at a gas station and heard someone say something fucked up. I'm not gonna deny that Alabama has some really fucked up, racist qualities, but so does Portland, NYC, the central valley of California and pretty much everywhere else in the entire world.
   A lesser-known quality about the state is that it has a long history of avant artists and musicians...many are well known and others fly far under the radar. When i was really young, I knew there had to be something out there besides top 40 radio and bad sitcoms on TV. I didn't know how to find it. I didn't know where to look, but I knew it was out there somewhere. I could feel it lurking in the shadows just out of sight. By the time I was in 4th grade, I had found THE CURE and VIOLENT FEMMES (thanks to a sister who knew what was up) but even that seemed distant...like I didn't know those people. It was cool to listen to their tapes, but I needed something to pull me into a different world altogether. When I was 11 or 12, I found myself in a dusty, wooden storefront in Montevallo with my sister at a performance art....thing.... Some people read bad poetry and others just kind of yelled at us. Then, LaDonna Smith and Davey Williams sat in front of the room and blew my little pre-teen mind, playing trombones and guitars like I had never seen before. That was it. I was fucked. It was over. I started finding more stuff (I still am). I discovered SUN RA, who many people believe is from Saturn but is actually from Birmingham, AL. Listening to his music helped me to open my mind up to all the possibilities of what's out there in the world and the rest of space. These people left deep, lasting impressions on me that have influenced my outlook on music ever since.
   That's why it was important for me to see SUN RA'S ARKESTRA a couple of weeks ago when they played in SF. Led by the 89 (!!) year old Marshall Allen, the Arkestra was transcendent and amazing. When they hit their first note, I felt at home. To see a band that was that trained and professional, but still able to improvise and go out on a limb was just a beautiful experience. (I'm getting to the point here in a second). I started thinking about the ways that they influenced my thoughts on free jazz and improv throughout the years.....the ways that I'm quick to dismiss whole swaths of the genre, even though the world of improv is so vast. To me, there's a huge difference between improv and "just kinda dicking around", but I know that not everyone thinks that way. I love the way that each performer can swirl around in their own world for a while but has an idea of when to join the others and work together.
   At some point during that performance, I started thinking of TACHYCARDIA, who I hadn't thought of in years. I got home and dug out this CD, which is just one 54 minute improv track of three accomplished artists in a studio in Austin. There's no riff or loop that they ever come back to but I think this recording has it's own character, personality and drive for the entirety of the recording. I can't really be the one to tell you how you should feel about this because I think everyone has their own approach to improv. For some that approach could be a full sprint in the opposite direction, but because of the weirdos I encountered during my early days in Alabama, I welcome this stuff with wide open arms.
  On this recording, TACHYCARDIA is Carl Smith on tenor sax, Walter Daniels on harmonica, clarinet, piper's chanter, nose flute and Wade Driver (from 50 MILLION, APOGEE SOUND CLUB and LIBERTAS) on drums, bugle and whistle. The amazing art (included in download) is done by Marcel Herms from Holland.

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Thanks to Wade Driver for allowing this online.

FRED LANE & RON 'PATE'S DEBONAIRS - "From The One That Cut You" - LP - 1983

    The record pictured above is probably one of the most important records (to me) that I will ever put on this blog. This record is responsible for vastly altering my ideas of music and changing the way I've thought about it since hearing this for the first time. It's just as important to me, musically, as THE MINUTEMEN'S "Double Nickels on the Dime", seeing the CRAMPS when I was 12, hearing the HICKEY LP for the first time, meeting my friend Harry and experiencing my first live IMPRACTICAL COCKPIT show. I came across it at Sunburst Records in Huntsville, AL when I was absentmindedly flipping through the new releases (which is weird since this thing came out in 83, but recorded in the mid-70's) one day in 1996. All of a sudden, this freak (pictured above) was staring me in the eyes and I didn't know what to think of it. I mean, how do you pass up a record with scrawled handwriting all over the cover, accompanied by THAT guy with band aids all over his face? Well, I couldn't pass it up. I bought it immediately without knowing anything about it and I remember Jay (the store owner) looking at it and saying "What the fuck is this, man?"

    When I first put it on, I was a little disappointed. This was just like...lounge music or something. I had some bummed out visions of those people who buy "Exotica" records and think they're really wild. I almost picked up the needle off of the record, but then it started to get weird. It started to delve into a cacophony of horns and weirdness that was approaching free jazz and straight up noise. The arrangements would flow out into a mess that sounded unstructured, out of tune and completely out of focus...but then it would all come back together in one big swell that sometimes worked, sometimes didn't, but I fucking loved it. This record grew on me over the years and started to inform the way I approached music and helped me to gain a better understanding and appreciation of the true freaks of the music world.

     But who ARE these people? That's the question that took me a few years to figure out (I didn't use the internet until 2001, plus no one I knew used it in the 90's anyway). It was next to impossible to find out any info about them in books or zines. The closest thing I found was a tiny blurb in the book Incredibly Strange Music but even that hardly said anything worth noting. After a while, I found out that this was from my very own home state of Alabama! The liner notes say that some of these songs were recorded in a stage production and a musical. After more digging, I found out that the group that played on this Fred Lane LP (the group consists of 21 people) had worked previously on another LP called "Raudeluna's 'Pataphysical Revue", which was recorded live at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 1975. It was basically a variety show that consisted of deranged swing standards, noisy improvisations, hardware store noise, a "Concerto for Active Frogs" and more.They needed an M.C. for the night, so they chose their friend Tim Reed, who renamed himself Fred Lane. The record sounds crazy, fucked up and beautiful and I love that it happened in front of a live audience at a school in Alabama. Between the noisy improv, pre-recorded applause, and door prizes (4 used tires), most of the audience walked out.

   Before this even, a core group of folks from this band were hosting group paintings and jam sessions at their house where prior experience wasn't necessary. This was the beginnings of this whole scene of people and improv musicians that continues to thrive to this day. Around this time, the guitarist Davey Williams met and started a longtime collaboration with LaDonna Smith (both on this Fred Lane LP) that continues to this day (incidentally, I saw them perform a performance art piece in Montevallo, AL when I was 12 or 13 that was a pivotal moment in my life that helped me to realize that "something else" was out there beyond mainstream music, beyond suburbs and beyond what I had ever even thought about. It meant a lot to me.).

   Anyway, let me get back to the point here. Apparently, this record ("From the One That Cut You") was literally inspired by a crude note scrawled on brown paper, wrapped around a bowie knife, found in a secret compartment in a 1952 Dodge panel truck when some friends (the owners) came by a house in order to repaint it, in order to elude capture by the naval police. The note, a sort of love/threat/confession inspired Tim (Fred Lane) to write the song, the stage show and create the character who performs the song...all from three sentences written by someone named Fuear. (This info comes straight from an article by Joe Tepperman) The note read " I hope the paine is gone. This is the one that cut you? P.S. Don't wear about Jimmy I will take kear of him the same way I took kear of YOU".

   There was a third album called "Radio Car Jerome" that came out in 1986 and a lot of people seem to love it, but I found it to be too structured and a little hokey. It didn't have the fucked up spark of the previous LP and a lot of the improv was gone. There was also an idea for a fourth LP called "Icepick to the Moon" but it never got past the idea stage and maybe that's for the best. A guy named Skizz Cyzyk has been working on a documentary about Fred Lane for 10 fucking years now and I wish it would come out already. I wrote to him once, asking questions about it and he never wrote me back. If you want to read more stuff about Fred Lane, Say Day Bew Records or the early Alabama improv scene, be sure to click over to the Raudelunas site. Be careful though because it can lead you down a wormhole of misinformation and internet time-suck. Apparently, this crew of folks loves embellishment and Dada-ist wordplay. 

   Also, I could talk about this record and Alabama for another 3 pages, but I will spare you. If you want to talk more about it, get in touch and I will bore you to tears.

Download "From the One That Cut You"