2018: December 7th - RIP Pete Shelley

Rest in Peace, Peter Shelley.

The first time I heard The Buzzcocks it was their single What Do I Get, circa 1998, and I was floored. After coming up in the early 90s and absolutely HATING the pop punk movement (do I hate green day more than I hate crappy 70s bands like Ace, Styxx, and Kansas? Yes. Yes I do), I was shocked to find there was pop punk that didn't turn everything I loved about the original 'punks' - a social movement more than a sound, per se - into a marketing ploy. Then, to find that as that as they evolved, the Buzzcocks melded more with the Post-Punk movement, I've often felt this band were way more important in the annals of rock history than they are generally given credit for. Even I haven't listened to the Buzzcocks as much as I feel I should, my familiarity starting and stopping with songs on an old mixtape back in the day, and an career-spanning anthology Mr. Brown gave me years ago.

I began working on my Top Ten Favorite Albums of 2018 list the other day. Did Beak>'s L.A. Playback make the cut? Honestly, I'm not even sure yet. It's always a favorite year-end activity of mine, to comb back through all the music that came out over the past year and boil down my ten favorites, but it's never easy. There's A LOT of good music out there. I also always look forward to reading other people's lists, chief among them the ones published by Heaven Is An Incubator and Joup's Daniel Fiorio. I'll definitely be posting links to those here when they drop.

In the meantime, here's some Live Beak> I found on youtube. Love KEXP! So many awesome bands - reminds me of the old Peel Sessions, or in a more contemporary, LA way, Part Time Punks.



Playlist from my travel day yesterday was primarily six sustained hours of Burial's Untrue, with a few other things thrown into the mix. That's how I travel: I put on an album, almost always electronic in nature, and drill it on repeat. This helps me reach a strange, liminal state, a kind of hypnogogic trance, and that helps me ride the day out in a strange but beautifully peaceful fugue, where none of the inconveniences or discomforts of traveling bother me, and I end up with a creative re-charge. Previous albums I've done this with are Boards of Canada's Geogaddi, Music Has the Right to Children, and Tomorrow's Harvest, and Moderat's II and III.

12/06:

Burial - Untrue
Burial - Kindred EP
Bohren & der Club of Gore - Gore Motel

Card of the day is super special today, because my good friend Missi surprised me with a present last night - a Mini Thoth deck. No disrespect to that Hansen Roberts deck I've been using as a back-up over the last year, but I have absolutely NO connection with it. Actually, while I can admire the beauty of many decks out there (chief among them that mind blowing Vertigo Comics deck), Lady Frieda Harris/Aleister Crowley's Thoth deck is the only Tarot deck I have a working connection with, so it's the only one I use. Maybe someday that will change, but I kind of doubt it.

I broke the deck in reading for Missi last night, and as usual, her understanding and interpretation of Tarot always inspires me, so the cards are charged and ready to go, and to celebrate I'm doing a spread today instead of just one card:

Full disclosure: I never factor in reversals. That said, while making this giff, I wanted to portray the cards exactly as they were drawn, so I kept that intact. Also, the fact that all three cards are reversed either totally negates the idea that a reversal in this case would matter, or testifies to it. Either way, I read them as the card, not their positioning.

This is interesting because it slightly mirrors the drawing I did for Missi last night, with two Cups divided by a Sword card. My overall reading is simple - I'm having trouble with the setting for the final scene in the book, because it's not enough of a 'set piece.' to change it, I must be cruel or kill one of my darlings - something about the scene that I've been adamant not to change. This will lead to a breakthrough.

2018: December 4th

Recently, I've had a brutal nostalgia for the late 00s. In some ways I find this odd, because that time period is largely a cold, lonely bubble for me. At the same time, I am a person who often enjoys cold, lonely bubbles, and winter always brings that out in me, so I guess this is all right on schedule.

The other thing about the time period in question is, by and large, the late 2000s didn't seem at the time like a hallmark era for new music. There was a definite feeling of lethargy and fraud as the digital file model began to destroy the industry we had known. Looking back now though, there was a lot of good stuff (not as much as now). Just look at a lot of the what's been creeping into these pages the last few weeks and you'll get a taste of what I was listening to during those years: LCD Soundsystem, Underworld, Burial, Kylie, Friendly Fires, Crystal Castles, Arab Strap. Lots of electronic, pop, and dance. I feel like the first decade of the new century, my second and final, ended when I fell back hard into metal, specifically black metal. The interest had been bubbling up again for a few years - Opeth and High on Fire were really the only 'metal' bands I listened to consistently during this time (Type O doesn't really count as the kind of metal I'm talking about and they're always a constant), and then really only closer to year's end. Somewhere around 2009 I got curious and began skulking through the metal sections of the few remaining record stores in the area. I discovered The Ocean Collective's Fluxion, the reissue, and from there it wasn't long until Blut Aus Nord blew my mind and sent me into a progressive Black Metal spiral. But as I said, most of that era was electronic music-oriented for me, and I'm falling back into those sounds pretty hard right now. Especially Burial's 2007 debut, possibly both the most iconic and enigmatic record of the era. Nosing around online for a track to post here, I found this:



I haven't had a chance to watch this documentary yet, but I can't wait to dig into the story of this album, because as I intimated above, I was still under the impression there was a cloud of secrecy around Burial and his music. I knew at some point an actual picture of him made some rounds online, but other than that I know nothing. Also, this is another little tidbit I found that blew my mind.

**

To wrap around back to a topic from a few days ago, during my recent re-watch of 28 Weeks Later, I found that it contains one of the most horrifying sequences I've seen on film. A lot of the horror is created in the camera work, but let's not gloss over directing a crowd this size; the sequence really gives you the feeling of utter helplessness that can accompany being stuck in a surging crowd. I've been there - not on this level, but in my teens I was at a Pantera show at Chicago's Aragon Ballroom where, after the show as everyone filed out of the concert area and down the double stairs that led to the ground floor exit, some stupid with a taser began to send wicked jolts of electricity running through the nuts-to-buts crowd. This was only a year or so after the AC/DC stampede that killed several people, so probably with that fresh in their minds, the crowd began to panic. Luckily, the situation never escalated beyond mere potential for disaster, and we all made it home safe after all.

Here's a little bit of that scene I'm talking about; it will suffer viewed out of context, so I'm really only leaving this here as a frame of reference for what I'm talking about. If it's been a while since you watched it, or if you haven't seen it, 28 Weeks Later is one of the most worthy sequels to a fantastic original film in recent memory, and very much worth your time. Plus, Robert Carlyle:



Playlist from 11/02:

Frank Sinatra - Ultimate Sinatra
Zombie Zombie - A Land For Renegades
Playlist - NIN between live sets (get HERE)
Opeth - Deliverance
Burial - Untrue
David Bowie - Low
Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy OST

11/03:

The Music - Eponymous
Burial - Untrue
Arab Strap - The Red Thread
Brainiac - Hissing Prigs in Static Couture
Polvo - Today's Active Lifestyles
Mastodon - Once More Round the Sun
Uniform/The Body - Mental Wounds Not Healing
Perturbator - B-Sides and Remixes, Vol. 1

Card of the day:

Instability. Situations that can lead to hot-tempers. This is a work-related pull, I think so I guess I should be on the look out for things that piss me off here and try to play it cool when I encounter them.

Burial - Rival Dealer

Really digging this new Burial.

Burial - Come Down To Us

Buy directly from Hyperdub here.

As much as I looove Burial's 2008 Untrue I have been lax in keeping up with his output - largely because there wasn't any for a couple years.

Burial - New Record Coming This Month (via Exclaim!)

I have to completely plagiarize Josiah Hughs from Exclaim!'s story from this morning and post this great news along with the same video he used because honestly I completely missed Burial's EP last December. So the above is from that and I'm tripping on new-old Burial music and the fact that two days after I just said to someone, "When the hell is Burial going to release something new?" I get this and then two weeks later I get more.

Exclaim has the full story here.