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TANKERTOWN weekly web comicxks
posted by elvis FROM THE SECRET BASEMENT OF BASEMENT SECRETS
posted by cansafis TANKERTOWN weekly web comicxks
posted by elvis Like Chris Cornell said - "Superunknown". ORIGIN & TECTONICS review by Justin Farrar / Cleveland Scene: When consumed as background music, No Doctors' Origin & Tectonics passes for neo-grunge blues rock. Guitarist Elvis DeMorrow grooves like a Midwest punk harboring a secret love for ZZ Top and Free, Mr. Brians pummels his drum kit with boogie belligerence, and Chauncey Chaumpers' baritone wail contains genetic chunks of the Lizard King, Glenn Danzig, and Ian Astbury in its double helix. Move beyond casual listening, however, and the band's fifth album reveals a refined weirdness. This has been the Bay Area quartet's modus operandi since coming together as teenagers in Minnesota nearly a decade ago. Like Royal Trux, their chief inspiration, No Doctors can pass for straightforward rockers and avant-freaks. "AAO," for example, would be garden-variety doom if not for the group's spiky minimalist interplay, sax-man Cansafis Foote's low-end skronk, and the jagged changes. "Yardin," a back-porch jam made muscular with proggy classicism, follows a similarly twisted path. But none of these eccentricities ever gets in your face. This is true even when the band cranks a hypnotic, stripped-down howler like "Tuning th' Sundial," which really isn't that far removed from the Screaming Trees or Soundgarden, except it's just kind of . . . off. (source) posted by elvis IT’S NOT GOING TO SOUND METAPHORICAL Before we gather ourselves around that old bludgeoned coin and shake off egregiously, I should confide in you to maintain my most personal phenomenon. Time is a midget. That’s right, I know I’ve claimed before to read the moon from behind the light of the scriptures, to behold the red cloud in my hand and whisper mantras backwardly at will. Yet every time I open my eyes I only see another flurry. This career as a lifeguard is not very meager and always pays the bills. They told me the track to stardom was laced with nanotechnology but now I behold life in a newest of forms. Bread and butter is my salsa. Forget freshman-phobia—manias are quite passé on the campus scene under the current administration. All strides being produced in auto-intoxication account for a generous heaping of envy in the lighthouse. Back before I knew what scenes were made of, I told myself at least a hundred times that the newspapers were fabrication houses. The industry that most heavily slaughters cattle and citizens will be manipulating our next stock-holder’s meeting in an hour. I’m often tempted to bewilder myself in the name of progress. I don’t indulge any sort of predictable pattern but it’s nothing personal. I’m rooting for you just like I would any do-gooder. The captain asked me to stand down and I actually stood on the side of the deck before swimming some laps, lavishly. This sentence that I’m about to read has been carved into existence by centuries of paralysis. posted by chauncey NO DOCTORS LIVE SATURDAY 11/17 SAN FRANCISCO Also, CansaFis & Mr. Brians will be guest-DJs on KUSF at 1500 PST this afternoon.
posted by elvis TANKERTOWN weekly web comicxks
posted by elvis Have you purchased your copy of Origin & Tectonics yet? And if not, why not?! From Geoff Shiner in PerformerMag: Musically, it's no stretch to say that on their latest full-length effort Origin & Tectonics, San Francisco's No Doctors have found a creative embrace of Captain Beefheart's desert-blind, off-kilter sensibilities. A penchant for the New York noise of Sonic Youth, Television and The Contortions is also apparent in their home-brewed amalgam of the "post" rock movements. Despite the evident relations to their ancestry however, it's clear that No Doctors are serious about bucking conventions. Unlike many of their guitar-toting peers, they turn to a wider instrumentation for percussive and melodic embellishment, which includes plenty of saxophones, gongs and even a glockenspiel. The recording quality is extremely dry, which accentuates the clarity and gristle of their vocal delivery while at the same time bringing more attention to warm and natural instrument tones. The guitar work is well balanced between chunky staccato chords and sustained melodies, yet remains mostly clean on the album. "Invisible Clopes" is a track that makes good use of this motif, where the close sound brings dimension to staggering, near-epiphanal vocal delivery. Space between these dynamic bursts is filled by sinister, rumbling baritone sax and sparse drum work. The lack of any detectable recording effects gives the track a confessional feel of torn emotions, light and dark. But despite the elusive strangeness of No Doctors, there exists throughout this record a whole-hearted showmanship that croons in baritone voices and kinky grooves. Take "Rumble Ring" for example, a quirky headbanging affair that could easily pass for the type of lo-fi dance rock being circulated today. Their talent for bordering on pop reveals a deliberate sense of control, the ability to concentrate their strangeness into a more digestible format. Perhaps it's not quite mind-blowing, but No Doctors are still able to throw a wrench in the works of modern rock music. (source) posted by elvis A DIAPHONE OF ECLIPSES, AN ELEGY FOR SAMSARA How far back now since the aching moonlight was a sweet song of serenity? How many steps have we taken since that fated encounter with the other life? Only a few breaths it seems and we were trapped in a cocoon, face-forward. The whole world was a pre-amble to the liquid explosion. We hovered incessantly like honeybees. Nothing moved of its own volition. Our faces were recklessly compressed against any conceivable source of light or data. posted by chauncey TANKERTOWN weekly web comicxks
posted by elvis JOKE IN A MOUNTAIN TERRAIN DOCTOR: (to the Woodsman) Drum and satisfaction, listen to the key- writing with a key, giving it a chance, the voice here is slight to the feminine, not a sex fantasy caricature, just a true self slightly pushed to anima from the animus, breathing with breasts and freedom, trance of the artist, shedding all fears, freedom, responses… WOODSMAN: Breathe, and drift away… but not to revisit that old familiar land. Today we are inventing unknown terrain. Striking out to render a fresh face on the golden pony. To believe in what was, is death. To remember or acknowledge can only stutter and stultify our transit. The moon’s cabal has called for an echo at the end of time to be our favorite unity in this elegant moment. And so I will blush and swing away from the envious superstition that hides inside my chest cavity. What urge do I owe truth- I, the artist? What goal, or fraction or thermometer? What burden, this silent invisible and hatefully negligent persona non audiencia? ¿Que pasa, señor? Very, un-needed, extinguishable; vim, stirred without definition or intelligibility, un-needed like kabuki. Sound patron, the death-spin dj. I am not distinct, I have no edges. My mess is an acrobat’s mess. Tonight I return and dwell inward and return and dwell inward. Feelings, first, flesh, face, spine, fingers. Order or existing absence, the trials of Europe, the breath of the believer, to speak my piece and for what, un-needed of the chance for claps and lightbulbs bursting. DOCTOR: Breasts heaving-ho in the moonlight and a snow-capped fantasy memory. I unyield you and unburden and relinquish and defeat this deceit. A talking trial lawyer says to me, “I am the phantom.” I hit him violently and abscond swiftly with all verbiage, exiting the roundhouse thoroughly and gracefully. My arc is complete, the voyage is superstitious, the mission is granted and the will is un-denied. All opposites being treated at face value. The clones calling me into lifelessness and a bloody beef of a mess to be had. Say it ain’t so, Wotzy. Sky’ll kill ya if you let it. That was the charm but now I have disappeared in the desert and at the edge the old man is sitting with both legs straight up, waiting patiently. Like a friendly father figure, the type who waves and smiles and speaks none too fast. Then there’s a blast and I look up into the sky and I see my license falling from the sky into my lap. I am sitting on an airplane. Nothing can be too old-fashioned anymore. I am the blessed eagle and this is my forethought. posted by chauncey AN INTERVIEW WITH WEASEL WALTER Weasel Walter is the prolific & outspoken mastermind behind The Flying Luttenbachers, as well as numerous other projects over the years. His new record, Incarcerated by Abstraction, is available via ugEXPLODE next week on 11/15. More information and mp3s can be found here.
Where does your idea of being a musician fit into the broader Well, originally it had nothing to do with it! Those were the days. As a kid, there was no competition, only the act of creation. For a while, creating music in a vacuum was fulfilling to me, until I realized that I wanted other people to hear it. I began to crave feedback and wanted to be in the "game". These days I have to waste a lot of time and energy fighting for shelf space with millions of other products. This constant struggle to survive can be fairly demoralizing. At its worst it makes me think that what I do is artistically superfluous or, that most people have so much shit smashed in their ears that they can't even hear music any more even if it was handed to them. Of course, the field of music (and media in general) has been rapidly
reaching a frightening saturation point over the course of the last 20
years, and I'm afraid to say that the economics of "being a musician"
(i.e., a "professional" musician, one who makes their primary income from
music related work) are fairly bleak for most of us at the moment,
particularly those of us who are trying to create challenging,
intelligent, abstract music. It seems to be the case of most people I
talk to - even professionals who have made good livings in the music
business for decades. The paradigm is analogous to the feudal-style caste
system we have in America - essentially there is a very acute
polarization of wealth distribution/recognition, etc. Unfortunately I am
a member of the lowest "class" of musician (I would prefer to at least be
in the lower middle, After all I turn in a good week's work perennially, Right now, I consider what I do to be a losing battle, but I keep In this current economy what do you think we can do, as non-mainstream artists and musicians, to propel our ideas towards a larger and more sustainable context? I don't think there is much to do other than strive not to make artistic
compromises. We must document ourselves and use whatever mediums we find
effective to transmit out messages. There's already so much mediocre,
pandering garbage in the marketplace that the only music that will truly
survive this morass will be the most fastidiously conceived art. Most
music I see being made today is truly disposable. There must be a
responsibility to create something we (and by proxy, others) will come
back to again and again. There's a lot of music out there with the effect Uncompromising music will always find its audience, but it just seems to take a lot longer. Is there a future we can look to where our arts and ideas are I don't see it coming in America any time soon. It's gotten worse, not better. As long as people are as overfed and complacent as America is, we are doomed on many levels. I should be more worried about what we're doing to the environment, but look at me . . . I'm grousing about making a living being a musician? Case in point.
Can art and music be defined as necessity? Why or why not? That's a tough question. The nihilist in me says that it is not a What inspired you to begin making music as The Flying Luttenbachers? When I moved to Chicago in 1990, I was dead set on being at the epicenter of whatever free jazz scene was there. Basically, I found out very quickly that I had to create one. I glommed onto Hal Russell and we started the band as an instrument changing duo before settling on the two saxes plus drums format we would have for a few years. At the time I felt like I had something unique to say in terms of intensity and drawing parallels between the idioms of punk and free jazz. This was my motivation. What inspires you to create as The Flying Luttenbachers now? At this moment, very little inspires me. I feel pretty tapped out after
having put so much blood and sweat into something that seems largely
taken for granted. My music does have its adherents, but I feel like one
of the biggest bedwetting stepchildren of music around. Perhaps this is
my fate - my lack of compromise and my refusal to pander musically has
created a public indifference towards my art. Creating a music that needs
How do these inspirations differ from what inspires your free jazz and ensemble works, and other bands you have worked with (i.e., Lake of Dracula, XBXRX)? Well, since 2001 the Flying Luttenbachers has transformed itself into a
forum for my complex compositional works. (Maybe the answer to my problem
is to transform it back into something more musically open?) With my new
album "Incarcerated By Abstraction" (out Nov. 15, 2007 on ugEXPLODE) I
think I may have said all I really need to say with this particular
format for the time being. I don't feel any more current motivation to
write very technical, complex, almost unplayable music for the group. The A lot of other bands I've been in have been more of an example of What are the most difficult, and, conversely, the most intuitive elements of your creative process? Logic has a lot to do with my creativity. I am generally trying to create an underpinning of coherence in my work and a lot of thought goes into that. Sometimes I like to utilize a very particular lack of logic or chaos - sort of an inversion of total logic. I suppose I'm an extremist in this regard. I don't really care for the middle ground very much. Emotion is a loaded concept. A lot of people seem to associate "emotion" in music with cliched signifiers. I've seen plenty of music that has the signifiers of "emotion", but sounds totally dead and calculated to me on every level. I don't really care what other people's opinions are about emotion in music because a lot of people don't really know what they're talking about. To them emotion is "happy", "sad", "angry" - these boring, simplistic, black-and-white terms. I don't know if they've challenged me per se - I seem to be my own "challenger" most of the time - but I've been fortunate to play with many musicians that I consider to be of a very high caliber. Mick Barr, Ed Rodriguez, Rob Pumpelly, Mary Halvorson, Marc Ruecker, Jon Raskin, Marshall Allen, Marc Edwards, Marco Eneidi, William Winant and Heather Melowic immediately come to mind . . . I have fantasies about playing with Cecil Taylor, Evan Parker and Keiji Haino. The first two are absolutely superior musicians in every way. I feel a lot of kindredship with Haino's approach to music. I still feel like there are so many challenges left in music that it keeps me going in spite of the demoralization I have felt lately. As long as there are new people and contexts to me, there seems to be hope or potential. Do you have any exercises you employ to build musical creativity? Hmm. Well, learning music is an ongoing process. It never ends. I learned how to write music by analyzing the music of others. I still work on technical aspects of drumming to facilitate the musical ideas I think of. I am constantly researching music and listening to it for inspiration. Another thing is that music has consumed my life since I was about 11 years old . . . to me, thinking about music (or playing it) is really second nature. It's what I do. Hmm. That's a tough question. I think there are some regional differences, but I'm not really concerned with that. I don't find it very fascinating per se. I do think that a lot of music audiences are very jaded currently. This has to do with 1) too many shitty bands, 2) too many shitty venues, 3) too many horrible, inept sound persons and 4) the fact that music is basically an all you can eat buffet that can be had for the price of an internet connection. A lot of people seem to take music (and musicians) completely for granted because they have too much of it. I don't know what's going to happen to equalize this. It's kind of scary. Sometimes I think that there's too much music out there and that the only thing to do is NOT make more music. It seems more noble not to add to the glut of aural shit being pumped out into the universe. Unfortunately music is the main activity in my life, so that isn't really an option for me. It has become an onus. Drunk? It seems this oversaturation that you mentioned earlier, in your view, is related to the internet? It's not totally responsible for, but has certainly helped exacerbate the conditions that we are in the midst of. How has the internet affected your creativity and production? It has decentralized the means of distribution, which is good in some
regards and bad in other regards. The good thing is that it's easier to
communicate with and sell things directly to interested people. The bad
aspect is that there is no longer any real filter for information -
misinformation is rampant as well as a glut of half-baked garbage that
really should have never been released in the first place in any form.
The toilet is so overflowing with musical shit now that it cannot be
flushed. Access to information is a double edge sword - to some it is
liberating, whereas to others it is an excuse for complacency. I believe that this oversaturation ties into the fact that we live in a
How can artists and musicians work to support sustainability for the art form as a whole? Is this a worthwhile goal? You can't teach people to care about things. You can set an example, but you cannot expect people to follow it or even understand it. What I try to do is maintain a diverse, international network of people
with interests outside the mainstream, i.e. musicians, listeners, booking
people, etc. With my music I try to tie together stylistic threads that
seem disparate at first, but have a lot in common. Right now I am making
an effort to play improvised music with as many people as I can. There
are a lot of great musicians here that need to be encouraged to take some
control of their destinies through booking shows and documenting their posted by cansafis
posted by cansafis EVERYONE ON THE INTERNET LEADS 1,000 LIVES If you’re the type that finds a primal confession to be the best mustard, then sit tight and shimmy up, because I’m ready to shed a very spicy bean. Often as I wind and trudge my way from the doghouse to the outhouse and back again, you might spy me dragging a limp and tattered broom behind me. When I encounter a fork, I first look left, then right, and observe the choices of my peers. If there’s a world beyond either horizon, I’m not buying what it sells. I am not an opinion-maker, and I am not a uniter. My mistrust is as firm as cement. My social boundaries are as real as any scientific phenomena, yet sporadically, and without warning, I find myself drenched in a bleak joy that swells up from within and invariably spills out toward my familiar tributaries. As the sun unfurls its arc, either in good faith or absentia, the wind brings me innumerous seemingly solitary tidbits of our storyline. I am a faithful if not always eager receptor. Yet there is a certain perspective that always stirs me. It comes when word leaks that the ship is sinking. I can’t help but feel gleeful when the facts add up to gross misconduct and the rear end of hope. I tremble with a delicate electrical surge of power. It all seems to confirm my hypothesis. For years the world has insisted on following its own charge, much to my chagrin, regularly ignoring my suggestions, rarely if ever asking for my insights. As the sea washes in its bounty of contradictions, I am happy to hear that things are foul and broken, because I’ve known it all along. Spare me your success stories, foul villain. I will not be lured onto your perch of strength. Bittersweet is far too sugary a confection for this palate. I like the truth, and I like it to resemble a stick of beef jerky. Fear is my oil, and without a doomsday to cower beneath, I would quickly still myself into silence. posted by chauncey DON’T EXPECT TO PROLONG THIS INTO A PATTERN OF SQUEALS I don’t read these blogs to connect with other minds; I’m looking to assimilate and codify knowledge. I’m most excited to be by myself. I can respect everyone’s intentions from a distance, but I’d rather not get my hands dirty. I’ve only submitted this in hopes of silencing the ceaseless haranguing by the coterie. Once I’ve spoken I am inevitably burdened with expectations. People project their wild and unruly feelings all over me and it distracts me from the task at hand. My ambitions are modest when I work alone but I always connect with the target. So don’t expect to hear much more from me. I prefer to find a quiet, peaceful position from which to view the world in all its strange mutations. I like to study and read and it’s OK if you never know very much about me. I can be happiest if I just minimize my obligations and dig into the project. posted by chauncey
posted by cansafis BLAME THE MEISTER FOR FRESH FITS OF BRILLIANCE posted by chauncey
posted by cansafis THERE CAN BE NO WORLD MORE SCANDALOUS The intricate unity of emotions that binds us together has fled. The world is no longer a sparkling oyster. In its place I have found only a broken menagerie of crystalline reflections. I am solemn and alone, without a trough to pour my heart in. Long gone is the waterfall of glyphs and gladiators who might romance a tender heart beneath an autumn moon. The sands of the desert have been blown away by gray winds to leave me an empress stranded atop cold pavement. I cling to this ivory cloak because it is the last vestige of another life. My cheeks have long since grown weary from crying, my heart has long since surrendered its hope. Only a falling star or tidal wave could shake me from my precipice. Only a final tear-filled trial will put these bones to rest. posted by chauncey KONSPIRACY KORNER UPDATES A good Chicago Tribune article on the USS Liberty attack, with some previously undisclosed bits. Related Konsp piece is here. Relevant to this recent kitchen sink Konsp segment, the current issue of The American Conservative has an article by the always excellent Philip Giraldi discussing the disinformation campaign related to last month's Israeli airstrikes on Syria, as well as a very good piece by David Lindorff on the B-52 nuke mystery. The Lindorff piece is not available online, but an even fresher take from him is over at Counterpunch this morning. Another quite comprehensive follow-up on the B-52 debacle is available here c/o Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya. The 'convenient' deaths are really stacking up at this point! I note that the "five or six nukes" discrepancy is being dropped from the narrative at this point. The Pan Am 103 case updates are coming quickly at this point, and it appears that a conclusion to Megrahi's current appeal should be forthcoming early next year. Here is a recent update. posted by elvis PRESIDENTIAL FAECES IN FOECUS
RUN posted by cansafis
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