Saturday morning and Nuno Canavarro.

Nuno Canavarro Wask

Nuno Canavarro [Untitled]

I made this poster for the Junior League Band’s show at the Rock N’ Roll Hotel in March. It will be printed on 19″x25″ Madero Beach Speckletone French paper, and have 3 colors - metallic gold/olive on the bottom, orange in the middle, and a deep brown on the top screen.

There are things about the poster that I like a lot (bird guy), and others that I’m still not sure about (everything else in the layout)… but overall I am pretty happy with it, and I think it reflects the band’s sound pretty well - just listen to the track below - picture my bird-man rockin’ out on that banjo solo that you hear 3/4 of the way through the track…

They’ll be $10 at the show.

Junior League Band We’re The Fools

This poster, for the Wild Beasts‘ show at the Black Cat next month, went out this weekend. I did it in 2 colorways, one on Starch Rain Speckletone, and one on Chocolate Speckletone, both 25″ x 19″ with editions of 50 for each. I’ll post photos when I get them back from Grand Palace.

The show should be great… I feel like the Wild Beasts are a bit slept on. Their last album, Two Dancers, is in my irrelevant opinion, one of the better albums that came out last year. It’s kind of dancy and accessible, but still manages to have some dark and weird qualities that make it unique. I’m not sure why they haven’t become really popular… or maybe they have, and I just need to get out more. Either way, I’m really excited to see them live… you should come too, and buy a poster.

Wild Beasts Fun Powder Plot

Wild Beasts This Is Our Lot

Sent these two Posters down to Murfreesboro, Tennessee this week for the old squeegee treatment. They are mostly inspired by The Clientele’s song “Harvest Time” (below), and the “Bonfires on the Heath” album artwork.

I can’t wait to see how that Tangy Orange, “Harvest by Night” version turns out. I’ll post flicks when I get them back.

Editions of 75, $10 at the show.

The Clientele Harvest Time

With all of the “best of the 2000’s” lists that have been going around these days, I find it hard to believe how few have mentioned Cannibal Ox’s 2001 classic, The Cold Vein. I am not at all interested in attempting the absurd task of listing my favorites, there were so many… but the more I think about it, The Cold Vein stands out as one that affected me more than any others I can think of.

El-P’s dusty, dystopian production, leveraged dissonance and discord in a way that I hadn’t really ever heard… it was loose and wild, but still maintained the controlled precision that a Hip-Hop beat needs. With eclectic samples from artists like early Philip Glass and Giorgio Moroder, the beats set the stage for a dark, Post-Apocolyptic scene like something from Blade Runner.

The album pushed envelopes lyrically as well. Vordul Megallah’s, Raekwon-esq, stream-of-conciousness verses, were like rapid-fire, atonal, rhythmic assaults - you can hear this clearly on his two minute verse at the end of “Pigeon”, or the second verse of album opener, “Iron Galaxy”. On the flip side of the album opener, Vast Aire delivered clever puns with a cool, calm flow:

“(and if there’s Crack in the basement), Crackheads stand adjacent. Anger displacement from food stamp arrangements. You were a stillborn baby, Mother didn’t want you, but you were still born. Boy meets world, of course his Pops is gone. What you figure, that chalky outline on the ground is a father figure?”

I’m not at all saying that this is the best album of the decade, or necessarily my favorite, but if I had to pick one, I think it may be the record that sticks the most for me. I honestly can’t think of any album that came out in the past ten years, that changed my point of view, or opened up my mind more that The Cold Vein.

Cannibal Ox - Iron Galaxy

Cannibal Ox - A B-Boy’s Alpha

Cannibal Ox - F-Word

Cannibal Ox - Pigeon

I’ve got a few things on the horizon for the new year so far, like a couple of show posters for Wild Beasts and The Clientele (both really amazing bands) in February, an almost completed, online-store (that will be called Bodega Arcade), and a new album of music for Brownstone Megaphone that is under way (this is a slow-going process, but going nonetheless). Updates on said items soon.

Happy New Year and Congratulations to my good friend, the talented and newly engaged, Dave Glanz.

Oh, I also have a new rubber stamp… it kinda looks like a hamburger… oh well, I needed something quick for the last round of posters.

Wild Beasts - Two Dancers (ii)

The Clientele - Jennifer & Julia

Often regarded as the precursor to Classical Minimalism and Ambient music, I think it is fair to go a step further, and say that Erik Satie was making repetitive, loop based music, similar to what’s often heard in modern, electronic music (even hip hop), before electronic music existed. Just listen to his Furniture Music compositions, notably Part 3: Phonic Tiles (2nd track below). You can almost hear the GZA’s voice over those menacing, looping strings from 1917. Sure, many hip-hop beats have sampled similar string sections, and that may be why this sounds familiar… but what’s notable with Furniture Music, unlike most other Classical music of it’s time, is that the pieces start, and end, with that would-be sample. Satie intended the phrases to be short, the compositions to be repetitive, and the overall piece to sit in the background of the room like a piece of Furniture.

Erik Satie’s - Furniture Music, Part 2: Tapestry of Wrought Iron

Erik Satie’s - Furniture Music, Part 3: Phonic Tiles

Erik Satie’s - Sports And Diversions - Le Yachting

Erik Satie’s - Gnossiennes #1 - Lent

Black Dice - Kokomo

Here’s some stuff that has been repeating on the player (and my newly rekindled internet passtime, Lala) a lot lately.
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First up is Zypressen - Obscure Japanese RIO from the 90s. Kills me every listen. This track is the one i repeat the most, if you can approach it with an opened mind, and get past the tense, proggy intro, it should blow that opened mind of yours.

Zypressen - Tangent (New Version)
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I’ve been a fan of Odd Nosdam’s smokey, filthy production for a number of years now…. but somehow always lose track of what he’s doing. His latest soundtrack (for some skate video that I am unfamiliar with) got added to the “repeat often” list immediately. It’s like an El-P greatest-beats mix tape. Fuzz..

Odd Nosdam - We Bad Apples ·
Bibio. Yeah, he’s all over the blogs lately. He single handedly, launched me head first, back into a faithful electronic music listening phase. “Ambivalence Avenue” is so good. It is one on my favorite albums of the past few years. I didn’t know what song to post, so i am posting the one everyone posts… listen to the album… it’s all over the place, in a good way.

Bibio - fire ant
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And lastly we have Kelpe. Boy did this album take me by surprise. Bouncy electronic beats. It’s like Jay Dee on acid.. or mescalin… or somethin. It’s got a sick album cover too. The whole album is worth a listen… trust me.

Kelpe - The Blankout Agreement
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Thanks to Jesse from Provocatively Evocative, for posting these nice words about me.
Enjoy your weekend, and I’ll try and do the same. thanks.

“I once used a vocoder borrowed from Bernie Krause when Eno and I did the Bush of Ghosts record. It was beautifully made, but rather complicated and very expensive.

A Harmonizer cost thousands of dollars, a digital reverb set a studio back maybe 10K, and a full-fledged sampling device like a Fairlight or later the Synclavier cost much, much more. But soon the price of memory and processing dropped, and the technology became more affordable. Inexpensive Akai samplers became the backbone of music like hip hop and DJ mixes, and sampled or digitally derived drum sounds took the place of live drummers in many recordings. And we were off to the races, for better or worse. With the digitization of sound, digital recording and eventually the CD became possible — and not too long after that, the capacity and speed of home computers was sufficient to record, archive, and process music…

…It’s not so surprising to witness the end of many of the delivery systems for recorded music — vinyl, cassettes and CDs. Somehow those changed from one form to another so rapidly over the decades that to see them all go away isn’t that much of a shock. I don’t really miss them all that much, to be honest. But to imagine that I might live to see the end of print — books, newspapers and many magazines — is mind-boggling. Publishers and news organizations might argue that they are not like the music business, but the patterns are too similar to ignore, except by those who don’t want to see them. Print and books have remained more or less unchanged since Gutenberg, but all that seems about to become history.”

David Byrne always has interesting things to say. Recently he offered up his thoughts on the new, digitized world that we live in, and the role that the Internet has played in the end of long time traditions like books, film and personal privacy.

As cliché as this topic may sound, Byrne still does a good job of provoking new thoughts on the matter, and offers the unique perspective of someone who has had the opportunity to be a part of the ever changing culture. I recommend giving his journal entry a quick read, and, as with the Brian Eno quote yesterday, I am making this the inspiration for my MSCED image of the day.

Here are a few bits of genius that Brian Eno and David Byrne collaborated on in the past. Enjoy.

Talking Heads - Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)

David Byrne - Two Soldiers (LP Version)

Brian Eno & David Byrne - Mea Culpa

Charles Burns did the artwork for Karin Dreijer Andersson’s (of the Knife) solo project, Fever Ray, it looks and sounds really good.

UPDATE: This artwork is actually not Charles Burns, but I guess just heavily influenced by him… as was explained to me by a commenter whose comments were accidentally lost with many others when I gave this site and the DB an overhaul.

15 days into the New Year… time for my favorite(ish) 15 songs from 2008.

Many of these are from albums that would also make up my “favorite albums of 2008″ list if I chose to make one. Some of them have also appeared on the many “best of 2008″ lists that currently saturate the music blogosphere.

Lists like this are stupid, I know. I am not a music critic, these are just some of the songs that influenced me musically this year.

They are listed in no particular order. Enjoy.

Lau Nau: Lue Kartalta

Nat Baldwin: Mask I Wear

No Age: Things I Did When I Was Dead

Atlas Sound: Recent Bedroom

Paavoharju: Kevätrumpu

Matmos: Polychords

Gang Gang Dance: First Communion

Q-Tip: You

Department Of Eagles: Phantom Other

The Dodos: Jodi

Portishead: The Rip

Meredith Monk: Skeleton Lines

Animal Collective: Water Curses

Man Man: Top Drawer

High Places: From Stardust To Sentience

I woke up today feeling like shit, dragged my ass to work in the freezing cold, and found this little Deerhunter booklet waiting for me on my desk.

I’ve seen Deerhunter live once, and I saw Atlas Sound live when the album first came out, but I unfortunately missed there show at the Blackcat on November 4th because of all of the election madness that was happening that night (not because I was sitting home drinking beer and cheering on CNN like an Obama fanboy, but because the U street corridor was a very unappealing scene of madness that night… and I was drunk at a bar somewhere cheering on the TV…)

Anyway, Deerhunter, and Bradford Cox related projects in general, have been some of my favorites over the last few years, and this little booklet they gave out at the Nov. 4th show made me like them a little bit more. Thanks to Jon Lee for picking it up for me that night, I wish i would have made it. It’s the little things.

Deerhunter: Nothing Ever Happened

Deerhunter: Saved By Old Times

Dan Deacon has so generously posted all of his albums prior to Spiderman Of the Rings as free downloadable MP3’s on his site. The link that he has on his homepage doesn’t work, use this one.

I think these have been up for a while, so you might hurry up and download them before they are gone - unfortunately you will need to tediously download each song one by one - I think Acorn Master is my favorite of the albums up there so far.

Lots of great weirdness, like this:

Dan Deacon - Big Big Big Big Big

I thank my good friend Zack for turning me on to Yellow Magic Orchestra a while back. This whole album is way ahead of its time (1981), sort of reminds me of a more industrial, Japanese version of the Art of Noise. These two tracks go together so well, play them back to back and enjoy.

“Stairs” and “Seoul Music” from the 1981 album Technodelic:

Yellow Magic Orchestra - Stairs

Yellow Magic Orchestra - Seoul Music

…that I am feeling at the moment. Here’s one track from each, they are all very different. enjoy!

1. Lau Nau - Nukuu - Painovoima Valoa

2. Vast Aire - Dueces Wild - The man Without Fear

3. No Age - Nouns - Things I did When I Was Dead

4. Matmos - Supreme Balloon - Rainbow Flag

5. Stars like Fleas - The Ken Burns Effect - You Are My Memoir

6. Xiu Xiu - Women as Lovers - I Do What I Want When I Want

I was talking to Victor yesterday about color, and was reminded of the band Negativland, and their weekly KPFA radio show called “Over The Edge.” Don Joyce, a Negativland member, hosts the show which features a number of hilarious characters, one of which is Crosley Bendix, Cultural Reviewer and Director of Stylistic Premonitions for the Universal Media Netweb. The reason this came to mind, was because one of the most infamous Crosley Bendix “reviews” was one in which he reports on the discovery of a new Primary Color, called Squant.

Anyway, I am posting this for Victor, and for anyone who has never heard the soothing, brilliant commentary of Crosley Bendix.

Here are three segments from the show, the first being “Squant”, the second is a review on “Style” (one of my personal favorites) and the third is the discussion of “Domestic Art.” All of these clips are from the late 80’s - early 90’s.

Also, I am posting a Negativland classic, the controversial “Christianity is Stupid” from the awesome album “Escape From Noise.” If you don’t know about Negativland, they are a very important part of the history and innovation of Plunderphonics and sample based music in general - you might spend a minute researching their “feud” with the band U2, or their hilariously controversial prank on the media and the backstory to their album Helter Stupid.

Negativland’s Crosly Bendix - Squant

Negativland’s Crosly Bendix - Style

Negativland’s Crosly Bendix - Domestic Art

Negativland - Christianity Is Stupid

I heard a nice feature on NPR’s ”All Things Considered” yesterday about Meredith Monk.

Meredith Monk is an American composer, singer, film maker, choreographer and performer whose Minimalist, Avant Garde work has been an inspiration to a number of artists like the Kronos Quartet, John Zorn, Todd Reynolds and Bang on a Can, to name a few.  She is considered a contemporary to the likes of composers Steve Reich, and Philip Glass.

Her newest album, Impermanence, combines soft piano textures, minimal string backings and her trademark extended vocal technique - a panning array of abstract vocal flourishes, sometimes reminiscent of Laurie Anderson, and other times sounding more like Bjork.  Its a really beautiful album, if you are a fan of things that are a little different… and especially if you were a fan of Big Science.  

I really like it.  Here are my two favorite tracks off of the album (so far).

If you like them, you should go buy the album.

Meredith Monk - Skeleton Lines

Meredith Monk - Particular Dance