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A new issue of Perfect Sound Forever is out. This iteration of the online music 'zine features an interview with Dan Snaith of Caribou, who talks about favorite bands, his creative process, and most interestingly music downloads.

The interview also links to a less-than-informative page about a new Caribou DVD. After seeing Caribou live, I wished I could buy a DVD of the videos projected on stage, and it seems my wish has come true.

The new issue also has a feature about Jandek, including a guide to the artist's vast output. I particularly enjoyed the reviewer's rating system, which ranges from "mulch" to "masterpiece" and his use of the Kurt Cobain quote, "Jandek's not pretentious, but only pretentious people like his music." I think I may have seen this quote before, but reading it today it seemed particularly apt.

"Border Lord" is probably my favorite country song of all time, and Border Lord might be my favorite Kristofferson album, although The Silver-Tongued Devil and I is in close contention. Listening to my well-loved LP, I wondered if Border Lord was finally available on CD. I absent-mindedly checked Amazon, and, although I thought it had never been released on CD, third-party vendors had an old version of the out-of-print CD - for $110. Yikes, I wonder why CBS has never reissued this album if people are presumably willing to pay that much for a CD.

I dragged the needle back to the start of side one, and the chorus "How much did you lose/ between the laughter and the tears?" stuck out at me. "What a great line," I thought. I then remembered Lou Reed's line, "Between thought and expression/ lies a lifetime" from "Some Kinds of Love." Is this just a coincidence, or are "between" constructions particularly effective in songwriting?

Nigel recently expressed skepticism about The Velvet Underground's third, self-titled album. I'd say "Some Kinds of Love" alone is worth the price of the record, which isn't to mention "Jesus" and "I'm Set Free," which got me through plenty of stressful undergraduate evenings.

Vice magazine has a muddled little video called "Do They Know It's Halloween" up on their Web site. Presumably playing off of Band Aid's 80s benefit single "Do They Know It's Christmas," the song is a benefit featuring "hipster" artists. (It features indie bands like Arcade Fire as well as corporate rockers like Beck and Rilo Kiley, so I don't know how else to categorize.) I wonder if this Unicef fund-raising is an effort by Vice to rehabilitate their image after a series of news stories pointed out the right-wing politics of the hip rag. The publisher of the site later said the politics were an elaborate hoax, but I've found so much offensive in the book, I find it hard to believe that it's all intentional. Regardless, I do applaud the magazine for bringing attention to suffering in the global South.

At a post-conference party last night, I mentioned this Simon Reynolds article about Gang of Four to a friend who has written extensively about the band. The band's early records are full of anti-institutional rhetoric that invokes thinkers like leftist thinkers like Gramsci, yet the band was rarely political in the sense of street-level action. Reynold's discussion of their later career is enlightening.

The extent that some of the band members pull the levers of the culture industry really is strange.

On Wednesday, I ran into a former student asked, "Are you going to see Gang of Four tonight?" The band was playing at Emo's on their reunion tour. I told the student I thought the show was sold out, but, in reality, I've been too busy to go to shows. If I had planned ahead, I might have budgeted time to go, but Reynolds' lukewarm reception of the band's reunion cast out any thought of going. This seems like it was a good decision. My friend said the Austin show was terrible.

Nigel points to a neat resource online, The Krautrock Album Database, which purports to be an exhaustive reference to German experimental rock of the late 60s and 70s. The database includes mp3 clips from Krautrock albums.

Last Monday, I caught Metal Machine Musik a Krautrock documentary made especially for the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown. Student films and TV appearances comprised most of the movie, which was tied together with historical detail. I would have rather watched the music clips. I've read Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler several times, and I feel well informed about the music, and it seemed that most of the audience were also Krautrockgeeken. Some of the narration seemed factually wrong, and there were historiographic problems throughout. Despite the narrator verbally sprinting between clips, I enjoyed myself thoroughly.

Sneaking a peak at Pitchfork this morning, I learned that blues musician R.L. Burnside passed away Thursday at the age of 78. I saw Burnside perform at a bar in Oklahoma City back in 1997, and I had some of the most fun I've ever had at a show. Burnside sat onstage in a rocking chair singing and strumming his guitar, while his grandson pounded out motorik beats from the drumkit. It was the kind of scene that requires guzzling bourbon and hollering. I was a little afraid to talk to him, but I shook his hand and got his autograph after the show, and he was a really warm and friendly man. I remember pressuring my roommates to go to the show with me, saying it might be the last chance we got to see him. As far as I know, it was.

Blues music invites all kinds of discussion about authenticity, and Burnside's music raises some particular questions. He played a more primitive, rocking rural style of blues that contrasts with urban blues styles that privilege technical ability. His label Fat Possum specializes in garage-y blues styles from the rural American South, but is often criticized for dealing in blues that appeals to indie rockers (like me) rather than blues connoisseurs. I think debates over authenticity are stupid to begin, so I say, forget the connoisseurs, if Burnside was playing his stuff in the Mississippi hill country, it's authentic.

Pitchfork also reports that Alex Chilton, the leader of Big Star and The Boxtops, has gone missing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I hope the lovable weirdo and rock icon is safe.

Although I attended Flaming Lips parking lot and boombox experiments in the late nineties, I still regret not attending the Zaireeka midnight release party at Norman's late, lamented Shadowplay records. It was probably my best chance to listen to the album the way it was meant to heard, with all four discs playing at the same time.

That is, until now. I just saw that the Alamo Drafthouse is staging an outdoor "screening" of the audio project later this month. The Web site says the folks from the downtown theater are "setting up a massive quadraphonic sound system with which to broadcast the album." I know this is splitting hairs, but if the album has four discs, doesn't it have eight channels of audio? Shouldn't that be an octophonic soundsystem? Perhaps they're mixing down each disc into a single channel.

A few years back, I kept hearing rumors that the Lips were working on a 5.1 mix of Zaireeka, which seems to be a much better format for home listening. Of course the idea of playing four CD players at home simultaneously is a little preposterous. However, I don't know whatever came of that project.

It's been too darn long since I've blogged anything. I was going to blog the story of Nike's appropriation of classic Minor Threat cover art when Pitchfork ran the story on Friday. Carrie at Stay Free! points to a thread where users have photoshopped other album covers into ads. The quality is uneven, but some of my favorites rehash Nick Drake, Gang of Four, Funkadelic, Wire, Emerson Lake and Palmer (I'm embarrassed to identify that cover), and Slint.

With the obvious exception of ELP's Tarkus, these are all records I'm quite fond of. I picked these because I thought the were the best executed and the funniest, but I wonder if my taste in music influenced my picks, or people who share my taste in music tend to have photoshop skills.

Apparently, there's someone blogging about Caribou with even more fervor than I. Through my referrer logs, I found Caribou Stuff, a blog devoted to everyone's favorite Canadian electronic project.

Caribou Stuff provides some useful information. At the show Friday night, Matthew and I were blown away by the animation projected during the show. The blog tells us that it's the work of a design group called delicious 9, which made all of the videos shown on the tour, as well as a video for Max Tundra's "Lysine." I agreed with Matthew when he said he would buy a DVD of the music and animation at the show, but apparently no DVD is currently available. However, the animation for "Yeti" is viewable online. It's not one of the freakier videos shown, but it's a gooder.

I really enjoyed last night's Caribou show. In the past, I've gone to see my favorite band play, then walked away disappointed, not liking the band anymore. This was not the case with Caribou. The second song they played was my favorite, "Bees," then followed it with my favorite song off of Up In Flames, "Bijoux," I was really excited, then worried that Caribou is like totally mainstream now, and my favorite songs are fan favorites, with jocks pumping them out of their Jeeps in the Jenks High School parking lot. I hope not.

When I think of electronic projects like Caribou playing live, I usually think of automated rhythm tracks playing while the artist sings or plays guitar. There was certainly live guitar - Mr. Snaith had a touring guitarist - but all of the drums were live, but the vocals were canned, which was certainly an interesting approach to a live set. Snaith played guitar on the first song, then played kit and keyboards for most of the show. He's quite a drummer; I was really impressed when he and the touring drummer busted out polyrhythms I assumed were programed when I listened to the records.

One complaint I had about the show was that the sound levels seemed a little too high. Much of the time songs I knew well sounded muddy and distorted, and, even with earplugs, the music was about two notches louder than what I would listen to with headphones. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, I go to way too many shows where the music is way too loud. I'm 29 years old and I'm already losing my hearing. Granted, this is primarily from cranking up the volume on my headphones to cover up subway noise, but I worry about the younger kids at shows who aren't thinking about tinnitus.

I am so excited about the Caribou show Friday that I can't think about anything else. I don't think I've been this excited to see a show since I was an undergrad. I feel like a huge dork, but my constructive side says, "run with it! When was the last time you felt excited about anything?" I looked on the Austin Chronicle's recommended shows to see if Caribou was listed. Indeed, it is a recommended show; I hope it's not all crowded. The preview says to expect "promises dueling drum kits, synchronized visuals, and walls of guitar on stage," which has me saying "hell yeah!"

Another one of the recommended shows is the Sightings show Monday at Church of the Friendly Ghost. I'm not familiar with Sightings, but my pals from Numbers on the Mast are playing, so, of course, I'll be there. I hope I can get my grading done beforehand, so I can see Sightings' "feedback drift/burst/smash/crash on top of addictive Liquid Liquid-like groove." I wonder why the Chronicle didn't mention Numbers on the Mast; they've recommended NotM shows before. Maybe they don't want to overhype NotM, and create a Spoon-like backlash.

OK, I am positively obsessed with the song "Bees" off the new Caribou record The Milk of Human Kindness. It sounds like something I've heard before, like a song I have in my record library, but I can't think of what it might be. Can anyone think of a song with a shuffling guitar riff and a diaphanous horn line on a record I have? I don't have a huge record collection, but Prentiss and Erich are the only folks who have been around my music in the past few years, so this is perhaps a silly question.

Also, does anyone know if the guitar line is a sample or if it's something he recorded and added a layer of tape hiss? Dang, it's a good song.

In other news, I've been a bad fan and downloaded the new Sleater-Kinney album before it's release. Oh, but, it rips. It rips, and it is loud. Not loud in the way I typically think of Sleater-Kinney, but sludgy Mudhoney-loud or Black-Sabbath-loud. I love it.

Oh sweet, Manitoba Caribou is going on tour and will be playing Austin on May 13. Would any of you out in blogland want to go? Up In Flames was probably my favorite record of 2003.

It has been a while since I've posted anything about music, so I will add that I really like the new Fischerspooner record, Odyssey. I won't say that it sound different than their first record, but it's different; it's much more pop-oriented, and it doesn't seem to be as thick with irony as #1. My two favorite songs are "A Kick in the Teeth" and "Cloud."

Perhaps fortunately, I listened to the latest New Order record, Waiting for the Siren's Call, a few days before I got Odyssey. My initial reaction was disappointment, partly because I'd hoped that it would sound more like Fischerspooner. When I refined my opinion of the album, I thought that New Order could be a little more like Primal Scream, radically updating their sound, as they did on Xtrminator. As Pitchfork notes, its a solid record, "from a group that doesn't need to prove a damn thing to anyone," but I have a hard time getting excited about it.

Recalling more pleasant kinds of memory in Wired, Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore relates his experiences with mix-tapes. Somehow, I had assumed that the mix-tape was as old as the consumer cassette deck, but Moore contends that the mix-tape only really came into being with the advent of portable cassette players like the Walkman. Although the piece is nostalgic, Moore doesn't really argue that the mix CD is that different than the mix-tape, saying, "CD technology has displaced the cassette in the mainstream, and mix CDs have become the new cultural love letter/trading post."

This weekend as I was compiling a mix CD for a friend who's moving away, I became circumspect about my more perfectionist tendencies, and asked myself, "Why do you feel like you have to fill up all 80 minutes of the CD?" I realized it was an atavistic impulse from my mix-tape days. If you don't fill a side of a cassette, you leave your listener with an annoying amount of dead air. I had a repertoire of songs I used to fill a side up, using a short Guided by Voices song as a short interlude to trim off a bit of blankness, or simply allowing Neu's "Lieber Honig" to cut off short once the head hit the leader. Of course, mix CDs simply end when the music ends, so I don't need to worry about kicking my pals into minutes of silence.

Moore's piece is part of an anthology he's editing, called Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I probably would have snapped this book up as soon as I had the spare cash. Not all of my reading was light, but back then I loved to read about other people's experiences, particularly subcultural experiences; I suspect that this led me to be an English major. I don't read much material like this any more, perhaps because of my grad school workload and perhaps because I've had my own experiences, but I suspect a lot of my attraction to this kind of reading had to do with being a rebellious kid trapped in Oklahoma, thirsting for something different.

John Darnielle has a really interesting post on Fiona Apple's new record Extraordinary Machine, which her label decided not to release, but found an audience and acclaim after it leaked to the Internet. He compares the record to Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which found an audience in the same way, after the label decided the record was too uncommericial for release.

Darnielle doesn't speculate on whether Sony will eventually release the record, but he does scold fans who villify record companies for privileging sales over artistry, saying " To be angry about the way the major labels do business while simultenously patronizing (for example) McDonald's, or Verizon, or Mobil Oil... is hypocrisy of a rather high order." I suppose there are indie rockers out there that have ambivalent attitudes toward corporate power. I like to think that I avoid giving my money to the really evil überconglomerates - choosing to eat at the co-op over fast food or running in American-made New Balances instead of Nikes - yet I still put gas in my truck and I'm enamored with my new iBook. Still - and I suppose I'm speaking as a Media Studies guy - in many ways I think corporate dominance of culture is one of the most pernicious ways corporations can exert their power, since it narrows the discourse to what media outlets will allow. Moreover, while there is certainly a broad degree of elite connoisseurship* among many indie rock fans, my knowledge of punk/indie history reminds me that music emerged as a site of contestation of corporate power because it is relatively inexpensive to independently produce records (as opposed to gasoline or even movies) and find a receptive audience.

In one passage, Darnielle also attempts to demythologize the role of record labels in earlier eras of rock:

Its somewhat interesting to contrast this myth with the parallel myth of the label exec as fly-by-night huckster. One label I thought was notably absent was Elektra, which introduced proto-punk bands like Love, The Stooges, the MC5, and, sigh, The Doors to a national audience. I suppose it would be easy to mythologize it as a visionary label, but I suppose the narrative of a folk label switching gears and signing Love could be as much about sacrificing ideals to turn a quick buck as updating values for a changing culture. I suppose I could do my own research, but does anyone know of work that's been done on the history of Elektra?

*dang, I had nearly forgotten about indie-rock snobbery until being confronted by it at some South By Southwest shows this week.

Its been Spring Break at UT, and SXSW time in Austin, so I haven't been blogging much. I've been having a good time at free day shows and catching up on movies at night. Vietnam played the KVRX showcase on Wednesday, and I suppose they'd be my "discovery" of the week. I enjoyed their set quite a bit; they have an interesting blend of boogie-rock and Flaming Lips-style sweeping bombast.

I finally got to meet Edith before her set this afternoon. Having talked to her on the Interweb for a couple years, it was great to talk to her face to face. Here's a shot of Edith playing her fancy blue Gibson:

Unfortunately, I couldn't hold my hands steady enough to get a good shot without flash, so you'll have to suffer my cliched digital-camera-in-a-dark-club shot.

I just caught the end of a master class with Bradley Beesley, the director of Okie Noodlin' and Hill Stomp Holler and an OU alumnus. He showed us clips of his latest movie, Fearless Freaks, a documentary about the Flaming Lips that will be premiering at the South By Southwest film festival. The Flaming Lips often make me nostalgic for my days in the Norman-OKC metropolitan axis, and I was feeling wistful until he showed us a longer scene of one of the members cooking up, which reminded me of not-so-pleasant days in Norman. I'll probably have to wait until May, when it comes out on DVD, to watch the whole thing, but it looks like it will be an awesome flick.

One thing that was kind of funny about the class was the Chainsaw Kittens' Tyson Meade was in the audience, and he sort of looked at me with that don't-I-recognize-you look. I'd only talked to him a couple of times at parties in Norman (althought I saw him at parties a lot) so I didn't go over and introduce myself, but it was one of those moments when you realize that you might be more of a scenester than you admit to yourself.

One of the issues we're exploring in my "Media/History/Collective Memory" class is nostalgia. We're looking at how it can be invoked for political purposes (generally on the right) or as a marketing tool. The New York Times has a story today about how many eighties bands are retooling, but having a hard time marketing themselves. Apparently, my generation doesn't idealize the 1980s the way that Baby Boomers romanticized the 1960s.

Certainly the cultural conditions of the 1980s were different from those of the 1960s, making it more difficult for folks my age to feel nostalgic about the Reagan era, but I also wonder if there were institutional conditions within the music industry that also generated products with a short shelf-life. For example, in the 1960s FM radio was still a frontier for commercial broadcasting - for much of the decade FM transmitters were largely used to simulcast AM programming. In the late 60s, FM radio was accessible to low-paid DJs who could introduce the public to favorite records and enjoyed a great deal of latitude over their broadcast. In contrast, FM listeners overtook AM listeners in the early 80s, and by then had become an important outlet for record labels to promote bands. It had become another arm of an increasingly corporatized music industry.

I'm on the tail of Generation X, and I enjoyed a lot of eighties music in high school: bands like Talking Heads and New Order were old bands from a different era. Still, I'd have a hard time enjoying more commericial bands from the early eighties. I sometimes listen to a retro hour on a local radio station, and I'm dismayed when they'll play a song that was released when I was in high school or - even worse - in college. I'll think, "Pavement isn't retro... yet." But I suppose, for the purposes of radio programming, anything that is off the rotation and the listeners want to hear is "retro.

Folks, I've been too distraught over The Unicorns' breakup to blog much. Maybe I'll have more to say in a while. In the meantime, listen to the title cut of their farewell EP, "Unicorns 2014."

Friday's Oscilate Night #6 looks to be rad, and not just because my boys from Numbers on the Mast will be playing. Its gonna be a laid back party-party, and we'll be dronin' on and on almost to the break of dawn (10pm-2am) at Ruta Maya. Most exciting is Tim Hecker, whom Josh is flying in from Ottawa, and makes, according to Pitchfork, "crackly digital static, mournful swoons of drone, and rumbling bottom." It may not be a genetically engineered army of Trans Am fans, but it'll be the next best thing.

...and since this post borders on nonsensical, I'll add that, I just wrote "I was Joey Lawrence all over the place" on a comment here. I think "Joey Lawrence all over the place" should be a phrase that gains some cultural currency. I know I'm Joey Lawrence all over the place about the next Oscillate night.

Rest in peace, Dirt McGirt. Gosh, this saddens me. I listened to "Shimmy Shimmy Ya" running this morning and cited Ol' Dirty Bastard in a class paper a few weeks back. I lived in Philly when ODB was busted at the Gray's Ferry McDonald's and helped settled a bar argument over whether ODB would live in West Philly or North Philly. I love that Old Dirty Bastard.

I'm still in Tulsa; my truck had transmission issues during the drive up from Austin and I've kicking it here while I had the tranny rebuilt. I just ran into my boy Reed Mathis from The Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, and, boy howdy, he is amped about their new record Slow Breath, Silent Mind, which will be released Tuesday. I haven't listened to it, but Reed showed me the packaging, and it is just gorgeous. The digipak features shots of the band recording at TU's Tyrrell Hall and a DVD of a live show. I think I'll pick it up when I get back to Austin.

Oh rad, Pitchfork reports Warp Records will release a DVD set of videos by Warp artists September 21. The DVDs will contain 30 videos from Warp's 15 year history. I generally don't see the point in buying DVDs, except if they're super-cheap or they're full of music videos. My friend Regina got me the Matador Records 10th Anniversary DVD for my birthday a few years back, and I think its a great buy. I can put it on for some eye candy without feeling commited to watching the whole thing.

Perhaps Jared will be the only one that appreciates this, but, good gravy, I just found a .torrent of Renegade Soundwave's 1989 album, Soundclash. KTOW, the indie/alternative station in Tulsa when we were kids, used to play "biting my nails" so much I still get it stuck in my head from time to time. I can't wait for the download to complete.

I've got a fat stack of wax sitting out, and in an effort to duplicate the runaway success of "The CDs on My Desk Right Now," I've created another Listmainia! List, "The LPs Atop My Crates Right Now." This list gives readers a snapshot of my musical diet by enumerating the LPs sitting atop my crates at this very moment. I mostly buy used music, so, yes, my taste is about twenty years out of date.

Pitchfork has posted the top 20 of their "Top 100 Albums of the 1970s," and, considering I own 80% of the records in the top 20, I can't quibble too much with their rankings. Okay, I might have swapped Another Green World (#10) for Low (#1) and I positively despise Led Zepplin, but I think the list is far better than the bizarre Guardian list Nigel recently blogged.

I decided to create an Amazon.com Listmania! list, "The CDs on My Desk Right Now." The purpose of this project is to give readers a sense of my musical taste and parody the pedestrian lists Amazon publishes on it site, by documenting the CDs sitting on my desk right now.

Amazon asked me to give myself a title that would indicate my qualifications for making a list. I couldn't think of a better qualification for a navel-gazing exercize like this than "blogger." If you're hungry for more navel-gazing, you can check out my Amazon Wishlist.

Stay Free! has an awesome interview with Public Enemy's Chuck D and Hank Shocklee on how changes in attitudes toward intellectual property have affected hip-hop. I've often wondered why the aural assault of PE's early records - or even the atmospherics of the Wu-Tang Clan - have largely disappeared from mainstream hip-hop. I've often thought that lame drum-machine driven tracks like "Rubberband Man" were instantly catchy on the radio, while denser cuts just sounded muddy. But the gentlemen from Public Enemy contend that music with layers of samples is difficult and expensive to clear with copyright holders, leading them to strip down their sound.

Its great to see an old-school 'zine like Stay Free! still around; when I ran across the article it was a pleasant surprise to see that old familiar title on the page. They even have a print edition!

Hooo-doggie, my pal George's band The Ills have landed quite a gig! The Norman band is opening up for Thrill Jockey mega-stars Tortoise this month in OKC. They'll be playing at Bricktown Live June 11 with Tortoise and Warp recording artist Beans of the Antipop Consortium. I'm still not very IDM-literate, but Warp is one of the best dance labels around, so there's some assurance of quality with that show. I've only seen Tortoise once, in Philly in 2001, but I will say that I actively disliked Tortoise until I saw them live, and now I'm a believer. Congrats George, Blaine, and the rest of the Ills!

Tower Records' location on the Drag is closing next month. I'm a little happy to see one corporate outlet leave the campus area, but I'm even happier about the 20% off everything sale that started today. Unlike 33 Degrees' clearance sale, I was able to pick up one of those CDs that are too expensive to buy at full price, and never turned up used. It's a little embarrassing to admit that I don't have this already, but I picked up Can's Tago Mago at a steep discount this afternoon. I also grabbed Boards of Canada's Music has the Right to Children, plus Cath Carroll's True Crime Motel. I only know her from the Unrest song, but it was only $.99, so its not too much of a risk. I almost grabbed The Flaming Lips box set Finally the Punk Rockers are Taking Acid, but I decided against it, since I haven't listen to them in some time.

I still feel a little bad about spending my money at a corporate store, but, I think of it the same way I think about buying designer jeans at Ross; the big ugly corporation is losing money anyway, so I might as well take advantage. Is there any reason I wouldn't want to participate in corporate culture like this?

As an addendum, Tower is the fourth record store to close in the time I've lived in Austin. (I've lived here since August, 2002) It's really starting to get weird. Has Austin seen a record retailing slump like this before? Are record stores closing across the country? I hope my favorite record store in the whole wide world, Philadelphia's AKA Music stays open. This article from Philadelphia Weekly says AKA has moved out of its location in an old pantyhose warehouse into another space a few doors down.

After the Austin Bloggers Meetup I stopped by Waterloo Records and checked out their used bin. I found T. Rex' Futuristic Dragon on CD for $4.99. I lthink I like T.Rex - I love Electric Warrior, and I enjoy The Slider - but I haven't listened to their full output. Thinking it might be one of those gems hiding behind tacky cover art, I decided to pick it up. Good gravy this a strangely ungood record. The title cut made me laugh so much I played it three times in a row after I fiirst heard it.

Its about time I mentally return from Spring Break and start blogging again. With that in mind, here's a news item that got my attention. Pitchfork reports next month will see the release of a new My Bloody Valentine compilation of old material. The first disc has remasters of four EPs - You Made Me Realise, Feed Me With Your Kiss, Glider and Tremolo - while the second disc contains the proverbial "rare, unreleased material." I own Feed Me With Your Kiss, Glider and Tremolo, but my copy of Feed Me With Your Kiss (on import CD) is pretty muddy-sounding, so a remaster of that and the unreleased material will make this worth the money for me. Of course, I still haven't gotten around to purchasing The Quine Tapes.

The first concert I ever saw as a teenager was The Dead Milkmen at Tulsa's late, lamented Ikon. I had to sneak out of the house with Jay and Eric because of some tensions with my mom. It was good guilty, fun. Now it seems kind of embarrassing to say they were the first band I ever saw live, but I know plenty of people who claim dorkier first shows. With that context, I'll say I am sad to learn that Dead Milkmen bassist Dave Blood committed suicide Wednesday.

Walking down The Drag one day, I spotted a poster for “Pimp Juice.” Remembering Nelly’s song from last year, and noting how the poster’s palette was ripped straight from a Miller High Life can, I assumed the poster was a joke or an old poster for the single. Yet it looked suspiciously like an advertisement for a real beverage.

A few days later I was in the bodega across the street from my apartment building. On the counter sat a stand-up card extolling the virtues of “Pimp Juice.” I asked, “Is this for real?” The men working burst out laughing and pointed to a cooler filled with the “premium energy drink.” I shocked, exclaiming, “Goodness gracious, there really is a product called ‘Pimp Juice’!”

I suppose Gruv, the high-energy drink with alcohol, has failed to slake the enervated thirsts of America, and pop-hopper Nelly has had to get into the mix. In the song, he notes, “Pimp Juice is color-blind/you find it work on all colors and kinds,” so perhaps Red Bull and its ilk failed to appeal to certain demographics.

Last weekend, Josh hosted a party at his little apartment complex featuring my pals in Numbers on the Mast. As NOTM were spreading their ambient cheer, a few kids were shouting and engaging in horseplay, I scolded,

"Hey guys, this is like ambient nerd church. You're supposed to be quiet!"
NOTM member Trey added, "This is ambient nerd church! Shhhh!"

When I lived in West Philly, a local organization the Philadelphia Ambient Consortium - Music and Noise (PAC-MAN) used to put on monthly shows at the Rotunda, a deconsecrated church owned by UPenn. In emails, I used to related glowing accounts of the "ambient nerds" and their "services." Although Josh' party lacked the ambience of PAC-MAN, here are a few shots from the Austin version of Ambient Nerd Church:

A few weeks ago I saw DJ Danger Mouse's The Grey Album in the record store, thought "huh?" and filed it away in my memory bank. Now, I've learned that its a concept album remixing The Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album together; thanks to legal action by media giant EMI, its been pulled from shelves; and, good lord, it is tight. Illegal Art has the whole darn album posted online in mp3 format, with more discussion of the controversy surrounding the record.

Band Web sites generally disappoint me. For example, DAT Politics' Web site is not only unhelpful, but also annoying. Other bands never seem to update their Web sites with current live dates. However, I just learned of Canadian band The Unicorns, and, not only is their Web site amusing, it really makes me want to go out and get their record. Although The Unicorns are regrettably using Flash, they do have some good band Website practices. Every band should include at least a few cuts on their Web site, some whimsical stuff that reflects the band's personality, and, most importantly, tour dates, so I know when I can see them.

Citing concerns about the mental health of workers, Czech labor unions are demanding stores stop playing Christmas carols or compensate retail workers, according to the AP. If stores persist, the union is demanding two days off or 500 koruna for each worker tortured with the merry strains of the season. One year, I worked at a Nine West during the holidays, and I can attest that the incessant repetition of christmas carols can easily affect a worker's sanity, but I do wonder what "Good King Wenceslas" would say.

Good gravy, UK paper, The Guardian has named OKC's Flaming Lips the greatest band today. Readers of this website will know that I enjoy The Flaming Lips, but, oddly enough, today I had a little confrontation over the Flaming Lips.

In the lab for the game class., I was playing Notwist over the PA for a little background noise. As class started, a particularly self-absorbed student put on Transmissions From the Satellite Heart, much to my dismay.

"This just isn't going to fade into the background," I said.

"But its the Flaming Lips."

"Yeah, yeah, I lived outside OKC for five years; I don't need to hear this again."

But I didn't get into that album until after Clouds Taste Metallic came out and had finally fallen in love with the band, so I feel a little righteous in telling the kid to take the damn rock-and-roll off the PA.

Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren writes about music created on vintage gaming hardware in the latest Wired. Calling the phenomenon "8-bit punk," he suggests the trend constitutes a new kind of folk art, self-conciously using techology for popular expression.

There's no mention of Dallas 8-bitters Treewave in the McLaren piece, but here's an old MSNBC story that gives them props.

Here's a "Cat and Girl" comic that depicts a conversation I might overhear around campus.

It looks like the efforts to wean inquisitive music fans off of file-sharing services and onto paid systems has taken a step forward. One of the major criticisms of the paid services is they only offered songs from a smattering of major labels, while ignoring indie labels almost entirely. Pitchfork reports, however, that Apple Computer has inked deals with indies Matador, Kill Rock Stars, and SpinART to ply their music on the iTunes Music Store. I can just imagine teenyboppers across America are trading in their Pepsi caps for Sleater-Kinney cuts online.

The Dallas band Treewave is the brainchild of programmer/artist Paul Slocum, who programs EPROMs for Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 cartridges to create musical sounds. I saw Treewave perform in Austin a few weeks back as part of the Cinematexas festival, and I was quite impressed by the music created by ensemble playing 2 Commodores, an Atari, and a 286 Compaq luggable, accompanied by a reprogrammed Epson dot-matrix printer. For techno-centric experimental music, Treewave's tunes are quite poppy and melodic. The band has mp3s here for your listening pleasure.

I've been meaning to post this Pitchfork feature, "Castoffs and Cutouts: The Top 50 Most Common Used CDs" for some time now, but I just haven't had the inspiration to blog much these days. The feature is enjoyable and informative, and I got a little bit of gratification of guessing the #1 most common used CD. Check it out, and you may get some good tunes on the cheap.

Today, Pitchfork has one of the funniest news items I've read in along time. This story relates how bubblegrunge producer Butch Vig suffered $50,000 in damage after a runaway backhoe collided with his recording studio. Although its not quite as tragic as the losses Sonic Youth suffered when their studio and gear were destroyed in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, the story notes Garbage's next album may be delayed as a result of the incident.

Finally, as the proprietor of infobong.com, I would be remiss in not pointing readers to this story about an Australian schoolgirl who, as a show-and-tell presentation, demonstrated how to build a bong out of a coke bottle.

Tonight I fired up my truck, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear The Warlocks' "Shake the Dope Out" broadcast on KROX, Austin's "New Rock Alternative." As the song played, I wondered why the corporate station would be playing a relatively obscure indie band. The record's been out for a year, I thought, maybe the label's making a push for commercial airplay. The song ended, and DJ Andy Langer announced he was hosting "The Next Big Thing," a show dedicated to playing the newest and hottest artists in alternative music. After some patter, he played "Soldier Girl" off The Beginning Stages of The Polyphonic Spree," an even older record.

I know KROX is not unique in describing their format as "New Rock Alternative," but whenever I hear "Rock Alternative," I think of "Pasteurized Processed Cheese Food," as if federal labeling requirements prevent KROX from calling the commercial music they ply as genuine "Rock." Of course if there were media labeling laws, Fox News would certainly have to drop the "News" from their name.

Oh, wow. The Pixies are getting back together for a reunion tour.

I'm getting wistful for the day in eighth grade when I first saw the video for "Here Come Your Man." Or riding around the brown Fairmont, while Casey played "Crackity Jones" on that yellow mono Sony Sports boombox. Or putting "Cactus" on a mix-tape for my Internet girlfriend in Oregon. Sniff. The Pixies were the music of my youth. I hope they come to Austin.

My skepticism about The Polyphonic Spree was completely unmerited. I finally broke down and picked up The Beginning Stages of the Polyphonic Spree the other day, and, good gravy, this is a good record. They do sound quite a bit like The Flaming Lips, but Mercury Rev might be a better point of comparison. Oh, its good. If you like The High Llamas or Lee Hazlewood - or if your handle is Loophole - you should check it out. You won't be disappointed.

Update (4:35PM): In their music rating system the late, lamented Might magazine described their top rating as "this album made me like music again." When I was a young, impressionable kid, I read that as a silly hyperbolic joke, but, boy howdy, this album makes me like music again. Its led me to dig out my old Mercury Rev CDs and jump around my studio apartment. Yeah, I like The Polyphonic Spree.

Edith blogged a while back about the fracas over the similarities between The Flaming Lips' "Fight Test" and Cat Stevens' "Father & Son." In this interview, Wayne told The Guardian Stevens now gets 75% of the royalties from the song after the group settled with the former folkie. I later ran across a story from The Calgary Herald that suggests Paul McCartney may have taken the melody of "Yesterday" (which I understand is the most-recorded song in history) from an older pop tune called "Answer Me."

That bastion of rock-and-roll culture, The Wall Street Journal, got into the plagiarism fray earlier this week. According to this New York Times story, the Journal published a piece Tuesday that accuses Bob Dylan of taking phrases verbatim from a book called Confessions of a Yakuza in lyrics on his latest album.

A grad student with a Poststructuralist bent might roll his eyes, invoke Barthes, and mutter, "Like, duh, all cultural products are simply rearticulations of earlier texts." Of course, the file-sharing wars demonstrate that the music industry still cling to Romantic notions of authorship., so that argument is not going to get a lot of play outside a New York Times story. Its interesting to note, however, how much recorded music plays a part in musical appropriation. In one of my undergrad music classes we were taught that Blues, as we generally understand it, did not really emerge until the 1930s when musicians began aping records from the likes of Robert Johnson and Ma Rainey, which solidified the genre's keys and song structures. Moreover, record companies were inclined to release songs that audiences could immediately recognize as "The Blues."

Listening to The Kinks' "Party Line," I thought of a paper idea that I'm sure I'll never use. The paper would "attempt to understand the social role of telephony through the textual analysis of popular songs." Aside from "Party Line," texts might include the B-52's "6060-842," Chuck Berry's "Memphis Tennessee," "Hangin' on the Telephone" by Blondie, and, perhaps, "Pennsylvania 6-5000." I'm excluding Tommy Tutone's "867-5309" because, um, I don't like that song. These are just the few songs that I thought of off the top of my head; I'm sure readers could think of more tunes.

Edith's post on Cocteau Twins' lyrics inspired me to find a site with lyrics for a similarly unintelligible band, My Bloody Valentine. I had always thought that the line from "When You Sleep" was "When I look at you/ Ohhhh, I don't know we're through," but the site insists the lyrics are, "When I look at you/ Oh, I don't know what's (true)." The site does acknowledge that MBV's lyrics have a degree of ambiguity saying, "the lyrics are not as important to the sonic structure of the songs as they are in traditional recording techniques."

In related news, I received word yesterday that the Austin Shoegazer Meetup is canceled this month for lack of interest. Considering the latest issue of Magnet has a feature on the shoegazer revival, surely there are at least five shoegazer fans in the ATX that want to get coffee and discuss Movable Type, effects pedals, or whatever it is shoegazer fans talk about.

In a Morning Edition story on struggling record stores, NPR featured an interview the owner of my favorite record store in the whole wide world, Philadelphia's AKA Music. Although crap bonanzas like Tower Records are losing money these days, Mike at AKA says his store is doing well. He attributes his success to emphasing indie rock, obscurities, and experimental classical and electronic music, rather than commercial, mainstream crap.

This afternoon, I caught Norman's Starlight Mints play an in-store at Waterloo records. I'm not a huge fan of the Mints, but it was free entertainment, and I thought I might run into some fellow Sooners there. As the band set up, I scanned the room and saw a hipster looking guy wearing a Norman Tigers football jersey, but I didn't see any Norman people I recognized.

The band was about to start, when the singer said, "Wait. We need a bass player. Where's Blaine?"

"Is Blaine Nelson playing for the Starlight Mints?" I thought to myself.

Indeed he was. Blaine is an outstanding bassist, who has played with my pal George in the latin jazz band Conjunto Clave and the insanely amazing Ills, which could only be described as live, improvisational drum-and-bass. It struck me as a little odd for a Jazzhead like Blaine to play an indie band like the Starlight Mints.

The Mints sound a little like mid-90s Flaming Lips with a little bit of that Olivia Tremor Control non-sequitural wackiness thrown in, a sound I imagine is hard to pull off live. When I saw them at Philadelphia's Khyber a year ago, they annoyed me, but today's show was solid and enjoyable. Perhaps the new bassist made all the difference.

After the set, I went up to Blaine who was packing gear on the stage. We exchanged greeting and shook hands, and briefly caught up.

I asked, "