Halloween Time!!

My friend Nick (DJ DJ TANNER) and I (Skyscraper) had talked about doing a Halloween tape since last year, but we didn't get around to it until now.

Listen to/download the tracks over at my bandcamp page, and you can buy one of the tapes from Warm Gospel.

I've also released a number of new tapes on the label, including a new one from DJ DJ TANNER, Theodore Schafer, and Skyscraper.

Currently underway is a tape from Ames, IA's JUXWL, another one from DJ DJ TANNER, and a Warm Gospel compilation, which I am still accepting tracks for, so send me your music if you want it to be included on the compilation.

treyreis@gmail.com

Skyscraper's Worn Gospel

Hello.

My next Skyscraper album, Worn Gospel, is finished and available to be listened to over here.

You can also buy the cassette version of it over here and I'll send it to you with a bunch of pretty stuff.

Some thoughts on drone and Flesh Canoe

I scribbled the majority of this down while sitting at Director's Park in downtown Portland, while working out a write up for one of the new Lillerne Tape releases, Fullerton Avenue Rhythm Arranger by Miracle Blues, whom I know absolutely nothing about. This is the initial direction that it took which I thought was worth posting here, because, for the sake of brevity and relevance, I cut out all of the Animal Collective "Flesh Canoe" stuff when I submitted it to Tiny Mix Tapes, and replaced it with information about the Miracle Blues tape.



This might be a bit of a continuation to an older post I did called Umm, Getting Lost OR I Remember Person Pitch... It Sounds Different Now OR Bands That Play On The Floor, in the sense that both of these posts probably stem from me constantly struggling to explain to people why I like a lot of the music that I do. It's hard telling people that it is more than just "background music," and actually being able to explain why.

Here it is:

The word drone, in its many forms, always seems to imply a sort of subterranean feel. An existence just outside of immediate consciousness. Drone strikes happen from a nearly undetectable mechanical force that seems to come from nowhere and disappear as quickly as it came. A military force with no visible military presence.

The idea is the same when referring to worker drones. Employees capable of doing the work on a nearly unconscious level; their minds wandering elsewhere in order to retain sanity.

Drone, as a music genre, works the same way. A tuning out that exists below our surface consciousness, accented only by little spikes that attack from nowhere and decay as quickly or slowly as they came. The way artists incorporate these peaks above the surface is what seems to differentiate most drone music; it’s the way the song pulls you from the quicksand all drone often spends the first minutes dragging you into.

A friend of mine in Ames, Iowa praised the song “Flesh Canoe” off of the Animal Collective album Feels, explaining that so much of the song takes place below the surface. And while “Flesh Canoe” is far from drone, it does share the same murky foundation—the bubbling pressure of water so deep that nothing escapes without damage, the gospel-like crescendos and guitar chugs included. Avey’s voice serves as the only real peak above the surface. It’s like a condensed drone track without any of the patient danger. No worries. No drowning. No waiting. No hand bursting through the surface to save us from the quicksand. Rather, the hand is offered from the very beginning of the song in the form of a “Young red bird…”

Been a long time...

I haven't been doing much on here... but I've been doing some stuff on my other blogs!!

I have a whole bunch of new tapes out on Warm Gospel, and my next album is about half done. You can hear some of the songs over at muh bandcamp page.

I think I even posted some new missing cat posters on my missing cat poster blog.

Also, Elowah Falls.

Black Dice at YU Contemporary

I received a few strange text messages at 2 AM Wednesday morning from my sister-in-law, Kate, suggesting that, for some reason, her and my brother, Trent, were up in Minneapolis hanging out with my other brother, Trevor, and his wife, Amber. This struck me as odd for a number of reasons.

1. Trent and Kate live in Iowa
2. Trevor and Amber live in Minnesota
3. All 4 of these people are adults with real jobs
4. The text messages were received on a Tuesday night/Wednesday morning
5. 2 AM??

As the sloppy text messages continued, I pieced together that Trevor had had a few drinks and was calling me Gregg. The 5 of them (Thurston included) were hanging out at Trevor and Amber's place up in Minnesota, and it had something to do with "Load Blown!!" and "Black Dice."

A quick google search of the Black Dice tour schedule brought me to the realization that Trent and Kate had taken Thurston with them up to Minneapolis to see Black Dice play and were likely staying at Trevor and Amber's place that night, after a little bit of drinking.

My jealousy was quickly squelched by scanning down the tour schedule and noticing a Portland, OR date on Saturday at a place I had never heard of simply called "YU", though my sense of family comradery was left unfulfilled.

Turns out, the YU was another one of those converted warehouse-type buildings holding strong in inner southeast Portland, and I'd actually ridden by it a number of times. The show took place upstairs in a large, empty loft area with huge windows looking out toward downtown Portland. The floor creaked and I noticed cracks of light from the room below shining up between the boards, making me ponder safety concerns in the event that this show gets out of hand.

Black Dice took the stage an hour later than I expected, led by no openers besides the crackling video footage projected behind the stage and a few scattered drone tracks falling softly out of the PA.

Most of the tracks reached some pretty upbeat highs, sending pockets of the all ages crowd into all out head-banging frenzies, and I kind of assumed most of what they played was from the new album, Mr. Impossible based on the 1 or 2 listens I managed to fit in before the show and the few reviews of the album I had browsed earlier in the week.

I had never seen Black Dice play before and, needless to say, they did not disappoint. The waves of distortion and reverse-fucked noise blaring from the 10 speakers set up on stage hit like the end of the eye of the storm. The best part is watching each of the 3 members of this band standing up in front of their table of electronics, turning knobs and pressing pedals, and being completely lost as to where the individual sounds you manage to discern from all the mess are actually coming from. I'll never get over loving that feeling.

Noise noise noise noise noise noise noise noise. MMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Tiny Mix Tapes

My old College Radio DJ name, Top Heavy, has been brought out of retirement to be used as my pseudonym to push new music that I find scattered across the internet on people via the Chocolate Grinder section on Tiny Mix Tapes.

Expect a few posts a week, and, ya know, listen to the songs, too... if you want.

Cabin in the Woods

I made it a goal of mine last year to finish all of Stephen King's Dark Tower series -- a 7 book (soon to be 8) series that sets the entire framework for every piece of fiction King has ever written. I was told that all I needed to do was read "The Gunslinger" and I would be hooked, so I read it one day after finding it for $1.99 at the Goodwill store near my house, which has a surprisingly well stocked selection of literature.

Upon finishing the book, I wasn't hooked.

In fact, it took until the fourth book, The Wizard and Glass before I was even sure I wanted to finish the series, something I did end up doing, somewhat reluctantly I must admit, in the early months of 2012, just missing my initial goal.

Something I can say though is that I love it when writers, artists, directors, etc. create worlds, and with The Dark Tower series, King invented his entire world.

Finding similarities between various works of art is something I really started to enjoy when I began taking English classes in college, and when one artist just hands you the similarities, it just invites one to look into everything they have ever done, and finding out more information about some one-liner character in this story, or some lyric in this song that refers back to that song is something I can't get enough of.

I think I love origins (not so much Origin though, oddly enough).

I remember seeing Alien vs. Predator: Requiem with a friend of mine when it came out 5 years ago on Christmas day. Most people agreed the film was awful, myself included, but when I asked my friend what he thought, he just kind of shrugged and admitted that, "anything that expands the canon of something as cool as Alien or Predator, and therefore, Alien vs. Predator is always going to be pretty cool to me." And that statement has always stuck with me, specifically with regard to all these remakes and sequels to horror films which weren't terribly good to begin with.

In The Dark Tower series, the center of King's entire universe is the Dark tower -- a black tower in the middle of a field of roses where everything in all of existence is tied together. In The Cabin in the Woods, the center of the entire universe of horror films is established as a shabby-looking cabin in the middle of a forest, and miles below sleeps something which could destroy everything. The scenario in this film suggests an origin story for each and every death in every single horror film ever created, as if every villain was sent to serve some higher, horror power.

It's like the New Testament to the Old Testament-like dogma of H.P. Lovecraft's Ancient Ones.

Murder in horror movies may never be truly mindless again.