Promising things from Pitchfork: a new mix section with song-by-song roundup/ interview kicked off by none other than JD Twitch. Check it here.
A plea: please listen to this song as if you were up in the mountains or away from a city for the first time in a long time. Looking upward or lying on your back, noticing new constellations the lack of atmosphere brings. The stars you hadn't noticed now shining dimly and appreciated, they are filling in spaces in the blackness you forgot about. The ones you had seen and become acquainted with, more overwhleming than ever before.
Maximum Overdrive (1986) /dir. Stephen King
Awesomely done piece of genre trash with an AC/DC soundtrack and Emilio Estevez. Sole directorial effort from Stephen King based on his short story "Trucks", where machines go haywire when an comet from hell passes too close to Earth. The action revolves around the Dixie Boy truck stop outside Wilmington, North Carolina and the hapless people trapped there by a gang of killer big-rigs. Did I mention the AC/DC? (Cock rock and evil machines... check.) Best summed up by three gonzo lines and what prompted them.
Jukebox explodes...
"The whole goddamn world's goin' tits up"
Automated arcade...
"Yo mama!"
In comet dust tail, truck drives itself...
"They can't do that.... we made you! Weeeee maaaaade yooouuuuuuu!!!!!"
Watch these previews and treat yourself to a copy.
My hyper-literate monthly of choice, The Believer, has just issued their 2007 music issue the with an accompanying CD featuring some rare & exclusive tracks from Lightning Bolt, Magik Markers, Aesop Rock, No Age, Grizzly Bear, and many others. There are also articles aplenty: a search for reclusive folkie Bill Fox, a conversation between Khaela Maricich of the Blow and Miranda July, a rethinking of the famous & oft written about false dichotomy "Beatles, or Stones?", and the story of rock's rarest instrument - the Birotron - an offshoot cousin of the Mellotron keyboard made from nineteen 8-track decks.
The magazine also features a center fold-out lovingly chronicling every-metal-band-name-ever (!) beginning with the letter R. Excerpted the forthcoming book "All Known Metal Bands", which promises to be a "poetic document of the continual collapse and renewal of civilizations", this list brings up as many endlessly debatable questions as it answers. Who would have known, for example, there would be 21 "Requiem"-s and only 10 "Rigor Mortis"-s? 30 bands beginning with "Rotten" and only one "Roadkill Sodomizer"? This had me alternating between mind-blown disbelief and hysterical fit this past weekend as I lay floating in a canoe, flesh burning off from lack of suncreen, in the middle of Lake Pinecrest.
The thing that got me most excited however was this new song from Zach Condon who is the principal entity behind Beirut. They have a newish EP called Lon Gisland and one amazing LP entitled Gulag Orkestar that is everywhere by now and you should feel ashamed if you haven't listened to it. Most of the album sounds like it was recorded with a gypsy folk marching band (really just Jeremy Barnes from A Hawk and a Hacksaw & Neutral Milk Hotel-fame) but there are a few other songs featuring cheap synths and drum machines sounding like they are plugged directly into a four-track. This feeling is revisited here with a solitary trumpet line & Condon's multi-tracked vocals swooning over a synthscape straight out of Music Has A Right To Children.
Zach Condon - Venice
Oh, I also forgot to mention that I have an extra copy of the magazine complete with CD for one lucky reader (the one who write to the email address at the top of the screen first).
Cobblestone Jazz are so en fuego right now. Mathew Jonson's collaborative group had two of the most highly-tauted techno singles last year with Dump Truck and India In Me, and they are now making the rounds again with Dmt and Put The Lime In Da Coconut (all on the brilliant Wagon Repair label), as well as blowing folks away at MUTEK and elsewhere with their largely improvisational live show.
Their first remix is part of the Juno Records 10th anniversary series, responsible for reissues of classic tracks bolstered by newly commissioned mixes. On paper the combination of this one instantly got my mouth watering and it actually turns out pretty well. All the best elements of the original track are there, with the beat flattened out more 4/4 stylee and the groove extended much further, teasing out every part of the original pioneering electro track . With Cobblestone Jazz being primarily an improvisational outfit both live and in studio, it rightly ends up sounding more like a Mathew Jonson solo remix than their proper singles, especially when the "Zombie Bikers"-esque bass line uncoils itself just after the 3 minute mark.
