8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Encounters with Dave Allen

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Dave Allen playing bass at the Eighth Dimension Studio in Orlando, Florida - 1998.

First Encounter, Manhattan, 1991 CMJ Music Festival: My status as a college radio music director was an excuse for attending, but I was also looking for opportunities to promote the shoegazey band in which I was a guitarist. Our singer, also my girlfriend at the time (not advisable), joined me. We heard about a live ‘A&R session,‘ a music industry conference trope that’s probably familiar. Band demos (cassettes!) are put in a box where they are selected randomly, then the initial minute or two of the first song is played for a panel of supposed experts. This panel included several label folk I don’t remember and Dave Allen, representing his young World Domination Recordings imprint.

My band’s demo was in the box, but never got selected. Other demos of varying quality were sampled and lightly praised or gently critiqued. No feelings were hurt, but no one was overly encouraged, though Dave told one aspirant to talk to him after the session. Whether in praise or critique, bands were often compared with much more popular acts. Things were said like, “Your band would appeal to fans of The Pixies,” or whoever was the hot college radio band of that time. Dave did this a few times, too, and it irked the singer in my band. She stood up and yelled at Dave, “Why are you guys always looking for the next whoever? Why can’t music be judged on originality?” I can’t remember Dave Allen’s response as I was too embarrassed to pay attention, but I’m sure it was a dressing down about the realities of the music business.

After the session, we stood outside the room where we met a friend of mine. We’re chatting when Dave walks out of the room and shoots a bemused, perhaps annoyed look in our direction. My friend halts the conversation and says, “Whoa, is that Dave Allen?”

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Second Encounter, Eighth Dimension Records: I have no idea how we got on Dave Allen’s radar. This was the mid-90s, and trip hop/acid jazz/electronic music was the bubbling next big thing. I imagine he was hunting for something like that to sign to his World Domination label. I co-owned Eighth Dimension Records, a small label specializing in that stuff. Dave’s second-in-command reached out to us, offered a manufacturing and distribution deal for our label, and we were off to the races.

I think I first met Dave Allen when I opened for Gus Gus in Los Angeles. The Too Pure trio Seely was also on the bill, and more about them later. Dave and I hit it off straight away and hung out while I was still in town. Of course, I was well aware of Gang of Four and Shriekback—very much into the latter’s early recordings, especially—but Dave was so down to earth that it never crossed my mind that I was cruising around L.A. with post-punk royalty.

A few months later, I returned to L.A. for a gig and Dave offered his guest bedroom in Laurel Canyon. Dave had quite a cozy existence there with his wife and young kids. I shot the shit with him over glasses of whiskey on a raised deck overlooking the lush greenery of the Canyon. I remember him pointing out that he was stone-throwing distance to Joni Mitchell’s famous former house. We had a lot in common, especially a love of creative games (like Eno’s Oblique Strategies) and the recording process of bands like CAN.

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Close Encounter, Orlando, Florida: Dave Allen had an idea. He would spend a week with us in Orlando and record a project in the small studio I shared with Jon Curtis (a fellow Eighth Dimension partner who released an album on World Domination Recordings as Pimp Daddy Nash). Dave was so impressed with Eric, the drummer from Seely, that he was flown down from Atlanta to participate. Dave and I discussed this much in advance, maybe even that night on his deck, and decided we’d record an album the way CAN did: long, improvised jams that would get overdubbed and turned into songs in the edit.

Dave and Eric took care of the rhythm section, of course, while I played guitar, and Jon manned the mixing board while contributing some synths. Once all the instruments were set up and mic’ed in the cramped second-floor office space, we figured we needed to warm up. “What shall we play?” someone asked. At that moment, Dave breaks into the bass line for “Not Great Men.” I still remember the ‘what is happening?’ look Eric gave me, which I probably reflected back to him. Then we awkwardly jammed with Dave Allen to “Not Great Men.“

Dave Allen playing bass at Eighth Dimension Studio in Orlando, Florida, 1998
Our friend Sean Patrick Eric Taylor from Seely, Dave Allen playing a small thumb piano, and me with a microphone, at Eighth Dimension Studio in Orlando, Florida, 1998
Dave Allen poses with a small thumb piano in his hands, at Eighth Dimension Studio in Orlando, Florida, 1998
Dave Allen playing a small thumb piano while I hold a microphone to it, at Eighth Dimension Studio in Orlando, Florida, 1998
Eric Taylor of Seely on drums and Dave Allen on bass, at Eighth Dimension Studio in Orlando, Florida, 1998

We recorded some fun grooves and improvisations throughout the week, but I don’t think we felt particularly impressed. The edit is where it will happen, right? Dave grabbed all the ADAT tapes from our sessions (it was the late ‘90s) and went back home to listen and think about next steps. “I’ll come back and we’ll do more,” he promised. He was so sure of this that he left his bass guitar—the one you see him playing in live photos of Shriekback with FACT painted across the front—as he didn’t want to risk flying with it two additional times.

I don’t know the exact ins and outs, but World Domination Recordings was made possible by some wealthy Japanese investor. After the Japanese market crash of 1998, World Domination Recordings was in distress and eventually shuttered. Dave Allen had a lot to deal with and never returned to Orlando. His bass guitar sat in our studio for at least a couple of years and, with Dave’s permission, made appearances in my recordings. You can hear me playing it on my song “Asa Nisi Masi“ and my remix of Tetris’s “Two Hours.” That bass sounded so fucking good.

Soon after, Dave moved to Portland. I regularly played in Portland, but Dave would often be out of town. Our schedules hardly ever coincided. One of those times, I called Dave to tell him that I was coming to Portland, and once again, he gave me the bad news that he would be gone on business. However, “My kid has expressed interest in playing bass. Can you bring it with you?” I nervously travelled by air with this hallowed object and left it with a Portland-based friend to deliver. My friend was also a Shriekback and Go4 fan. When Dave returned, my friend showed up on his doorstep expecting a quick hand-off. Of course, Dave Allen invited him into his house and they had a cup of tea and a nice chat.

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Final Encounter, Brooklyn, Mondo.NYC: It’s November 2019, right on the edge of COVID-times, and I’m attending the Mondo.NYC music business conference. It’s late afternoon, most of the seminars have let out, and the bar scene at the conference site hotel is crowded. I’m talking with a friend and keep glancing toward the bar. Can it be? I haven’t seen him in over a decade. I wander to the bar and “Dave?” He responds with that sly grin of his: “I was wondering how long it would take you to come over.”

There we are for over an hour, catching up, Dave had plans. He told me about reclaiming the Gang of Four masters from Warner Brothers—several months later, they would reappear on Matador. And he told me about playing live again, that he found some incredible young musicians (he was always on the lookout) and wanted to mix them in with Hugo and Jon from his band of yore. The guy was jovial, hopeful, and not jaded in any shape or form. As Dave always did, he made me feel good and inspired about my own plans. After saying our warm farewells, Dave and I exchanged emails for a few months, and then time evaporated in a pandemic haze.

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Part of being younger is believing that some people will be around forever. As we age, that illusion is shattered by the stark inevitability of losing our heroes, mentors, friends, and loved ones. Dave Allen was one of those who seemed like a constant. Though primarily tied to my past (and my more creative, ambitious youth), I always felt I could just show up on Dave’s doorstep for a drink and a chat if I wanted. That may have been true, and it’s a shame that, in these past several years, I never did.

Dave Allen’s generosity, confident opinions, and artist-first ethos left a pronounced mark on me. I have little doubt I’d be in a different place and with different values for navigating the wretchedness of the music industry without his influence and friendship.

Here’s where I’ll throw back to that Gang of Four song we jammed on together and make the bad pun that, to me, he was one of the ‘great men.’ I can almost see him wincing and chuckling with mocking disapproval. Strum on, Dave Allen.

Jon Curtis also wrote about his memories of Dave Allen on his Sonic Wasteland blog. I also suspect he took most, if not all, of the photos accompanying this article.

Strange Days Indeed

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A tale of many protests: Steve McQueen, a filmmaker not shy of raising thorny topics, has curated a photography exhibition titled “Resistance.” Ths show, on display at the Turner Contemporary in Southeast England, showcases 100 years of protest in the UK stating with 1903’s suffrage protests to those in 2003 reacting against the Iraq War. Photography remains important in creating awareness and inspiring others to join in as they empathize with the activists depicted. Clarrie Wallis, the director of Turner Contemporary and McQueen’s co-curator: “Many grassroots photographers and community activists were using photography not just to document protest but also to shape their own narratives and build solidarity networks.”

The problem now is how the power of photography to incite gets sapped by a proliferation of digitally created or altered imagery. I’m not just talking about AI fakes that denigrate protesters. Well-meaning images created to further activism and causes but merely mimicking scenes of real life inadvertently lessen the emotional call-to-action of actual protest photography. This is where the questioning of reality results in the complacency of confusion, something we’re already seeing in our everyday discourse.

Another barrier is the criminalization of peaceful protest. But if peaceful protest is now a crime, then why not do actual crimes? That’s where we’ve ended up, a place that no one—and by that, I mean everyone—saw coming. Here’s The Guardian speaking with an anonymous source from the activist group Shut the System (STS):

“We vow to wage a campaign of sabotage targeting the tools, property and machinery of those most responsible for global warming, escalating until they accept our demands for an end to all support for fossil fuel expansion.”
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He said new laws further criminalising disruptive protests had made traditional, accountable methods of activism increasingly unsustainable, and a clandestine approach increasingly attractive.

The article describes recent actions, including covert protesters in France filling the holes of golf courses with cement. We here at the blog absolutely do not condone illegal activities, but, if we ever did, I think we may have found a winner.

Anyway, the article, titled ‘‘A new phase’: why climate activists are turning to sabotage instead of protest,’ reads like one of the short chapters in the first half of Kim Stanley Robinson’s excellent The Ministry for the Future.

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1992 was an odd time for cult bands like Television. What marketing execs called alternative rock somehow hit paydirt, and bands were getting signed to corporate labels like these bands were going out of style. Kurt Cobain wears a Daniel Johnston shirt? Well, shit, let’s give Johnston a deal with Atlantic Records based on that. Strange days, indeed.

This also meant that bands of huge influence and small sales figures were repeatedly name-checked in Rolling Stone interviews by these newly minted major label bands. Television was certainly one of those name-checked groups—I mean, R.E.M. might be more responsible for their reformation than anyone if we’re honest. There were all sorts of hell-freezing-over reformations happening during this period. Even the Velvet Underground got back together! Television’s reformation album, despite the too-crisp production and uneven though mostly good material, is still one of the highlights of this ‘return of the cult bands’ era.

On Television’s self-titled 1992 reunion album, it’s “1880 or So” that excites most. The song opens the album and gives the impression that we might stay put in Marquee Moon territory for the original lineup’s first venture in 14 years. The following track, “Shane, She Wrote This,” puts that hope to rest, easing comfortably into the mode of Verlaine’s reasonable solo work. Should we feel guilty for wanting Television to step back and sound like four guys making music in 1977?

Oh, it doesn’t matter. “1880 or So” is a brilliant song, one of this quartet’s best, and I’m thankful for it. The remainder of Television, though mostly not as receptive to CBGB’s era nostalgia, is also made up of fine songs. Look—there’s Richard Lloyd, here with Tom for the first time in a while, responding with spidery guitar riffs and textural string work like nothing on the vintage albums. You can’t ask for a better guitar pairing than this. I’m not exactly a supporter of guitar heroics, but I could listen to these two bouncing off each other for hours. Worth revisiting, no doubt about it.

How to Disappear Defiantly

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Kellar and his Perplexing Cabinet Mysteries. - Strobridge & Co. - 1894 - via Library of Congress

This post was originally intended for the actual friends I share on Facebook, not necessarily the ‘added friends’ who I don’t know in real life. Over the decades, I’ve made many worldwide acquaintances; sadly, my only link to some is as a Facebook connection. This screed is about deleting my Facebook account, which means forever severing connections with some people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. This is not a happy post.

I dislike writing these things. I’ve written about this topic before—”fool me once”—and I hope this is the last time. Before disappearing, I could have put this in a Facebook post, but I know the algorithms there will prevent my connections from seeing it. To Facebook (Meta), free speech is a grift. Any dissent is throttled to obscurity. I thought I’d be better off linking to a blog post, though I know the algorithm hates links, too. I’m banking on it hating dissent even more than the link post that possibly sent you here.

The worst thing about these posts is I fear I sound self-righteous and smug. I also know that I’m privileged even to consider quitting Facebook—for some of you, the platform is a sole lifeline to family members or mandatory for your job. I get it. I don’t mean anything here as judgment. If anything, and like most posts on this blog, I’m working through some stuff and trying to figure out where I stand. I write to think, not the other way around, and I only hope some find these ramblings useful.

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In a new piece on Brian Eno in The Guardian, Bette Adriaanse, Brian’s collaborator on the book What Art Does, says, “We’d just met and he said, ‘If we want a new world, we have to start making it right now, and whatever we are doing, we have to make it as though we are in that new world.’ And that just kept singing in my brain.”

I’ve written about a version of this quote that Brian likes bandying about and how it sings in my brain, too. However, Bette’s twist on it suits the present moment with an uncannily tight fit. “We have to start making it right now, and whatever we are doing, we have to make it as though we are in that new world.” The alarm is a piercing scream: we have to start RIGHT NOW. Terrible people rule the discourse, and our best protection against this psychic barrage is to act, within our daily lives, as if we’re reaching toward the world we want.

For me, that’s a world free of cruelty and suffering and without the proliferation of injustice that goes hand-in-hand with those things. Increasingly over the past decade—after many failed battles with what can most charitably be described as ‘bad vibes’—I’ve learned to work harder to base decisions on this metric. It influences what and how I eat, the information I ingest, where I shop, and how I treat or think of others. I’m not great at it, but I’m always aware and trying. And part of this is admitting I’ll always fail. For example, Orlando is a city where you can’t quite live without a car (I’ve tried), and you’ve got to get gas for that car. I’m unaware of any automobile or oil companies that aren’t on the spectrum of doing evil deeds to maximize profit.

Still, there are areas of our lives where we can refuse to participate with companies whose cruelty outweighs any benefits. I do my best to identify these and act accordingly. These are small efforts in a big world, but they make me feel better—I’m working on my new world. And then there’s the contagion factor, where perhaps I can inspire someone else to think twice about eating meat or frequenting sites that traffic in clickbait ‘outrage of the day.’ But, primarily, I’m working on myself. I want to be a better human, and, among other things, that means denying terrible people of my attention and engagement.

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Sometimes, I’ll tell people I’m still a punk rock kid, and part of that is my distrust (I’m being charitable again) of large corporations. I grew up in one of those tiny towns that got swallowed up by Walmart. I also spent my teenage years shouting along to songs like the Minutemen’s “Shit From an Old Notebook” and “The Product.” Never trust a corporation. And suddenly, here comes Facebook (Meta), one of the biggest corporations ever, swallowing us up omnivorously as if we’re those tiny towns of the late ’80s.

Like many of you, I’ve kept a Facebook account for a simple reason: I have friends there, and Facebook is how those friends keep in touch. However, time is a flat circle, and I’ve debated the existence of that account before. There’s been this, and this, and this, and it was obvious a while ago that Facebook was not working toward making the world a better place. I decided I wouldn’t engage on Facebook; I only occasionally posted what I was up to (mainly links to my online writing and podcast work) and maintained ‘business’ pages like the one for the online magazine The Tonearm. That felt like the minimum I could do, but it also often felt too much.

I kept floating along because I was already engaging with other untrustworthy corporations—for starters, the desktop computer I’m typing this on, the cell phone plan I have, and the health insurance I require. Perhaps I’m justifying. But the cruelty and suffering that will dramatically increase over the next four years is an awful reality. If I can disengage with any organization kowtowing to the terrible people fueling this misery, then sooner is the preferred alternative to later.

Meta groveled at an impressive, alarming, and unsurprising speed. I won’t go into it here, but Casey Newton has a comprehensive and disturbing round-up of the depths of Meta’s servile prostration—so far!—in his Platformer newsletter. (If you click on only one link to read from this too-long blog post, please make it that one.) Cruelty (in this case, under the gaslit guise of ‘free speech,‘ but without the accountability that exercising that speech entails in the normal world) is now embedded as Facebook policy, and suffering is sure to follow. It’s terrible people all the way down, and I can’t take it anymore. I’m out.

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I’m thankful that Lawrence, my partner in The Tonearm, agrees. The online magazine’s social media distribution includes Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Those pages are linked to my Facebook account, so if I go, they go. Lawrence, as disgusted by all of this as I am, wholeheartedly supports my decision to the degree that it’s become ‘our’ decision.

The Tonearm’s online profile might diminish, but that’s favorable to compromising our principles. That said, I’d love for you to support us in this decision by subscribing to The Tonearm’s email newsletter. That newsletter will be our main outreach point outside the site. Our Mastodon and Bluesky accounts will also continue to churn out fun posts.

I’d also like to keep in touch with you. Whether you’re an old or new friend, it stinks that Facebook might be our only connection to each other, and now I’m pulling the plug. By all means, please email me, even if just a quick “hello, here’s my contact info” message. I’m also goofing around on Mastodon and Bluesky if that’s your thing. (As Mastodon is a fully decentralized system that can’t get taken over by terrible people, I encourage you to explore that one further.)

Our continued friendship should not rely on a corporate platform mandated by the power-mad aspirations of terrible people. Please reach out.

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One final zinger: The terrible person in charge of Meta says that people like me are ‘virtue-signaling.’ Maybe you agree. If ‘virtue-signaling’ is publicly exercising a personal moral code by leaving a platform that allows (and algorithmically encourages) the dehumanization of oppressed people, then I suppose that’s what I’m doing. I imagine the opposite of that is flaunting a watch that costs $900,000. I know which one’s celebrated in the world I want to live in.

Here’s how to delete your Facebook account.

suspicions of provenance

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Hakobune‘s guitar is processed like one hundred Guthries, ringing with reverb abandon as chords stretch into warm, elongated vibrations. The 2019 album Rain Studies is a full-spectrum affair; it alternately plays and washes away intruding sounds. Its CTwins-spirit is best transmitted on “Tenkyuu,” which sounds like muting everything but a single guitar track on Victorialand‘s mixing desk.

I suppose these comparisons are a little unfair. I feel I’m projecting my influences onto Hakobune, the Tokyo-based sound artist who also goes by Takahiro Yorifuji. But, in a way, the guitar is baggage, and a limited sound palette is never free of suspicions of provenance.

Hakobune strikes me as a guitarist falling under the spell of electronic drone music but opting for the novocaine instead of the noise. Rain Studies could refer to the mix knob on a reverb unit pushed all the way to ‘wet,’ but it’s also chilling (both interpretations accepted), like rainfall. “Tenkyuu” is the difference—the other tracks simply blend as one liquid sheet supplants another. No doubt these ‘studies’ were recorded as the rain fell outside, watched through a drizzled window as the guitar reflected and chimed its accompanying song.

On the periphery, John Coulthart wrote about echo guitars, an initial attempt at a ‘Young Person’s Guide.’ He mentions the Watkins Copicat, developed in the late ’50s and arguably the first independent tape-loop-based echo unit. A chance encounter inspired UK music gear innovator Charlie Watkins to explore the possibilities of tape echo:

… a pair of customers, returning from a visit to Italy, [regaled] Watkins with talk of a performance they’d seen there. The singer Marino Marini, who was enjoying a worldwide hit with his cover of Dominico Modugno’s hit “Volare,” had run his microphone through a pair of reel-to-reel recorders with one continuous tape loop rolling between them to recreate his distinctive vocal echo. The sound had knocked their socks off. *

The Copicat followed, as did an influence on musical styles like surf rock and the kosmische exploits of Manuel Göttsching and many others. The popular Echoplex emerged alongside other tape delay machines, leading further outward to dub and studio-as-instrument forms.

In my Spotlight On interview with David J, I remarked that my favorite sound might be a tape echo filtering away into infinity. David signaled his agreement.

Shimmering & Shining with The Black Watch

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It’s easy to get distracted by the number 23. Not only are we told it’s everywhere by thinkers as prestigious as Robert Anton Wilson and Jim Carrey, but those two digits look and feel special. How about a 23rd album? Perhaps that’s magical in some way (especially if the KLF ever got there), but to most, it just sounds like a lot of albums. Twenty-two is a lot, too, not to mention twenty-four. But I don’t want to get hung up on the 23rd album because it doesn’t matter to John Andrew Fredrick of The Black Watch. Weird Rooms is the band’s album number twenty-three, but John isn’t counting or accumulating. He’s persisting.

John may be aware of the potential baggage in musical prolificness. Quantity sometimes counterintuitively means stagnation: running in circles, repeating the comforts of an established sound or workflow, or releasing the same record ad infinitum. I can testify that this is not the case with The Black Watch. Not only does John profess an incapability of stopping rather than an effort at ‘building content,’ but also of directly reacting, in a sort of dialogue, with his preceding albums. Changing line-ups, songwriting styles, producers, and, as is the case with Weird Rooms, city locations (Austin, this time) enforce a variety of textures and execution. There’s no sameness here—The Black Watch’s twenty-third record probably sounds as fresh as 1988’s debut.

John and I planned an interview session for a long while, with my delays a glaring (to me) contrast to his musical productivity. Weird Rooms was finally the excuse to get our screens together. John is a delightful conversationalist, an obvious fan of wordplay and language (he’s also an author), and inspiringly enthusiastic about his creative work. We discussed so many things: creating music for personal satisfaction, writing from the subconscious, the unexpected perks of a Lutheran upbringing, what focusing on singles says about your band, and so much more. I tried talking to him about the number 23, but he wasn’t having it.

I mentioned how The Black Watch, and especially Weird Rooms, wears its influences on its sleeve. I likened this to a recipe in that the album’s sound takes things from different, identifiable artists without sounding directly like any of them. I suggested that that recipe includes a heaping tablespoon each of My Bloody Valentine, The Cure, and The Beatles. John agreed, adding Syd Barrett, who is probably floating around like a bay leaf. It’s a great mix of ingredients, making songs like “Gobbledegook,” “Swallowed,” and “Miles & Miles” achieve Michelin-star tastiness.1My metaphors aren’t getting any better.

And though Weird Rooms was the inspiration for our conversation, John was especially excited about The Black Watch’s next record, (tentatively?) titled Bye. “With a pun on saying goodbye and a bye in a tournament,” John explained. While John was understandably bubbling over with thoughts on this 24th effort—to him, it’s the fresh new thing, of course—I’m trying to hide my astonishment that we’re on the heels of Weird Rooms‘ release and the next album is already in the hands of a mastering engineer. At least John admitted it wasn’t a good idea to release it immediately.

But I can’t get over the as-yet-unreleased album’s title, Bye. Does John give it a double meaning because it’s a fork in the road? Is it a goodbye, as Pop Matters recently wondered? Or, as in a tournament, will it mean The Black Watch is ready to advance to the next in a long, long series of rounds? John told me he couldn’t stop, even if he wanted to, so I’m optimistically embracing the sporting option. I doubt 24 is The Black Watch’s idea of a final score.

Here’s the extended audio of my conversation with The Black Watch’s John Andrew Fredrick, with an excerpted text version below the fold. At the bottom, John answers my “What’s something you love?” inquiry with the aplomb worthy of someone with a PhD in the art of words. Dig it!

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The Children…’s Blues is a Primal Yowl

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The three members of The Children… sitting around

The Children…, as you have already noticed, follow their band name with three dots, periods, or stops. I detect the implication of something sneakily approaching. Whatever it is, it’s not necessarily coming for the children, but maybe it’s the children themselves, Village of the Damned-style. I say this in hindsight after listening to A Sudden Craving, the second album from The Children… The music evokes multitudes. It’s a layered and cinematic affair with intricate instrumentation, spacious sonic production, and beguiling stranger-lurking-around-the-corner vocals. The songs on A Sudden Craving are also delightfully ominous, spurring a complexity in their deep darkness—a reflection, rather than a warning, of what comes after those three dots. It might be those spooky movie kids with glowing eyes, or it could just be something chasing childhood’s innocence down a night’s cityscape.

The core of The Children… is Michael Wiener, Jim Coleman, and Phil Puleo. Others float in and out, but this trio provides the bulk of the instrumentation and songwriting credits, with Michael also deploying the vocals. Jim and Phil are veterans of Cop Shoot Cop, and Phil has done time in Swans and Swans offshoot Angels of Light. Michael’s artistic journeys have taken him into the avant-garde, as well as writing essays, criticism, and screenplays. Bonus points: Michael is a memorable figure in the fantastic documentary Hail Satan!, described as the film’s ‘performative inspiration.’

The band’s collective curriculum vitae (which I’ve largely truncated—there’s much more to these three) informs A Sudden Craving toward the ambitious, the unrepentantly artistic, and a product of the grimier parts (are there any others?) of New York City. The noisier, perhaps industrial-inflected, side of late ’80s NYC rock echoes throughout, but the imagined spaces frequently found in these songs add a quiet contemplation to the set. Most importantly, it’s a dynamic reading, especially when the album is listened to from head to toe. Whatever malevolent Children… are coming upon us, I’m guessing they’ll be won over by candlelight.

Months ago, I sent a handful of questions to The Children… and received prompt and generous responses from Michael and Jim. However, the interview’s appearance on this site was not as prompt as I suddenly needed a cornea transplant1It went well! I may write more about this soon, or I may not., which put all eye-related goals on the back burner. My apologies to everyone involved, of course, accompanied by gratitude for these illuminating answers from The Children… In this exchange, the two touch on the darkness of an NYC music scene, how improvisation is everywhere, how they embrace a certain definition of ‘gothic,’ and tales from the recording of A Sudden Craving. Enjoy, kiddos.

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A Degree of Randomness: A Conversation With Joseph Branciforte

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Joseph Branciforte pops up on my computer monitor as we begin our chat. He’s in an austere studio chamber, pristine and wooden, with racks of audio gear and a familiar Juno-60 behind him, all by its lonesome. Are those a pair of Grammy awards I see on the shelf? It’s not the typical studio I encounter when chatting with a musician making electronic or experimental music. Besides the Juno, it doesn’t look like any studio I’ve recorded in. Mine are always a mess.

Have you ever noticed that graphic artists, especially those with a refined aesthetic, have the nicest workspaces? The idea must extend to mastering and mixing engineers of Jospeph’s caliber and scrupulous dedication. Glance over his client list, and you’ll see names that I’m sure have requirements: the ECM label, known for its consistently polished palette, figures in as a patron of services. This makes Joseph’s Greyfade imprint, established in 2019, an exciting development. We expect a bending of sonic expectations, a lack of preference for electronic and organic, music redefining its terms, all immaculately recorded and presented.

I’ve got Joseph and his studio on my monitor as we’re discussing LP2, a collaborative album with storied vocalist Theo Bleckmann. Joseph is warm, engaged, and obviously proud of his work on this record. He should be—featuring Theo’s wordless melodies and Joseph’s electronics, the album bends all expectations, blurs the electronic and the organic, and redefines plenty. As for how it’s recorded and presented, the sound of it is as stunning as the record’s stark design and packaging is remarkable. Released at the tail end of 2023, on the eighth of December, LP2 made it just in time to become my album of the year.

I should briefly explain Theo Bleckmann. He’s a vocalist and composer of incredible range (“both his pitch and emotional range,” says Joseph in our conversation) and an epically diverse repertoire. He’s a human instrument, as you’ll hear on LP2. and has worked with the likes of Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass, so many others. Curiously, and possibly impressively, Theo is credited with an alien language in Men In Black.

As an electronic manipulator himself—Theo submits his instrument to his own rack of effects—the voice is game for dipping in and out of familiarity. Joseph enhances and de-hances, both within live improvisation and in a post-production setting, and the results are magical. I almost wish I didn’t know anything about the who and why of LP2, as that would make its songs so immediately mysterious. What’s the voice? What’s synthesized? Are we outside? What’s electronically rejiggered? Is that a vibraphone?

The instruments on LP2 insist on being listened to as a whole rather than picked apart. This makes discernment fuzzy, especially if experiencing with mystery, but satisfying for those of us seeking something secure yet impressionistic. What Theo and Joseph have created floats around—a warm mist that’s neither comforting nor ominous but holds gentle touches of both.

My conversation with Joseph was heady and sometimes technical. We delve into his process and dig into the creation of specific tracks on LP2. In contrast to my vague, descriptive flowers above, Joseph delivered a pleasantly straightforward overview of what makes the album something special. We also chatted more than I’m letting on here, and I’m saving our short discussion about a much-anticipated future album until its release. Joseph also teased me at the end by saying, “We could talk about Master Of Puppets for an hour.” Bring it on.

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Pierced With Lasers

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Eyesore! That’s the chant around these parts. My right eye (previously) was pierced with lasers the other day in preparation for next week’s big surgical procedure. Tiny little holes. Visually, I don’t quite notice—my eyesight in that eye was rotten to begin with—but there is a dull throb around the eyeball that’s making things a tad difficult. It’s not terrible or even painful. It’s persistent.

“Do you want to be awake for the procedure?” the surgeon asked. How many patients choose sleep? “It’s like half-and-half. Usually the ones with anxiety.” Surprisingly, I don’t get anxious about things like this, so I decided I’ll stay awake. I want to retain the experience of this unimaginable thing taking place. Does that sound crazy to you? Just over a year ago I had the first procedure which—spoiler alert—eventually turned into a failure. But I was awake—heavily drugged, but awake—and I enjoyed it! I felt like Dave Bowman getting swept into the Jovian Monolith. The colored lights were awesome.

In the meantime, here I am maintaining this blog with a throbbing right orb, but blog I must. There’s a lot going on besides the sight-related. I’m in the middle of editing an extensive interview with one of the two folks behind what’s probably my favorite album of 2023. That will appear here, signaling more features to come on digable artists (sound and otherwise). I’m playing around with the new MEMORA8ILIA blog, though I’m having trouble with its dark mode. I’m thinking a lot about what’s next for the record label and leaning toward that ‘next’ looking very different. And this week’s Spotlight On podcast is out, and it features Nic Dembling who was in a late ’70s outfit called Comateens. They orbited the CBGBs bands everyone talks about when discussing that scene, but Comateens were there, too, and Nic has fun insight on all of that.

In other anticipations, this movie looks fantastic.

via The New York Times:

Los Angeles and its sounds are pivotal to “The Tuba Thieves.” All kinds of noises, welcome or not, make it into the movie: the crackling of fires, the roar of traffic and, above all, the repeated sound of overhead airplanes, a constant background pollution for residents near the airport. In contrast, there’s silence, represented by a re-creation of the 1952 Woodstock, N.Y., premiere of John Cage’s infamous “4’33,” in which a pianist simply sits in front of the piano silently turning pages for four minutes and 33 seconds, opening and closing the keyboard lid to signal the beginning and ending of the piece’s three movements. Apparently irritated by the spectacle, a man leaves and stomps out into the woods, only to be captured by the sounds of nature around him.

I spun the musical wheel and happened upon Night Places, a three-song EP1It’s still longer than the first Van Halen album, though from Rose. There’s no information about this artist anywhere, dammit, though ‘they’—there are two figures on the cover art, so I’m assuming here—have released music for at least a decade. Oakland’s exceptional Constellation Tatsu imprint is a key collaborator.

These cuts exhibit that swirly head trip stuff anchored by out-of-focus rhythms that feed sustenance to my 8-sided veins. Admittedly, the first track, “Phosphorene,” doesn’t do much for me, and I can’t put my finger on why. Perhaps it aims hopefully at a dancefloor with too much intention.2The most effective dance music is the least intentionally so. That’s a hill I’m prepared to die on. But the latter two-thirds of this EP excel in a Dave Bowman flying into the Jovian Monolith kind of way. “The Searing” opens with a distant foghorn over bouncy thuds. The wash of sound builds pleasantly like a tide gently rolling in, and soon, we’re gliding. Then, the last few minutes are a rhapsodic freefall. And I’d like to imagine the title track’s name is a play on Tones On Tails’ Night Music—they mined similar territories of mixing the light and dark—but I’m content to visit these dream fields throughout the day. Though, yes, this tune, in particular, is a more fitting venture when broadcast outside of sunlight.

Rose’s music is crafted. That’s the word that popped into my head as I listened. It’s deliberate—not the same as intentional—and patient. Music like this connects so much for me: shoegaze, (deeper than) deep house, ambient, and aspirations of inner calmness. I feel it’s experimental in ways that a lot of experimental music isn’t, in that disparate threads tie together without exposing the knots. Night Places tickles my brain in ways that only music like this does. If you understand what I’m talking about, then please send more in my direction.

Side note: I just noticed the entire Constellation Tatsu discography is $20 on Bandcamp at the moment. That’s the kind of crazy talk you should immediately converse with.

Creature Feature

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I have some curatorial notes today. Memora8ilia, the “filing cabinet for 8sided.blog,” is presently hosted on Tumblr. I’m in the process of moving it to a self-hosted site, at which point I’ll get more active with it. I’m not necessarily moving it off Tumblr due to recent controversies. However, that does serve as a reminder that when we rely on other platforms to present our creative work, problematic associations can (and probably will) happen.

Memora8ilia is meant to be a place where I store cool things I find on the web in case I want to find them again. It’s inspired, in part, by Warren Ellis’s LTD blog, which is his “writer’s notebook” and daily log that we, his readers, are allowed to access. Warren logs what he’s reading, watching, and hearing, as well as updates on how his garden is faring (a source of both his joy and frustration). He often checks in with his morning status and what his workload looks like for the day. Warren claims the people he works with can use that status to gauge how slammed and accessible he is at any time. I won’t go as far as posting my status, though. For one thing, the people who I work with should always consider me slammed and pretty much inaccessible lol.

Memora8ilia’s just fun stuff, and you’re welcome to follow along. Sometimes, things I briefly add to the Memora8ilia filing cabinet stick in my brain, and they work their way over to this site. That process is interesting, and I like having a record of it happening. So, look for that to pop over to its new home soon. I don’t think I can transfer the Tumblr site posts over to the new one (which will be a WordPress thing). It’ll be a fresh start. I’ll keep the Tumblr archive up and create a post at the top with a redirect once the change occurs.

More curation? This Beginner’s Guide to Chinese Shoegaze, courtesy of Concrete Avalanche, is so uplifting it makes my entire body tingle. And Simon Reynolds dropped a blog post about the “two kinds of early electronic composition and musique concrete that I really really love, and can’t get enough of” and helpfully supplied embedded YouTube examples. Your Discogs want list just got a lot bigger. On the niche (my kind of niche!) side of things, check out Harvard’s Davis Center Library Poster Collection, solely featuring digitized “Soviet posters dating from 1919 to the 1990s.” Be still my heart.

There’s also the music I am posting in these blog entries, whose curation, from the outside, appears a bit higgledy-piggledy. Well, posting only the latest music isn’t something I’m that concerned about. That’s a good thing because, as this blog goes through its long pauses, the music piles up. This particular pile consists of music I’ve purchased on Bandcamp with the intention of mentioning on the blog and releases sent to my inbox by kind and understanding labels and artists. I’ve thrown all this music in a folder, and when it’s time to concoct a post here, I use my handy-dandy randomizer and see what it pulls out. Surprise!

Today, I rolled a 244, and that points me to Andrew Edward Brown’s “Her Rescue.” Andrew is a Los Angeles-based via Philadelphia producer who also records under the alias Champion Soul and in the collaborative project Andy & Sasa. “Her Rescue” is one of the tracks found on Mr.Brown’s Studio Sessions Volume 3, an EP released by Strange But Soulful (could be a little stranger, tbh). The other cuts on the EP aren’t my thing, but “Her Rescue” has a hazy simplicity that harks to that time when techno producers were loudly proclaiming jazz bona fides. “Her Rescue” has all those elements: a gently percolating synth sequence, four-fingered chords on analog gear, and spacey treble strings, all riding on a kick drum shaker cycle. There’s saxophone, too, but I don’t mind as it’s reverbed and restrained and works a lot better than the Blade Runner love theme. This stuff is real fuckin’ sexy, just like you asked.

I also want to take some time to pour one out for Creature, AKA Creature Feature Double Feature, pictured at the top in a senselessly abstracted portrait. This exceptional cat, who enjoyed giving me determined head butts at three in the morning as I was fast asleep, was a part of our household for 17 years. Impressive! And a couple of days ago, he decided to wander off into the good night, likely not to be seen again. That fellow never had an awful day in his life — especially that day when he caught a squirrel (bad Creature!) — so our sadness is tempered by the appreciation that anyone could be so lucky to have 17 wonderful consecutive years. Off you go, sir, and farewell.

Time Travel, Expressed

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I should talk about my podcast work. It’s going well! My main gig is the Spotlight On podcast, hosted by music industry vet and erudite interviewer Lawrence Peryer (LP). Several months ago, I was promoted (I suppose that’s the word—it’s a two-man operation) from editor to full-on producer/manager of the show. That means I’m handling nearly everything outside of hosting.

I’m having a blast and am thankful that I’m working on such a terrific podcast. I’m always learning, a state I strive for in any project I take on. In addition to production and marketing duties, I suggest and book some of the musician guests, but LP tracks down the majority, who are mostly new to me. Fortunately, LP’s musical taste converges nicely with mine, so I’m discovering loads of new artists through the podcast.

This week’s guest is the German jazz drummer Mareike Wiening. This is my first encounter with her, and I am digging her jazz tidings. Check this out:

Mareike Wiening on drums, abstract photo

You can listen to her episode and all the others from the Spotlight On webpage. Or, if you want to be a superstar in my book, subscribe via wherever you get your podcasts.

Pro tip: Be sure to peruse the show notes. Compiling show notes is one of my favorite chores, and I give them a lot more attention than I probably should. I always slide in links to one or two fantastic articles or things tangentially related to the show.

A few months ago, there was a last-minute guest cancellation, so I became the guest. LP and I freeformed for a bit and released our gab session as an episode. I’ll embed it below as it’s found nowhere else on this blog, and I think it’s a fun chat. Some hot takes (well, ok—more like lukewarm) get dropped, too.

Another thing I’ll embed today is Opening Space, an album from Open Spaces on the Oakland-based ambient label Constellation Tatsu. Its Bandcamp release date of March 3, 2020, may seem prescient—mere days before the initial pandemic lockdowns—as producer and audio engineer Chris Hancock explores placing his music in imaginary environments. It wouldn’t be long before contemplating environments outside of our four walls was a hot new trend.

Open Spaces, the project name, designates Chris’s experiments in 360 audio, including heady-sounding technologies like, as noted on his blog, “binaural recording and ambisonic spatialisation software.” The opening track—”Opening Spaces,” natch—is a salvo of an example, flitting bird songs right out of Herzog’s jungle accompany a warm, harmonium-like drone before nature gets reversed. Time travel, expressed best as sonic art form.

The album continues to mine and develop these notions with gently pulsing drone work and elegantly located sound markers. “Compassion” adds distant percussion booms and a seemingly improvised but effective dream vocal from Michelle McCosker for a piece that made me think of Dead Can Dance warming up at soundcheck. And then “Some days are easier than others” (caps absconded) opens things up with a string-plucked motif driving a polite but shady crawl. In the last third, additional melodies and bass lines subtly appear and wash the clouds away with peeks of sunlight. It’s a generous production on its own merit, but it must have sounded downright ebullient in its time within the confines of closed-in spaces.