connexion: the selector

I’m in the mood… for offending people with music.

There I was, walking the streets and enjoying the first day of spring together with the rest of the city. Sun warming my face, birds singing together with me. In a great mood. Slightly unhappy.

I played this song before going to work today and I’ve been humming it ever since. It’s one one of those bittersweet tunes that makes me both happy and sad.

When the pollen comes, and one finds it hard to rest the night through. After the rains, the sun rises, and all of the trees burst like enormous seed-pods, spreading invisible tendrils, some snaking deeply within ourselves.

Because of the unseen pull of the trees, we toss and turn, always drifting in the shallows of the sea of sleep, always risking the shoals and the groundings, where our ships will lie above the water at unhealthy angles. Longing to trawl deeper waters, we drift and dream instead; harpies, sirens, ancient mollusk; the scraping of claws upon the bottom mirroring our own vague scrapings on land, soon to be washed away by time and weather.

I listened to this song a lot last fall, daydreaming of cherry blossoms, feeling the pit in my stomach that told me that winter was coming with its long nights and constant rain.

Now that spring is upon us and I drag my feet in the cherry blossom petal snow drifts that collect in the gutters this song feels entirely different to me. It makes me want to set up my coffee table with my special tea cups and favorite kettle, jasmine tea inside.

It makes me want to go up to volunteer park and just walk around with headphones on, or maybe lay in the grass while I watch the sun lazily wander across the sky.

Ken emailed me today just to ask me if I had heard the song and it reminded me that I had meant to post it weeks ago.

So this one is for Ken.

Danielle Dax’s music is, for me, all about the summer of 1986. I had an informal summer job at a computer lab at college, where I wandered in barefoot and sat for long hours coding things to make the system work better, taking breaks to argue about music on Usenet, and to eat microwaved frozen burritos.

Outside the lab it was a hot Pasadena summer. I lived right across the street in a big corner room on the second floor of a cozy old house. I could open the window in each wall and get breezes and watch the passers-by on Holliston Avenue. My best friend Peter lived across the hall, where he played R.E.M. and Bauhaus loudly. We would amble onto campus and find people to hang out with in the long warm evenings.

The record store of choice was Poo Bah. They had very interesting used bins, always worth trawling through. One time someone sold a bunch of records by someone I’d never heard of named Danielle Dax. They had pretty good covers (my benchmark at the time being 23envelope, of course) and weird titles like “Jesus Egg That Wept” and “Yummer-Yummer Man”. The next time I went, they were still there, so I bought a few.

“Pop-Eyes” was the earliest, and the best. Danielle Dax’s career arc as a solo artist began in 1983 with her sitting on the floor of her apartment surrounded by toys, all listed on the album cover: various analog synths, guitars, horns, and for percussion, assorted pots and pans and a TR-808. She recorded onto four-track a collection of songs that were enigmatic and playful and spooky and impossible to peg into any existing genres. To me they sound just as fresh and original today: not synth-pop or industrial or ambient. Nothing but what came into Danielle’s head that day.

“Here Come The Harvest Buns” is some kind of nursery rhyme, with a bouncy little TB-303 hook set to a rhythm of spoons clinking bottles. But it wobbles and fuzzes and there’s something about being “sick as a pig when morning comes”. In “The Wheeled-Wagon” the menace is more up-front, as the sinister school bus of the title rolls slowly onwards, with the children trapped inside, to the accompaniment of woozy saxophones and distorted guitar and a tap-tapping 808.

I hear these songs and remember that room. Playing these records on the stereo and feeling that special joy of experiencing something you can’t quite figure out, but that you love anyway. Something no one else knows about yet, something you can share. Someone made this music for no other reason than that it amused her, without any desire to copy what anyone else was doing, but with melody and sly wit. If I could make my own music, I’d want to do the same.

A lot of people absolutely hated this film, but not me, my friend. I loved it, and not just because my man George Clooney (and his ass) is in it (oh George, you irrepressible scamp!). Like All About Lily Chou-Chou, something about the mood and tone of Solaris resonated within me. The colors, the quietness, the sadness and loss. Like Waking the Dead–in which you can hear another song I’ve posted recently, “Mercy Street” by Peter Gabriel–Solaris is one of my go-to movies when I just want to feel out my bundled up knots of sadness, loneliness and loss.

But this isn’t about the movie, it’s about the music. I watched this movie on my computer with headphones on and as soon as I heard the first seconds of the soundtrack I was hooked. It’s cold and lonely, empty and soothing. Often, I go to sleep at night with this on and pretend I’m alone in a pod, drifting in outerspace. I like to imagine I’m floating in the darkness, and that I’ll never return.

Despite the fruity cover and the even fruitier reviews on that amazon link, I highly recommend you check this out. I’m not much for movie scores, but this one just about kills me.

It started out with just seeking a little bit of warmth and comfort. Fifteen minutes later we were pressing each other against the floor, against the walls, squeezing, thrusting, licking, grabbing.

Completely exhausted we barely made it to bed. Drowsy smiles. Eyes closing. Drifting away, gently rocked to sleep by Mizutani.

There are places inside that dark and soft.

Sometimes you find yourself down in the well where that soft darkness bleeds like sumi ink on rice paper along the underside of your skin.

You can feel it right below the surface and you can taste it in your mouth. It slides into the swirls of your fingerprints, it lines up in the spaces between your vertebrae.

I dream about the well often; I

From the All About Lily Chou-Chou Site:

Lily Chou-Chou: A fictituous character originally created by Shunji Iwai for a novel he also wrote. The soundtrack for the film was a collaborative effort beween Takashi Kobayashi, who had already worked with the director, and Shunji Iwai himself. Lily’s songs are sung by newcomer SALYU.

All night last night I dreamt of emptiness and walking on dried leaves.

There were wide open fields like in the movie, there were figures standing with their heads down.

I remember screaming and screaming and screaming, but no one looked up.

I have never been able to scream that way when I was awake.

I think part of me has died somewhere, and I can’t see it. I don’t understand what’s going on with me lately, and that’s very unusual for me. Usually I am keenly aware of how I feel and why I feel that way.

It’s rather terrifying.

This song’s so rich with the fear of being alone, forever, heart frozen and hope barren. My eyes are going hazy and I am locking up my joints so I can feel what it is like to be as crippled on the outside as I feel inside. It’s more beautiful and pathetic than I ever imagined.

I declare tonight The Eve of Hurting Hearts, even if only for myself. If it never gets better, I may keep this on repeat forever.

I thought about Music To Make Yer Old Lady By for a while.

This is what I came up with.

Talking to sara nh tonight about X, we decided that it’s a mini-party inside the party, where that mini-party is a “pretty much you have to fuck when you listen to X” party.

Holy holy, where to start with X? I remember counting out change on the counter of Moby Disc to buy Los Angeles on tape when I was 13. I played that tape enough in the first 6 months I had to buy it again. As has been noted ever since the early 80s when X hit, Exene and John Doe’s voices are perfect together, you can hear the sexual tension in all of their early songs. In the version of “The World’s a Mess It’s in My Kiss” you can definitely hear it–it’s like a drunk sloppy fuck right there on stage.

“White Girl” showed up on the very first mix-tape I ever made.

“Johnny Hit and Run Paulene” rivals “Bullet” by the Misfits for number of times I found myself listening to the song on repeat, door locked and lip swollen from biting my mouth shut.

“Sugarlight” just sounds like a fun goofy sesh with a boy you really like but need to sex like right now before you tear him in half.

Plus, John Doe is pretty much a combo of the last two guys I was into. One’s definitely got the hair, and the other…I don’t know, if you smash him up with first dood, they are pretty much John Doe.

Man, if either of them had John Doe’s voice, I would have been ruined.

My absolute, number one, get-to-straight-fuckin’ song. If Iggy doesn’t make you want to get to straight fuckin’, well, maybe you’re dead ‘tween the knees.

Slow. Good and slow. MMMMMM. I listened to this in the car a lot until I found that the squeezing my knees together action was impairing my driving.

“I can’t keep my mind out of the gutter, not even to save my soul.”

Man, TRUE.

Download: X - My Goodness
Buy the Album: X - Ain’t Love Grand

When sexual selections are exhausted, one must think of further topics for Selector.org theme weeks. I cannot speak for any but myself, and, thus, will promise in weeks to come:

Thinking Music Week
The Fall In Love Week
The Quiet Dinner Week
My Favorite Voices Week
Underwater Eden Week
Unusual Movie Soundtracks Week
Repetitious Week Repetitious Week
Aztec Heliopolis Week
Unearthed Week
and so on….

Until those weeks, I leave you with a track by Scotland’s mysterious Pub, who certainly give Boards of Canada a run for their money. It’s music for Fall In Love Week, Thinking Music Week, Underwater Eden Week, The Quiet Dinner Week….

Spring is not quite here for those of us in the Northeast, but it’s really trying. It makes me feel like I’m perpetually in motion and wherever it is that I am going, it is good. This is the kind of song hamsters would listen to if they were taking a trip.

this
is
very
nice.

when i was a kid, i was hard, fast, and determined to grow up and marry a spanish woman.

i imagined cooking grilled cheese for her, looking fat and repulsive like a new york cabbi in a grease stained wife beater.

and i would love her to death. we would come home from a day of promenades in bleaching spanish sunlight, our stomachs full of paella and siesta with eachother. when we woke up, the sun would be intense and somewhere between unbearable and falling. we would take a drink on a veranda and sex so hard without any regard for sun screen.

not much has changed since my childhood, i still have it bad for dark featured women, i just might have a healthier self image.

this is for you, my spanish bride.

jessicabruises (11:51:32 PM): i am going to post one of my favorite masturbation songs tonight.
jessicabruises (11:51:42 PM): because at least when you masturbate, you are loving the one you love the most.
sloppysean (11:51:53 PM): that’s no water hot, neither.
jessicabruises (11:52:03 PM): wha?
sloppysean (11:52:36 PM): it’s an old deep south saying, no bullshit.
jessicabruises (11:52:51 PM): oh, word
sloppysean (11:55:01 PM): SCRATCH MY NIPPLES, JESSICA
jessicabruises (11:55:20 PM): whoah, i just wet myself
sloppysean (11:55:22 PM): and feel the sweat collecting between my thighs.
jessicabruises (11:55:23 PM): stop that
jessicabruises (11:55:28 PM): whoah askldfaslkdjas
jessicabruises (11:55:29 PM): stop it!
jessicabruises (11:55:34 PM): i am listening to “bullet”!
jessicabruises (11:55:58 PM): i am not even posting about it yet and i’m getting all hot in the pants.
jessicabruises (11:56:43 PM): when you talk dirty to me, i get all blushed up in the face.
sloppysean (11:56:57 PM): that’s perfect.
sloppysean (11:57:32 PM): i thought you were masturbating, and i know how you like the hot tawk.
jessicabruises (11:58:27 PM): OH MY GOD
jessicabruises (11:58:42 PM): i think this is the post for the song, thenk ewe mary.
sloppysean (11:58:56 PM): this conversation?
jessicabruises (11:58:59 PM): yes
sloppysean (11:59:07 PM): FUCK. GOD. ALWAYS.
jessicabruises (11:59:08 PM): THERE’S LOVIN’ FROM YOUR PALM.
sloppysean (11:59:08 PM): yes!
jessicabruises (11:59:18 PM): you gotta suck suck jackie suck!
jessicabruises (11:59:23 PM): oh no, i need to change my pants.
sloppyseanr (11:59:36 PM): dood, just peel them off and lay down a towel.
jessicabruises (11:59:54 PM): fuck a towel, yo
sloppysean (12:00:16 AM): good point, there’s no reason to kill the slide.
jessicabruises (12:00:27 AM): everything is everything my man.
jessicabruises (12:00:31 AM): everything is everything.
jessicabruises (12:00:34 AM): (in my pants)
jessicabruises (12:00:39 AM): masturbate me!
sloppysean (12:00:55 AM): circle, circle, dot, dot.

Okay, anyway. I first heard this song at the tender age of, I don’t know, 13? 14?

I was listening to Rodney on the Roq on KROQ in LA way before KROQ got all shitty and I think one of the ladies from the Lunachicks played this song and said it was one of her favorites.

By the end of the 1m38s of the song, I was humping my pillow frantically, and since I had been taping the show on my boombox, I proceeded to rewind and grind for the next 2 hours or something.

To this day, when I hear Bullet I start looking for table corners, bed edges, the backs of chairs, etc, to wrap myself around for old time’s sake.

I threw in Last Caress as an extra wet lickery kiss from me to you.

The Misfits do the same thing to me in this way that the Stooges do: they make me long to be on a downtown bus at 2am with a filthy, sweaty 19 yr old skater, sloppily making out while his hand is down the front of my pants.

Given that I can’t even remember the last time I was on a downtown bus, at any hour, with anyone’s hand down my pants, in my tender moments I like to throw on the Misfits and pretend.

I don’t have pictures this week, or even links to buy, since all this shit is out of print, but I need to get laid, and if I were right now, these selections would be up there on the list.
The long, long list.
I don’t even want to think about it.

For reference, the songs come from:
DDAA - When A Cap Is Raising
Slaves - The Devil’s Pleasures [whole album is EXCELLENT to screw to; I speak from experience]
VA - Sex O Rama Tape 5 [five cassette box]

The XXth Night:

Bourbon.
Electrical tape.
Bruised wrists.
Skinned knees.
Split lips.
Gauze.
Scalpel.
Bandages.
Bandages.
Bandages.

When it’s over, and you lay like Adam next to Eve, the whole world new and undone and somehow slumbering inside its shell.

Quique is perfect. About forty-five minutes within it, (and you are traveling inward) you hit “Through You” and it’s all afterglow, until the final hooning tones of “Signals.” “Filter Dub” occurs between these two tracks, as the pulsing continues to reverberate through your body, spiraling ever downward and outward. Too pure.

The early nineties were when the ambient boom occurred, the shoegaze scene was burning bright, and it seems unfortunate that these two didn’t mate more often than they did. In my little 1994 world, the seduction of college-age girls was always accompanied by either the former or the latter music. Most often, it was with both, and Closedown (one album, never to resurface) had enough floating atmospheres, moon-eyed vocals, and lovely space-dub textures to suit any LSD-fueled trysts, whether in dorm room, open field, or apple orchard. The orchard especially, where fruit was on every limber tree, and the milky way visible the year ’round. The drugs have gone by the wayside in my life, as it should be, and as is appropriate, but the orchard and all its seeds remain.

“… doesn’t care where he spills his seed, or loses his senses.”

I first “got there”–felt the pulsing, watched from outside as the feathered-lizard brain of the ancients whispered quietly and deeply–as I listened to From Here to Tranquility. I can remember having it on but not consciously playing it to create a mood. It was a random selection, and a revelation. I can remember feeling out of my body, as if there was someone manipulating my movements, tailoring my sensate reactions to stimuli, controlling my sensations.

At that college, the magnetic parts of my stereo’s speakers would pick up radio waves from nearby radio stations. Behind the sounds of the CD, you could hear far-off radio announcers; tinny, tiny music; bass vibrations. A hidden etheric audience that was out in space as well as in my bedroom. In a way, I was more a part of this wispy audience than I was present in my own body. Sex will always have a little of that cloudy time within me.

Yes – It starts out, and you’re coy, but sensual. You put on your play, dancing the dance people have swayed horizontally to since Adam and Eve, mocking the seriousness with which people take sex. You mock the rose petals on the floor, leading up to the bed. You mock the white wedding dress, for yours, if it were any color, would be sin red. You slowly unbutton their shirt, as the tempo changes and you regress into animalism. Clothes get thrown about, you hear ripping sounds, but don’t bother to check, hands molest roughly because you can’t believe there’s an end to one body and the beginning of the next. Limbs get contorted, feet show up in places you thought you’d see an elbow. Sweat begins to drip, bruises begin to form, and scratches mark your back. You bump, you grind, you hump, and you laugh.

After a bout of furious, mutually satisfying thrusts that move in time to the baseline, you collapse in a sweaty heap. You exhale, and catch their eye. There’s a moment between that and when you notice their chest heaving, but their perk nipples suddenly have you up again like a 16 year old zit-faced boy. And it begins again…

A slow strum brings you back, and you’re reaching for your first post-coital cigarette when Parsley Sound takes over the speakers. The pillow talk starts and you find yourself confessing things you didn’t expect to, but it’s ok because after what you two just did, everything else seems illusionary.

Long kisses, soft caresses of tender spots, fingers in hair (on various parts of the body); this is where you find their flaws. You notice their teeth are slightly crooked. They have a birth mark on their shoulder. Their right ear has a knick in it. Their abdomen has a kidney scar, and you pull them on top of you, just to feel their weight, as if that will somehow make them more real. You’re struck by the fact that two lives can even come together, even just for this moment, and make a mental note not to forget the trail of rose petals to the bed next time.

The shuffling begins, and you both get comfortable, finding that position where your bodies fit into each other’s crevasses. You know you’re supposed to fall asleep now and have wild dreams of happily ever after, but you give up on that idea so you can lie awake and feel their breathing slow, matching yours to theirs.

Then The Books start playing, and the real part comes. The times they roll over in their sleep, and you watch them quietly listening. Your mind wanders and you run through endless possibilities. You imagine getting up and leaving right at that moment, leaving them in the dark at 4:30 in the morning, without any note left behind. You imagine them on Christmas morning, in their old pyjamas, opening presents; with the dog you two got somewhere along the way jumping through the discarded wrapping paper. You imagine your first fight, and the make-up sex that follows. You imagine proposing, getting engaged, and then having them die the next day in a horrible crash, while you buy a black mourning dress, and cover the mirrors, even though you’re not Jewish. You imagine losing your job, failing school, and turning to them for support, only to hear the exact thing you want them to say: “Fuck it all, let’s run away to Europe, or go teach English in China.”

And you can’t fall asleep, because what would happen then? What would happen if you let your guard down and didn’t protect yourself from every possibility?

But why rush it? Go to sleep. You’ll find out what happens soon enough.

in honor of music to make love to your old lady by week:

oh girl.

oh god. this song is making my panties wet as i am typing this.
in case you ever forget/do not know what it’s like to have a hot, trembling
boy on top/inside of you, there’s suicide.

i’m going to have to cut this short. i have to uh.. take care of some shit.

in the meantime:

you know how.

With this post, I hereby announce the commemoration of The First Complete Month of The Selector by proclaiming this week Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By Week. I invite all Selectors to hit us up with all those songs that put you in the mood to Make it Happen.

Let’s do this right, my friends.

————————————————————————————————

I have been known to say the following about D’Angelo:

If I even look at D’Angelo I’m pregnant. I’m not even with child, I am with a fucking litter. I want to be his baby’s mama. Especially since angie stone IS his baby’s mama! He likes women with the bang boom kakow! That’s hot. My introduction to D’Angelo was one day way back in college when I settled into my oakland apt for a nice afternoon of post-classes tv decompression. It was there I discovered the station The Box and D’Angelo’s video for “Untitled (How Does it Feel)”. By the end of the video my shirt was open and my hand was in my pants. I want to make love to him. LOVE. His eyes…his body…the way he sings about wanting to cum inside me. Er, you, I mean cum inside the collective “you”. Us. He wants to cum inside us. I would let him bareback me and then fill me so I can be heavy with his child. Children. Litter. Whatever.

As recently as this morning I said:

Dood, the drum in all of D’Angelo’s songs sound like an ass being smacked. Just like a medium strength “pah-pah” kind of smack.

[NB: The percussion in “The Root” is a perfect example of this.]

D’Angelo is late night kissing until the inside of your mouth is raw sex, sunny good time in the morning booty, and blowjobs under the cover of reflections of downtown buildings at night on the windows of your Lincoln towncar.

echoing not only the extreme aggressiveness with which
i conducted myself in bed this morning, but also the
unbelievable frustration i am experiencing as i search,
desperately, for a fucking job in new york city.

for when you’re feeling small and anonymous:

last night i dreamt that my sister and i were back in action, hitting up the world.

we saw the tundra melted over, looked at disney forests and flew over the canopies of the south pacific.

i walked through a grey building where tropical birds got caught in the corners not illuminated by sunlight. so they littered the floor dead, some resting on wired mesh, their colors almost washed out in near dark.

Oh, this is one of those songs.

This is one of those songs that you share with someone in the hopes that they will somehow feel it like you do.

That unfair and ridiculous test of “How alike are we? Will you understand me? How much will I have to explain to you?” Unfair and ridiculous because we all know that there should not be those tests, but there are. No one likes to think of themselves as some sort of adolescent when it comes to things like this, no one wants to be a Nick Hornby character. I think, though, if we’re honest, we’ll admit that sometimes we are. Maybe it’s even unconscious, maybe you don’t even say to yourself “oh, if XXXX likes this movie/song/book/artist, I will be that much more fucked, I will convince myself just by the virtue of our similarity that my heart belongs just that much more to them.” No, we’re not in junior high, it’s not a list anymore. It’s more insidious than that–and at the same time a bit more genuine, if you can cop to it.

Because it’s not about being cool or all the culture references we know.

It is:

Little things that make your heart flip with hope because it’s that much less that you have to say explicitly.

Because sometimes, no matter how much we all like to talk about ourselves, sometimes it feels infinitely better not to have to.

When I heard this song for the first time, it was like someone hit me in the mouth.

I dreamed last night.

Walking in the rain; a large, damp field of deep, deep grass, enough to swallow a man. And there was love; a painful thing, as I wandered.

I can’t tell you about the dream, but this song played, with different lyrics; ones I’d made up in my mind, about a person who exists and does not exist. If I concentrate, I can remember the words now, phrases and briefly lucid moments of emotional honesty.

I don’t have any Blue Nile albums, and I’m not even sure if I like them in the first place. But we can’t always decide who or what is in our dreams, or what they mean when the veil of sleep is lifted and we look upon ourselves with new eyes.

there’s not much to write about. if you don’t know about peter gabriel, but want to, that’s a good place to start.

it’s a good place to start for just about anyone you want to know about, but don’t.

sometimes i feel like giving a lot of biographical or historical information about a song or artist (especially any even marginally well-known one) is fairly worthless, given this is the internet and we are all pros at finding shit out about shit we don’t know at this point.

but i will say this: something good about peter gabriel is he started real world records, which puts out really amazing World Music titles, but more importantly has an excellent art department for their releases.

this is a song that i sometimes listen to when i feel small, sad and broken, because it allows me to cry. it’s been in my life for a very long time.

everything is like this lately.

from the garmonbozia website:

In the time of depression and a world falling apart
we hope we can comfort you with our music
or perhaps make your world a bit more
beautiful.

Not only are the Youngblood Brass Band probably the best thing to listen to on a hungover Minneapolis morning, eating bacon and eggs and tomatoes, they’re also catastrophically amazing educators and humanitarians as well as musicians. They travel around the world doing residencies at schools, their Layered collective houses a publishing house, record label, music transcription service and outreach organization, and, yeah, most of all, they make seriously amazing music. Five horn players, two drummers, a sousaphone and an MC. Get on the bus, creeps.

There are days like this.

You walk around the city and it’s cold outside, but the sun is like white and yellow exploded everywhere. Everything is shining bright, but everything is lonely.

Everyone you love is far away and everytime you sit down to write a letter, nothing good comes out.

You walk around with your headphones on, or maybe you’re driving with the windows rolled up tight and the music loud.

You are a satellite slipping along with other satellites, nobody touching. Nobody makes contact.

You are shining bright, and you are lonely.

i don’t know how much everyone else has to bite their tongue and break their nails on saint patrick’s day, but in kansas city the streets are contaminated with 1,000 douche-jesuses spilling in from the suburbs. they are generally huge dildoes, acting fools, drunk and lame like polio.

i didn’t wear green. i slapped away the pinches.

this is my retaliation for closing the tivoli early for a man who, for some reason, thought snakes were unacceptable.

See this, this I can’t do. School’s piling up in the last month, so I can’t go on this site because every time I do I get lost for hours and don’t notice that I have class in the morning, but I do it anyways because I can’t help myself. Geez, even my precious el-gay has been reduced to two line entries :P

But The Clean have been on my playlist for close to two weeks now, and I just can’t get over them, so I had to share.

Picture this: You step out of your front door on a particularly fine day and toss your Salon Selectives hair like a supermodel as you start your little stroll down the street.

The soundtrack? Bell Head, by Liquid Liquid. Before you know it, the delivery boys are tossing their packages and falling in behind you. The old man sweeping the sidewalk in front of his store skips along, twirling his broom like a baton. Guy and Gal Friday in full corporate attire look to each other with a smile, join hands and break into a twirling dance. Birds are swooping around your head. Everything is totally fucking radical.

All you gotta do now is shake it,baby.

I made this mix with my two favorite people, jon and niki, in mind. They are on opposite sides of the country now, but I imagine them both listening to this on their headphones while they glide through their respective cities.

This mix is for urban soundtracking, quietly.

“LETSmakeOURmovies” agf
“urah-shigue” equadoodle
“good morning sunshine” colleen
“western airlines” domotic
“minimal tunesia” agf
“pour une flaque” davide balula
“imawa mori nona kani” the konki duet
“plantage” under byen
“rind-gand rind-gand hearts” tenniscoats
“pur glace” davide balula & domotic
“hjertebarn” under byen
“sweet c.k.” kazumasa hashimoto
“she is a rainbow in curved air” acid mothers temple & the melting paraiso u.f.o.
“awaawa” eisi
“nightfall at the Riverside” cinq
“ending theme” tenniscoats

More music from the last few nights’ adventures.

Domotic is Stephane Laporte. He wears nice sweaters and has a soft voice.

He smiled secretly when he talked about chasing pigeons with Davide Balula.

I imagine he smells like tea with cream and honey, and a thousand cigarettes.

Strangely, I am on a roots-ish bender right now, which is almost irrelevant because “Copied Keys” isn’t necessarily roots-y. To stretch the metaphor to the lyrical, the song is all about transience, about feeling homeless in your home, about being a guest in your own life.

The strange thing about this song is that nothing really happens - it’s just the same chord progression repeatedly - yet I don’t seem to care or get bored. As a matter of fact I love it more every time I listen to it.

I guess this is my second post in a row featuring Canadian singer-songwriter types… Ms. Edwards hails from Ottawa and cannot come back to Winnipeg soon enough.

Musically, it’s been an exciting couple of days for me.

Prompted by Daniel’s fantastic AGF post, I started what’s become a two constant discovery of new music. First, I watched the interview he included in his post, which led me to watch all the other remaining episodes currently offered on their site. This led me to a band I will sure to be posting soon, Tenniscoats. Through surfing the web for Tenniscoats, I found the HAPPY website, which brought me to Gutevolk, which I posted a couple days ago. It also led me to Cinq, Piana, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, and World’s End Girlfriend, all of whom I also expect to be posting soon. I spent hours clicking along, headphones on tight and loud, sampling music I had never heard before.

Simply put, I was in bliss. This is exactly what I had hoped for when I started the Selector, to be opened up to things I had never heard before.

Last night, I was back watching This is Our Music episodes, where I found Active Suspension Records. Holy holy. So so much good music. All the artists featured on the program are fantastic, and of them all, so far I like The Konki Duet and Davide Balula best. Honestly, there was so much great stuff to choose from, I pretty much randomly chose a couple of tracks to post up.

Basically, this is why I love the internet. I hope that you like these tracks and perhaps find new things to love (and share with us). I especially encourage you to check out This is Our Music; as Daniel noted in his post, it’s a bit of Swedish at the beginning, but the interview proper is done in English. I think the show started on MTV Europe, which really pisses me off because the quality of this program seriously kills the quality of anything I’ve seen on MTV for years both in terms of content and also aesthetics. This week there’s going to be a piece of Juana Molina, holy crap.

So there you have it, the linkiest post in Selector history.

PS–I hope you checked out sneJ’s first post for Under Byen, yet another band that I intend to research the hell out of. I can’t wait to see what that investigation leads me to.

Today it was 40 degrees outside, and sunny. I wore my tshirt outside, comfortably, with a poofy vest. It’s not quite Spring in New England, but it’s getting there, and that warrants celebration.

Hey. Any excuse to break open some wine, I’ll take it.

Under Byen, from Denmark, provide that sensuous eeriness that we’ve come to expect from Scandinavian bands (OK, except those from Sweden), while still remaining unexpected and alien enough to actually merit those comparisons.

The singing may seem familiar, but on closer inspection isn’t: where the sainted B—k growls and rolls syllables around in her mouth like marbles, Henriette works with sighs and whispers, her voice breaking. And instrumentally, it’s unlikely that S—- R– would risk breaking their elfin spell by pitching John Bonham down a flight of stairs for a rhythm track.

Under Byen pull in odd directions: elsewhere, “Batteri Generator” begins with trendy glitches but ends in a jazzy barrelhouse piano improvisation, and throughout the album one can’t tell whether intermittent screeches originate from a laptop, electric violin or a musical saw. A band whose cellist dares to wear angel wings in concert can also decide to show their mud-covered singer dead in a ditch on the album art.

Adding to the mystique, the band remain (undeservedly) obscure in a growingly One-Click world. Having first stumbled on the gorgeous video of this song, my subsequent frantic efforts to buy the CD were stymied: neither Amazon nor iTunes had ever heard of Under Byen. Nor had InSound or Pitchfork! Instead I was led on a merry chase through obsessive fan pages and shoddy foreign CD shops, finally making the transaction in Euros at a smoke-filled Dutch website. I didn’t actually leave the couch, but it felt like the days of old when I’d finally find a long-rumored disc at the back of the cut-out bin in the ninth record store of the afternoon.

It’s that delightful obscurity that I want to shatter by telling everyone how great Under Byen are. Because I’m like that: I’m The Selector. Thanks for having me on the show.

Makes my eyelids flutter uncontrollably. Love it so much.
Probably best to avoid if you are: pregnant, epileptic, over the age of 65, or boring.

Lollipops. I’m convinced Schikowski loves lollipops. He’s obsessed. He sits in his flat counting the licks and composes during self-induced lollipop highs. He dreams whole worlds in the air bubbles and swirls. He thinks of nothing else, except sound. Sound and lollipops.

Lollipops. That’s the secret.

Some of you almost liked Prurient. But I was gentle. No more gentle.

I have been a slacker. At our fearless founder’s urging, I submit to you a track.

Not too long ago I discovered that Jon Kennedy was holding a remix contest for a track from his upcoming album. To any who requested it, he released a raw vocal clip, a guitar melody and some other random noises. To date, he has not yet released to the original track, so all the entrants have been working blind. I thought this made the contest especially interesting, since while I knew of Job Kennedy, I’d never heard any music that had been specifically created by him.

In my mix, I chose to work with the vocals (chopped and otherwise mutilated) and one of the random synth/piano single-note-sounds. The rest is original. If you’re interested, you can listen to all the current entries to the contest here.

If you’d like to give mine a listen, please do listen to my track from the link below… that’s the finished, much-higher-quality version.

A while back, while trading emails, Jon asked me for a sample of what I had completed so far, so I (reluctantly) sent him a sample.. he then went and posted it, despite my protestations… and he’s been a bit slow getting the finished track up there. So yeah, the link below is bettah.

If you have the patience and/or the interest, please do listen to the other entrants, as there are some greats ones in there.. although the lame truth of this whole ordeal being little more than a popularity contest shows in the ratings of some of the better (and worse) tracks.

I do hope you enjoy it.

Name: sneJ
Location: San Jose, CA
Interests: aegypt, agnosticism, ambient, amnesia, antlers, basslines, bebop, board games, children’s books, codex seraphinianus, collaboration, cutely disturbing, david lynch, deja vu, drones, instant messaging, intp, jamais vu, jim woodring, john crowley, kranky, mac os x, max ernst, hayao miyazaki, moomintroll, moose, nintendo, parenting, pattern languages, philip pullman, pillbugs, presque vu, programming, science, social software, space opera, spookiness, surrealism, sushi, typography, venice, writing, zelda …
Favorite Music: Swirly droney noisy dubby lovely mysterious swooping sounds. Viz: Stars Of The Lid, Windy & Carl, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Cocteau Twins, Tarentel, My Bloody Valentine, Rachel’s, Under Byen, Sigur Ros, Robert Rich, Mono, Marsen Jules…
About: I love things I can’t figure out. I love things that are beautiful and disturbing at once. Everything should be fierce and kind and cozy and unexpected. I make things, I imagine the shapes of invisible contours between things people haven’t realized are connected yet. I can’t draw or play an instrument, but I can find pretty pieces and join them together. Getting bored is not allowed.

Contact: sneJ@REMOVETHIStheselector.org
Site: Giant Moose

“Most of the day
We were at the machinery

In the dark sheds
That the seasons ignore
I held the levers that guided the signals to the radio
But the words I receive, random code, broken fragments from before.

Out in the trees
My reason deserting me
All the dark stars
Cluster over the bay.

Then in a certain moment
I lose control and at last I am part of the machinery.

Where are you?
And the light disappears
As the world makes its circle through the sky.”

Between 1970 and 1974, a little Chicago label called Capsoul cut a few singles and then vanished. The material that was recorded then has just recently been re-released.

I picked up the first of the Eccentric Soul series on a whim and, as happened when I did the same so many years ago with that Nick Drake record, I had the realization that the ocean is so much deeper than i’d ever imagined before.

Somewhere, I’m walking under cherry blossom trees, and this song is playing on my headphones.

In my head I am planning many trips to places where I don’t know the language, and I am stomping in foreign rain puddles; I’ve got on new rubber boots, and I’ve pulled up my hair, with lady bug pins holding up the wily pieces.

A Spring trip, to somewhere far away.

I have addresses for post cards, maybe I’ll send them now and we can just pretend.

One thing that I really enjoy with my studies is writing. Not so much producing pages of text, but the simple act of forming letters with a pen.  Γ ^ρ_μν  +  Φ g ^ρσ { g_σν ∂_μ Φ^-1  +   … slowly writing symbols, figuring out what the next line will be, puts me in a very meditative state. I enjoy writing some symbols more than others, b and  ξ  are particularly delightful. This fascination with text began as soon as I learned to write, and I really loved those excercises when you were supposed to fill an entire page with a particular letter. I developed my own system on how to write numbers in script style and started to use it in maths class, something my teacher was not so happy about. Today, I’m still playing with the thought of inventing my own alphabet.

Antye Greie-Fuchs is a Berlin-based artist using calligraphy in much of her work. A Swedish team recently made a short documentary about her, it’s available here for a few more days (click “Se programmet”, two minute intro in Swedish, the rest is in English).

I know I know. “If you’re going to post something Mike Watt related, why the fuck aren’t you posting the Minutemen???”

Because, well, I didn’t start listening to the Minutemen until the last few years. I just didn’t know, ok? I learned about all my music growing up on my own for the most part, get off my back, stop being a jerk. Be easy, this is still good.

Man, fIREHOSE. What the fuck, M? I love this album so much. Crap. It reminds me of high school, the good parts. Hanging out with my skater friends who all listened to stuff like REM and shit that used to be called “college music”, whatever that is. It reminds me of sitting up in Greg’s room and looking out his window across the valley and thinking about how Shara was totally in love with him and how I still remembered being in 3rd grade class with him, drawing fighter planes and army doods exploding when we got done doing our maths early. We talked about his zine while I tried (in my head) to hear all the words to “In Memory of Elizabeth Cotton” and how it shocked me that Phranc’s voice was so pretty.

And it reminds me of my first real crush, Jerry, who was in love with the bass and how I tried, like a retard, to make conversation about it with Mike Watt as my in, even though I (obviously) had no idea what I was really talking about because I had no idea of his hx and how Jerry was still nice to me, even though I was a retard and obviously completely stupid for him.

And it makes me think of listening to my walkman with If’n on auto-reverse, doing chores in my backyard, hiding in the garden when my dad came out to check on us because I just really wanted to sit in the calla lillies a little longer, I didn’t want to go inside and clean his bathroom.

It reminds me of going to sleep everynight on my twin sized bed, sharing the space with the boombox at my feet, my soles against the speakers, feeling the vibration of the thunder broom while I day(night)dreamed about how I was going to talk to the people at school the next day, when all I really wanted to do was spend the day laying halfway out my window, If’n on repeat, reading books.

Since I left home for college I have moved 7 times, and this is one of the 5 cassette tapes (of hundreds) that have stayed in my possession.

There’s part of me that wants to link every single song of this. Seriously.

Oh damn.

It’s 4fuckingam. I was going to write all kinds of rad about this song, but now I am tired and I don’t have it in me.

But I have to share this song NOW because it’s too good to keep to myself anymore.

It’s basically the rad “it’s Spring and I am totally crushed out/in love!” song and even though I am neither crushed out nor in love, Spring makes me want to be.

Lee Hazlewood is an icon and Ann-Margaret is damned Ann-Margaret. Know this, man.

Because I’m the super-female that’s called Jess-e´
And like Hurricane Annie I’ll blow you away
Whenever I’m in a battle, yo! I don’t play
So you best go about your way
And have a nice day.

It’s no secret that I’m something of a recluse.

It’s no secret that there are some songs better sung without words.

It’s no secret that you’ll find me, at the end, in that bar, the spot in the back corner, my jacket, the tiny glass of vermouth, the pencil-thin smile, the thin man in the booth.

I don’t normally like songs with words, but when Steve Kilbey sings, it’s like he’s whispering secrets, long untold. “Music is a door.”

I don’t make mixes very often, but here’s what I made for the FYC mix exchange.

1. Soul Center - Can I Ask You  [W.v.B.]
2. Gebr. Teichmann - Aus der Ferne  [Kompakt]
3. Hombre Ojo - Manejando Un Carrito Rapidito Por Santiaguito (edit)  [Perlon]
4. Antonelli Electr. - The Man with the Golden Hands  [Italic]
5. Studio 1 - Gr�n 3  [Studio 1/Profan]
6. Cristian Vogel - What  [Tresor]
7. Alexander Kowalski - Hearing Is Believing  [Kanzleramt]
8. Oliver Hacke - 21:31  [Traum]
9. Marko F�rstenberg - Stockhorn  [Thinner]
10. Various Artists - Erode  [Chain Reaction]
11. Round Five feat Tikiman - Na Fe Throw It  [Main Street]

After going back and forth between a number of songs I had finally decided what my first post would be. Trying to fall asleep, my mind started playing around with how to write an introduction to the song, the only thing missing was posting instructions.

Late for work as usual, I was having breakfast in front of my computer and happily discovered that Jessica just sent me the instructions. As soon as I got back from work I was ready to go. Some of the recent Selector tunes were playing in the background and all of a sudden something hit me. That guitar sounded VERY familiar. I switched to iTunes: The Go! Team - Ladyflash had sampled one of my favourite songs and I needed to hear it NOW. One minute later Archie Bell & The Drells - Tighten It Up started spinning and my old post felt completely irrelevant.

“Music has a strange effect on me
It doesn’t matter wherever I may be
Whenever I hear a drummer play that funky beat
I drop everything and get out of my seat”

I just can’t stop dancing.

Here are my two very favorite Boards of Canada songs.

Like Tom Waits always reminds me of Iowa, Boards of Canada will always remind me of first coming to Seattle, and my first Seattle Summer. I had never seen such an amazing season in my life. Summer is why I have a hard time ever imagining leaving this city.

Gyroscope: This song is what summer smells like. It’s laying on my bed in my basement apt in August, taking pictures through my blinds of the stairwell above my bedroom, the sun coming in soft and slow at 7pm, listening to people talking and laughing outside, everything cool in blue inside my walls.

Dandelion: At 1min15secs, “Dandelion” is probably the shortest song to ever pull an emotional response from me.

This is the song that sealed the deal for me on Boards of Canada, and I have to admit I don’t really have the words to explain why. The backwards sounds are like water filling up my chest, reminding me of the intense loneliness I was experiencing the summer before last, when Geogaddi first crawled up under my skin. It has the blurry-eyed, covered in gauze, almost synaesthetic quality of memory that all of the really great Boards of Canada releases have that cleaner sounding tracks lack.

My reaction to this song is immediate and nearly overwhelming. The fact that it’s over almost as quickly as it started is what keeps me from drowning.

Two versions of a favorite song.

Since I am currently beating myself up for not being fast enough and getting tickets to one of The Go! Team�s already sold out shows in NYC, I thought I�d post these little gems of theirs from last year.

To me, these tracks sound like indiepop meets Motown meets 80s electro-funk. Very fun. Perfect for a, well, pep rally. Thus, I would like to give this Brighton, England six-piece props for name-appropriateness.

P.S. Good news for NYC peeps: a �secretish gig� on March 23 at the Tribeca Grand Hotel has recently been announced. Free. Hooray.

Hot damn, people, Spring is here!

Today was warm and beautiful and there are STILL people outside, drunk, beautiful, enjoying the new season.

I spent a lot of the day cleaning my apt, which over the Winter months had taken on an unclean that surprised even me. There’s a lot you miss when you spend most of your time at home in the light of a single desk lamp.

It’s easy to miss things when you don’t like to clean. And people, I hate cleaning. Oh damn, do I hate cleaning.

But today! I cleaned the hell out of my apt. There were bottles sent to recycling and boxes cut down to easily bagged pieces. THERE WAS MAIL SORTED. My cleaning impulse got fucked up along the way and only really hits me for real every 10 months or so, so when it does, I BEST GET THINGS DONE. And things got done, they did, thank the lord.

The thing that kept me going all afternoon was my men Lee “Scratch” Perry and Desmond Dekker. I swear to god there’s nothing that’ll get you moving with a smile on your face like some good Jamaican dub/rocksteady/reggae/whathaveyou. I could start in on just how influential this men are, but I think I have done quite enough work today, thank you very much. Instead, I’ll direct you to these nice lil’ run downs by amg.

I know a lot of you are still under the blanket of a cruel winter, but out here in the Pac-Northwest, Lady Nature has seen fit to throw us an early Spring. Rather than bite our nails and worry about what this must mean for global warming and the like, I invite you to pretend like it’s early June, spin these little gems and get excited about what Spring and Summer are bound to bring you.

So good!

The saddest and most beautiful ambient music ever created. Two tracks, 27:27 each. Michael Fibe, where are you?

When listening to “The Last Leaf,” look outside at the surrounding trees. Is there a leaf, left from the autumn past? Imagine it, its papery sounds as the wind whips, the rain drenching, the sun baking, that shhhhhh noise the breeze makes through it. What kept it upon the tree so long�mussel’s beard? When it falls, finally….

This is my I Lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa post.

[caption:The view from that tower, 01/04/03. That’s the Quaker Oats factory across the highway, where they are proud to tell you they produce more cereal than anywhere else in the world. The best nights were when they were making crunchberries or when the elevator smelled like frosted flakes.]

I lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for seven months in 2002.

Living in CR is exactly as you would imagine it. Empty, flat, beautiful and strange.

It seems amazing to me now that I did it. When asked why I am always hard pressed to adequately express what made me leave a perfectly good life in the Bay Area of California for the cultural wasteland of Iowa.

The best I can say is that my life in the Bay Area was not perfectly good. I was in a job i hated, with people I didn’t like, doing something that was marginally rewarding. I had little to no clue of what I was capable of. I had spent a year putting my heart back together after falling in love, for real, for the first time. I had never lived alone, I had never seen my stuff. I was in debt, I was bored. I had a best friend I missed terribly and she was there. I didn’t understand what it meant to leave everything you knew and everyone you loved.

I was Nowhere, so I figured going to the physical manifestation of Nowhere would give me insight and strength. Being afraid of fire and therefore immolating yourself to get over it, so to speak.

I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew that the life I had was not feeding me and I wanted more. I had never lived anywhere but California, and I knew that there were different kinds of places with different ways to be. I thought it would force me to figure out a different way to be, since anything different would be better than what I was.

I had romantic ideas of what the Midwest would be like: the simple people, the slower pace, the sunsets on porches with fireflies and thunderstorms, all soundtracked by Grant Lee Buffalo. I imagined falling in love with a simple fresh faced farm boy, a boy who saw farther because his eyes weren’t shot short by looking at dirty pavement and office buildings on every corner. I thought that my head would be set right there, that I would find some peace, that I would figure myself out without all the extraneous bullshit that I felt when I was in California. I thought that the company of this girl I had known and loved for 10 years would be a salve for my soul-sickness, and I don’t even believe in souls.

I just knew I needed different. And Cedar Rapids, Iowa seemed like the most different I could get without leaving our borders.

And in some senses, it really was like that. In others, though, it was nothing like that.

I was foolish. Within two months, the best friend stopped talking to me for reasons still unknown, and to be honest my heart isn’t even broken over it anymore. So it goes and go it does. The lower cost of living in CR was offset by a shitty job (with the best people I have ever worked with) that left me in worse debt than when I left California. I knew no one and was in the worst period of social anxiety of my life. People who knew me from online visited me and I was terrible to them, or boring to them, or both. It was, in a word, fucked.

I was completely broken. I spent 5 months alone in a high rise apartment in downtown CR, the loneliest downtown you could ever imagine, trying to figure out how I had fucked up my life so completely. The only time I talked to anyone was when I was at work talking to customers over the phone, at the news stand talking to Stan, the only person who could be even aproximately called a friend, or when I had the odd phone call from home. I discovered whiskey and delved deeply into Tom Waits. I drove for hours into the middle of nowhere and had dreams of Tim Burton silos, Seurat-style pointilist landscapes and empty maker’s mark bottles lined up against my bedroom wall. I sat in the dark listening to “Death Valley ‘69″ by Sonic Youth with my palms pressed into my eyes until I saw stars.

I fell in love with factories and cemented my obsession with trains. I convinced myself I was in love with a man because I was lonely and bored. I created a whole internal world that heretofore had only been intimated at in my loneliest moments. My insides were a mess of bourbon, music and torn up letters.

And then a little over two years ago, it was over. My mother, in a fit of angelic generosity, decided to bail me out and give me the money to leave. My brother came to the rescue, for the second time driving me along I-80 to a life I thought would be better. As we crossed over the Iowa border into Nebraska, in the early hours of January 6, 2003, I threw Iowa the bird harder than I ever have thrown the bird in my life. We made it from CR to Oakland, California in 30 straight hours of driving delirium, I think of the 30 I drove 6. He is the one and constant savior in my life, the rock that everyone dreams of having, and desires to be.

[caption:Early morning 01/06/03, leaving Laramie, Wyoming.]

13 hours after a sleep in California we drove into Seattle and it’s the best decision I have ever made. Here, I have discovered everything I was looking for there and have settled into my skin. The loneliness remains, but now I am my own best company anyway.

But there are times I wake up in the middle of the night and I am back in CR, staring at the high ceilings of my old apt in the dark, scared and alone. It a sadness that lives in my skin now, seeping down deep like the rest of my scars.

I have to admit, though, on my best nights I still day-dream of marrying Grant Lee Phillips and living in the middle of nowhere California, with a dusty porch and bourbon in jelly glasses.

I still have a roll of film I haven’t developed, shot in my last week in Cedar Rapids. I am literally terrified to see what is in there.

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, the city where I live, has this tendency to drive people away, be it because of the cold, the isolation, or whatever. It’s the murder and child poverty capital of Canada (per capita). It’s 685,000 people in the middle of fucking nowhere. It’s frozen solid seven or eight months of the year.

I guess there’s some hometown favoritism involved in picking this song, but it reminds me of why it is I still love living here and why I may never leave.

I grew up in an über-christian household. My name’s Joel because my dad was so high on Christ he was in theology school when I was birthed. My mom had the God-fear so bad she wouldn’t let us kids watch Care Bears cause they used magic, and Jebus don’t love that. We wouldn’t want to go to hell would we?? They’ve mellowed muchly since, but due to this overdose of the Holy Spirit, I was limited to records and tapes with big blue singing bibles on the cover.

Until grade 5.

That’s when Teresa came into my life. She was the after-school sitter that taught me to play pool and made me my first mix tape. It contained numerous wonderful early 90s ditties like Extreme - Hole Hearted, Salt-N-Peppa - Let’s Talk About Sex, and PM Dawn - Plastic. After three weeks of saving allowance, The Bliss Album became the first album I ever bought.

Also on the tape: ELO - Evil Woman. My love for them started way back then, and hasn’t dissipated a drop since. With that in mind, I’ll leave you with one of my fave tunes.

Yours in Christ…

pru�ri�ent
adj.
-Inordinately interested in matters of sex; lascivious.
-Characterized by an inordinate interest in sex.
-Arousing or appealing to an inordinate interest in sex.
-Harsh and unforgiving noise interspersed with occasional butterfly kisses of ambient love.

This is the micro mini cool kitty, Amelia Earhart:

And this is her theme song, Micro Mini Cool, off the album Cloudy Cloud Calculator.

Most days, Amelia smells like Botan Rice Candy. She is named Amelia Earhart because she is an adventure cat.

You take the F train into the LES. You don’t bring a map because, even though you have no idea where anything is in this city, you’re determined to learn it all the hard way. You’re rockin’ the iPod. Nod your head to a little Mos Def. And then, by way of the glorious shuffle function, “Siren Wine” by The Autumns kicks in. Suddenly you’re fifteen and wishing you could star in your own version of “My So Called Life.” Dye your hair a slightly unnatural color. Nothing shocking. You’re a little sheltered. A little prep school. Your acts of rebellion consist of sporting Doc Martens and black jelly bracelets. You write really. bad. poetry. You have heartbreaking love affairs in your head. You have no idea that this is the sweetest your self-indulgent bouts of waxing mysanthropic will ever be. Once you’re over 18, no one’s charmed by your Neve Campbell bit. All you’ve got left is a bunch of songs you’ll never tell anyone you still listen to.

[NB: This is actually a song that I posted when I was on the other music blog. You know, the one I got kicked off of? Yeah. Here is what I posted then, with some minor editing. No, I didn’t get kicked off for posting this song.]

I first heard this song in ‘97, I think. It was on a mixed tape that my best friend, Niki, made for me. One of the best, I still have it 7 years later actually.

Boo Trundle is an artist I hadn’t heard of, nor heard about since. The little I’ve been able to find over the years has been crappy, but I still really love this song. I had been searching forever for it, and found it a few months ago.

When I found it, I almost started crying, I was so happy. It’s not because of how good the song is, even though it is good. It’s because this song holds everything for me that a good nostalgia song should: smells of late nights on Niki’s porch in Moorpark, smoking cigarettes and talking about boys, late nights listening to coyotes when everyone else was asleep, prickly skin worrying about things that shouldn’t be worried about, because in the end they didn’t matter.

It’s just one of those songs, the kind you can’t really explain why it’s up under your skin. And it has one of the most truthful lyrics I have ever heard: You’ll find that everyone looks lonely when they’re close to you.

This song is early 20s late night blues, with guitar.

When I was a child, my father would take me, on weekends, to Van Saun Park, a seemingly limitless area in northern New Jersey. There were fields and a large pond with ducks to be fed crusts of leftover bread crusts from home. It was a quiet place, as my child-mind reminds me, and the sun always seemed bright, too bright, as though it could burn out your eyes if you stayed out in it too long.

The thing I remember best about this park (though it could have been a different park, couldn’t it?) was a long body of water, almost a rectangular pool, that lay near a playground. It had white tile along its border, as though it aped in miniature the Potomac in Washington. The time I saw it last, and I will remember forever, it was clouded over completely with green algae, a living sheet of photosynthesis disguising the unknown depth of the pool. I poked at the verdant cover with a short oak branch and shivered. Just how deep was it, down there?

At Van Saun Park, in 2005, I look straight at the sun, hoping it will burn my eyes out, freeing them, as I recalled it would. Nothing happens, and I look at the sun’s multitude of reflections off the tiny pool, sparkling. The silences are the intention of the artist.

i am leaps and bounds!

tomorrow, i meet a blissful fourteen days in paris and barcelona.

i will come back infused with the spanish sun.

consider these songs a fourteen gun salute to awesome vacations.

you know, i’ve loved this album for years with no side effects, but for some reason i can’t get this song out of my head today.
i think it’s the lyrics, which are genius, and read like a dating service questionaire.

i was going to wait on this one, but i told lauren i’d post it now. i’m a sucker for a pretty lady.

mmmmmmmmmsogood. an italo classic.
if your ass does not move to this, you are dead. or boring in a very serious way.

as i stated earlier:

my eyes are crossing in opiate bliss.

i’ve eaten three oxycodone tabs and i’m ready to slip into the pink space with the one i love and just, throb.

These three songs come from the Pony Express album, which I have recently gotten into in a big way. I had originally heard the second of these songs when it came out, and even though I couldn’t really get with the rest of their stuff at the time, my taste has changed over the years.

These three songs represent in my head what I like to call the Make Out With Your Best Friend Trilogy. You know what I mean, that person who you’ve spent hours talking with, confided in, talked shit at shows with, looked sideways at art with, laid in bed with while the room is spinning and held onto each other so that you wouldn’t fly off the face of the Earth. Either you’re taken or they are, the timing is never right, you’re afraid to see what would happen if you laid a nice big wet one on them, but you are dying to all the same. Their mind turns your knees to liquid, and when you are with them you feel like your best self. You think being with them would be Right, but god damn it, what if they don’t think the same thing? Then you’re fucked.

A late night cocktail and cigarette sharing session, a laughing fest that ends with you both crying and rolling around on the floor holding your sides, faces close, looking at the space between the top of their tshirt and their collarbone, biting your lip and closing your eyes:

Do you?

I made a mix for the trip to Quebec with my dad, but a section of it didn’t really work. So I edited it a bit.

01 the decemberists - shiny
02 Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Lovely Creature
03 love - maybe the people would be the times or between clark and hilldale
04 Eldorado - Honey Don’t
05 United States of America - stranded in time
06 Ike & Tina Turner - you don’t love me (yes I know)
07 the new york dolls - trash
08 Billy Fury - Bumble Bee
09 aztec camera - lost outside the tunnel
10 the fall - blood outta stone
11 love and rockets - here on earth
12 The Royal Family and the Poor - I love you (Restrained in a Moment)
13 Yes - A Venture
14 Love - A House Is Not A Motel
15 Kevin Coyne - Really in Love
16 Spacemen 3 - it’s alright
17 Woven Hand - Sparrow Falls
18 Partridge Family - I Woke Up In Love This Morning
19 the new york dolls - subway train
20 CAN - Mary, Mary So Contrary

Sometimes you crawl out of bed and all you wanna do is start trashing shit.

Music to do so by. After about 30 strange seconds of silence.

Oh, ex-Heroin dudes and some folk who went on to do Thingy, Black Heart Procession, Rocket From the Crypt, etc. I guess this is two in a row from San Diego for me.

“obsessions, edit” joe frank
“sunshine + gasoline” godspeed you black emperor
“two years on welfare” exhaust
“fabulous muscles (mama black widow)” xiu xiu
“everything dies.” navicon torture technologies
“no mercy for she” yann tiersen & shannon wright
“sabbath (marina rosenfeld unholy sabbath remix)” mono
“lucy dub” loscil
“red sea edit” joe frank
“lazy sunday funeral 05″ marsen jules
“deer stop” goldfrapp
“4 or 5 trees” rachel’s
“cherry blossoms” tindersticks

“bluebird of happiness” mojave 3
“i came to your party dressed as a shadow” piano magic
“chrysanthemum” aki onda
“tokyo ghost stories” arovane
“mode” loscil
“2 candles, 1 wish” mono
“chinatown” do make say think
“upside down” david darling
“yara 03″ marsen jules
“a lot” the wind-up bird
“straint” re
“spiral steps” 1/2
“tnt (nobukazu takemura remix)” tortoise
“rabbit ears” daedelus
“inertia” jega
“ooze out and away, onehow” the moon & the melodies

“theme” jon brion
“snow drums” piano magic
“don’t be afraid, you have just got your eyes closed” mum
“sickbay” loscil
“orientale” alfonso de vilallonga
“halcyon (beautiful days)” mono
“slowly, clearly and calmly” yasume
“hana” asa chang & jun ray
“busy signal” daedalus
“gyroscope” boards of canada
“end of music” do make say think
“that i’ve” the wind-up bird
“lazy sunday funerals 02″ marsen jules
“20 msec” ryuichi sakamoto
“striated interlude no3″ dj spooky

purple orchids, one paper lantern.

Sex me up with:

viognier and mango slices
dancing with the lights off
hands and lips
talking dirty in foreign languages and fountain pens on skin.

oh damn.

PUNCH ME TIL I’M BLACK AND BLUE.

i can’t tolerate sedation for one more minute.

i’m drinking coffee out of a glass jelly jar because the dishes are dirty and i’m about to lose my blob planning the itinerary for barcelona.

Honestly. I don’t know where to find this song. iTunes says it’s on Cymande: The Message. That’s all I got’s fuh ya. I will say this, however: if you want me to get down on my hands and knees and stroke your glorious package with the most sincere dedication, you’ll drop the needle on this little gem right heah.

Name: niki
Location: brooklyn, ny
Interests: accumulation, aquatint, bill murray, booty shakers, cy twombly, cartography, d’amico’s, dinner parties, entimology, ephemera, figs, full bars, the f train, henry, john james audubon, jose saramago, joseph cornell, medium format, pablo neruda, rauschenberg, sahadi’s, screenprints, tapas, vice, written correspondence, works on paper
Favorite Music: big star, the birthday party, cocteau twins, cymande, david bowie, desmond dekker, esg, the innocence mission, jay-z, jeff buckley, john coltrane, migala, mos def, nick drake, nico, nina simone, otis redding, the pixies, prefuse 73, public enemy, the rachels, robert johnson, roy orbison, slint, snoop dee oh double gee, suicide, syd barrett, tom waits, unwound, van morrison, the walkmen, white magic
About: you ready, b?

Contact: tiznit@REMOVETHIStheselector.org

When I bought my house, I secretly hoped it would be on a street that somehow avoided the plows when snowstorms hit. I wanted to get snowed in, frequently, if possible. Somehow wishes are granted, and the plows always avoid my street. Here I am with eight to twelve inches on the ground and what to listen to, what to listen to? “Winter Arc” by Andrew Chalk? Mirage (”an electronic winter landscape”) by Klaus Schulze? Hoenig’s Departure from the Northern Wasteland? Yagya’s Rhythm of Snow? Permafrost by Thomas K�ner? All too long to upload, thus we have Wolfgang Voigt recording as All. You can listen to this all tag, and tomorrow too, after the cleanup.

At almost ten minutes, Yagya’s “Snowflake 6″ was too long to upload at a decent sound quality. Xela’s track “Under the Glow of Streetlights” is just as sweet and just as chilly.

Lest I should ever forget, Ida reminds me that I am lonely.