"I'm living rent-free in the back of your head."
Live albums have been a staple of late night spins since the dawn of the bean bag chair. Basements across the globe set up with decent hi-fi stereos, Hendrix wall tapestries, and a mellow haze in the air have welcomed sleepy-eyed listeners in their warm yet dank embrace. Cheap Trick’s Live At Budokon, KISS’ Alive, […]
Read More Edena Gardens : Live MomentumI’ve always been a bit perplexed when it came to the pro-life movement. Growing up in the Midwest(aka, the Corn Belt) I’ve had a firsthand view of its insidious sincerity. Sure, saving the unborn children; making human walls of screaming, shrieking Christians in front of Planned Parenthoods, medical clinics, and OBGYNs calling cowering, scared women […]
Read More Sermons By The Devil : Pro-LifeYves Tumor was one of those names I’d heard in passing over the last few years, but truth be told never made it to my ears. I thought maybe it was the name of a rapper, or some strange avante garde pop artist like Arca. Turns out I was wrong and sort of in the […]
Read More Yves Tumor : Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)Ruban Nielson arrived on the indie music scene back in 2010 with his Unknown Mortal Orchestra project in an air of mystery. This lo-fi project made songs that sounded as if they’d been locked in a storage locker for 40 years; musty, muffled tracks that were equally built for grooving and for dropping out. Garage […]
Read More Unknown Mortal Orchestra : VThe signs were there earlier in the week. I had a low-grade fever of 99.3 last Sunday and felt pretty run down, but the fever went away by late afternoon. Then on Wednesday I started having body aches, chills, and my head felt like it was on fire. I took some pain reliever, laid on […]
Read More Intermittently Awful…Marginally TerribleOli Heffernan, aka Ivan The Tolerable, makes the kind of drone-heavy psychedelic jams that would be just at home playing in your ears on one hell of an acid trip as they would soundtracking a post-apocalyptic road trip. The songs hang in the air like fog over daybreak waters, or wavering smoke rising off burning […]
Read More Ivan The Tolerable Quartet’s ‘Toft House Session’ Out 3/31; Zone Out To “Mothra II”Christmas, 1988. I was a newly-minted 15-year old, in the prime of a dorky and awkward teenage existence. I didn’t play sports, got bi-weekly allergy shots, had a mere handful of friends(the kind you spend lots of time with, not the kind you bide your time with in Algebra or English Comp), and spent most […]
Read More Christmas, 1988 : The Stockin’ Was Rockin’It’s been nearly two weeks now since the great and legendary jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter passed away at 89-years old. I hadn’t yet sat down to write something about the man I consider to be one of the greatest jazz saxophonists and composers to ever blow a note. Why? Well, Mr. Shorter passed away on […]
Read More Wayne Shorter 1933-2023Every once in awhile an album comes along and sort of rewires your brain. Something or someone in the universe sees fit to gift your head and heart with a little aural magic; a tickle to your psyche that ignites something in the head and heart. For me that came in the form of Paul […]
Read More “Nature, The Cosmos, Music, Art…” : The Sound World Of Paul RiedlAlexander Donat never rests when it comes to music. The German musician/songwriter is always working on new songs; whether it be the post/punk dark wave of Vlimmer, the the shimmering dream pop of Fir Cone Children, under his own name as Leonard Donat, or his most recent project Assassun. Assassun is a kind of post-punk/EDM […]
Read More Listen : Assassun Returns With Chaotic “Unfold On My Chest”; ‘Chronic Quicksand’ Out 3/24
Complex Distractions 