travel light

Well, damn...

…that tape that I was kvetching about transcribing a few posts down—I put it off and off until yesterday, when I accidentally taped over the fucker. ______ ______ wasn’t thrilled when he found out the first interview was just a dress rehearsal.

Oddness

Because I tossed my paint pen into the Schoykill River a few weeks back and haven’t yet replaced, I have an impressive build-up of burned yet unlabeled cd-rs in my apartment. I haven’t listened or paid much attention to them in the past week owing mainly to a recent obsession with the gypsy death marches of Evolutionary Jass Band’s excellent What’s Lost. Today, with strep throat apparently cleared and not much feeling like I’m going to die for the first time in five days, I went for the CDs, looking for, um, some disco or indie-rock or something/anything. The one I draw, a very blank looking cd, is none other than What’s Lost, which I’d been listening to on vinyl record and was not aware that, the album being from Mississippi Records, it existed in the digital. So I’m wondering if the CD maybe came with the vinyl—which doesn’t seem right—I’ve just had it a long time without realizing (it’s been out a year or so),  or some less explainable/cosmic coincidence occured.

I Have Arrived

Dennys, yes the Dennys of Grand Slam Belgian Waffle Emergency Rest Stop fame, just called me on the phone. Something something about “one of their bands,” Taking Back Sunday.

I said “now that is a band I associate with Dennys.”

Pre-transcription Anxiety

Is real! I’ve got the music off, the tape rewound, headphones plugged in, new Word doc open, and…and I just can’t do it.

So I wrote this blog post instead.

Flag Day

I celebrated Flag Day by going to Fort McHenry Park and admiring the cannons. Does it still count if I didn’t know yet it was Flag Day when I was admiring the cannons?

just for fun...

…I made a blog post for D.C.’s Brightest Young Things. Find it here.

A Band Named Breasts...

“These Breasts all have beards.”

"bleep-bloop music"

[ELECTRONIC DANCE FUN] Generally, a techno show is a techno show is a techno show. But an Atole show is a different beast, with the Portland electronic pop collective acting more like a rock band than the short-lived old model of electronic dance performance (a dude holding down CTRL and Z on his keyboard). But I ain’t here to hate, I appreciate! Atole is so much fun that even a performance-centric old-schooler like myself uses it as a gateway drug to get into other bleep-bloop music. El Ten Eleven fits that bill, playing Ratatat-style dance rock with a decidedly more 8-bit feel, and Portland New Wave outcasts Flaspar give dance fiends and aural obsessives alike something to bond over. And I’ll finally say it: It’s getting increasingly hard not to notice a “Portland Sound” developing out of high-energy electronic pop.

Strangely, I find this to be almost as bad as Tonry’s cringe-worthy rant in the Mercury. The points missed/purposefully evaded are much the same—one just cloaks it in hoakey earnestness while the other tries to deliver it with a dull rockist knife.