Artist: Climb the Mind
Song: ????? (Chikyuu no kaori [Fragrance of the earth])
From album: Denaturization
Genre: Hotwind Rock
[Buy CD][Website]

Climb the Mind is a Japanese three-piece that makes songs of sonorous richness and scope. The guitars come in emotive waves of intensity somewhere between kicking down a door and setting a forest fire, and change mood and target like a restless sandstorm in open expanses.

Feels something like walking into a storm while safely wrapped in a warm, purposeful resolve.

Artist: Bandwagon
Song: What Went Wrong!!
From album: The Eternal Allergy
Genre: Guitarmony Rock
[Buy CD|Mp3s][Website]

Here’s some almost feelgoody upbeatish rockiness. I’m going to use it to say bubye to summer even though it may not be particularly appropriate.

It is now cold in the DC area, to say nothing of the rest of the world.

Artist: José González
Song: Slow Moves
From album: Veneer
Genre: Slow-burning acoustic fire.
[Buy CD|Mp3s][Website]

This song is laced with golden fire, hidden in ember-woven nets that drag the sky. It’s a song, an album, to be listened to in the wake of a hurricane, electricity just a memory and a frontier dark and silence on every side. It should be listened to by indirect candlelight and given your full attention in order that you should not miss its subtle moods.

You can trust me, I’ve been there.

It has been a while since I have posted any art, so here we go. This is a time lapse video of the various incarnations of a cooperative mural by several extremely talented artists. They build on each other’s creations and constantly re-design and evolve the piece until it changes form completely and they start over. It covers a whole week in under 6 minutes. Very cool.

[Link]

Artist: Downy Song: ? (Delta) Album: ?? 4th (Mudai)

Here’s the video that first introduced me to downy. It came like manna from heaven at a time when I was at a dead end in my exploration of Japanese music.

The Japanese music industry has a whole lot in common with the American music industry; in fact, it’s probably a glimpse of the American Industry’s near future state: A behemoth of advertising, mass production, formulaic repetition, and blatant revenue creation. Years ago I used to hear it rumored that the Backstreet Boys and N’Sync etc. were creations of record companies, more or less genetically designed to make the most money from the least effort by pandering to a demographic with sparse discernment and extremely liquid assets. Well, often the Japanese industry doesn’t even pretend to hide it, and no one seems to mind.

Take Johhny’s, for instance. It’s more or less a boy band factory. It scouts members based on personal magnetism and charm, and then puts them through boy-band-bootcamp to learn how to dance, and hopefully at least marginally, to sing. Johhny’s does this successfully over and over and over, people keep buying the records, and they end up #1 on the charts. Also, basically each member in one of these groups is guaranteed a starring role in at least one tv drama, product endorsement deals, and various variety/gameshow appearances, and in fact, most groups actually get their very own TV show.

Not that any of this is intrinsically bad, it just gets old after a while. One can, perhaps, only take so much of the same sound, same routine. Thank goodness for downy, my first taste of life after so long having wandered in the aural wasteland.

Listen, listen again, then let go and really hear.

Artist: Chicken Rice
Song:
From album: Lucky 7
Genre: Taiwanabilly
[Buy CD|Mp3s][Website]

Chicken Rice is a Chinese band that sounds very much like a Google searchbot’s nightmare, as well as a sort of happy house mix-platter of rockapsychobilly with a side of punky jam-laced blues.

The whole song is a bizarro 50’s steam engine ride. The verse chugs uphill steady and building, leaning back and looking ahead to the peak of the mountain when the chorus will plunge over the edge in bursts of steam and whistle blast. Heads and arms exit windows, plowing thick fog and rushing wind, carried along on this crazy one-way night-train to party town.

Artist: Kayo Dot
Song: A Pitcher of Summer
From album: Choirs of the Eye
Genre: Proto-neo-classic orchestra-core.
[Buy CD|Mp3s][Website]

This was the first song on a mix CD I gave people for christmas last year. It strikes me as a sort of an apocalyptic epiphany, of waking up into a new reality.

The beginning thaws from complete silence into a glowing hum of gentle awakening. It’s comfortable like being born full grown into a world of warmth and soft white and yellow light and texture. Our world is repose and stillness. Gradually we awake, developing quickly, and soon become curious about the world outside of our opalescent shell. We rise and stretch, and peek around a corner to find an earthen alleyway. We wander out in safety and solitude, but turning another corner we find our niche opens onto a larger public thoroughfare. Stepping out cautiously, we begin to be pulled along by the current of traffic and civilization, beginning to understand the structures and patterns of industry and society. These exciting moments suddenly dampen and blur as we come upon the city’s central monolith. Awe-striking structures rise into boiling storm clouds approaching the city.

We pause, gazing, and time seems to stand still. Apprehension and uncertainty occur to us for the first time. Why are we standing here? Is something out of place? Something wrong? There’s something uneasy about this sudden unexpected silence of mind. And then with a sudden sickening, sinking feeling comes the realization that things are not as they seem; not at all as we know them to be.

Facades and forms start to melt and peel away, bubbling off of every sight and surface. Unfathomable strangeness is unrelentingly revealed wherever we turn our now frantic gaze. The world we knew rushes into and through the streets in streams of flowing ichor, away from us and down into gutters and channels unperceived. A painfully sparkling sharp and crystalline world emerges from our old understanding. It burns into the mind the utter fallacy of trying to understand it. In the end we must succumb to complete abandon, relinquishing the concept of self and existence. We revel in the perfection of chaos in the final instant, and are pulled into slumber once again.

This of course, sounds awkward and indulgently ridiculous… but it’s something like the impression that this song gives me, whether or not it makes any sense.

Kayo Dot, in any case, deserves your attention. Simply stated: they make brilliant and fascinating music, fluid, varied, and inspired. It most certainly deserves to be bought!

Artist: Chad VanGaalen Song: Red Hot Drops Album: Skelliconnection

I guess that contest is a bit of a tall order, so I’ll just put a link on the sidebar and keep on trucking. Here is a video from the man whose handiwork is the prize for the contest below. He animates his various videos personally, and even some for other bands.

The least I can say is that they are pretty clearly not inspired by a life of austere sobriety, and also that they are pretty clearly pretty.

In other news, I took down the ads for the time being because ads sorta suck, and at the current rate I am going it will take about 5 years of ads to pay off one year of hosting, so the choice seems clear.

Super busy as usual, but I’m thinking of posting a series of more “edgy” stuff, meaning noisier and rougher around the edges in general. We’ll see how that goes.