YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN - "Queens". A messenger arrives form the future, in a time-machine the size of a bachelor apartment. It flicks into existence on the lawn of the White House. It makes a sound like someone slapping someone else. The doors slide open, metallic, reveal a woman. She steps onto the grass. She is scared, glancing. She holds up her hand. In the years to come, this gesture will be endlessly analyzed. Was it a greeting? A warning? Was it just the sun in her eyes? But she raises her hand and this is the moment the snipers shoot. The woman is pinioned by multiple bullets, like she is dancing around a maypole.

YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN are an art-psych band from Montreal and Toronto who stand in heavy water, weeds to their hairlines; they scythe through fields with wielded guitars; they recall full summer, apocalyptic winter, the heaviest bits of Espers and Besnard Lakes, Led Zep with the Boredoms. They call it Noh-wave. This is a clever joke. Other jokes that have a bearing on Y//ST: wasps, sparks, jellyfish, ice. This music is available on a white vinyl 12" record and I imagine using this record as a plate, a moon, a circular saw through forests of birch.

[buy/listen]

---

Elsewhere:

Please read the beautiful, breathtaking speech by Slavoj Žižek at #OccupyWallSt, the best thing I have heard from this movement (and many times more sophisticated, yearning and true than the recent speech by Naomi Klein). An excerpt:

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false." After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair--the only thing unavailable is red ink." And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants--the only thing missing is the red ink: we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

No Words salutes Bert Jansch.

I will be appearing as a judge at tomorrow's Literary Death Match in Montreal, alongside Jonathan Goldstein, Alexis O'Hara, Katrina Best, Byron Rempel, Jason Camlot and Zoe Page. This is also a launch for the new issue of Maisonneuve.

Later this week, I appear on Wednesday and Friday at the Montreal Improv Festival, as part of VENEZUELA.

(photo source)