Brave Radar - "Shimmer". Maybe one hundred million light years from here, there are scientists who have learned to find planets just by their light. The sun reflects on the earth, glazing it, and as they peer into their telescopes the alien scientists say: Look! A place! But not just that. The scientists watch in their ratty labcoats, gravel and grass stuck to the soles of their shoes, thinking about the movies they're going to rent this weekend, thinking about the extra-terrestrial equivalent of Denzel Washington, and they make further discoveries. They see that there is too much light coming from the planet Earth. The shimmer on our planet is not just the reflection of our star. No - we make light here. We make it with fire, with gunpowder, with incandescents, with fluorescents. We make it by turning the dimmer switches in our family rooms. The scientists watch this. They make tick-marks on their space-clipboards. By this time they are not merely daydreaming about the alien buddy-cop movie starring alien Denzel Washington and alien Daniel Craig. They are thinking about the girlfriend they had three years ago, the one who loved alien Denzel, who used to grinning make jokes with her friends about him. And the way the scientists used to squirm at this - were they supposed to feel threatened? Did they feel threatened? All this as they watch the glimmers on the planet Earth. They are still thinking about their ex-girlfriends as their instruments detect tiny interrupted flickers of light. The scientists stare at the readings. The chief scientist wonders why none of the scientists are female - was he sexist in the hiring process? did he reject female applicants due to his emotional baggage? He remembers the way tangled sheets are differently tangled when two people have laid there. The scientists chew on the ends of their space pencils and look at the interrupted flickers. These are matches, they deduce. Beings on this planet are standing in their driveways and passing their hands in front of the flames. Just as the scientists do, sometimes, at night. They do it and they don't know why. Back and forth, darkly lit. A hundred million light years away, someone may have been taking notes. [buy/MySpace/release party in Montreal this Friday!]

Blake Miller - "This Morning". When David Foster Wallace died, he was writing a book called The Pale King. This book will eventually be published. The Pale King is reportedly a book about boredom, about the mind-numbing boredom of work and taxes and days' daily cycles. And it is also a book about reaching the sublime, about touching the light, by way of the mundane. The book, I assume, is itself boring (by design), and Wallace will try to create the same effect: to bring the reader past monotony, past fatigue, and through through through - up close, ear-to-keyhole, to the Beautiful. In Blake Miller's "This Morning", he asks if This is what life is all about? These are stupid lyrics. But they are not stupid lyrics as they are applied here. They are repeated, over and over, amid thrum & shudder & drone: a mantra. The mantra becomes the apparatus of Miller's experiment. Is this what life is all about - this asking? Let's find out. Let's listen and see if in the song's asking hush and hum we find a pearl of truth. [buy/more songs]

(image by Brian Michael Roff)