Said the Gramophone

O, Unborn Leader!

Goat - "Goatman"

Goatman will Fuck you up. Goatman says that Every Day is a Point of No Return. Goatman drinks gasoline, to render it Unusable. Goatman rides a vegetarian horse, through barren steaming planes. Toxic clouds, toxic water. Goatman keeps an Electronic Journal. Goatman hides his face, but only to keep his Skin. A famous swath of Purple Cloth. Goatman is the Counter-Weight, the One that Balances. Goatman will soon be here. [buy from Forced Exposure]

(image from Consume Consume)

KWOON

Method Man, Freddie Gibbs & StreetLife - "Built for This". Later this year, the RZA will use this song to soundtrack kung-fu. I can already imagine the sword glints. I can already imagine the fists smashing brick into dust. I can imagine everything: just from this sharp, mean bassline; from the organ glitter; from the rappers' rough-house rhymes. As you know, I like a song that will march right through a building. I like a song that will level a grass hut. I like a song that doesn't hesitate before it grabs for the pouch of rubies. [bandcamp]

The Decade of Acquaintances

Fiona Apple - "Regret"

A given room normally has six sides. Four walls, a ceiling, and a floor. Maybe a window or, if you're lucky, two. Rooms can be furnished or finished or un to both. They can be high up in the air or buried in the ground, but usually they are about eye level. When a bomb goes off in a room, when it's held out on the palm of your hand, a ticking bundle of dynamite like a piece of fruit, the room becomes quickly something else. Yes it will all die, but at that moment when the blast blows the floor and the walls and the paintings and the wires all over the place, there are hundreds of sides to that room. It's showing all its material, its guts are told at once, and there's something lovely and embarrassing about a room that used to have the normal six sides that suddenly has to reveal that it's always had hundreds, they were just kept in line by physics. Even if you only ever see it once, and only for an instant, and you will never get it back, and you probably won't even survive. Still, it's nice. [Buy] (thanks to Adam for insisting on this record. I love it. Go buy.)

(self-portrait of artist (and musician) Bryan Lewis Saunders while on bath salts)

& THEN REPEAT

Isaac Delusion - "Early Morning". It is not easy to stop a moving vehicle. You have to sustain the impact, accept it, without losing your footing on the road. You have to say yes while also saying no. It is the same thing with a day: it will not stop unless you can let it wash right over you, all twenty-four hours. It takes practice to do this: not to flinch at dawn, at dusk, at meal-times. Stand in an open space - a dance studio, a clearing, a parking lot - and practice letting time come in. Practice sustaining the impact of each minute. Accept each tiny second. And then at a certain point the day will come to a stop. It will come to rest - like a car, like a truck, like a sled. Like no thunderstorm ever does. [out soon on Cracki Records]

Jessie Ware - "Wildest Moments". This is the song I keep listening to this week. And in a certain sense that is what this song is itself about: returning to something, again and again. The drums repeat and revisit; the chiming piano chords; the answer and reverb. Ware asks questions and lets her song pause just before the answer - before the reckoning or consequence, before the regret, before we have to decide whether to stop. Or whether to repeat. [buy]

(Photo is Lee Miller's From the Top of the Great Pyramid, 1937)

WE CAN SEE YOU

Kissed Her Little Sister - "The Thrill is Gone"

I can reset your cells to zero. I can let you live in the same stinking body, with the belly paunch and the weird ears, for two hundred more years. You'll consume twice as much meat and burn twice as much gas and break twice as many spirits and tumblers as any normal person. Any former person. You are the new kind of person. Double life persons. Twicers. Do you want to have a hundred and sixty more years of working in bars, trying to make ends meet, working on your career? People think living forever means dressing in a toga and walking the greenspaces. Naw, it's only your life, you only get 220 years of it, make the most of every day.

(image)(cell reset)

GOING RIGHT HOME

Arlo Guthrie - "I'm Going Home". Every so often I am getting ready to bicycle down to a concert and I bump into a friend. "What are you going to see?" they say. And I tell them it's a singer-songwriter, a girl with a guitar, or a guy with a guitar, and they say, "Oh, ok, cool," and we part ways, and part of me is embarrassed. And then when I'm on my bicycle I ask myself why I'm biking downtown to hear some dumb sappy songs on acoustic or electric guitars, with a lap steel or two, why I'm not going to a loft to hear strange future music, like sea creatures turning somersaults.

And then finally I arrive, every so often. And I go into a long room. And a song like this one is coming over the P.A., acoustic guitars and shaker, voice, vibraphone, and it's the most beautiful thing in the world, unassailable, and why would I ever want to be in a room where this song is not playing? [buy]

Cochlear Croon

Josephine Foster - "Child of God"

Greatest Hits Summer. All the greatest summer days of your life, in a row. All killer, no filler. The day it rained at the garlic festival and it was so wet and people ran everywhere and that poor farmer slipped in the mud and then it cleared and the clouds looked like a holy painting. The day the morning was so bright you thought your head might explode but it was just up-all-night body dirt and the coffee you shared smiling tasted like it was the first one ever made. Like the cricket night, the gravel drive and grass stain cricket night. The water day. The day all the traffic lights conspired to set you totally free. The day you walked under a cherry picker and the man up in the tree said, "Hey. Hi. Up here." "Yeah?" you said. "I'm just gonna throw some stuff down, so...don't be startled." "Okay." Only days like that.

[Buy]

SAPPY TIMES IV

SappyFest 7 happened at the beginning of August. Sackville, New Brunswick's music and art festival is one of the greatest little things in the world: a tiny village assembled just once a year, filled with racket and song. It is a place to make friends and cherish them, to fall down and get back up. Tiny stages filled with the world's greatest noisemakers, heartbreakers and pals, where nobody wants anything more than for the moments to be special.

At SappyFest I write SAPPY TIMES, a daily newspaper of the things I hear. SAPPY TIMES is proudly printed, on real paper (!), and distributed for reading throughout Sackville, NB. But paper gets wet, or gets lost, or maybe you weren't at Sappy at all, you poor daft sorry fool. So as in 2009, 2010 and 2011, for archival purposes, and for the interest of Said the Gramophone readers, I offer the digitized SAPPY TIMES right here:

This year's festival highlights include: Metz, YAMANTAKA//SONIC TITAN, Canailles and Man Forever's hullabaloo, as documented in Saturday; Fucked Up, Christine Fellows, Eternal Summers, and the Talking Exploding Diamond Talk Show, which did feature an exploding diamond, as remembered in Sunday; and Bry Webb, the Mouthbreathers, Silver Mount Zion and BA Johnston, as documented in Monday.

If you've never been to Sappy, I'll say it again: it's so special and small and of exceptional quality. If you enjoy the kind of music I do, and the songs we do, you owe it to yourself to book a trip to the Canadian maritime provinces. See some swans, some beautiful songs, then drive to the coast and swim in the sea.

And finally, a little awkwardly, if you run a festival or an event or a zeppelin race or anything like that, and you would like to bring me to where you are, to write something like the SAPPY TIMES, I would always love to talk to you. This is my email address.

I Am Not The Enemy

Mountain Mocha Kilimanjaro - "It Must Be You"

A room service cart rumbles squeaky-wheeled down a stark hallway, a silver-domed tray and a bottle of red. Room 422. A man, face half-covered in shaving cream, comes wet-haired to the closed door. Peephole, distorted uniform, the lock--chunk. "44.95, would you like to cover that now?" "Put it on the room. Make it 60." "Thank you, sir." "'sat a shrimp parmesan?" "I--'m really not sure." He lets the door close itself and the man continues shaving his face. He is at that point in the shave where he cannot possibly shave in the right direction, for little hairs grow every which way in this particular area. He pauses for a moment, listening to the fan, the lights, the idle plumbing. Scritch. Blood. The man runs the water, curls back his lips. Softly, outside the bathroom, the small reverberant lift of a silver-domed tray. The man dabs the cut, and puts a foolish bit of toilet paper on it, it grips his neck, a tiny Japanese flag. Clin-tick, the familiar drawing back of a hammer, snub. The water stops, his breathing stops, everything stops. He looks in the mirror, at the shadow in the hall. "You must've lost weight," he says. He slowly grabs a towel, daubing his face gingerly around the cut. The shadow replies, "I'd never order a shrimp parmesan." The man looks at himself, his eyes suddenly well aware of gravity, like a heart suddenly aware of its need to keep beating. He plucks the tiny tissue bandage from the cut, it blooms again, still less silly than that white outline. "Just tell me one thing," says the man, his chest beginning to show the shape of age, that sharp breast-like sag, "Did that waiter know?" A pause, the colour blue, a pause the colour of deep dark blue night water. "Yeah." The man sighs, frowns, resigned. "Tell him to make it 50." Kang.

[Site and Buy (thanks, Emilie!)] (source)

COMEBACKS

Taylor Swift - "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (country mix)". I like the tiny things that make this a "country" mix. The angles to Taylor's voice, leading up to the chorus. The twanging steel as the chorus opens up. The fiddle breakdown. The mandolin, buried in the mix. But there is no genre to the winning, wordless, "ooh-oo-oo oo-oo", and Taylor's collaborators - Max Martin, Shellback - will pretend that there is no genre to that robotic bass-drum thump, to the shouted punk-pop refrain. Oh but there are so many gorgeous inventions to this silly, joyous kiss-off song, whether it's the country mix or the original. I love the way Taylor's "we" - the we that represents the former couple, the failed relationship, the doomed love - is sublimated as "Weeeee!". I love the grin and eyeroll as her boyf consoles himself with a "cool ... indie record"; as if Taylor is admitting she likes it a bit too, but seriously boy-o come on. And I love the way the title doesn't give away the choruses' secret: we, in fact, are never ever ever getting back together. Because it's 2012, I hear a little "Call Me Maybe". Because it's victorious & rocking, I hear "Since U Been Gone". Because this is Said the Gramophone, I hear defunct sparklers, tumbling magnolia blossoms, matches. [Red is out October 22]

Pale Eyes - "This Coward's Theory of Beauty". A two-minute ghost story: a figure rises from the cinders and he has seen the day after tomorrow, when the sun hides in a warehouse, when the cars are soundless, when she has cut off all her hair. The ghost's voice is like a tape run backwards, a drowning, a hollow log. A thing can be ruining even as it is admired. A beautiful song lies rotting on the ground. ["This Coward's Theory of Beauty" samples Colin Stetson. Toronto's Pale Eyes includes former members of Archivist. Video / Soundcloud / Website.]

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Elsewhere:

Fulton Lights' gorgeous, furious, funky album Am I Right Or Am I Right is finally available, in full, at Bandcamp. Go get it. (Previously.)

Jessie Ware's Devotion, one of my most anticipated albums of the year, is streaming now at the Guardian. (Previously.)

Bry Webb, former frontman of Constantines, whose album Provider I adore, has created a weird cassette of midnight-black, bending, psychedelic saxophone music. The music samples Feuermusik and StG's beloved Best Show on WFMU. It is called Sax Tape, it is available here, with all proceeds to charity. Bry is also on a short Canadian tour; he plays Montreal's Theatre Ste-Catherine next Wednesday.

(Image is Jean-Léon Gérôme's Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind, 1896.)

Day-Glo Hunger

Thee Oh Sees - "Wicked Park"

"Put your hands in the dirt," he said sharply, the tiny camera whirred and that meant business. She pressed her hands, white lace gloves, in the dirt like she were kneading dough. "Good," he said, and moved the camera closer. It was one of those cameras that looked like a boxy laser gun, without a proper viewfinder, he couldn't really know what the picture would look like. They walked through a field and to a fence, her black velvet dress getting streaked with dew from the tall grass. Her feet were wet and sore through the shoes. She thought about eating dinner while she climbed the fence, the camera whirring. "What will you do with this?" "I'll edit it," he said, and of course she knew that but his tone kept her from asking any further. She thought he had wanted her to be his actress because he liked her, but he was not acting that way now. The sky was moving quickly and the lace felt silly over her eyes. What were they even doing out here? Summer almost over and the August heat soaked into the ground and was starting to disappear. It seemed like they were putting gestures and guesses into this whirring jar, for later, and what would they look like? They would probably look exactly like what they were. Kneading the earth like dough, standing on a fence post, and walking in grass. It's likely, she thought, that memories are most suited to decay, since they too are organic matter, like vegetables or pets or food.

[Pre-Order now from Picadilly in the UK] [Buy from In The Red in North America Sep 17]

RAINCOLOUR

Frank Ocean - "Thinkin Bout You (Ryan Hemsworth bootleg)". The way the light changes at rain. Peter needed onions and he decided to walk all the way up to the market, forty-five minutes each way, through the broiling heat. He watched his feet land in front of each other, one after another, and the skid & cough of the city buses. He watched sad men sitting on their verandas, radios playing, with paper dogs that scampered to the gate and then lay down. He was aware at every moment of the sun's vibrating yellow disc. It was so hot, and Peter was so stuck on Jude, and it felt so hopeless and tragic, so squandered, like a house never lived in.

Then quietly it began to rain, and then loudly it began to rain, and it was as if the whole grey city was getting washed and anointed by tiny clear pinpricks. The road disappeared. The pavement's clear lines went wavy. Cars lifted like lakes. Peter blinked in the mist, vision swimming, with a sun that showed and vanished, showed and vanished. There were pinks and golds but especially blues, running blues. Peter thought of Jude, he was so stuck on Jude, but he could no longer find the heartbreak in it, the loss; while the rain ran, he remembered only the way that a touch feels, touching, and the way it feels, so gently soft, as it is coming apart. [Ryan is from Halifax / buy Channel Orange]

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My friend Richard Parks (Music Man Murray) is making short films for the reissues of his dad's albums. They are short, skewed, impulsive portraits - beautiful works of whimsy and pop. Much, much more than advertisements.

Pleaser

Foxygen - "Why Did I Get Married?"

Neville's breath. Neville had paper thin breath, after three vodkaredbulls and a slack neck taxi ride home. His life, of late, had the composition of a compressed brick of garbage, sitting formed into a shape all the things that never resembled that shape to begin with. He thought of the bar, the dance floor, where he danced nervously, as if pleasing some king, and thought of the creep with the upside-down face¹. At that moment, he suddenly felt all the things in his pockets, they took shape against his body and he had wanted to strip naked. But, prevented by decorum, he watched expressionless as people all around him 1-upped their life goals, and he felt invisibly stepped-on, used as leverage or like a pipeline. Now home, he blared old Stones and thought about how all of us are pipes, made of pipes, live off pipes, and ship our poison and bring our death about with pipes. Lead pipes, sewer pipes, oil pipes and organs. Neville felt that dual desire within him, that familiar pull between hungry enough to get food and too drunk to move.

¹ The man with the upside-down face. The top of his head came to a small point, like a chin, and his eyes, in their resting state, lay squinted beneath a brow so prominent it made a dark line across his forehead, greatly resembling a mouth. His nose was piggish and looked as if it opened upward, and he had a line of hair under his bottom lip, below his splayed and froggish mouth, that looked like a reverse eyebrow. Further below this, as if he had cultivated this look exactly, he had a luscious chin beard, which contrasted starkly with his completely bald head. As Neville danced he wondered if the man had any further Twilight-Zone-style differences, like he heard music backwards, or lived in an upside down house, the floor lamps hanging bolted from the ceiling, their chains dangling perfectly within reach, and strapping himself into his suspended bed at night.

[Buy] (thanks, Roger)

SUPERINTENDENT

Jhené Aiko - "3:16 am". With every passing year, Joanie grew more and more certain that she would break up with Mac. She would go up to him while he was untangling his fishing-line, standing just in the corner of his view. She would say, "Mac, we need to talk." They would talk. But it was at this point that her imagination failed. She could not imagine the conversation with Mac. All of her complaints seemed so trivial: he was often a little late, he never tried new foods, he never complimented her manicures. Their relationship was five years old and there had been no crisis or scandal. They were OK. And it crushed her heart to imagine trying to explain this to him, as he blinked his eyes, Mac her teddy-bear and puppy and all-star. She put on "3:16 am" and listened to its thundering drums, detonation after detonation, and wished that she could see the signs of drama in her own life: fractures in the walls, dust falling, flashes of orange light as the building shivers and prepares to collapse. [forthcoming]

WHITE+

White+ - "Red+"

"She dumped him because of his synthetic stomach." "That's fucked." "I know, it's not cool, I'm not saying it's cool. But.. the way she explained it to me, it kinda made sense. I mean, first of all, apparently he's always bragging about it. He says it's 'his favourite part of his body' which is weird and gross and kinda sad." "Well that's--" "And he can't even eat natural foods, well he can, but he's actually supposed to take these pill supplements that are better for him, so they never have dinner together. And he said he likes it so much he's gonna get synthetic lungs and he wants to be tested for a synthetic heart, which would mean he'd be in a wheelchair." "A wheelchair?!" "Yeah, cause synthetic hearts are huge, they require that you're confined to a wheelchair with like, an hour of movement a day to keep your muscles from atrophy." "Woah..." "But you live for a really long time 'cause it doesn't give out." "Like how long?" "Like, another sixty years he says." "That's crazy." "I know, right?" "I mean, like, why would you want to live longer if you have to live in a wheelchair?" "I know, right?" "Yeah, I guess he is kinda weird." The conversation stops there, when the air is ripped open by the thunderous tearing of a plane overhead. In the reflections of windows and car doors and sunglasses, summer unfolds like a Dear John letter, where nothing can be but the end.

[only site I could find. If anyone has a buy link, I can update]

AND BY RECORDS I MEAN MP3S

The Mouthbreathers - "Birthdays". At parties sometimes you drink some punch, and the punch is spiked, and you do not know it is spiked until you have drunk it down. And sometimes you do something, and you do not realize you are growing up until you have finished the something, and you have lost that friend or felt that feeling. And when you form a band you don't know what the band is until you've formed it. You have drunk a drink, you have grown up a little, you have formed a band. These things happen when they happen. Like a birthday, like the end of a song. And Mouthbreathers played one of my favourite sets of SappyFest: this young band that rehearses in a shed at the edge of town. Someone crowdsurfed. Someone sneezed. Lots of us laughed a lot. [Bandcamp]

Mold Walks the Maze

Blackout Beach - "Deserter's Song"

As much as nothing is perfect, so must be everything. I found her initials in a penny. D.G. Regina. We were lovers for a time, we'd hold hands and make the shape of a hull. Fingers interlaced like the sides of a shipbottom. At the place we lived, old tenants received unchecked magazine subscriptions, piles of magazines, unread, a monster collage of ricocheted interests, Perrier & Gun. On the coffee table orphaned ants would wander and stray, over old buns, not a collar in sight. We put up posters "FOUND ANTS" but received no responses to aretheseyourants@gmail.com. I would pretend to leave the house, yell "Bye!" and shut the door, then stand in the foyer, sometimes for an hour, waiting. D.G. Regina would sing to herself, a voice like the breeze, played a rotted ghost guitar. I'd skip meals, flattened behind the winter coats, listening to her sing, I wanted the truth and not the trust-me face. I'd get so hungry. Swarms of hunger, great brick-walled hunger, satellite hunger. [Buy]

Lonnie in the Garden - "Said"

A forest is a cult, made up of impressionable trees. Soft wood, able to be swayed. A perfect cult, no telling who's the leader. [free]

(image of Frank & Louie, a 12-year-old Massachusetts cat with 2 faces)

RIDING CROPS

The Luyas - "Fifty Fifty". The sky is grey. Take away the gases and eddies and atoms and particles and the sky up there would be grey as silt, even on sunny days, grey for forever, lightyears of grey. But the sky is blue. The sky is blue, for now. The sky is blue because it is filled with ghosts, and the ghosts make it blue, like light in lanterns at the sides of the bay. / When we die we are like parachutists, leaping right back up. [The Luyas' third album, Animator, will be released October 16 and I cannot wait]

Breatherholes - "From in the Grass". I am outside your house and I am knocking on your door. I am inside your parlour and I am knocking on your door. I am with you and I am knocking on your door. We are swimming in the lake, we are riding down the highway, we are playing in the tent, we are lying in the sheets, we are throwing all the plates, we are writing letters in separate lands, and I am knocking on your door. Knock knock / Who's there? [out on cassette in september / website]

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THIS WEEKEND IS SAPPYFEST HURRAY!