Said the Gramophone

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The Rolling Stones - "You Gotta Move"

Headlights are streetlights and puddles are electrified. The wind will smash things together and the yogurt might be off. If it were cold enough it would just be skating. Stay safe. [Buy]

(photo by instagram user: andjelicaaa)

WOBBLY LIFESAVERS

Phantom Buffalo - "Stark Glass Man". We are all attuned to certain kinds of voices, certain kinds of chords, certain guitar sounds, their sustain and shake. Some like the warble, others the croon; some like the shout, some the breathed. There is a catalogue of things I like, an unwritten taxonomy. One of the chapters is headed: THIS. The heading is in fact a recording of the song "Stark Glass Man", by Phantom Buffalo. It is recorded in a nice big typeface, in gold foil, so that even the half-blind can read it. Even in their dark tower rooms they can flip open my Book of Likes and find this fall jangle, this Portland intuition, this rosy cerulean song, see-through like stained glass. Seven years after I first heard them, Phantom Buffalo have made an album of kings and queens, valleys and mists, jerkins and bucklers. This is a fanciful thing, a small indulgence, but the songs are as likable and direct - just instead of flashing like puddles, they flash like fish. "Stark Glass Man" is an off-phase pop song about a man who may or may not be made of glass, who may only figuratively be made of glass, who is happy and sad and singing wordless "da-da-da", full of wistful longing. Jonathan Balzano-Brookes has a voice like a bell that's about to ring and his band will gallop for miles, if he asks them. [Tadaloora is out Nov 5 on Microcultures. Video teaser here. Or play the Tadaloora Adventures online video game.]

Pat Jordache - "Steps (Damaged Goods)". A new ropeadope from Montreal's extraordinary Jordache. Melting funk, cowbell roast-beef, Ziggy Stardust plummeting Baumgartner-style from subspace to terra. Bluetooth headset blinks, sharp blue light, mayday / octoberday / saxophone. Play two records on rival turntables, align them, make them perfect, break up with the DJ. Break up with the DJ - and see if those records wobble. See if they scratch. See if they keep on turning, 33 or 45, unstoppable diamond needle, as the earth takes a deep breath and decides to quake. [Soundcloud / buy Pat's preceding album / the new one can't come soon enough]

[Photo: Fête sportive à la commune libre de Montmartre, avec les deux bibendum (Source Bnf), 1922.]

Have Good Times, Have Lots of Friends

Einzelgänger - "Einzelgänger"

I am in a period of chemical readjustment. My body was incarnated with certain proclivities. A predisposition for diabetic, asthmatic, depressive, and generally allergic behaviours. I once tried to pass a whole grocery store bakery section through my digestive tract and my body almost completely broke down. I self-surgered, klepted a tetrahour of rejuvenative rest, and released myself from my apartment the following morning, I remember the sun was very hot. I am chemically readjusting for my partner. My partner enjoys recreational drugs, and I would like to be able to participate in that. Currently, when I ingest them, I feel like a skeleton, and I do not wish to feel this way. I do not care that I am a skeleton, I do not want to remember this, and I do not want the drugs fucking reminding me. [hard to find] (via Paul)

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To follow-up on Tuesday's post on P.O.S. (aka Stefon Alexander) there is some troubling news. He has had to cancel the fall tour in support of We Don't Even Live Here because his kidneys are failing. He lays it all out in the video below, and now there is a way to help: http://bit.ly/stefneedsakidney

In just a few days they've raised 12K of the 25K goal.

A TRAIL OF CLUES

Essaie Pas - "Carcajou". This was not supposed to be a mystery story. The setting was set, the characters were rubbing their eyes and sitting up in bed, symbols were assembling on a branch out front. You thought you knew what it was, that it would spool out straight - a meeting, a parting, a typhoon, serendipity, love. Then suddenly there was a body on the ground, bloodtrail: it had turned into another mystery. The night wouldn't lift. Boats were in the bay. Every window seemed to be made of frosted glass. A faded sickle moon was hanging perilously low in the sky. [bandcamp / thanks to Silent Shout for the tip]

Harold Arlen - "Stormy Weather". The greatest lover in all of Philadelphia has a voice like a squashed frog. You wouldn't think it would be such a problem - but it is. The greatest lover can't get a date. He lives in an era before online dating, before the internet, when you ask a girl to dance by asking her to dance - by murmuring a few words and extending your hand. The greatest lover in Philadelphia has tried to skip the words part, just doing the hand thing, but it has resulted in mixed messages. As they would say in the era after the internet, he gets "friend-zoned". Essential to being a successful lover is the deployment of key phrases, in a voice that doesn't sound like a squashed frog. And so the greatest lover in all of Philadelphia is largely unsuccessful, wandering the streets alone, swinging his umbrella, and dreaming of gchat.

(image source)

I Don't Want to Think About It

P.O.S. - "Get Down (feat. Mike Mictlan)"

Make it symbiotic, things will level out. If I had to peel money off my wallet like skin off a kitten's back. If I had a counter above my head that counted weight and volume of all the trash I produce. If my car were a beast, that had its own desires, its own dreams, its own way to go, if it weren't a dead thing. If the world weren't so easily conquered, if it weren't all done for us already, it would be easier to appreciate how alive it no longer is. [Buy this record, it is so good]

(image)

FALLEN CROSS

Extra Happy Ghost!!! - "Filler (Minor Threat cover)". You can do extraordinary things with math. You can make a one-sided loop, turn a triangle inside-out, flex a hexagon. You can pour a large cylinder into a small pyramid. It's this pouring that interests me here, listening to Extra Happy Ghost's cover of Minor Threat. Minor Threat made a track that sounds like a solid cliff face, something to scale; a song that's frenetic, shouted, dizzy. Extra Happy Ghost somehow poured that material into a container that is unrecognizable. It is not dizzy, shouted or frenetic. It does not sound like a solid cliff face. Extra Happy Ghost's "Filler" is like swimming in a lake. It is like the breast-stroke through weeds. It is a melting pop song, or perhaps a pop song that has already melted. But both versions are persistent. They will not be dissuaded. They know they do not agree with what has happened and they will not stop shaking their heads, burning books, snapping crucifixes. [get the Hippie Depression 7"]

---

The extraordinary Emma Healey, editor of the Incongruous Quarterly and past contributor to Said the Gramophone, has written a book of poems. I truly cannot wait to read it. She will be launching the wonder of a thing at Montreal's WWTWO gallery, this Thursday October 25. Emma is reading and Michael Chaulk is reading and I am reading too. PS I Love You's Paul Saulnier will be manning the DJ decks. It's due to start between 7pm and 8. Maybe see you there.

(image source; it's the work of Alex Box)

Freddie & Gut

Times New Viking - "Middle Class Drags"

A cold fall Friday night, the sun beaten off early by the streetlights. A concrete high-rise with a bike rack that, bulging and salted with yellow leaves, sits like a brooch on the building's moist lapel. Up on the fifteenth floor, a power-saver pre-drink is fully underway. Freddie randomly messages girls on twitter, while Gut plays Unkillable and listens to some soupy guitar on tiny tinny speakers. Drang drang drang drang. Freddie gets his first reply in a half-hour: "@stingsfan fuck off."

Freddie and Gut get KFC combos and eat in baseball caps. Freddie wears a frayed Stingers cap, his jacket flecked with white paint from an old job, and the smell of his shoes wafting up from the floor, damp from the light drizzle. Gut, his age swimming somewhere between thirty and a heart attack, is aptly nicknamed. Freddie nudges Gut with a look, points his eyes towards the line-up, where a teenage girl in a fur-lined hood stands in black tights looking up at the menu. Gut smiles.

After nine drinks each, at Danny's the well-lit bar where the tvs competed with the conversation, they stumble to a certain corner where they know they part ways. "Well. Yep." "Yep," and they separate like two water droplets, blown by different winds. Freddie texts his girlfriend from three years ago, and Gut knocks a garbage can over. [pre-order]

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Also, Toronto-people, the wonderful Emma Healey is launching her new book of poetry Begin With the End in Mind through Arbeiter Ring Publishing at Type Books (883 Queen W) this evening at 6pm. Come!

UNPREDICTING

Grizzly Bear - "Frolic". An unreleased song from the early days of Grizzly Bear; it's called "Frolic" but it doesn't sound like one, sounds like a dirge, sounds like a man being slowly buried in gold coins, baubles, false gifts. Look at Grizzly Bear today and then look back at the far horizon, where they came from. Not darkness but twilight, not sadness but decay, dwindling, breath through a harmonica, just breath. The acoustic guitar, speaking in rounds, sounds like the setting on an old Casio - clipped, mean. When I woke up this morning I rolled onto my side and spoke, spoke into the grey room, and my voice was like a ghost's. [from Richard Parks' CONTENT. Contact him for a copy. / Meanwhile, Grizzly Bear's Shields is out now.]

(plate by Chad Wys)

Cheap Time

Cheap Time - "Typically Strange"

They're one of those special couples. That go off and make things and you forget about them until they're ready. The kind of couple that will never show you what they're like when they're alone, that's a secret. They + each other, they don't just =. They're making their own loud music that is great and going on out of sight but when the sun hits it it sparkles.

[Buy]

MEDUSA

Karneef - "Got Money". Like Mozart's Sister or Pat Jordache (where he was a member), Karneef is an act from Montreal's new bedroom school: damaged, funky, full of appetite and desire. None of Grimes' childish hexes; this is more grown-up than that, nicked and mangy, wolftongue lapping. In Error is a simmering, sidling broil, with grooves that will inch over and burn. Karneef can sound like David Byrne or he can sound like Prince, he can sound like James Murphy or Jim Carrey circa The Mask. "We Found Money" is a resolute jam, skewed and self-satisfied. The singer found money. I do believe he found money. As you may imagine, he is happy about this. He celebrates like a man dancing alone on the dancefloor, like a man dancing alone in an alley, like a junkyard dog dancing alone at the top of the heap. But with the song's slow advance - woodblocks and backing sighs, a cellphone interruption, the sudden & unexpected, frisky, acoustic guitar - you can imagine everyone joining in. You can imagine the scales falling from everyone's eyes, realizing this dirtbag ain't. He found money. He's a millionaire. [buy]

Blue Hawaii - "In Two". New music from a duo that made one of my favourite songs of 2010; a band that's described as a Braids side-project but that's better than Braids, for my money; more pop, more constrained, water poured into a container. With Blue Hawaii I am always made to think of essences, concentrates. You reduce a thing to its purest part. Acid blotter, rosewater, petroleum - it shows itself in the first taste. Splendour unhidden. Either you look her in the eyes or you do not. Other bands are also messing with cut-up synths, sudden blooms, the layering of female voice - but most use these sounds as a screen, concealing that there is nothing inside, no interior. With Blue Hawaii the music is all thrown colours, inkblots, addings. At most it is a veil - something to conceal those eyes. To matter, a song does not need to be a shapeless trance. It does not need to be a room full of smoke. It can be many shivering, separate fires. [out January 22 / via Gorilla vs Bear / five gigs at CMJ]

(painting by Paul Jelinek)

Eyes Crossed & Closed

Each Other - "A Strong Spinning"

This map is not for this place. These rooms are shaped for creatures unlike us. These are doors, unshaped without handles or passage, hallways move in strange directions, unexpected and illogical. These directions are not for things that move like us. "Go to the middle of the hill, turn side, drift, and breathe around the summit."

[Each Other, one of those bands that stirs excitement in me with every move they make, are going on tour (check sidebar "shows"). Americans, Canadians, go catch 'em!]

A LITTLE MORE MALARKEY

Bob Dylan - "Narrow Way". My parents used to call me Bean. It started when I was in my mama's belly, teeny as anything. They looked at the ultrasound and said: "That there is a Bean." Now I'm not so teeny: I got myself a good truck, a little house, a girl in every port. I got myself a wife: heavy-stacked as hell. So it's hard when I go home to J------, WI, and I rap on my parents big brass knocker, and mama pulls the door open and says BEAN! I'm no bean, not any more. Mama drags me into the parlour and calls down my skinny pop and then they want to know how it's all going - how's the house and how's the truck and how's Stella. Stella, my wife. They don't ask me about the girls in every port because they pretend they don't know that I got a girl in every port. They pretend other things too: that I don't swear, that I still go to church, that I kept pop's Mississippi Sheiks records. But life's a long fackin road, you know? Sometimes you're on the highway and the sky's full of big separate clouds, tall clouds like ships, separated by curtains of sun, and you think to yourself: look at this goddam place I gotta do whatever I want. It's like one long thought, brought on by that wide sky. Look at this goddam place I gotta do whatever I want. [buy]

(photo is of the headquarters of Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party, ca 1934)

See The Future

Generationals - "Ten-Twenty-Ten"

Upside-down, a calculator is boobies.

[Buy] (image by Wanda Koop)

THE CHEMISTS

Freelove Fenner - "Workshop". Marty showed up with a guitar he had turned inside-out. Trudy put down her cherry coke. "How did you do that?" she said. She went over and touched the inside-out guitar. "It's inside-out, right?" Marty said yeah. He tightened one of the tuning knobs. "What does it sound like?" Trudy asked. Now Sam had come over. He plinked one of the guitar strings. It made a sound like this: wingggg Marty said that he had found the instructions in an old book, from the library's one-dollar sale. He said he had ordered a modulator on eBay. The inside-out guitar was seafoam green. It looked a little like a guitar and a little like a seahorse and a little like the facade of a hardware shop. Marty plugged it in to an amp. He asked Sam for a pick. He flicked on the switch and ran the pick over the guitari's looped strings. The sound was crystalline, bittersweet, medicinal, like an elixir. It wasn't a sound for love-songs or rockers but you could make a sound like that into a tiny little universe, a sequence of oribiting planets, supporting life. You could make a sound like that into a psychedelic mission-statement, a reason to keep looking at leaves through your pair of prismatic glasses. [buy]

Like a string of inhalations, half-breaths, the phrases that come before and then. Gifts, splendours, endlessly unconsummated. [Dishwasher's Peace Signs is out October 15]

Jermaine

The Bad Plus - "In Stitches"

Jermaine, the cat, wears a trench coat in the rain. Drops bead on his shoulders and back, I'm like a duck's ass over here. Jermaine is down on his luck. Way down. Luck like pocket lint, luck like old soup skin, luck like an eight-dollar handjob. Nothin to eat in this town, thinks Jermaine, looking through closed flower shop storefronts and barred barrister windows. This town weighed heavy on Jermaine often, he thinks of the way it runs, like a big clock in the sky, full of gears and moving parts, beyond his understanding. His apartment is small, a little room with a mattress on the floor, litter box in the corner, stinks the whole place to high heaven. Can't cook in there, smells so bad, so he goes out every night to eat. But he's sick of the same old diners, that surly bastard with the dirty apron at Gil's Place, that old smoke-stained lady at The Fournier. Tonight, it's just rootin' through the garbage in the alley behind the grocery store. Back to this old shit, he thinks, holding his breath and chewing.

Jermaine goes back to his apartment, left the tv on. "So You Think You're Innocent?" is on, announcing this week's verdict. Not guilty is very different from innocent, thinks Jermaine, clawing in the litter box. The contestant, in a pompadour and a patterned button-down, waits nervously. Jermaine flicks off the screen before the announcement. He looks at old birthday cards on his fridge, almost a year old now, when can you throw these damn things out? He collapses in his bed, looking up at the ceiling. He stares up at it, like staring at a wall, this is my whole goddamn life, just white walls in every direction. But every time Jermaine closes his eyes, it isn't like this. When Jermaine closes his eyes it's colours and stripes and landscapes and everything's easy. And something stirs in Jermaine. He sits up, on his paws, looks to the corner, by the closet. Old paint cans leftover from when he moved in, lids half-closed, drips down the sides, no one ever paints without spilling a little bit.

Jermaine slinks over to the cans, brings them one by one over to the mattress. Stands the mattress up on its side, roaches scatter. He slides his one chair over, it squeaks with weak legs. He holds the open can, Sunday Cloud, with one paw, dips his other paw right inside. Wipes it on the ceiling. Gets the other, Rusted Sand, dips his other paw in, wipes another streak. Something happens. The ceiling opens up and sings, Jermaine is rubbing swirls and streaks and it drips in his face and he's pressing his whole cat face up against the paint, breathing it in, toxic or not it doesn't seem to matter. He paints for hours, layers on layers on layers, sometimes a face, sometimes a whole world, sometimes a series of colours. It's what Jermaine sees behind his eyes, come to life. After hours of painting, he's tired but can't sleep, can't breathe in the apartment, goes out for a walk by the tracks. A train comes by and he hops on and he's more cat than he's ever been in his life. He heads to a place where the sun actually comes up when it's morning.

[Buy]

DISSOLVED

Peter Peter - "Une version améliorée de la tristesse". Rain wash white out. You are driving and the world is suddenly wiped away, dissolved in a thunderstorm. You panic at first but then your fingers tighten around the wheel and you snap on your hazards and you are still driving, driving slowly, in a column of cars. In the aftermath you have the time & space to recall the feeling, the feeling that the feeling recalled. That rain wash white out, rain-wash-white-out, it reminded you of another time, on the street, when the whole world seemed to melt away. You were walking. There were solemn streetlights and strafing headlights, and you were putting one foot in front of the other, and your whole life was skidding out under the soles of your busted wellington boots. [buy / credit Adam Kinner for that extraordinary life-giving saxophone]

Not If

Boys Noize - "What You Want"

...but when robots are hunting us for sport, mounting us in Bodies Exhibit-style silly poses, skinned, plasticized, faces forever splayed in last-moment horror, it will be the great human endeavour to hide and run and stick together. In de-lectrified chambers we will live by candlelight, running in untraceable patterns that we learned as children to the convenience store to buy extremely expensive cans of tuna or Orangina or Doritos Mecha-Crunch. Brave ones, bored, will sit on their roof with Beta Shields and a Polarizing Gun, picking off drones as they float by like sky manatees. Political ones will hold Voice Tuber meetings in the sewers about new policies of strike and defense. Fratty ones will run naked through a dark alley and join, heart pounding, their brothers in arms for life on the other side. The romantic ones will write whole novels longhand about Love in the Time of Laser Whips. There will be no music. [Free]

(Sailboat Books, 1976)

The Finks - "Emma Again". A book of short stories, sitting on the bench at a bus stop. It is just a little paperback, bright yellow cover, and after a while you pick it up because the bus is late. The book feels good in your hand; feels just right. The sky is clear as a perfume bottle, blue, you think to yourself wanly, as the Librarian's eyes. Lately you have been obsessing about the Librarian and you have been quietly enjoying this obsession - you are not sure how much you are being ironic when you type and delete and re-type the Librarian's name in the Facebook status update box. You just know that you always close the window.

Now you are at the bus stop with the little yellow paperback. It feels good in your hand so you flip open the cover. A story called "Emma Again". You squint at that title. "Emma Again". Someone has taken a ballpoint pen and crossed out the word Again. You shift on the bench and cross your legs. You start reading the story. It is a story about new love. It is written in a fumbling, bumbling style, like the author does not have a full command of the English language. You flip back to the cover. "by Emma D----". Is Emma writing about herself? Is the narrator deliberately clumsy? Is this meta-fiction or whatever? The back of the paperback doesn't have any information, just a publisher. You wonder what the Librarian would say about this book. Would they know all about it, just from the author's name, the publication date? Would the Librarian be able to quote back the opening line?

You keep reading and on the third page you find another word has been crossed out. In fact it is the same word. After a while she said I'll go home again. You pore over the rest of the pages. Throughout all of "Emma Again", every instance of the word again has been crossed through, in a wobbly blue line. Why? It is a mystery. You look up - the bus is coming. Its orange lights shine through the morning mist. This little paperback is a mystery, a mystery, and you clutch it happily. You're so happy to have found a little mystery. You rummage in your pocket for a bus token. Later you will see the Librarian again and you will have this book in your raincoat pocket and the mystery will give you something to talk about. A loose thrill rolls around in your chest. You are a bit embarrassed by the somersaulting thrill, the fuzzy heat of it - you don't even know if you even really like the Librarian; but you try not to overthink it. You squeeze into the bus and try to find a place where there's room to stand and also room to hold the yellow paperback in your left hand, thumb wedged in the spine, to read. You will read the whole story, while the bus rolls and shudders, again and again and again.

[The Finks on Soundcloud]

(photo source)