Said the Gramophone

FOUR FOOTPRINTS

Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld - "Won't be a thing to become". It is possible to be so stuck in your own story, so mired in it, that you do not notice the most obvious thing: that there are others here too. In sorrow, in bliss, in pain or fury - there are others on their own paths, before their own windows, beside their own lakes. We are not in it together but we are all in it, and almost always within shouting distance from one another. If you are not shouting then cock an ear. If you hear shouting, go there, help. If you are stuck in your own story, mired in it, try to remember that it is so; for three seconds; for two bars; for the time it takes a violin bow to pass across the strings; for the time it takes two lovers to take their separate breaths. [buy / I also write about this song in Saturday's Globe & Mail]

(photo source)

You wanna know?

Ultrathin - "I wanna know" [buy] Video by Jacqueline Lachance
Abwärts - "Computerstaat" [buy]

These are the things I sometimes do but can't help:

- After a shower I tuck my penis between my legs and arc my back and dance like Scott Weiland from 'Stone Temple Pilots' in the 'Sour Girl' music video.
- Whenever I put my shirt on backwards accidentally, I always moonwalk while I reverse it and put it back on.
- After I get out of a long bath, I stand backwards in front of a mirror and flex and un-flex my ass, chanting "relaxed! not relaxed! relaxed! not relaxed!" while looking at my ass flexing.
- I always skip the first step of any stairway. If I don't, I have to listen to 'Stairway to Heaven' for the next 48 hours otherwise, bad luck. Just simple bad luck.
- Whenever I'm in a crowded elevator, I get an urge to scream "Tyra Mail!" like the 'America's Next Top Model' contestants but I actually don't because it would be annoying.

Also, today I was in an elevator with a 'Fed-Ex' delivery guy and a 'Canada Post' guy. They were having friendly small talk. I almost cried and wanted to sing 'We are the World' but didn't.

CLARISSA

Poor Form - "Boxed In"
Poor Form - "Sever"

In the city that summer it was hot. The businessmen in their suits downtown, the kids at the skate parks, the women on the synchronized swimming team, the old people in their homes. Everyone felt it and they all felt it together.

Throughout the heat wave Clarissa stayed at her post at the café counter, by the window looking out at the street. The café was in an old brick building and had tall ceilings that kept it a few degrees cooler than outside, but only a few. Not enough to justify her steady consumption of piping-hot espresso.

Clarissa was writing her book that summer. While the rest of her friends explored swimming holes or sucked up the air conditioning at the mall, she sat there alone, writing.

The café was run by an elderly woman. Sometimes when she spoke it seemed to Clarissa that she was speaking a different language, but then she realized that she was stressing different syllables. Sometimes Clarissa thought that the old woman might appear in her book, in a slightly different form, but she hadn't yet.

What was Clarissa's book about? She couldn't say. It took place in an old castle that was being encroached upon by suburbs. It both was and wasn't like the castle where she worked as a tour guide the summer before. There was a love affair, a fireworks display, a mysterious object that appeared in the lost and found--she didn't know how they all fit together yet.

"It's nice to see you writing. Always writing," the old woman told her and gave her a free croissant.
---
[Poor Form are an incredible punk band from Vancouver. Their songs are gritty and full of heart. Their voices are wild and strong. / buy]

UNSPEAKABLE POWER

Shura - "2Shy". The strange fragility of wishes: so fabulously powerful, transformative, and yet they must not be spoken aloud. A wish must remain behind closed lips, or if it is uttered it must at most be whispered. Before coins and fountains, before flagging candles, we think our wishes. And sometimes we sing them, in songs that pretend to be dreams.

It's not real, we pretend, lip-syncing into a microphone. Somehow a song can still be a thought, unspoken; somehow the sung wish retains its magic, its glamour; somehow it can still enchant. Shura never said her wish, never gave it away - she merely sang it out, aloud, onto tape.

[soundcloud]

(image source)

So Anxious

Ginuwine - "So Anxious"
Drake - "Legend"

Here we have an object lesson in taking the things about you that you can't shake and spinning them into a superpower. Twice over.

So, pre- the new(ish) Drake tape, had you thought about this Ginuwine song since, like, 2000 if you'd thought about it at all? Right. Me neither. It's a jam, though - and also, at first, hilarious. This song is so blatantly, relentlessly, remorselessly thirsty that you have to laugh the first time you listen, the same way you would maybe laugh if you saw a tornado or an enormous ocean wave about to crash down and engulf you. Like, even that title - he's not fucking around. He's so anxious! It's nuts! It's 9pm and he knows you get off work at 11:30 and already he needs to see you so bad that he's actually dying. Over the course of this song, Ginuwine checks in with you at two different times even though he knows you're not off work yet; he wails and he rolls around on the floor and he sends you like thirty messages. While he's at home alone slowly dissolving into a pile of sparks and smouldering ash on the plush carpet in his beautiful empty sex palace, you're at work dealing with petty bullshit and trying not to think about how much your feet hurt, and when you get done you're going to look down at your phone (your pager!) and be like, jesus, wow, okay. This guy.

Now. There is nothing inherently sexy about this level of thirst. Technically, it's the opposite of attractive; common wisdom goes confidence, sure, yes, but desperation? Absolutely no.

But it's in the weird place where those two seeming opposites converge that you can catch the true genius of a song like this, of this song specifically, buried. There is no flinching in "So Anxious," no squinting or head-shake or shy laugh or "hey I know this might sound crazy, but like..." Nope. Ginuwine knows he's a sexaholic, and so do you. The power of this song, the thing that makes it an endeavour that walks a fine line but comes out successful , hot and weirdly kind of endearing, is that he takes the thing that he knows is most true about himself (not most attractive! Crucially! Just most true, most inherent, most core-connected) and uses that thing to power this song entirely. No holding back.

This is the extra-genius of "Legend," a song so perfect that I have listened to it like twenty times every single day since it came out. The other day, I was trying to explain why I love Drake to some guy, and when you do this to some guys they get weirdly nervous; usually they'll start making fun of you or Drake or both, because there is something that is both perplexing and unnerving about Drake's attractiveness that makes straight men feel as though someone's shifted the center of all things without asking their permission first. This guy was like "oh, is it 'cause he's sensitive? But he's tough? But he feels things?"

Which, yes, of course it is. But also. Drake is a man who has built a career (and ostensibly a love life?) out of being completely unapologetic about things that most of us would at the very least elide in order to make ourselves seem more attractive to others, and therein lies his power. Drake is a total dork - he's polite and obsessive and awkward and sentimental and thirsty as hell, for sex and love and women and fame. But he doesn't fuck around. "So Anxious" shows up a couple of times on If You're Reading This It's Too Late, weaving in and out, and I am convinced that its use, especially on this song, is one of the most brilliant and subtle displays of power I've seen in any kind of music in a long time. What is more needlessly melodramatic than saying - to yourself, to everyone - oh my god. Oh my god. If I die, I'm a legend, like you're so excited and so upset, and meaning it with all your heart? If you were out drinking with a friend and they started talking like this you would wrestle them into a cab and the slack in their face would haunt you for weeks.

But then the next day your friend would text you like hey, look, I'm so sorry about -. Not Drake. Drake gets it and he gets the game, too. He knows that the whole joke of him is how bad he wants everything, and he knows that his life is about how bad he wants everything, and instead of pushing back against it or trying to seem more chill than he is or letting everyone else's raised eyebrows stir him from his course he takes the thing that is most about him and doubles the fuck down. Takes another song whose perfection comes from its unapologetic thirst and uses it as the literal foundation for his own statement of purpose. It's genius. And then there's me, and everyone else in the city, walking around repeating it to ourselves on the walk to the streetcar. The whole 6 gets shot through with what's most Drake and loves it, loves him, just like that. Oh my god, oh my god.

[buy Greatest Hits / If You're Reading This It's Too Late]

Artist Residency

Michael Hoenig - "Sun and Moon" [buy]

I am an artist who is just doing my artist residency on my bed today. just making this wonderful installation piece called, "too tired so lay in bed watching cute kittens on youtube" I think its a masterpiece.

(photo source)

NOTHING THAT YOU DON'T ALREADY KNOW

Francis Bebey - "Binta madiallo". I keep returning to this song; as if it's a place, as if it's a beguiling place, somewhere impossible to resist. Every day I take a detour to visit "Binta madiallo". I ditch my friends, defer my lovers, feign illness so that I can take the shortcut back to Bebey's song. To spend some time here. To watch the plants grow. To watch the plants grow, the sky change, the sky change, the plants grow. I have yet to dance to it but I feel like I am always on the verge of dancing to it, microscopically close, held back just by the thinnest part of myself. Some cowardly part of my soul is still too frightened to slip under the curtain and into this song, a song which feels like a place, to move among its lights and darks, under all the leaves, where the nighttime is and isn't. [buy]

Casual Shred

Sheer Mag - "What You Want"

Q: Is this my new favourite song?

A: It is certainly the one that makes me feel most ready to make out with someone or to knee someone else in the chest, and then maybe go out dancing. If you took an x-ray of me listening to this song, you'd see spring coming up and through every single part of my body, its lush spreading across my whole nervous system, spring and summer and that guitar that sounds like a handful of sparklers being thrown into four lanes of traffic. This song sounds like it feels to wear your jean jacket and tough-guy sunglasses for the first time since the endless drag of winter; it sounds like you felt the first time some beautiful party genius taught you to call it a JJ instead of a jean jacket, to say "blaze a jang" instead of "smoke a joint." It sounds like my heart sounded the first time I ever played a plugged-in electric guitar, which was my boyfriend's and looked like this. This song tastes like a keyhole in the side of a tallcan; it feels like your best friend biting the grass stains off your knees. This song means business but it wants to fuck around a little, this song knows you'd get on your bike to just follow it anywhere, and it's cool with that. It's cool.

[buy buy buy 7" / thanks Alex]

HAHAHA LOL

Tom Rosenthal - "Don't You Know How Busy and Important I Am". Rosenthal writes a song for all those dumb bozos with "important" jobs, lacing his monologue with irony. "Don't you know how busy and important I am? / I've got soooooo much to do." He's too busy to know, too busy to see his son, to finish this song. But what Rosenthal gets most right is the song's jaunty pace. Jaunty is what capitalism pretends to be. Capitalism would have us think that its system is light and upbeat, full of forward momentum; that it will progress and progress, easy and trotting, with a grin on its face. Let's all jauntily repress ourselves, for the sake of an inflated mortgage. Let's smile as we're clobbered, dreaming of upward mobility. Let's drown out the gasps and shouts, the suffering shrieks, with a jaunty piano and oh god yet more cowbell. [buy / thanks jez!]

Rob Part I

The Cleaners from Venus - "A Mercury Girl" [buy]

The Go-Betweens - "Cattle & Cane" [buy] -Sorry there is no reissue for this one. I only found original lps here. But CD and songs are available on usual place like itunes and amazon. *As it's pointed out, there is a box set reissued last year featuring this song but it's sold out...here

At the tender age of 18, Rob was a kind-of-popular guy at the high school in his small home town. He became kind of popular by hanging out with real popular guys, he was careful to fit and therefore got a truck that was really high off the ground. It was so high he could even look down on Manute Bol (7'7" former NBA player). Even though his girlfriend was only in Grade 8, she was as tall as Muggsy Bogues (5'3" also former NBA player). He got big sub in his truck. In his high school, how much bass your stereo could produce correlated exactly to how cool that person was. It was so bass-y that his 14 year old girlfriend threw up on the way home from a bush party. He was a hardworking man to fit in. He worked out and lifted weights in his basement. His older brother, Bob, had a Bowflex and other stuff which he only used for 2 days before he moved away to go to college. Whenever he could Rob lifted weights. By grade 12 he was "hot" according to Grade 8 girls.

His high school semi-popular semi-charmed life soon ended. He graduated high school. By the end of summer, his friends had moved to nearby city (3hrs away). Most of his friends didn't really tell Rob about what they were doing in the city. In fact, his "friends" were not returning calls or texts and at this point, he realized his semi-popular, semi-charmed life was all an illusion. His third eye, used to read people, was blind to his "friends" secretly making fun of him. He was third eye blind. But Rob followed them like he always did in high school. After he said a teary goodbye to his girlfriend who baked him cookies shaped like whales but ended up looking like penises that tasted like pure sugar, he drove to the big city. The trip cost him $58 (gas $40, chocolate milke $3, A&W big papa burger combo $9 and beef jerkey $6). In the parking lot of A&W some girls smiled at him. He smiled back trying to hide his shyness and insecurity, he didnt know his smile looked like Jim Carrey in the movie 'The Cable Guy' to them. After the long ride to the city he realized one of the reasons the girls were laughing was because his zipper was down the whole time. Rob was now in the city stuck in a traffic jam. He sighed quietly and then...to be continued...you won't believe what he does next in the city and that will probablly restore your faith in humanity...ok Im very jet-lagged....good night.

(photo source)

WANDERING

The Gories - "Can't Catch Up With You" [buy]

A guitar plays a simple lick and then another kicks in playing the same, then the drums start beating along behind them. It's the sound of a young gang on the move together through town on a hot day. The search begins: "I went down to get you out of jail / but you were already out on bail." The singer checks out the old haunts, the burger place, the quarry pit, the liquor store, up and down. When the frustration becomes unbearable the guitar solo kicks in.

"Can't Catch up With You" is a simple song, but it's burned into my mind. I don't make lists of favourites, but this song has to be among those I've listened to the most over the years. The mystery pulls me along every time. Where is the object of the singer's affections, anyway? The guy at the liquor said that she bought some wine, the kids at the burger stand thought she had gone swimming. No matter where the singer goes, she's out of reach, and by the end of the song it seems like she might be gone for good and no amount of guitar soloing will bring her back. But it's not a sad song, it bops along full of young feelings, wired up, on the move, searching, on edge. This song contains a whole bildungsroman in two minutes and change.

This song perfectly captures the wandering I did as a young person. Never aimless, there was always some vague destination or objective. It was rarely as desperate a search, mostly it was just hanging out, killing time, drifting. Before cell phones we'd all just wander around running into each other on street corners or stopping by friends' houses unannounced, getting tangled up in whatever they were doing. I hear that open time, those drifts, in this song, and it's a perfect crystallization of those wandering-around times in my life. I love this song more every time I hear it.

(image: The Removal by L. S. Lowry)

RISER

Suuns and Jerusalem In My Heart - "2amoutu I7tirakan". This music so full of movement: down, or up, or forward; or moving but staying in place, atop an advancing floor. Perhaps I will imagine it as a rearing skyscraper, a tower that rises up from breakwater, past sand into air, widening and narrowing, windows and balconies, razorwired parapets, an ascendant empire forever. Or else as a person falling - plunging down through black air, ever and ever, doomed or flying. No no: a machine, an engine, running on water. A heart pumping with fuel. A crane pushing its frame through clouds. A synthesizer's blinking light, on and on, as the earth spins on axis. Together, Montreal's Suuns and Montreal's Jerusalem In My Heart have conspired to describe a kind of motion, like a physicist and his formula. Kinetics rendered in gleaming groove, repeated beat. Perhaps it is not the sound of movement but a sound for movement, the soundtrack for whatever your body is about to do. [buy]

(image source)

Take What You Want

Waxahatchee - "Breathless"

My favourite way for a song to be, in this world, is in disguise. There are different levels. You've got your sad songs dressed as happy ones - we'll get to these another day but you know what I mean, the ones that take wallow and boredom and lonely and roll them in sequins, wrap them in a chorus you can't shake. Songs like this can be funny (and sometimes Too Cute), but if done right they serve a sneaky purpose; they're a way for you to carry your bad feelings around right out in the open, without anyone else looking twice. In the grocery store, on the radio, in your head, you hear your heartbreak set all catchy and it's a secret signal, small thrill. You can't always defeat the thing in which you're mired, but you can make it sing for you.

But there's a second kind too, more subtle. "Breathless" starts off like a love song - broad strokes, ringing organ, You look at me like I'm a rose, those guitars singing past like other headlights on a night drive - and if you let the thing's sound carry you alone, you might not even notice what's actually going on. You take what you want, you call me back. I'm not trying to be yours. It's not love Katie Crutchfield's singing about - or at least not exactly, anymore. It's a hymn for something done but maybe not quite finished; the sound of finding yourself back somewhere, with someone, and knowing it's been over. Already somewhere else, but still, you're here. Her voice and the organ's steady line all rising to meet each other and never quite touching, a perfect machine made of near misses. You see me how I wish I was - but I'm not trying to be seen. It looks like a love song but it shivers when you touch it, bends more like a certain type of long silence: bare feet on cold kitchen tile, long empty light in the afternoon. The walk home by yourself. The balance shifting back.

[buy Ivy Tripp]

password to my memory

Chevalier Avant Garde - "Nowhere" [buy]

Recently I tried to log into my eBay account which I had abandoned for about 6 years. A lot of things happen in 6 years. Winter and Summer Olympics, World Cups. Two girls one cup. An indie singer-songwriter becomes mature and turns into an adult contemporary singer songwriter. Around six years ago, I had a fire in my kitchen from cooking tempura at 3 in the morning after coming home from a party and forgetting about it, which I note in my mind as the 'Godspeed You Black Tempura'-incident (please do not try this at your home). Around the same time, I started my own business, in which I call myself CEO even though I'm the only employee to make myself feel better. There are more things like getting 2 parking tickets in one day.

Anyway, the point is that I couldn't figure out the password and didn't even remember the username or email I used. It felt like a deleted scene I made up from the movie, Memento, where he farts and asks the guy beside him, "Did you just fart?" It was annoying, like a breakdancer on a busy, narrow street, spinning on his head like a Vertical Horizon album cover. But in the big scheme of things I guess it's not that big of a deal, I forget passwords all the time. It is nothing compared to a vegetarian in Medieval times or 2 parking tickets in one day.

Then, I realized I should check how much $$$ I have in my bank account before I spend it.
"What is the cutest thing?" is the question asked as my online banking security question and the answer is the name of my cat who passed away this January. It is just a security question, but it brings up so many beautiful memories with my cat. One time, I went to a party at a friend's house and saw some cute kittens. When I got home, I had to tell my cat. "I just talked to them. That's all! Nothing happened! I swear!" At this point, I didn't care how much money I had, or that I couldn't log in to make a bid on ebay. That memory was priceless.

(photo source)

"WHY DO I LOVE YOU?"

X - "Suck Suck"
X - "Police"

My cat makes noises in the morning. She squeaks and yowls and worst of all scratches the wicker basket on the other side of the room. Sometimes she jumps up on the bed and punches me in the face with her giant paw.

"Why do I love you?" I ask as I get up and step into my flannel-lined slippers.

Every morning it's the same - she demands to be fed.

I always make her wait though. I pull down my stovetop espresso maker from the top of the fridge, fill it with coffee and water, screw on the top and put it on the burner.

I am filled with joy and gratitude every morning. Thank you O durable stainless steel coffee maker. You cost me $24 at Milano and I've had you for eight years of mornings and you've never let me down.

"Meow?" my cat asks. "Meow meow?"

I open the fridge door. "Meow meow meow meowmeowmeowmeowmeow!"

"Get a grip," I tell her. I get out the can of food and slap some of it onto her dish and she's on it like she's never eaten before.

I leave the cat, go into the bathroom and notice some truly ghastly bedhead in the mirror. I can hear my cat scampering down the hall, her feast ended, as I pick up my toothbrush squeeze on the toothpaste, run it under the tap for a second, and then begin to brush.
---

[I was not prepared for the powerful churning bass and perfect hollering vocals on X (Australia)'s first LP when I picked it up at the mighty Birdman Sound last week. Recorded in five hours in 1979, the ingredients of this raging foot-long from the first wave of Australian punk are equal parts piss, vinegar, snot, and spunk. Toronto's Ugly Pop Records wins the gold medal for reissuing Aspirations and X Spurts, a collection of the band's 1977 demos. Get them before they're gone! / buy]

---
This was written in a writing exercise that I lead in Anna Leventhal's class "How to Write Good: The Aesthetics and Practice of Creative Writing" at Dawson College New School last month. Thanks to Anna for inviting me in and thanks to her students for listening and sharing their own writing.

BEFORE THE MOB GETS HERE

Gaps & Spaces - "Oration". Gaps & Spaces call this an oration, which is to say a speech. There is no speech in it. Instead, the piece begins with a strain of plain violin, dipping and persuading like the opening sentences of a-- well, a speech. There are already signs of discontentment: crackles and drones, electroncis that bring to mind the flecks on an old photograph, the sepia melt of antique film. But then all of a sudden the drums are coming, a mob of drums that crashes into the strings' weak speech and overwhelms it, tumult everywhere. It's the sound of furious progress, and as soon as there's a pause some new voices cast out from it: saxophones singing, hooting, cheering, and finally simply fading, while only the dumb mob lives on.

[On Synoptic Optiks, Gaps & Spaces' Caleb Willitz and Greg Ward are joined by Jeff Parker, Dave Miller, Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello, Makaya McCraven and Dominic Johnson. / buy]

---

In case you missed it, I've begun writing about songs in a weekly column for the Globe & Mail newspaper. You can see my recent articles here: 2/20, 2/27, 3/6, 3/13, 3/20, 3/28, 4/3. I also recently wrote a profile of national treasure Michael Feuerstack.

If you're interested, I also have a few appearances coming up where I'll be talking about Us Conductors (full dates always on the website):

• April 8 • Québec City - Imagination Writers Festival
• April 15 • Montreal - Westmount Public Library
• April 17-18 • Picton, ON - Prince Edward County Authors Festival
• April 24 • Ottawa, ON - Ottawa Writers Fest

Would love to meet any readers of the blog.

(kanye photo source)

10-Day Forecast

Bill Callahan - "Spring"
Fiona Apple - "Anything We Want"

Patterned glass. Thick mist. Grey everything still, a cold so your fingers dissolve like static at the tips. Cigarettes blooming up from the gutter. Dusk that bleeds into everything, dusk you breathe in until your eyes swim with it, until you find yourself mouthing words that aren't quite your own. On the way home you'll watch an airplane cut through the fog, but it looks more like a car with a busted headlight towing the whole sky behind it. Dragging the day over. You'll dream like a skipped record about being the last person on earth and then when you wake up it'll be true. That swift forward pull in your stomach like you've hit turbulence - you'll walk around carrying that feeling in your throat for a day, for a week, for until you find someone to take it back from you.

[Buy Dream River / The Idler Wheel...]

(photo's just my own)

IT'S OVERDUE

Safe Home - "Leda". I have been meaning to write about this song since 2006. Nine years it's been sitting like a neglected letter in the folder called blogpost mp3s. Luckily it is exactly the kind of song that does OK amongst the dusty hours, waiting and waiting. It's well-crafted, Dutch-made, with ambitions as humble as Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth. It's twinned voices, clean claps, guitar run forwards and in reverse. There's the whirr of a synthesizer or of an old film projector. There's a sing-song story like a fallen kite. I imagine this song like a present sitting wrapped upon a table; beside a green potted plant, under a Danish modern fixture, from someone long-loved and distant. Nine years to get here, but the song's not gone stale. It's still good. [buy]

chicken soup for the paleolithic teen's soul

Pheromoans - "Trusthouse Blues" [buy]
Cave - "Ravens Hash" [buy]
Nanimal - "Mother Father" [buy]

"Oh man! It's so cold today! Never ending winter is killing my vibe!" It was 685944 years ago today, Uggo said it to his friend Roko, who was still asleep over by the leftover wild boar corpse they hunted and ate last night. "That was such a feast! Well done! no pun intended, hahah." Roko was still sleeping but Uggo laughed alone anyways, which woke Roko up. "Did you like the Kale salad I made? Did you like it? Apparently, it's good if you make it crispy. Everyone in my cave is into it. I'm thinking about adding dairy and gluten into my diet. What do you think? Anyway, get up! We have to get going!" It was already late afternoon, Uggo and Roko, who were in their mid teens, had told their parents that they were going hunting a couple of days ago, but they were actually just going to this music event called, Mammoth festival. Roko's cousin organized it and Roko asked for a V.I.P.(very important paleolithic) pass, but he didn't get a reply so Uggo had to ask for one from his friend's band, Primal Skream, who were playing the fest, for guestlist spots. He sent a smoke signal asking for guestlist, but he also didn't get a reply. So they were not sure if they would get in, but they didn't want to miss the chance to see their favorite drum circle group, Dinasour Sr, reuniting. "Dude! I can't wait to see them hit the drums! Apparently, they are super loud even though their are only three members!" They only had about 63 more days of walking ahead to get to the Mammoth fest. "Oh man, I'm so excited!" Uggo said as he walked proudly decked out in his new mammoth skin jacket made by a local designer, which he had traded for with an artisan spear that he had crafted from saber tooth tiger canines, and teak.

They walked and walked and were getting close when, Uggo pointed at the sky with a look in his face like he saw a T-rex. "Oh shxt....do you see that smoke?!" Uggo asked Roko. "I think it's my friend, Bobu from Primal Skream......"

They both realized at the same time the smoke signal saying, "Sorry dudes, we don't have any more spots left......."

".................Mammoth fest is so full of lame people anyways."
"Ya true, kids these days, they just go to party. they don't appreciate real musicians, fxck them."
"I'm gonna send another smoke signal to my friends to find out where the after party is before it gets dark."

(photo source)