Imagine the ambient side of Sigur Ros bottled and re-released on it’s own. This is Jonsi and Alex. [vimeo]5580355[/vimeo]
The debut album is called Riceboy Sleeps and it is very powerful.  Atlas, included on the mixtape is epic. Brian Eno would be proud.
Desmond Dekker was the first jamaican to get a hit record in the UK.  ’Peace of mind’ is timeless–a fun bouncy ska song over which Dekker belts, “everywhere I go, there is always, trouble and misery”

This video is a mini-doc on ska music, jamaica’s first musical revolution and it’s trickling into the UK with (obviously) a great soundtrack and some very nice images interspersed.

[youtube]wbIiFCAzMvg&feature[/youtube]

“the big surprise” – The Felice Brothers
from their latest album, Yonder Is The Clock ; ‘no frills’ acoustic revelry

-*gotta love those naturalist indie band photo shoots-

“Dream Pop”

Asian women seem to sing this type of music the best. It’s soooo modern and has a nebulous relationship with anti-depressants. On Josephine’s Shop, My Little Airport’s singers sing,
“Cause running business is not your gig…Why don’t you close it? Why not say damn it?”
Deerhoof’s last album, Offend Maggie, may have gone across the radar relatively unnoticed because of the grand hype of Friend Opportunity which was ok. The problem with hyping a band like Deerhoof is that people hear, oh a great indie band and they come expecting Grizzly Bear or Deerhunter or something more accessible and more polished. Polish is not one of their aesthetics, and you can place a safe bet on this band continuing to refuse to conform and produce an album that Rolling Stone would give a shit about.

Before shutting down, and relocating, The mind behind Radiobutt elected the Antler’s album, Hospice as the top album of 2009.  The album, from Prologue to Epilogue, chronicles the lead singer’s experience escorting a loved one to an imminent cancer death.  [youtube]ZsXKa97J6pM[/youtube]

The album is most intriguing to me because lyrically, and musically it has that ‘Shinsian’ sort of pop-disaffect, it’s even playful at times,  (especially “two” and “bear”)–the brilliance of this album is the way the morbidity and sorrow is transformed.  It’s very modern and very gutsy. When i clicked to download, i was imagining industrial synth full of dissonance, there are dream pop moments here (bear) it truly conveys unpreparedness and surprise, even reluctance and fright (“I should have quit but I took care of you”) and the mostly un-gaudy, eloquent, comforting and eventually eulogizing hand reaching out which you see on the album (“Dont be afraid to speak, don’t speak with someone else’s tooth”)

And lastly, some Lute music for all you witches and alchemists.

]]> http://darkcomedyhour.com/alive/2010/02/23/sublet-a-short-movie/feed/ 0 http://darkcomedyhour.com/alive/2010/02/20/bob-dylan-bootlegs-pre-1966/ http://darkcomedyhour.com/alive/2010/02/20/bob-dylan-bootlegs-pre-1966/#comments Sat, 20 Feb 2010 05:06:15 +0000 rox sirand http://darkcomedyhour.com/alive/?p=134

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TOV1ILK7

this bundle, mostly unreleased, includes:

Before The Flood And After The Fire
Hootenanny
Folk Rogue
Live at the Gaslight 1962
Minnesota Tapes
Newport 1965
Paranoid Blues
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan Outtakes
The Witmark Demos
Town Hall, 1963

[youtube]MJ_XhVAxxJ8[/youtube]

The first chapter of “A Power Government’s Cannot Suppress”

Here, Bob Herbert of the NYT talks about a more intimate experience with Zinn

[youtube]3zUS_oh4XeU[/youtube]

]]> http://darkcomedyhour.com/alive/2010/01/30/zinn-the-name-of-my-first-born-child-or-my-next-dog/feed/ 1 http://darkcomedyhour.com/alive/2010/01/24/anewrenewpoopoo-january-mixtape-2/ http://darkcomedyhour.com/alive/2010/01/24/anewrenewpoopoo-january-mixtape-2/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:55:56 +0000 rox sirand http://darkcomedyhour.com/alive/2010/01/24/anewrenewpoopoo-january-mixtape-2/ musicforeducationalpurposes

January hasn’t proved to be very futuristic.  I’ve already had a thorough nigger moment, and I have formally lifted my denial (late) that some of the muck is sticking to the liberal Manchurian Candidate. However, tripping forces us to abruptly cover a lot of ground.  The fastest runners are falling.  That is unrelated.

Sugar dates

Spike.

Oh nine.

Ten. January.

When come strings? That

Inverse cloud cover,

Sweeping dash of salt.

“–It came without the manual.”

Mellowdrone; Big Winner: “Show me the ropes now baby, show me the ropes…”

Thank goodness we have a band called Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.

I used to play one of these so very proudly. They get murky toward the end of their lives like light switches. You loose the battery door. It’s one of the few visual images that I recall of my life before the age of three, the year of my first and only move. Ma and Pa took the eggs out to the suburbs when they started to see more dope-boys on the block. I awoke somewhere more anti-fungal. There was an amazing bossa nova loop you could play along to so I wouldn’t play much piano over it, since I was so pleased the machine played itself. Those lo-fi synth beats were so hot in the mid 00’s. –Those beats were so hot in “The aughts? The naughties?”

Should we ever grow out of Post-rock?

Not me, not this month.

It’s one of my favorite American Exports.

Mogwai’s The Hawk is Howling was pretty coarse. There were no Golden Porches not even a Stanley Kubrick. There is a song on this album called “I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead”.[youtube]x8J98ZeS-ME[/youtube]

Beak> is what Portishead brainchild Geoff Barrow has had on his mind of late.

Francoise Hardy is an  interesting life force.

Passion Pit, token ‘what the kids dig pick.’

Herbie Hancock is one of the most talented musicians of all time. I hope he makes something we might prefer to his older work.

Plucking
Decor, lattice, pop-
Smut and skin lotion,
Folding the newspaper
In a manner to make it insensitive.
Implicating especially, the qualms
Of luxury from the shrillest magazines,
Grown-up fudge,
–No bright
Packaging, and
Never before bed.
Wouldn’t want to be all the way over there
Unnecessarily.

“Should we clean the vents?
We’ll have to get out the ladder.
Maybe tomorrow.”

Pragmatic
Comedy think
Tanks, the grainy bottoms of lattes,
From which the future hurtles.
“Plights” of the living,
Tangible adversity
The kind that can be represented in digits
The kind
Paid artisans write articles about for
The breathing dead.
Balance; lets rent a helicopter to
Find it, to land there squarely.

The
Shut first worlds, closed
Air of the over-hemisphere
Of a bubble
Sitting in an interminably vast
Standing water,
Who knows
Where you are?
Campy, barreling.

To be one of those
Strong eastern european women
Who don’t take any shit, who shake the
Shit out of your hand.

One could only be so lucky to awake in the
Second world; to be
Maimed,
Not swallowed,
Though
Amphibians seem so
miserable. These folks
Do not speak of love
Over tapas.
Chickens are corralled and
Pinched, swung like
Numchucks.

III.

December.
A dry steppe proving effervescent,
Roused by
A pack of skinny dogs humping one another,
Who’s tongues can’t hang
Straight,
What else to do?
God’s
Laughter.
God’s
Famine.

January in Miami,
Premium
Reclining chairs cocked
For an even suntan, facing
Hispaniola this week by chance.

40 degrees fahrenheit, a tragedy
The papers pitch
Until a real rattlesnake rears
Shoots and steals the floor under the city
Of cards, Port-Au-Prince.
Cooly, chair clerk folds, tosses
“Haiti” like a how are you.
I say, “Haiti” back, shake my
Head, project some sadness, some
Predictability.
“Lots of voodoo there,”
Pointing to the mute
Horizon with his mustache
Before a shrug, as if that’s the
Sort of thing that cries wolf,
As if you catch cold.

What a great twenty four hours for your snarky afro-carribean occasionally racially obsessed blogger who has tallied more make out sessions with white women than black women. It’s not my fault white girls are looking for safe adventure. — Guess how many times I’ve heard, “Guess what, you’re the first black guy I’ve ever been with!”  Not sexy.  ’Not quite white’-water rafting- I don’t even have any priors.    Thats like going ‘camping’ in a heated RV.  

There was ‘lobsters’, the poem about the white dudes who were talking really loud about politics until they realized i was behind them when they were making fun of that crazy asshole Obama for changing his mind about something.

Then there was this afternoon, when I was assuming this man was about to say something offensive and he said something hilarious and revealed he wasn’t even white although he looked like the quaker oats man.

I was on the road when Clap Your Hands Say Yeah came out with their landmark self-released album that sold way too many copies for a self-released indie rock album with a ridiculously indie-self-released-album name like CYHSY. I saw them play live at the Bowery Ballroom around the time that their second, more secular effort (Some Loud Thunder, produced by Dave Friedman) came out and I hadn’t been more anticipatory of a concert since I saw Tortoise in the same space for my 21st birthday. The show sucked. Something was going on. If I was blind, I wouldn’t have said so. They had done so much touring around the country playing their 25 or some odd songs that they had them down, but they were doing the tortured artists thing, maybe they had a fist fight in the green room or someone shagged someone’s girlfriend but it looked like their weren’t having ANY fun, and I looked plenty stupid for having so much fun–in fact, since there were nothing but white boys there, I looked like i was on cocaine because i was jumping higher than everyone during Heavy Metal.

Well. The wailey Alec Ounsworth (CYHSY frontman has a sideproject)
LINK (for educational purposes)
I particularly love That is not my Home (after Bruegel):
It references my favorite painter that never saw or thought to paint anything but lots and lots of white people together in wonderful colors.  It starts off like it’s going to have huge balls, like some and then ends up sounding just like someone’s grabbing Ounsworths’ balls, like many of the best CYHSY songs.

“Will you be dining alone?” The server asks.

“No. Expecting a date.”

“Oooh,” the the server says, excitedly, with a smile, and ushers me to the only empty booth in the restaurant.

I’m not expecting a date. I’m preparing to read William Carlos Williams’ ‘In the American Grain’. I said this because the restaurant is busy and sometimes you need cause to get a booth.

As I’m beginning to write these lines, she comes by and asks,
“Are you slowing down? Do you need a box?”

“Oh no. I’m a slow eater.” I say.
“Is it soooo yummy?”
That is an unprofessionally leading question.
This is precisely what a snarky northerner doesn’t want. This waitress she is the only waitress I could hear as soon as I walked in. She is the only waitress that won’t do in this particular lifetime.

I heard her waiting on the table behind me with her modulatedly uber-friendly high voice and thought please don’t be my waitress. I’d rather the slightly unnatractive server over there, whom these two suits roll their eyes at each time she walks away. I almost always pretend to like those girls if they’re half friendly. I look at them just a touch too long each time I get the chance. It’s the pretty ones expecting pleasantries without offering any besides a low bust line who I try not to look in the eye and whom I tip precisely 15%. My waking life so often unfolds in series of premeditated social crusades like these. I am always scheming on mustering the appropriate passive aggressive act in the given situation. It’s terribly pathological and is extraordinarily consuming.

“You’ve got just the cutest accent. Where are you from?” She says.

I have no accent. People say I sound white because the median example from folks with my nose, my skin color and hair type is ebonics if not plain inarticulate. I am pretty articulate but I say gonna, lie-berry, and waited 26 years to launch the initiative to speak turr-odd as tirade, but whenever I’m in the south, white folks love telling me how impressed they are with my talking skills. A lady in a drug store said she wanted to pinch my cheek. You can make that shit up. And in this case I have for want of a physical image at the end of some things that I have not made up.

“I’m from new York” I say.

“I knew it”

“You’re smart!” i say.

I am wearing three black-colored articles of clothing and am wearing a scarf.

A Florida woman wearing a visor appears looming over me with a black hole sun smile. She has been sitting behind us, “eavesdropping.”

“new York is my favorite place in the world!!! You just came from there?”

I’m shocked. Usually southerners want to suggest youre crazy for living there by telling you their story of their largely inappropriately-paranoia-filled shopping trip in midtown.

Despite her visor and lipstick, her husband is markedly whiter-looking. He looks like the quintessential Caucasian florida senior citizen. He is wearing a US Army sweatshirt and has a matching hat. He has red veins surfacing on his cheeks and all of his hair is white. His eyes are piercing, as if he’s had a lot of cola. As his wife says, “He hates New York”, I’m expecting him to call me a communist with his eyes or something. I’m getting ready to turn my hearing aide down by widening my smile and he spouts,

“im an Indian and I don’t like new York because the white man gave us some measly jewels for all that land.”

His wife rushes them off to get toothpicks after apologizing for the intrusion. She closes my jaw and waves from the exit. I wave back.