Thundercat “Them Changes”

“Them Changes” is the latest jam from Thundercat. Haunting and powerful.

His new album, The Beyond / Where Giants Roam is available.

Music can act as the great healer.

Musicians can be shamans, channeling their energy into song and to the listener.

BC Camplight “Grim Cinema”

Philly expat, Brian Christinzio (Sharon Van Etten, War On Drugs) released How To Die in the North earlier this year to critical praise. It shares some sonic DNA with 70’s iconoclast, Skip Spence and his record, OAR. Folky acoustic intro with a chorus nod to Jim Ford Harlan County boogie rock make up the meat and bones of “Grim Cinema.” Toss in a wicked little synth guitar breakdown at the mid point and you’ve got a clever hodgepodge of a tight pop song. But for those unfamiliar, think Beck meets Tame Impala with a dash of Brian Wilson-style vocal arrangements. The video is a perfect mirror for the song comprised of found footage and lots of swinging tassels. Yay tassels!

Tour dates and info at http://bccamplightmusic.com/

Chelsea Wolfe “Carrion Flowers” – Official Video

I have been eagerly anticipating news of Chelsea Wolfe’s forthcoming album “Abyss,” due in August from the brilliant folks at Sargent House (Cathy Pellow & Company).

Over the past few weeks they’ve thrown some bones. A set of lyric vids for “Iron Moon” and “Carrion Flowers” plus a headlining tour with Woven Hand was announced for the Summer/Fall.

Chelsea skirts easy genre classification. That said, it’s certainly not Pop music, not in the literal definition of the term.

Her songs exude a Lynchian charm. There is a comforting ambiguity to her fearless approach to song craft. Which can also be unsettling.

“Carrion Flowers” is no exception. The middle eastern melody that acts as counterpoint to the droning synth waves and industrial drumming is familiar yet new.

A petit deja entendu for the Mise en abyme

The video was directed by Wolfe and longtime collaborator, Ben Chisholm.

US CD/LP Store: http://chelseawolfe.hellomerch.com
UK & EU CD/LP Store: http://sargenthouse.awesomedistro.com…
Amazon: http://smarturl.it/CWAbyss_Amazon

http://sargenthouse.com

CHELSEA WOLFE
http://chelseawolfe.net
https://facebook.com/cchelseawwolfe
http://twitter.com/cchelseawwolfe
http://instagram.com/cchelseawwolfe
http://sargenthouse.com/chelsea-wolfe
http://www.vevo.com/watch/USQY51568929

Leon Bridges “Coming Home” – Mahogany Sessions

Between producer/composer Adrian Younge’s work in hip hop and neo-soul, Raphael Saadiq’s stellar musical output of recent memory and brilliant artists like RZA exposing old music to new ears, Leon Bridges inhabits that sweet spot between familiar and inspiring. His latest effort, Coming Home, is an analog purists dream. A mini-masterpiece comprised of soulful three-minute tunes. If you need any more excuses to buy a turn table, receiver and pair of speakers, this is it. Slow dance your Sunday away with your sweetheart to the title track, “Coming Home,” or nod your head along to the swinging back beat of “Smooth Sailin’.”

The folks at Mahogany Sessions have had their fair share of rad performers (Allen Stone, Hozier, Flogging Molly) in their format of performers in transcendent locales, but hearing Leon with a guitar, sax and two back up singers in an abandoned house ranks top marks.

Check OUT the performance

What do you think?

Coming Home” is available for download on iTunes: http://smarturl.it/ComingHomeiT

Follow Leon Bridges:
http://leonbridges.com
http://facebook.com/leonbridgesofficial
http://twitter.com/leonbridges
http://instagram.com/leonbridgesofficial
https://soundcloud.com/leonbridges/

CODAS “Currents” streaming via Ghost Cult

Sleep Lady guitarist and ex-San Diegan, now Brooklyn transplant, Mario Quintero, is set to release CODAS “Currents” on June 2.

The record is streaming via Ghost Cults now. This is some spectacular guitar-based riff worship in the tradition of Mogwai, Don Caballero, And So I Watched You From Afar with nods to prog, hardcore and a little bit of Jesu for good measure.That’s just referential shit for lazy listeners, CODAS is doing some really interesting work in that space. Manipulating the template in a way that is new without losing momentum.

I only wish he didn’t have to move across the country to do it. Hope they’ll play SD in the future.

Listen at the link below.

http://www.ghostcultmag.com/audio-exclusive-stream-codas-currents-ep-mario-quintero/

Disappears – Halcyon Days (video)

Chicago band, Disappears have been sculpting moody and paranoid sonic compositions, altering the notion of structure on each subsequent release since forming in 2008. On the band’s latest, Irreal, they manage to ratchet up the tension with a minimalism that is calculating and precise. I appreciate their sonic aesthetic even more, now that the band seem to be moving toward the type of music they made on the 2013 12″, Kone. They’re delving into the IN BETWEEN space, creating music in an era where you can easily spend 90 minutes in a isolation chamber. Not to be confused with cold or isolating but fluid and viscous.

Some writer with more time and a better grasp of metaphor likened them to David Lynch.

Sure, Disappears make Lynchian-post kraut rock. Now it’s dark…

Disappears are accessing something unique. Getting farther and farther out. The use of repetition, recursive riffs and motifs paired with Brian Case’s monotone vocal delivery of haiku-like lyrics that often end in ellipses rather than declarative cliche, escape the velocity of rock pastiche.

They’re playing at the Casbah on April 3, 2015. The night after TV On the Radio plays the Observatory in North Park.

Another important distinction, Brian Case has an affinity for Taylor Swift, which I share so he and his band get top marks in my estimation.

Haiku 3/3/15

Twirling in the sun

A noose hung on cottonwood

Blade marks in the bark

– Tajomaru Thiret

Spectres – Where Flies Sleep

“Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.”Jonathan Crary

Anxiety abounds in this tense and compressed new track from Bristol UK shoe-wave band, Spectres.

They made NME’s album of the week and it’s about time to commend the lads for their diligent and provocative sound. For a band that has been anchored to an island, hopefully, the extra attention will garner a tour. Maybe, if the black supermoon aligns, a tour US will follow and they can anoint us all with layers of fuzz, suburban ennui and melancholy for an atrophied diaspora of guitar-centric music.

Art and Dissent

Permit yourself to imagine.

Once accomplished, travel is unrestricted, borders nonexistent, walls breached.

How?

• Words
• Spray paint
• Lines of code
• Guitar
• Microphone
• Objet trouvé
• Dance
• March
• Screen print
• Sculpture
• Décollage
• Sticker bomb
• Banner drop
• Tree-sit
• Occupy
• Slingshot
• Molotov
• Barricade
• Arm-lock
• Film
• Gas mask

• Antacid and water
• Fiction

Dissent is fluid.

And the energy generated as it passes through a medium?

Consider the variables contained in oppression, impunity and greed.

Each element behaves like velocity, temperature and density and movement is inevitable.

Our expectations of art are disrupted—subverted.

Remember the Chilean arpilleras? A people’s history of tragedy, torture and Desaparecidos woven into tapestries by garment workers—Madres, Hermanas y Abuelas—under the brutal Pinochet regime.

Listen to the music of Pete Seeger. The power of protest is embodied in song.
 An iconic image of a working class man with an inscription in black text on his banjo, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”

Image and text by Barbara Kruger. Appropriate. Borrow. Reconfigure. 
In a haunting piece by the artist we are presented with the cropped décolletage of a woman, her neck and chin exposed and the text: “We will not become what we mean to you.”

Lauren Poitras is an Oscar and Emmy nominated documentary filmmaker and journalist. She produced, “My Country, My Country,” a film that exposed the turmoil caused by the occupation of Iraq by the United States military and the effect it had on both Iraqis and American soldiers. Poitras is consistently harassed by the Department of Homeland Security. 
Detained upon entry each time she returns to the U.S. from traveling abroad.

Journalists, Filmmakers, Artists and 
truth seekers—add them to the no-fly list,
 confiscate their electronics,
 surveil all communications.

Detain them. Intimidate them.
 Harass them to death.
 To “suicide.”

Like digital activist “hacker” Aaron Swartz?

Look at Kevin Carter’s, “Famine.”

The image of a starving Sudanese child on the ground with a hooded vulture standing sentinel in the background, netted the photojournalist a Pulitzer.
 Some time later, Carter drove to a favorite overlook—blue horizon and meditative rushing river drone—taped a hose to the exhaust pipe of his vehicle.

He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at 33.

For those haunted by experience and an excess of empathy, suicide may be a final rebellion.

Recall Thich Quang Duc immolating himself in protest of the Vietnam War?

A burning rage against the machinery of apathy.

In India, a quarter of a million farmers protested seed patents through suicide by ingesting pesticide supplied to them by Monsanto.

But is that Art?

The 2011 arrest on a trumped up tax charge and subsequent, temporary disappearance of Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, had Western supporters mounting a full campaign for his immediate release.

#releaseaiweiwei trended on Twitter.

Soon after, inexplicably, numerous shattered dynastic vases and knock offs adorn the steps of historical Chinese landmarks and consulates in Western cities.

Dissent art is situational and represents the possibility of a crucial narrative, not new but suppressed.

We’ve been locked into a singular system, which serves official culture.

Flummoxed by alternative thinking, critical thought asphyxiates under the touch screen.

The forty-pixel finger navigating through a pop culture shock architecture, finds many connections and little substance.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of the feminist punk group, Pussy Riot begins her two-year sentence for her participation in the bands February 2012 protest song and performance at Christ the Saviour Cathedral.

While at Penal Colony 14, Tolokno goes on hunger strike, citing the inhuman conditions and slave labor practices of the colony. She smuggles a letter, which is published later online, detailing her treatment. She is disappeared while in transit to a new prison camp in Siberia.

A single human brain is capable of processing 37 petaflops of data, rounding up, that makes one quadrillion calculations, give or take, per second.
 So, knowing the variables make it—art—difficult to quantify.

Emerging science suggests that within the next 18 months there will be a network of supercomputers capable of five times that amount of processing.

Art must penetrate this confounding and subvert the official narrative.

Open the between space.

Alyce Santoro articulated the role of Art recently in her “Manifesto for the Obvious International.” She writes: “Drawing on art’s infinite possibilities, system-defying agents are re-humanizing, de-commodifying, and debunking all manner of contrived contraries by creating barter systems, cooperative workspaces, soup kitchens, food forests, and street libraries. In societies based on an ever-intensifying quest not for peace, health, or contentment, but for “progress” (broadly defined as the drive toward maximization of personal convenience, or what social ecologist Murray Bookchin called “the fetishization of needs”)—strategies for existence that are participatory, inclusive and nonhierarchical, and that encourage the sharing of skills, ideas and resources (the maximization of meaning), are eminently subversive.”

Caveat emptor.

Temptations are everywhere.

We accept these little concessions without reading the service agreement and relinquish control for convenience—security for a sense of belonging.

In his latest collection of “quasi-essays and docufictions,“Revolutionary Brain” writer and critic Harold Jaffe offers, “Possibly the hardest factor for concerned younger artists to accept is that there will always be an incommensurateness between their imaginative efforts and results. The primary obligation is to not avert your eyes: to bear witness.”

Writers, artists and activists must refute official narratives.

The artist/revolutionary creates new methods of engagement, informing the discourse with immediacy.

Artists are in a unique position to engage directly with the established value system, call it into question and mobilize against it.

If a distinction between commercial and activist art no longer exists, the medium(s) an artist uses no longer need be relegated to a single surface or conversation.

Subversion happens while viewing.

Walls disintegrate and become canvas.

The canvas extends beyond the inner city, barrio, border to the wild.

Courage of the imagining mind.

Mega Yay! Sharon Van Etten “I Don’t Want to Let You Down”

Suffice to say Sharon Van Etten’s Are We There bubbled by brains for the better half of 2014.

Late in 2014 I picked up Strand of Oaks Heal, on the title track, Showalter name checks Van Etten “my headphones on And I listend to Van Etten Sing You gotta give out, give up…”

Van Etten has a voice that seeps. Fills in the seams.

The way her voice wraps around words or, trying to explain Are We There to a friend when playing the “No Bad Songs” game in that irritating dancing-about-architecture explanation of music that is so subjective and personal I thought, man, even though I’ve only recently discovered Van Etten I feel like I’ve been listening to her my whole life.

Okay, enough with the exposition. Here’s a new track she released. Oh, and if you haven’t seen her and Shearwater’s performance of the Petty/Nicks “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” do yourself a favor and consult the oracle.

Bully “Milkman”

Everything old is new again.

This song from Nashville band, Bully, will make your young heart go tachycardic.

They’re hitting the road with Strand of Oaks this winter.