PUKESKYWALKER.COM - Blog

Bl’ast!- The Power Of Expression (1987)

2012-01-25T23:24:00.006-05:00

Something Beyond by Bl'ast! on Grooveshark

This whole album sounds like a darker version of Damaged. Fucking cool.

It's really good.

///

Download
Bl'ast! - The Power Of Expression

Thanks to http://vonfrost13.wordpress.com/ for the link

ommmmmm

2012-01-19T21:10:00.001-05:00

As The World Burns

2012-01-16T19:51:00.004-05:00

Video: US Marines laugh, urinate on slain Afghans.

2012-01-12T12:47:00.001-05:00

http://news.antiwar.com/2012/01/11/video-us-marines-laugh-urinate-on-slain-afghans/

Trash Talk - Slander music video

2012-01-10T12:19:00.001-05:00

Corpgov Monsanto

2012-01-08T21:48:00.003-05:00

US to Start 'Trade Wars' with Nations Opposed to Monsanto, GMO Crops. The US is threatening nations who oppose Monsanto's genetically modified (GM) crops with military-style trade wars, according to information obtained and released by the organization WikiLeaks.

The WikiLeaks cable reveals that in late 2007, the United States ambassador to France and business partner to George W. Bush, Craig Stapleton, requested that the European Union along with particular nations that did not support GMO crops be penalized. Stapleton, who co-owned the Dallas/Fort Worth-based Texas Rangers baseball team with Bush in the 1990s, stated:

“Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits. The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices.”

http://naturalsociety.com/us-start-trade-wars-with-nations-opposed-to-monsanto-gmo-crops/

America the Global Cannibal

2012-01-04T14:17:00.003-05:00

Behind Enemy Lines

Obama for ex-preident 2012

2012-01-02T02:00:00.010-05:00

Go Forth

2011-12-28T00:52:00.002-05:00

"Video response to Levi's Go Forth Campaign.

Marketers implore us to go forth seek out the light... As long as we do it in *their* jeans. But the fact of the matter is that these are the self-same scoundrels that are clubbing our lives into dank submission. Our every creative outlet, our every joy, they will rip from our hands.

Go forth?! Go forth indeed. Go forth and loot their jeans."

This is also the same series of ads that used audio of the dead Charles Bukowski in their commercials.

Triac is good / Weekend Nachos on tour

2011-12-19T00:44:00.006-05:00

Weekend Nachos are going on tour January 2012. Don't miss it

Triac is good

Pitchfork Media

2011-12-16T10:22:00.008-05:00

I made a Pitchfork parody t-shirt, based on an old Something Awful design you can see here. Then...

////

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Accordingly, we have set the content that is alleged to infringe the rights of the third party to “pending status” which disables said content from being displayed in your shop or purchased by the public. You may review the content set to pending status by logging into your CafePress account and clicking on the “Media Basket” link. The content set to pending status will be located in a “pending images” folder, which can be accessed via the pull-down menu bar on the left hand side.

If you believe that you hold the rights to the content alleged to infringe the rights of the third party, we encourage you to contact the alleged rights holder directly for a resolution to this matter. Below please find the contact information for the party alleging infringement.

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MAHHSIVE / JAH ROTTEN

2011-12-15T15:32:00.004-05:00

"Punk and Reggae poles apart one would think. Heavy slow bass driven toons versus tinny white boy thrash. Quasi mystical ganga based black man beat versus white swastika toting amphetamine driven nihilism. Punk and reggae became further intertwined because of two of punks most influential figures, Mr Rotten and the boys in the Clash. reggae was very much a part of their musical scene and growing up and each vied to say they loved it more than the other as an influence."

"For the Clash they covered Junior Murvin's Police & Thieves, wanted a Notting Hill riot of their own, had Lee Perry produce one of their finest singles Complete Control and worked alongside Mikey Dread on their sprawling Sandinista album while wearing initially clothes with Prince Farianisms like' Heavy Manners' sprayed on them.

Jah Wobble in PIL would utililise the pounding reggae bass on a many a toon and as Haile Unlikely Vs the Steel Leg recorded his own groovy 12". Contrasting this is the two very different experiences of the boys visiting Jamaica. For the Clash it was a heavy trip resulting in the song 'Safe European Home'. For Rotten, him and Letts spliffed out to sound systems and generally had a good time at Virgin's expense as can be seen right."

Jah Rotten

- http://www.punk77.co.uk/punkhistory/reggae.htm

ATari Teenage Riot is back

2011-12-14T13:12:00.001-05:00

Whoaaaaa

The Middle Class Declines

2011-12-11T00:24:00.005-05:00

"A norm-based social class will persist with disastrous financial choices long after the secure financial environment, on which its scripts are based, collapses. Simply because membership of the class is the source of all social identity and access to social capital.

Except that the social capital, which the members are clinging to, is eroding rapidly as well."

READ MORE: Acting Dead, Trading Up and Leaving the Middle Class

The Exploited - Fuck the USA

2011-12-10T14:03:00.001-05:00

There really is nothing nice about USA
You go to the hospital you have to pay

Occupy LA - Vet spits truth before cops move in

2011-11-30T22:27:00.002-05:00

William S. Burroughs - A Thanksgiving Prayer

2011-11-24T21:31:00.001-05:00

A True Dropout

2011-11-21T21:19:00.002-05:00

(taken from the Ran Prieur discussion forum)

I thought I'd talk about my great friend Don Schrader here. He is the most radical person I know, and has inspired me and educated me, and I think he might be an inspiration to folks here who are interested in radical/simple living.

Don Schrader is 62 years old. He lives on less than 3,500 dollars a year; his main motivation for living on so little money is that it allows him to legally avoid paying taxes, and war-tax refusal is the most important thing in the world to him. Don is an all raw-food vegan; he eats this way to avoid contributing to animal cruelty, to avoid environmental damage, and for health. He eats for about 2 or 3 dollars a day, and he eats A LOT ("the best nutrition for the least price," he says). Don is openly gay, and is a nudist that works for "naked-body freedom." He walks around mostly naked when weather permits, and sunbathes in weather as low as 33 degrees. He is in INCREDIBLE shape, doing hundreds of pushups and situps every day, rebounding 45 minutes a day, every day, and doing 40 pullups a day. He has not been in a car in over 7 years. He has not driven a car in many more years. He doesn't own or use a computer. He doesn't own a phone. He walks virtually everywhere he goes. He is very open about his urine therapy; he drinks and bathes in his piss daily (which seems strange, but is apparently quite healthy). He is agnostic.

Don is very distinctive in appearance. His hair is long, and his extremely lean, muscular body is very tanned. Many people mistake him for being at least partly Native, but he is of purely European descent.

Interestingly, Don didn't know he was gay until he was 31. He was a devout Christian, and was a preacher in his early 20's. In his early 20's, he became a conscientious objector (Vietnam era), and began his path towards truly radical living.

I found out about Don through TV; he hosts a local cable TV show which he uses to discuss pacifism, simple living, health, gay-liberation, naked body freedom, and so on. I grew up hating him, since I was raised fundamentalist Christian, but when I discovered anarchist thought when I was about 20, I started watching his show, and found it made so much sense to me on so many levels.

Truly, Don and Ran together have given me so much hope and inspiration. Both of these unconventional and brave folks have taught me that there are other ways to live that can be gratifying and beautiful. But since I know Don personally, and visit him regularly, I can see in great detail how he does what he does.

He writes down ALL his expenses - down to the penny (so when he says he lived on exactly 3,546.43 cents in such and such year, he means it). He recommends this practice to everyone; he says it cultivates discipline and wakes us up to how much money we waste on "crap no-one needs." He also picks up every penny he sees on the street (which is funny - now that he collects S.S., he has more money than he needs or wants). He collects throw-away produce at a local food market. He grows lots of edible wild greens - particularly lambs quarter (he calls it calitas, or "wild spinach.")

This is worth mentioning: edible wild greens are wonderful! They are naturally pest resistant, they WANT to grow, so you don't have to do much to take care of them, and because they are wild, they are hearty and packed with nutrients!

Don rents a small 12x14 foot apartment for about 210 dollars a month. He disconnected his toilet and uses graywater from the sink to flush it. He uses his shower as a closet. He doesn't eat ANY cooked food (literally NONE) and so has no stove. He uses virtually no heat in the winter (but has about 8 incandescent lights that he flips on when there is company present in the winter, and those add a good bit of heat). He uses no AC.

He buys his clothes used at the flea market, and often modifies them with his own (very colorful) designs (but he mostly only wears clothes in the winter time).

Don doesn't have a job, and hasn't worked a "real" job in many, many years. Until a couple years ago, he was a nude model at the University, which is only a few blocks away from his apartment. Living on so little money, he didn't need to work very much. So Don spends his days exercising, going to local events, reading, writing letters to the editor for various papers and magazines, doing his TV show, writing letters on behalf of prisoners around the world, visiting with close friends, and so on. He has a full life, and always has a very positive attitude, even though he speaks often of friends who have passed on, and the importance of sadness and death in life.

Don does not oppose being labeled a hippie, but only if people mean "someone who loves peace and nature." He doesn't use drugs or drink - at all. He eats no candy or junkfood, though he admits to having an addiction to icecream and other junkfood up until perhaps his 30's.

He has no long-term lover, but he estimates he has had over 300 sex partners (he doesn't brag on this - he says he would much rather have had serious romance with only a few men). He would love to find a serious partner that shares his values, but refuses to settle for unradical, unhealthy folks. He loves his freedom and is happy single (this is inspiring to me, since I have often felt lonely and have craved deep romance).

Many people here wish to live out in the wild, perhaps on a farm - something away from "civilization." That's a perfectly good goal, but Don, interestingly, prefers the city. He loves the wilderness and says that there is great appeal to living off the land, but he loves the city. He loves the people and the variety of life. I see a lot of this in Ran, too; a recognition of the insanity of civilization, but also a kind of love for urban life.

Years ago, his grandparents were murdered. He went and spoke to their killer, and personally forgave him and corresponded with him for years (until the man committed suicide in prison). Don believes greatly in the possibility of change (Don himself is an example of how drastically an individual can change, and also freely admits that disconnected from the love and wisdom in his own life, he is no better than Hitler or Stalin or GW Bush) and the importance of forgiveness. He opposes the death penalty and all war.

Most of all, Don is one of the most open, friendly, and sincere people I've ever met. He is utterly transparent and honest. A ray of sunshine. A true inspiration to me!

Anyhow, I can't do him justice in writing, but wanted to share about him since I know there are many folks like me who wonder "how the hell can I be free in this insane society!"

If there are any questions about any aspect of his lifestyle, I am happy to answer to the best of my ability!

If anyone here lives simply or radically, it would be fantastic to share about it, for the purposes of education and inspiration! For my part, I am nearly car-free (95% or so, and bicycle for most of my transportation), I am child-free for life (sterilized this past June), I am vegetarian, and I am increasingly frugal, but have MUCH work to do in that department. I go to UNM part time and work a 20 - 25 hour per weak job. I intend to work part time jobs for life - I've never worked a 40 hour a week job, and never plan to. I am 25. I consider folks like Ran and Don to be so inspiring and informative, and I am indebted to them both, as well as others.

I love radical souls!

Nick

More:

http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2007/oct/12/don-schrader-reveals-inner-layers-his-life/

Fuck you scott walker

2011-11-04T20:47:00.003-04:00

Holy shit!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Walker_%28politician%29

Old Heads Hang Low

2011-10-31T10:28:00.003-04:00

Oakland Policeman Throws Flash Grenade Into Crowd Trying To Help Injured Protester

2011-10-27T19:25:00.000-04:00

Squat the World

2011-10-27T14:00:00.003-04:00

Just look at this picture:

Isn't it amazing how all of us were born to Squat naturally

and with perfect technique? Where did it all go wrong then?

I'll tell you where: coach potato-lifestyles and deskjobs got

our hips all tight and inflexible. And that's why the Squat is

so challenging for most of us.

Here's a tip: sit in the Squat position like the baby is doing

for 2 minutes every single day. Feet shoulder-width apart,

feet straight forward and let your hips stretch. This exercise

is called "The Third World Squat" because people in the

third world often Squat instead of sitting or kneeling.

This Third World Squat exercise is probably going to hurt at

first, but it will increase your hip flexibility and improve your

Squat technique if you start doing it daily. And proper hip

flexibility is key to getting stronger and thus gaining lean

muscle and losing your belly fat as a result.

Octopuses

2011-10-26T22:25:00.001-04:00

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6474/

Unwelcome Guests: Deschooling Episode 1

2011-10-20T12:59:00.007-04:00

http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/562

Mack Evasion interview, 2011. First interview after 6 years of no contact

2011-10-16T14:52:00.004-04:00

Mack - the author of the book, Evasion.

winter 2010/2011

[ introduction ]

{ Outside the snow fell. It was nearly 5am. We had just finished the interview. Standing up, he said, 'I think I know this place in this building...' }

The late 90's and early 2000's diy punk scene seemed to exist on scams and secrets passed between forever-young kids with dirty clothes and squeaky bikes. Amongst my friends, there was an unspoken determination that adventure took precedent over jobs, and in hindsight, the afternoons spent on the river in hand-built rafts and the photocopied zines carried on cross-country train-hopping trips were the spoils of our starry-eyed oaths to get around the traditional work-economy in any way possible.

It's hard to recollect the significance of this era for us without speaking of other people whose direction overlapped in places with ours .

One afternoon, a friend passed along a copy of a zine he had picked up. It was called Evasion, and it was a [very thick, very wordy] account of a hardcore kid hopping trains, shoplifting food, and sneaking into concerts. In short, it was proof to us that our band-of-thieves network of friends stretched out further than our city. It made me feel that ours was a militant movement stretching to all corners of the country. Excitement dripped from the pages of that zine. And we treated it as a dare to go even bigger!

{ We shuffled down the hallway, flanked by doors on either side. Florescent lights throwing their glow on a corridor empty at this late hour. 'I think it's this door over here,' he said. We tried it. Locked.}

Around this same time, another publication from the hardcore scene - Inside Front - arose in the form of a book called, Days Of War, Nights Of Love, a sorta modern take on anarchist ideas, and dare I say, giving it a much-needed kick in the ass. That publisher, Crimethinc, then followed that up by publishing Evasion in book form. And with that, our scene that existed on scams passed around amongst friends began seeing a new wave of energy surging into its midst. And at once, it was exciting, though if we would've taken a breath, we should've seen that our days were numbered.

But every wave has its backlash.

The sustainability of a lifestyle of low-end scams and dumpstering ones necessities is based on staying two steps ahead of those corporations whose lackeys were catching on to our tricks. As refreshing as it was to see these new books have such a large impact on people across the country - and possibly even further - part of me couldn't help but feel that they were partially responsible for commodifying a way of living that I felt an affinity to. What seemed to follow throughout the scene was an era containing a volatile combination of adopting new ideas to their extreme, short-sightedness, righteousness, an unfortunate influx of celebrity, gossip-mongering and arrogance that the subculture had at least superficially claimed to have sworn off, and ultimately, a whole lot of cynicism. Before long, Evasion and Crimethinc became the whipping posts for any ire directed at situationist-style activism or any semblance of drop-out culture, and it soon seemed that more focus was being spent tearing apart the negatives rather than acknowledging anything of significance and moving on.

{ And then the giving way of a door that pushed open. We moved it slowly and looked inside. The cafeteria was immaculate. The dimmed after-hours lighting reflected on orderly and thoroughly restocked counters and displays of chips, juices, energy bars, and snacks. We stepped inside, ignoring the overhead security cameras.}

Over the ensuing years, the Evasion columns became more vitriolic and less fun. A reflection of the cynicism becoming all-too-present within activism at the time. And then, the columns disappeared altogether. Rumors of a second Evasion book faded over time.

It may have tread on territory that wasn't completely original, and maybe in all of its pages of 'lefthanding' groceries, impersonating company employees to get crates of juice, and redundant of vegan straight edge hardcore band references, there is no formula of an anarchist utopia [though what else is to be expected from a punk zine?], but for what it was, it went bigger than most of the other zines and books breaching the same subjects. And here is where the entertainment and challenge presented by the book lay.

{ To this day, I couldn't tell you if that pre-jadedness era of zines and travel and these stumbled-upon accounts of the endless possibilities was as romantic as the distance paints it, but what I can say is that dreaming up the next big idea with an armload of free Odwalla drinks has never ceased to put a smile on my face. And as we left the building and walked out into the snowy streets on this late night, I could only smile and hope that that 'youthful idealism' would continue to have this much of an impact well into another decade. }

Today, it seems harder and harder to find friends from those days who are still involved in any type of activism. And I wonder if there are still kids out there to whom finding the loopholes around selling ones self to the wage economy is as meaningful and as fun - fuck, is as unquestionably urgent and cathartic - as it was for us... and for some of us still is.

It was with these questions of the elusive history of the subcultural terra incognita of the intentionally- and gainfully-unemployed that I set out to track down the writer of Evasion - who goes simply by the name Mack.

---

[ interview ]

Mack: Let's start at the end, and then go back to the beginning. I think we should start this conversation with how I have literally not had a full conversation about Evasion in about 6 years.

So before Evasion became a book, it was a zine. I'm interested in hearing if you had any goals originally when you wrote the zine, did you have anything you were hoping to accomplish?

I wrote Evasion for who I was when I was 17 years old. I wanted to write something I'd wished I'd had when I graduated high school. I knew I wanted to circumvent college and circumvent having to get a job, and just go straight for maximum optimal experiences all the time. I wanted to extend my youth indefinitely. There were zines that came close, like, obviously, Scam zine was the biggest influence, as well as Cometbus. But I felt that, in certain ways, they were a little out of sync with my identity. I felt like Cometbus was a tad too cynical and Scam was a tad too drunk. I wanted a zine that was all-action, no filler, and absolutely unapologetically criminal and militant. I wanted a zine that said, I'm not going to ever work again and I don't care what you think about it, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to make it happen.

I wrote the Evasion zine, which eventually became about 40 percent of the book, in the spring of 99. At the time, I was 21. This was a period in my life when I decided the social scene I had back home wasn't for me and I decided I was gonna go on this epic hitchhiking trip by myself and move to a new town by myself and write the zine. I hitchhiked down the West Coast to San Diego, and then took a bus to Tucson, Arizona, where I knew absolutely no one. I pulled off a rather lucrative little scam of sorts and got myself a month-to-month studio apartment right next to the university campus where I holed up for several months.

At that point I had no formal training as a writer, I had never written anything in my life. So I went to Barnes and Noble and got three books, Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott, Writing Well by Zinsser, and How To Write by Richard Rhodes. I devoured those three books, I read them all several times. I also had several issues of Cometbus and Scam #3, which had just come out. Between those five blocks of paper, I was able to pull off some very passable writing. I wanted the thickest, most militantly punk zine ever written, that's what I set out to do. And in about May of 1999 it was finished and I hit the road again.

So when I first sat down to write the original zine, it was written for kids who were exactly where I was when I was graduating high school, who knew what they wanted to do but didn't know how to make it work. It wasn't written for cynical hipsters or people who had been in the scene for years and years.

How was it originally distributed?

I did all the layout in a Kinko's in Little Rock, Arkansas. I slept inside of a movie theatre behind the screen at night, and the days, I was in Kinko's all day. I remember at one point during the final stages of the layout I spent 24 straight hours in a Kinko's, which I was really proud of at the time. Doing the layout was my entire life for like three weeks.

I finally got a master copy together, I think it was in late June of 99, and I made 10 copies of it. I gave a couple to people I met inside the Wild Oats, and to a handful of other people I met around town. It might have taken me a week to give out those 10 copies. I didn't have the confidence to actually mail my zine to HeartattaCk or Maximum RockNRoll. I felt like, why the hell would anybody want to read what I had to write. Over the next six months, I might have given out maybe, maybe, another 50 copies around the country. But by the time the end of 99 came around, the Evasion zine was a closed door. I had moved on. I was proud of it, I hadn't forgotten about it, but I wasn't reproducing it anymore.

And how did that lead to Evasion being made into a book?

By the time the end of 99 came around, I had moved on. I was no longer reproducing the zine.

It was about a year and a half after I made those first 10 copies, about the fall of 2000, I checked my email and it was as if somebody had flipped a switch. I had like a dozen emails from people all around the world saying they'd gotten the zine. I was totally baffled as to what was going on. I eventually pieced together that someone from the band Zegota had picked up one of those 10 copies in Little Rock, had stolen it from someone's bathroom, and had made thousands of copies and distributed them all over their tour.

Eventually I remember getting an email from Crimethinc, and them saying, 'We like your writing. We're willing to take a chance on you. We want Evasion to be the follow-up to Days Of War, Nights Of Love'.

I spent the first month after I got this offer holed up in the basement writing this book. I was living with a girl, but all of this was foreign to her; my lifestyle, the zine. I felt like the environment just wasn't working out. So I put everything I could into my backpack. I remember I had a backpack filled to the seams and a paperbag with every piece of paper I had up to that point, thousands of pages of notes, journals, every scrap of layout. And I remember standing at a bus stop in Long Beach, California with the rain pouring down onto this bag of notes knowing that I had to find somewhere to write this book. So I caught a bus to the Metrolink, which I took down to San Diego. I caught a bus to La Jolla, I went to the UC campus, I threw all my notes and everything into a locker at the arts school and threw a padlock on it. I roamed campus for a few weeks, found an abandoned broom closet, moved in, and spent the next three months living in an abandoned broom closet while working on the book. So most of the Evasion book was written in the UC San Diego library. I was spending like 12 hours a day, going through like 32 ounces of coffee, bleeding out of my eyes to write this book. It was a real struggle because I had to think about if my locker was found out, I would lose everything. So I was spending like every third day backing everything up at Kinko's, mailing it to friends around the country. I had backup copies of the book planted all over campus in case something went wrong with the originals. It was a very sparse existence. I spent most of my time in the library or in the broom closet, or sleeping in various 24 hour lounges around campus. It was great, I have really good memories about that time.

But eventually, it was like early June of 2001, I remember sending a one-line email to Crimethinc saying the book's done, let's get together and edit this thing. So I hitchhiked with two friends to Olympia. We had a very strict deadline for this book. It was, in part, due to the fact that that the publisher was getting school credit at Evergreen for the book and he had to meet the semester deadline. And Earth Crisis was playing their last show at Hellfest and I had to get to that, so we each had our own deadlines. It was just ruthless, I remember sleepless nights. And we hacked through it and whittled it down to something that was passable. I think of the new material for the book, it should have been cut down by at least another 20 percent. It was too verbose. I was trying too hard to meet the word quota and focusing on quantity over quality. I cut a lot of it out for the second printing, but not as much as I should have. In the end it was rushed.

So a problem that I had with the book was that I felt like Evasion was commodifying a lifestyle that I felt a part of, like it was taking something that wasn't extremely popular at the time and representing it in an over-the-top excessively romantic kinda way.

Never in my life had anyone put me under scrutiny, because nobody had any reason to care about me. I was never part of the scene. I was very quiet, I was very socially awkward, I was very withdrawn. Let me tell you how absurd it all seemed from where I stood. I was this lone vegan straightedge punk kid that knew nobody. I was never plugged into social circles. My window to it was lyric sheets and zines. A lot of what I was doing, I didn't know if there was anyone else doing it. Like, you would read Scam or Cometbus and they're traveling to these little punk enclaves like Philadelphia or Portland. I was always interested in going to the small towns that no one talked about, where there wasn't a punk population. Places like Fargo, North Dakota or Hastings, Nebraska. Those were my favorite towns. I had spent two years photocopying the zine. It never got any reviews. The audience was 100% people who I met, people who picked me up hitchhiking, or kids I met outside of Whole Foods, or those people who photocopied it and handed it to people they knew. It was totally DIY for so long, and my heart was totally in the culture of it. At that point, nobody in the punk scene did books. Maybe the Burn Collector book came out first, but it was uncommon for punks to put out books at that point. As soon as the book comes out, all of a sudden the quote/unquote Evasion Kid, which was an identity I never signed up for, finds himself under a magnifying glass. Now everybody wants to know my opinion on white privilege, and everybody wants to know my opinion on feminist politics. I was accused of trivializing poverty, of not acknowledging class privilege, of not acknowledging that my poverty was self-imposed. And that's where the whole disconnect between the Evasion zine and the Evasion book. It was a photocopied zine, no different than any other photocopied zine that ever came out, it was just a little bit thicker and it happened to circulate a lot more, but nobody is holding every other zine that came out to the standard of 'you must include a class analysis in your writing.' It was a personal narrative, that's it. It never occurred to me that I might have an influence. I felt like I didn't know that by releasing the book I took on the burden of making sure everybody didn't apply the things I wrote about in a really destructive way. I was outside of these circles, so I didn't take into account that I could have embedded my writing with a greater emphasis that this is not a blueprint for hedonism. I never wanted anyone to hitchhike and dumpster dive and shoplift and feel good about themselves for doing it. If you're not taking that time, that freedom that you're creating for yourself and trying to make the world a better place with it, then I don't have any more respect for you than the 9 to 5 wage slave that's treating their life like it's disposable.

I know there was a lot uproar when you wrote about what you called the 'girlfriend scam'.

You know, it's always hard to know how big a rumor actually is in relation to how often you have to answer for it. In other words, there was a time when the biggest dirt anyone could dig up on me was that there was some two page Evasion supplement of which I made about 20 copies which sorta concluded by saying 'what I'm doing now is this thing called the girlfriend scam. I've been living here for three months and she hasn't asked for rent yet,' which is totally consistent with the type of humor I used in Evasion. But the fact that I referred to something as the 'girlfriend scam' in a very tongue-in-cheek way seemed to come back to haunt me for years afterwards. It was this rumor that just spiraled to the point where I think most people just thought I had written a zine just on how to scam girls into paying your rent. What was most interesting, there was a time for a couple years when I had to answer for the 'girlfriend scam' all the time. I'm still friends with the girl I lived with. There was no exploitation going on. I paid my rent through food and other things that in monetary value more than eclipsed what I would have paid in rent.

Then let's talk about some of the columns and writing that came after the book. It seemed as if you began to focus more on stirring shit up and making a lot of accusations and severing ties with other people who had visible personalities in the hardcore scene. Does any of this feel like it was the result of ego?

It always bothered me that I felt that people who found themselves within visible positions in subcultures lost a lot of their fire, they lost their edge, and they were dulled by having this social incentive to get along with everybody. This tempered their criticisms and tempered their opinions, and this made me sick. I remember being in high school and thinking if I ever got into a position where I had an audience, I was not going to be one of those people that was pacified by the social aspect of the scene.

I remember what was probably the moment where I surrendered all investment in the political hardcore scene. I tagged along on this tour called the Total Liberation Tour in the summer of 2004. It had political hardcore bands, vegan hardcore bands, and speakers. It was a really great idea. It epitomized the aspect of hardcore that I valued most at the time. I remember being at the show in Indianapolis, and there was a guy onstage who I had known since before he knew anybody else in the scene. I knew him well enough to know he was a really big talker that liked to impress people with his hollow boasting. I remember seeing this guy giving a workshop on how to carry out ALF actions, and knowing for an absolute fact that this guy had never done a thing in his life activist-wise for animals, had never lifted a finger to do anything other than promote his own name in the scene. He was on stage acting as though he knew how to carry out ALF actions, speaking on how to carry out various sabotage actions, and the whole audience eating it up and giving him a huge round of applause afterwards, because he was in a band. And I remember thinking, if I'm part of a scene that can be this easily fooled, I'm done. I don't want anything to do with this anymore. And it was very soon after that, a month later, that I wrote a column for HeartattaCk, calling out people exactly like him: people that tried to cultivate an image of being these radical eco-warriors but who had never done anything other than buy records and sit around on message boards gossiping all day. That column was my attempt to sort of burn bridges and say, if you are going to take things that I care about and make an image out of them to further your own social status, don't come anywhere near me cause we're not friends. So if it came off as ego, maybe it was fighting fire with fire, because I felt that I was trying to fight against these scene-climbers that were motivated by ego and the desire to make names for themselves by being in bands and perpetuating a totally fraudulent image that wasn't who they were.

Having unfashionable opinions in those circles is like a social death sentence, and since I was never socially invested in those circles anyway, it gave me a lot of freedom to say exactly what was on my mind. All I had to do was use a line like 'girlfriend scam' or call out Against Me! or something. I was saying things like, you know, talking about white privilege all day doesn't make you radical, it just means that you want to cultivate the appearance of being radical. When the book came out I was thrust into what was primarily an anarchist-based scene where it didn't matter what you did, it only mattered what you said, it only mattered that you used the right language. I just didn't identify with the critique-junkie anarchists. It was, essentially, a subculture of people who were all talk, and that was in total opposition to what Evasion was about, which was action-based, which was if you're not putting this stuff into action, it doesn't mean anything.

One thing I've gotten from your writing and talking to you is the idea of constantly trying to push boundaries, to go bigger, to look for new ways to get or accomplish something. What do you think are people's hinderances from this, what is it that leads people to look at the scams you wrote about in Evasion as a checklist, but then to stop there rather than taking that mentality and those methods and expanding upon them in their own ways?

That's the thing about Evasion is by the time it came out, I was already on to the next thing. By the time the writing saw print, I was already three steps ahead. I think it would really surprise people, and that was stuff that I never wrote about.

I think these radical subcultural ghettoes discourage people from looking outside of themselves, or rather, discourage anyone in the scene from looking outside of the scene for influences. I think in these scenes, people are surrounded by an unambitious crowd, and everyone's too concerned looking to their left and looking to their right before deciding what they want to do. In effect, I think these scenes enforce mediocrity.

You read Cometbus, you read Scam, nothing will ever take away the role those zines played in my life, but that's like entry-level stuff. I was reading true crime books, I was reading books about people that took things to the extreme, who exercised more ingenuity to get what they wanted out of life. Now it just happened that the subjects I was reading, what they wanted most of the time was money, which was not what I was going for.

I was fortunate enough to meet the guy that invented the scam that funded many punk tours and lifestyles up until the early or mid-90's, which was the salt water coke machine scam. Where you would squirt salt water into the coke machine dollar slot, and it would spit out all its change and sometimes you would get about $50. I met this guy and I asked him the story behind it and he said, and I don't know if this is embellished, but he said he was on the roof of some building on the boardwalk, this is like Coney Island, in New York, and a giant wave came in and struck a coke machine and when the water receded, he had noticed all the coke machines had spit out all of their money. So he kidnapped a coke machine and performed experiments on it, and basically reverse-engineered the machine and came up with it being the salt water that did it. That set off a wave of salt watering coke machines around the country and got a lot of punk kids a lot of money. And then it became obsolete. It got to be so widespread that coke actually installed these salt water shields over the dollar slot of every machine that prevented the water from getting to the crucial circuitry. So he kidnapped another machine and took it to his basement and performed experiments on it and figured out that if you punch out the little backlit square that said 50 cents, if you punched it out and squirt salt water directly into that hole, you could circumvent the guard and actually still get the same effect.

I just don't see a lot of innovation like this going on. I still meet people that are doing the same things, and it's cool if you're just outta high school and haven't really thought about this before, but I feel like people should look at it the same way I look at writing, which is to flagrantly rip off other people's ideas until you develop your own identity, and in the course of being a copycat, you will develop your own identity. When I sat down to write Evasion, I was going to flagrantly rip off Scam and Cometbus, and hope that in the process I would develop my own voice as a writer, which I think is what happened. And you can do that with lifestyles.

In the time since the book came out, have you heard of anyone who came into these ideas through the book, but who eventually went bigger than the scams that you were writing about at the time?

I definitely met a lot of people that took things a lot further than I was. Like people who were running massive shoplifting rings and making a lot of money and taking that and buying property with it. Though, I think when people are just getting into these ideas, that's the stage when they're really more likely to come up to you and credit you. And there gets to be a point where, because punk emphasizes autonomy, you want to kill your teacher, so to speak. I think that's where a lot of the backlash came from. So I feel like the people that did take it far were already so separated from being the type of person that would want to give me feedback, so I really didn't meet a lot of those people.

Who or what are the things that have inspired you?

I'm always really inspired by people who are willing to risk bringing either adverse social or adverse personal consequences to act in a way that's consistent with their beliefs, people that are willing to risk prison for what they believe in, who are willing to risk losing friends to act in accordance with their principles. You see that so rarely. I don't think someone's core principles or values are exhibited by what they say, but only spoken through their actions. I really only respect people that I see dong things that risk having personal or social consequences for them, that's the mark of someone that's truly sincere. So I'm inspired by the Animal Liberation Front, the Earth Liberation Front, by the founder of WikiLeaks, he knows he's got a target on his head and they're going to put him in prison one way or another, and he's going for it. There's a fairly decent list of people who were coming out of the vegan straightedge scene that had actually put their beliefs into action in a way that was more than just a lifestylist way. You had people who have gone to prison for burning down fur-feed factories, you had people who had liberated mink from farms and so forth. There's a guy who is still a fugitive named Andreas San Diego, he's accused of bombing a pharmaceutical company. I mean, these were people that I felt were putting their beliefs and politics into action.

Can you explain why it seemed there was such an abrupt ending to the columns and your writings?

By every measure I disappeared. I've never talked about why that happened. This is the first interview I've done in six years. I felt like the mystique around Evasion had reached such a level of absurdity that the rumors and the mythology and the gossip was now in the driver's seat. It had gotten bigger than me and it didn't feel like I was steering what was becoming of Evasion anymore. I just remember things getting really crazy. I remember the book came out in 2001. By 2003 things were so crazy that I was having people stealing my trash and making zines about what they found in my trash. Evasion was at the mercy of this hype machine. The same thing with my personal identity. I felt like I was losing control of my identity, that no one could look at me as anything other than 'the Evasion kid,' and I didn't want that to define me. It happened countless times, where I'd meet somebody and they'd want to pick my brain, and they would find out that I wasn't the person they thought I was. I had what I thought was a very dynamic life. I was never just dumpster diving and hitchhiking and shoplifting, that was only a selective account of my life, but Evasion and the stuff I wrote about was never more than a pinhole view of my life. I started to step back and think, all the hype around what was just me in my bedroom, writing the kinda zine I wished I'd had in high school, turned into this. I felt like the message of Evasion had gotten totally lost in all the hype, that's what ultimately led me to close the door on Evasion for a while.

In late 2004, early 2005, I had almost finished the second Evasion book, and I was terrified that this book wouldn't be read by anyone with fresh eyes, that this book that I had spent two and a half years of my life writing would get published and get funneled right into the same subcultural gutter. I wanted to be sure that when I gave this book to an audience, it was an audience that could look at it objectively and judge it objectively based on its content. I wanted to have it published on the furthest possible thing from Crimethinc. I had to wait until the timing was right, so I just vanished. I disappeared. I stopped doing the HeartattaCk column. I sent them a one line email saying don't expect to hear from me again. I stopped doing mailorder. I cut off all communication with Crimethinc. I did the most complete break that you possibly could with something that, at least on a public level, made up most of my identity.

And something really interesting happens when you're so invested in an identity that you just walk away from; your friendships start to become more genuine, they start to become more diverse. I can say that less than 10 percent of the people I consider friends or interact with now even know that I wrote a book.

Having had literally years go by now, given the chance, is there anything in the past you would've done differently?

As much as I was very autonomous and not very interested in punk circles, I still didn't stray too far outside of them either. I eventually realized you should never put faith in any subculture. You can put faith in individuals, you can put faith in yourself. But I feel like music scenes attract very insincere people. I think I didn't come to that realization until a much later age than most people do. And I will never devalue what hardcore was to me, and what it still is to me, and what it is to a lot of people. I'm not turning my back on the scene, but I do think that it tends to attract the people who want to cultivate the image of being radical but who are not actually radical and don't live radical lifestyles. That's a hard thing to admit. That's a really hard thing to admit.

In terms of my life, I would have escalated my tactics a lot. I would have challenged myself a lot more. There were definitely long stretches of my life where I felt like I had become too comfortable with my own checklist. By the time the book came out, I was starting to push myself a lot more in new directions, though that's not to say there weren't blocks of my life where I feel like I stagnated. I would have forced myself to escalate my tactics sooner and more often.

I think I would have been a little bit less of a lone cowboy and plugged myself into different circles that I shunned because we didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things. I think one of my biggest regrets is not being more socially versatile. I didn't identify with other people I knew that were squatting, or who were hopping freight trains. I didn't identify with most punk kids, frankly. I think my personality type has just always drawn a lot of lines in the sand and anyone that wasn't on my side, I just wasn't going to be friends with. I would've been more versatile in that sense, where I could hang out with those people and just find the common ground. I stand by everything I ever wrote, but I do think that I could have not carried that attitude over into my one on one interactions with people.

I need to embed my writing with a very strong message that you don't get to delude yourself into thinking you're radical because you don't have a job. It's what you do that doesn't make for sexy stories that matters. That's the biggest message that got lost. I'm gonna give a much fiercer effort to make people realize that it's your obligation to use a militantly unemployed lifestyle for the greater good. That's a mistake that I'm not going to make the next time around.

I'm going to go out of my way to make sure that my Evasion life and my real life don't overlap at all. I probably won't even tell most of my friends that I wrote a book. Because I don't want to slip back into the same mode of having a persona I'm not in control of. I think that's how I can put this book out and stay healthy and stay grounded and stay true to who I am and not just who people think I am.

How do the principles you were writing about in the book factor into your life now? What roles do they play?

In many ways I'm still that 18 year old that gets giggly when I'm in a situation I somehow maneuvered my way into. At one time, that was strictly criminal, it's a lot more diverse now. The superficial aspects of the book don't define me, but the guiding principles of the book definitely define me, those have never changed. I set out at age 18 to spend the rest of my life doing everything I did for the purpose of having a good story to tell, and I've never strayed from that in the 15 years since I made that commitment.

The tactics I'm using now have changed radically. But everything I do still feels like a scam, it still feels like a hustle, like I'm getting away with something, even if it's in a totally different realm. And when I talk about the high that comes with getting away with something, it's not the high that comes with breaking a law, it's the high that comes from being in complete control of my time and not answering to a boss.

I still travel incessantly. I'm still seeking novelty in all forms. All these years later, I'm still trying to figure out how to push the boundaries. I'm living in a fairly long-established all-vegan squat. By every other measure, it's a normal household. It's all still a complete hustle, but I'm still pulling it off and having a lot of fun. I'm still vegan. I'm still straight edge.

The other night I was at a potluck at someone's house, and I saw a copy of Evasion on the bookshelf. I hadn't even seen a copy of the book in quite a while. And I was looking around the room, and there were professors from the local university, there was a local hip hop artist, there was a punk kid with face tattoos. I remember just looking around the room and thinking how interesting it was that I had this entire secret history that none of these people even knew about, that made up a huge chunk of my life and nobody had any idea. And I like being able to move between the two worlds without those worlds overlapping.

And just about a year ago, I had dusted off that book that was about 90 percent done. I realized I had slowly lost touch with certain circles of people, to where I didn't know if Evasion still had an audience. I didn't know if it was still read. So I began to ask people, is Evasion still viable? Does it still have an audience? Is there still a scene around this? And the answers I got were that things had changed a lot. And I started to wonder if maybe the time was right for me to put that book out. So I began to do some re-writes and some editing, and finish the last chapter. It started to take shape and I'm inching my way toward releasing it.

If there was one idea or challenge you could set forth for people, what would that be?

If I could've summed up the entire message of Evasion in one sentence, there's a line written in the book that says, life serves the risk-taker. And that's what I want to put forth to everybody. You're not going to achieve big unless you dream big and act big. Those are the only people that live lives worth living. It's not enough to have read all the right books, all that matters is what you do with those politics in the real world. Life is just the bat of an eye in the bigger picture, so if you don't live it militantly, it's not worth living.

david icke etc

2011-09-24T18:24:00.002-04:00

http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/523

dirty pictures

2011-09-21T17:07:00.001-04:00

Untitled from M Co on Vimeo.

meta Punk posing

2011-09-15T16:19:00.009-04:00

NIST FOIA: Raw CBS 9/11 WTC Footage

2011-09-11T15:09:00.003-04:00

Historically architecture is its most exuberant at the peak of a civilization. One World Trade Center or "Freedom Tower" is a perfect example of that. It's nothing more than a coffin nail. Globalization is dead and it has nothing to do with politics or class warfare or any nonsense peddled by mainstream media. What is sinking this ship? Depleting resource base which no society can survive. We are at the precipice. Our lack of dealing with energy issues is what will destroy our civilization. Not just America. Everything. We can't have rational discourse because there is NO solutions to continue the infinite expansion paradigm.

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/kc0pg/im_sorry_but_its_been_10_years_and_i_just_dont/c2j2gu8

Asansho

2011-09-02T20:06:00.007-04:00

Hey guys. This is a video of music from the GBAO, which is the eastern part of Tajikistan which fought for its independence unsuccessfully in one of the least-publicized civil wars of the 1990s. I have a hat like the guys in the video; it's called a tokey (toe-kay). But mine is black.

edit:

Actually I like this song better. I ripped it from the same disc.

Pat The Bunny Punk Globe Interview

2011-08-26T15:14:00.006-04:00

I have a feeling this interview could get lost in the bowels of the internet so I'm reposting it here.

http://www.punkglobe.com/patthebunnyinterview1009.html

Punk Globe: Hey Pat, thanks for agreeing to this interview. Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

Pat the Bunny: There's not much to say. I try to maintain sanity in a society that is both criminally insane and accuses anyone transgressing its norms of being utterly mad. And honestly, that pursuit takes up most of my time in one way or another. In that respect I am probably like most people, and almost certainly most people that find themselves connected in some way or another to the phrase "punk rock".

Punk Globe: How did you first get inspired to write songs?

Pat the Bunny: I write songs mostly because it didn't occur to me not to.

Punk Globe: Do you think you're part of a folk-punk "movement" or "scene" so much as just one musician?

Pat the Bunny: I think of myself in relation to "folk punk" about the same way that I think of myself in relation to "the United States of America". It is a social reality that I am "part of folk punk", just as it is a political reality that I am a "citizen of the United States". In both those cases, and most others, MY opinion on the subject doesn't matter very much.

Punk Globe: The Johnny Hobo and The Freight Trains songs are very impressive, but you stopped playing them a while ago, right? Even the ones without overt drug references?

Pat the Bunny: Yes. It is true that I am extremely bored with singing about drugs, but more to the point all of my old songs are written from a certain perspective of fear and cynicism that I do my best to avoid having now.

Punk Globe: How would you feel if you heard kids covering those songs?

Pat the Bunny: I have heard kids cover those songs. A song, or any idea for that matter, belongs to whoever finds meaning in it. Those songs do not mean anything positive to me at this point, and so they do not belong to me.

Punk Globe: When you play live, sometimes it's just you with an acoustic guitar and sometimes it's an entire band. Which do you prefer and why?

Pat the Bunny: Playing music with your friends is incomparably more enjoyable than playing music by yourself. This fact likely has to do with human being's nature as social animals.

Punk Globe: Is there anywhere you haven't played that you'd like to eventually play?

Pat the Bunny: Alaska.

Punk Globe: What about places you've been and would like to revisit?

Pat the Bunny: Most places themselves are fairly similar to be in, at least within the English-speaking world. There are a couple different templates, if you will--being in a city is different than being in the country, or the mountains are different than the desert--but not much remarkable variation within those templates. It's largely collections of people, and the projects they undertake together, which make one geographical location preferable to another. So I'll say that I want to go back to Cincinnati, Ohio.

Punk Globe: There are rumors going around that you're straight edge, but that isn't true is it? I know you don't do drugs, but do kids ever offer you stuff at shows?

Pat the Bunny: Am I straight edge? I am a drug addict!

A lot of people seem confused by this, so I'll try to make it as clear as I can: when I say I'm a drug addict, that doesn't mean I like to or want to use drugs. It means I have recognized that I cannot moderate my use of drugs, that they are destructive in my life whenever I begin using them, and that the only positive thing for me is not to use them at all. Maintaining sobriety is a priority of my life, albeit not one I am always successful with. But I am definitely not straight edge; I chain smoke like a mother fucker. If you define "straight edge" as someone who is "against drugs", then even when I give up smoking I have too much direct knowledge, through my own life and others, to think that drugs or the people that use them are morally bad in some way.

Addiction is a mental illness, in my opinion and experience. Not only that, but addiction isn't an ailment that goes away just because you get off drugs. It is a lifelong disease that people like me will live with until the day we die. Any world view that hates someone for being sick is ignorant, and any person who is anti-addict is anti-me.

(If you are reading this and believe you might have a problem with drugs or alcohol, chances are you do. If you are willing to stop, get some form of help as soon as you possibly can, because almost no drunk or addict can get sober alone, and those that do end up carrying around the same mental problems that led them to addiction in the first place and feel as miserable sober as they did while using. If you don't know where to start, literally look up "addiction" in the yellow pages--most everywhere there will be hot lines to call and get you started. When taken seriously with an open mind and a willingness to change, recovery will make your life better. I know that I sound like a public service announcement, but I didn't find much encouragement in "the scene" to seek help, and I wish that I hadn't waited as long as I did to begin getting my fucking life back.)

Punk Globe: Some of Wingnut Dishwashers Union's songs are very political, so I wonder if you feel any connection to older protest singers like Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, or Woody Guthrie.

Pat the Bunny: Radical folk musicians have never interested me very much creatively. I identify as part of anarchism, or more specifically I believe that throughout human history there are institutions of dominance and movements of resistance to them, and that the foremost political, social, and economic project is to undermine all such institutions of dominance and define new methods of organizing human society. In this sense I feel connected to the musicians you mentioned, because they also identified themselves with resistance movements during their contexts in time and space. But in the same sense I feel much more affinity with, and have been influenced much more significantly by, the Zapatistas in Chiapas Mexico. They are MAKING REVOLUTION as we speak (instead of singing about it decades ago).

Punk Globe: Is the song "Proudhon in Manhattan" a play on Zinn's Marx in Soho?

Pat the Bunny: That's very clever, and not a connection I would have made myself.

Punk Globe: I don't like to get too personal, but you poke fun at your own virginity in several songs. Has that become a gimmick or running joke at this point?

Pat the Bunny: As a species of animal, sexuality is a significant part of (most people's) human experience of identity. Feelings of not participating in that field of social reality are significant and extremely alienating ones, at least to me, and so I have mentioned that aspect of my life experience more than once. As for whether it's a gimmick or a joke, that has more to do with your interpretation of the songs than it does with me writing them.

Punk Globe: You run your own distro and DIY label, right? How much of your time and energy does that take up?

Pat the Bunny: The "label" is usually an extremely part time job, but at times it will become completely overwhelming without warning. There are things I am not very good at, like screen printing shirts, which sometimes make it very difficult. Most of my time is taken up by playing music (both my own songs and for other people's bands), keeping my house clean, maintaining friendships, and organizing broader projects like a radical community center and music venue I will be helping to open in January, and a collectively run bus transportation service I am helping to get started within the next couple months.

Punk Globe: On your label's website under "Writing," it says "coming soon." What kind of writers are you looking to put out?

Pat the Bunny: The only material I distro or release is stuff my friends make.

Punk Globe: Judging by the Johnny Hobo song, "Untitled" you seem to be into literature. Have you written anything besides songs yourself?

Pat the Bunny: As a writer, I only have marginal proficiency at song writing and a somewhat academic style of political analysis. Of these only the first is an accessible form of expression. All my attempts to write politically in a manner that does not assume prior exposure to radical theory ends up as a propaganda tantrum instead of a nuanced argument, and there are few contexts in which to produce such writing. I have plans to make a couple different zines, but so far they always take a low priority.

Punk Globe: Do you think of Johnny Hobo as a character or a side of yourself?

Pat the Bunny: Johnny Hobo is an archetype of misery, fear, and disengagement. It's reflective of a time period in which I was very miserable, afraid, and disengaged.

Punk Globe: Thanks again for the interview Pat. Any final words of wisdom?

Pat the Bunny: I have even less wisdom right now than I usually do. I am relearning how to deal with everything about being alive without getting high, which used to be my response to pretty much everything about being alive. It's a very disorienting experience; at the same time, it is the most gratifying undertaking I have ever engaged in.

The nightmare continues

2011-08-26T09:30:00.004-04:00

David Icke Is Right

2011-08-17T16:53:00.000-04:00

"January 22. Return of the Dinosaurs. According to this article about ancient global warming, when volcanoes did what humans are now doing, and put a lot of carbon and methane into the atmosphere, oxygen levels dropped, temperatures rose, and dinosaurs might have appeared as an adaptation, thriving in that low-oxygen high-carbon greenhouse environment.

Now my own wild speculation: The deeper cause of dinosaur extinction was not some cosmic impact or volcano. They were already weakened, because through their whole age, atmospheric carbon was getting stored deep in the Earth, and oxygen levels were rising, favoring other species and dino-killing diseases.

But now, we are burning oil and putting that stored carbon back into the air! We are re-creating the ecological niche of dinosaurs. And I've seen the idea in indigenous traditions, in investigations of the "paranormal," and in Sheldrake's morphic fields hypothesis: that extinction is not exactly permanent -- that extinct critters can survive on some other level that we don't understand, making enigmatic appearances, just waiting for conditions to change so they can come back in full physical form.

So we could be circling around to a new age of the dinosaurs, 200 million years of hot, low-oxygen jungles as the carbon slowly goes back into the ground. And if the energy matrix of dinosaurs is hanging out somewhere, suppose it has intention and the power to influence the energy forms underlying this world. Suppose the consciousness of dinosaurs has created and steered human civilization to restore the conditions they can live in. David Icke could be literally right: Unimaginably ancient reptilians are controlling human society from another dimension."

http://www.ranprieur.com/archives/001.html

Dan Weyandt / Zao

2011-08-16T15:02:00.004-04:00

Cross Stitched Eyes

2011-08-16T11:09:00.004-04:00

Don't Want Burial

2011-08-11T15:37:00.004-04:00

Friday Friday gotta get down on Friday

2011-08-05T17:41:00.001-04:00

Expose Yourself to Kids

2011-07-25T12:07:00.001-04:00

CRASS playlist

2011-07-05T10:50:00.011-04:00

My favorite Crass songs

http://grooveshark.com/playlist/Crass+Playlist/34402769

Whistle as the wind blows

2011-06-08T23:05:00.002-04:00

The Economics of Killing Someone
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/china/110603/china-economy-car-accidents

"The secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy." -Christopher Lasch

2011 update

2011-05-13T15:21:00.014-04:00

I made a mix. It's a grooveshark playlist, not a zip

http://grooveshark.com/playlist/Blog+Mix/53354055?src=5

I've been reading a lot of Ran Prieur and building a touring bike. The best shows I've seen in the past year were The Tough Shits and Weekend Nachos. Really recommend you check out their music and see them live.

I've got a youtube channel going: http://www.youtube.com/user/pukeskywalker

Is Myles of Destruction coming soon? If I find a CD drive in the next few months. Myles was cool enough to send me a CD and stickers maybe two years ago... I planned to rip and upload it but never did. If someone out there wants to paypal me $5 I will mail you the CD if you swear you'll burn and distribute it.

The Eeries

2010-07-10T21:57:00.005-04:00

Myles of Destruction is coming soon.

In the mean time check out this philly band The Eeries.

First two songs are my favorite..
http://www.myspace.com/theeeries

All their EPs are available here.
http://theeeries.blogspot.com/

Atari Teenage Riot - Sick To Death Live In Canal (1998)

2010-02-28T13:00:00.000-05:00

Crisis of Conformity

2010-02-10T15:57:00.000-05:00

...it just gets worse

2009-11-18T15:01:00.002-05:00

No Trend - Teen Love 7" ('83)

2009-10-17T15:25:00.005-04:00

Experimental, antagonistic punk from the D.C. area - around when Minor Threat / Dischord were in full swing. This aged better! Highly recommended.

Download
No Trend - Teen Love 7"

For more info see the No Trend - A Dozen Dead Roses post from last week.

INTERVIEW: Nac/Hut Report + 1000 Double Difference Error EP ('09)

2009-10-11T18:30:00.024-04:00

Today we have an Interview + EP download from Poland's Nac/Hut Report! I highly encourage you to download their EP at the bottom of the post, these guys are fantastic!

Tortured guitars and Kollaps-ed melodies on cheap electronics and concrete noises... Everything Mix-ed up together for no obvious reason... The worst kind of post-modernism...

Who are you, and how did you get started as a band?

M.A.D.ame Decode: I’m M.A.D.ame Decode and the other guy is Li/ese/Li, we met the first time two years ago in Krakow. In that period I worked mainly with visual art, while Li/ese/Li was already into music since some years.

One year after our meeting we started to live together in Italy and there was born the idea of the band.

Li/ese/Li: In the beginning another musician, called Blume, worked with us, but then he has moved outside Italy, so now he just sends us the audio material.

You've been mysteriously posting "Nac/Hut Report has not died for delirium" on various music blogs. Is this some sort of viral marketing campaign or are you both insane?

M.A.D.: No, there is no marketing strategy. We just spend a lot of time on music blogs. Probably we are both insane.

You cite Musique Concrete as one of your influences. How did you get interested in this obscure genre?

Li/ese/Li: For some period in the past, I’ve been influenced by the use of guitar of Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth, but we didn’t want to use these guitars in the context of rock and pop music, with a conventional drum and all the rest. We thought that we could create some kind of pop music only using noises without all the harmonization typical of pop genres, so Musique Concrete was quite natural to us. We have been very influenced by Pierre Schaeffere, Pierre Henry and Jean Tinguely

M.A.D.: We also wanted to use this part of european avantgarde tradition. Musique Concrete was perfect reference for us, because even the way this musicians composed was particular, most of them were also visual artist so their methodology of producing the composition was very differnt from the classical one, was much more pictorical, I could risk to say even abstractive, the sounds didn’t play the conventional part: rythm, melody... but were more as objects placed in the space of sound. For what we wanted to do with pop songs was a perfect idea. Completely other kind of reciving music, as a piece of art that you can modulate and construct in a way as you construct a model, a landscape, an abstaction.

Li/ese/li: The very first idea of the band was to create some “concrete” compositions and just play experimental gituar and pop vocal melodies on them, but later we had some problem with linear vocals and we started decompose them.

What animal best describes your band and why?

Rats, they always find what they need in the trash...is what we’re doing with sound.

Madame Decode, you look very cool in your myspace gallery. Will you be my internet girlfriend?

M.A.D.: I don’t know if i can have an internet relationship in this period...i should ask my psychiatrist.

Download:
Nac/Hut Report - 1000 Double Difference Error EP

Preview
Myspace

A Message From Our Sponsers

2009-10-07T16:24:00.008-04:00

Informative scientific developments - you need to know!

Breaking News: You are ugly in a new way! Buy product now!

Afraid of a dangerous, government-subsidized chemical in your food?
Are you gay or something?

No Trend - A Dozen Dead Roses ('85)

2009-10-04T01:20:00.014-04:00

Crazy punk/post-punk/weirdo music from the 80's. In the same antagonist vein as Flipper, but more coherent and complex. So far the title track and the one below are my favorites.

This album includes the "Heart of Darkness" EP the band did with Lynda Lunch (the OG '77 NYC punker from Teenage Jesus and the Jerks). Big thanks to labs from reddit for pointing this one out. More No Trend to come.

No Trend - Tear You Apart

There's a great article on the band here:
New York Press - No Trend Didn't Just Go Against the Grain...

Download
No Trend - A Dozen Dead Roses

INTERVIEW: The Stomach Aches - "A-Bombs" ('09)

2009-09-30T23:58:00.041-04:00

Last month I came across an interesting post on reddit. In it, a member of The Stomach Aches shared a track he had recorded under the influence of Ambien. He has no recollection of the night it was recorded, which makes it even better. The track itself, dubbed "A-Bombs," makes for a uniquely disturbing listen.

A-Bombs by The Stomach Aches

Ridiculous, strange. Lucky for you, the man behind this track has agreed to answer a few question for us, as well as sharing an awesome sneak preview of The Stomach Aches' upcoming "Black Death" EP.

(a rare glimpse into The Stomach Aches' "recording studio")

How did you feel when you first heard this track, considering you have no recollection of recording it?
I found it rather worrisome.

Are you taking ambien recreationally or do you use it to treat an actual sleep disorder?
I take it for sleep. However, my body seems to rebel against this intention.

Your other music is nowhere near as violent as "A-bombs." Was this song the result of a primal, ambien-fueled rage, or are you acting on some punk/metal influences?
It was an existential temper tantrum.

Describe the LA music scene in one word.
Spatula.

If you were a pokemon, which pokemon would you be and why?
I don't know Pokemon that well. Do they have baby giraffes?
(editor's note: yes, they do)

Any final words?
The Stomach Aches are in a bad mood. "Black Death EP" coming soon.

Download
The Stomach Aches - Black Death EP Sneak Preview
The Stomach Aches - "A-Bombs"

Visit
The Stomach Aches @ myspace

The Lost Sounds - 1+1=Nothing 7" ('01)

2009-09-29T20:17:00.025-04:00

This is an out-of-print, three-song 7" EP from Jay Reatard's older band The Lost Sounds. From back when he wasn't punching kids in the face on Youtube. Effortlessly mixing garage rock with black metal and synths, this EP is a forgotten jem.

Download
The Lost Sounds - 1+1=Nothing 7"

More Lost Sounds:
The Lost Sounds - Black Wave (2001)
The Lost Sounds - Lost Sounds (2004)

Flipper - Sex Bomb Baby ('79 - '82)

2009-09-27T16:05:00.009-04:00

This is a collection of Flipper's singles, b-sides, and comp tracks from 1979-1982. Pissed Jeans is the best contemporary comparison I can make.

Download
Flipper - Sex Bomb Baby

G20 Video Update (Univeristy of Pittsburg)

2009-09-25T16:14:00.010-04:00

Here is some footage from the University of Pittsburg last night. Watch burly riot police abuse confused Pitt students in the courtyards of their own dormitories.

G20 Police Brutality is Underway in Pittsburg

2009-09-25T09:53:00.017-04:00

(Pittsburg punks Aus-Rotten "The System Works for Them")

G20 is happening 5 hours away. UPitt students are getting blasted with sound canons, shot with rubber bullets, and beaten by riot police. God Bless America!

Here is a first hand account from Reddit:

... There was a dumpster lit on fire further up the road, so I went up there to see what I could see, and suddenly there were tons of people sprinting down the sidewalk away from the fire. SWAT vans and six or seven major police cars pulled up to Schenley Plaza.

Reddit, the next two hours were complete chaos. My campus was invaded by armored police officers. They threw actual tear gas into crowds of students. They SHOT students with rubber bullets. They beat slower-moving students with a baton. I saw a group of cyclists being herded down the sidewalk. A cop reached out and pushed a woman on a bike. She turned around and pushed her bike at the cop. Next thing we knew, he grabbed her by the face and slammed her down on the concrete. Read the rest >

Related:
- Real News "G20 - Make or break?"
- Crime Inc "Why & How to Confront the G20 in Pittsburgh"

Orange Juice - "Blue Boy" ('80)

2009-09-24T19:08:00.008-04:00

If you liked the Wire post, then you might enjoy this too. Here we have the 7" single for "Blue Boy" by the Scottish post-punks Orange Juice. Circa 1980

Preview @ blip.fm

Download
Orange Juice - Blue Boy 7" single

Wire - Pink Flag ('77)

2009-09-24T01:17:00.003-04:00

Nothing too crazy tonight, just Wire's "Pink Flag" a staple "post-punk" album from 1977. I ignored this band for way too long, don't make the same mistake.

Allmusic describes them as "The Ramones Go To Art School" and I think that's a pretty apt description. Check em out

Preview
Wire Pink Flag Part 1

Download
Wire - Pink Flag

Darkmateria - "The Picard Song" ('04)

2009-09-22T21:23:00.014-04:00

An intertubes classic that you may have missed, now available in mp3 form. Thanks to Hazel for turning me on to this one. Watch the video here.

Download
Darkmateria - The Picard Song

D.O.A. "Woke Up Screaming" ('78)

2009-09-21T21:05:00.028-04:00

D.O.A. is best know for the tune "Fucked Up Ronnie," and is widely credited with naming hardcore punk on their 1981 LP: "Hardcore '81"

But before all of that happened, there was the "Disco Sucks" EP. Here we get to see the slower, snottier side of D.O.A. The best song on the EP is "Woke Up Screaming", a raspy slow jam that sorta makes you want to get drunk and die. It's like the New York Dolls meets Vancouver, Canada!

There is a faster, louder version of the song on Something Better Change (1980), but it's not as good.

Download it here:
D.O.A. - Disco Sucks EP

Site Update Complete

2009-09-21T18:45:00.005-04:00

Our layout update was finished today. If you're reading this from an RSS feed I encourage you to come check out the new page.

Regular posting will return later this week!

Hello everybody

2009-08-25T09:18:00.008-04:00

Major updates to this blog coming in September. We aren't dead yet!
EDIT: Starting the layout update now, bear with me

John Cage's first television appearance (1960)

2009-06-05T02:02:00.004-04:00

John Cage performs "Water Walk" on a nine-minute game show segment in which a host reads from a newspaper review to prove that Cage is a legitimate artist--"lest you think this is some sort of a stunt"--and gives him a five-minute introduction. Cage then plays on, and I quote: "a water pitcher, an iron pipe, a goose call, a bottle of wine, an electric mixer, a whistle, a sprinkling can, ice cubes, two cymbals, a mechanical fish, a quail call, a rubber duck, a tape recorder, a vase of roses, a seltzer siphon, five radios, a bathtub and a grand piano."

The audience treats it like a comedy performance, and Cage isn't above hamming it up a bit--he even seems a little corny here. Still, despite his smirk and the laugh track, it's bizarre stuff. Imagine a primetime game show today putting aside ten minutes for this.

The Undertones - The Undertones (1979)

2009-05-26T00:02:00.005-04:00

Why isn't this talked about as one of the great punk albums along with the first four Ramones records? Maybe because they were really one of those bands that found its own mix of punk, new wave and power pop, but never really focused enough to win over any of those voting blocs.

But like any good band of the era, they stayed around just long enough to crank out four albums in five years and disband. And the first is the best.

"Teenage Kicks" was John Peel's favorite song. He played it twice in a row when rating songs on a 1 to 5 star scale. It got 28. "Teenage dreams, so hard to beat" is written on this grave. The best example of their sunny, but wounded, perfect rock songs distilled to two or three minutes.

"Mars Bars" packs an absurd amount of brash, adolescent punk fun--the seventies kind--to a song that's just shilling for a candy bar. "There's glucose for energy/Caramel for strength/The chocolate's only there/To keep it the right length" should have been a real ad jingle. And Feargal Sharkey uses his quavering vocals to deliver the most eloquent pun about sweets in punk history: "To Patrick Moore and David Bowie/And all the other stars/There's evidence here to show/That there's life on Mars." The best example of how gloriously youthful the band sounds--the way the Ramones could somehow cover "Do You Wanna Dance?" and "Surfin' Bird" on the same album but still seem cool.

(And, if you can't choose between the two, they called the first song on the follow-up album "More Songs About Chocolate and Girls".)

The Undertones - The Undertones (1979)

Suicide - Suicide (1977)

2009-05-17T19:23:00.002-04:00

In anticipation of a slated live performance of this album in September as part of the Don't Look Back concert series, here is Suicide's self-titled 1977 debut. Duo consisting of a vocalist and synthesizer/drum machine player. The most famous cut is probably "Frankie Teardrop," the ten-minute story of a man who loses his job in a factory and murders his family--is still one of the scariest, unsettling songs ever--though lately I've taken a big liking to "Ghost Rider," which is actually kind of groovy.

This is a 2002 reissue, which includes plenty of interesting supplemental material. The first seven tracks on disc one are the album proper, followed by three bonus cuts. The second disc is live material. Most interesting is the last track, "23 Minutes Over Brussels," is a recording of the show at which they were booed off the stage when opening for Elvis Costello.

Suicide - Suicide (1977) [Disc One]
Suicide - Suicide (1977) [Disc Two]

Gary Wilson - You Think You Really Know Me (1977)

2009-05-07T23:35:00.003-04:00

When Gary Wilson was 14, he contacted the composer John Cage, who invited him to his home to talk about music for a few days. Cage told him if his music "doesn't irritate people, you aren't doing your job."

Gary listened.

His self-released 1977 debut You Think You Really Know Me--his only record for almost three decades until he was rediscovered and returned to recording--is the perfect blend of a horny teenager's rants and an experimental edge.

The first listen to You Think You Really Know Me is usually pretty jarring and even a bit uncomfortable. Wilson sings about his crushes by name, but inbetween calling out for Karen or Kathy or Debbie over groovy lounge funk he slips into sections of noise and found sound. A slow jam titled to "Cindy" is preceded by "Loneliness," which starts with animals moaning and the lyric "sometimes I wish I were dead." He sings about school dances like an innocent high schooler, but there's a song called "Chromium Bitch." He only sings about making out--sex doesn't seem to be on the table yet--but he frequently worries a girl will send him on a "sick trip." "6.4 = Make Out" seems to hit all these notes in just five minutes.

It's awkward, laughable and spooky all at once, but it's surprisingly addicting.

Gary Wilson - You Think You Really Know Me (1977)

Alvin Lucier - I Am Sitting in a Room (1990)

2009-04-29T23:44:00.003-04:00

Lucier's own words:

"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."

Very interesting piece. About a dozen or so minutes in the words become indecipherable, and we start getting some very bizarre sounds--unearthly, pure tones. Well worth at least one intent listen.

This is a 1970 composition--the 1990 date comes from the release of this particular recording, although I'm not sure if that's when it was recorded, or if it's a re-release date, or what.

Alvin Lucier - I Am Sitting in a Room (1990)

Wavves - Wavvves (2009)

2009-04-23T00:01:00.004-04:00

Well, Nathan Williams, aka Wavves, has gotten considerably more popular since he was last featured here, hasn't he? Seeing as how TPot upped the first album and isn't around for the follow-up, I figured I should fill the void. Another nice set of lo-fi, noisy, catchy "beach punk." Here you go!

Wavves - Wavvves (2009)

So long for now from tpot.

2009-03-28T00:58:00.003-04:00

I'm moving far away from reliable internet sources. There's a slight chance I'll be able to post some third-world psych folk stuff here that'll blow all your minds to bits, but for the most part it's gonna be pukeskywalkerblog's other contributors from here on out. Thanks to everyone who read regularly and posted comments. Take care of yourselves and remember that only hands can wash hands. Peace.

- tpot

Hank & Slim - The World Turned Gingham (2000)

2009-03-14T11:00:00.002-04:00

I liked this album, though my cat didn't. The liner notes credit this music to two former country/bluegrass superstars, Hank and Slim, who were fired from the Grand Ole Opry for refusing to wear sequins and scaring the other cowboys with electronic experimentation. Long presumed dead, they were rediscovered decades later in trailer park, where they had been nursing their obsessions with electronics, peyote, fake English accents and the idea that "if you play a country record backwards your dog recovers, your truck runs again, your wife comes back and you get out of jail" (Slim also invented a "sonic dream catcher" out of an adopted DAT cassette player; the liner notes contain instructions).

Supposedly, this album is the archival recordings produced over many years in that trailer park home, though it sounds a little too attuned to modern ambient for this to be true, and in fact it turns out that this is a secret project by Nigel Ayers (Nocturnal Emissions) and Robin Storey (Rapoon, formerly of :zoviet*france:). The whole thing really retains a very :zoviet: feel, which I guess is why I like it so much. The influence of bluegrass and country music is really rather minimal, though we do get a good old prairie narrative on "The Ballad of Marky Martin":

now Nedd Ludd killed away fans
and Ned Ludd killed grease
that big fucking skinhead
was never at peace
darkness followed him there
as he went to the bar
and he said "Where's that cunt, Marky Martin?"

now Pauline called "P"
she knew a thing or three
and she said, "Marky Martin, where's he?"
said Ned Ludd to Pauline
"He'd better make me that porn film
or the wrong end of my howitzer he'll see"

now big, bad Ned Ludd
he was never no good
and eventually he found
poor Marky Martin
he strangled poor Marky
with his old football scarf
and that was the end
of Marky Martin.

Hmm.

part1, part2

Natural Snow Buildings - Tracks On The Bloody Snow (1999)

2009-03-09T16:53:00.005-04:00

The music of this French duo is apparently widely regarded as post-rock, a classification which I guess I can understand, though their foggy production aesthetics are more reminiscent of the brittle ambient folk of Henry Flynt or (VxPxC). This sprawling album is a collection of early 4-track recordings, released in a limited edition of one (one!) CD-R, which was given as a present to a friend of the band.

part1, part2

Gianluca Becuzzi & Fabio Orsi - Muddy Speaking Ghosts Through My Machines (2007)

2009-03-07T16:13:00.003-05:00

Fabio Orsi, like a lot of other experimental musicians, seems to be on his best behavior in collaborations, and I think this album (one of many recorded with Gianluca Becuzzi) is the most coherent project of his that I've heard. The drones are amazing, but it's all held together by a sort of twangy blues ... mournful female vocals and guitar textures that sound earthy and authentic rather than overly clean and new-agey, as so often happens in ambient. Highly recommended.

Muddy Ghosts Speak Through My Machines (2007)

Surprisingly, this album is available on amazon. You can also usually get collaborations and solo Orsi albums through his own myspace.

Unrelated news, the Portland-based experimental label Soleilmoon Recordings is doing a grab-bag sale now. Ten CDs randomly picked by the staff for only $15. Soleilmoon, originally a sister-label to the Berlin-based Staalplaat Records, provided an outlet for many years to super-prolific groups with bad PR skills like Muslimgauze, the Hafler Trio and :zoviet*france:. They've released a lot of kinda samey "ritual" dark ambient too, but with ten CDs for $15 you guarantee yourself some pretty rewarding sounds, especially in this economy!

Ethan Rose - Oaks (2009)

2009-03-06T13:13:00.002-05:00

Notes: All the sounds were sourced from a 1926 Wurlitzer Theater Organ and then altered with computers and electronics to create the pieces on this album.

Imagine, if you will, an old Wurlitzer Theater Organ that once accompanied silent films in Portland, before being moved to the Oaks Park Roller Rink, where it has been ever since. Imagine the artist, Ethan Rose from Portland, Oregon, helping out repairing that antique, before starting to explore its tones, textures, and colours from another era.

The result is "Oaks", Ethan's third full-length CD (after two titles for Locust Music: "Ceiling Songs" and "Spinning Pieces"). And once again, Ethan has succeeded in dragging a forgotten bit of our collective sonic past out of the shadows and reinterpreting it in a modern ambient electronica context. There is an elegant and crystalline quality to the eight pieces that make up this album. The music on "Oaks" evokes the meticulous sonic explorations of acousmatic composers like Francis Dhomont and Jonty Harrison, crossed with the dreamy and hazy soundworld of ambient experimentalists like Fennesz and Oren Ambarchi.

Ethan Rose's work reflects his interests in old technologies, new sounds, and the restless exploration of musical form. Over the past ten years he has released recordings, scored films, performed internationally, created sound installations, and worked with a variety of collaborators. His music is also featured in Gus Van Sant's latest film "Paranoid Park". His sound environments merge the old with the new. Past works have included experiments with music boxes, player pianos, and carillons.

Oaks (2009)

Exuma - Exuma II (1970)

2009-02-20T14:56:00.003-05:00

The second Exuma album, a little bit weirder even than Exuma I. "Baal" is one of his best songs and "Paul Simon Nontooth" is some weird shit ("help me find my head").

Exuma II (1970)

Vladimir Vysotsky - Banka Po-Byelomu (Video)

2009-02-14T16:15:00.001-05:00

:zoviet*france: - Shouting At The Ground (1987)

2009-02-13T15:57:00.005-05:00

This remains my go-to album for ZF; it was the first one to grab me and it retains a really cohesive feel throughout. None of the missteps that break up the continuity on some of their other pieces. I'd characterize it the same way I did Ghedalia Tazartes: it sounds like speculative tribal folk for alien civilizations. But unlike Tazartes, :zoviet*france: very rarely has vocals up front. More droney textures and unsettling chanting, less soul.

For the uninitiated, this is from their wiki:

Their music often consists of droning textures set against fractured rhythms and fleeting dissonant melodies and their earlier recordings have been described as "evoking a cross between musique concrete and tribal music". Neglected sound sources are frequently used, such as obscure radio broadcasts, toy instruments, and field recordings, often heavily processed or looped. Over time, they have increasingly added electronic elements but without adopting computer based composition techniques. In describing their approach to making music, the group has been quoted as saying:
"All audio equipment distorts sound to some degree and, eventually through mechanical and electrical failure, fucks it up. Since indeterminacy as a compositional parameter has been a constant in our work, this often produces what we regard as interesting new developments."
The packaging of their early works was extraordinary with records released in hessian (burlap), roofing felt (roofing shingles) and aluminum foil, amongst other materials.

If you like this one, the next album I'd recommend is Music For A Spaghetti Western.

Shouting At The Ground (1987)

Scienz of Life - The Blaxploitation Sessions (2006)

2009-02-13T13:23:00.003-05:00

This is one of my favorite rap albums of the 2000s, and it doesn't seem like enough people are listening to it. Check it out.

The Blaxploitation Sessions (2006)

News Flash: Amebix Plans to Record New Material

2009-02-09T13:01:00.005-05:00

So last week I had the pleasure of seeing Amebix on the final date of their U.S. Reunion tour. It was the best show I've been to in a long time.

I sent the band a quick message about how much I liked the show and asking if they were going to record any new material, I got this message in return:

thanks Wes,we had a great time,best show was definitely Philly.
We will be recording at some point,probably a single though,see how it goes,no rush after 22 years!
Rob

Whooo. You heard it here first

Momentissey - The Faster You Push Me

2009-02-07T22:43:00.001-05:00

aka Morrissey - The More You Ignore Me

Al Stewart - Past, Present & Future (1973)

2009-02-05T14:20:00.005-05:00

This is one of those albums that I had on cassette as a kid and listened to nonstop for years, and that really had a major impact on the way that I thought about music as I grew older. Al Stewart is a singer-songwriter from Scotland who frequently bases his songs on history. His most commercially successful effort was Year of the Cat, but the real masterpiece is undoubtedly Past, Present & Future, the most conceptually coherent album with the tightest songwriting. It begins with the plodding "Old Admirals," based on the autobiography of a 19th century British admiral whose wisdom and experience were ignored during World War I (the opening line of the album: "I can well recall the first time I ever put to sea / was on the old Calcutta, in 1853"), then transitions into a criticism of regressive Prohibition-era playboy Warren G. Harding. With steel drums.

Then the heart of the album, a couple of songs about the historical malaise and uncertainty of the middle of the century: the early 70s Bohemians of "Soho (Needless To Say)"; the tragically ignorant or uncaring lovers of "The Last Day Of June 1934", whose most endearing qualities are the same ones that make them culpable for the rise of Nazi Germany; the cheesy country/western pop of "Post World War II Blues" (according to the liner notes, the only song Stewart ever wrote in his sleep); and the goofy brilliance and minimal bass-choir atmosphere of "Roads To Moscow", about a Russian peasant-soldier who survives the genocidal war against Germany only to end up in a gulag in his own homeland. The album closes with an "I Am The Walrus" tribute, "Terminal Eyes", and the spacey post-hippie epic of "Nostradamus", which is the only thing on the album that's kinda embarrassing.

A truly unique album bursting with ideas, not to be missed.

Past, Present & Future (1973)

Steppenwolf - Monster (1969)

2009-02-05T13:26:00.012-05:00

(Monster)
Once the religious, the hunted and weary
Chasing the promise of freedom and hope
Came to this country to build a new vision
Far from the reaches of Kingdom and Pope
Like good Christians some would burn the witches
Later some got slaves to gather riches
But still, from near and far, to seek America
They came by thousands
To court the wild
And she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light
And once the ties with the Crown had been broken
Westward in saddle and wagon in went
And 'til the railroad linked ocean to ocean
Many the lives which had come to an end
While we bullied, stole and bought ourselves a homeland
We began with the slaughter of the red man
But still from near and far to seek America
They came by thousands
To court the wild
And she just patiently smiled and bore a child
To be their spirit and guiding light
The blue and grey they stomped it
They kicked it just like a dog
And when the war was over
They stuffed it just like a hog
And though the past has its share of injustice
Kind was the spirit in many a way
But its protectors and friends have been sleeping
Now it's a monster and will not obey

(Suicide)
The spirit was freedom and justice
And its keepers seem generous and kind
Its leaders were supposed to serve the country
But now they won't pay it no mind
Cause the people grew fat and got lazy
And now their vote is a meaningless joke
They babble about law and order
But it's all just an echo of what they've been told
Yeah, there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there watchin'
Our cities have turned into jungles
And corruption is stranglin' the land
The police force is watching the people
And the people just can't understand
We don't know how to mind our own business
Caus the whole world's got to be just like us
Now we are fighting a war Over There
No matter who's the winner, we can't pay the cost
Cause there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there watchin'

(America)
America, where are you now?
Don't you care about your sons and daughters?
Don't you know, we need you now?
We can't fight alone against the Monster.

Monster (1969)

Luigi Serafini - Codex Seraphinianus (1978)

2009-02-02T23:09:00.003-05:00

Luigi Serafini - Codex Seraphinianus (1978)

The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978.[1] The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, a thus-far undeciphered alphabetic writing. (wiki)

The Believer Article

Aphex Twin - Windowlicker (Video)

2009-02-01T16:07:00.002-05:00

This isn't obscure or anything but if you haven't watched it in a while you should probably take the time out of your day to do so.

Muslimgauze - Arabbox (2003)

2009-01-30T21:18:00.004-05:00

Another Muslimgauze post. This material was recorded 6 July 1993 in Manchester, but didn't get a release until 2003, when Soleilmoon put it out as a limited edition of 500 CDs packaged in a handmade tin box from India, then in another less-limited edition of 1000 CDs in a normal jewel case. I own the metal box one, so be jealous. This was the first Muslimgauze album I ever heard, and although I don't think it's the best to start with, it is probably top fifteen or so. Not very abrasive at all, very droney with a lot of shimmering keyboards and water samples. Long, hypnotic jams, with a very smooth electronica feel that you don't get on many other Gauze releases. When I first heard it as a dumb kid, I fell asleep to it a bunch of times, I liked it but didn't really get into the music until I heard Lo-Fi India Abuse. I was pretty dumb back then though, I thought psytrance was the pop of the future and that My Bloody Valentine's second album was the soundtrack to some sort of futurized "space-Vietnam" the same way the Stones' "Paint It Black" became a soundtrack to normal Vietnam. I mean, what the fuck?

The title track is the only song on this album that I don't like too much. The rest is excellent.

Arabbox (2003)

Angus MacLise - Astral Collapse (2003)

2009-01-29T18:19:00.002-05:00

Shadowy weirdo and adventurer Angus MacLise was a member of La Monte Young's Theater of Eternal Music and later, on the recommendation of his roommate John Cale, the first drummer for the Velvet Underground. MacLise was not present at any of the band's recording sessions, and he quit in late 1965 when the band got its first paying gig (because playing music for money was selling out). He tried to rejoin after the VU started getting some underground credibility, but Lou Reed wouldn't let him. MacLise traveled the world experimenting with percussion and religion and eventually found his home in Nepal, where he explored various elements of Tibetan mysticism through poetry, drum loops and droney textures made with organs and found sounds. He died of tuberculosis in Katmandu in 1979, having probably the second best life of any member of the Velvet Underground (the first being that of Sterling Morrison, who quit the band to get a doctorate in Medieval Studies and then spent a decade as a tugboat captain).

Although MacLise left behind a large body of recorded work, most of it remained unreleased until 1999. This album from 2003 is representative of some of his weirder outings; it begins with some of his Tibetan mystic beat poetry and contains some of the most beautiful drones ever.

Astral Collapse (2003)

Ammer, Einheit, Haage - Odysseus 7 (1998)

2009-01-28T14:25:00.005-05:00

This is a weird one. Experimental space-opera recorded live on German radio in 1997, reinterpreting The Odyssey within the context of space exploration, the frontier as frightening and mysterious to us as islands of the Mediterranean were to the epic singers who preceded Homer. Odysseus becomes an astronaut, the Ithican characters his ground control, the monsters and gods that haunt him are constellations and the ghosts of space (such as Laika, the Moscow puppy who became the first mammal blasted into space, and who died very alone and confused in her orbit).

This was the sweet song
that the sirens sang
But my head was filled
with the sound of Big Bang
Oh yeah.

The opera was written by the poet/playwright Andreas Ammer and the music was arranged by Ulrike Haage and F.M. Einheit (of the group Einstuerzende Neubauten, see here and here; this recording also features Neubauten member Alexander Hacke as the voice of Telemachos). The liner notes credit Haage with keyboards and Einheit with "schlagwerk," which Babelfish renders as "rammer," but I gather to be some sort of percussion. Lots of the sort of tape-manipulated drumming you hear on middle-period Neubauten albums, quite a bit of creepy chamber-opera atmosphere and a lot of cello and theremin too, of course. It doesn't always succeed as an album, though some of the individual tracks are really great; the others probably make more sense if you understand German, which I don't. It's a pretty bizarre experience and definitely worth a listen at any rate.

part1, part2

Blind Guardian - Nightfall In Middle Earth (1999)

2009-01-27T21:05:00.012-05:00

Blind Guardian - Nightfall In Middle Earth

What is power metal? Well, just think soft-metal: falsettos, fairies, and ridiculous solos and you've got the right idea. Some fans would argue against this depiction, but you can ignore them. They play D&D, they own several swords, they have never know the touch of a woman: POWER METAL.

Now, this here is the only power metal album you should bother checking out, ever. "Nightfall In Middle Earth" tells the entire story of the Silmillarion by J. R. R. Tolkien. Here Blind Guardian tones things down a bit, turning out an hour's worth of mid-tempo power-metal epics, with surprisingly professional spoken-word passages throughout.

When I first started listening to this album, I thought it was funny. I also thought it was corny, slow, overblown, meandering... but.... Then I listened again, and again, and again, and then I started to love it in a completely un-humorous way.

Maybe it's the amazing choruses in "Nightfall" and "Blood Tears," maybe it's the guitar harmonies in "When Sorrow Sang", I don't know. I can't say enough good about this. Check it out if you're feeling virginal.

youtube
youtube
youtube

Pissed Jeans - Shallow (2005)

2009-01-24T16:38:00.002-05:00

Pissed Jeans - Shallow

Punk band from the philadelphia area. I read an interview with one of these guys and they know their 80's hardcore like nobody's business. Pissed Jeans has a sizable hipster following thanks to pitchforkmedia's glowing reviews, but they are legit. They're pretty weird, I can't think of any bands to compare them to.

myspace

Ghédalia Tazartès - Diasporas (1979), Une éclipse totale de soleil (1982)

2009-01-20T22:01:00.006-05:00

Ghédalia Tazartès is an ultra-obscure French musician of Turkish parents, though not much else is known about him. He performs rarely and issues recordings infrequently. Musically, his style is a sort of absurdist opera characterized by alien soundscapes with bizarre vocal arrangements (both his own voice and samples). The voices on Ghédalia Tazartès recordings scream, whisper, cry, laugh, chant, pray, preach, lament and proselytize. They speak in many languages and in some sense channel all of humanity into a conversation that transcends them all.

The musical accompaniment is diverse, ranging from Middle Eastern strings and industrial drones through fuzzy psychedelic guitar and lo-fi synths that sometimes remind of the Residents' earliest creations. But the best reference point for me is :zoviet*france:, because this music, like that of ZF, is a sort of reinvented primitivism that doesn't just build on the musical traditions of the past but imagines the musical traditions that might have been. This is the kinda stuff that would be filed under "World" in an FYE in an alternate universe or another galaxy.

In my world it's really the perfect music and I'm not sure how I survived so long without it. Both of these albums are absolutely brilliant.

Diasporas (1979)

Une éclipse totale de soleil (1982)

Mare - s/t EP (200?)

2009-01-19T19:19:00.004-05:00

Mare - s/t EP

Switching between beautiful choral vocals and LOUD doom metal? Okay! Who the hell are these guys? I have no clue. Hydrahead records.

Averionline Review
Myspace

Flower Travellin' Band - Satori (1971), Make Up (1973)

2009-01-19T18:19:00.001-05:00

Flower Travellin' Band was one of the granddaddies of the Japanese psych scene, though their sound had more in common with their English and German psych-prog contemporaries than with their noisy Japanese successors like Fushitsusha and Les Rallizes Denudes. These albums aren't difficult to find, but I figured I would put them up here in anticipation of the band's upcoming North American shows (the band reformed after 30 years in January 2008; they were scheduled to play their first-ever US appearance in December but it's been postponed to the spring).

The most famous and essential piece by the band is unquestionably Satori, a startlingly original piece of cohesive prog that sounds like it was recorded on another planet. I'm also including Make Up, a live double-album that showcases the band's less bizarre (but still innovative and unique) proggy blues sound. It also happens to feature an abridged (24 minutes!) live version of the music from Satori, under the name "Hiroshima."

Satori (1971)

Make Up (1973)

Johnny Thunders - So Alone (1978)

2009-01-17T00:41:00.008-05:00

Johnny Thunders - So Alone

So Alone is a 1978 album by Johnny Thunders, then leader of The Heartbreakers and formerly lead guitarist for the New York Dolls.

After recording L.A.M.F. with the Heartbreakers, Thunders returned to the studio and recorded his first true solo album, So Alone. The album featured Heartbreakers Walter Lure and Billy Rath, as well as several well-known guest musicians, including Chrissie Hynde, Phil Lynott, Steve Marriott, Peter Perrett, Steve Jones and Paul Cook. The album contained a mix of originals, standards from Heartbreakers live shows, and covers, including the Chantays' surf classic "Pipeline," the Shangri-Las' "(Give Him a) Great Big Kiss," Otis Blackwell's "Daddy Rollin' Stone" (done as a duet with Lynott), and the New York Dolls' "Subway Train."

Trouser Press called the album "Thunders at his best." [1]

Great stuff here. I've been listening to "you can't put your arms around a memory" all week. My girlfriend is starting to get pissed off.

"So Alone" is not quite as good as L.A.M.F. but damn near close. Johnny Thunders did a lot of heroin, it's sad to see how bad he looked at the this point in his career. I would love to have another Johnny Thunders solo album as good as this one.

Exhibit A: his creepy, doped up lip-sync to "You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory"

Laibach - The John Peel Sessions (2001)

2009-01-16T12:29:00.003-05:00

It might make me a disloyal fan, but I think this and the live album M.B. December 21, 1984 are my favorite Laibach recordings. Neither are constructed as wholly cohesive concept albums, and on the contrary seem to deconstruct the Laibach ethos and humanize its members. M.B. December 21, 1984 preserves a moment when that ethos was just being founded, when the future of the group as underground political commentators was very much in doubt, and the free-jazz clarinet on that recording provides a funny but very fitting element; it goes with the martial drums and howling vocals perfectly, but also links the group to other avant-garde scenes of the time. It makes them seem less like the perpetual insider-outsiders they want to be ("we are the mirror image of the deadly curse") and more like the arty nerds they always have been. Likewise with The John Peel Sessions, recorded in two sessions ten months apart in 1986 and 1987, but not released until 2001. It features Dare Hocevar as bassist, who left the band not long after; guest musician Oto Rimele handles guitar. They sound like a young punk band here, and it's good. The longer version of "Life is Life" is especially great, gritty, crushing the cleaner and more anthemic version that made it onto Opus Dei. This is where Milan started to transition from the plain aggression of his punk-metal vocals to the bleak narration of his dictator-voice. The birth of a new sound out of nihilistic garage rock and military marching tunes: every minute of the future is a memory of the past.

The John Peel Sessions (2001)

Amon Düül II - Wolf City (1973)

2009-01-14T19:25:00.002-05:00

I put up two other ADII albums a while back, Yeti and Hijack, because they represented opposite instincts in the band: Yeti for ambitious experimentalism and improvisation, Hijack for more accessible and competent musicianship. This album, Wolf City, lies in the middle both chronologically and stylistically. It's definitely got that eccentric something that Hijack doesn't quite have, but I also probably listen to it more than Yeti. Check it out.

This is ripped from the CD reissue that includes three bonus tracks.

Wolf City (1973)

Kula Shaker - Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts (1999)

2009-01-14T17:56:00.005-05:00

Britpop isn't cool anymore, or never was, particularly when it's as unabashedly 60s-nostalgic and embarrassingly Hinduphiliac as Kula Shaker, who achieved fame in the 90s as a sort of radio-friendly version of Tripping Daisy or the Flaming Lips. Those bands have kinda fallen by the wayside too: Tripping Daisy destroyed by the drug-related death of its guitarist and subsequent metamorphosis into the Polyphonic Spree, whose shtick was so earnest and vulnerable that even VH1 felt superior enough to make fun of them; the Flaming Lips burned out and overexposed, ruined by one too many lame Zaireeka parties held by stoner chicks with every Jethro Tull album on their laptop.

As for Kula Shaker, they were easy targets. Stoned and disconnected from reality enough to tell the British tabloids they wanted to perform with huge burning swastikas behind them on stage, not realizing that most of the Western world doesn't see these symbols as ancient Indian peace signs anymore. At the same time, contemporary enough in their sound that they got swept away with the backlash against Oasis and mid-90s rock as a whole, Britpop in particular. And they didn't have the indie cred of Tripping Daisy or the Flaming Lips to save them. People like me gave them up, switched our favorite 9th grade Doors t-shirt for a Velvet Underground long-sleeve, started following politics and went to college.

But there was a time, before the internet ruined music forever, that Kula Shaker and Morphine were probably my two favorite bands, and I'll never be able to fully escape Kula's best offering, Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts. The songwriting is solid. The production and arrangements are great. The cheesy token Indian music tracks work in the background for atmosphere, like tedious hip-hop skits. No matter how easy this music is to mock, it's inventive, and nothing then or since has sounded quite like it (including the album they released last year after their reunion). Highly recommended if you like the Lips, Tripping Daisy, or the really over-earnest 60s bands like Love.

And, I mean, it's better than fucking Animal Collective.

Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts (1999)

300 Visits

2009-01-13T21:11:00.005-05:00

We topped 300 unique daily hits on Sunday this week. Also, big thanks to Google Germany, who has us on the 2nd page of results for "japanese puke torrent." What an achievement!

Billy Childish & Holly Golightly - In Blood (1999)

2009-01-12T22:08:00.008-05:00

Billy Childish & Holly Golightly - In Blood

Billy Childish is a songwriter man that you could compare to an extremely prolific hillbilly version of Billy Bragg.

Holly Golightly is a girl from Thee Headcoatees, the all-female counterpart to Childish's band Thee Headcoats. She also sang a song with the White Stripes and had two songs on the soundtrack to Broken Flowers.

I'm not sure what either of them sound like individually, but this album is pretty cool. Lo-fi Rock/blues with about 1 chord per song.

Here's a youtube of billy childish

Cluster - Sowiesoso (1976)

2009-01-11T16:51:00.001-05:00

Pioneering space-rock from one of the most underrated krautrock bands. This is a subtle, bewitching listen, a little bit sleepy but flawless in its execution.

Sowiesoso (1976)

High Rise - Psychedelic Speed Freaks 84 - 85 (1997)

2009-01-11T13:31:00.005-05:00

High Rise - Psychedelic Speed Freaks 84 - 85

I saw this band listed as for fans of "Les Rallizes Dénudés," the sweet japanese psych band that tpot posted a while ago. (here and here)

These guys are also Japanese psych, but where Rallizes plays slow, trance-like psych jams, High Rise play extremely loud, sloppy, and insane crap. You're going to have to listen to understand the rest. It's really fantastic.

I don't know anything about this band so I'm not going to say much more. I would like to say that the production on this album pushes the limits of good taste, even for a "garage/psych" band. It sounds like it was recorded in a aluminum trash can, sent through the shittiest distortion pedal on earth, and then recorded with a contact mic strapped to a tin can... which I guess is pretty sweet actually.

This CD is a comp of their early material

Check 'em out
myspace

Coalesce / Napalm Death - In Tongues We Speak EP (1997)

2009-01-10T15:49:00.004-05:00

Coalesce / Napalm Death - In Tongues We Speak

4-song EP from two great metal bands. Coalesce's "Harvest of Maturity" is a fantastic shit-talk on straight-edge hardcore, and is only available on this EP right here.

This video gets pretty insane about a 1/4 into it

Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker (2000)

2009-01-09T01:35:00.006-05:00

Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker

His first solo album, and his only consistently great one. This is how country was meant to be played: by a New York City hipster.

Of the eleven albums he's released in the past 9 years, the only other one I'd recommend is Jacksonville City Nights.

youtube

Zero Boys - Vicious Circle (1982)

2009-01-07T18:47:00.009-05:00

Zero Boys - Vicious Circle

Excellent early-80's punk. They've got one loud song (first youtube), the rest sounds like a noisy version of the Ramones.

myspace
youtube
youtube