New Rudi Arapahoe record is done. Now I know what to buy my family for Skyscraper Day on September 3rd.

Candy Claws Glacier Prey. Bicycle music. It seems that a dog in Australia has tested positive for the Hendra virus. I remember feeling the most desperate heartache when I read a pro-med post concerning a young veterinarian that died from the Hendra virus for no other reason than his love of animals. Fear the flying fox seeking figs! Or fido. I mention heartache and I recently, well this evening, had dinner with someone who had an infection of the pericardium and nearly died. if he had gone to sleep one evening he would not have awoken the next morning. Frightening. He was wearing a purple fitted shirt and cowboy boots this evening, if the virus had been active I am not sure that is the ensemble to be seen dead in. I was wearing something far less fashionable. Not a headband. Candy Claws have been seen all over town with their beaded headbands and vaguely arranged musical thoughts. I could wear a headband now, my hair is unseasonably unkempt. I live now, only, for the ride home with both windows down and my hair dashed haphazardly by the turbulence of life in the fast lane. Cue Urban Dance Squad. First track here, 670,000,000, 670,000,000 insights into my soul. Or a reference to their favorite year BC. It was noise, it was nice, it was vague. Second track, less disorienting, gentle keyboard triggered samples, her gentle voice(inaudible). They are children of the blooms, flower power, raised on corn and fueled by raw milk. Are they aghast by the recent Morrissey comments? Possibly only because he made them in public but the silly equating of animal life and human life is what leads to things like genocides and totalitarianism and a role in life similar to a worker in a hive programmed only for the collective good and in this case not just humanity but for Gaia's sake. Snow Bear River Fire. Why is this not an official release? it is available for free download from their website. It isn't as accomplished as the two official records. The lyrics, inaudible, although my ears have been made even more suspect by the humidity and the accompanying air conditioning in Chicago. I spent the past four days in Chicago. Interesting in that the buildings are so beautiful and the people are not. i was on the most exclusive avenue in Chicago and surrounded by the unglamorous set, Midwestern, overweight, incurious stares affixed to their faces. I will admit to staring up and staring down, I like to watch people and when they wend through a chasm created by remarkable architecture and when they take the stares down to a subterranean street beneath the glitz and glamour it is interesting to see the relief. I spent a fair amount of time inside of taverns and pubs and a delightful Piano bar but always the walk home was spent with my head craned, watching the reflection of the unspectacular night on the panes of glass. Third track, very Procedure Club, see dull. This sounds like a demo, this sounds the germinate, this sounds like gentle whirrs of the air conditioning reflecting off of the glass inside of the elevated train. In the future there will not be air conditioning, because the ice had disappeared from the Arctic air conditioning will be banned except for inside Air Force One and inside Margaret's ice cream factory. Fourth track, softer, more glacial. Twinkles. Are they still in Fort Collins or have they moved to the big city? They should move to Chicago. They could busk near the Marilyn Monroe statue and excoriate the cretins assembled there while the greened Nathan Hale statue only one half of a block away keeps lonely vigil in front of the Chicago Tribune. I suppose Marilyn Monroe had a larger impact on culture than Nathan Hale, at least in the conscious culture, but Nathan Hale helped to create the unmentionable character of America, the unspoken, inherent, soon to be withered away and decayed spirit of freedom. Fifth track. But the Marilyn Monroe statue makes a better photograph. I know. i do not take photographs, it is a better exercise to sit in reminiscence and try to recreate the image in your mind. Post your photos online, we are having a wonderful time. This is a vague pop song, a vague croon, a slow march in the dappled sunshine beneath the ubiquitous honey locust of South Chicago. I walked inside of the exclusive retail centers and did not feel at home. I am no socialist agitator, it did not anger me to see such ostentation on display, but it didn't seem to be jolly or warm. I would imagine were I so flush I might be cheerful all of the time. Like the fifth avenue charlatan hippy children in our rather posh hotel in town to watch Lollapalooza. There to see Electric Touch I am sure. This is an Ace of Base cover, sounds like a Candy Claws song, the recognizable keyboard snippet follows shortly after the recognizable chorus. Ho hum. But how are the tattoo'd masses that consume their socialism through a straw where enmeshed in the fruits of their parents capitalistic pursuits able to sleep in such accommodations. When I travel I travel in hostels. My parents were mostly working class while I grew up but still I am steeped in the hopes of Lysander Spooner and Wilfred Trotter. Next track, after the cover, nice Wall of sound-ish experimentation, a sketch for the next record, a hint of things to come for the Firebreather record? Possibly. It is nearly over. But drinking on a business trip is so commonplace. I am on vacation now. I am staying at home and I am not going to drink or eat but I am going to run every day. I am going to run through the neighborhood and learn more of my neighborhood. Perhaps I will become a social agitator and assemble my neighbors for a march on the town hall. We will demand that they stop painting on streets notes in bright white spray paint indicating that because the inhabitant of the home adjacent has not paid his sewer bill(12 dollars a month, hardly onerous) they are going to be forcibly disconnected from the public sanitation system. Apparently this operation with a back hoe is expensed to the homeowner that can't afford the 12$ per month for sewage service at a rate of $8000. Currently we are listening to a dream. Kaleidoscopic. On the airplane I read in the newspaper that Kaleidoscopes are from Scotland originally. It was invented by David Brewster. later it was mass produced by an American and it is a fascinating thing to realise how the angle of reflection of the enclosed mirror has such an effect on the resulting projection. Is there a statue to David Brewster in Scotland? Would he rank higher in cultural importance than Marilyn Monroe? Unlikely. Another sketch of a song, Hiding, reflections of notes and notes and shimmers and shine. it has a subtitle, "sound idea". It was very humid in Chicago. Music travels less well in humidity. But I was conscious to not wear my headphones while walking around the city. When I passed lovely young women with their earbuds inserted they all stood erect, passionless, determined, fearful of the squalor that surrounded them among the spires ascending from Nordstroms and the like. The harsh reality of the commonness of Midwestern living. But apart from the tourists, who infested the area I was in, there were the locals and they bread a true culture much unlike the sterile conditions here in Denver. Perhaps I romanticise the existence of local dialects and culture but the homogenization of human existence is a scourge that would be well defeated if people knew the existence of the beauty of everyday life rather than the imagined excesses of some far off utopia that should be benevolently spread beyond its borders into our mundane lives. Another slow instrumental track. it sounds as they are swaying back and forth out of existence, leaning forward and casting a reflection and then pulling back into the rip caused in the space time continuum by the mass of humanity preventing an elevator from leaving the ground floor. All of these tracks sound familiar. Are these ideas that have already come to fruition? My friends the pop songs, my only friends. My friends, the readers, my only friends. This entry is as vague as the music on offer, The Blue Octavo Notebooks. Each succeeding song recorded on smaller film stock to reflect the intimacy the idea has with its genesis, the lack of remove, the sound hasn't disassociated from the expansion of the mind kept for true disassociation by their beaded headbands. Headbands are a difficult look. It is difficult not to look like a member of Khan's entourage while wearing headband, especially if you do not know all of the words to Xanadu. I have finished the first movement of Dance to the Music of Time and am in love. And because my heart is very small and mainly vestigial it makes me weary and unable to use it to further conquests of hope and time and human interaction.

Panda Bear Tomboy. Somehow this record is very much smaller than the last Panda Bear record. It is very similar to the last record. But we tire of the lack of novelty quickly. We are on to more novel forms of novelty already. I love this album. I love Panda Bear. I enjoy his interviews when he earnestly proclaims his desire to make something worthwhile enough to attract attention and allow him to provide for his family. It's the smallness that charms. First track is a repeating bit of rhythm, some found sound samples and his overachieving voice. Is it overachieving only by technology? I am not certain. Second track. The songs are much shorter than on the previous record. Sonic Boom produced this album and he has fingerprints left as smudges in places conspicuous and others less so. On this track the repeating motif on the guitar would not sound out of place on a Sonic Boom/Spectrum record circa 1992. It might just now, now when Sonic Boom has squandered the good will fostered by his legions of snack cake/drug dealer/trance imbibing aficionados. His fortune is much reduced. There are the rumours that he makes it down the hill occasionally with copies of the Spacemen 3 Rugby recordings to finance his "lifestyle". Is it still his "lifestyle"? Unknown. I always thought that both he and Jason Pierce looked terrifically fit for heroin addicts. And Sonic Boom had that haircut. I wanted that haircut. I achieved it once, for a brief bursting moment in 1993. But it fell away. This was the last time I was ever truly happy. This track is like the first, repetitive, hypnotic and awesome. It is all awesome. Third track Slow Motion. This is one of the ones he released before the album and I was much dismayed over. it has had a reworking and it fits in much more cohesively as part of a flexible whole instead of jettisoned out on some jetty exposed to the elements and the cold penumbra of space. It is raining again. After the rain there exists the still silhouettes against and overcast sky, the buildings and trees and hopes and dreams. Stillness is oppressive. When the wind chimes through the catalpa trees and the honey locust trees it signifies movement and change and expression. The stillness encases all of life in a bound, spiny memory box. Nothing exists except on the border between the existence within and the dreamed of existence that lies just out of reach. My boss straddles this line. He has a new Volvo. Repetition is difficult. Sonic Boom mainly got it wrong. Except on Recurring. Side one of Recurring-the Sonic Boom side-is genius. Absolutely. J Spaceman's side, not really. he has the truncated bit of Feel So Sad which is amazing sure and Hypnotized but after that-meh. He may have already had half of Lazer Guided Melodies in the can. Who can be sure, they could have been recording in a studio demarcated with an impregnable dividing wall of saran wrap with a full spread of snack cakes on one side and syringes filled with Sheep collagen on the other. One of them has a chin. Surfer's Hymn, a bit more propulsive, more "hymnal". His voice is earnest. He seems entirely earnest. Animal Collective has more the feel of an athletic endeavour than an exercise in hipster ennui. Am I misreading these things? Heart comes the human heart rate rhythm so common to Animal Collective records. It is the Panda Bear heart that sets the tempo in Animal Collective. This is more primal. He has a heart more centered and carried closer to the surface than his colleagues in Animal Collective. Next track, the songs are so much shorter. Last Night At the Jetty, doo-wop vocals well forward in the mix, an uncoordinated sample providing the melody and distant garage door claps for percussion. His voice is multi-tracked and it feels like a choir of routinely modest young men. Did it take ages to create these tracks? What is the process? I would imagine that he makes something more lush and intricate and busy and that the art is the excision. Dissecting the prolapse and witnessing the rebirth. The lyrics? Insignificant. Surely his family rises to the fore and is utmost in his mind, he's a technological busker counting on the good will of those more magnanimous than myself to come through. I will do my part by giving to the cause, I will learn the Portuguese word for inspiring someday in remembrance of the greatness that is Panda Bear. Panda Bear in Portuguese is Panda Urso? Is it not? must consult my Tavares, Mello & Grunewald guide to Portuguese in order to be certain. Why is is that I am on a first name basis with so many dictators? Unknown. From Bainimarama to Nazarbayev I have their name at beckon call in my consciousness. It might be the fault of the Economist which in spite of their silly opinions on climate change and tax increases is still mainly right in identifying dictators when people like Bob Stanley have created shrines to them out of Helen Love 7" records. Drone, was this a collaboration with Sonic Boom? I need an aimless, meandering bit of loveliness to fill in the middle four minutes of my mostly marvelous record. I will call the man who gave us Forever Alien! Enough about Sonic Boom. I won't mention when I saw him live in New York by himself with his keys taped to the floor, his fringe looking magnificent and his voice resembling Gabriel. I won't. You will have to imagine the most serene moment of your life ever and then feel disappointed when I tell you it can't compare. After Drone. back to the cheerleading pop songs. I know people who love Panda Bear but do not love Animal Collective. His heart is many chambered and for his own records he shrinks it away from that of a highly prized heart of an athlete and it turns sentimental and romantic and now with the percussion coming from the floor being stomped under feet of the Williamsburg masses. I am having visions of silk screened flyers, possibly created by members of the Axemen visiting Panda Bear as an homage from the knowing forebears who he must deeply respect, and the Williamsburg types and Taylor Swift seeing these silk screened flyers next to gig posters for the Drums and a congregation of nothingness and irony and a march in place to MGMT or Joanna Newsom records and a surreptitious microphone hidden beneath floorboards, underneath the parquet. Next track, a piano, field recordings, lovely voice, Scheherazade. In just over one week I will visit the swimming pool where Johnny Weissmuller once dipped his toe. I haven't been in a swimming pool in a very long time. 20 years? Possibly. I remember being in a swimming pool and being terrified of the contacts on my eyes floating away on the surface of the swimming pool and being unable to circle underneath and to surface in perfect alignment to recapture my lenses. This is a bit like a Verve b-side, a bit Endless Life or a b-side to Blue. I spent a few hours watching live videos of Verve on youtube a few weeks ago. When Richard Ashcroft was muffled by the maelstrom, when John Leckie took Nick Mccabe by the hand and they opened a pathway to miracles. And then Richard Ashcroft had an acoustic guitar and a quiver full of laments and bad advice. oh dear. Is Avey Tare the Richard Ashcroft to Panda Bear's Nick Mccabe? No. I like Avey Tare. I don't like his solo records. But were not the first few Animal Collective records solo Avey Tare records? I am not knowing enough. This track feels like a gospel experience, I am reminiscing about my life spent in a church in Warren, Michigan when the congregation rose as one and sang hosannas to the lord. It sounded nothing at all like this, to our detriment it would appear. My parents once considered the ministry as an appropriate occupation for my brother. My oldest brother was a heathen. I was unconvinced. Mostly this track is constructed around the voice. Layers of his voice, mostly inflexible, it's sound manipulations more than emotional registry. He moves my heart by the gracefulness of the construction, by the isolation, by the oneiric invocations. It is truly too lovely for me to give justice to. Will the Belle and Sebastian fans who imbibe the toot with Belle and Sebastian also have this cd on their floating shelf above their turntable? I was meant to camp out in front of the new Ikea store in order to win a new sofa. I did not. The first 38 brave campers will win a sofa. I hope it is a nice sofa. This track is more Beach Boys-y teenage symphonies to Jobs. His voice at the top of his register, but restrained, the cacophony is imaginary, the fragile construction is inconspicuous. Is this the record to play for seduction? You could establish a meaningful connection with a meaningful rhythm to this track, the percussion softly escalates your pulse until a mild form of exertion turns to a conflagration of passion. Is Panda Bear sexy? Unknown. My sex is indeterminate. Heart rate percussion muffled beneath woolen duffle coats and textured scarves. So nice. I could listen to Panda Bear and recreate all of the times when I didn't feel insecure and inadequate and feel that sense of invincibility one should feel when you are 19 and the world is at your beckon. The world never answered my call or I remained mute. Unknown. Panda Bear has stepped into the breach and offered his soul to the world at large and I applaud most heartily. If only I could offer a real reply instead of counterfeit insouciance. Last track. his voice, multi-tracked, out of phase, dreaminess. Amazingness. Last track respiteness. In the final epiphany of Walter White I am hoping that this track is the soundtrack as the world comes to heel and in with very tiny fingers and too many toes to count we arrive at the moment in time when Brian Cox may proclaim our love as more lovely than anything you can imagine. The universe in a flatly monotonic outreach. Chocolate absorbed through my skin. The atmosphere of language. Hosanna.

If you were stylish and smart you would be listening to Giorgio Tuma's In The Morning We'll Meet.

The Procedure Club The Salmon of Doubt. I am a loner now. I ride the light rail and read books in seats while exhibiting a menacing slouch. I am terrifying. Really. I have just begun reading a new book. Anthony Powell, I always disregarded him because I felt some strange protectiveness concerning Evelyn Waugh. I took his racism and snobbery to be a personality quirk. His books are funny, in an unracist and unsexist way. Aren't they? I've nearly finished them all. Before this Anthony Powell I'd only finished Afternoon Men, but even as I am only 100 pages in I am ensnared. I may need to read all 12 volumes by month's end. First track was buzzy fuzzy(my scientific analysis, please do follow along), I thought it was starting off "I was happy, which is not like me at all" but it did not. Second track, buzzier still, less gothic, her voice recorded from behind the iron curtain. It is a bit like the Primitives meets my bathroom wall reverberating because of the end of the world or the Fourth of July. It is vague. Vagueness is the new punk rock. Better than having an opinion I suppose, an opinion that the founding fathers were all terrorists was offered recently. But what of John Dickinson who mainly opposed violent response to the King's edicts. But this is the age of the enlightenment and the words of Lillburne and Rousseau and Locke all resonated against the tyranny of the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Intolerable Acts, etc...These were grievous offenses to men of virtue. The crown still viewed the colonists as second class members of the empire. It was time for a revolution. Oh but only 33% of the colonists supported the revolution. Well, imagine trying to get 33% now to agree to a revolution against our current rulers. Good luck. Am I advocating revolution? No. But there are far more onerous impositions being foisted upon the population now than in 1776. The myth of wealth has suppressed resistance. But now that America is in decline, now that even future wealth is being consumed in a conflagration of historic proportions we will return to simpler times. When men were men and they ate the bark off of trees and boiled shoe leather. It will resemble the trailer for Breaking Away that I linked before. Perhaps the return of struggle will fill people with soul and depth and divest them of their intense narcissism? Or will it merely reinforce the isolation of technology that seems so comforting in the face of a reality of eroding comfort. Or will we all take steroids and become soldiers of resistance with tongues made impotent by the injections in your buttocks. I was sitting next to two muscled up young men and their speech was dreadful, it lacked dexterity, the words poured forth and with a dull thud landed on the table in front of them. They spoke nothing of ideas or ideals or passions or hopes, just gossip and cruelty. This is our world. There is a story on Popmatters concerning the anniversary of the murder of Lorca. Apparently governments are worst that murder poets or artists. A hierarchy of victimhood. Franco was awful because he seemed to be completely insensate to all of the suffering of his country, he was the ultimate technocrat. because his death squads were not passionately ideological but more materialist than the anarchists and communists it isn't more awful. Because the rebels were successful they have attained that mantle. but poets matter no more than the mean with tongues with more muscle than grace. Art of Ignoring is playing now. It is art school pretension, meaningless inaudible lyrics and bashing on machines. I rather like it. They are a duo. he is from Poland. She is not. The music is not varied or filled with depth, it is a sonic sheet, impenetrable and unchanging. There is the idea, an ideal, the blueprint, and it is tweaked slightly over the course of the album. This is similar to the last track. Her voice is pleasant enough but it shares the stage with the squiggles and denseness of the music in an egalitarian fashion. Are they political? He is from Poland. Perhaps this is concerning Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the Kosciuszko uprising! How many people know about the importance of engineering to the revolution? Not very many. There is a Kosciuszko statue in my hometown of Detroit, on Michigan Ave, and there are very many Polish emigres or their descendants. Mainly in Hamtramck and in Macomb County and while there isn't a real interest in Kosciuszko in Hamtramck there is an interest in Paczkis. This track is noisy guitar, there is a minimalism when it comes to breadth of ideas. it is not so interesting more than overwhelming. volume is key, inject the rear of your stereo with the same needle that the muscly tongue types inject their buttocks and you will understand truly. Ed, more buzz, more indescribable tedium. I am for noise, I feel noise. But just because you've created a three second loop of noise doesn't mean that if you loop that four second loop for two and one half minutes that it is some great achievement. Apparently her voice is a marvel to behold. Who knows, you can barely hear her. could I have a bad version? This is the problem with bands whose favorite record is Psychocandy they don't listen to the same records that Jim and William Reid listened to, the soul records, the motown records, the MC5, the Stooges, the Beach Boys. Instead Procedure Club listen to Psychocandy. Ah, this next one is nice, there is space to explore, room for the ears to manipulate their surroundings instead of hunkering down. This one is Index Finger and still I cannot understand her. But instead of a maelstrom bleeding from one speaker to the next there is an arrangement, theoretically, there are guitar lines to e discerned in the mix and while the voice is inconsequential the whole is pleasing. Will this be played in the grocery store on my next visit? Not likely. I was shopping for milk and chocolate yesterday and there was Blur's She's So High playing in someone's headphones but it was so loud I could recognize it as I was purchasing Skim and they were going for a pint of 2%. I drink so much milk these days. Next track, more minimal still, trying to effect some sort of New York cool, blah blah blah, we hate New York. You are not cool, you are from Poland and you are not thin, let's have passion and earnestness instead. She's So High is a painful song, it soundtracked my first love affair. My first love affair did not occur until college. I was shy. Now I am just anti-social. But when I found out my girlfriend at the time was seeing someone else and just decided to stop calling or talking to me instead of telling me I was crushed and on the ride home from her house after one last glance at her black Pontiac Sunbird it was She's So High that soundtracked my ride home. All of my most important musical memories are intertwined with my being alone. I was never in a room filled with my best friends listening to Spacemen 3's O.D> Catastrophe and celebrating the invincibility of youth or the worlds that we would soon conquer. I was Widmerpool. Snowy is playing now, the volume has been reduced, it is mainly guitars and ethereal vocals, could pass for a Candy Claws track. But a Candy Claws record is not an assault, it is an impressionist landscape, wombedelic, charming naivety. They probably love Keiji Haino alsmot as much as Procedure Club person from Poland. The volume climaxed and that was rather nice. Now malfunctioning drum machines and human pain, and guitars, nice. Not sure why we need a voice. Why do we need a voice? I would like a printed lyric sheet. I would imagine a lot of the music is about boots and sleep and tensile strength of sheets of aluminum when played with large rubber mallets. This is the twee'st assault in the history of mankind. It is the equivalent of a Sherman Tank, the twee'st tank ever being confronted with a Tiger and running away. Are her vocals looped? Are they just lazy? Do they record an entire album in approximately 11 minutes? Most of this is repeating patterns of noise that doesn't distinguish itself from the background noise of everyday life. I listen to the conversations of people who participate in life almost every day and it is as discordant as this is, there is one agenda competing with another and in between there are all sorts of misplayed notes that cause dissension and unhappiness much the same as this record. Are people happy after listening to a Procedure Club record? Will they assume it is cool because it isn't well crafted or thoughtful? Probably. They will move to New York and have remixes done by people who used to be friends with people who used to know people who knew Panda Bear reasonably well. I can't wait for the next record. On the next record they will record one track for 43 minutes and it will be composed on one 2.3 second loop repeating for 43 minutes and the lyrics will be the instructions read in Swedish by a non-native speaker on how to assemble floating shelves from Ikea Ikea opens in Denver, well Lone Tree, soon. Come visit, we can re-enact scenes from 500 Days of Summer in Ikea and listen to the Smiths.

Former The Smiths frontman, Morrissey, said,

“It’s a self-regarding gesture. I would find the idea of compiling a set list that doesn’t wildly excite me to be too restricting. The fire in the belly is essential; otherwise you become Michael Buble — famous and meaningless.”

Conquering Animal Sound Kammerspiel. It begins twinkly. Soft plucks, gentle piano, squealie voice. I don't mind the squealie voice. It is not Japanese squealie voice which disrupts my constitution. It is non-Japanese. It is not Tujiko Noriko. I haven't actually made it through this album entirely. It is likable but it isn't necessarily memorable. They are a new band. They don't have any pretensions yet about how to play their instruments or who their favorite member of Can is as of yet and so a lot of this is primitivism. Tristan Tzara, I've conveniently just finished a biography, would approve. Have you read his dada contributions. Was it more compelling in person because it has not travelled the age in between effectively. He was 20. But 20 in 1916 is not 20 now. "Thought is made in the mouth". And thus Twitter. Second track, more atmosphere or rather samples of atmosphere, fractured acoustic guitar, tension. Loveliness. I believe they are Scottish. I know, it is not difficult to confirm that. The internet has made us all sloths. I possess in the palm of my hand of all the entirety of human knowledge. Michael Scot travelled to Toledo for the same. He would look down on me as fatuous and decadent. But imagine the delight if Michael Scot could travel forward and see the access to the human encomium that is the internet. And yet might he have been Almohad equivalent of an obscurantist today, preferring the demo translations of Ibn Rushd before Abelard came and ruined the party. I have been to Toledo, Ohio, many times. It does not compare. My life would not compare favorably at all with Michael Scot and he didn't even have a car. I have a car. I could leave tomorrow and drive to the coast, take a ship westward and end up in an alien continent with Leptospirosis and disease ridden Civets and pollution. It has been raining ferociously for most of the week, each evening we are visited by a tremendous act of nature and it thrills. And on television I watch small children running through flooded parking lots in front of pawn shops and because I have read the Pro-Med mailing list for far too long I worry about them getting Leptospirosis. Leptospirosis is the curse of the good samaritan. although, I watched this week as a woman was rescued with a rope and unfashionable know from two inches of water along Dry Creek Road. Fourth track, the third was especially lovely but I was lost in tangent. This is reminding me of something. It will come to me. Is it not true that comparison is the bane of a real music reviewer's existence but it is the most effective way of describing the sound of music. Is comparison awful? I would love to be compared to someone I thought was fabulous. What if I was compared to Morrissey? And if the job of the new Morrissey was already filled by someone else more deserving then I could possibly rate as the second Jobriath. That position has not been filled. The governor of Texas is going to run for president. I wonder in a debate when he is asked who his personal philosopher is will he answer Jesus Christ? Almost certainly. What if he answered Morrissey instead? Sure he has some goofy ideas about militant vegetarianism but that would resonate in a world where i discover online profiles who seem to believe that torturing animals is worse than starving children. The lack of humanism in our age of narcissism. Perhaps their response is a comment on the obesity crisis and they find the idea of chubby children losing a few pounds not unreasonable but taping a kitten to a refrigerator door is. They are both reprehensible. Next track, we missed an instrumental, it was an incidental instrumental, an intermission. Is this similar to Palms? It is twee. Palms have constructed a facade of toughness. Are these entries "thoughts created in the mouth"? Possibly. It could be that I am an accidental dadaist. My genius lies in my naivety. I am not 20 years old. Because of the rain coming out of the south, from Arizona, because the dew point in Phoenix is above 55 degrees and it is really hot in the mojave desert the electric sunsets have returned. Denver is a city of grime. All of the dust and sloughing and the magnesium chloride returning to its original state. The rain is a baptism, thank you Lloyd Dobler. That last track was a bit unmemorable, it may have been where I was lead astray by previous listenings. It is the longest track and yet it is not the last track and so by rule it is meandering and uninteresting and probably should have been left off of the album. But one track must be longest unless all of the tracks are of equal length and then the true egalitarian spirit would take hold and music would be universal and would lead to cosmic harmony. I spent most of yesterday at a country club. There was an emergency. Several dozen trees were damaged and it may have meant that fabulously wealthy patrons might be denied their round of golf. It was have been an unspeakable tragedy. But the country club survived this Saturday and I skulked in shadows underneath the cottonwoods that survived their armageddon and watched the scions of "powerful" families, pretenders, on the driving range in their jodhpurs and with their generic scionness turn on little white balls, rotate their hips, come to level plain at the top of a back swing and lap up their inherited privilege. I felt like Durruti planning my next military offensive on the children of the Bourgeoisie. Last track was ok. It is easy to not pay attention to the music. Is that a problem? Probably. Electronic bands are a strange lot, they seem to have an endless repertoire of sounds and constructions to chose from and yet so many electronic bands sound just the same. Is it because Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook.com and did not become a member of an Orbital tribute band? I watched The SOcial Network and my two favorite characters were the guys who went around talking about themselves all of the time, "I am 6'5" and 220 lbs and there are two of me". Awesome. it was high comedy. I wish people at Harvard were that gifted, we might not have been afflicted with our mediocrity in chief if the Harvard depicted in fantasyland actually existed. The world is shaped by the tiniest minority. This is a more minimal track, radio static, her unaffected voice, swirls of melancholy and miasma. Nice. I should have listened to these tracks before, but the rain. The rain has taken on the convenience of being a built-in excuse for my lethargy. Similar to when the northern sky was dressed up in comets, when my mother would ask me if I had applied to some corporation I would say "But Hale-Bopp!". She would understand. Comets for the blind. There is the name of the second Conquering Animal Sound record. i don't know what their band name is meant to signify. I don't know is an acceptable answer, I am always told this. I am flying to Chicago soon and I will carry the philosophy of Morrissey in my pocket. it is a self-reliant philosophy and while sure he is a labor supporter and was just as outraged as Johnny Marr when David Cameron was expressing his undying love for the Smiths he espouses and individualism in his music. The fear of being apart from the herd must be overcome because the herd is based on belief and not the truth. Thom Yorke would have your fate ted to the masses, the unthinking masses that require not strawberries from Kenya but free newspaper records. This song is Giant. Her voice multi-tracked, it appears more interesting and lovely when it is difficult to focus it, they should remember this on future releases. They will release seven albums and then have children and move to New Zealand and live next to the Thompson Twins. And the sheep. I am 6' and 190 lbs, there is only one of me. I did not go to Harvard. I went to the University of Michigan. I did not create Facebook.com. My new online profile, oh and I think starving children is worse than torturing animals but I wouldn't engage in either. Neither should you. Last track, Ira, repeating musical motifs, pinched vocals, the same as always. They could be marvelous, they will need some practice in order to learn exactly how they might become marvelous. Just now, they are not.

The Heart Strings Flap Your Crazy Wings. The rain is pouring forth rather furiously just now. The pop songs that emanate from the Heart Strings are mere striplings and are timid little cuties. They might turn to oceans of sand in the calamitous rain shower and was away between your fingers and your toes. "It takes strength to be decent and kind". It's true. The sarcastic world will hear this album and act with derision and as I am now reading the Instinct of the Herd and have now realized that the gregarious instinct of man means that this irrational belief is unchangeable by reasoning I will instead just assume you, the Heart Strings skeptics, are mentally defective. The earnest are to be re-educated. I've only just got to the bit about the mentally unstable actually being overly sensitive and unable to see the intrinsic altruism of existence so my line of thinking here is on less sturdy placement. Second track. Buzzier. Swooning synths, distorted weak sauce voices, it's marvellous. Truly. Third track, more buzzy synths, it reminds me somewhat of a Honeyrider record only instead of a California surfer dude in control it's a library science major trying out for the pep squad. More distorted voices. In the background there are the electrical sprites dancing across the sky, proclaiming history through their vulgar fulgurites. A fall away to twinkles, a tender voice, dreamy female backing vocals, just so incredibly charming. I am weak sauce. There is ambition here. There is ambition towards achieving a sense of beauty for its own sake. I trust in this interpretation. It is my heart's delicate attachment to the meek. They shall not inherit the earth but I will buy their limited edition pressings every day and the on the one that follows afterwards. Fourth track, his voice, a ukulele, the impressions of twinkles, a bit of the Fonda 500 sensitivity on the vocals. There is of course Frankie and the Heartstrings. This hasn't anything to do with them. I haven't yet lost power in spite of the maelstrom framed by my bedroom window, night to day, stillness to fireworks. When I first moved here it rained nearly every single day of the summer. It was a wonderful way to synchronise your biological impulses, the fire caressing the air, the speakers crashing the sky, the the prodigious amount of water causing the appearance of impromptu lakes making me nostalgic for home and forests of mullein and leafy spurge to spurt recklessly. I like rain. This is a truly fearsome storm. I like rain. The Heart Strings would be declared earnest by bureaucrats at Musical Nomenclatura Agency. The songs would be stamped inoffensive and blandished with official speak so as to be properly accessible to the working class. it isn't revolutionary. Revolutions aren't all that revolutionary. I am learning that they are irrational. most of the "furniture" of the human mind is irrational. Belief is the basis for everything. When I tell you that the Heart Strings are endearing and warm and gentle and kind and wonderful and sweet unless you have formed an irrational opinion based on your group you will most likely just accept the opinion of the larger communal organism and just dismiss them. The earnest will be rounded up, they will have pink stars affixed to their chests and their cats will be run over with Caterpillars and people with commercial drivers licenses will be the new politburo. A wheezing organ. A pep rally cheer, drum fills, cleverness, sweetness. I need more adjectives for romantic and charming. Vampish? Enchanting? It is very 1991. It is the sort of thing that the people I loved in 1991 would have put on a mix tape for me, the sort of thing I would have listened to while out walking in a fierce thunderstorm such as this, underneath the utility pylons with dreams of her or her best friend in my head. This is an essentially random take on nothing at all. Du-du dum dum dum. The number one dream of many people now is to be a bureaucrat. This is step one on our road to the Wanting Seed. We all want to work for the ministry. The one child policy will arrive next, not for fear of overpopulation but as a means of reducing the communal carbon footprint, and then the fetishization of homosexuality as the responsible choice and then when you die you become phosphorous. Unless you are a diet soda addict and instead you turn to trypanosomes that swim down the veins of your last sexual activity mate. But perhaps The Heart Strings will save us from our bleak destiny. Clear Channel will force all of their stations to play this and the herd will decide it is good and not destroy this change and instead sanctify, memorialize it as part of the canon, see symmetry where there isn't any and we'll throw Russell Brand into the void instead. The Heart Strings are friends, they make music for their friends, surely their fans are dreadful. They wear hair slides, they wear wellington boots when the weather stays fine and smoke to make their voices deeper. I am a fan. I have just outed myself as dreadful. It is true. My insecurities make me rather difficult. i am off to Chicago soon. I will swim in the pool where Johnny Weissmuller swam his olympic trials, I will be further along in my path to greatness afterwards. i could enter a footnote in my "novel" concerning Johnny Weissmuller and rebel hijackings of celebrity golf carts. It will make my memoir different from the norm. Nice Hangover. In Chicago I will be very close to home. There will be water, the great lakes, my ancestral home. i will walk out into the surf and strip myself naked and wash myself clean of all of the mundanities of life in Colorado. I will remember our ascent as the aquatic ape, descendant of Pakicetus, aerobic and proud/ What does Colorado stand for? Fitness? Fleece? It is difficult to say. There is still plenty of snow on the mountains but mostly people don't seem to notice. If only a Subaru was truly autochthonous. Staring at the snow. Whistles. His voice is generic indie pop voice but in the most delightful meaning of the word. Big buzzy bits now, Don't Let the World Gang Up On You. A song for Dominique Strauss Kahn. It has two parts, the verses and the ecstatic bits. His voice, reverberated, the drums compressed, the world impressed. This is a marvellous, marvellous record. I met someone who may be a member of the sarcastic syndicate. I can alter my behaviour, alter my appearance, I can eliminate my sincerity. I could grow a beard to hide my non-jutted jawline and non-simian brow which betrays my twee sympathies. I am not hairless though. The last track The Watering Can of Love. A very Duglas Stewart song title. Falsetto, churchy organs, more voices, sophistication. Dreamy. When I invade the country club where Mark Ruffalo plays golf I will commandeer the golf course short wave radio station and play the Heart Strings and it will break more than par.

Lady Lazarus Mantic. The name, Sylvia Plath reference, ugh. But it's actually lovely, the record, Sylvia Plath perhaps. Why not be more independent and far ranging and adopt a nom de guerre from a poem by Anna Laetitia Barbauld? You know, the rumor is that she counted Marat among her lovers. And she hung out with Joseph Priestly who was eminently more cool than Ted Hughes. In fact if Sylvia had perhaps chosen her Ted's more wisely she wouldn't have placed the damp dish towels across the threshold and checked the pilot light. If she had me Theodore Hall instead, I believe he arrived at Cambridge before she died, well she might have had a rich and wonderful life. He could have seduced her with tales of watching Kim Philby look at photographs of Giraffes and she could have written a poem for him about treachery and naivety. He was a dashing young physicist/spy. First track was distant voices and piano, surely it was all torment and the rain. The rain has been coming each and every day. It isn't a melancholic arrival, it is angry and tumultuous. This isn't angry, it's monotonic and basic and I rather enjoy it. This second track is much like the first only with less distant voices and more notes on the piano. Is Lady Lazarus to be counted among those who scrape Ted Hughes vile name from Sylvia's tombstone every season? I hope not. Anna Laetitia was a prototypical romantic poet, were she more astute Lady Lazarus could have chosen Cristina Rosetti instead and coloured her record with the flourish of a pre-raphaelite instead of the greys of a luddite. She could cover Shelleyan Orphan. She could have hair filled with curls and Ivo Watts Russell as a close personal confidant. In the 1990s this might have been released on Xpressway records. It's primitivism. More shrill voiced sentiments and inexpertly played piano. The songs are somewhat long, I am not certain I will be able to maintain my literary allusions for the duration. Shelleyan Orphan were mocked for their literary pretensions. Sad. Graeme Downes was also criticized for his pretensions and so he stopped mentioning Dostoevsky and started to sing about blankets over the sky and wars in his head. Now he's old and he croons sad bitter excoriations of straw men and shadows of history. Perhaps also if Sylvia Plath's father had bene the Belgian apiologist Maurice Maeterlinck rather than the dreaded Otto of Daddy well she would have grown up reading The Secret Life of Bees and hallucinated over its strange passages over the courtship of bees and the glory of their devotion and been a happy child and we would never have been concerned about Sylvia Plath. I rather like the Bell Jar and I would like to have read her final notebooks. Am I anxious for 2013? Next track, a bit more pace. It has a Peter Jefferies as neutered by Jean Smith feel to the music. it is all repeating motifs and moans of confession. There is a bit more color in this track provided by a embedded melody and some low rumble in the mix but not a whole lot. With this little variation over the course of the first five tracks she might have considered not having released so many tracks on her album. I am something of a tapophile myself. I enjoy visiting cemeteries. I have two purposes for visiting cemeteries. The first is to sing at the top of my lungs all of the lines to Cemetery Gates and the second...erm, no. I like to go to cemeteries and make lists of names. There are fascinating names carved in stone and I have no compunction over stealing them for my own purposes. Dramatically rendered names are not my strong suit. Better to borrow someone else's inspiration. The second reason I enjoy cemeteries is to look at the headstones and create in my head a life story for these strangers that lie in peace. It is especially easy to conjure romantic tragedies for those that passed far too early. My first ever date was in a cemetery. It was a moonlit picnic against a stream that formed the boundary of a cemetery in Lake Orion, Michigan. I don't revel in the macabre or morose I chose to celebrate life even if it is in the past. A brighter track here, thundering chords on the piano, her voice recorded in a public restroom alongside the interstate. It is called Half-Life. How many tracks have there been that have been called half-life? i would wager there have been a great many. This is a fine addition to the canon. It would be lovely if each regularly repeated song title and sentiment had a canon to compare current offerings to all that has come before. This could be the purpose of the cloud. I don't fell great excitement about the cloud. Already our wireless connectivity is depressed, the idea of 1 million teenagers listening to Bieber on their Android phones rather than their ipods and this causing me headaches at work when trying to transfer photographs of trees on houses and trucks mangled on overpasses is not an appealing imagining. Another similar track. The piano is repetitive, hr voice is not really decipherable, so if she is deep and expressing keenness in spades we are hopelessly unaware. Is this Peter Jefferies piano that she is playing? Did she smuggle her way onto an Otago bound freighter, steal her way onshore, catch a ride to Gwen Jefferies home and steal Peter Jefferies' beloved keyboard? Is his keyboard now in B.C.? Is he still married to Jean Smith? Does she still wear her bearskin cap? Next track, no piano. Twinkles or trickles on a teapot. It's uninspired and dreary. I am enjoying it. "Just do something girl, was my reply, just do something girl, don't worry about anything". Hmmm...was this the advice given to her before she absconded with Peter Jefferies' prize? Perhaps. I should write about The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World some day, "just do something"-right? Good advice. I don't like The Last Great Challenge... as much as I love Messages from the Cakekitchen. Peter has less tenderness in his croon. it is more scientific. He could have had a brilliant career as an Earth Sciences teacher. Midnight Music Condition for a Broken Heart, I like that title, it seems more plaintive and urgent. Still rudimentary attempts at the piano but her voice seems more pleasingly engaged. I can't make out the words, not clearly, but with a clever title such as this surely the words form the basis of a splendid dream. Did it cost 11 dollars to record this album? I don't know where lady Lazarus is from. i would imagine she is american, who else to be so obvious to select a Sylvia Plath poem to label confessional music. Next track, less good title, I Couldn't Find Me in Anything. Less good music. Less good voice. I was unaware that I had downloaded this. I've had it for months. I will delete it as soon as I am finished typing. "This isn't writing, it's typing" but I am not in Lakewood and I am not Jack Kerouac and you are not Truman Capote. I am anxious to write about Heart Strings instead. They are not ponderous and important, they are charming and endearing and I more closely resemble the latter. I can be serious. I know a lot of things but how to come off as something not monstrously pedantic? I don't Know. I just nod and smile when the founding fathers are labeled terrorists. What of George Mason? What of James Madison? I was in no condition to found a nation when I was 25. 35. 38. But there was kissing. And I haven't been kissed in some time. Next track, ugh, she's showing off on the piano, oh dear. It's a struggle. She should take lessons. Perhaps it is Isidore Isou that has stepped in on the piano. he's wearing a 4 foot collar and top hat and can't see the keys from the bees. maurice maeterlink has his head in his antennae. This is perhaps the worst instrumental that I have ever heard. Perhaps. That is unkind. I had a friend that used to love Cat Power because she was absolutely certain that she could play guitar better than Cat Power and this gave her a feeling of superiority over Cat Power. My friend would love Lady Lazarus. now there are buzzes and her dreary voice, oh this is tedious. i have a few more tracks to endure. I will maintain. This is a short one, Pearl, only 2 minutes long. SOunded like the painful birth of a pronoun. Another track, same as the rest, only longer. I will need a glass of milk in order to finish this. This is work, and I might just need an exhortation the likes of which Marcus Aurelius delivered in Dalmatia, "You have no real love for yourself; if you did you would love your nature,and your nature's will. Craftsmen who love their trade will spend themselves to the utmost in laboring at it, even going unwashed and unfed; but you hold your nature in less regard than the engraver does his engraving, the dancer his dancing, the miser his heap of silver, or the vainglorious man his moment of glory. " Remember that the next time someone says to Levene "you call yourself a salesman you song of a bitch?". There is elegance. I mentioned kissing. It was dreadful kissing because I am apparently now a dreadful kisser. My muscles have lost their fine movement. My face is alien to the rest of my being. Listening to the bloodless is in no way going to improve my methods of seduction. But it is the last song, soon I will be able to turn the page and listen to the Sixths Kissing Things and allow Sarah Cracknell to reignite my passion. No.

Possibly a new Prefab Sprout record in October!? Trapdoor Melancholy. It could be a marvelous halloween.

All of the slow and pretty, I am beginning to calcify.

Beirut The Rip Tide. As obsolete as warships in the baltic. Wishing she could call him heartache but that's not a boy's name. Hello stranger, the stranger I've become, I've become an air raid. I am positively thrilled over the news of a possible Prefab Sprout record appearing this autumn and so as you no doubt recognized those were Prefab Sprout quotes without quotations. It is my Apollinaire impression. And isn't part of the charm of Prefab Sprout his electrifying dramatization of the mundane and petty into something effortlessly gorgeous? Apollinaire might approve, what were his feelings over the English anyhow? I don't mean to slight Beirut. He's lovely, really. He's got that silly less than taut baby fat that migrates seasonally from his face to his pectorals and back when the solstice strikes his silhouette. Eva Mendes is a Smiths fan and loves Manchester. It's true. I read it online. Accordion, this is the Beirut on Magnetic Fields album. I've discussed, previously, my desire for bands to become active partisans. I would like them to stop getting sympathetic tattoos and instead to adopt arms and join the battle on their preferred side and after the experience then write a passionate record about their experiences. Beirut would have served in the the Popular Front obviously, in the Red Army, on the Long March, they would caress their Mausers all day and in the evening exhale their traumas into their lovely little accordion squeezed pop songs. Beirut have a theoretically old soul. The music feels antiqued. fIt has passion in spite of its refinement and elegance. They could only be American, or French. Second track, more Magnetic Fields-y pop music. This is the most "pop" Beirut album thus far. At this point in the continuum he must be looking for some sort of remuneration for his efforts. He must be 25 by now? Ancient by rules of the pop game, a guest spot opening for GaGa, a television appearance on the view where he endorses Anthony Weiner for IMF chairmanship and a halftime spot at the super bowl. The world is his. It's a lovely record. Just terrifically lovely. But what of the baby fat? The repeating motif here reminds me of Ride's Time Machine. Is that unlikely? The seventies keyboard riff that adds a sense of rustication to the efforts, always his voice is rustic and there are the flugelhorns and the martial drumbeat. It's all eminently posh. Third track, accordions wheeze, urban landscapes painted in the background by field recordings and atmosphere and a tender mid-tempo stroll. He writes pastoral captions for musical postcards. It is all very evocative of time passed, of a simpler ethos, of a commitment only to the passion of the vision. I've just finished a biography of Tristan Tzara and he's rather unimportant in the greater scheme of things, isn't he. Dada was a lark. His championing of Rimbaud as the bringer of sophistication to the benighted continent is a laff, and the idea that the work of art itself was less important than the undirected thought that was its genesis seems to lead to a world where nothing matters except for the ephemerality of dreams and undirected thought. Art is born in the mouth. The Dead C would appeal to Tristan Tzara and yet the rest of us know how absolutely dreadful the Dead C really are in reality. fourth track now, piano, a ballad, a California pop song. It is all well thought out and prepared. The Magnetic Fields have the Dada Polka, Beirut have their mexican folk songs and their panoply of horns and sympathies for the weak. Just now a climax is achieved with the registered drumbeat, the melancholy horns and his voice so tenderly offered. Next track. Payne's Bay, a geographical reference? Ah, I've googled, Barbados. Perhaps a memoir of his trip to Barbados with his super model girlfriend where she travelled to recover from her debut at fashion week with baby Beirut in the front row taking photographs with his instamatic. This is beautiful. The last full Beirut record was more thematically timid, each track had a softness and here, on the new record, there is a more symptomatic boldness, a greater use of dynamism and musical heft. A female voice has joined him, his voice is so intensely doleful and when twinned with his glittering carnivalesque ballads it is inspiring and romantic. I don't mind the baby fat. Next track, more pop, a wooden block, pianos, strings in excess, drama in perfect measure. There is an element of ambition in all of this tiny pastoral symphonies. Each vignette a resplendent monument to the beauty of the human experience. I might comment on the lyrics but it feels as if this is the music of the working man, this is the music to be played on the front lines against the storm troopers of the republican party who want to deny you a comfortable retirement attainable at 52 years old. This is the rallying cry of resistance against those who would deny a bureaucrat's right to have sexual relations with an african hooker in a 3,000 dollar per night suite. These are the battles to be documented by the emotions spilled forth in the wake of Beirut's pop masterworks piped through loudspeakers in the tent cities filled with children with trust funds and keys to their Audi's parked overnight in a two hour parking space. These are the times that create lasting art. They might. My recent laments have expressed dismay over the damage that comparative wealth has wrought on independent music. Indiepop is less a revolt of the young and more a "gap year". Something to fill the resume while attending prestigious universities as a legacy enrollee before taking that job at Goldman Sachs. I love this album and while I am completely unserious as a revolutionary because I believe the ideal president is the one elected on the platform where he claims he doesn't have any answers to the problems but that he knows that most government solutions actually exacerbate the problems they attempt to remedy and so he's gonna put the entire place up for sale and go fishing instead. But we have this need for a messiah. Obviously the current occupant is a born mediocrity. More of the same is likely to follow. Perhaps if instead of getting fair trade tattoos if Chris Martin exhorted self reliance and freedom from government regulatory tyranny from the stage we might see the light instead of a future of narcissistic darkness. The Peacock, an intermission, a gently rumbling hum and his plaintive voice over multiple tracks. Nice. Last track. A ukulele, twinkles, an extended intro and his poetic ear for writing lyrics that seem more profound and amplify his effect as a storyteller and wrap the listener in a warm cocoon of collective inspiration. I really do think Beirut are one of the greatest bands on the planet. I will love them forever, honestly. Applause.

Deaf Center Owl Splinters. Deaf Center are Norwegian. The same as Edvard Munch, Henrik Ibsen, Quisling...oh, sorry. The music is wordless and as such we are thus granted the freedom to attach any significance to the music that we would like. It could be a reaction against the diminishment of the power of the written word in America. Are there book burning still in America? I haven't been to one in ages. I do recall the emotional "power" of that scene in Footloose when the good people were burning all of the scandalous books--Are you there God? It's Me Margaret, How to Eat Fried Worms, The Push Cart War, etc...all aflame! And then John Lithgow, in his handsome phase, swooped in and saved the day but later he blushed when his daughter cursed in church. But now? Would they burn Sula or an EM Forster novel? They would be doing the children a great service if they would. And what happens when all school children are toting tablets and nooks and kindles and the like, will we burn books only metaphorically? Gather around a barrel of paper towels dipped in kerosene and chant Indonesian koans? But then there aren't many movies made now that have the societal impact of a Footloose and so without Kevin Bacon who will make that urgent call to action. We are the poorest that we have been in generations. Deaf Center would be ideal for movie soundtrack work. I am not familiar with Norwegian filmmaking at the moment. Should I be aware of any Norwegian filmmakers at the moment? The first track would soundtrack the scene where in Svalbard a depressed Norwegian laments the midnight sun and lingers over an application to the oil fund in Norway to fund his experimental re-pigmentation that can only be performed in North Korea. He is an albino but we only learn this as the second track begins and he removes the sombrero from the top of his head. The music could underscore the dexterity in which the protagonist places his periods and half-stops and the agony of font selection for his application. It would be sombreros and typewriters, marvelous, the scrapes and radio static would unite effortlessly with the scene. This is the excitement of wordless pretty things. The Oil Fund in Norway is a monster. 570 billion dollars. Do they accept tender pleas from Norwegians to fund emergency liposuctions or performance art pieces on the premise that 'the destiny of nations depends on how they nourish themselves'. perhaps not. I remember reading an article on summer homes in Norway and the outrage found nationwide when some louts were outfitting their homes with electricity and air conditioning. Apparently there are loads of old cars in Oslo because the entire nation is frugal. I am frugal. I could be Norwegian. i could write the Oil Fund and submit a grant application expressing my desire to study the differences between a pseudo-Canadian's frugalness versus an average Norwegian's frugalness. Will I succeed? I could send them a copy of my "novel" and ask them to publish it. Third track, started off with a bit of ominous urban soundscaping, then the piano arrives and it is a David Fincher movie, it is softer, and lovelier. It is not very Canadian. I was once Canadian. I have mentioned this in the past. But there is reason now. It was recently Dominion Day, sorry it was recently Canada Day, and I was displeased at my lack of options here in Westminster for celebrating this monumental occasion. In Detroit it was on Dominion Day that the major fireworks display occurred. We would travel as a family underneath the Detroit river and sit on the Windsor side of the river because there was less likelihood of being murdered in Canada than in the USA and watch the fireworks and have romantic visions of the Viscount Monck and Sir John dancing arm in arm after the establishment of Canada as a sovereign nation in 1867. It must have been romantic. Atom Egoyan could make a film of this, their torrid affair covered up by the history books and Conrad Bain as the Viscount. Conrad Bain could be deceased. Next track, the epic centerpiece of the album. It is ten minutes long. This is reminiscent of the Dustin O'Halloran record that I recently wrote incoherently about. it has less of a classical structure, it is looser, it would fall more soundly in the electronic camp than in the indie classical movement. The air is moved around the room by synthesizers and found sound rather than having a composer move delicately among the spaces in between the molecules. Electronic music even at its tenderest is still an aggressive form, there is little room separating the oscillations and waves and so it acts almost as a glacier would as it carves the landscape all things powerless to resist, mountains of granite, conifer forests, human civilization, all consumed in the frozen wake and similarly all human experience is overwhelmed by the impact of electronic dissonance. Not really, I became lost in metaphor. Instead of a glacier I should have compared it to isostatic rebound after the glaciers have receded. And suddenly the epic movement has ceased. This track begins with samples of a violin being abused? Lovingly. A cello? My ears. For someone with this deep seated attachment to music, it soundtracks everything I do whether it is present in the air or not, I have been blessed with miserable ears. The treated stringed instrument is manipulated forcefully and with grace in a very small space, it feels as if this song was recorded in a very tiny space and squeezed onto this album through some sort of semi-permeable surface to remove the excess filamentous accompaniments and all that is left is minimal brutality. So lovely. The first Deaf center album was also very lovely. It was also wordless. I am not sure that more music should be wordless but possibly more people should be. That is a cruel aside, my apologies. I make apologies to the shadows of former readers who become so disgusted with my lack of artfulness that they vow never to return to the Ron Powlus universe ever again. Has Ron Powlus ever visited this site? Surely he is one for ego-surfing. Would he be disappointed? I am not living up to the legend that he has established. he could be a massive Deaf Center fan. He could take cruises in the Norwegian midnight sun with Owl Splinters on his ipod and ear buds in his ears as he stares out across the deck and admires the beauty of the non-setting sun. Next track, minimal piano, I am fairly certain that I could play this piece. It is an assemblage of five or six notes repeated over and over. This could be soundtrack work, they could compose these records while watching television, this the soundtrack to a particularly dismal financial news report. But are there dismal financial reports in Norway? They have 570 billion dollars. They could retrofit a great number of summer homes with electricity for 570 billion dollars. We could not. My company is receiving stimulus money. We are spending it to alter the environment, to conduct a war on an insect, to pay our employees Davis-Bacon prevailing wages. Next track, samplers and samples of strings placed far out among the celestial objects on the posterior side of the horizon, among Gannyede and Ceres and Iapetus. This could be on the next Voyager mission. It sounds like space traveller music, if I was in a spacecraft hurtling at excessive speed towards another star I might listen to this. I might not. It would be a long journey and I might be alone and this is isolated music, this enhances the feeling of solitude with its elicitation of the womb and rain and our journey from the ocean depths to the tops of expansive mountain ranges. If I was a spaceman I might opt for some Bob Seger. I can't imagine Bob Seger would be a big fan of Deaf Center, I can't visualize him on his deck at his house on Orchard LAke in Michigan blasting the Deaf Center through his speakers that look like stones in the landscape. Last track, Hunted Twice. Refrigerator hummings in opposite channels. Are songs such as this constructed or are they accidentally discovered, as they are tuning up the piano do they simply twist knobs and depress keys and write unknown variances of source code and happen on a lovely bit of melancholy such as this? It seems that there are now manipulated strings in the mix as well, these sounds have a human origin. I am almost certain, again, my ears. There is a metronomic beat on piano keeping time in the foreground, the sound is unfocused and plaintive, pastoral, Norwegian. And then, just now, there is but the metronome and a soft tingling from keys and it gently dissipates into confessional tones.

Oooo! New Beirut has appeared. I don't condone such things. If I would then I should call it really lovely.