The Little Black Egg

She Was So Pretty

2011-12-31T17:40:00.003+01:00

Although it got off to a horrifying start, 2011 ended up treating us pretty well—good enough, in fact, that we're going to indulge in some uncharacteristic optimism. So in a few hours, with a glass of cheap champagne in hand and Dick Clark's slack, dead face on the television, we here at The Little Black Egg will resolve to wriggle like a fucking eel in 2012.

Now, I wanted to talk a little bit about the above 7", which after years of looking I finally scored for a reasonable price. I tend to shy away from collecting olden punk singles for the simple reasons that they are usually extraordinarily expensive, and I am not of the financial posture to drop over a hundred bucks on a piece of plastic. My copy of this thing is pretty ragged, however, and the previous owner appears to have added up a restaurant bill on the back in blue ballpoint pen; thusly, even a miser like me could throw down for it.

Pekinška Patka were one of the first punk bands in Serbia, and were fronted by a high school teacher named Nebojša Čonkić. Their early singles and first album are great—although like too many of their ilk, once money and recognition hit these guys they transformed into something else by their second album (in this case, palatable postpunks). Some people like their postpunk stuff, but as far as I'm concerned, the early singles and 1st LP are what count here. In their prime, Pekinška Patka were catchy playful without being annoying, and their songs are undeniably infectious—they're like the super-fun friend who everyone invites to their parties. Bila je Tako Lijepa was their third single, a cover of a smooth Euro crooner number rendered in frantic basso profundo glory by Čonkić, who has a ridiculous set of pipes. This masterpiece is backed with Buba Rumba, an ersatz-ska number with a weird spoken intro, multiple interjections of "olé," and a brief thrash breakdown. The whole affair is extraordinarily charming.

The thing I really like about this record—and the rest of the pre-81 Patka oeuvre—is how on it is for it's time and place. It's enough to wish that I was in a situation were someone was wondering aloud "Hey I wonder if first-wave Serbian punk was any good" so I could whip this puppy out and be like "Bang fucking bang, the mighty Pekinška Patka! Put this in your ear, son." No one, and I mean no one, did the thing they did any better.

This kind of perfection is part natural skill and craftiness, part cosmic alignment of interplanetary bodies, and while it can't be sustained we live in an age where anyone can get a copy of the document in one form or another. Everything goes downhill eventually, you know? If anything good remains, I think it's a victory over Vishnu in his many-armed universal form.

All Hail the Maharajah

2011-10-30T20:25:00.010+01:00

Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane. To designate the act of manifestation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierophany. [ . . . ] By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself . . . A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable off revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.

—Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane

James Booker was a New Orleans piano prodigy who was difficult to work with, so he ended up playing solo piano gigs. There’s a recording of a solo gig he played realeased as the album Resurrection of the Bayou Maharajah, which is one of the best things ever captured by magnetic tape.

Over two sides, medleys of whatever comes into his head sprawl through a series of unbelievable piano acrobatics, stop for digressions into classical runs, and mutate into paranoid tunes about how the CIA is after everyone. It’s an insane, baroque mess spilling all over the place, an admixture of the history of New Orleans piano as presented by a hierophant whose connections have been swapped and resoldered. By all accounts, Booker was a genius—the liner notes of this album detail an incident when he tells a headlining musician that he’d hit a bum note in his solo, then proceeds to play the headliner’s entire solo from memory, and then play the whole thing again, backwards.

By the time I’d heard of James Booker he was dead and interred, and only crossed paths with his music because one Friday I was walking home from work and I stopped in the liquor store, where I ran into an acquaintance. Actually, that’s too generous a term—I’d met the guy once at a bar. We had mutual friends. He was a writer and from the South and was wearing a cream-colored blazer, which was enough to seem fairly exotic to me at that time. Bleary-eyed, two bottles of gin in hand, he didn’t recognize me when I said hi, but asked me to come back to his apartment and talk about writing—it turned out we lived about 2 blocks from each other.

His apartment was fantastic and there were these plots of dirt out back where he was doing gardening, supposedly, although nothing was growing there. He poured gin into a pint glass and added a splash of soda. I opted for whisky, and was given my own pint. “This is a sipping drink,” he explained.

There wasn’t really much in the apartment except for alcohol, some furniture, and CD racks lining the walls. The guy clearly had money coming in from somewhere, On closer inspection, it was all blues and jazz stuff—a really impressive collection. So we were talking about music for a while, and he knew everything. It was like talking to what’s his face, Alan Lomax. Like a gin-soaked Alan Lomax with a totally dead garden. Our conversation moved to writing, which is always more awkward for me (and I don’t know why, that’s probably something worth examining but who has the time). He was going to be reading some of his stuff later that night, and showed me a really good poem he’d written.

I finally had to go because I had to meet my lady, at which point my host began demanding to know about her. I told him a thing or two—she used to work for the circus, she like experimental theatre, she was from Oakland—and he began scrambling along the CDs, chuckling to himself. “Oh shit my friend, you are in luck, you are gonna get laid tonight friend, oh shit.”

He thrust a copy of Bayou Maharajah in my hand and I crept out the door, shitfaced and happy. He made it clear that this was an important album, and I thanked him and promised to return it, which I never did. I never hung out with the guy again. I have no idea what happened to him.

I was weightless as I climbed up to my fourth-floor walkup. Sarah was eating a Mango and listening to Hot 97, which was the usual Friday routine. I put on the James Booker CD and it unfolded into the room, a weird angular buzzing cloud that that sparkled. We tried to talk about our plans but instead hunched around the apartment singing Boney Maroney. The world was rife with possibility, and we vowed to have great adventures together.

In the weeks to come, that album never left our stereo. We still listen to it all the time—it feels like the apotheosis of New Orleans R&B and about 13 other strains of American music. You can hear the audience on this recording, they’re loving it—Booker had a residency at this club, and I don’t know how this show stacks up to his other performances, but this is the one that got recorded and the one I listened to. It’s still around and still means things, and as long as humanity is still crawling along the face of the earth, it’s still going to resonate within a small circle from one generation to the next.

There are a lot of non-fiction books that trace the origins of cultural phenomena. The root of a certain religious practice, the evolution of political theories, technology. Music fanatics like to trace the pedigree of certain bands or artists. Someone could probably write a tome on James Booker, who seems to effortlessly channel the entire history of New Orleans music. It's hard to articulate what this means to me. I'm reduced to thrusting this album at other people and telling them that it's the real shit. I'm not sure why I can never say why this particular album is important, whenever I try I just feel like I'm somehow pointing my finger at centuries worth of music and saying "it's all that, because of all that."

Also he had an eyepatch with a star on it, which is nothing if not classy.

Nepal Ko Katha Haru - Rai Ko Ris Interview Part 2

2011-09-22T07:35:00.001+02:00

"Mainstreaming is not our concern, that is the agenda of businesses + the elite classes. Protest is our concern, protest not just your own cause, but the cause of all the oppressed, of all the underdogs, of all the people who don't fit in + who don't want to fit into their agenda."

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Ah! I see you have returned, dear readers, to peruse part two of our exclusive interview with Rai Ko Ris! I shall forthwith dispense of the comma-littered editorial nonsense I am known for and get on with it...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The Little Black Egg: How important is the role of the various networks of independent labels, distributors and bands to you? Are they your only connection to the outside community?

Olivier: Yes, for the distribution all over the world of our music and lyrics, the anarcho-d.i.y.-punk network has been the main connection for us. But also zines and individuals we meet here through our gigs or the infoshop. It is the DIY thing.

Sareena: I think for distribution it’s great that we have the network for all the reasons stated before, that it is opposite to the mainstream way of doing things.

TLBE: So you're content with creating music on your own terms?

O: Yes, we are happy the way things are and feel that there are already enough things on our plate. In the DIY sense of it, I don’t think we would be able to deal with much more than we do at present.

S: We were always doing our band our way, despite everything, and other people got interested. That’s how things like releases and interviews happened. These days I can see it’s the opposite. Bands form and release demos in the hope that some foreign d.i.y label will pick 'em up or some western band will do a split with them to give them some kind of status in the international circuit. Isn’t that just the same as being in the mainstream world? That’s fucked up; I never consciously wanted that or pushed for it like I see bands compete for here today.

What I notice now in the younger punk kids is this underlying rivalry about these issues and it makes me sad. Our band, our anger, and our will to not be dictated to by the mass media were all one and the same. We never gave a crap about a record deal to make a name. Course it’s nice, but it shouldn’t be the aim. The aim is to play our hearts out, to keep making this music that we can’t live without because we'd feel lost in this world if we didn't have it. That’s what fuels me. Not the hope that some foreign band or label releases me. That’s just a little cherry on the cake...ha ha...a christmas present when you never celebrated it ever in yer life.

TLBE: You have managed, despite some daunting logistical challenges, to tour a few times. Is touring abroad a positive experience despite all the difficulties?

O: Yep! I love it all, because we meet very inspiring people and learn a lot about how to better organise our struggle from other people's contexts and experiences.

S: Touring can be dangerously addictive; the only thing is I don’t sleep enough on tour which means getting sick fast, and being sick is the one thing I hate the most in the world about being a humanoid in this weak shit body. Touring is extra special if you get along really well as a band and are equally motivated in the same way. That’s the hard part!

TLBE: If somehow you had the money and the time to tour the USA and Europe, would you even want to, or at this point in your lives are you content to avoid all the glitz of the western world? Even for a Yank like myself it’s pretty intense and often overwhelming.

O: Ahahahaha, good point.

S: Ha ha, touring in squats and community run punk collectives is not very glitzy at all! It’s like, vomit for breakfast a lot of times, beer smelling carpets to sleep on, bread and cheese meals everyday....most asian boys would be crying for their mama’s rice and meat. The girls, like me, couldn’t hack going to the toilet without a door on it. However, what we love the most is the total non rockstar way gigs are played, and how we all hang out with the other bands afterwards, sleep on the floor together and queue up for the toilet the next morning smiling shyly at one another. It’s the best, best, best way to do it.

O: It is a bit difficult sometimes in the west to adjust to the way of thinking and eating and dressing. But when we tour, we are always in the anarcho-hardcore-punk context so we feel very good with the people we meet. So, doing 30 gigs in 30 days, driving most of the time and not spending time with active people, I'm not interested in that; but playing music, sharing, taking time to understand where we are and who does what at places we go to, yes, I would tour anywhere.

TLBE: Please tell me why Rai Ko Ris is such a ripping musical force on record.

O: We are a LIVE BAND! To make albums has never been a priority, it’s never been something I particularly enjoyed.

S: I hate recording 'cause I hate having to hear myself after. Musically it’s OK, but the vocals make me wince and i can’t sing to save my life. So I’m not into spending time or energy or money on doing recordings. I once read somebody had written on some discussion group about a song of ours: “the music is great, but I don’t like that guy’s voice”. It was me singing! Ha ha!

O: We just laugh at ourselves because it is something other than what we’ve always been doing (making songs, practicing and putting on d.i.y. shows). I find quite abstract the album thing anyway, I just like to play live, meet people and see other bands and talk together after shows.

TLBE: Please indulge all of us here in radioland who practice home recording; how do you go about putting your records together?

O: We move our equipment from the tiny practice room into the kitchen/living room because it is slightly bigger; we play live exactly like a practice and just turn on whichever recording device we have at the time.

For the 1st and 2nd albums we used a minidisc player with a little stereo condenser mic. For the 4th and 5th, the same mic and our laptop, and whatever simple program we could find 'cause we suck at computers. We usually do 1 to 3 takes of each song and then choose the better version and that’s all.

For song writing, Sareena or I will come up with some rough lyrics about something that we saw or went through, or sometimes heard about, then Sareena will get some chords together. Then we work on everything in the practice room, like arrangements, more lyrics, backing vox, new parts, sound and all.

Sareena mingles with young fans.

TLBE: As a politically active band, you must be very sensitive to the changes that have been sweeping Nepal over the last twenty or so years. Has there been a noticeable increase in the prevalence of foreign (particularly western) corporations in Nepal in recent years?

S: There has been a huge increase in all aspects of life, mainly the crap we’re told to buy.

TLBE: What sort of effect is this increasing commercialization having on the populace?

S: People eat more instant noodles and have tooth decay from sweets and coca cola up in the mid hills. The problem is they don’t have access to health care or money to get rid of the problems that come with such consumption. There are no mechanisms in place for post shock care. That’s just one illustration of this multinational corporation crap.

On another level, there’s this cream called Fair and Lovely for women or Fair and Handsome for men that helps us brown people to become white. It is bleach and probably has cancer as a side effect. Multinational partnership corporations sell this stuff. The same goes for bad (GMO) seeds, pornography, and "rapid development".

TLBE: Is the younger generation buying into what the West is trying to sell? Are there kids all decked out in Nike, eating Kentucky Fried Chicken?

O: Yes, pretty much but it is not only nike or kfc, it is a lot of alcohol and dope and fashion punks; so-called artists, democracy people, peace people, nationalists; thinking well and talking well like in the west but in actuality doing jack shit.

S: Olivier summed it up well. "Democracy = partying = turn your back on the poor = punk = artist = peace = fashion = cops = army".

TLBE: Yes, people love to talk a good game, but when it comes time to pay the postman... Does this make it more difficult for you to try to disseminate your own message?

O: Not really, because we don’t think in terms of a message. We just do things in a certain way; we practice, set up d.i.y. shows, run a small infoshop with activities in our community, and we enjoy all that. Other people can take it or leave it. But it sucks when we do a show and a bunch of dope heads come and think that it is punk to be macho, violent and non political, read “not responsible”.

S: All the bullshit is coming along with all the bullshit. We have to remain positive or we’ll do group suicide. Aghhhhhhhhhhh.

TLBE: While we're on the subject of irresponsibility: I have heard that the World Bank has recently been involved with Nepali affairs. What is your opinion about similar bureaucratic organizations and multinational corporations having such a huge amount of power and influence, but not being accountable in any way for their highly questionable practices?

O: These kinds of organizations seem to be from, by, and for the upper classes, just like governments, armies, banks, and so on. The whole point of making laws, rules and constitutions is only to protect these organizations and ensure that they are not accountable to the masses. So it is like the upper class' safety web: armies protect the money makers and laws protect the armies and then army commanders and law makers get a little share of the cake. We are very pro-association, but not so much pro-Organization.

S: The people are an easy target, because a lot of us don’t know the repercussions of making quick dirty deals. Money is a simple way to make any politician sign a document to rape his own country. That’s the world bank’s talent, the IMF, all profiteers.

Did nobody at World Bank HQ
realize that their logo looks
just like the fucking Death Star?

TLBE: As people who live pretty far off of the beaten path, do you feel that entities such as these are a threat to anyone who may prefer to live independently of any sort of state control?

O: Yes. The upper class people are very, very paranoid and they are the only ones who really know why. Basically, people who want to be rich materially should be free to do it, and those of us who want to do something else with their life should be able to do that as well. But things don’t work this way, based on our experiences and knowledge and what we've seen here during the 11 years of conflict.

S: The multinationals are enemy number one. They are in the food we eat – that’s scary.

O: They are a constant threat to people like us, but we know their weaknesses and can organize accordingly. We waste lot of energy on that but that’s the way it is now. If you live apart from the circle of earning and spending, and you are well and happy, other people get new ideas and start to reinvent themselves. It has a snowball effect where people start to get more together and associate with each other. They form active communities and realise that they don't need to spend 80% of their time earning money.

The problem is that people who want to be rich and stay rich (understand here: to have the power to do what you want when you want) cannot do so without workers: servants, policemen, soldiers, pilots, drivers, cooks, miners, the list is long. So when they start to lose workers they freak out and try by all means to stop the hemorrhaging, forcefully and aggressively if they feel it necessary. They have been doing that for a long time and they know it very well, so well that they have become completely paranoid. They have killed, tortured, exploited and imprisoned so many people for so long that they are shit scared, because they know that they are a tiny minority.

See something, say something. I say mind your own fucking business, pal.

TLBE: Here in Boston, as in all major American cities, our subway has signs and announcements advertising the Department of Homeland Security's “see something, say something” campaign. It basically instructs you to turn anyone you might find suspicious in to the police. And of course, it's totally anonymous...that seems to send a message that is particularly insidious because it exploits people's fears and encourages a constant feeling of distrust. Do you think those in power are intentionally trying to divide communities in order to keep people feeling helpless?

O: These “see something, say something” signs remind me of what was happening here during the conflict, and in a way I find it pathetic and almost funny how desperate, paranoid and aggressive the upper class can be. Now if they were actually so successful, powerful and sure of themselves they wouldn't need all that, so I kind of think that they are themselves in the shit. But really, instead of being divisive, I think they try to get more people on their side by compulsory capitalism: you play the money game or you are a terrorist.

Basically, when people start to have more than what they need, they don’t want to have anything to do with a community because they have more than enough without it, and consequently side with the upper class. So if you are not after profit you are potentially dangerous and/or different.

But the more of them there are the more wealth they need (because these people don’t like to share, that’s basic), so they have to kill, colonize, steal, conquer, exploit and torture. But that makes their enemies (us) more angry and organized, and because they are a tiny minority on the scale of the planet, they are doomed, and the richest ones kind of know that. When I say “enemies” here, it's not because I consider myself as one, but they do so I practice “self defence”.

S: Olivier is very optimistic. I sometimes panic at the thought of ‘doomsday, doomsday’. These people are tearing the world down and taking us down with them. We can only hope to teach our kids self defense, which means ‘don’t buy into this worldview, there’s always another way’. I liked that movie Avatar because it was a simple way to understand the shit that’s happening today for people in the west. I hope people (the masses!) didn’t think it was some fantasy story. It already happened. It’s still happening.

TLBE: What is your advice for all of us who think that shit is fucked up, but there’s nothing they can do to change it?

O: You're not gonna change things on a large scale, but you can change the way you think and act, change youself and realise there are plenty of people like you all around the planet. Don’t fight a ghost with negativity; build something better with positivity and with people who think alike, they are everywhere. And if all the people in your area are really fucked up, move to another place. The world is big and I don’t think there is such a thing as “the place where I belong/my culture/my home/my people/my country; go where you can use yourself best and most positively.

S: There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to live in this present day scenario, it's terrifying! But that’s why the west got it wrong, and they still get it wrong with their statistics and data (e.g about how many millions of people use internet and who’s connected, etc). Balls. There are many different ways to live your life, and many places and different people, and yes, there are people who don’t use the internet. Don’t be afraid to reach out and be with different people, to change yourself. Home is where the heart is; it's about quality of life, not quantity.

TLBE: From the viewpoint of parents, what kind of world do you want your children, and their children, to grow up in? Will sanity, reason, and compassion triumph over the evil forces of doom?

O: Eh eh eh. Well I think that parents suck, you know, this "blood relation" stuff, like people try their best for their family members but they don’t give a damn if somebody is in shit next door. I just hope for everybody to be normal so that everybody can take care of each other without the need to dominate or exploit.

S: I just want them to be strong for what's to come, but to be sensitive so as to appreciate love so that they can share all the positive stuff they have in them.

O: If anything I wish for my kids not to take more than what they need, for their own good.

TLBE: Thank you both so much for taking the time to do this interview. Are there any final thoughts you would like to leave our fine readers with?

O: Whatever I write is only words put together to try and explain things, but I am very crap with thinking and writing...In the end it is really about common sense.

S: I think I’d have been miserable without music, and being able to play it has been pure joy. It’s also an armour that has saved me from being in that rat race. One of our Infoshop activities is that we give free music lessons to some girls from our village (who are considered ‘low caste’ in the fucked up hindu caste system). Music’s been such a nice way to communicate and get to know these young women, and it’s a great joy to see them have a space for themselves to create. For me, that’s challenging the system; that’s punk.

So, friends and well-wishers, while we drink beer in our hip urban pads and accumulate more and more stuff, as we sit on our stylish couches and chat about how much we disagree with the very lifestyle we are living, people like Sareena and Olivier actually get out there and try to do something about it, no matter how minute the returns. This sort of dedication is sorely lacking these days, and it warms my heart to know that there are still real warriors out there, kicking ass and not giving a fuck what you or anyone else thinks.

"Punk rock terrorists are here to stay,
We're gonna blast your heads off with our noise today!"

Rai Ko Ris' band/Infoshop site.

A great old interview, in German. Worth it to translate, almost as good as ours.

Another informative interview from 2003.

Listen?

Listen.

Listen!

Nepali farmers.

Nothing like this in Massachusetts...

Nepal D.I.Y. Punk Kills You: An interview with Rai Ko Ris (Part One)

2011-09-10T07:40:00.001+02:00

I've finally done it! This interview has been a long time coming, and I'm pleased to share its sprawling magnificence with all of you, dear dear readers, in two badly formatted, yet nonetheless special, parts.

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The Himalayan country of Nepal, squeezed between the rapidly developing nations of China and India, home of Everest and the Yeti, was until recently completely cut off from the rest of the world. But hey now, that doesn't mean that it's an uneventful place. Witness the Nepali Royal Family Massacre of 2001, a Hamlet-esque orgy of violence that culminated with the deaths of the King and Queen and seven other relatives at the heavily armed hands of the Prince; experience the horror of the bloody and contentious civil war of '96-'06, which resulted in thousands of deaths, displacements, and general bad feelings; and taste the fury of agrarian society fighting a battle for survival against the dreaded juggernaut of Progress.

It's a hit in my house, anyway.
Fortunately, the ups and downs of this dizzying upheaval have been placed into clear context by the one-hit-kills gut-punching rock unit of Rai Ko Ris. Full time parents, as well as face melting post-anarcho-motorikpunk revolutionaries, Sareena Rai and Olivier Bertin are kind of like the Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Asia, but without the hipster smugness or top ten college rock hits.

Sareena spent her formative years in the U.K. during the Thatcher years, where she was versed equally in punk rock and late 20th century Western consumer culture and its persistent overtones of racism and sexism ("Where do you think you are now? Oh little brown girl so out of town" --On the Bus in the U.K.). In high school, she formed Skinhead Barbie; later, the "canto-punk" duo Bruce Lee.

Finding her way back home to Nepal, she and French expat Olivier created a musical project which was known as Juto, Magic Scooter, Jajarcot Massacre, and finally (kind of) Rai Ko Ris. In addition to self-recording and releasing a multitude of albums under the RKR moniker, they have performed and recorded as the post-riot-grrl thrash punk outfit Tank Girl and reggae/ska saboteurs Naya Faya. They organize and play regular gigs, raise a family, run an infoshop & bookstore, in addition to getting involved with their community in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us cowboys and yahoos. So put down your iPad, set your fucking g.p.s. camera phone to silent, get your thumbs out of your ears and pay attention.

Rai Ko Ris is a really fucking good band.

The Little Black Egg will begin with the most cliched of all music interview questions: What are some bands that have influenced you over the years, both musically and politically?

Olivier: Many, but to name few: the Minutemen, Fugazi, Crass, Inner Terrestrials, Kasi Sayang, Inferno, Kortatu, Frank Zappa, the Krays, Harum Scarum, Ya Basta, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Itsukas Over Disneyland.

Sareena: Politically and socially wise, the consistency of the DC bands and Ian Mckaye and friends’ ethic helps us not to feel on an island alone. Anti Product, Bikini Kill/Le Tigre and all the female bands and musicians that ever blasted away all those long haired metal dudes that i thought were gods when i was a kid – when i discovered The Slits, Thee Headcoats, The Raincoats, Throwing Muses, Babes in Toyland, I was a little bit feeling crap for idolising only male bands for so long. Musically, after my pre-teen metal phase in the 80’s, I liked the grunge era as well as Sonic Youth’s sonic sounds; early R.E.M, all that...Pavement, The Breeders...I love all that stuff and STILL listen to them all...even tho half the tapes are mouldy and squeaking. I have too many bands to mention after this phase...but basically those politically active, anti sexist d.i.y bands put music and politics into perspective for me later. Better late than never.

Himalayan Frostbite 7" back cover

TLBE: What sort of music do you listen to when you finally get to sit down and relax at home? Any bands that you listen to currently that you think deserve wider attention?

O: Lots of different stuff. But nothing beats when I listen to the bands we’ve been sharing the stage with while on tours. One band we haven’t met yet, Itsukas over Disneyland, a band from the Philippines who we have not had the pleasure. Just email pals.

S: Right now I’m listening to Dinosaur Jr. Oops, don’t think they need wider attention! The French band Ya Basta totally gets me going....militant lefty ska punk...inspires me to continue our ska band Naya Faya. I love the guitar playing of Sleater-Kinney...they do twin guitars better than Iron Maiden, so how come they didn’t get as much attention world wide? Steel Pulse. Mmm. Good band. So many bands. When this question comes up i always forget the list that I’ve been making in my head. A guy called Marc who calls himself One Man Nation from Singapore who does noisescapes...he is frightening, he is good. The guitarist of Vialka, Eric is like a guitar/bass hero for me. The drummers of Bhaktapur (medieval town outside Kathmandu)...my drum teachers there are all rockers. Black Sabbath would feel embarrassed in front of them. We both love the bands we met on tour though – Inferno from Rome, Mossuraya are so good – from Switzerland; women in Ze Revengers from France; I’m getting old and I forget everything.

Tank Girl CD Insert.

TLBE: It's sort of comforting to know that such a highly-developed musical entity could exist and even thrive in such an isolated environment. Do you think a lack of outside pressure has allowed you to do your own thing without having to compromise your message?

O: Yes, very much. But also the fact that for us the armed struggle of the farmers here from 1996-2007 was something very, very intense which the band sort of grew up with; a situation where we had to take a stand, especially being in the capital where almost everybody was either against the farmers (who were challenging their capitalists’ heaven) or at best didn’t give a damn about all the atrocities going on all over the country...

S: ...or didn’t go out of their way to find out. Hey, i'm not sure about the 'highly developed musical project' part....ha ha! In the early years we really did try (maybe too hard) to talk a lot about d.i.y and doing things collectively with other bands here, to try to get them doing things on a more socially responsible level, but it backfired on us and other bands thought it all too serious and almost hated us for it. Understandable, because it's alien for young middle class and rich city kids in Kathmandu (or anywhere. kids today...-ed) to want to really take any responsibility. So in that way, we had no scene and felt alone, and despite being alone, we just continued our thing, just the two of us. As a result we might have gained a lot of respect from it in the long run, for sticking to our guns for so long and maybe being the only band in this regard in Nepal.

The first vinyl record ever made in Nepal?

TLBE: Have you received any sort of attention from the "outside world"?

S: It’s hardly attention! One punk or activist person emailing us every three months, one visitor every so often travelling through. It seems, though, that there are more punks travelling than before, and more opportunities to connect because of internet. It's more a case of developing interesting new friendships with similar politics. People are mainly surprised that we exist and do what we do despite our ages! (we’re getting older but scarily more into what we do as it goes).

O: We were invited last year to play in a “sub-culture” festival in Denmark with plane tickets and all expenses paid plus money for the gigs we did. That was quite a surprise, until we found out that one or two people involved in the artistic direction happened to be in the punk scene. We had some internal discussion between both of us whether to do it or not, because it was not really a politically motivated event; but we decided to do it because the people seemed genuine and it gave us a chance to tour rest of Europe after the festival as well. We even had to go on a mainstream tv news program and be interviewed by a leftist newspaper in Denmark...that was weird. Later we went on to tour part of Europe playing in squats and community centres and we were surprised to be so well received and seemed like people kind of appreciate our music and lyrics. They were just as surprised as we were.

S: I’m not so interested in westerners who are just fascinated by brown dudes with Mohicans regurgitating Dead Kennedys or Casualties – brown dudes who don’t really give two shits about the girl raped in their neighborhood. Sometimes the ‘orientalist’ perspective in punk is just a cool photo story to tell fellow western punks back home: ‘hey I went and got trashed with some punks in Kathmandu and heard three different bands in one gig play the same Rancid song over & over’. It's like a postcard of brown people imitating western subculture, like when they see coca cola written in Arabic and want to take the can home as a souvenir. So I’m not surprised by the attention in that touristic way. I’m surprised when people are genuinely liking the music of Rai Ko Ris. That totally surprises me. There are so many good bands in the world.....Punks are everywhere now, like coca cola. But they're different types than us. We aren’t one thing, as you know, just like back home. There are so many assholes in the punk scene, even in Asia, even in Nepal.


"The Relevance of Anarchism"

TLBE: I remember about ten years ago seeing a show at a place called ABC No RIO in New York City. The rest of the kids there were about 14 years old and sloppy drunk on 40oz, shouting for Misfits songs and grabbing the microphone. That's the first memory that popped into my head when you described the state of the scene that has sprung up in Nepal. Is that kind of how it is, sort of an unfocused adolescent rebellion, fueled by violence and alcohol?

O: Yes, like “let's get trashed, fuck everything and have fun”. But we don’t really get carried away thinking about it, we are pretty busy at doing things that matter to us, so we don’t have energy to spend on thinking or criticizing people that are insignificant in their actions. It just gives a bad name to “punk” here, no big deal.

S: I think it’s ok, as long as I’m not there! Ha ha! I think it’s kind of sad that some bands mistake our distance from this aspect of punk as us being elitist or mainstream or something. I just want to say once and for all, getting totally shit faced and swearing really loudly and pushing everyone really hard ‘til they hurt themselves just does not relate to my own personal feelings about what it means for me when I say ‘fuck you, I’m punk and that’s what I am’. But as Olivier kind of states above, there are bigger fish to fry out there in this fucked up world than chaos punks! I wish they’d realize the same when they attack us for avoiding such punk gatherings.

Nepal Ko Katha Haru Lyric Sheet

I’ve been in a beautiful situation where people were drinking but weren’t shit faced; where people were dancing against each other but in this really elated trance that was far from violent; where men and women were jumping together and bodies were touching one another but in a way where girls were not feeling unsure or unsafe – we were all just dancing together to the sounds of a punk band in Denmark. I did not once feel threatened – in fact, two tall women were behind me smiling and were ready to gently push anyone with a smile who might hurt me by mistake. I have yet to experience that again. It’s not quite that here yet. Maybe there’s just too much drugs and alcohol and sexual frustration. In fact, the whole Nepali boys hardcore or punk scene is fuelled probably by sexual frustration. That’s why i don’t blame women for feeling a little scared in it. Probably was the same in the hardcore scene in the 80’s in USA. Did you see any of those documentaries that recently came out about hardcore or punk? A lot of testosterone. That’s what’s being imitated here, but badly. Now there are movies about it, it kind of legitimizes Nepali boys’ punk motivations. I can only speak about all this in my perspective as a girl, a woman. I am not out to judge anybody – just to say how i’ve felt all along and that is why I choose to avoid being in certain scenes or situations.

Internationally, though, we definitely do belong to ‘a scene’ – any old band from anywhere in the world can’t just go touring the punk circuit as you know, unless your politics are halfway right. If they’re not, people in our d.i.y conspiracy pretty quickly will find out that you are just macho or fascist or just spoilt rich brats using this network for a stepping stone to go major. I mean, people ultimately can do what they want and it's fine, but we personally feel comfortable in the underground socio-political music scene as opposed to the other options, and in so doing, we make a lot of like minded friends all across the world through this ‘scene’.

Back of Nepal Ko Katha Haru CD sleeve.

TLBE: Sareena, I understand you spent many of your formative years in an English boarding school. Is that where you were first introduced to punk rock? What sort of reaction did you have to your sudden immersion in western capitalism?

S: We (there were two other Nepali girls with me in the school) thought that white people’s crap never smelled bad like ours did, and that their excrement was white in color too. Ha ha!! Oh capitalism is so widespread, I encountered it way before boarding school – i was actually born in Hong Kong because my father was serving as a mercenary in the British army for many years.

The shocks were more about how people behaved – the culture thing. I stayed with some (white) friends and i saw their parents walk around naked going from one room to another. I was like, yikes, these people don’t know i’m here. But they did. And kids behaved so badly towards elders...no regard. Talked to them like shit. I thought that was weird and scary. People didn’t share their chocolates or chips so easily as we did...i don’t know. We shared answers during exams; cheating was like, no big deal. My white friends never wanted to share info during these times, like they took that stuff so seriously. We didn’t have the attitude, but learnt it as soon as we realised ‘we are on our own in this crazy life’ (that’s what they teach you in school in the west. Not so much here.)

Sareena & fog.

I was lucky, in my teens i went often to meet a cousin brother who was older than me, who was already squatting round London and was an anti war activist in the anarchist circle. (He later wrote books on the Iraq war and about Noam Chomsky’s politics). I went to some demonstrations, saw the activist life in action, saw another life that was hidden from my upright, bourgeois British education: equality of sexes, living alternative to the dictated system. I must have been 16 when my brother blasted Crass’ ‘Beg Your Pardon’ on his LP player. Something shook deep inside of me when i saw him pogo round the tiny squatted living room on his own, jumping wildly while I just sat and nodded my head to the music, thinking what is that? That affected me years later. There was another way to live.

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Thus concludes part one of our exclusive Rai Ko Ris interview. Please return soon for part two, fellows, and you will be informed about all the things that you need to be informed about, forever and ever.

Listen Loudest!: An Interview with Zdenko Franjic

2011-06-04T21:55:00.021+02:00

Dear Reader, as you all know, we here at The Little Black Egg think that punk rock (and other music) from the ex-Yugoslavia is among best stuff ever made. Starting out in 1987, Croatian record label Slusaj Najglasnije! (or Listen Loudest!) documented many of Croatia’s greatest bands, including Madjke, Hali Gali Halid, Satan Panonski, Bambi Molestors, and many others.

Over time, Listen Loudest! evolved, and today releases music from artists the world around. The mastermind behind Listen Loudest, Zdenko Franjic, has been kept his label/life mission together for over thirty years without a break. His Bombardiranje New Yorka album is one of the all-time great punk comps, and has spawned multiple sequels. Zdenko is also a DJ and performer, and has published numerous books.

Hi Zdenko. What are you up to these days?

I just got back from Vinkovci and Novi Sad where I’ve been with my stall with books and my digital records. In Novi Sad we (“Iggy Onemanband and his Harp Explosion” and me as Lutajuci JD Zdena, or “Wanderin’ DJ Zdena) did a show in Nublu cafe/bookstore. Also, I’m preparing a little tour of east and south Serbia and Macedonia and I will play at “InMusic” biggest Croatian festival with my band Babilonci (The Babylonians).

When did you start DJing?

I’m a DJ from the late seventies. I like funky music.

How did you get into singing on top of other songs?

Well, I have been forced to do that. I remained without musicians and I use instrumental music to talk/scream my words over it.

I was reading interviews with you and you mentioned that what got you into music was this guy in your town who dressed all in black and wandered around with a violin, and the neighborhood kids all yelled stuff at him. Is this true? It sounds like Fiddler on the Roof.

My mother bought me a record player and a few records when I was a kid and there was that guy in my village. It was early sixties and he looked like he came from another planet to me. He died a few years later on a railway. A train hit him.

How did you end up gravitating towards rock and punk?

First I started to listen to glam and pub rock music and later came punk and all other kinds of music. I’m listening everything.

What led up to your starting a record label in 1987? Were there a lot of independent labels in Croatia at the time, or was it like just Jugoton, Dallas Records, and you?

I think there was another one in Slovenia, but I’m not sure. I used to mail order records from England and U.S. and I wanted to try to do it by myself. It was difficult of course but I think it’s worth it. Now I’m doing 10 albums a month, but selling is not going very well. : )

Do you find that people keep on discovering the bands on Listen Loudest! year after year? For instance, I know that Satan Panonski and Hali Gali Halid continue to have a cult fanbase in the USA—everyone I play that HGH record for loves it.

Yes, I sell some of my stuff abroad, too. I also have some US bands on my label: The Humpers, The Morlocks, Al Perry, The Suicide Kings, etc.

Satan Panonski and Hali Gali Halid are just the tip of the iceberg because here we have a lot more to offer, not just punk and rock bands, there’re also more progressive and different and great bands and artists.

Was there a reason why Bare didn’t continue with HGH?

Hali Gali Halid started as a joke and Bare’s project. He played all instruments and everything else on that EP. There’s a rumor that Bare will play one gig as “Hali Gali Halid” in the near future. So, who knows, maybe there’re will be a new release too.

Did you get to see Anti-Nowhere League when they recorded their Live in Yugoslavia album? I’ve heard some funny stories about those guys.

Yes, I went to that concert, which was part of a two-day festival in early eighties. Laibach also played on that festival and some other foreign groups. Anti-Nowhere League also made a Return to Yugoslavia album but that one is boring fart.

What was it like organizing a two-day festival during the war?

We were lucky because the guy which run a place where was a concert had a brother which was working at police so we get a permission for concert. At that time (middle of war and bombings of Zagreb) there were no concerts at all.

There are a lot of stories about Satan Panonski: that he killed a guy, he was in the institution, he cut himself when he played shows, he died mysteriously. But when I talk to my friend from Rijeka, who is a writer, he never mentions any of that stuff. Instead, he’s always talking about what great lyrics Satan wrote, and how important they were to him and his friends. Was Satan Pannonian an inspirational figure in Croatia at that time, or was he just seen as a madman, or both?

Satan Panonski was a band and Ivica Culjak was the leader of the band and he made a legend out of himself all by himself and without help of media. We first did his 8 song demo in 1989, and after that an album called Nuklearne olimpijske igre (Nuclear Olympic Games) in 1990. He chose to record for my label because my label gave him all the freedom he wanted.

For me Ivica was a great artist, a renaissance man I can add. He was a painter, a poet, a performer, an actor, he made even his clothes and everything he did with a great perfection.

The songs he did with the band are not his best. His best poems can be found in his book called Prijatelj (A Friend).

Ivica was an inspirational figure for me and a lot of my friends in Croatia and wider. Some saw him as a madman and were afraid of him, and when I sell my stuff at my stall everybody has something to say about him.

Was it hard to get him out to play shows?

No, on contrary, he enjoyed shows very much and there was a show before and after the show because he was also a great entertainer. Recording sessions are also big great fun because of him.

How did people take Satan Panonski’s Kako Je Panker Branio Hrvatsku album? Were people offended by the more nationalist songs, or did it capture the spirit of the times?

Yes, on that album there are two “nationalist” songs which perfectly capture the spirit of the times. He was on a first line of the front during the war, and they played those songs over the radio to his enemies.

Did Satan have a steady band over time, or was it more just random people? I’d read that a couple of his bandmates were killed in the fighting, but I don’t know if that is true or not.

Everyone who knew how to play also know how to play Satan Panonski songs in Vinkovci, his hometown. He never had a steady band and a lot of people played with him so it is possible that some of them were killed in the fighting, or from drug overdose, or from jealous woman etc. : )

How did you begin corresponding with John Trubee? He’s infamous for his song Blind Man’s Penis, and for generally just being a fascinating human.

I met John Trubee through “Real Life (in the Big City)” fanzine from LA. I think John is a great poet and musician. I did his book Electric Prong From Hell.

You’ve got loads of Bombardiranje New Yorka compilations. The first is obviously a super-famous punk compilation that sort of introduced people outside of Croatia to Satan Panonski, Majke, etc. You’ve kept doing them, however, going from vinyl to mp3, and the comps feature more international artists. What kind of stuff are you excited about nowadays?

Yes, I made the first one in 1989. I made a cover from two pictures, one picture of old NYC, and another of a plane dropping bombs from “Search and Destroy” fanzine. I was compiling Volumes 5 and 6 when real bombing was happening in a real NYC. It looked like pictures from a sci-fi movie when I saw it on TV.

Now I’m on Volume 14. The 13th Volume was on a DVD in mp3 format, both audio and video. Over 55 hours of music. Artists from all over the world. I don’t know that anybody ever did such a deed. It is a compilation to listen for a years to come. There was just one review of that compilation by Vladimir Horvat Horvi on Terapija Magazine on the net. I send my stuff to Roctober zine and KZSU radio, and some others, and they review and play my stuff, but nobody noticed or recognized that compilation.

What question do you never get asked during interviews that you wish people asked?

How about “why bother?” Sometimes I feel like a character from a sci-fi novel/movie by Ray Bradbury: Faranheit 451 for sure.

Anything else that you want to say to the people, sir?

All my releases can be downloaded through Soulseek. User name: franticz

So there you have it, readers. Slusaj Najglasnije! is still very much alive and kicking, and you can contact Zdenko directly to order any of the amazing records and books he puts out. There's shirts for sale, there's all kinds of stuff. Go there, fer chrissakes, and get some stuff. You won't be disappointed—there are a million record labels out there, but few present such a solid, unified body of work. It's worth your time.

* * *

Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of "facts" they feel stuffed, but absolutely "brilliant" with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

You Can't Escape Your Biology

2011-05-28T22:38:00.012+02:00

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.

—H.P. Lovecraft

The object of desire, the object which stokes one’s passions and ignites the senses; that which lay at the center of the best time in one’s life. The subject of sighs of regret, memories of one’s halcyon days. The thing you didn’t try hard enough to keep, you fucked up, and now you’re left to contemplate a life of solitude, breathing in and out in a gray and exhausting world that grows dimmer and dimmer until you lay down and die.

In my case, the one that got away was a copy of the soundtrack to the movie Rollerball; it happened last week, and I’m still thinking about it.

Last weekend I flew up to Maine, for a day, because my niece was graduating from college. Also I was thinking, I'm tired of New York, I’m sick of all the garbage I have to wade through here, I hate all the people, I hate all the places, and when I start feeling like this I have to hit the reset button or else I’m going to crawl underneath the furniture and hide for weeks. What could be better than a weekend in sunny Maine, with my niece and nephew and eldest brother and eldest sister-in-law, checking out her cool art stuff and wandering around Portland, which couldn’t be any worse than the other Portland in the Pacific Northwest at the very least.

The other thing was, going to Maine would give me a chance to get on an airplane, which I’m really good at. I’m good at packing just the right amount of stuff, I know which terminal any given airline is in at JFK, I like to wait for things, and I really enjoy sleeping in anything that moves. It turned out that Portland was full of hippies, freezing cold, and it rained all the time.

One thing you should know about me, Dear Reader, is that I have a somewhat difficult time connecting with people. I’m good at being friendly—but secretly, I’m just doing a modified impersonation of David Letterman. I have funny things I say, I prompt people to talk about themselves, and I keep the conversation moving along. But really, it’s all learned behavior. I spent a good chunk of my childhood catching snakes and frogs in the middle of nowhere; with human relations, I am usually vague and distant. I tend to go to shows alone, not socialize, and then just leave, which seems reasonable enough. What am I gonna do, talk to a bunch of people? Jesus.

The point is, I’m good at travel. If I could figure out some way to be mobile and have a tiny income, I’d just go all over the place and never ever stick around anywhere, never have to see the same people and do the same things.

The hotel I was staying in was in the middle of town and was seriously underbooked, with old ornate elevators and the odd Mainer stumbling around. It occurred to me that, just like H.P. Lovecraft sez, you can’t escape your biology. I was soon among my people, drinking beer and listening to my nephew tell a pretty great story, which went like this:

So I was at this fuckin party at this house and the fuckin cops came and I was like oh fuck so I jumped out a second story window and just ate shit and when I stood up and some fuckin kid lands on me, and this fuckin cop shines his, uh, his flashlight at us and was like stand still but I was like fuck that and I fuckin took off into the woods and ran into this tree, but then I got up and no one was around so I went back to see what the fuck was goin on and the cop saw me and was like don’t fuckin move so I started bookin into the woods, runnin into trees, fuckin running through brambles, eatin shit right and left, I lost my fuckin shoes, and the cop was behind me but I jumped a stone wall and tripped and fell into an electrified cow fence which fuckin wrapped all around me and was stuck to my skin and shit so I couldn’t get free, and I was shoeless and gettin fuckin electrocuted, but I heard this fuckin cop and got free and took the fuck off and got home. Then I remembered fuck, I need to find my fuckin shoes.

My niece, meanwhile, has been making hundreds of tiny florescent trees out of paper, and they are fantastic. The motivation behind her art is fantastic. People were bugging out looking at her stuff in the gallery.

The secret plan the whole time I was there, was for me and my brother to go record shopping. Portland has three record stores, and my mind was swimming with the unlimited treasures that might be found. “There’s no way that these lumberjack schmucks understand the potential of the sick-ass vinyl in this town,” I was thinking to myself.

Quietly, my brother and I formulated a plan to sneak away at every opportunity to check out the record stores. It was pouring rain and we had no umbrellas, so we ran giggling from one place to another. He picked up a shitload of Allman brother records, I got the Shangri-Las and a sound effects record. And at one store, which we snuck into 5 minutes before closing. My brother began making a pile of Kansas records, I found a pretty good copy of Metallic K.O. for $4, passed on a totally fucked Bo Diddley record, and out of boredom (while my brother examined the grooves of a Little Feat LP), I started perusing the soundtracks section, and came across the soundtrack to the movie Rollerball.

And I’ll say this right off—if you don’t like this movie, you don't deserve to be human.

James Caan plays the Michael Jordan of a mega-violent futuristic sport designed to control the masses. [GROOVY, right?] The fascist government of this world decides that James Caan is too revolutionary and wields a dangerous amount of power, so they attempt to bring about his demise.

It should be mentioned that the sport of Rollerball is basically a lethal version of roller derby, with motorcycles, and this weird chrome ball that the participants have to throw into a tiny goal.

There is all this really intense classical music, crummy computer fonts from the olden-timey days of Atari and that kind of thing. James Caan revolts, however, and kills everyone else in the game to stick it to the man, a lone gladiator, his future uncertain: will he be liquidated, or will he stride out into the world, triumphant in a pair of tight polyester slacks? You never really know whether Caan will don slacks again at the end, because them’s the brakes when it comes to these kinds of movies, movies where grown men do karate on rollerskates. Why is he fighting? Mostly it seems that it’s because he misses his family, who were forcibly removed or killed or something by the overlords of Rollerball.

There’s no resolution to this; there’s just a bunch of death, which although dramatically unsatisfying is true to life. Individually we’re just these bags of cells and fluid that run down and die.

So I was in the store, looking at this copy of the Rollerball soundtrack, priced at $5, it was pouring rain, and for some reason I didn’t want to get it. I really should have; granted, I was a little low on cash, but I’d set aside some folding money for the trip. I was either going to get this record, or later, get drinks in the lounge on the roof of the hotel, which looked creepy and isolated.

I said to Scott, “I want to buy this record, but I also want to have drinks in the hotel lounge because it will be like the Shining.”

“There’s some beer in our dad’s room,” he said.

“Stealing beer from dad is not like the Shining AT ALL,” I said.

“Dude, get the Rollerball soundtrack. That movie is awesome.”

I should mention that my brother gave me all sorts of music on tape as a kid, lots of mixes or just tapes of Beatles albums. His beat-to-shit copy of the Rollin Stones’ Get Your Ya-Yas Out was one of my favorite tapes when I was a little kid; it played too slow and was muddy and stretchy and distorted, like it was coming from a reversed magnetic death planet far off in the cosmos. I was disappointed when I heard how the record was supposed to sound. My brother once built me a bicycle from spare parts (he’s amazing at building and fixing bikes), when I could barely walk I watched him make a giant rabbit out of snow. He trained his dog to fetch anything. He can basically conjure wonder out of random materials; I took a very different path in life, where I am always hunched over paragraphs of text both at work and at home, worrying about copyediting and proofreading, making sure that paragraphs are kerned correctly, poring over typesetting specs, and in general just destroying my vision. I think about fonts. There was a time, though, when I was a little kid, watching a wobbly video of Rollerball in my parents’ living room, and thinking about how the future was doomed. It was just going to be ominous electronic music and people in spiked gloves smashing each other in the face, or something. My future was definitely doomed. I was always sure of this.

“Forget it, man. Do I really need the Rollerball soundtrack? I have so much stuff I don’t need.”

We had to get back to the hotel. The rest of the day passed. There was graduation, I shot the shit with my parents, hung out with my niece and nephew, and ate horrible pizza. Back at the hotel, by myself, I packed my luggage and sat on the bed, exhausted.

I’m terrible at going to sleep anywhere which isn't a moving vehicle. Once I’m asleep, I’ll sleep forever, but getting there is impossible. Anxieties eat at me all the time. I worry about death. Sometimes I read about totalitarianism when I need to sleep, and I had a Victor Serge novel with me for just that purpose, but I felt disgusted by looking at all the letters all lined up. I know that language is supposed to be the force that gives me meaning, but sometimes it just gives me a headache and makes me nervous. The words don’t always cooperate. The room had a TV, but I'm not really a huge TV fan.

I crept upstairs to the bar and got a drink and sat at a table near the window so I could look over the city, which spread out indeterminately below. Somehow, it was still raining, so everything was blurry. I had to get up in four hours to fly back to NYC and go right back to work, and then I had other writing projects, and I was supposed to edit something. I'd barely slept. I wish I’d gotten that Rollerball soundtrack so I could go home and put it on the turntable and turn it up, really loud, and maybe then I could drift off to sleep. I was exhausted.

Crusty Love

2011-05-17T06:33:00.018+02:00

I once worked with a Crust Punk. He always seemed to be suffering from some sort of phlegmatic malaise, which was undoubtedly attributable, at least in part, to his wretched personal hygiene. Then suddenly he's not at work for a couple days, then a week, and people start to ask, "where's that crusty guy?" Well, it turns out he'd contracted Legionnaire's disease! Punk fucking rock!

Legionnaire's Disease in Action

I'm not sure if my crusty former co-worker lived the whole squatting, train-hopping lifestyle, but all outside appearances indicated that he either had in the past or soon intended to. Like the group of transient Crusties who camped out on a corner adjacent to a liquor store where I once worked, fresh off the boxcar from Portland or Olympia or some other dreary NorthWestern heroin town, looking to, I don't know, stop war by getting drunk on malt liquor. I didn't really have any objection to their presence, or their putrid dog that was always getting up in my junk; it didn't even bother me that they asked for change every single time I walked by, even though they knew I knew they were going to take my money to my liquor store and buy some more Steel Reserve to drink at a filthy squat. One of the girls in the crew had her entire nose tattooed green.

I suppose I'd lived sort of a Crust lifestyle in the past, but with no acknowledgement of the music or the politics or the veganism. And instead of living on the streets and partying till I puked blood every night, I was attending an infamous art college and partying till I puked blood every night. I did play in an offensively named punk rock band, though, and I was all aboard with the minimalistic hygiene practices. But I got older, and the acne became unmanageable.

Don't get me wrong; I'm glad these people, these "crusty" people, exist. If only I'd been turned on to Amebix when I was 18 instead of 28, things may have turned out differently. I could have contracted Legionnaire's disease, gotten my nose tattooed, and rocked my teets off to countless face-smashing bands nation-and-world-wide. Instead, I followed the twin lures of the warehousing industry and crippling social anxiety.

So where is this all leading, you ask? Well, in my investigation of the crust phenomenon, I came across some recordings that have fulfilled some primal music-nerd cravings deep within, and I have to make sure the whole world hears my opinion and agrees with me.

Now a disclaimer: I'm not an expert on Crust music, so I'm not going to pretend that these records are representative of the genre as a whole (or at all). They're just a few that I have been fortunate enough to stumble across in my blind bumbling spelunk thru the caves of madness.

Salpetriere - L'etre / Le Neant
These gentlemen and one lady are Russian, and I know almost nothing about them except that they're fantastic. They brood, they build, they thrash, they explode! The Muscovites call it emo, probably due to the lyrics, because musically this isn't in the same time zone as the emo we know here in AmeriKKKa. I suppose in Russia including melodic passages and memorable hooks in a hardcore/crust context means you're a pussy. This too-brief 7" is a masterpiece of mid-fi production, five nearly perfect rainy-day hardcore anthems to glare menacingly at strangers to. The members of this band are also members of many other bands of varying repute among the young cheloveks. Buy it, it's cheap!

e123 - demo

From Kirov, Russia. Two vocalists: low growler, high screamer; the Cookie Monster/Skeletor pairing so prevalent in extreme metal. Punishing instrumental attack and more Russian lyrics that I don't understand. But man, these fellas can stop on a dime and kick out a killer groove when properly motivated. I wasn't really a fan of this type of music until I heard these guys. An added bonus appears between a couple of songs in the form of some sampled movie dialogue (e.g. Apocalypse Now, Fight Club) in the background followed by what I imagine is translation into the Russian by a band member or well-wisher. They encourage you to download it for free, and I recommend you fucking pay heed.

Alpinist - Minus.Mensch

My favorite type of cheese is muenster, and Alpinist is from Munster, Germany. So already by association Alpinist is destined to become my favorite post-dark-hardcore-crust band from Germany. This record sounds fantastic, friends, an immaculately recorded, churning stew of blastbeats, pick dives, harrowing vocals, with plenty of breakdowns perfect for picking up change. I don't have enough of a frame of reference to compare it to anything, but I'd shoot it out there that they sound kind of like the better tracks in Converge's early repertoire. Because, you know, I once owned a Converge album, as anyone who lived next to me sophomore year in college could tell you. I don't listen to Converge anymore, but I do listen to Alpinist, like, a lot. Just go to their myspace page and see for yourself.

Death Dust Extractor - Slay Your Masters Or Slave In Chains

Holy shit from Japan! More frenetic mayhem for people who like Lip Cream and amplified vacuum cleaners, guaranteed to alienate your square neighbors. 9 speedy, spiky, all-conquering tracks in under 15 skuzzy no-fi minutes. I don't have to say anymore about this, other than it's fucking awesome and you need it, now.

Maybe there will be part 2 sometime.

—mk

Black Stalin

2011-05-01T00:18:00.003+02:00

Since we here at The Little Black Egg live in a Carribean neighborhood, we're doing our best to learn about music from that part of the world. And while we have only just begun acquainting ourselves with Calypso and Soca stuff, we are pretty sure that no one has a cooler name than Black Stalin. The question is, can we option the movie rights to this guy's name?

Mr. Dr.

2011-04-21T08:26:00.010+02:00

How is it possible I've lived this long and never heard the Suicide Commandos' 1977 meunsterwerk "Make A Record?" It's a fact; I've managed to remain incognizant of this tasty slice of punchy guitar riffage for all these years, and I think it's safe to say that I have squandered my entire life up until this day. So it is thus, upon emerging from the murk of this fece-encrusted rat hole i once called existence, I peer pusillanimously at the new musical landscape that is stretched out before me and mutter to my trembling self, "I'm pretty sure Rick had this record in college and that fucker never played it for me." Beautiful Day of Discovery!

So here's what's between the hot-dog buns:

-Spastically limber-limbed drumming that drives the point into your brittle bones. What's that point, you ask? That's right, pal: Rock 'n' Roll.

-Slash-and-buzz guitar that's all up in your business one minute, then out front mowing the lawn the next, then before you know it it's right back in your face asking for some money to buy some more riffs. And you know you're gonna dig back into your wallet because you just love those wiry fucking hooks, you want more and more, but then the record ends you're left wallowing in your misery once again.

-A fantastic frontman, like a Richard (Hell) Meyers who never got involved with Tom (Verlaine) Miller and all that French Literature.

Whereas contemporaries the Sex Pistols inhabited a world of blues progressions and bondage pants, The Commandos relied on their fantastic chops and frantic, catchy tunes. And all these years later that stupid no-talent fool John Simon Ritchie is splattered all over t-shirts at the mall, while top notch Commandos guitarist Chris Osgood (not the NHL goaltender) is left to play minstrel music at Republican Political gatherings. But I suppose that's how things shake out in the rough and tumble world of professional record-making.

This one is a Top Fucking Pick! I'm Serious! Check out the lurching, woozy "Burn it Down," which no doubt got some needle time on the turntables of Clint Conley and Roger Miller.

--mk

Oh Joyous Funeral

2011-04-16T22:26:00.002+02:00

Here is the Sandy Lopicic Orkestar:

Probably the best song about killing a spouse, really.

The Charismatic Croatian Caliphate of Crazed Caprice

2011-04-16T18:09:00.014+02:00

Dear Reader, throw all that Erkin Koray shit out the window because the future of Turkish music is here, and it's from Croatia in 1991. That's the year that the Slusaj Najglasnije! (or "Listen Loudest!") label released the Vo-zdra EP by Hali Gali Halid, AKA a Mr. Goran Bare from Vinckovci, Croatia.

Now I first came across Hali Gali Halid courtesy of the excellent (if now-defunct) Static Party blog. Hali Gali Halid was the brain child of Croatian RNR mench Goran Bare, frontman/mastermind of Majke and all-around debonaire man-about-town. When Majke went on hiatus, Bare formed Hali Gali Halid to make fun of the Turkish pop craze sweeping Croatia.

This shit is far out. Honestly though, this is more than the sum of its parts, and its parts are fucking awesome. Besides Vo-zdra, there is a Hali Gali Halid tape floating around, which is a little rougher around the edges and sick as hell. Nothing else sounds like this—I crawl through dusty boxes of vinyl and around the internets and through estate sales like some cruddy Count of Monte Cristo looking for audio splendor that will help me exact my revenge on boredom and the dull etceteras of virtually everything, and then suddenly here it is, 20 years old and with cheerful cover art of a rocket ship flying through eyes. I know that this is supposed to be a satirical album, but I don't know enough to get the joke and I can't speak the language, but I know a thing or two about a thing or two and this thing is killer.

Hali Gali Halid lasted for a couple of years and then fell apart, Majke started back up and that was that. Luckily, the tape was rolling when these guys were kicking it.

Cella Dwellas - Dungeon Master Hip Hop

2011-01-27T03:46:00.003+01:00

One of the MCs in this fantastic duo is named Phantasm the Tall Man. 'Nuff said!

These guys also wrote (probably) the only rap song that describes the entire plot of the 1979 Walter Hill film "The Warriors":

--mk

Hockey Mustache Gallery

2011-01-25T07:27:00.016+01:00

Garth Boesch, perhaps the first Hockey Mustache

Dave Tippett

"Broad Street Bully" Dave Schultz

Paul MacLean

Dennis Maruk sporting some fine handlebars

Rod Langway

Cult hero Harold Snepsts

Wendel Clark

And the all-time hockey mustache king, Lanny McDonald

--mk

The Irrepressible Album Art of No Limit Records

2011-01-22T19:54:00.059+01:00

In the world of late-1990s rap music, few figures could boast the success and popularity of Percy Miller, a.k.a. Master P. The New Orleans native began small, running his fledgling No Limit Records label out of a San Francisco suburb. Soon afterwards he formed a group called Tru with his brothers Silkk the Shocker and C-Murder, and behold, a new force in urban music began to crystallize. After a move back to the Big Easy his empire began to enjoy amazing success that was no doubt helped by a sweet distribution deal with Priority Records (home of N.W.A. and the Geto Boys, among others). By the end of the millennium, Miller and his stable of No Limit soldiers were on top of the rap world, with multiple gold and platinum records and Billboard #1 hits to their credit. The label also moved into the film world, with theatrical releases such as 1998‘s “I Got the Hook Up” and 1999's “Foolish” starring Eddie Griffin. This success led Master P to focus his attentions on many non-label related pursuits, including an attempt to play in the NBA and appearances in professional wrestling shows. Perhaps due to these larks and a great many lawsuits brought against the label by former artists, No Limit began a precipitous decline that ended in bankruptcy in 2003.

Master P lugs the rock upcourt in a 1999 preseason game.

During Master P's heyday, I was employed at a small used cd store that had a pretty lackluster rap section. Unless you were a fan of No Limit Records, that is. The label was very well represented in the dusty old bins; everything from The West Coast Bad Boyz "High fo Xmas" to Snoop Dogg’s “No Limit Top Dogg” came and went through the shop. Now, anyone familiar with these records can attest that most were pretty much by-the-numbers gang-banger jamz that stuck to a rigid formula of chintzy beats, thug posturing, and hooks you‘d swear you've heard before. Not exactly ground-breaking, but pretty indicative of the state of rap music at the time. But the sounds on the disc were secondary to the mind-melting packaging (courtesy of Houston-based design company Pen & Pixel), which, along with the similarly packaged Cash Money Records, blurred the distinction between rap music-as-art-form to rap music-as-product.

You see, each No Limit release burst forth in a cardboard and plastic digipak that featured some of the most comically garish and over the top photoshopping you could possibly imagine, each using a combination of any number of gangsta cliches haphazardly layered all over the package. These themes involved, mainly: 1. bling (gold, diamonds, cash, often adorning giant hands reaching out to you); 2. tricked out rides with gold rims (from Lexuses to Hummers to tanks); 3. mansions/mausoleums; 4. rappers making their most menacing thug faces; 5. booty babes, and 6. long lists of guest stars. But the fun didn’t stop at the covers, no sir! The innards were bursting with advertisements for upcoming No Limit product, and these ads oftentimes one-upped the cover art in terms of diamond-crusted ghetto ridiculousness. For a while, these albums were being churned out at a fantastic pace, as the bargain basement productions (by the aptly named in-house team Beats By The Pound) guaranteed that Master P’s “quantity over quality” ethos would result in maximum profits for him, if not necessarily for his artists.

Now, back in my record store days, I was appalled by the rampant glamorization of thug life that I saw reflected in these album covers. But with the benefit of hindsight, I believe the folks at Pen & Pixel were actually completely aware of what they were doing, and were just having fun with the whole operation. I imagine there were in-house competitions between the designers, each trying to outdo the others in terms of sheer orgiastic excess. I can’t say the same for many of the rappers themselves, as they seemed to be completely incapable of self-parody and were probably stone cold serious about how “thug” they were (witness C-Murder’s not so shocking 2002 c-murder of a 16-year-old fan).

Following is a compendium of some of my favorite No Limit album covers, and some brief thoughts on each. Enjoy!

Note the No Limit Platinum card he's using, ostensibly to buy the classical ruins in the background. But this begs the question, what are his monthly payments gonna be like? Does the Bank of No Limit offer a debit card? As you can see, some of these covers reveal more questions than answers.

I don't know what the fuck is going on here, what with the the huge hands and the desecration of the graves in front of the American flag, but his face is telling me in no uncertain terms that he's pretty disgusted with the whole situation.

This one is an all-time favorite: camouflage-clad tykes busting out through a wall of toys and fire. It's notable as one of the very few (perhaps only) No Limit titles that did not feature a parental advisory sticker. Just a seven-and-nine year old telling tales of 'hood survival in their adorable widdle voices.

Here's the impresario himself, showing off his sweet cell phone and gold rims, and offering YOU a little taste of his fabulous... ice cream?

This one's got all the elements for success, including a continuation of the hubcap fixation, a big ass in a g-string, and a dude talking on a huge cell phone.

Another favorite, this one dispenses with all the bullshit and shows you that this guy not only has heaps of cash, a huge chateau, and a sweet ride, but ACTUALLY OWNS THE WORLD, which he keeps safe in a giant golden chalice in his driveway.

It may be difficult to make out, but this album is called "My Balls and My Word." I don't know what that's supposed to mean, but I'm sure that Young Bleed doesn't fucking care because he has a mansion in the clouds with a golden staircase protected by two bengal tigers. To top it all off, his music is actually really great...go figure.

This one certainly lives up to its name, as it features none of the No Limit trademarks save the screwed-up gangsta pout, but there's something very refreshing about its simplicity. Also, it seems to imply that jigsaw puzzles are unpredictable, which is a bold statement. Maybe someone took one piece out of the box but didn't tell Mystikal. Yeah, that's probably it.

This one speaks for itself. What it's trying to say, though, I'm not quite sure. Are Steady Mobb'n benevolent angels, ushering this poor dead homey to Thug Heaven? Or are they at the scene of their own murder? If so, why is there only one body? Is the other guy behind the fire truck?

There's so much going on here (Tanks! Jets! Explosions!) that you'd think it would inspire more of an emotional response from Slim. Instead it looks like somebody just asked him how his dinner at Applebee's was.

Here's another one that bucks the No Limit formula, with no bling or rims, just Silkk crawling out of an old shitty television, "Videodrome" style. Shocking us with stark imagery!

I like the fact that their names are written over their ski masks, so you can tell who's who. Also notice the "Best Buy! More For Your Money!" disclaimer. I wonder how many filler tracks and guest rappers that pallet of money behind them could buy?

Even Snoop got in on the action, and it looks like he was amply rewarded with a castle called "Snoop World" and a diamond studded muzzle for one of his rottweilers.

The No Limit packaging also inspired many parodies, the most well-known being Kool Keith alter-ego Dr. Dooom's "First Come, First Served":

Thanks for joining me on my journey through the fantabulous world of No Limit album art!

P.S. - This one isn't a No Limit record, but it is quite possibly the single finest piece of work Pen & Pixel has ever produced:

Look at this one really closely and you will uncover a world of untold riches! Thanks to Rick & Sarah for calling this to my attention. Read a very perceptive review of this album here.

Also, check out this inside look at Pen & Pixel Studios by British comedian Louis Theroux:

--mk

CHELSEA WOLFE - Ἀποκάλυψις

2011-01-22T07:47:00.009+01:00

CHELSEA WOLFE - Ἀποκάλυψις

The current musical landscape is littered with bands, duos, etc that are sucking on the shriveled up teats of the 80s/90s goth crossover/shoegaze-craze, as if they were the first to discover the Jesus & Mary Chain and reverb. Unfortunately, most of the original wave of these frumpy downcasts produced the same boring turds over and over again until the NME found something else to rub their dicks all over. Now I'm not saying that these bands weren't doing something cool and artistically viable, it's just that the course was run when it was run and rehashing the same fucking Cocteau Twins cliches over and over and over became stale and predictable. That's what happens in the world of popular music; that's why musicians are forced to try to reinvent the rock and roll wheel every half decade or so. See, in 2006, everybody was into this guy named Neil Young (ever heard of him?) and cranking out mushy meandering guitar pabulum at a fantastic clip. Each review I read cited "Harvest," and the "hypnotic krautrock rhythms," and other such hogwash. But fuck, that was like a million years ago! Wooden Shjips? Who?

Well, it's time to move ahead! By going backwards! The eighties/nineties are the new sixties/seventies; now it's all echoey percussion, nonexistent songwriting, and vocals awash in reverb (better to disguise vocalists who didn't bother to learn how to sing). This stuff cannot even be considered in the style/substance debate; most of it contains neither. And for fuck's sake, don't get me started on the cover "art"... I'm old enough remember the eighties, and they weren't that great. All this fetishization of New Wave (cold wave, Cold Cave) is rather disturbing. I know rock music has never really been a bastion of originality, but c'mon, it doesn't seem like anyone's even trying anymore. But what's this? Here to rescue me from this white (brown?) water rafting trip down the river of turds is a lady named Chelsea Wolfe, whose underexposed Ἀποκάλυψις (Apocalypse) serves as a reminder that not all music that looks to the past has to be shamelessly derivative and numbingly dull. It's like Ms. Wolfe actually paid some heed to carving her own unique niche among her lesser-inspired peer group, and in the process crafted a record that outstrips all of these floor-looking echo-happy posers. It's rather refreshing to hear some guts splayed all over a recording as opposed to the bloodless douchebaggery that so often these days passes for music.

So first off, Wolfe can sing. Wow! She's got many of the same influences as her peers: some yearning Elizabeth Fraser /Hope Sandoval-y vocalese, and an oft-doomy backing group that at times mines the spare, visceral "Dry" era rhythm section of PJ Harvey. But unlike many of the bands that follow a similar path, Wolfe's got a heck of a talent for composition. These tracks don't simply ape their influences; they take the basic framework and re-kajigger them into something that sounds fresh and thrilling ("Movie Screen", "Pale on Pale"). I suppose you could compare her to contemporaries such as Zola Jesus and Marissa Nadler (both of whom, for the record, I like just fine) but I frankly don't think they're in the same league. This is mostly due to the arrangements and playing, which are fucking ace. Ace! It's slow and sludgy at times, a terrifically desolate glacier of impending dread, and at others lilting and uplifting in a bleary-eyed kind of way that makes you want to stare at the sun until your eyes burn out of your head, loving every second of the sweet searing pain. Some people call her "goth" but those people are dicks. This shit may be prime depresso-snowdrift music, but calling it goth is doing it a horrible disservice. The bloodcurdling screams she lets loose at the end of "Pale on Pale" would scare the pantaloons off of all the jerks who are boringly recreating Siouxsie for the new uninformed generation (what's with these fucking kids these days?!)

OK, so the record drags in places ("The Wasteland," "Mer" ) but even these not-so-awesome tracks contain some interesting instrumentation, and you forget all that when songs such as "Moses" and "Friedrichshain" jump up and rip your face off. She's got another album I haven't heard, but rest assured I'll be hearing it as soon as fucking possible. "Apocalypse" is prime winter headphone fare, perfect for this unceasingly snowy winter Fan-fucking-tastic!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And an awesome album cover to boot.

Büdösök Kills, Eats

2011-01-12T03:07:00.005+01:00

As far as I'm concerned, Büdösök is the greatest thing to come out of Europe since defenestration (and/or Tesco brand beer). If you peer into the background at 3:08, you can see me hunched over and lurking.

More about Büdösök here.

Tyvek: Nothing Fits

2011-01-08T21:27:00.013+01:00

I liked all the previous Tyvek stuff a lot, but when I put this platter on the turntable a bunch of exclamation points appeared over my head and I hollered “Gadzooks!” I didn’t even know what side I was listening to because the record didn’t have a sticker on it. "4312” kicks off side 1 and it’s sick, the first chord hits and it's a brushback pitch so pay attention. The guitars sound like crummy magnetized metal hulks grinding together; I'm guessing that someone took a soldering iron and circuitbent Detroit’s municipal power grid to get this tone. Unlike some of today's rickety garage/punk/moustachekrieg/etcetera breed that use noise and shitty recording techniques to obscure what's going on, the lo-res sonic maelstrom on Nothing Fits is on-point and ecstatic, catchy without being poppy or pedantic or anything.

Tyvek writes brilliant songs that don’t go where I think they’re going to, except sometimes they do which is weirdly comforting. Have you ever had really strong déjà vu and felt creepy but in a good way? “Kid Tut” and “This One or That One” offa side 2 sound really familiar, like I’ve heard them before but I know that I haven’t because if I had I would have taken out a post-it note and borrowed a pen and said “what band is playing this song, let me write it down and stick it to my refrigerator or somewhere that I’m bound to see it tomorrow morning when I wake up, this way I can go to the record shoppe and throw some cash down on the counter and say ‘sirs please provide me with the newest record by the band written on this post-it note I have taken out of my pocket and handed to you, I need to change my life and start doing things differently right now.’” Finally someone put the first couple Meat Puppets records in the cyclotron along with the Swell Maps' Jane From Occupied Europe and hit the button that will make them smash together. Now we're in the future.

These are tunes that aren't going away, like that fucking monolith in 2001. Frankly, this album crushes heads with a human femur. It's a step forward for the human race.

(Also, “Frustration Rock” is still the jam.)

Index - S/T (1967)

2011-01-03T07:22:00.008+01:00

There are a lot of people out there, living in the periphery, who make it their lifetime goal to hype mediocre garage-and-psych-era albums. I've heard countless records that have been touted as "mind blowing", "fuzz monsters", or "lost/undiscovered classics", only to discover that in actuality they are nothing more than a third-tier Jefferson Airplane knockoff or some such. It seems psych collectors fall into two categories when it comes to overrating these "legendary" slabs of rare wax; the first is the collector who found a completely unremarkable record that just so happens to be rather rare, so he will hype it up in hopes of jacking up the price among other collectors; and there are those who automatically love anything that is obscure, regardless of any musical merit. The latter I can forgive, because genuine enthusiasm, even in the service of God-awful music, is still genuine. The former, on the other hand, are the scum of the earth, and should have their records confiscated and be forced to listen to the most bombastic Broadway show tunes for the rest of their miserable days.

Rarely, though, the raves turn out to be justified. Index, the 1967 self-titled debut from a group of young Michiganders, is one such album. Opening with a strange intro about flying over the plaza de toro in a helicopter, complete with cries of "ole!", the band proceed to ease into a fantastically dark surf rock rendition of the Byrds' Eight Miles High. The whole album continues in a similar vein, seething with a sick desperation, cavernous reverb, snaky guitar lines and sad-sack lyrical content. It's fantastically minimalist, starkly atmospheric, and sprinkled with some truly ferocious guitar work (see the storming surf workout "Shock Wave" and the frenetic closer "Feedback"). I see similarities between this record and the legendary Gandalf album on Capitol, in that both contain a bunch of covers that take the originals and stamp them indelibly with a whole new personality. The lack of major label resources actually benefits the Index recordings greatly, giving them a gritty sound that has the feel of being produced in a dungeon. Anyone interested in garage rock should be forced to listen to this, as should every skinny-jeans wearing Pitchfork.com devotee out there. There are a million bands in Brooklyn today that would trade in their beards to be able to sound like this, which makes it even more astonishing that this record was recorded over forty years ago.

Check it out here, as the limited vinyl reissue on Valord is already becoming pretty scarce.

The Compelling Saga of Jon Hess - Master Of S.A.F.T.A.!

2011-01-03T06:54:00.009+01:00

(Originally published on 10.25.2007 on my defunct "Danger is my Beer" blog.)

"There Are No Rules!" was an early catchphrase of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. At the core a misguided attempt to hook into the "Faces of Death" crowd, the founders of the UFC could never have envisioned the media juggernaut that the sport would eventually become. Originally a real-life Bloodsport, the first few events featured an 8-man single elimination tournament, pitting practitioners of many different styles against each other to see which martial arts was the "best of the best!" This was also before weight classes were introduced, best illustrated by a UFC 3 matchup between 600-lb Emmanuel Yarborough and 200-lb Keith Hackney. The similarities to Jean-Claude Van Damme's "underground death fight" genre flicks (Bloodsport, Kickboxer, Lionheart, etc.) were particularly "striking". But let's put the joking aside. We're here to talk about Jon Hess.

Hess first became interested in the budding world of mixed martial arts after witnessing UFC 4, which he "thought was a joke". He took aim specifically at legendary Brazilian jiu-jitsu master Royce Gracie, whom he said he "could defeat very easily."

Mr Hess came to UFC 5 billed as a practitioner AND co-founder of a martial art called S.A.F.T.A., a wonderful acronym for "Scientific Aggressive Fighting Technologies of America." Now anyone who has seen either of Jon Hess's two professional fights can attest that there is nothing Scientific about S.A.F.T.A., nor does Technology play any part in said style. Take a look-see at Lew Hicks, co-founder, in action:

Hess's first fight was a true battle of the titans, as he took on Andy "The Hammer" Anderson, who, in addition to owning a string of totally nude steak houses in Texas, is also remembered as wearing the most memorable outfit in UFC history, complete with spaghetti straps and vertical striped pants. He was billed as being 86-0 in "bare knuckle challenges", with ALL 86 WINS BY KNOCKOUT! What a fearsome competitor!

In the end, though, Andy Anderson and his moustache were no match for the 6'7" 295 pound Hess and his inimitable fighting style, which included head stomping, eye gouging, and various other Aggressive techniques that resulted in many fines for our hero. After this fight, Big Jon withdrew from the tournament due to a fractured hand, which, combined with his unspeakable savagery, landed him on the UFC's blacklist. Sadly, this would be the last time we would see S.A.F.T.A. in action. Or would it?

Fourteen months later, Hess received a challenge to fight in the Superbrawl 2 event from someone calling himself simply Victor, who claimed to be the brother of Royce Gracie. Despite being overweight and undertrained, Hess bravely accepted this challenge and was summarily destroyed in 12 seconds by one Vitor Belfort who, at the time, was one of the best fighters in the sport:

Vitor Belfort vs John Hess

Hess suffered a concussion in the bout, and has not fought since. This has not stopped him from calling out superior fighters, though, as illustrated in this 2005 interview with Sherdog.com.

Thousands of people (including myself) are still awaiting Jon Hess's return to the fight world. Yet as each day goes by, the chances of seeing Mr. Hess and S.A.F.T.A. again grow slimmer as Hess the man grows fatter and more obscure. A true American Hero, let's do our part to put Jon Hess in the spotlight once again!

--(mk)

HESS UPDATE!!!!

There is news that Big Jon has been surreptitiously slinking his way back into the world of professional fighting! It seems that the first posting of this article in 2007 stirred Hess into a comeback attempt, but he has been derailed multiple times by injuries. He has, however, become a successful cornerman for various Team Quest fighters (Randy Couture's camp), so there is further hope that S.A.F.T.A. will soon come roaring back with the same ferocity as the merciless pummeling of Andy Anderson!

Civil Defense: Mysterious Face of Russian Punk

2011-01-02T17:31:00.009+01:00

A brief note from the Editor: Happy New Year, Dear Reader. In the spirit of new beginnings, we here at The Little Black Egg have decided to add another contributor to our storied bullpen of writing talent. Thusly, I would like to introduce you all to Matt K., an old and dear friend of mine who knows more about music than anyone I know and once had a leather jacket that said “Danger Is My Beer” across the back. We are very proud to have recruited Matty to write for our humble publication, and I’m sure you will all hang on his every word. In addition, Matty and I will be introducing full on reviews to The Little Black Egg, which we think will compliment the usual discursive essay-spews that you all love. And now, Matty:

A few years back, a friend of mine was living in Eastern Europe, deeply embroiled in a “moonshine-and-sausage-for-breakfast” tour of the former Communist Bloc. I would periodically receive dispatches from this friend, whence he would regale me with fantastically grey tales of his exploits as a fish out of water in a world he never made. He hadn’t a mustache; his hirsute limbs were not clad in a tracksuit; he was easily identified as an outsider. His only solace seemed to lie in "the search," wherein he nobly strove to root out the bristly, elusive hedgehog that goes by the name “Eastern Bloc Rok.” It was from here, amidst the displaced monuments to The Glorious Worker, that he sent notice of a prolific entity known to every mohawked shit kicker from the Ukraine to the Kamchatka peninsula as Grazhdanskaya Oborona, or “Civil Defense.” (Disclaimer: Despite living in Hungary at the time, my contact actually learned about the band in an interview with Kevin DeBroux of Pink Reason, who is, as far as I can tell, the #1 proponent of GrOb's music. But I didn't learn this until much later.)

In the 1980s, we didn’t fear Muslim extremists and elderly motorists; we were focused on staunching the insidious Red Tide that was encroaching upon our shores. Back then, “the Russian” was fucking terrifying. He killed without mercy (witness Ivan Drago’s fatal pummeling of poor Carl Weathers in Rocky IV) and he hated our way of life and everything we held dear. He had a liver full of vodka and an itchy trigger finger; with the slightest drunken shudder he could initiate Armageddon, and he’d certainly delight in the wanton incineration of millions of babies and kittens. Yes, my friends, this is the image that was posited in the ‘lobes of legions of impressionable American youth throughout the Cold War. I fell into the belief that all Russians were Cossack-kicking bear wrestlers. It seemed plausible enough; heck, Russia was another planet as far as I was concerned, and the idea that these murderous brutes could enjoy a rich, complex cultural life never once occurred to me. Then my father bought me 1985’s “The WWF Wrestling Album,” and the entire lexicon of Russian culture was flung open to me.

You see, Nikolai Volkoff was one of pro wrestling's classic villains, a role he played with relish, especially when paired up with the equally notorious Iron Sheik. He could also claim to be of actual Russian heritage, unlike many of his contemporaries (i.e. Boris Zhukov, or as his mother knew him, Jim Nielson from Roanoke, Virginia). He loved mother Russia intensely, so much so that he pulled the plug on his own rendition of the Jay and the Americans’ hit “Cara Mia” in order to belt out the Russian national anthem. This certainly didn’t please Vince McMahon or “Mean” Gene Oakerlund any, but it stirred my order-craving inner socialist to an alarming degree. A small fragment of curiosity (любопытство) lodged itself deep within my subconscious, periodically resurfacing when certain stimuli (e.g. Tetris, Yakov Smirnov) were present. Years later, in my continuing exploration of the punk rock omniverse, I noticed a sorry lack of available product from the Communist hinterlands. You can find Clash and Ramones albums at any megastore, but where you gonna go for your Orgasm of Nostradamus or Salpetriere fix? I’ll tell you, pal: Eastern fucking Europe. [ Or the internet. —Ed.] The heavy gauntlet of Soviet oppression made sure that all underground music stayed underground, and the subsequent free fall into a capitalist vacuum ensured that chaotic pressing and distribution practices would doom Russian punk to obscurity. Fortunately, this didn’t stop the disaffected Red youth from strapping on guitars, risking Gulag and re-education in the name of all that is Rotten. The most prominent of these hairy kids was one Yegor Letov from Omsk in southern Siberia, and in his home country he is to rock n’ roll what Oscar Mayer is to wieners.

Letov formed Posev (Sowing) in 1982. It wasn’t long before songs such as “I Hate the Color Red” roused the attention of the Politburo, and soon the KGB persuaded Yegor to dissolve his band and commit himself to a mental institution. After his eventual release, Letov retreated to his modest apartment (GrOb Records & Studios) and unleashed a Krakatoa of low-fi musical magma upon the oppressed youth of Mother Russia. From writing and recording all of the music, designing his own album art, and handling distribution through a secretive network of peer-to-peer tape sharing known as magnitizdat (home recording, derived from samizdat, or underground publication of dissident literature), Letov created a self-sustaining entity with little outside assistance.

In excess of twenty albums leaked out between 1985 and 1989. Listening to these recordings for an extended period of time and at a high volume, on cheap headphones, in shitty, gray weather is akin to implanting a Soviet winter directly into your brain. They can fill you with a feeling of menacing claustrophobia, or inspire you with their rousing folk melodies and universally humanistic pathos. GrOb shares a certain kinship with bands like the Pogues in that many of the songs have entered the folk music tradition of their respective countries; evidence exists in countless videos floating around that feature shitfaced young Russians passionately singing Letov's compositions. This is serious business, sir.

Sadly, Yegor Letov died On February 19th, 2008 at his home in Omsk, Siberia, at the age of 43. Fortunately for we adventurous amateur musicologists, he left a stunning legacy of recordings in his wake. Despite a language barrier and less than perfect fidelity, his songs resonate with emotion, brim with fiery invective, and most importantly, are relentlessly tuneful.

I’d like to thank RBC Video in Brighton Beach and their helpful staff for stocking these nearly impossible to find cds and sharing their knowledge of Russian rock history with me (269 Brighton Beach Ave., Brooklyn N.Y.; also online at www.bukinist.com.)

GrOb performing Все идет по плану in concert in 1994:

Все идет по плану as performed by a buncha Russian kids (there are about a million videos like this on YouTube):

An orchestra performing Все идет по плану:

JANG JANG GRXDZANK (Fin.)

2010-12-31T20:32:00.008+01:00

And with a simple trip to Amoeba records in Berkeley, CA, I became the proud owner of the final A Frames record, 333, which is three albums (!) of demos, unreleased stuff, singles and EPs, and all sorts of good stuff. Since this is the A Frames, it's all good stuff. Then I accidently left it behind in the house I was staying at, and Sarah's mother mailed it to me but then I wasn't home to pick it up and the USPS dude didn't leave a note so it was returned to her, so I had to download this fucking album illegally and listen to it until I finally made it back to CA to retrieve my records and take them on their third trip across the continental divide.

Anyway this is amazing and all the songs are the best. I saw these guys play at the Cake Shop a few months ago and it was the best. The A Frames were the best! You wanna argue with that? Well then I'll tell you directly: they were the best, you schmuck. Now they aren't really together anymore. So someone else needs to step up and assume the mantle of righteousness. I don't know who that's gonna be but they had better get it together already. I don't have the rest of my life to wait for another band to like as much as I like these guys.

Anyway this triple record is probably the best final, you know, final thing or whatever that there could possibly be for this band. I came back and threw this thing on the turntable and turned it up and listened to it go "JANG JANG JANG" for three sides, then I made this spaghetti and watched part of this Alice Cooper DVD, then I went back to listening to the other three sides. (As an aside, that Alice Cooper DVD had like a lot more interpretive dance than I'd really counted on. It was like some weird community theater production.)

You can order this amazing audio codex by going to SS Records, the fine people putting this thing out. Put this shit on and study it, because it's the foremost codex of the 00s. This is at least as important to us guys as the Code of Hammurabi was to the ancient Babylonians.

And there is Audio

2010-12-12T09:08:00.004+01:00

Today I went to a record sale at the Archive of Contemporary Music and made a killing. Yeah, a KILLING, Dear Reader. I got so many good records, you wouldn't even know.

These records make me feel vaguely better about everything.

Phantasmagoria

2010-09-15T20:57:00.005+02:00

The best American movie ever made is Don Coscarelli's Phantasm. It asks important philosophical questions, such as how one deals with the knowledge one's deceased parents have been stolen from their tomb, placed into armored cannisters, and shrunk down to dwarf size because they are forced into indentured servitude on a barren desert planet with higher gravity than ours.

Also, it features chrome spheres with spikes that drill into people's heads, and an undertaker who is very frightening because he's always weirdly taller than anyone else in the room. There is no way to be able to predict the direction the movie is taking because I'm fairly sure that the script was being written in parallel with the actual shooting. I've seen it hundreds of times and it's always different, and I am always surprised by the outcome of the film.

What most people don't know is, Don Coscarelli also made the best music video in the history of the world. It is for Ronnie James Dio's song "Last in Line." It's about how "we're" the last in line. What does that mean? Well, it seems to mean that everyone who is last in line has metal shit coming out of their head for starters I guess.

Why is there a weird space tentacle? What was in the package that guy was delivering? Who needed it delivered? Or was is just a ruse to lure messengers into this place where they're the last in line? Why is the drummer a cave man? Whose side is Dio on? Etcetera.

Thinking about Phantasm and this weird music video made me revisit heavy metal. It seemed like it was time, since I've never really been the hugest fan of metal, Dear Reader, and as a genre it might be my biggest musical blindspot. I'm sick of not knowing about stuff, even if I don't like the stuff I'm ignorant about. So I got some metal, and have recently been listening to the Ukrainian black metal band Drudkh.

A favorite Sunday afternoon activity is to load some Drudkh on the iPod, get some Caribbean food from one of the numerous takeout joints in the neighborhood, and try to think about the future. I can barely see into the future at all anymore. This is embarrassing, really—I'm used to being able to see around corners and detect the tidal movements of the invisible world. Now my senses have been blunted, and I feel helpless.

Really, the thing I'm most worried about is the chance that my powers of perception will recede like an outgoing tide, dropping below the level of the present, and I won't know what the meaning of anything is anymore.

March of the Hierophants

2010-09-13T19:19:00.013+02:00

Dear Reader, I hope that you have your thinking cap on, because we have to figure this shit out together. So sit back in your weird ‘70s egg chair, pour yourself a vodka and blood orange spritzer thing, take a bite out of a 7 grain toast with raspberry jam on it, and check the creases in your slacks because now it’s time to get down to business.

I started this online publication when I was living in Budapest, trying to figure out what the shit I was doing, and when I wrote stuff for The Little Black Egg, I was reaching out across the ocean, nay, across the world, trying to connect to fellow bad-smelling nerds all over the place who might be vibrating at the same wavelength. Now that I’ve been back in New York, my zone of operation, it’s a different story. We here at The Little Black Egg find that we’re shrinking backwards, being inexorably drawn away from The Little Black Egg and into the void.

Thusly, Dear Reader, we here at The Little Black Egg are marshaling our forces, unleashing our hounds, sounding the trumpet, and throwing the severed body parts of the Egyptian god Set into the sun. It’s time to annihilate the outer cosmos where the Elder Gods lurk; to smash the Skriker, portent of evil, ancient and damaged, in the face with brass knuckles; to heave a copy of Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood at a scurrying cockroach; and to generally get it together.

We've always hated solitude.

The Utter Failure Which Was Responsible For Recent Radio Silence
Most recently, I tried and failed to put together an article about three awesome Jewish/Guido rock bands from NY: ManOwar, The Dicators, and Twisted Sister. The idea being that these groups sort of represented the Jungian take on the ages of man. Early in life, during The Dictators phase, man is turned inward, concerned with simply satisfying base desires, selfish, really. Then, as an adult, man turns outwards into the world (the ManOwar stage), conquering life and showing no mercy. This is the stage when life is lived. Then, man turns inwards again, Twisted Sister-style, in a garish adult pantomime of youth, trying to once again address the needs of one’s Self.

Working on this article was like dropping quarters into a fucked pinball machine that’s permanently on TILT. I couldn't finish it. That article was dead as dead.

I struggle with my failures. I crawled around on the floor, moaning and frothing.

Slightly Less Anonymous
Just so it’s clear, I am not a very cool guy, you know? This can be surmised from the fact that I have a blog, in the first place. But I am the kind of guy who eats toast and peruses the Chicago Manual of Style whilst listening to (but not watching) a DVD of The Fly with Jeff Goldblum. (Fuckin’ Brudlefly, amiright?!) I go to the grocery store and think to myself, “do I have what it takes to invent an awesome sandwich?” I drink seltzer a lot, alone. In the dark.

When I go see music, 9 times out of 10 I do so by myself, hanging out in the back, shifting from foot to foot on account of the fact that I can’t stand still ever. What tempts a man to lurk in the corner of a dank shithole, watching a bunch of jerks feeding back onstage? The answer can be traced, I guess, to early isolation, and several fortuitous events that shaped my early childhood:

My brother Scott making me a Beatles mixtape
My brother Scott making a second mixtape with songs like “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” and “Quinn the Eskimo” on it
My parents buying me Heartland Music’s “Fun Rock” 4 LP set after weeks of agonized begging on my part
Finding my brother Scott’s fucked up, zillionth generation tape of The Rolling Stones’ “Get Your Ya-Yas Out”
Discovering the Beach Boys
Seeing my cousin Wayne, who was a punk

My cousin Wayne was a punk rocker from Long Island in the mid-80s. He saw the Circle Jerks, the DKs, the Ramones, Marginal Man, all that stuff. Just seeing my cousin was totally off the hook for me as a kid. It was like seeing a superhero—he looked like a cross between Wattie from the Exploited and Lord Humongous from Mad Max: The Road Warrior. Orange mohawk, leather jacket with studs, fingerless leather gloves, chains, engineer boots, the whole thing. He looked like an extra from Death Wish 3 Nowadays, he and his wife Jen (another former punkeroo) have an awesome kid and live the high life in the country where they are visited by loads of cool friends and farm chickens and drink cocktails and live a very solid life.

I Was a Teenage Viscount
Here’s the other thing to understand: I grew up in a very, very small town, pre-Internet, where mountains blocked most outside radio reception, pre-satellite TV, a town so small that no cable companies would run a line to it because it wouldn’t be profitable enough, not even if everyone in town subscribed. It used to be hard to acquire media, is what I'm saying. I hungered for RNR and punk rock, but I had little exposure to it. I used to put stickers on my face, like those star stickers that teachers put on test papers. I’d put these stars all over my face and I’d tell everyone in the grocery store I was a punk rocker and that I knew how to breakdance. Then I’d spend my allowance on a Charleston Chew and pretend to fight off ninjas with it. I was one of the weirdest, dorkiest little kids in this dairy farming community.

It wasn’t until I was older, a social retard wearing weird blue slacks and buying LPs, that I figured out which way was up, and finally actually heard punk rock, which didn’t disappoint. Actually, some of it really did disappoint, especially some of the goofier British stuff.

Still, each album acquired made me feel that I was ascending to an elevated realm of greater perspective, a perch from when I could see the history of the world more clearly, like the member of a royal court.

Allies in the Final Conflict
Dear Reader, I ask you—who among has not had close friends who give them important shit to listen to? Me, I have a couple. First off, there’s my wife, who I pretended to like jazz for, and then actually ended up liking jazz—a proposition that initially seemed unphysiologically fucking impossible. Then I got my friend Matty, my friend Tom, some other people, and most recently, my friend Nate. The people you know are windows into other dimensions.

Nate (I won’t use his last name) is the main dude of a jazz combo called The Nathan Clevenger Group. They are a really good band. Everyone in the band are titans of music. Imagine the Founding Fathers descending from Mount Olympus with tentacle arms gripping inky quills, preparing to legislate. Actually, that's a little off. It's more like this: have you ever gotten a foreign film that maybe you weren’t sure about, but then it ripped your face off, and it was the coolest thing you ever saw, and it somehow synthesized straight-up literary frumpiness with avant-gardeness and unexpected twists and you were at the edge of your seat the whole time but then, afterwards, you couldn’t find anyone else who had ever heard of it? That’s pretty much what their music is like.

Anyway, it was my birthday recently, and Nate gave me a gift certificate to Amoeba Recrods in the Bay Area. This was really cool, since I am poor (hey, anyone need a freelance writer/editor/copy editor?), and I haven’t been able to buy records in a long while.

So’s I had this gift certificate and I bought a clean copy of Billion Dollar Babies by Alice Cooper and 333 by the A Frames, my favorite ever band (in the last 10 years). I am still aglow from Nate’s act of kindness. So much of my music time is spent turned towards magazines and music blogs, trying to peer through the general blur and discern where the music is that will keep me from dematerializing. To be given this music as a gift is miraculous.

And Scene
One of the reasons that The Little Black Egg isn't all full of music reviews is because I’m not a scientist, and I can’t analyze anything objectively. I hurtle through life, an itchy bundle of anxious flesh, happy for the few moments where the world seems even vaguely human. I don't understand anything. The greatest illuminations were passed to me by others, fragments of sound and information that brought the world into focus.

It's hard for me to see clearly because I stand so close to everything. I have hope for us in the future, though, Dear Reader. I really do. Together, we have the technology.

The Drummer Has a Rubik's Cube For a Head

2010-07-16T22:01:00.002+02:00

And the band's name is just a question mark. Like the dude who fronts the Mysterians.

Siberian Hunchback Punk

2010-07-08T05:04:00.004+02:00

Оргазм Нострадамуса were from Siberia, and they sounded like what I always imagined crust punk ought to sound like. I grabbed all their albums from Puke Skywalker. From Puke:

Tragically, the band's mission was cut short in 2003, with the murder of its guitarist Arkhip (again, details are spotty, though there are claims "he was poisoned by unknown envious skinhead-person") and the death of Ugol some months later by a combination of alcohol, pills, and choking on his own vomit.

I'm thinking about learning Russian just to understand the lyrics, that's how much I like this band. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if I could understand the lyrics to this song, I'd appreciate Richard III even more than I do right now.

The Magyar Scott Walker?

2010-02-26T20:46:00.001+01:00

Máté Péter brings the pathos.

The Space Monster Never Sleeps

2010-02-08T23:22:00.004+01:00

In this amazing photograph, Neil Young looks like a space monster.

Guerilla Radio

2010-02-08T05:49:00.007+01:00

Dear Reader, if you are at all a fan of the writings found in this fine publication, you are no doubt wondering: “Rick, why in the world haven’t you yet reviewed any books about punk rock from the former Yugoslavia? You seem to like music from there so much, and are always boring people to tears with little anecdotes and facts you’ve learned about the people who made it, so why don’t you etcetera?”

Etcetera indeed, Dear Reader.

Although we here at the Little Black Egg don’t like to actually review things, we are happy to strenuously recommend that our readers purchase a particular product. And for those of you who have felt the pull of Balkan rock music but have been unable to find out any information on any of the bands short of that which appears on blogs, wiki entries, or indescipherable online translations of articles in Serbian and Croatian, I would like to recommend that you pick up Guerrilla Radio: Rock’n’Roll Radio and Serbia’s Underground Resistance by Matthew Collin.

Now, Guerilla Radio isn’t a book on punk rock from the former Yugoslavia, because that book doesn’t exist in English. This is better. Collin’s book examines B92, the Belgrade radio station that was the voice of anti-Milosevic Serbia in the 1990s. It’s totally fascinating, and if you’ve got any interest in YU-Rock, or radio stations, or music, or the Balkans at all, you ought to get a copy. I think I got mine from Amazon for like $1.50 or something unfair and insane like that.

As someone with a keen if amateur interest in this part of the world, I was surprised how little I actually knew about B92 and the resistance it fostered. The huge anti-war, anti-Milosevic movement that rose up in Serbia didn’t exactly have a huge amount of ink spilled about it the Western press. Huge demonstrations that took place against Milosevic occurred in Belgrade, and B92 was a key component of setting the stage for people to feel free to voice their discontent.

Amidst state run media organs, B92 basically stood alone as the de facto voice against the regime. It was shut down, its people threatened, and its offices ransacked. The Milosevic regime thought that this tiny radio station posed a threat to their power over the country. They were right. Huge street protests against the government enveloped Belgrade, ultimately causing the Serbian army to send tanks into the streets of the city to disperse the protestors.

Collin uses B92 as the lens through which to focus the reader’s attention on the events at this time. This book is succinct rather than exhaustive, which works to its advantage. Collin reported from Belgrade in the mid-nineties, and a lot of the material in this book comes from first-hand interviews conducted with the people who were a part of the events described. I’m no expert, but I haven’t read a better book about this period of time in Serbia’s history. Guerrilla Radio avoids sensationalism and hyperbole completely; instead, it’s a very human, very compassionate look at a handful of extraordinarily brave radio misfits who became, well, heroes.

We here at The Little Black Egg suggest you acquire a copy immediately.

Šarlo Akrobata

2010-02-07T22:08:00.005+01:00

Šarlo Akrobata were a Belgrade-based Novi Val band active in the early 1980s. They only had one album (Bistriji ili tuplji čovek biva kad...) and it's unbelievable. I'd cut off my hands for a copy of that on vinyl.

Here is some hilarious video goodness from them that washed up on the You Tubes:

and:

and:

Hard to know what to say about these guys except, you know, when you gots it you gots it.

Hail Satan

2010-01-23T08:43:00.002+01:00

Satan Panonski!

Goodbye 400 Years of Culture

2010-01-14T04:42:00.008+01:00

It’s been a dry time here re: the word production of we here at The Little Black Egg, but a totally super-exciting time in our actual lives. Now, there may be some seething pedants amongst my Dear Readers who are cocking their heads and waving their fingers all in my face and saying “Rick, shouldn’t your entire life center around word production? And if so, doesn’t this mean that your life is therefore all the poorer, since you’re not producing any words for The Little Black Egg?”

To you pedants, I say this: my life is none the poorer—it is your life, shitface, which is the poorer for my absence." And for this, I apologize. I am returned to you now, Dear Reader: the sun rises once again over this blighted land, so you can turn your eyes towards the truth and light.

Now, I didn’t have any of those year-end lists or anything like that, because I never really know what exactly is happening in time and space. We here at The Little Black Egg can’t be keeping abreast of everything in the world. Instead, with the New Year, I would like to mention something that I will be leaving behind. As the trees grow bare, as flowers wither, as eczema forms in the cold, I will steadfastly turn my back on this thing and walk away.

Now, saying arrivederci to something is never easy. For instance, it took years before I could make myself stop buying $1 exotica albums. I just no longer have the capacity to house these goddamn things. Like many people, I have been known to part with a buck for a record with some weird looking white dude shaking maracas with a parrot on his shoulder and foxy ladies reclining on flowers with title that says like “Tropical Organ Moods.” You know what though? Owning those records does not pay off. What happens is, you become this graying dude drinking beer alone, listening to a record of the Cincinnati Lutheran Ramblers play “Stardust” on steel guitar, and feeling sad about yourself. Those are the wages of lounge, my friend. At the end of the day, it’s best to stop trying to squeeze enjoyment out of things that you don’t like.

The thing that I’m turning my back on this year, is the opera. Now, you may be saying, “Jesus H., mister, we didn’t come to this here internet publication to read about the opera. If we wanted to read about the opera, we’d—wait, we’d never want to do that.” And I say to you, “listen pal, you’ll eat what you’re given and you’ll like it.”

Now, let’s begin at the beginning. For some time, my better half had a job with the Great Big Opera here in NYC. This job allowed her to get extremely discounted opera tickets. Therefore, we here at The Little Black Egg would attend the opera a whole lot. Often enough that some people had the mistaken impression that we were “opera buffs.”

There are many things I enjoyed about the opera, to tell you the truth. For instance, I liked having a seat right up front, so’s I could walk by all the fancy opera patrons and mutter under my breath: “Sorry you have such horrible seats, you revolting peasants.” Then I’d go sit up front with the agéd creatures who looked like dried apricots in evening finery and try to hear the music over the sound of them snuffling, dozing, and in one instance, listening to the Yankees game on what had to be the oldest goddamn walkman I ever saw, seriously, it was like the size of a carton of milk, and instead of headphones he had this flesh-colored ear plug thing.

Now, listen, I know opera is highly unpopular with a large swath of the population, but you know, it was kind of interesting. Like many people who latched on to le punk rock in my youth, I was accustomed to existing in a very small Musical Comfort Zone. So when I finally decided to branch out and explore the teeming wilds of audioville, it was like being dropped into enemy territory with no compass, survival knowledge, tools, etc. However, it did build my character and make me strong like bull. So I bravely started listening to all sorts of boring, go-nowhere musical things that I hated for years until my brain gave up and began grudgingly liking it. And after many years of striving, I learned to like weird, atonal operas like Wozzeck and Lulu. Then, before you know it, I’m having conversations with opera people.

Despite having seen dozens of these things, I really didn’t know doodly about opera. In fact, I don’t know anything, at all, about music. I had gotten in too deep, and developed a terror of the Lincoln Center creatures who hovered around during intermission. The joke had gone too far

Or had it? Maybe the joke had not gone far enough. Maybe if I’d put my nose to the grindstone and really done the homework, I could be walking in two worlds. Sometimes I’d be sitting around, listening to the kind of stuff I do now (i.e., audio of three Polish dudes whacking on metal in 1982 that was recorded on a wobbly dictaphone and sourced from a tenth-generation tape), and other times I’d be dressed all natty in a three piece suit, sipping a glass of shitty white wine while I held forth on why Luigiani Fotzabini was an inferior tenor compared to Francesco Fettucini.

That would be good, right? Old ladies and assorted waspy-looking old palsied dudes would cluster around me. They'd hanging on my every word while, half-concealed behind a pillar, New Yorker critic Alex Ross would surreptitiously record every word I wrote, like some creepy Salieri-type feller. He would have espied me in the orchestra seats and followed me out, hoping to soak up my nuggets of expertise. So there he'd be, furiously scribbling in his notebook as he snatched my insights from the air and retooled them for an awesome New Yorker article (with lots of umlauts over words like “reëxamine" and "coöperate"). I will catch a glimpse of Alex Ross’ loafer poking out from behind the pillar, and I will smile quietly to myself, because you know, I’m not desirous of the limelight.

Then, right, there will be the sound of chimes—the ushers signaling everyone back to their seats—and I will blend in with the seething mass of evening wear-bedecked Skeksis as they hobble back into the orchestra sections. There, enjoying the sonic advantages of row L, I will look at the wood veneer of the opera house (made from a single rosewood tree, should you be wondering) and think, oh opera house wood veneer, thanks to Alex Ross recording my intermission chatter with his fancy Marantz recorder thing, and then utilizing it in an article that will be read by the smartest of the smarties, my thoughts on this opera will echo through space and time long after its final notes have reverberated through your wood-grainy woodness. Then the chandeliers would rise towards the ceiling, the Skeksis would cease their chatter, and I would half-close my eyes as I soaked up the first mercurial notes of the 4.5 hour act as they wafted through the room, alighting on my ear like velveteen butterflies of the dawn.

That would be pretty nice, wouldn't it? Velveteen butterflies of the dawn and all. I'm serious about that! It would be nice, but unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. Now that I don’t have a ticket hookup anymore, though, I find that I don’t think about opera whatsoever, not even a little bit. However, once in a while I think about What Could Have Been. The last opera I went to, I was sitting about six rows behind Alex Ross. (I didn’t know it was him until a musician friend of mine pointed him out.) A whole bunch of people talked to Alex Ross between acts.

The opera was about Oppenheimer and the first nuclear bomb—I thought it stunk and was ridiculous. Alex Ross gave it a really good review in the New Yorker. During intermission, I spent $5 on a coffee because I felt like I was going to fall asleep, and drank it while everyone I was with analyzed what they were seeing and hearing. I just never got it. I guess it’s like how you can lead a horse to water but you can’t etcetera. Cold comfort.

For a while there, I really wanted to have this stuff figured out. I was like a guy looking at a map of a strange, impossible continent, and dreaming about exploring it; but when I got there, I was just lost and desperate to leave. Today, when I want ornate, overwrought Italian music, I’ll listen to proggy horror movie soundtracks. Thusly I turn my back on opera in 2010; not as a hero, but as a failure. Arrivederci.

It's Halloween

2009-11-01T01:20:00.001+01:00

Dear Reader, regular broadcasts from The Little Black Egg will now resume.

In Recognition of Excellence

2009-08-21T15:57:00.005+02:00

Dear Reader, I'd like to draw your attention to the internets' number one blog for mind-blowing Hungarian punk, experimental and otherwise: Ultra Rock Agency

Here is VHK (The Galloping Coroners) playing a show on weird sculptures.

For the longest time it was really hard for me (and, Dear Reader, you) to find this stuff, or even know what it is. So we here at The Little Black Egg salute you, Ultra Rock Agency. Keep doing your thing.

Miskolc 2

2009-08-18T20:01:00.003+02:00

Every year, Miskolc hosts the Retek Festivál (Radish Festival). Here is an interview with some of the people who put the festival together, along with a cross-section of bands from the area.

Miskolc 1

2009-08-15T00:28:00.010+02:00

One day I went to go see Hiroshima Rocks Around, an excellent Italian noise band that had been booked in Budapest. I got talking to the guy who booked the show, and he eventually asked me what my favorite Hungarian band was, and I told him Büdösök , a band that plays hilarious, psychotic, shitpunk music.

This was apparently the right thing to say. The singer and drummer from Büdösök were in the crowd, and in fact the drummer was in Kerdojel, the opening band. Kerdojel played shrill noise punk and wore weird masks and costumes and shit. They were great. Besides Büdösök, it was the best band I’d seen in Hungary. They were 100% fun.

It turned out that these bands weren’t from Budapest, but from Miskolc—a city about two hours from the capital. This explained why I hadn’t seen anything like them in Hungary. Watching these guys, I understood that I’d been looking in all the wrong places for music like this. It turns out that Mikolc, an economically depressed city of about 200,000, was/is home to a completely sick, experimental punk/poetry/noise scene that is totally remarkable.

There’s a lot of Miskolc music to write about, which is what I’ll be doing over the next few weeks. I’ll be posting what are going to be essentially rough drafts of something larger here at The Little Black Egg.

To start with, many of the bands and individuals that form the nucleus of the Miskolc music scene were somehow connected to a band called Ápolók, which is Hungarian for “The Nurses.”

They formed in 1982, and from what I can tell, they were the lynchpin of the Miskolc music scene, spawning a bunch of other bands. Ápolók started sounding like a fairly weird punk band in the early 80s. Only demos and live recordings of this material seems to have survived. The fidelity isn’t always great on these recordings but it isn’t completely horrible, either. Honestly, the fact that a digital record of this stuff even exists nearly 30 years on is remarkable, and I feel lucky to hear it.

Their early stuff is striking. Everyone sounds as though they haven’t been playing for that long; still, they aren’t laying down by-the-numbers punk at all—all the songs strain at their edges and follow strange paths. Who knows how this stuff actually sounded—the lo-fi tapes that remain give everything a blown-out, keening edge

Ápolók have keyboards and weird instrumentation at times, not unlike contemporaries such as A.E. Bizottság, who they played some shows with back in the day. Whatever Ápolók might have ingested from those guys, however, was excreted as something far stranger and more intense. (Interesting side-note: the song “Da da da” contains the same keyboard rhythm track that prompts Mark E. Smith to yell “turn that bloody, blimey space invader off-uh!” during the Fall’s “The Man Whose Head Expanded.”) I don’t know what was in the water supply in Hungary at this time, but it did its job. At this stage in their life-cycle, Ápolók are vibrating with potential, and were about to transform into a something else.

After a couple of years, Ápolók entered a period of dormancy as its members took care of real life concerns. During this time, Ápolók’s sound transformed, advancing them to a weird new plane. No recordings were issued during this period, so it’s anyone’s guess what happened with these guys, biologically-speaking. They didn’t “mature,” which as we all know is about the shittiest thing that a band can do. Instead, they mutated to a more virulent and efficient life form. Ápolók’s true character extruded from its old form; their new physical manifestation sounded like a spastic Beefheart/Zappa mutant, punchy and hilarious, crossbred with Hungarian film soundtracks and god knows what else, performed by musicians with surprisingly sick chops.

I don’t think you could call this post-punk, or at least, it sounds nothing like what people generally identify as being a post-punk sound. The nearest touchstone might be the Dog-Faced Hermans, maybe. Most of the songs are somehow intricate and off-kilter. You get the feeling that a couple of these guys might have come to this band after being expelled from the conservatory or something.

During the 1990s, Ápolók made a ton of music videos and little movies, all of which are still available. These are perhaps the coolest thing that these guys ever did. Shot on no budget in Miskolc, it shows the band members and their friends creating surreal and hilarious scenes.

For instance, the video for their song “Fegyver Tusa” shows one of the band members ostensibly taking a shit in an outhouse while singing. He then grabs a rifle, rolls around on the ground, sharpens the rifle on a grindstone, worms around on his stomach, and then joins his friends (who are performing a kick-line whilst dressed in Hungarian winter gear) for a waltz as the song morphs into the Hall of the Mountain King. It’s hard to explain the charm of these films but it’s easy to appreciate them.

I consulted a friend from Budapest about the meaning of this song. Here is what she said: “He says it is better to lie on the ground, which is why he is always lying on the ground, and there is a Hungarian saying that is like ‘It is always better to be lying down, because you can’t be going any lower.’ And do you see where he is sitting in this video? He is sitting on a toilet. It is very funny, actually.”

During this time, Ápolók began playing shows outside of Hungary. Barangó, former Ápolók member and current friend/co-collaborator/secret weapon/man-on-the-scene, told me this story about the time that Ápolók got booked to play a show in Amsterdam. This show happened prior to the Berlin Wall falling, so the band had to cross into West Germany to get to Amsterdam. They’d loaded all their members, weird instruments, etc. into an old Soviet model van, and drove through the snow to the checkpoint. The West German border guards wouldn’t let the band drive their van, which was a piece of shit, on West German roads. So they abandoned it, and everyone decided to hitchhike to Amsterdam. In January. They somehow pulled it off and played the show. Then they hitchhiked back.

Ápolók’s also met resistance from numerous venue owners, who didn’t feel like having to mix sound for all of the weird instruments that they employed. Also, it’s important to note that Ápolók are from Miskolc, not Budapest. That’s an important distinction.

Miskolc birthed a music scene that’s pretty singular in terms of weird avant-punk stuff. The fact that this happened in a small, dying industrial town hours from the Hungary’s largest city might seem counter-intuitive, but I think something about the relative isolation of Miskolc allowed bands like Ápolók to grown into something completely original. Like how fucked-up looking fish evolve at the bottom of the ocean. Unemployment is rampant in the city, a fact which doesn’t look like it’s going to change anytime soon. As one member of Ápolók told me, “People used to get up early and go to the factory. Now they get up early and go drink.” This decline isn’t a new thing either—the city’s economy shit the bed about two decades ago. Although this comparison doesn’t really work, Miskolc is not unlike parts of the American rust belt, where the economy has collapsed but the art scene is still vibrant.

Goszi, the drummer for Ápolók and Digep, put it this way: “People in Miskolc are more like cartoon people.”

Barangó was more blunt. He described the music scene in Budapest back in the day as having too many “people who are really pretentious, as though they wanted to be like Lou Reed or something, and did not have a sense of humor.”

Ápolók would splinter off into a number of groups. It seems that many of the members had side projects going all the time. I'd hesitate to call the Miskolc crew a collective, but from what I can tell, they all appeared on each others' projects. Ápolók itself never really stopped either—recently, they came out with new material that is another leap from their old style into something different.

And so, Dear Reader, wraps up the first part of our series on Miskolc music. There is more to come, and much work to do. I am still trying to extract more Miskolc music from the ether. There is more to come about Ápolók and others over the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

Now, some Ápolók:

We're the Youth of Today!

2009-08-14T21:00:00.007+02:00

So the other day I went to the pawn shop/junk store on the corner of my block to look for records. At the moment I'm living in a primarily West Indian neighborhood, so I'm always hoping to score reggae and soca and etc. albums at places like this. So far I've turned up a few gems, which might make their way to this blog once I get a pre-amp for my turntable.

Sometimes, though, I come across stuff that I really just didn't think I'd come across:

I wonder who pawned this thing? For $2, though, I'll take it.

I always liked the Plasmatics, even though they were sort of a crummy band, all around. The concept was great, even if I'm not entirely sure what it was. And when it came to punk/metal hybrids at that time, these guys were about as fun to listen to as D.R.I. or the Cro-Mags. The important distinction being that the Plasmatics were fiction, and bands like the Cro-Mags were non-fiction.

Did the Plastmatics ever link up with Troma? If not, they certainly should have. Anyway, these guys were like a distillation of everything good about those weird mutant street gangs who turned up in movies like Deathwish 3 and the Class of Nuke 'Em High. You know what I'm talking about? Fictional gangs of weirdos where everyone is just violent because they're weird. They all fight with like switchblades and clubs, and they all have names like "Deuce" and "Strangler" or something.

Possibly the best scene in American cinematic history, from The Class of Nuke 'Em High:

Stirring, no? That movie is a stone cold classic. Why doensn't anyone make shit like this anymore? What's wrong with everyone?

Relax With the Stinkies

2009-08-14T20:57:00.001+02:00

Büdösök plays a mellow version of their theme song for all the young lovers in the audience.

Kitchen Terrors

2009-08-10T04:34:00.008+02:00

There used to be this old-timey radio program called Inner Sanctum, which is now mostly available on Archive.org. Out of all the old horror and suspense radio shows, Inner Sanctum was the grisliest. Sometimes it was just disgusting. And in my favorite ever episode, this bank robber visits a black market doctor who has a secret office in the basement of this building. The bank robber wants to get plastic surgery to change his appearance—he's worried about getting caught and executed.

The doctor straps the robber down to the operating table so he won't struggle during the surgery. He uses this opportunity to extort more money from the bank robber. Then he begins the surgery, without anesthetic.

He intones something along the lines of "There will be no painkillers for the likes of you, Rocco!"

The sound when he starts cutting, right before Rocco begins screaming, is really, really upsetting. Right after he beings screaming, the show abruptly cuts to an advertisement for Lipton Tea. But right before that commercial, it's really goddamn upsetting. Even if, like me, you were gleefully reveling in the campy opening sequence and organ cues.

I don't know about you, Dear Reader, but I often have a much more visceral reaction to sound than to film. And there's nothing quite like spending the evening slistening to a weird sound scape record whilst eating a peanut butter sandwich and staring out the window. And while I know that this shit isn't for everyone, part of me can't believe that it isn't more popular. Of course, it isn't easy to get one's head around the many, many, many albums of weird soundscapes and ambient clankings and experimental, you know, stuff . Finding something really good can be difficult unless you are already clued in to this sort of thing, which most people aren't. I'm not even, really. However, I've been listening to this album by The Sonic Catering Band called Seven Transdanubian Recipes, (or, in Hungarian, Szónikus Élelmezési Együttes Hét Dunántúli Recept)and it's one of the weirdest/greatest things I've heard in a while.

I don't know if this can officially be called experimental music, since each of these sound pieces use the preparation of a particular recipe for their source material. These sounds then get manipulated and generally screwed around with, and the end result is pretty unsettling.

From a 2003 interview for MIELE Magazine:

You could argue that what we're practicing is the antithesis of experimental music as most of our recordings have followed a very strict formula in that we let a given recipe dictate how a certain track will sound and develop. [. . .] A typical Sonic Catering session involves three phases: cooking and recording the meal in question; selecting and processing the raw sounds we want to use and finally, editing and layering. Raw sonic and culinary ingredients both become transformed into something thoroughly other both on plate and headphones.

Song titles like "Covert Feeding," "Lactic Sugar Dream," and "The Alimentary Canal by Night" may (or may not!) give you some idea of what to expect. I suppose that the easiest comparison to make would be Nurse With Wound, and like that outfit's better recordings, this album is a fully-realized, completely successful whole. Weird hissing, bubbling, gas burning howling in strange empty spaces . . . this album sounds malevolent for so long that it actually gets pretty funny, and then doesn't really seem funny, and then, after a while, you sort of give up trying to think about it and just agree to inhabit the space that it creates. Extremely enjoyable musique concrète for evil, hungry listeners.

I'll Take My Hilarity Where I Can Get It.

2009-06-15T00:19:00.003+02:00

Dear Reader, we spent this weekend hanging out with some friends in Brighton Beach, where we got green borscht and went CD shopping. Our friends Inna and Ljova took us around the neighborhood, took us out for food, acted as translators, and basically showed us a great time.

We also learned that Potap & Nastya, a Russian hip hop duo, might be playing Brighton Beach soon. This group released an amazing video for a song about Bruce Willis which is completely insane:

The title of this song is "Krepkie Oreshki," or "Hard Nuts."

I'm thinking about going to see these guys. I'd also like to note that I took the time to see Speak the Hungarian Rapper during his first ever show at Budapest a couple years ago.

I was there.

Set Things On Fire

2009-03-09T06:11:00.004+01:00

Japanese band GISM formed in Tokyo in 1981. Here, they attempt to set their audience on fire with a flamethrower. (The flamethrowing starts about 6 minutes in.)

YU Rock Fakebook

2009-02-21T01:20:00.006+01:00

Dear Reader, you are doubtless aware of how much I like punk rock from ex-Yugoslav states. Well, last summer Sarah and I were in Sarajevo, and I was looking for Bosnian punk records. I went to what must have been every record store in the fucking city, but I couldn't find anything even close to what I was looking for. And since Sarajevo is an incredible place and my time there was limited, I finally gave up searching.

But I did find this really cool Balkan rock fakebook:

It's basically just a collection of tabs for popular tunes by ex-YU rock bands. Check out this page spread of two Pekinska Patka (Peking Duck) tunes:

Pekinska Patka are from Serbia, and they are one of the best punk bands ever, from anywhere, at any time in history. Period. This song, "Biti ružan pametan i mlad" (the computer translates it as "Subsist ruĹľan brainy plus adolescent"), is one of their best.

I've long wondered what Nebojša Čonkić was saying at the beginning of this song. According to my book, it's "pipipipi, kvakvakvakva, kakadakakadakakada."

This book? This thing is authoritative.

Sloopy in the Future

2009-02-16T03:43:00.010+01:00

My friend Greg is a parts guy at a Harley Davidson dealership. In fact, his official position is Chrome Consultant. He lives in upstate New York, and spends his days playing blues rock in a band that has opened for the likes of Loudness and Pat Travers, listening to bands like Accept and Saxon, and riding his Harley around.

Besides our mutual affinity for The Dictators, Greg and I like completely different kinds of music. He frequently tries to convince me to go see bands that are a good 30+ years past their prime when they play in Poughkeepsie. Sometimes I cave in—which is how I found myself in Greg’s truck, listening to Montrose, and heading towards a motorcycle swap meet where Rick Derringer would be performing. My friend Tom, a noted Klaus Nomi enthusiast and experimental film guy, was also there.

Later on in this story, Tom has an eerie premonition.

Chances are, if you’re going to go to a motorcycle swap meet, you ought to have at least a vague interest in motorcycles. Unfortunately, I don’t know shit about motorcycles, so I wandered around the swap meet environs—a disused IBM plant—staring at, like, greasy bolts and handlebars arrayed on the floor. There were also vendors selling t-shirts, the best of which depicted a guy with a moustache and mullet riding a motorcycle, superimposed over a line drawing a of a Native American chieftain, with the caption “Brothers in the Wind.”

At events like this, Greg is like a celebrity. He’s like a cross between Bob Barker and Spiderman. As he works the room, shaking hands and kissing babies, I survey the crowd. About one-quarter have some kind of visible disability brought on by motorcycle riding—canes and braces were all over the place.

Greg introduces me and Tom to several notable scumbags who all had names like “Poochy” and “Deuce” and "Earwig," as well as one guy who also had a funny name (that I won’t list here) and a face covered in warts. He breathed really loud through his mouth and kept talking about he couldn’t get any women to show him their “pairs,” as in “man, Greg, last year everyone got all fucked up, and the girls showed me their pairs. I saw some nice fuckin’ pairs, brother. But I ain’t seen no pairs today. I’d settle for any kinda pairs, I’ll tell you that much.”

Anyways, I should mention that I didn’t actually know who Rick Derringer was. According to Greg, he was the guy who did “Rock and Roll Hootchie Koo,” which I swore I’d never actually heard until I saw the man himself perform it—at which point I said “Oh yeah, this song.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My point is, I’m wandering around this event with Tom, and the two of us have no idea what to do. We’re just waiting for Derringer. I went in there not knowing or caring about Rick Derringer—after hours of staring at crap like wires, troglodytes, and t-shirts with “English Spoken Here” printed on the front, I was desperately craving some entertainment.

There was some dink from a local radio station who made some announcements. He looked like Matthew Broderick, kind of. He really sucked, but I thought to myself, man, I wish I was born with a radio-ready voice. My voice is nasal and naturally pretty quiet, so I always feel like I'm straining to speak above a mumble. What the crap. Anyway, this is the kind of stuff I was thinking about in the interminable wait for the show.

Then, suddenly, Derringer. Tom said “watch, I’ll bet you he’s a Christian rocker now or something.” And, as Rick Derringer hit the stage in the IBM plant, the drop ceiling a mere six inches from the top of his head, a monogrammed towel hung near his amp, his hair looking perfect—he looked a bit like a shorter John Voight, to tell you the truth—and a gold crucifix dangled conspicuously down the front his shirt, I knew that Tom's premonition was correct. It was gonna be Christian rock.

Man, I’ll tell you what—Derringer wasn’t in any rush to get to the hits. He played one Christian rocker after another, the stoic audience patiently resting on their orthopedic equipment, waiting for Rock and Roll Hootchie Koo, aka The Big Song.

But before he played The Big Song, Rick Derringer announced that he was going to play the state song of Ohio. It turns out that the state song of Ohio is Hang on Sloopy, and Derringer was in the McCoys, who did this in 1965. Wow! Suddenly, everything was different. Man, I love Hang On Sloopy, you know?

Now, when I was a kid, my parents mysteriously had a copy of Heartland Music’s “Fun Rock” collection:

Which was 4 LPs of awesome songs like Yakety Yak and Purple People Eater and Sugar Sugar and stuff. Also on this collection was Hang On Sloopy. I couldn't get enough of that tune. Seriously. I played it all the time. It's still one of my favorites, and probably the best Louie Louie rip the world has ever known.

I remember it well, because for a really long time I thought that they were singing “Hang on Snoopy,” which made sense, right? But then I realized it was “Sloopy,” and I didn’t know what that was. I mean, are there any girls named Sloopy out there? It was goddamn weird. But I used to like that song a lot.

After Sloopy ended, Derringer played The Big Song and everyone left. We left too.

I told Greg about how I grew up with Hang On Sloopy and he said “Hell yeah, man! Derringer fucking rules! Let’s go get some beef jerky! Hot damn!”

Later on, I looked up some stuff on Rick Derringer, and it turns out he also worked on Weird Al Yankovic albums. Which, I guess, means that he had a fairly odd career arc, right? One Hit Wonder to Promising Blues Rocker to Weird All Cohort to Christian Music Guy.

But the funniest thing about the whole experience was that, after having seen Rick Derringer perform Hang On Sloopy, I felt mostly like I’d run into someone I’d gone to Kindergarten with or something. Like we used to be friends, and I hadn’t thought about them for decades, and they looked a lot different than I thought they'd end up looking. It’s a strange feeling.

They're the Ones With the Cut Off Hands

2008-12-21T05:55:00.007+01:00

Dear Reader, we here at The Little Black Egg were idly perusing an old Search & Destroy zines (which later morphed into RE/Search Publications) whilst taking a break from working on a writing project. Specifically, it's Search & Destroy #7, and it contains an interview with Roky Erickson.

Roky had this to say on his reading habits:

I go for the more evil side of things. I don't really like anything unless it is evil. I go in for nightmare comics and things like that.

I like to go to old buildings that have caved in, in the darkest part of Dallas at midnight and read about people injecting printer's ink into people's veins, and someone cutting off a man's hand because he wanted his ring and then the hand kills him in jail while he's asleep.

I exist off things like that, but I shouldn't force people to print that kind of periodical just for me! It's kind of mean to make them keep printing it and have it come to my doorstep, because I know I'm the only person that reads it. I guess I'd have to be, because they're the ones with the cut off hands and the blood spurting out the little arteries in their wrists after they're cut off, and that gets real scary.

I wish I had a job where I printed a periodical solely for Roky Erickson's enjoyment. I should get on that.

Here, Roky lays down some wisdom and then plays "Creature With the Atom Brain.

Clandestine Psych

2008-12-19T19:34:00.003+01:00

Not that long ago, I had the good fortune to see Los Llamarada at the Cake Shop here in NYC. These guys were sick, and there was loads of feedback cutting all over the place and everyone was having a great time. Also, they probably have about the coolest looking guitar player in North America.

I’ve been wanting to see this band for some time, ever since I read about them in Z-Gun. In fact, when I was Hungary I considered taking the train out to see them there when they played some festival in Europe—Belgium, maybe? But I didn’t have the money. All sorts of great music came out in 2007, and I kept getting worried that I was missing it all because I was in Budapest and when I got back all the bands would be broken up.

Anyway, Los Llamarada is pretty harrowing, not least of all because they are noisy as shit. The songs move through weird territory and defy easy categorization. They are totally remarkable and a lot of fun, and also, listening to it gives you evil psychedelic powers. Right now, Los Llamarada have two albums. The first one, The Exploding Now!, came out a little while ago and was recorded mostly on crummy tape recorders, which made it sound awesomely clandestine and caused music fans the world around to shit their pants with joy.

Their second album, Take the Sky, came out just recently. It’s recorded on slightly better equipment and may, in fact, have slightly better songs than the first one, although it’s hard to say for sure. I like it a whole lot. Retains Llamarada's invisible creepiness while aspiring to marginally higher-fi.

These guys also have a 7”, but I haven’t heard it. Both albums are insanely good, and you will love them unless, of course, you are some strange gray Stasi agent in the employ of insectile overlords, and seek to destroy every single last inch of progress that rock and roll has made since Bo Diddley was birthed. It’s very possible that there are other bands that mine similar sonic territory out there—for all I know, some guy with a beard and weird pants could tell you “These guys sound just like Dead C meets Lothar and the Hand People. Ho hum!” But me, I am not that guy with a beard. I have no beard. But I think that Los Llamarada are really fucking rad, and not enough bands sound like this.

I didn't take this photo; I took it from the Los Llamarada photo page.

Fine Art and the Private Press

2008-11-10T01:56:00.014+01:00

So the other night I was walking the Financial District after having picked up a copies of Alice Cooper's Muscle of Love and the Residents' hilarious Third Reich n' Roll in the used bin at J&R music world at 99 cents a pop, and I was talking to my friend Matty on the phone.

Matty had just picked up the reissue of the Bachs' Out of the Bachs album, and we were discussing the unique production that went into that record.

"The drums sound like there's a guy hitting a ride cymbal with a stick and there's another guy pointing a microphone at him from like a mile away," said Matty. "It's fucked."

"Maybe an original copy has better sound," I said.

"Probably not. Besides, there's only like 150 known copies and they're all accounted for. Getting an original would run you, like, $5,000."

"Jesus shit!"

"Yeah. These psych collectors—they might be weird and hunched and bald, with like a ring of curly hair around the back of their head, and wear stuff like corduroy shorts and a tie-dye shirts, and purple sunglasses with tiny diamond lenses, but when it comes to record collecting they don't fuck around."

"So Out of the Bachs has gotta be like the most expensive private press record ever, right?"

"Uh, maybe. No, actually, there's this band called Nuclean Debris—I read about them in that Acid Archives book. There was a guy named Johnny Scrotum in the band. Anyway, there's only one known existing copy, and the guy who has it wants thirteen million dollars before he'll let anyone reissue it."

"Thirteen million dollars!" I exclaimed, and as I did all these Wall Street banker guys on cell phones whipped their heads around to look at me. I probably caused that downward line graph that charts the decline of our economy to take a brief upward jag. Feel the power of Johnny Scrotum!

As I walked to the subway, Dear Reader, it suddenly struck me—this means that there actually is a record more rare than Voice Print, which I'd once believed to be the rarest vinyl in the world.

Speaking of Voice Print, upon my return to the United States I was presented with a pristine and sealed copy of that very record with a note on it from Tom and Marcia Hatten! Wow! I couldn't even believe it. Hatten's note starts out with the words "Decisions, decisions, decisions . . ." I can't even believe that he gave me a copy of this record—Dear Reader, I couldn't be happier. I'm framing this thing and never opening it.

Nuclear Debris may be selling for $13 million, but I'll tell you this—no piece of vinyl is worth more to me than this sealed copy of Voice Print. This isn't just some record album, it's a piece of conceptual art! It's going up on the wall! You think I'm going to let Voice Print languish in a cardboard box next to . . . uh, next to my Alice Cooper records? No sir. This is special vinyl.

And if I ever sell it, the auction isn't gonna be on eBay, it's gonna be at Christie's.

Waking Up on All Saints Day

2008-11-02T05:42:00.007+01:00

Dear Reader, I hope life finds you well. The past few months have been interesting for us, and you may have noticed a brief interruption in our broadcast schedule. We here at The Little Black Egg are pleased to report that our new editorial headquarters have been set up, and we are prepared to resume our normal programming.

Be Seeing You.

2008-08-10T12:22:00.008+02:00

We here at The Little Black Egg are gearing up to leave town, so things will be a bit quiet around here while we pack up our editorial offices and ship them to our new destination. We urge you to stay tuned to this channel, however, as we are currently working on an essay on punk rock from Miskolc, Hungary. It will be the best thing we've ever presented, and should be available for your reading pleasure in a couple of weeks.

When one thing ends another begins. Dear Reader—we'll be seeing you.

It Came From Rijeka: Hrvatska Punk

2008-07-24T20:54:00.011+02:00

Just recently, we here at The Little Black Egg went on an excursion to Croatia. Naturally, we worked to improve our collection of ex-YU punk music while we were there. You see, Dear Reader, Slavic rock music is the shit. Anyone who tells you different is lying and should be immediately smashed because they are in the employ of the forces of mediocrity.

However, figuring out what to buy is tricky if you don’t speak Serbian or Croatian, since that’s what most websites and books about the YU Rock scene are going to be written in. Music sharity sites specializing in rock and punk from the Balkans (which you can find under the YU Rock heading on my link list), are very helpful. Most of this stuff is long out of print, and looks like it will stay that way.

Our first stop in Croatia was Rijeka, which is a port town and major transit hub. Many tourists to Croatia pass through Rijeka but don’t stop there. To be honest, Rijeka is somewhat less visually entrancing than, say, Croatia’s many historic medieval cities located on scenic beaches. But Rijeka has the advantage of not being overrun with German tourists doing that tourist thing where they dress as though they are prepared for a jungle safari, instead of a stroll down the main drag of some UNESCO protected wonderland. Later on in my trip, I saw lotsa Germans in Winnebagos. But I digress.

The point is, Rijeka was also the epicenter of one of Yugoslavia’s major punk scenes.

Should you find yourself in Rijeka, the record store to visit is called Dallas Records. My friend Nikola clued me in about this place. It stocks local and international stuff, and is also a record label that has been steadily reissuing a bunch of Rijekan bands.

When I asked the woman at the shop about Rijekan punk, she told me “Yes there have been many many groups from here, we have one of the best scenes in the world and now you will listen to all our bands.” And then she proceeded to take about 15 CDs out of their shrink wrap and play them for me over the in-store stereo system. She talked a little about the Rijekan scene, and how there used to be a lot of back and forth with the Belgrade scene before the war.

If my budget weren’t so limited, I would have gotten tons of stuff, but as it happened I ended up only getting a collection of Rijekan legends Termiti, garagey punks from 1979 with a killer organ sound. Their song “Vjeran Pas” is monster anthem that can’t be stopped. The Dallas Records Termiti collection is entitled Lp ploca vjeran pas: kompletan opus legendarne punk grupe! 17 skladbi, bonus live + multimedia. The multimedia component is a short documentary about the band, which includes footage of them from back in the day. The singer is off the hook, and at one point sings with a toilet over his head. Like, an actual toilet, worn like a hat.

Later on, half of Termiti morphed into Let 3, a cheerfully transgressive bizarro-rock band that’s still kicking today. The CD of Let 3 didn’t really tickle my fancy, but then again I don’t speak the language so I miss all the jokes. They’re real popular in Croatia and the surrounding environs.

While in Rijeka, I was told that Dallas Records was releasing a 3CD comp of all Rijekan punk bands but it wasn’t out yet. I was fucking pissed. I’m always a day late and a dollar short.

But then, about a week later, I was in Dubrovnik and got a line on another record store. I went there and got the same treatment—the guy in the store kept playing me music until I said I had to go. And even though I’d been warned that he probably wouldn’t want to talk about Serbian stuff since he got hit with a bunch of shrapnel during the shelling of Dubrovnik during the war, when I got there he put on a Pekinska Patka album right off the bat.

Best of all though, that 3CD set came out, and it is a real motherfucker. It’s called Rijecki Novi Val. (Novi Val is Croatian for New Wave.) This is one of the best collections of anything I ever acquired. Punk and New Wave were huge in the Balkans. I said it once, and I’ll say it again: the ex-YU countries are responsible for the some of the best punk music made anywhere.

For a communist country, Yugoslavia was comparatively relaxed when it came to personal freedoms. A Yugoslavian passport would allow one to not only journey to the West, but also to travel behind the Iron Curtain (Yugoslavia was non-aligned, and not part of the USSR).

Yugoslav bands played shows and released albums, often with government assistance. The big YU music label, Jugoton, had a roster that included punkers such as Electricni Orgazam, and Jugoton also released albums by foreign artists like Bowie and PiL for the Yugoslav market. Balkan groups got exposure to a wide array of rock music from around the world, but never lost their regional sound. And as I understand it, the authorities mostly welcomed the satire they got from Novi Val bands, considering it to be healthy for society or whatever. For an example, check out this video from the Belgrade band Idoli:

The Rijecki Novi Val Antologija contains 70 songs from about 1979–1989, ranging from more garagey, obviously UK and US influenced punk, to New Wave tracks, to industrial synth experimentation. The production varies on some of the tracks, which include tracks sourced from live records or demo tapes alongside studio recordings. Luckily, these were remastered at Laibach's Studio NSK in Ljubljana, and everything sounds good.

The Xenia track “Troje” sounds has a radio-ready Siouxsie and the Banshees kinda vibe, but is more Slavic than anything else. And some of the more out synth stuff, like Mrtvi Kanal, would trounce anything on those Messthetics comps. But for all the stuff on here I’d heard of, like Let 3 and Paraf (legendary Croat punkers who totally rip off the Ramones’ “Chinese Rocks” in their song “Rijeka”), there is twice is much I haven't. Take for instance Porko Dio, a band with one song on this comp—an 80 second long lo-fi synthpunk workout. I can’t find out anything about these guys (guy?) except that the song, “Riba” (which means “Fish”), is from 1988. Do they have an LP? A demo cassette? I don’t know. Just when I think I’ve figured something out, something else sends me searching.

You’d think that a 70 song compilation would be exhaustive, considering that it documents the punk scene in a town of less than 150,000 people, but the more I look the more there is to find out. I’ve pulled a dozen tracks from the comp and made a sample mixtape, which you can listen to if you find yourself so inclined.

I’m not entirely sure what the best way of procuring a physical copy of this compilation would be, since Dallas Records doesn’t seem to have a web site. But I highly recommend buying it as opposed to downloading it, not because I’m a goody-goody but because the boxed set comes with a big booklet of photos and text, and a bunch of inserts. The time has right for this music to see distribution in the United States.

Someone should get on that.

The Shape of Things to Come

2008-07-14T02:44:00.018+02:00

The Sightings have been around for a few years now, and were the headliners at a show I wrote about recently. They have several albums out, including their excellent LP Through the Panama, released last year.

This is the cover for Through the Panama. I was going to take pictures of the show but my camera is broken.

The show was an RNR 666 event, and the bands played at Corvinteto (please excuse the lack of Hungarian diacritical marks), a multi-story bar/café/movie theater located above Budapest’s first-ever department store, which was built back in the commie days and hasn’t made any concessions to trends in modern retailing. It looks like a warehouse with low ceilings and rows of florescent lights illuminating racks of useless merchandise with the occasional bored clerk waiting for her shift to end. I went in there once and the only other customer was this old woman in purple with a limp who kept coughing as she shuffled around, touching things.

The store atop which rests Corvinteto. This image can be found in its original context here.

The Sightings came out and introduced themselves, announcing that they hailed from Ronkonkoma, Long Island. The band is three guys making music that sounds like a radio transmission from the future. And it seems that the future is going to be a super fucking rad slimy David Cronenberg latex surgery hell world where bands like this pass for pop music. Thank god.

Weirdly, the Sightings have your standard power trio singer-guitarist/bassist/drummer lineup. They sound nothing like a power trio. I have no idea what effects gizmos this band uses, but their guitars make weird ghostly noises, or sound like handfuls of change hitting glass tabletops in slow motion, or anvils dropping on piles of undifferentiated meat at the bottom of a grain silo, or odd pulsating emanations—infrequently, they sound like distorted guitars. Out of this emerge songs—amidst all the reverb and delay, there are these structured songs that guide you forward amongst the strange, looming blocks of sound. It’s noisy material that seems like it should be difficult but it isn’t at all.

On Through the Panama, the Sightings are pretty nuanced. Sometimes the material is cold and sterile (in a good way), but it also crosses into territory that’s almost heartfelt, while also being really creepy. Live, they’re more unhinged; dynamic waves of huge, echoing noise bouncing and crashing, spilling forth and receding while the drummer propels the songs along, sometimes messing with piles of effects stuff. It's the sound of the shape of things to come. After seeing them, I was surprised that more bands don't sound like this.

The Budapest crowd warmed up to the Sightings' weird barrage fairly quickly. From what I’ve seen, Hungarian audiences can be a little reticent with the applause at first, but unlike, say, New York crowds, they aren’t the least bit jaded. Bands that venture outside the bounds of the typical Euro tour circuit can really leave a serious mark on the crowd. And at this show, there was a small group of people up front, staring at the goings on like they were downloading secret commands into their cortex. And they were. Those that were susceptible to this kind of music were being activated. That’s the kind of thing that can only happen once. I’m glad I was there too.

Zvoni Telefon

2008-07-13T13:37:00.005+02:00

We here at the Little Black Egg just got back from a trip to Croatia and Bosnia. While our record hunting efforts in Sarajevo were a total bust, we scored some amazing stuff in Rijeka and Dubrovnik.

While we feverishly toil to complete two forthcoming articles, please enjoy this Serbo-Croatian version of a Blondie classic from Rijekan group Fit.

Büdösök: The Brown Danube Waltz

2008-07-02T07:00:00.014+02:00

For nearly two years, we here at The Little Black Egg have been searching high and low for music by the Hungarian band Büdösök. We first saw them play at the 2006 Sziget festival. They really stuck out, considering Sziget is a giant, boring rock fest stuffed to the gills with bands a good fifteen years past their sell-by date.

Büdösök were playing on a tiny stage that was about 999 miles away from where the headliners played. Their lineup consisted of a drummer, a bass player, and a singer who played the trumpet and a tiny keyboard. When he sang he sounded like . . . well, you know those olden-timey sanitariums you sometimes see in period films, where everyone is chained to the wall and drooling and soiling themselves, and there’s this one guy in restraints who thinks he’s Napoleon or St. Francis of Assisi? And this guy is haranguing everyone around him? Imagine that backed by a distorted, skeletal bass plod. It was nauseating and impressive. I loved it.

The show ended, and two years passed while I tried to find out stuff about them. As in, I looked through the “B” bin in just about every single record store in the country. The record store guys either didn’t know what I was talking about, or insisted that the band had never made a recording. For a minute I thought I had a lead when I met a young man from a Budapest-based pop punk band whilst hanging out at one of my girlfriend’s gigs. When I told him that Büdösök were my favorite Hungarian band, he said “Ah! Büdösök! That is the true Hungarian shitpunk!” And he was right.

This is a video for their song “TV-Stáb-Uzo.”

If there is more Hungarian shitpunk to be found here, well, I’d like some help finding it. Büdösök were pretty goddamn elusive. I never saw any fliers for shows they played, and no record stores had their CDs. There was no Büdösök web presence to speak of, either. Or at least not that I could find. And I was out there sniffing out clues like Sam Spade. I’d pretty much given up hope until I bumped into two of the Büdösök guys at this show I went to.

A teaser video for “Büdösök B.Á.,” the band’s theme song.

I learned that Büdösök’s studio output is isolated to a four song EP called Markomban a buvészpálca . . . muvészetem buz és álca (I don’t know what that means, nor do I know how to get my computer to make the double accent mark over some of the vowels). The drummer told me that they were recording a full-length album, and were going to be opening for NYC’s the Sightings at a venue in downtown Budapest.

So I went to the gig, which was off the hook. In front of a rabid audience, Büdösök delivered the goods. Most of the crowd seemed to know the words and sang along. People were drunk and falling down and a few were crawling around on the floor. A lot of the singer’s between-song stage patter was delivered in a weird falsetto voice, and I think most of it was fake German. The whole thing was really, really funny. The crowd was elated and yelling. It was a big, noisy mess.

It’s possible that I’d like Büdösök more, or maybe less, if I knew what they were singing about. But I don’t, so never mind. (The few lyrics I managed to translate were unprintably scatological.) Büdösök’s sound is built on similar sonic terrain to that of AmRep stalwarts like Killdozer, the Cows, etcetera. Except Büdösök are not from the US Midwest, and they’re not trying to sound like they are. Büdösök’s brand of funny-yet-unnerving inebriated skudge rock is totally home grown. You can pinpoint a couple of influences, but . . . this is the true Hungarian shitpunk. It's seasick and strident and totally fucking weird. No one sounds like this. I'm sure that, if there are C.H.U.D.s living in the sewers of Budapest, these are the songs they march to.

Italian Horror Songs

2008-06-20T21:25:00.020+02:00

Dear Reader, we here at The Little Black Egg have found it advisable to get regular doses of Grade A skronk to inoculate ourselves against the mediocre bullshit in life that can fasten itself to you like an invisible lamprey and drain your bodily humors. So last week, when it came to our attention that Italian band Hiroshima Rocks Around were playing a show in Budapest, we set off into the night to find them. HRA plays a species of weird, noisy thrash stuff that is all too rare in these parts (or anywhere else, really).

The show was at Filter club, which is a bar with a secret music venue in the back. Three bands were on the bill. The first opener, Grip Casino, was a guy who did a solo electric guitar and singing thing, including a nearly indecipherable cover of the Fall’s “Hotel Bloedel.” It was a lotta fun.

“?” (a band, not the famed Mysterian) went on next. I wasn’t sure what to expect from these guys, and what I got were these hilarious noisy punk tunes by a bunch of people wearing weird masks. For instance, the drummer had a Rubik’s cube mask, and the guitarist guy had bandages wrapped all around his head. The band also featured one guy who didn’t play anything, but instead capered around the front of the stage, showcasing his silent comedy moves and doing disgusting things with a harmonica. A record is coming out soon, I gather. ? is one of those bands that verge on being performance art, and were enthusiastically heckled by a loud group of soused fans.

In the break before Hiroshima Rocks Around came on, a member of ?’s extra-hydrated posse demanded to know what I thought of the Dog Faced Hermans. I forget what I told him, but anyway, as I was talking he suddenly fell face-first into the merch table, like kind of like something out of a Buster Keaton movie. Then he got up and wandered off. It was stylish.

I also managed to talk to the folks who booked the show. They put on these events under the moniker RNR 666. They’d previously got the band Tunnel of Love over here, amongst others. NYC’s The Sightings were booked to play next week, and the RNR 666 people had set their sights on getting Live Fast Die to play. How cool is that, right? It occurred to me that these were the people that any stateside unorthodox/noisy/weird punk bands ought to contact if they wanted to play a show in Budapest.

Suddenly, it was time for the Main Event. For their part, Hiroshima Rocks Around put on a high-energy show that kicked my ass. Propelled by a furious drummer, HRA’s singer/guitar mangler guy belted shit out into a little clip-on popstar microphone, while the saxophonist (and sometime bassist) gave Peter Brotzmann a run for his money in the “playing so hard you burst a fucking vein in your head” category of avant horn squealery. The sheer amount of skronk in the air was probably about 5 decibels away from being fatal to organic matter.

Here is some video from the show taken by other people. I didn’t take any pictures of the show because I couldn’t find my camera.

You know, when I think of Italian bands, I think of Goblin and their ilk. Now, there’s nothing wrong with Goblin, but you know what? This is 2008, man. I want my horror movies scored by bands like Hiroshima Rocks Around. Someone who makes horror movies oughta get on that. Every single song HRA played felt like it was about to unbalance and lose its cohesion, but that never quite happened. This wasn't some math rock bullshit, either—these Italians deal in music made outta raw noise and terror, and they make it real fun.

You can get their stuff here and here.

Summertime Piano Mutilation

2008-05-30T18:21:00.015+02:00

I don’t know what it’s like where you are, Dear Reader, but in Budapest spring is here and there are flowers all over the place. Summer is right around the corner, which for this writer means drinking lotsa beer outside with friends, having loud conversations, eating cherry soup, dancing to records in various poorly lit rooms with creaky disco balls, checking out all kinds of live music, and generally having just about the best time I’m gonna have all year.

It also means that we here at The Little Black Egg pick a feelgood jam of the summer. Last summer, our feelgood fun jam was “Vomiting Mirrors” by Clockcleaner. Usually the feelgood hit is a new release, but not always—in 2006, the feelgood hit of the summer was “So Inernational” by B-Legit (feat. Too $hort), which actually came out in 2002. But this year, we return to the present day with Melissa St. Pierre’s “fig. VIII,” off of her Specimens EP released on Table of the Elements.

I didn’t grow up listening to jazz , so every time I listen to improv or experimental or “new” music a certain amount of effort is required for me to wrap my head around the sounds I’m hearing. Not that I’m complaining—I’m willing to put in the work. In my experience, active listening is usually rewarded.

But sometimes, intensely active listening can make me feel like I’ve been on a really long sea voyage on the Sloop John B, and I just wanna go home: for me, “going home” means sitting around listening to Alice Cooper. I’m sure I can’t be the only person who feels this way—hungry for new sounds, but secretly craving tunes that make you want to get down. Getting both can be a rare thing indeed, but when you do . . . oh, when you do.

Enter Specimens.

The album has eight songs and clocks in at just over fifteen minutes. But really, it could run like one long song in eight parts. The main instrument is a prepared piano, which proves to pretty rad both on paper and in practice.

As many of you probably know, the prepared piano was invented by John Cage, and is basically a piano with stuff stuck between the strings so that the piano makes a whole bunch of different noises. I don’t really know much about John Cage, but I do know that John Cale prepared his piano by sticking paperclips in its strings to get the crazy-ass sound you hear on “All Tomorrow’s Parties” offa The Velvet Underground and Nico.

The sound of the prepared piano on Specimens veers between atmospheric noise piano and sounds that are more percussive—whole hosts of weird piano tones that sound like bells or steel drums or just odd, ringing, resonant things. Who knows what strange fate befell this piano, but it makes sounds that you’re not going to hear anywhere else.

I don’t know who else plays on this record, but it sounds like someone is triggering samples on a laptop, and there’s someone playing drums. That might not sound like it would be accessible but it is. Strange territory is explored, and the music goes in a lot of different directions without being alienating or difficult. In fact, it’s downright catchy—sort of a Zeena Parkins vibe by way of Konono No. 1.

Sixteen minutes, eight songs, one slab of music. And I don’t know for sure, but this might be the first instance of a prepared piano record that you can dance to. (In fact, you should dance to it.) Don't hold back. Go have a good time—it’s the summer, for chrissakes.

It seems there’s a video for fig. VIII.

Finally, might I add—that Table of the Elements label? They’re a class act. They consistently release top shelf product. Here’s to hoping that this album sees a vinyl release.

Rock Around the Bloc

2008-05-05T00:44:00.007+02:00

The Little Black Egg HQ has been chaotic recently, as we finished some shiftwork and chased down money that was owed to us. (It was hard work, but you better believe our debtors rendered unto Caesar.) You see, we’re amassing capital for a summer excursion to Moscow and St. Petersburg.

We look forward to our Russian campaign this summer with great anticipation, Dear Reader. However, we need your help.

We’re planning on sinking our Economic Stimulus Package into the fertile landscape of Russian record shoppes. So if you’ve been to any good record stores out in those parts, especially those that sell older vinyl stuff, we’d very much appreciate an email or a comment with the pertinent details.

~~Any leads on where to get roentgenizdat would be greatly appreciated. Thank you, and thank you kindly.~~

Ahem. Actually, we here at The Little Black Egg are going to Croatia and Bosnia instead. So, if you have any leads on good record stores in Rijeka, Dubrovnik, or Sarajevo, please drop us a line.

The Lysergic Demonology

2008-03-17T21:37:00.010+01:00

When I was but a young whippersnapper hanging out at the record shoppe, I used to compulsively read album credits. If there was something I was interested in, but I couldn't buy it, I'd just read all the information possible. And if I actually bought a record, well, then you could bet I examined every square inch of the cover, insets, and etcetera. (It is perhaps no coincidence that we here at The Little Black Egg are nervous, nose-picking nerds.)

Now that I am a rapidly-graying adult humanoid, I still find myself scanning and memorzing names, dates, places—skills that would have probably made me a pretty good gum-cracking girl reporter. Unfortunately, I'm more Langley Collier than Nancy Drew.

As you might then imagine, we were ecstatic when given a copy of the Acid Archives, the poorly-designed yet mind-blowing tome you see pictured above. Put together by the good folks over at Lysergia, this book compiles some of the most chromosomally-damaged psych and weirdrock ever cut to wax.

Of course, we here at The Little Black Egg are so broke that actually purchasing any of the rarities contained between the covers of this here book—well, that's out of the question for the time being. Thankfully, some of stuff has been or is being reissued. I spent an enjoyable weekend with my pal Matty, the kind benefactor who set me up with this stunning title, listening to some of the luminaries described therein.

An excerpt of author Patrick Lundborg's description of weird Christian psych group The New Creation:

. . . you could write a whole book about the strange cerebral buttons this album pushes, the aggregated effect of which is truly staggering. The female vocalist is unsure of things such as rhythm and accents, and opts for a very unusual half-sung/half-spoken syle that sounds liek a 1950s housewife humming to herself at K-Mart. The male vocalist has a flat, geeky voice that lends little weight to the apocalyptic and often quite bizarre lyrics about degereate hippies, drugs, Sodom & Gomorrah, immoral adults, sinners and more . . .

I've since heard the New Creation, and lemme tell you—that description? Spot on.

For the serious to super-serious psych collector, well, it seems like this guide is kind of required reading. For a cash-strapped jerk like myself, flipping through this guide is like reading about strange, half-forgotten crypto-zoological menageries. Either way, the authors deserve a thundering round of applause for the work they've put into this title.

Spending $12

2008-02-23T17:58:00.020+01:00

As an itinerant writer and copyeditor, I’m not always rolling in the cabbage. Not that I’m complaining—you think I’m complaining? You think I want to go back to my old cubicle and turn gray under florescent lights while invisible demons eat my soul? No! I’m aspiring to live like Beaumarchais!

Of course, right now I’m copyediting an 800 page book on Romanian farm collectivization, meaning that my life actually resembles Kafka’s Das Schloss starring Henny Youngman, but that’s the price of endeavor, and I can do naught but cast my gaze towards the ineffable rewards that will someday be mine. Sure, things are tough without a steady paycheck, but do you think Gomez Addams came by his fortune through normal channels? No! And when the biography of Gomez Addams is written, I bet they’ll skip over his “lean years” and devote the bulk of the text to Gomez’s knife-throwing, tango dancing, and alligator farming. So it is with me. Above my desk, Dear Reader, I have two cross-stitched samplers: one reads “An ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A copyeditor spends his life getting into tense situations,” and the other reads “The life of a freelance writer is always intense.” Those are words to live by.

This is all a roundabout way of admitting that I’ve been totally fucking broke lately, especially during my recent visit to NYC. I don’t know when I’m gonna be able to get out west to see people, or when I’m going to be able to pick up that Times New Viking Present the Paisley Reich record I’ve been wanting to get—or any record, for that matter. In fact, if it weren’t for good friends, I would have gone without food and housing.

While in NYC, I was bound and determined to see music. Specifically, I was determined to see Om, who were playing a show with Daniel Higgs. That’s a good lineup right there.

Daniel Higgs is the main guy in this band Lungfish, and now makes these strange albums of solo banjo and jew’s harp improvisations. I’m a big fan of his recent Metempsychotic Melodies album, made up of long banjo-based compositions plus the odd string of stentorian intonations about love.

Higgs music is sprawling, and it sounds like he’s channeling awfully weird forces when he plays. (My friend Matty, who has launched a one-man humanitarian mission to make sure that I stay tethered to the world of fine music, introduced me to Daniel Higgs’ stuff. Thanks, Matty.) Besides Metemphychotic Melodies, I’d recommend his album Atomic Yggrasil Tarot, which you can get with a little hardbound book of Higgs’ paintings and written text. All of the Daniel Higgs solo releases are good, though.

Om, on the other hand, is a band made up of the bass player and drummer of Sleep, a band that broke up in the 90s. Sleep started out sounding kinda like Black Sabbath, and ended up trying to deliver an album to their record company that was an hour-long weed anthem. One song—one hour. This album is the legendary Dopesmoker, available at fine record shoppes everywhere.

Needless to say, a 60 minute marijuana metal monolith isn’t gonna move units in the way that 90s alterna-hits of the day did. The record company wasn’t pleased, and the band split amidst tensions. The guitarist guy formed High On Fire, which is a metal band that has songs about Pharisees and yetis and shit. (Check the sample lyric: Abominable nomad/The ancient monks know his clan/The time of yeti will rise/Because his ways have been wise.) The other two guys in Sleep, bassist-singer Al Cisnros and drummer Chris Haikus, became Om.

Om is just bass, drums, and singing. Their music really couldn't be simpler, but by making long, repetitive songs that undergo slight variations over time, the band creates something totally compelling, and rewards your listening effort. They do songs with names like Rays of the Sun/To the Shrinebuilder—songs that take up the entire side of an LP, and keep going and going until your mind is all stretched out. Now, I’m not a big heavy metal fan, but I do like psych music and dub reggae. A long, psych-stoner-doom rock dub sounding anthem thing? About a shrinebuilder? I’ll buy that for a dollar.

This kind of music doesn’t just drop out of the sky—if you’re going to be in a bass and drums combo that does hypnotic 20 minute long songs with only one part, well, that’s dedication right there. That’s the kind of band that springs from the fertile soil of a previous band’s decomposing remains . . . a lot of things had to happen for a band like Om to exist.

Seeing as how I was in New York for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t gonna miss these guys for anything. This took some planning—you see, I really was broke, and not at all sure I was going to have the $12 (or whatever) it would cost to see them by the time they played. I had to buy things like food and subway fares.

So I squirreled away $12 at the beginning of my trip, figuring that I could make up the remainder of the ticket price by changing the assorted foreign currencies in my wallet. Let me tell you: not dipping into that $12 was a lot of work. I won’t go into some of the more embarrassing details.

And as I wandered around NYC, seeing friends and eating their food, I began thinking about why I liked Om (or, say, Akron/Family) more than, say, certain other kinds of modern-day psych-y bands that play shows all over These United States. Because they’re out there, you know.

One train of thought led to another, and I ended up finding myself thinking about this Jorge Luis Borges story called “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”

In this story, the narrator talks about his friend Pierre Menard, who is a writer. He lists Menard’s works, which are all pretty interesting, but pale in comparison to Menard’s real work, which was to try and write Don Quixote:

The first method he conceived was relatively simple. Know Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard studied this procedure (I know he attained a fairly accurate command of seventeenth-century Spanish) but discarded it as too easy. Rather as impossible! my reader will say. Granted, but the undertaking was impossible from the very beginning and of all the impossible ways of carrying it out, this was the least interesting. To be, in the twentieth century, a popular novelist of the seventeenth seemed to him a diminution. To be, in some way, Cervantes and reach the Quixote seemed less arduous to him—and, consequently, less interesting--than to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.

So the story continues onward in this interesting manner. When Menand finally produces his fragments of the Quixote, the narrator compares it to Cervantes’ Quixote. Now, the two texts are identical. And comparing identical passages, the narrator finds Menand’s Quixote to be “almost infinitely richer.” Even though both texts contain the same words, one was written in the 17th century, and the other was written in the present day. Therefore, they are judged differently and they contain different meanings.

Bands like Om and Daniel Higgs seem familiar at first. Before I even heard them I'd heard about them, and figured that they just made drugged out, boring hippie nonsense. I resisted listening to them for a long time: I didn't necessarily want to listen to some guy making banjo drone-folk, and while I liked Om on paper, it seemed like they'd be tedious in practice. When I finally took the time to actually listen, I was hooked. It’s hard to say what these guys are tapping into. but the stuff they’re playing is entirely new, and nothing if not contemporary.

I'm always hearing how people are supposed to have low attention spans because we live in a media landscape of soundbites and blah blah blah, but it would seem that a whole lot of popular music these days embraces dynamics, experimentation, and active listening. OM and Daniel Higgs (along with a number of other artists) are making these kind of sounds that demand that everything else be pushed away. It's meditative, but not necessarily peaceful. I'm reminded of . . . I don't know . . . I mean, don't most world religions or spiritual thingies have a moment when someone, like a priest or a magic warlock guy or whatever, performs some kind of an action to prepare a space for religion stuff? Like how priests say prayers and wave around that incense burner, or how a magic warlock guy might light candles and place them around the sacred ritual pentagram? They're purifying the space, right? Purifying the space, or creating a void in the secular world, or something. This is an ages-old practice, but its done differently by different people from different religions in different parts of the world. Despite all these differences, it accomplishes the same thing.

It’s 2008, and the music industry is collapsing like a preternaturally old man-monster who lived for 200 years by sucking the blood from the young and innocent, until his tick-like, swollen body became too heavy for his spindly little osteoporosis-inflicted legs to support, so they snapped like dry branches while, shrieking like a falsetto air raid siren, while his repulsive, claw-like hands dragged down anyone within reach. Meanwhile music just keeps getting more and more innovative: things are expanding rather than contracting, and new vistas are opening up for brave listeners the world around.

At any rate, you can imagine my disappointment when I found out that Om split up and the show was cancelled.

I bought tacos and beer with my $12.

Asylum 66 Revisited

2008-02-17T13:05:00.009+01:00

Dear Reader: as you are no doubt aware, I spill writing of the highest caliber out onto the page, where it shines like a million fucking diamonds reflecting pink lasers into your face. (If there was some kind of award I could win for that, you’d better believe that I’d have that award, buddy-boy, and my award acceptance speech would move the audience to tears.) Everything I write for The Little Black Egg is a cause for celebration, and my readers say things like “strike up the band and slaughter the fatted calf, new words about music have been penned, and they are certainly wry and insightful! Oh, happy day! The darkness has been banished from this land, let us now turn our faces to the sun and drink in its priceless illumination! Let us fall back into the gentle nuance of this record review, as one might fall into a bed of rose petals near of gentle, winding stream! Tonite we sacrifice John Barleycorn! Barring that, let’s at least break out the pickles and vodka!”

But sadly, Dear Reader, The Little Black Egg has been soiled by a mean-spirited piece of writing included in its archives. I could offer excuses as to how it came to be that it got there, but who cares about that. All you need to know is that I wrote something mean about a band called Asylum 66. I made fun of them because I thought other people would find it funny, and then I forgot about it. Except now, when people are looking for information on Asylum 66, my little tirade pops up. Well, this situation makes me feel crummy.

You know, Don Rickles used to say that Will Rogers said "I never picked on the little guy, only big guys." I'm no Don Rickles, but I think that's a good thing to keep in mind. That's the kind of motto you write down on a cocktail napkin and carry it around in your wallet. Pull it out once in a while, mull it over, you're less likely to be destroyed by your own hubris.

In this spirit of the New Year, I’ve redacted the offending content. We here at The Little Black Egg do not want to be skulking little meanies, taking cheap shots at people for cheap laughs. And they are cheap laughs, Dear Reader—the kind of laughter you see chimpanzees emitting from behind their plexiglass wall in the zoo when they throw their poo at another chimp. Well, I’ve decided that the price of that kind of laughter is simply too high to pay.

I think we’ve all learned a valuable lesson today.

Metapost: It's a Virtue

2008-02-10T18:51:00.000+01:00

Dear Readers: I've been travelling a lot recently, and having too much fun to provide you with the quality content you've come to expect from The Little Black Egg.

Now, I've got so much quality content stuck in my head that it looks like I have hydropcephalus, and I can't wait to get home so's I can stick a shunt in my head and drain that quality content out for consumption by you, my beloved audience. I know that you are all possessed of that virtue that is patience, and are not annoyed at the time that elapses between posts. When my new content appears here, for free, I know that you'll be here with hands outstretched, ready to recieve it. Thank you and thank you kindly.

This can be assembled.

It's Monk Time

2008-01-12T23:19:00.000+01:00

Dave Day, the banjo player from the Monks, died the other day. That's him on the far right.

Over forty years ago, some American GIs stationed in Germany decided to form a band after getting out of the army. They got cowls, wore nooses around their necks, and shaved their hair into monk tonsures. The Monks played weird, distorted, rhythmic, sarcastic sing-along music, and released one album, Black Monk Time, in 1965.

I first heard this band when I was 19 or so and my friend Jackie loaned me a CD of their stuff (which I lost like a jerk—sorry about that, Jackie). I liked them immediately—it's hard not to. They're like some wondrous mythical animal that has the science community scratching their heads, while cryptozoologists hammer away at keyboards, trying to concoct a thesis that will convince the world at large that this impossible creature actually exists.

I don't have any fascinating insights to offer about the Monks; I just think they were light years ahead of their time, and I'm sorry Dave Day is dead.

Thanks to magic of the internets, the existing footage of the Monks, originally broadcast on German TV, is available for anyone to see. Way back when I first heard this band, I never could have dreamed that I'd ever actually get to see a recording of them. They are hilarious: let's watch some television.

This clip contains Monk Chant and How to Do Now. Check out the guitar abuse in the former and the Dave Day's psychotic banjo wrangling in the later.

Boys are Boys. Dance to it, you Germans!

Here is Complication, probably my favorite Monks tune. It was compiled on the famous Nuggets comp, and woulda been a big hit if there was any justice in this world.

The Monks reunited in 1999 for Cavestomp, and then stayed quiet for a while. A book was written on them, a tribute album was recorded, and a documentary, Trans-Atlantic Feedback, was made. So forty years after Black Monk Time was released, they were persuaded to play some shows. Here they are, after all that time, still bringing it.

This song is called Higgle-dy Piggle-dy. Click here to see Mark E. Smith stagger out onto stage with the Monks while they play this song at another date. He does a funny little dance and then abruptly leaves.

Black Monk Time.

Rest in Peace, Dave.

2007 is Over

2008-01-02T13:09:00.001+01:00

Recently, my friend Matty send me some clippings from The Wire magazine, along with a couple of CDs he burned. He kindly sent this package from Boston to Hungary just to be a nice guy—it was a mercy mission.

You see, dear Reader, I’ve been living in Budapest for about a year and a half now. And during this time I’ve understandably fallen a bit behind on the killer new sounds pouring out of the USA. Were it not for the internets, WFMU, and music purveying pals like Matty, I’d be trapped in 2006 forever . . . and ever, and ever.

Unfortunately, the rock and roll scene in Budapest isn’t really my cup of tea (except for the band Büdösök, who sound sorta like Cop Shoot Cop, but with better songs and a trumpet player. Stay tuned for a future feature on this band—I finally tracked down a guy who knows them, so hopefully I can actually get their CDs. See, I go into stores and ask for them by name, and that name is a bitch to pronounce. The store owner guys just laugh at me, because the name Büdösök means “We Are the Stink People” or something. Now, besides the fact it’s a funny name, if I mispronounce it—and there are three other possible pronunciations for each of those vowels that only Hungarian ears are properly attuned to—I end up saying something like “we are smelling stinky,” or even “we are a shit-octopus.” It’s embarrassing, man). If I were a metalhead, I’m sure I’d be having a blast watching Magyar metal bands like Watch My Dying and Graveyard at Maximum. But I’m not. So I end up seeing folk music and traditional stuff and various permutations thereof.

A year and change passes with me seeing these kinda shows, when Matty’s package full of clippings and CDs shows up in my mailbox. So imagine my surprise when, tucked in the envelope was a one-page “Global Ear” section on Budapest from the Wire, penned by the guy from A Hawk and a Hacksaw.

It was really weird to read this. I go to these places! I’ve seen all these bands! It’s like the Wire is shaking my hand, saying “Congratulations son, some invisible British music nerds recognize that you are totally with it.”

But enough patting myself on the back for seeing music in places that other, actually cool people told me about. The point is that, out of everything in that little article, the most important thing is that Sirály, my favoritist place in the city, is finally getting the props it deserves.

Sirály is a three-floor bar/café/bookstore/performance space in downtown Budapest, which is also a squat (probably the only one in the city) and a Jewish cultural center (probably the only cool one in the city). The people running it do a great job, and a ton of cool shit goes down there, and it’s usually for free. They just do it for fun. You wanna see Moroccan dance-rock motherfuckers Chalaban? It’s free. You wanna see Eastern European Jewish party songs played by ass-kicking trad Klezmer band Di Naye Kapelye? It’s free. Also, they’re on the same bill, and the place is packed, and everyone is getting down. Seriously, if that place didn’t exist, my experience here would be about 300% less fun.

There have been a couple articles on Sirály—a hi-gloss “lifestyle” kind of piece in the LA Times, and an extremely poorly researched thing in some German paper, which had some factual errors and also totally missed the point of the space. But whatever. We were here when Síraly first opened up, and it’s been consistently kicking ass, the people who run it are providing a service to humanity, and I’m glad to see it get recognized.

I had been planning on writing a sort of year-end rundown of my favorite music shit from 2007, but soon realized that I’m outta touch when it comes to the cool releases that came out. I guess that the song “Vomiting Mirrors” by Clockcleaner became my 2007 Funtime Jam—but really, I haven’t been able to hear most of what came out this year, as I have neither the money to pay for imports or the patience/strength of will to download them all from the internets. Anyway, downloading new releases isn’t very sporting, don’t you think? (Not to diminish the glory of “Vomiting Mirrors,” which is a great big steaming pile of wonderful.)

The best music thing I saw, however, was Frank London playing with Boban Markovic (part I) and then the beautiful audio dogpile of the Síraly afterparty (part II). Now, I know many of you might be rolling your eyes, thinking “Blah blah blah, Boban Markovic, I’ve real miles of print about Boban and I know the score.” But the plot thickens—dear Reader, read on.

Part I: The Show

Here is a shitty picture of the stage

On paper, it was already a good concert. There was Boban Markovic, the megastar Serbian trumpet great who is universally loved in the Balkans and the world around, and who deserves every piece of hyperbole that music journalists invent to try and describe his playing. With Boban, you also get his Orkestar, which is made up of the cream of the crop of Serbian brass band guys, and his son Marko, who is being groomed for excellence. Then there’s Frank London, who recently won a Grammy (!!!) with his band the Klezmatics. From what I understand, Frank is a New York music vet who plays, you know, the cool kind of Klezmer stuff that comes out of New York. Despite his Grammy award, his music doesn’t make concessions to . . . I don’t know, whoever hands out Grammies. You know what I’m trying to say.

Both of these guys did an album together at some point, and they were playing together at the Sportarena. I hadn’t seen an arena show since I had just turned 16 and drove my deathtrap 1972 Plymouth Valiant (which went to internal combustion Valhalla after two guys bought it from me and drove it to a violent end in a demolition derby) two hours through the ice and snow to the Pepsi Arena in Albany. But I digress.

I’ve seen Boban about . . . I think I’ve seen him three times now. I’ve heard a lot of his albums, and I’ve seen him in Underground, obviously, and I have to say, it would have been better to catch Boban a couple of years ago. Because each time I’ve seen him he’s kind of phoned it in. That’s probably understandable—his band plays a lot, and most audiences seem to want the same 15 songs from the standard brass band repetoire, and he’s played them a hundred zillion times and no longer has anything to prove. Of course, he’s not always like this—Sarah saw him in New York, and he happily pulled out all the stops for the ex-Yugoslav expats there. And I’ve never managed to see him in Serbia. The last time I saw the Boban Orkestar was at this place West Balkan not too far from my apartment: the band has kicked ass, Marko kicked ass, and Boban sort of wandered the stage, leaving the soloing to his son, smoking and yelling at the sound guy.

The Main Event worked like this—Boban’s group played some songs, and Frank’s group played some songs, and then, for the exciting part of the evening, they both played some songs. And Boban was pumped up. He was exhorting his band to play better, and his solos traveled through the Sportarena’s stale air to melt my eyes out of my skull. It was the Boban show I felt like I’d always wanted to see, but had never gotten the chance to.

Here they are, playing together. I don't know what this song is, but check out the insane tuba battle halfway through.

When they played together, though, that was when the real shit happened. First of all, it was clear that Boban and Frank had no little amount of mutual admiration, and their playing was fucking intense. Second of all, I learned that I’d been horribly underestimating Marko. He kills it on the trumpet, and when given the opportunity to call the first song of the combined set, do you know what he called? “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaata.

You know “Planet Rock,” right? That song that samples Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express”? Well, my mind folded five ways and inverted the minute I understood that I was watching the Boban Markovic Orkestar play an Afrika Bambaata tune. That little snatch of electro-tunage went from Germany to New York to Serbia: how cool is that? Kraftwerk, man—you can’t stop the funk.

Here is 90% of Planet Rock: sorry that I missed the beginning of this song. They kind of mess around with it for a minute, and then it returns to melody at the end.

I came away from this show a fan of Frank London, my faith in Boban Markovic renewed, and a convert to Marko’s playing. I’d pay to see Marko sans his Pops any day of the week.

Part II: The Party After the Show
Sirály was doing something every night of the week for Hanukah, so we headed there after the show figuring that all of our friends would be there. And they were! It was great.

See, there was a giant, unstructured music thing going on in the basement of the club. It started at 8, and we got there around 10:30. How was it? I dunno. I mean, it was great, but it was a real mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

For instance, there was a diminutive Hungarian Hip hop girl who assumed that everyone was there to back up her rapping. They kept turning off her mic, much to the amusement of the crowd. I don’t know much Hungarian, but even a foreigner like me could tell that this MC was, as we say in the US, “wack.” Here, let me do an impression of her for you:

Vashty-vashty-vashty VASH
Vashty-vashty-vashty vash
Vashty-vashty-vashty VASH
Vashty-vashty-vashty vash
Vashty-vashty-vashty VASH
Vashty-vashty-vashty vash
Vashty-vashty-vashty VASH
Vashty-vashty-vashty vash.

Rinse and repeat. What is this, 1982? Watching her rap was like watching the Bizarro version of Superman try to fight crime. Seriously, she’s the kind of person who they used to drag off the stage with one of those big shepherd’s crooks in the vaudeville days.

There was a Hungarian jazz band that hadn’t played in some time and were having a reunion gig of sorts, and they were the main music nucleus for a while. Their massive piano player had no piano, and engaged in some scatting that—you know what? I’ve never actually seen scatting with my own two eyes, and while I sort of wish he hadn’t done it, the guy managed to come off as ballsy rather than retarded. He also got the fuck offa the stage after dropping his scat. Well played, piano guy.

Then some other guy tried to scat. Horrible. Fuck that guy. Two people scatting is one and a half too many.

It should be said that during this time, a number of drummers had begun showing up to play drums. Most importantly, there were these two elder drum wizards. They just played straight through the whole thing. They didn’t get up to take a leak, get a drink, have a cigarette, scratch an itch—nothing. They just sat there, playing conga drums. They weren’t flashy, either. They just sort of played this beat. I didn’t know who they were. The Sirály folks didn’t know who they were. No one there knew who they were. I still don’t know. In this photo, a young guy who they seemed to know sat down between them and joined in. Mysteries within mysteries.

Accordian player David Yengebarian dipped in and out of the proceedings. He’s played at Sirály a number of times, and he’s fucking fantastic. Also, might I add, a lot of stage presence for an accordian player. The guy sort of looks likes the Somnabulist from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Yengebarian seemed a lot, shall we say, looser than he usually does during his actual gigs, and it was cool. He eventually got up and wandered off.

Frank London’s appearance around midnight went nearly unnoticed. Several members of his All Star band showed up as well, and they killed. They didn’t actually play a proper show or anything, but occasionally a few of them would dip into the general weirdness. They were very generous, giving local musicians more than their fair chance in the spotlight and taking it in stride when their solos were cut short by, say, flailing belly dancers, an enthusiastic whitey-fro’d yeti youth squealing a yeti love call through his clarinet, the aforementioned MC Vashty-Vash, or etcetera.

And so the night wore on into the wee hours of the AM. Although his combined stage time probably amounted to about fifteen minutes, Frank and his All Star band really did music scene of Budapest a solid by showing up. He didn’t have to—I mean, he is Grammy Award Winning Recording Artist Frank London.

“Grammy Award Winning Recording Artist Frank London.” That has a nice ring to it, right? I certainly thought so, and continued to refer to him as such throughout the night. For instance, I might say “Whos that? Why, that’s Grammy Award Winning Recording Artist Frank London,” or “Hey Greg, did you enjoy seeing Grammy Award Winning Recording Artist Frank London play fifteen seconds of free jazz before that dipshit with the clarinet barged in and started shrieked out a 300 decibel yeti call?” Or maybe I’d say “There was a fight outside? A knife fight? Between who and who? Did they both have knives? Only one guy had a knife? Is anyone hurt? Not really? What? ‘It’s all good?’ What the fuck does that mean? What the fuck. You mean to tell me that I’ve been wasting my time standing around down here, drinking beer, waiting to see if Grammy Award Winning Recording Artist Frank London was going to get up there and play something, when I could have been upstairs, drinking beer, watching a knife fight out on the street? Oh man.”

Anyway, Grammy Award Winning Recording Artist Frank London seems like a cool guy, but he wasn’t the coolest guy in the room. Not by a long shot. The coolest guy in the room was approximately 138 years old. He had a long beard, and a wool hat, and looked sort of like a homeless longshoreman. Or maybe a sailor who has been cursed to walk the earth forever and ever after angering the sea gods. He was another guy who no one knew, and was just randomly wandering around downstairs, like he didn’t know or care where he was. He kept picking up stuff, examining it, and then gently setting it back down again. At one point he wandered into the middle of where everyone was playing music, looking bored, then checked his watch and gradually wandered off. Like he had somewhere better to be! Maybe he did. I don’t know.

Around 3 AM, we wandered off as well, exhausted. On the way home, I was thinking about this time I went to go see a show at the Stone in NYC that was a celebration of John Coltrane. It was on his birthday, and there was this incredible band assembled playing Coltrane songs. There was Rashid Ali and Reggie Workman, who were Coltrane’s rhythm section after things got too weird for the original guys. Fuck, I feel like an asshole, but I can’t remember the other guys who were playing, but they were awesome, and my mind was blown. So, I had this realization that these guys weren’t a tribute band or something, but that they were channeling music that was every bit as vital today as it was forty years ago. And that there was all this room in the music for people to express themselves, and it was never played the same way twice. The music I was hearing only existed in the present, and I’d never hear it again.

That looks pretty fucking corny now that I’ve typed it out, but it was a big deal for me to really understand this. It was like learning how to swim or something.

Now, a couple years later and a few thousand miles away, I’m seeing this other musical improv event in Budapest. There are a lot of crucial differences, but that’s all right. There isn’t another venue in the city for this kind of thing, so everyone came to Sirály. Everyone who had the night free and wanted to throw down threw down, from Grammy Award Winning Recording Artists to total beginners with a chip on their shoulder. Good. I’m glad they did, all of them, even Scat Guy II and MC Vashty-Vash. Because that isn’t going to happen again, and I’m glad I had the chance to see it.

Dear Readers, I hope that each and every one of you had a good 2007. And if you didn’t, well, that’s all right too. It’s already gone, and we’re never going to see it again.

Printhead

2007-12-02T17:25:00.000+01:00

A little over a year ago, I was hanging out with my friend Dave. (These days, Dave is probably better known as Davey Oil, but I knew him before that appellation came into being, so I still call him Dave.) He was in town from Seattle, and we were sitting around, listening to music, and shooting the shit. You know, as you do.

Anyway, we were looking at this book my girlfriend bought me this book for my birthday. It was all the William Blake poems as he published them, i.e. as multi-colored engravings. It was pretty impressive collection, and reading those poems as engravings was a much different experience than reading them in a Viking Portable paperback edition.

At the time, Dave was the director of the Seattle zine library. At least, I think he was. See, it might have been a consensus-based, anarchist kind of thing, with no hierarchy—if so, Dave would be annoyed to be called its director. He explained the whole structure of the thing to me, but the passage of time has erased the truth out of my brain. The important thing to know is that Dave is both a charismatic mofo and a bottomless well of knowledge about zines and comics and self-publishing and all that. He was excited that I was reading William Blake, and told me that Blake may well have been the first real self-published zine guy.

And you know what? I think he's right. Blake was an engraver and a printmaker, and self-published all his own works. Other people have self-published, but he actually did his own design and layout and printing.

The other night, I was flipping through the little William Blake paperback I brought out here, which has his collected works and letters and stuff. It includes a couple of bombastic advertisement he'd written for himself. Dear Reader, I submit them to you—does this count as the world's firt-ever zine ad? From October 10, 1793:

The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works.

This difficulty has been obviated by the Author of the following productions now presented to the Public; who has invented a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one fourth of the expense.

If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward.

Mr. Blake's powers of invention very early engaged the attention of many persons of eminence and fortune; by whose means he has been reguarly enabled to bring before the Public works (he is not afraid to say) of equal magnitude and consequence with the productions of any age or country . . .

. . and so on. Then follows a list of every "issue" of Blake's poetry. For example:

America, a Prophecy, in Illuminated Printing. Folio, with 8 designs: price 10s. 6d.

The ad spiel ends with:

No Subscriptions for the numerous great works now in hand are asked, for none are wanted; but the Author will produce his works, and offer them to sale at a fair price.

Is William Blake the first zinester guy? Do each of these quartos count as a zine? And if so, has there ever been a better zine than his? Besides Shark Fear, Shark Awareness, obviously.

I don't know. But I have to say, I'm more than a little impressed with the tone he sets with self promotion. It's clear where he stands, and I think others would do well to follow his lead. In 1809, a printed advertisement for an exhibition of his concluded with:

There cannot be more than two or three great Painters or Poets in any Age or Country; and these, in a corrupt state of Society, are easily excluded, but not so easily obstructed. They have ex[c]luded Water-colours; it is therefore become necessary that I should exhibit to the Public, in an Exhibition of my own, my Designs, Painted in Water-colours. If Italy is enriched and made great by RAPHAEL, if MICHAEL ANGELO is its supreme glory, if Art is the glory of a Nation, if Genius and Inspiration are the great Origin and Bond of Society, the distinction my Works have obtained from those who best understand such things, calls for my Exhibition as the greatest of Duties to my Country.

Wm. Blake: Independent publisher.

Reptilian Psych From the Center of the Earth

2007-11-24T02:15:00.000+01:00

Over the past few years, we here at The Little Black Egg have been sucked ever further downward into the vortex that is psychedelic music. It feels as though we’ve digested thousands of hours of psych at this point, if not aeons of psych, but it's still only at the tip of the iceberg.

As a young man, I was surprised to discover that psych music could be a howling pit of lysergic paranoia and general rock and roll awesomeness. I didn’t know that. See, I’d been led astray by boring crap like post-Syd Pink Floyd. That shit is boring, right? It is indeed. It’s very, very, boring. If you don’t do the research, you’d never know that, at the same time Pink Floyd was beginning on their odyssey of pandering to boring people the world around, Roky Erickson was emanating schizo LSD R&B out of his third eye. Do you know how much reading I had to do to divine that fact? Goddammit, in the United States of America, it shouldn’t be so hard to find the real shit. I don’t care if repeated listens will hunch your spine, destroy your chromosomes, and cause pink tentacles to grow outta your face.

However: at the end of the day, this is an cruel world where charlatans and Salieris abound, full of hard luck stories and Van Goghs cutting of their ears and all that, and some things remain unjustly hidden from the audience that would revere them.

There are many stories of heroism in the annals of record collecting, and I’m afraid that my discovery of the rarely-seen Cold Sun record is not one of them. No, I just stumbled across it, really. I think I acquired it because it was a psych record, from Texas, and the name of the band was Cold Sun (but also known as Dark Shadows), and it had never been released commercially at the time of its recording, which was 1970. It’s been released since, in small batches, thanks to Rockadelic.

Cold Sun had a lot of things going for them. They were from Austin, TX in the 1960s, and hung out with Roky Erickson and the Elevators. They had an electric autoharp, which sounds sort of like three 12-string Rickenbackers being played at once with a velvet pick. My first couple times through this album, I couldn’t figure out what the shit was making that noise.

Billy Miller, singer and authoharpist, would later be in Roky's band.

Cold Sun clearly took a lot of hallucinogenic drugs, which went well with the fact that they had a real thing for reptiles. Whoever wrote the lyrics really liked snakes and lizards and other scaly things, and sang about them in songs. For instance, check out this snatch of verse from their song “Ra-Ma,” which (I guess) is largely concerned with the goings on of the past, present, and future, and a tortoise:

The tortoise before you
Saw da Gama
As he landed . . .
We can make a life in a temple of stone
It took an age or two to get home
Now see the tree and how it has grown
It was a seed in my hand when the tortoise was born

Ha ha ha, word! Ra-Ma is over eleven minutes long, by the way. It starts of with all sorts of (actually very pretty) autoharp craziness before growing into a tower of mystical verbiage.

(On the mystical verbiage front, the good people at Lysergia have an excellent article on Cold Sun, where it is revealed the album was made to be the exact length of a Johnny Winter album, because a certain member of the band had a real thing for numerology, and as a result songs like Ra-Ma had to be made longer.)

It’s hard to describe the Cold Sun sound—maybe if you could imagine the 13th Floor Elevators, and then make that image very, very blurry, and at times aimless, and add a weird, dreamy autoharp . . . that’s sort of it. Or, maybe more accurately, it sounds like humanoid-reptilian beings living inside of a hollow earth picked up on radio transmissions from Texas in 1966, and attempted to pay tribute to them in their own band. As biology would have it, their reptilian ears and brains couldn’t quite process how rock and roll worked, so they came up with their best approximation of it via their evil reptile music. Also, they’ve never seen the sun. Or maybe the sun is cold in there. I don't know.

Some of the melodies are a little same-y, but that's all right. Each song is still an amazing psych revelation. “See What You Cause” has, out of the blue, a screaming 10 second-long guitar solo right near the end of the song that sounds like Helios Creed briefly materialized in the middle of the recording studio before blinking out of existence once again. “South Texas” is a nitemare seasick creepy-crawler that ends, weirdly, with a snatch of blissful, come-hither cooing. “For Ever” states the fact that how your future lies is written on your hand, then ends with a horrible guitar squall of white noise, followed by a cleanly played little guitar and harp flourish, which stabilizes the proceedings for the album closer, “Fall.” I say album closer, but there is no definitive track listing. There are other tracks, too, and you can put them in any order you like.

This album is rare, and it’s weird, and it has a cool link to Roky, but that’s not why I’m writing about it. No sir, I’m writing about it because it’s the kind of music that I didn’t know I needed to hear until I heard it. Then I thought, I’ve been waiting to hear something like this forever and ever. How did I ever get along without it? It sounds like its been around since ancient times, like the coelacanth. Yeah, it's like coelacanth of psych. People thought it was long dead, but it’s still around, and it’s eating things.

Godstar

2007-10-29T14:52:00.000+01:00

I know this probably goes without saying, but the Stones made a big mistake when they kicked Brian Jones out of the band.

Is Their Satanic Majesties Request the best Rolling Stones album? We here at The Little Black Egg are starting to think it is.

Ripped From Today's Headlines!

2007-10-27T12:03:00.000+02:00

These music blog thingeroos are neat and everything, but there's nothing like actually reading words on paper. You know, so's I can read in the park, or on the toilet, or on the bus, or lying on my bed, or whatever.

And if you, Dear Reader, are in the market for music zines, printed on paper, you'd have a harder time getting a better value for your money than Z Gun. Based in Sacramento, Z Gun just recently put out its first issue, and it's fucking great.

Now, there's a lot of cool things about Z Gun, such as the fact that it's a giant newspaper tabloid, the writing is snappy, and that it's relatively typo-free. But the best thing about it is that it's a music publication you can trust, and that's important. And at the end of the day, isn't that what you're looking for when you're reading about music? Whether you are compelled to examine single album in the record store before you can leave with a clear concience, or if you just wanna figure out what's good out there now, Z Gun is in your corner. A fact worthy of note: one of the editors of this fine magazine runs the equally fine Crud Crud music blog, which I link to at right, and the S-S Records, which put out a lotta notable records (including my faves the A Frames, holy shit one the A Frames writes for Z Gun!!!).

On a personal note, I was pleased to be directed towards some excellent new(ish) music like Pink Reason and The Touched, and old music like Washington Phillips and Witch—these are solid recommendations, people. Also, I hafta admit I got a total nerd-rush upon discovering that I could easily keep up with their San Francisco artpunk primer. (Ha ha ha, I still rule, OK?)

Speaking of San Francisco art punk, Z Gun kind of reminds me of V. Vale's old zine Search & Destroy, which later mutated into RE/Search. There's the tabloid-style layout, obviously, but besides that, I am gripped by the sense that music is out there happening, and it's happening now, and if I'm missing it, it's my fault. I get the feeling that, in the future, these will be considered an important record of an important time. It's inspiring stuff.

Ink on paper.

Voice Print: the Plot Thickens

2007-10-17T17:22:00.000+02:00

A reader writes to announce their discovery of not one but two additional copies of Voice Print:

Add another extant copy of Voice Print to the registry: my friend just found a sealed copy in Kerrville, Texas! Did Tom say how many were made or how they were distributed? The record is a collaboration with Kocot, who went by "X" at the time. She took the photograph on the jacket.

A copy also sold on Ebay in 2005 for $40.

Wow! As the world's foremost expert on Voice Print, I'm glad to know that I don't bear the burden of my knowledge alone. Here is a picture of the album from the Pop Sike website.

Voice Print is described thusly:

Weird PSYCH! VOICE PRINT by HATTEN on Middle Earth Recs!

Truly a bizarre record and a rare one too!

Much of it is whispering weird poetry with trippy sound effects, echo, and bizarre other-earthly musical sounds...

Gatefold cover with black on the inside! Recorded in 1974 on Middle Earth records. Cover photographed by X.

Record is VG++/cover is VG++

Happy bidding!

The record is in "VG++" condition? Really? You mean that the grooves aren't all worn out? Ha ha ha, but I kid. "Weird psych," indeed.