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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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