Oh Joyous Funeral

Here is the Sandy Lopicic Orkestar:

Probably the best song about killing a spouse, really.

The Charismatic Croatian Caliphate of Crazed Caprice

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.

Büdösök Kills, Eats

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

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.)

JANG JANG GRXDZANK (Fin.)

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

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

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.