PORTAL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emrBZZtGFgI ok so this show actually happened before the EHG god show but i wasn't moved enough to blog about it till after i gushed about EHG. In general i was pretty interested in seeing Portal play hearing how they were more or less the new "cutting" edge in death metal and what not. The show had lots of appeal too.. you know touring from Australia, and playing with Krallice at a small club i like (kungfu necktie) seemed like a winning combination. but at the end of the night i was sort of underwhelmed in general. The band wore "costumes" which to me is a huge lets hide we suck by playing Halloween with our dress up party. If you try to dress up the visual element and presentation of your band is that because i'm uninterested in what you're doing??? Back to EHG and one of the refreshing Black Flag elements of that band that i love is that they are what they are kids!!!! But anyway if you watch the youtube clip of Portal i agree that shits pretty impressive. Live maybe I'm underwhelmed because all that sick technical playing is sort of hiding by the lack of of it being conveyed in a shitty small club with a mediocre sound system. They had a pretty impressive mechanical Armageddon type of throb but what they are doing live i just don't think it translated enough in the setting i saw them play in.

post brought to you by even more Yuengling forgive all the bad grammar and spellings

NEW SHOWS

fuck yeah fuck yeah ... Eye Hate God/ Brutal Truth in Philly. 20 something years later EHG are pretty old hat but god damn they were just blistering in Philly last week. and all ages show at the church basement that i assume was sold out and sweaty and hot as hell. Amazing stuff heavy wild and even reasonably tight for EHG. I was thinking about this while they were playing that for a guy about my age and 5-6 years younger seeing EHG is more or less our Black Flag. just a totally different edge to them then every other band you're going to see these days. nothing seems premeditated and they truly seem dangerous and explosive on stage and un-contrived in anyway. and sonically they just smoking. Hats off to the sound guy/ mobile sound guy from the Church (John something or another). If anyone knows me they know i hate hate hate house sound men with a passion. laziest fuck heads in club who just want to get shit over so they can smoke out back. But fuck yeah dude had the balls to run guitars through the PA!!! Hats off!! recording is smoking you rule.

Beyond gushing about EHG Brutal Truth was pretty cool as well. I don't know though I'm not a huge grind guy, unless your Discordance Axis or something I'm generally unimpressed or mildly entertained.. I mean its nice as a change of pace to see some non-psych rock thing now and then and get some speed on but in general i'm like this is dumb.

Funny thing too prior to the show i was trolling online and saw some Sonosax recorder and it jogged my memory that i own one of these Sonosax sx-m2 mic pre's. basically its a portable phantom power unit that DPA recommends to be used with my mic set (4052's). I had been using the 48v phantom power that's built into the Sound devices 722 recorder that i use and its always been pretty good but lately I've been really bummed out when i can't use my millennium media tube preamp to run my mics. Something totally magically about tubes isn't their??? Anyway, so i remember i had one of those portable sonosax pre's that i used literally twice like 4 years ago. I tracked the thing down pulled it out and stopped at Home Depot on the way to the show to get batteries. ( fucker uses 2 9volts for about 8 hours of record time) rigged it all up in the uni-bomber bag i carry. So after the show on play back after dodging crazy stage diving and the chaos of the show recording totally smokes. It's not as sexy as the millennium tube piece i use when i have access to power, but fuck for a portable unit standing in a crowd running my music stealing device out of a bag it fucking kills. why wasn't i using that thing for like the last 4 years?? duhhhhhhh. awesome stuff

Then on the back end i get bummed about the label taking a total shit.. recording is so good, the band was so raw and gnarly, just a totally shame no one hears it?? Be cool to just do like a bootleg club for like a nominal fee like $5-10 to cover expenses and postage and have 50 people pre-subscibed to just get random CDR offerings in the mail of recordings. no copy write bullshit, just stuff that was cool and sounds great in minimal packs. No respect for what a band wants to do or any of that shit. I can post shit on the blog i guess but MP3's are such totally shit. (ok i wont go back to a rant on mp3's and the Ipod but fucking A compressed music sucks)

PS this Sunday night rant has been brought to you by yuengling

NP sisterfucker!!!!!!

PICS SORT OF RECENT SHOWS

From top to bottom

BIRDS OF MAYA MEGA BOOZE BAND from the jack rose Philly record release show, Harmonica Dan leading the way

FLAHERTY/ MOORE / CORSANO and others at the jack rose record release show

MIKE GIBBONS and NACHO GIBBONS at some horrible show in south Philly. the Bardo guys don't talk much about Nacho he's sort of like the brother they keep locked in the basement.

KRALLICE at the Mroom in Philly.
BLUES CONTROL art gallery show in Philly

STEVE GUNN art gallery show in Philly.. check out his pretty great record on Threelobed.

NOW PLAYING vulture club on Utech.. whatever happened to the follow up for this awesome disc????

EMAIL ABOUT PITCHFORK

some email correspondence i got about the pitchfork thing.

Hey,

Just read the article/interview on Pitchfork and was a bit disappointed to see that filesharing got blamed for the decrease in sales. I'm quite sympathetic to your frustration but I don't think it's directed at entirely the right issue.

The example of The Goslings / Warmth split not attracting the same amount of sales, for instance: for whatever reason, in 2009 the album didn't attract nearly the amount of hype and solid reviews that Grandeur of Hair did. Blogs and review sites lavished praise over it, while hardly any sites talked much about the split.

For instance, on RateYourMusic, a database of people keeping track of their MP3 or CD collections, you'll see that Grandeur of Hair has 329 ratings and Heaven of Animals has 16.

http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/the_goslings/grandeur_of_hair/

http://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/the_goslings_and_warmth/heaven_of_animals/

If filesharing were to blame, don't you think there'd be the same level of interest generated, yet fewer sales? From what I've noticed, filesharing seems to be part of the marketing hype cycle of generating interest, especially in niche markets. Perhaps the fickle hype processes might be more to blame?

http://rateyourmusic.com/label/archive_recordings/

Michel

My reply

Hey didn’t know the article was up.. I just cruised it and I think its pretty well written.. I will say we did talk about a lot of things that have taken place in the market place and I would say there are a whole host of different factors on the table currently that can be linked to the more or less wide scale drop off in sales (this is the case with nearly every label I’ve talked to) He’s focused on the downloading file sharing for his piece, which I think might make up the lions share of the issue?? But certainly things like the fans fickle taste, current worldwide economic situation in the last two years, the over glut of product out there to consume, and maybe the people that used to buy my releases have just grown less interested in what I’m doing???

So I agree with your valid observation as noted below, but one thing I can tell you is the landscape is very different for me then it was two years ago, the ultimate reason is most like some type of combination of all of the above..

All good though life long music lover here and will stay that way.

PITCHFORK

http://pitchfork.com/features/columns/7804-the-out-door-3/ link to a pitchfork piece i was interviewed for.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/business/media/10audio.html?hp NYTimes article about the music industry that i found interesting also

old tubes

Picked up a old Melo ps1 phono pre-amp the other day in an estate sale through a third party.. awesome unit lots of gain, great tube sounds, flexible in use, and most importantly sounds really sexy. 20mins in the first listening session hmmmm whats that smell?? something burning? maybe some dust burning off the tubes from it sitting around for a while? dead... no sound? oppsss the separate offboard power supply fried. What the fuck. Ahhhh what can you do. A quick google search found a repair guy who works on the Melos units and knows the circuitry well enough so off in UPS it goes to Brooklyn. Hope it doesn't run me too much??



Saw Blues Control at an art gallery in Fishtown last week. Pretty good super nice folks also. wasn't super woowed but was a fun time all the same. Lots of drink at this gig



Went to the Alcest show in Philly which was on a Monday night. Was expecting like 3 people to be there but low and behold basically sold out. Seemed like a pretty lame crowd just by visual inspection of who was there. I had high hopes for the show but bailed before they even played.. too crowded, too hot.. and basically wasn't feeling it. I got this email the next day from Adam of Comoros strange psychic abilities you possess.alcest were terrible... beyond terrible, they were embarassing and emo and awful. how did you know? hahahaha pretty funny, well some times you win i guess??? Also bumped into the vocalist of OAK http://www.myspace.com/oakdoom at this gig. super nice guy lots of conversation about old metal. West coast heads keep an eye out they are trying to make out that way over the next few months. One of the best house shows i ever saw was them in South Philly at disgraceland. not so much drink at this gig.



Bardo Pond had a show at JB's back like two weeks ago. 2nd band that night CARLTON MELTON http://www.myspace.com/carltonmelton maybe a less freak out more rocking version of Earthless. really excellent stuff though. I didn't record though duhhhhhhh. I generally rely on good intelligence in these circumstances when an opening band is playing that i don't know and i didn't get "hipped" to these guys prior to them playing. Lots of drink had this night.

LATEST SHOWS

Caught a few gigs last week. Bardo guys finally playing some shows. First ones is months as far as i can tell. Always good to see those guys out and about. Saw a bunch of boring metal bands play with Krallice. I did enjoy Krallice though glad they opened so i didn't have to sit around through Tombs, Lucidra (spelling?? i forget) and Lair of Minotaur. the last three bands i mentioned were all ok but i just found them really boring and predictable. At least Krallice had some weirdness going on. Mick's abstract circular rhythms with variations mixed in. Kind of hypnotic for a metal band. Alcest play here on Tuesday so I'm fairly keen to see them. http://www.myspace.com/alcestmusic It's billed as French black metal or something but i don't think its that at all sounds more progressive then that to me. but we'll see??? Anybody else catch them on US dates out there???