Author: andrea Page 58 of 72

I’m scattered this week. Scatter-brained, definitely. Days late and dollars short on everything I put my brain to.

Not that I want this post to be a litany of excuses, far from it. But it’s a bit all over the map. Geographically, thematically, everything. OK.

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UT CONTEST WINNERS:

One set each of the two UT reissues go out to the following winners:

JON HOPE and IAN BEVERLY.

JON is the only one who got the correct answer to the Noise-Fest cassette question. The UT song on the Noise-Fest cassette was mistakenly called “No Manifestos” on the limited-edition run of the tape. (That Thurston is scatter-brained too, evidently.) The song is actually “Swamp,” which reappeared on the Live 1981 cassette. Either way, it’s incredibly rare! So, good Googling there, Jon. That was a sneaky trick question!

IAN didn’t get the Noise-Fest answer, but I loved his definition of UT: “Ut: n. Abbr. The symbol for the element gold as designated in the periodic table of essential listening.”

Both of you will get copies of the CDs, which won’t be released in the US until October! Congratulations!

And thanks to everyone else who sent in their entries!

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I don’t go to Fall River often. But whenever I find myself there (usually on stifling summer evenings) I always think of the opening lines of Angela Carter’s short story, “The Fall River Axe Murders”:

“Early in the morning of the fourth of August, 1892, in the city of Fall River, Massachusetts.Hot, hot, hot. Even though it is early in the morning, well before the factory whistle issues its peremptory summons from the dark, satanic mills to which the city owes its present pre-eminence in the cotton trade, the white, furious sun already shimmers and quivers high in the still air.

Nobody could call the New England summer a lovable thing; the inhabitants of New England have never made friends with it, More than the heat, it is the humidity that makes it scarcely tolerable. The weather clings, like a low fever you can’t shake off. “ [from SAINTS AND STRANGERS, 1985]

A perfect incantatory vision of the haunting (and haunted) summer evening that Lizzie Borden took an axe and —well, you know the rest.

I saw Rasputina last week at Fall River’s beautiful Narrows Center. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen them —I saw them once before, a couple of years ago, in a depressingly generic Ye Olde Irish pub that had a personality-free music venue in the basement. They counter-acted the exaggerated frat vibe of the place by belting out a raucous cover of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”

Their performance Thursday night was less giddily, self-consciously subversive —the band, for the most part efficiently on-point, preached to the choir as we sat in our church pews. It only served to remind me how unfortunate it is that the group have such an aesthetically precise and narrow visual image —at this point the “ladies cello society (with corsets!)” feels more like a millstone.

The costumey formality of their visual aesthetic gives every song a lingering aura of in-jokey anachronism by proxy. It’s too bad, because they —like Edward Gorey before them, another misunderstood, tarred-unfairly-with-the-Goth-brush writer & artist, are incisive storytellers, lyrically pungent and armed with an utterly deadpan sense of humor. (Melora introduced the final encore with a tentative, “Um, we’re going to utilize our classical training now,” right before tearing into a thunderous version of Heart’s “Barracuda.”)

To bring it all back to Fall River, murderous rage & baroque fantasy, I’d love to see them adapt Angela Carter’s short stories to a song cycle. The Bloody Chamber in ten acts, perhaps? I can just picture the opening lines: “Never stray from the path, never eat a windfall apple and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle…” Words for all cello-toting, rockin’ maidens to live by…

(What bands would you pair up with your favorite writers & why? Would you go for tonal complements or opposites or some variation thereof? )

***

Last night I was lucky enough to see Gillian Welch and her husband David Rawlings play a secret pre-Newport Folk Festival show at beloved local watering hole Nick-A-Nees. Needless to say, the “secret” got out and Nick-A-Nees, a pretty tiny place, was crammed full of more people than should be humanly allowed (especially considering it was hotter than hellfire n’damnation in there). Lots of people loitered outside, craning their necks to try and get a good glimpse. I’m glad I got there early enough to get a relatively good spot near the stage.

They’re charismatic, relaxed performers. Low-key, holding everyone’s attention without any demands. Speaking softly and saying so much, especially with beautiful guitar interplay. Watching them playing their warm, charming music for a small, rapt audience, I got the feeling they’d just as soon play for ten people as 1000 so long as they knew they were appreciated.

And last night, they definitely were.

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I hate to poach the fabulous 20JazzFunkGreats , but my my my, how I love new Ze signings Michael Dracula. Navigating Ze’s partially reconstructed site is a nightmare of misdirection, so I couldn’t find their new single anywhere. So I’m posting “Destroy Yourself” instead. It’s one of those songs with enough atmosphere to burn. It’s a surfy, slightly scuzzy Hammer horror delight, its scorched-earth, razor-sharp angularity giving way to a lush, louche, cherry-filled center. Existentialist bubble-gum?

Picastro’s tension-filled, atmospheric “Red Your Blues” arrived in the mail today. I celebrate by giving you “Sharks.” Slow-build music. Cat Power via Sabbath, scrabbling in the dark.

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This weekend I will FINALLY post the first part of my interview with Rykarda Parasol. If you’re in SF tonight you can still make it to the record release party at the Mission district’s swank Make Out Room.

***

Picastro, “Sharks” [from Red Your Blues, Pehr Records]

Michael Dracula, “Destroy Yourself”

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Gillian Welch | Michael Dracula | Ze Records| Picastro | Rasputina | Angela Carter’s short story “The Fall River Axe Murders” can be found in the collection Burning Your Boats. A wonderful interview with Angela Carter can be found here.

It’s been busy this week. Work & travel are keeping me away at the moment. I promise to have something substantive up by Monday someday? (Soon.) Until then, keep yourselves out of trouble with this archival post (from January, back when all of four people were reading this), an article about Fall-obsessed C-86 misfits Prolapse. This was originally published in the late, much missed Puncture#37, late 1996.

I discovered Prolapse when I was living in the UK. My boss at the time conveniently happened to be one of the most forward-thinking A&R people in Europe. One day he played “Tina This Is Matthew Stone” —a song that compresses Edward Albee’s raging, tempest-in-a-teapot domestic drama “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” into seven vibrant, exhaustive minutes. After I picked my jaw up off the floor I knew I’d stumbled upon my favorite band for life. And lo, it came to pass.

They can be a bit of an acquired taste, but then, anything worthwhile often is. And hey, MP3s are free! Try ‘em. Then buy everything they ever recorded. You won’t regret it.

In addition to offering some Prolapse samples (from the beginning to the end, really) I’m also giving you another rarity: Prolapse ranter extraordinaire Mick Derrick’s side project Cha Cha 2000. Imagine Kraftwerk interpreted via an Atari 2000 meltdown…

For more information on Prolapse please visit Graham’s most excellent Prolapse page. Or, you can always add your 2¢ over at Wikipedia or the ever-entertaining Prolapse: Classic or Dud?

Prolapse, “Serpico” [from their first album Pointless Walks to Dismal Places, 1994]

Prolapse, “Black Death Ambulance” [from Pointless Walks]

Prolapse, “Fob.com” [from their final album Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes, 1999]

Cha Cha 2000, “Autobahn” [apologies for the sound. This is directly off vinyl. For more info on this try Lissy’s.]

Buy: Insound | Cherry Red | Try Ebay. too!

PHOTO: PROLAPSE AT ROTA, 1994(?). IF YOU KNOW WHO TOOK THIS PLEASE LET ME KNOW!

WARPED REALITY has a contest! A first for us. And not only that, but it’s for one of our favorite bands, Ut. In honor of Mute’s August 14 re-release of the classic Ut albums In Gut’s House & Griller, we will have two sets of each to give away!

From Mute’s press release:

Ut: Two Classic Albums Reissued on CD
The Critically Acclaimed In Gut’s House and the Steve Albini Engineered Griller

Blast First / Mute reissue two classic UT albums —In Gut’s House (1988) and Griller (1989)— on 14th August 2006.

Sprung from the downtown No Wave scene, Ut (Nina Canal, Jacqui Ham and Sally Young) originated in New York City in December 1978. The inheritors of the fertile collision between rock, free jazz and the avant garde that first manifest itself in the Velvet Underground, Ut soon became a serious force within the New York music scene.

The band were joined briefly by film-maker Karen Achenbach in 1979 before resuming as a three-piece and migrating to London in 1981. Ut toured the UK with bands such as The Fall, The Birthday Party, The Raincoats and Pigbag. Originally releasing albums on their own label, Out Records, the band became a favourite of John Peel’s and recorded a Session for his show in 1984 before joining forces with Blast First in 1987.

The critically acclaimed In Gut’s House was originally released in 1988 and made NME’s Top 50 that year. As The Washington Post exclaimed, “With In Gut’s House, Ut has scraped and droned one of the finest underground rock albums of the year… The tightly interwoven, firmly focused sound… is rich, spooky, urgent and quite unexpectedly beautiful.”

In 1989 the band recorded and released the album Griller. Engineered by label mate Steve Albini, who shared Ut’s raw aesthetic. Griller captured the gripping intensity and sheer power of the Ut experience.

Unfortunately, Griller was to be Ut’s final release and in March 1990 Ut played their last concert in Paris.

A seminal influence on later bands such as Sonic Youth, and spiritual companions of The Fall, the miracle is not simply that Ut survived for 11 years, but that every Ut performance blasted away everything inessential and reached for the primal nerve.

Ut never softened or diluted its force, its restless confrontation and its pull on the secret heart of rock and roll.

“It isn’t rock anymore. But what is? There’s no one like them” –NME

TWO PRIZES, TWO WAYS TO WIN.

1) Which Ut song had its debut on the Thurston Moore-curated cassette accompaniment to
the Noise Fest festival at White Columns in 1981?

OR:

2) Give me your most creative definition of the word “Ut.”
Go Dada, go Wikipedia, go Haiku. Just have fun with it.

For reference, my extensive recent interview with the band: Part One; Part Two; and Part Three.

You can post your answers here in the comments or e-mail them to
andrea (at) warpedrealitymagazine.com. Make sure you leave your e-mail address
or other contact information.

Two winners will be drawn on AUGUST 1, 2006.

(More information here. You can also pre-order the albums through Mute or Amazon.co.uk.)

Ut, “This Bliss [live]” | from Early Live Life; recorded at Club 57, 1981 | THANKS TO HK FOR THE TWEAK ON THIS ONE.