November Goings-On

(originally posted to Substack)

I mistakenly wrote December in the subject line just now. A funny gotcha about transitioning from making stuff privately to being a musician out in the world is that it feels like living in two or three seasons at once sometimes, and I find myself talking like it’s already spring before the winter solstice has even hit. Part of me wonders how long it’ll be before I can feel grounded in the present again – then again, maybe just as well.

Anyway it’s a blessing to be busied with one’s own projects, so lfg:

1. Out and about
2. World of trash
3. Back in the AW universe
4. A few things I’ve been into
5. Closing

ONE: TWO RECEIVE SHOWS THIS MONTH

We’re back at Hart Bar on the 15th, then LIC on the 19th. Hope to see ya out there!

TWO: STAR CARD TRASH WORLD IS GO

Meanwhile, Calley’s other band Star Card (with me on drums) is finally putting out our first full-length on the 14th! It’s out on the illustrious Already Dead, on cassette and digital. There are a couple tracks out already, and you can hear them on ampwall or bandcamp or even the popular military AI tech investment app spotify.

Trash World is also somehow the first published music Calley and I have both worked on, despite playing together most days of the week for the past few years. Wild!

ICYMI, check out the video for Flowers, made by Zia Hoskins:

Plus, we’re doing a release show over at Gold Sounds to celebrate. You should come.

THREE: A REISSUE, A SHOW

Ten years ago I played a few guitar and koto parts on this album for my bud Andrew Weathers, called Fuck Everybody, You Can Do Anything. It’s getting a well-deserved 10-year anniversary reissue treatment now from Debacle Records out in Seattle, so hell yea to that. Give it a listen.

Meanwhile, AW is making the hike over to NYC for a very rare Tethers set, as part of Freak World 3D on the 8th and 9th. We play on Saturday night, around 8:30 or 9. Tethers sets tend to happen once or twice every like five years or so, and it’s always very special. (While he’s here, we have some time booked to work on that next Tethers record that we started in 2018.)

FOUR: ITEMS OF INTEREST

This post/email is long but I told myself I’d start talking about things that have moved me recently, so here are a few:

Olaf Stapledon – Last and First Men

I’m halfway through this book now. I first encountered this story via the 2020 film adaptation, which I recommend very highly. (It’s the only full-length directed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who you know as the score composer for Mandy and Arrival). The movie was adapted from a 1930 British novel, written as a 250 page future-history book spanning hundreds of millions of years. Its first pages recounting the 20th and 21st centuries are delicious for what the author can’t know will happen (WWII, computers). Thereafter it’s delightful for it’s total lack of grounding in anything other than deep time. You turn the page and he spends scarcely a full breath on the ends of cities, continents, species of mankind. I love how humanity as a whole is treated as the central character, going through rise and fall after rise and fall. This book is pure flight.

Nils Frykdahl – The Nothing Show

If you don’t know Nils from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Idiot Flesh, you are in for a treat diving into that world. Sleepytime has been back for a minute now and the live situation has always been top tier. But meanwhile, Nils has been plugging away at a broadcasting project of his own, named after an Idiot Flesh album from the early 90s: The Nothing Show.

I’ve been listening through the shows in order – a mixture of biography & oldhead tales, interviews with friends who do cool things & think cool thoughts, and readings from his favorite books (Foucault, Lispector, Burroughs, et. al.). As gifted an orator as he is a composer and singer, each episode is a joy, and I find myself reaching for my pen and notebook several times per episode, eager to garden the page myself. Definitely check out the Patreon.

Charles Curtis set hosted by Blank Forms

This was a little minute ago now but seeing Charles Curtis play was a delight. Like probably many others, Curtis’ solo cello work hit my radar through his work with Éliane Radigue and the 2LP set that Saltern put out in 2020. (Come to think of it that album may be how I was put on to Terry Jennings as well, whose tunes I’ve been deeply enamored with for some years now.) Anyway the show was great. It was one of the last hot nights of the summer, and the audience was packed into what looked like a sculptor’s studio near Washington Square Park. The program was Feldman, Wolff, Lucier’s Glacier, and Alison Knowles’ Rice and Beans for Charles Curtis. The Lucier piece stood out for me (one twenty minute glissando, let’s fucking GO), and I see there’s a nice video of him playing this piece a decade ago, but obviously seeing it on a screen surrounded by a bunch of distracting shit is way different than sweating it out in silence with a sold out room full of people. A gift.

FIVE: ALRIGHT

At last, we are caught up.

Last month I was saying I would do a paid-subscriber post on the 15th of each month, but I think instead I’ll just post everything for free – anything else feels weird. I set this month’s post on Sparklehorse to free, so it’s readable to anyone wandering through now. This month’s post will be too. Cool.

OK, thanks for reading all this, and hope to see you out there.

talk soon,
B