March 2007 Archives
the Central Eastside Industrial District/ Marriage Records "The Lightnings" won our second game on thursday, March 29th 2007. here is an awesome picture from right before our first game (stolen from the marriage records homepage)
what a rag tag group of players we got. i am so proud of our team! such a scrappy bunch, taking the beefy-er, perhaps more serious teams by surprise with our undying heart, our loud yelling and screaming, our aggression, and our utter lack of foot /ball handling skills. we are 1-1 so far. GO LIGHTNINGS! Im sure that sometimes Lightnings keeper/ UHAC team owner Mike Merrill will post some footage and re-caps over at the UHAC blog soon enough, but IM PROUD RIGHT NOW. much less sore than last game. I feel like as a team we are learning how to pace ourselves. Now its time to really develop our offense into something big and scary.
in other news, last tuesday was my birthday and i want to send a special shout out to all the cool homies who came out to the longest running and oldest restaurant/bar in portland, Huber's. the Spanish coffees were dramatically poured, the magic tricks were very easy to see through, and my thanksgiving style turkey dinner was perhaps the best i have ever had.
Extra special thanks go out to Jona, who, after bumming a ride with me to Fry's to shop for car stereos, decided to just GIVE me the one out of his sad, totaled car. THANKS HOMIE! My ride is finally getting re-pimped.
Of course, even more extra special thanks goes to Honey, who - despite having to put up with me day in and day out for years on end - somewhere, somehow found the kindness and patience in her heart to be especially sweet, giving and loving to me on my birthday. thanks baby. I love you!!!!!
No other real news to speak of at this point. Honey's Valet record Blood is Clean gets official wide release from Kranky on April 16th, so if you have 15 bucks just laying around waiting to get spent, go out and get it at the stores so it can reach #1 in the charts.
Rob Walmart's got a show tomorrow, Sunday April 1st, at Holocene with Ghosting and Pash and some rock band with strings. Here's what the Portland Mercury had to say about it: "Ghosting blasts scary noise like they are Rob Walmart's evil twin; both mine from the sound collage vein, but Walmart's soundtrackscapes are more easily stomached. "
????????!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?so weird!!
Click here to get your own player.
Recorded by the good folks at the Sugar Gallery. Show with the deeply damaged psychedelic CRUNKecho mic madness of in-house band The Sixth Deer and the darkest black magic tarot/scary mannequin clown doll performance noise of Power Circus..I played a short, peaceful little set to close out the night.
people should go to the gallery to check out the awesome photo show up right now. The owner of the gallery, Michael Demeo takes awesome photos as do a lot of his friends. all up for a bit longer this month. his photo BLOG is cool too. thanks Mike for setting up the show!
honey's record blood is clean got a cool write-up today with a streaming song from a website i had never heard of called paperthinwalls.com. i like the format of this site. every review has a song you can listen to. anywaxy YAY honey! YAY valet! yay! blood is clean....cool TGIF!
http://www.paperthinwalls.com/
http://www.paperthinwalls.com/singlefile/item?id=572
"VALET - “Blood Is Clean”
Stream Download
from Blood Is Clean (Kranky)
Free-Psych // Out April 16
Am told that Oregonian Honey Owens makes her living trolling through Salvation Army centers and the like, recovering vintage clothing and reselling it all on eBay. Not unsurprising then that such discovery of threads of gold amid heaps of moldered finery translates into her recording project as Valet; her debut disc, Blood Is Clean, has a similar tinge of hermetic alchemy. Clean was recorded solo in her house on junked instruments, presumably late at night, as one can hear a night train bellowing past on the title track. Through the disc, there is an alternating current of comfort and unease in this blackness, as if being seduced by your babysitter. The effect is different if you imagine her being 16 versus 60, but Owens plays both roles, to where the sensuous and the sinister are impossible to parse. Over a turbid, clenched guitar strum, she incants that “my blood is clean but the devil’s in me.” Over such disquiet, the guitar grows incandescent as a flare, as caustic as colitis. Valet’s noise becomes less about strings and more about the history of electricity itself, seething as a live wire though the darkest night, writhing without insulation nor coating. - ANDY BETA
Mar 16 "
just FYI if anyone reading this is actually interested in these things:
the dark yoga CD posted in the last post is now temp un-available until further notice. dark yoga is working on packaging for a new second edition of this CD. thanks for your hypothetical interest and keep on trippin'
love
adam
ACRE "CANDYFLIPPING":
Acre is our new friend Aaron, who recently moved to Portland from Olympia. Aaron truly knows his synthesis and plays extremely reduced, refined synesthesia-enducing and generally psychedelically affective minimal drone using a minimal amount of equipment (including mixer feedback, sampler/loop, various filters, phase-shifters, tremelos and the like).
CANDY FLIPPING is three tracks of sweet drone-gazed, tunnel visioned, double-dipped DMT cloud-lift. The first track, "Moth" instantly breaks out into the upper chakra registers with thick drones that hit you like LaMonte's Dream-House. Second track "Together We Are Poison" is all glossy-eyed and drooling lower-level chill-out pillow room in the rave of LIFE. Once asleep there, the third track "Drifting" will slowly, slowly slowly bring you back up like some dred head trance DJ opening up the 303 filter ever so slightly until we are again filled with ecstatic psychedelic feel-good sunshine laser light and your head and the whole moving mass of people explode upward together into another level of collective consciousness . GET FLIPPED
For more info on Acre go HERE.
CANDYFLIPPING is three tracks of straight-up DENSE micro-tonal, synesthetic stereo brain-wave sync, hallucinatory DRONESCAPES that will seriously TRIP YOUR BALLS OFF.
edition of 100 copies SILK SCREENED WITH GLOW IN THE DARK INK HAPPY-FACE DEEP RAVE COVERS
CLICK HERE FOR ORDER INFO
Dark Yoga "Live on KBOO":
Dark Yoga is an obscure Northwest American Psychedelic NOW VIBRATIONAL Music Commune founded in early 06 by Adam Forkner, Honey Owens, Brian Thackeray, Matt McDowell, Aria Benner and Dan Barone. Dark Yoga's music is a heavy heavy weird brown fog of loose psychedelic improv in a fuzz-wah style with 70's Miles vibes, distant flutes, bongos, etc etc etc.
LIVE ON KBOO is a Radio Transmission from the Spiritual Heart of this Commune at the Apex of their groove recorded in May of 2006. Its an hour-plus of continuos improvisation that wanders from heavy psyche fuzz funk to strange passages of pastoral hippy bongo and flute melt-downs, and everything in between...
edition of 100 copies BUT WE HAVE A VERY LIMITED NUMBER ON HAND
CLICK HERE FOR ORDER INFO
(Live Dark Yoga Photos from 2007 © Michael J Demeo... more can be found HERE)
also check the criptic (ie not updated that much) Dark Yoga myspace
we've been doing virb lately and it seems to finally be out of beta and open to the public so get in if you fit in and haven't already..this is the music/band based social networking site for all the people that talk a lot of shit about myspace
check out my virb at virb.com/whiterainbow
it is time to re-design. but i need someone to help me.
is there anyone out there that thinks they have an understanding of the underlying aesthetics of my vibe, a better knowledge of CSS than me that would like to help me?
i will re-pay with CDs:
any and all available yarnlazer releases (there are two new ones on the way)
AND
any and all available white rainbow releases (zome, box, sunshifts).
payment upon completion of redesign.
i can supply images and weird photoshops.
the basic vibes are, could be, will be:
purple, violet, mauve, brown, orange, neons vs pastels, sunset colors vs primaries.
mid-century new-age wonder,
spirit and healing,
psychedelic exploration,
the dark side of the moon album cover,
a contemporary,
re-contextualized look at modernist utopian visions and visionaries.
californian mid-century gurus like dr bronners, father yod, unarius society, esalen institute of human potential, etc.
email me at adamforkner @ yahoo . com
thanks!
yesterday i bought a can of WD-40 at schucks while curtis was buying fuses so we could roll down the windows of his car. see the door out in the hallway that leads to the stair well has been creaking like crazy. and that door is a straight shot from our front door
boy i tell ya that wd-40 sure does get rid of squeaks. i was going around trying to find other things to lubricate. insert anal sex joke here. yeah anyway. no more squeaks. now we can breathe easy. that shit was driving us nuts. felt like we lived in the middle of grand central station!
now
its like
the quiet ward in the hospital.
so many memories connected to wd-40. the smell of it. that little sturdy red straw. reminds me of my garage when i was a kid.
Chong: "mmmmellow....
oommmmm......
meeeeeellllllow........."
at which point he makes a crazy face and freaks cheech out real bad. but then cheech starts laughing really hard. but then the cop comes. then chong eats the stash.
privacy
eternal tapestry
white rainbow
tomorrow
sunday
march 4th
free
holocene music venue
portland
21+
9pm
at the curatorial request of m. mcgonigal, i will play along to harry smith's "early abstractions" films creating a live, improvised new soundtrack.
this event being the second free monthly in a series called
"Miniluah"
like the Halleluah fest of last summer which m. mcgonical (editor of the thick, progressive Yeti magazine who moved from seattle to portland a couple years ago, bringing with him a long and colorful history of music writing since back in the 80's in new york with his Chemical Imbalanced zine up to his newest book about the my bloody valentine album Loveless which just came out as part of the 33 and a 1/3 series) and chantelle hilton (who has booked just about every good place to see shows since the blackbird back in the dark ages of like, 2001 and shit) have put together as a new free monthly that fills the shoes of the retired "Church of Psychedelia" (which was wonderfully curated for a couple of years at a couple of different venues by the wonderful Josh Blanchard of Plants (ex delano, kremlin bronx, mome raths, point line plane etc), who has done his fair share of booking in this town. I met him back when we were both barely out of our teens and he was helping out with Thee O aka the O Hell, which was the sequel to the legendary grunge/punk all ages venue The Xray (both of which were run by the dude who now runs Voodoo donuts) back in 1995 or 96. Josh booked the weird, melencolly final days of the legendary satyricon, filling it with music perhaps too adventurous to bring out the throngs, but some of of the most memorable shows i saw or played since moving back to portland circa '01/'02.
there was the church of psych and now there is miniluah. a handing off of the baton to some new curators.
an uncredited writer of some sort for the mercury, our local "indie rock" news paper decided to make a snarky and dismissive statement about halelluah, miniluah and local "psychedelic" music in general this week, summing them up as basically the equivalent of a dude with a "leather jacket with tassles" playing boring guitar through a delay pedal for 45 minute stretches.
which could be seen as an insult to me and most of my friend who make music. but when you boil it down, the dude is right on. much of this city's psychedelic/noise/improv/abstract/experimental/electro-acoustic/ambient music IS about one dude being "boring" on stage.
its just that some people get into "that sort of thing", and some people don't. most of it is not the best "party music" if you are looking for bands to chug pints to, bop your head to, dance twee-ly to, pump your fist in the direction or do much of anything to except maybe relax, sit back, reflect, trip out, lose sense of time/space, get lost in, etc.
anyway, not all "drone" or "psychedelic" music is of the same quality and a lot of it IS completely tedious. its true. sometimes a person is just not in the mood. and sometimes the dude or dudes on stage making the trips dont quite "hit it". whatever.
maybe there was a need to clear the air, or create a healthy "other" to the group of dudes writing for the merc (including-ironically, perhaps- Josh Blanchard) who were more than a bit psyche-obsessed last year. the annual music issue last year was dedicated to psychedelic music in general and plenty of ink was spilled on me, plants, ghosting, jackie-o, valet, world, and a bunch of other trippy bands. perhaps our day in the sun is over now. the hardcore of us will tread on, delay pedals at full bore, while those who were just passing through will move on to other, fresher creative ground.
its hard enough to keep up with national trends in music writing and criticism, let alone the rapid-fire ebb and flow of dudes writing about portland's ever changing and expanding and growing hip music scene.
privacy is laurel knapp, who is the more private co-runner of marriage records. she's the wife of label ceo curtis knapp and mother of their son Fox - who happen to be two of the most delightful and inspiring friend i have. at any rate, laurel's music is a wonder to experience. so quiet, truthful and close to the source that for me it is impossible to separate from (what i see of) her life with curtis and fox. in this way it is perhaps some of the most "folk" music i have ever seen and heard played. even for me, whose experience of live music performance is so often colored by my friendship of the person(s) playing it as to be completely non-objective. there is a simplicity and honesty to laurel's music that is so refreshingly transparent as to be totally and completely disarming. it comes back to the simple roots of picking notes that sound good, the pleasure of discovering the basics of music itself. Privacy is just really, really good! i cant recommend it enough. she usually plays for only 10 or 15 minutes so come early or risk missing it all.
i met nick bindeman, (who along with his brother jed and a bunch of other cool dudes i know far less make up the deep psychedelic jam band Eternal Tapestry) way back in 2002 or 2003, when he was in Alarmist with James Squeeky (who went on to do sex with girls is rad and is now doing solo stuff as argumentix) and Eva (who later did malibu falcon with nic and is now the woman behind inca ore) and Eric Crespo (who went on to front Ghost to Falco). i saw them play a show, perhaps as part of a Tropix or Arctix festival and was blown away by their weird crazy power and intensity. nic was the drummer. later he gave me a CDR of his solo stuff called Tunnels and i was again blown away, this time by his deeply german kosmic drone music. it was sounded fresh and raw and awesome. when honey and i were dropping out of jackie-o and tom was looking for replacements for us, nic and eva were the first people that came to mind. in between all of that he was playing in crazy spazzed out avant punk band hustler white and probably a bunch of other stuff i dont know about. and also this band ETERNAL TAPESTRY who have been playing a bunch of shows this last year. nic's brother jed moved to town and has been playing drums for them. sweeeet. also, very trippy. in that leather tassel and delay pedal sorta way. FUCK the haters. do a preview vibe on their myspz http://www.myspace.com/eternaltapestry
anyway here are some clips of the harry smith film i will be playing along to, in case you were curious. they were made 50 to 60 years ago (1946-57) and are totally beautiful:
