June 2007 Archives
After a wonderful night spent in a crappy, over-priced hotel a little south of the wonderful town of stockton (at 2 in the morning, rolling around trying to find a place, some dude in a crappy station wagon whispered "nice chevy" at us from a lane over) and a quick stop at some cool african coffee place in an otherwise bombed out mini-mall, we made it to LA in time for the saturday night show of the Foxy Digitalis Bottled/Bottling Smoke Festival at Mr. T's Bowling Alley - a strange, dark, deeply crunk meth bar at a converted bowling alley deep in Echo Park.
It was a pleasant surprise to find out that Alex from the Hot Knives (who had just flown up to portland with the whole hot knives crew to fix us all a killer vegan brunch a couple of weeks ago) was in the first band Robedoor. They have an awesome split 7inch with our tour-mate Ghosting on Not Not Fun that people should check out. Ironically, honey and I missed their set while eating weird vegan mexican food at this little restaurant down the street. Sorry dudes!!!! All accounts state that they were awesome, and played in a cool tent. TENT CORE REPRESENT!
Battling first-show-of-tour/ just-got-out-of-the-van after-driving-1000-miles/ "we-are-all-so-excited-to-finally-see-you-play" nerves, Zach laid down a heavy, excited, killer, sub-harmonic active-drone blast. A beautiful announcement of our arrival to the party.
The rest of the night was real fun. So many Portland psychedelic noise homies represented! Matt McDowell (our brother in the Darkest of Yogas), Theo Angel (our brother from 05 era JOMF), Ilyas Ahmed....so many killer dudes came down to LA to vibe together.
(zach, ilyas, theo)
Last but certainly not least on the list of awesome homies was Marriage Records' recent intern Zully (who -rolling straight from his senior prom with two beautiful girl friends- smoothly and easily bribed the hilariously over-zealous door men into letting them into the 21+ show). That guy was straight PSYCHEDELIC PIMPING.
I would wish that dude the best of luck in his life, but seeing the way he rolled that night i doubt he is gonna need it.
The whole scene was a wonderful convergence of the west coast/national/international psychedelic/noise/drone/cdr label/freak music community. It felt so good to be surrounded by fellow trippers all there to share their beautiful esoteric sound blankets with the rest of us.
Starving Weirdos brought a whole crew of Arcata freaks to lay down some heavy Abraham Lincoln-inspired surrealist tape collages, bull whip, quiet cricket sounds and collective drone improv with the lights out save for a few candles surrounding a wonderful portrait of Honest Abe. The shit was TIGHT.
It was also killer to finally meet Jefre Cantu, a dude i have known of and talked to online since the hey-day of turn of the century space rock, and finally see
Tarentel play. Jefre's new label Root Strata is straight killing it these days and he laced us up with a ton of new releases. Such a kind, genuine, relaxed and awesome dude. Tarentel's set was awesome as well. A dark and dirty burble of guitars, electronics and drum blasts with an awesome film projected onto and above them.
All in all it was a totally killer way to start the tour!
tour was fun as fuck. z reno, owens and me just ripping down I-5 like three banshees in the night. we left the friday before memorial day. i got our rental car on priceline.com for real cheap. (i would recommend it.) AND when we got to the car place to pick it up, not only did we skip the huge line since it was pre-paid but we also got upgraded to a killer Impala 'cause they were out of "compact" cars. aux input jack, plush interior, huge trunk. it was nice. $13 a day!
that day we rolled down the 5 hitting multiple burger joints and trying to leach wifi from the parking lots of travel lodges and holiday inns.
i found this interesting scene outside of a wonderful am/pm/arco /a&w root beer deeply co-branded gas station/drive-thru 
i can only assume this to be a deeper rural oregon redneck prank. i just imagine all across america people souping up little honda sports cars, putting ugly rims and half ass blue metal fleck candy paint jobs on them, installing bass tubed sound systems to blast some 'pac or e40 (with the inherent irony of this blurry distorted rural white caricature/homage of urban black style) ...and occasionally pissing off their homies enough for their homies to get a bar of soap and accidentally make their rides way more interesting (to me) than they could ever imagine. 
the simpleness of their homophobic redneck jock motherfucker efforts, as well as the aura of banality in the air: just sitting there with no one paying it any mind in a parking lot in a little i-5 road side community.it felt too weird and funny on too many levels for me to actually be mad about how obviously fucked up it was. it comes as little surprise that young folk in rural oregon would be extremely homophobic. the rural redneck jock vibe is inherantly extremely homo-erotic, teetering on a level of overtly sexualized preening (of the self as well as the obviously phallic hot-rod) that would rival -if not completely surpass - the primping of the queeny-est of queens.
maybe i'm reading too much into this. maybe i should have just written: ACCIDENTAL POST-MODERN ROB WALMART PARTY VEHICLE CREATED BY HOMOPHOBIC RED NECK PRANKSTERS ON THEIR BUDDY'S NOx-ED OUT, RIMMED-UP, BASS-TUBED HONDA CIVIC.