Recently in NEWS Category
Just got done with a little under a week of Atlas Sound full band practice. Our new best friends Bradford Cox and Stephanie Macksey flew in from Atlanta and Brian Foote came up from LA and we jammed on some heavy psychedelic grunge that took me back to being in Yume circa 98, played poker, stayed up too late hanging with Rob Walmart, eating various burgers and in general having a blast. Our tour (AKA "Pery Ferral Solo Tour 2002") is gonna to RULE:
Atlas Sound White Rainbow Valet "Pary Ferill Solo Tour 2002" Feb/March 2008
Feb 19 ATL, GA THE DRUNKEN UNICORN (MJQ)
Feb 20 Chapel Hill, NC Local 506
Feb 21 Washington, DC Black Cat
Feb 22 Philadelphia, PA Johnny Brenda's
Feb 23 New York, NY The Mercury Lounge
Feb 24 Brooklyn, NY
Feb 25 Poughkeepsie, NY Vassar College
Feb 26 Cambridge, MA The Middle East Upstairs
Feb 27 Montreal, Canada Casa Del Popolo
Feb 28 Toronto, Canada The Horseshoe Tavern
Feb 29 Detroit, MI Magic Stick
Mar 1 Chicago, IL Empty Bottle
Mar 2 Minneapolis, MN Triple Rock Social Club
Mar 5 Vancouver, Canada Pat's Pub
Mar 6 Seattle, WA TBA
Mar 7 Portland, OR Holocene
Mar 8 San Francisco, CA Bottom Of The Hill
Mar 9 Palo Alto, PA somewhere on the Stanford Campus
Mar 11 Echo Park, CA The Echo
Mar 1? SXSW
Atlas Sound myspace
Atlas Sound/Deerhunter blog
photos by Tim Schaar
Tom Blood's book The Sky Position (Published by Marriage Records) took the Grand Prize for Poetry at Literary Arts 2007 Oregon Book Awards
CONGRATULATIONS TOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ROB WALMART 2008!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sky Drips Drifts and Prism of Eternal Now are available as full-album streams to listen to on my virb.com profile. check it out
just a quick note:
1) the White Rainbow CD SKY DRIPS DRIFTS is now available from States Rights Records and they are doing some crazy package deals too...like prism 2xLP plus Sky Drips Drifts for $25 or Sky Drips Drifts plus Paper's awesome "as as" CD for like $16........PLUS all orders of Sky Drips Drifts come with a free mp3 download of the deeply out of print White Rainbow SUN SHIFTS cd that we put out on yarnlazer earlier this year. BOOYEAH (oh yeah you can listen to a track from sky drips drifts here...)
2) RAD SUMMER, the awesome vintage/retro/handmade clothing + cool underground records and tapes STORE that Honey (along with her homies Charolette and Jacob as well as Tom Greenwood and a host of other vibe helpers) has opened up here in Portland is having its GRAND OPENING PARTY TONIGHT!!! pop in and groove with us. i think we will be bumping a bunch of Calvin Johnson mix tapes (25 varieties of rare 45s mixed to perfection ranging in theme from deep 80's dancehall to female soul to regional hip hop to Japanese new wave) drinking wine, having fun, doing cool stuff. i dunno. POP IN!!!!
so yesterday i for whatever reason decided to start making the yarnlazer website into a blog im thinking of maybe doing that with the white rainbow page on yarnlazer as well, but i don't know. i have so many pages for white rainbow and yarnlazer...i got this blog, myspace, official websites, virb pages, flickr, vimeo, youtube....trying to consolidate things ususally makes my head hurt in some way. anyway, check out the yarn redesign....
yes hello hi i was just thinking i would put this yarnlazer.com news update here cause i took the time to make all the links work and everything and to re-write it to fit the vibe here would be a drag and i am lazy. beyond this semi official business news, i am doing fine. i pretty much hate my wine delivery job right now. just sick of it after 2 years. if anyone reading needs a job, has a working car, can lift 35 to 40 pound boxes repeatedly, knows how to get around portland, is familiar with working with a hand-truck, has a high tolerance for this city's growing traffic crisis, can work well under the pressure of impending deadlines, can tolerate mild to fairly overt guilt-trips from asshole and/or yuppie restaurant and/or wine shop owners, knows how to add, has a mild understanding of spanish and french pronunciation, can decipher others' butchered pronunciations of french and spanish, likes an occasional free bottle of wine, has a valid driver's license, can work tues thru friday from around 10am to around 4pm, will be happy with the average weekly pay of $200 to $300 and would be willing to train with me for a few days to a week...well then.....do the do... so on a related note if anyone needs their record mastered at affordable rates, would pay to listen to the rants of a bitter young man, would pay for pretentious, possibly useless and misguided advice, would pay to learn the pentatonic "blues" scale on the guitar in any key or any other such thing...well then.....lets get pizza'd. furthermore if any reader has actually useful tips towards alternate income sources that lead to actual earnings in cold hard american cash dollars, i will gladly give up a small percentage of these earnings as a sort of "finder's fee".
as a side note, someone should do something about the entertainment booking at the Produce Row cafe. jazz jam mondays suck, as do the shitty bar bands that play on saturday nights. only generic, clean, pastel colored spineless indie pop would upset me more if blasted straight from a loud outdoor PA into our windows every god damned night of the week. seriously. this band down there just played the worst rendition of that "whats your name (chik-oo-ahhw) who's your daddy (chik-oo-ahhw)" song i have ever heard in my fucking life.
besides all that everything is great! here's the yarnlazer update. love adam
"Wow sorry no update for 3 months! Yarnlazer took the summer off kinda. Everything from the spring/early summer 07 is sold out on our end. One can always try the various little online shops that specialize in these sorts of things, someone somewhere has something you might be able to purchase and enjoy.
Valet has been hard at work on a new record for Kranky, which will probably come out early next year. And she's got an awesome new seven-inch of the songs 'Fire' b/w 'Beach Gaze' on the new Burnt Brown Sounds Label out of Chicago. Aquarius has some now.
Two new White Rainbow releases are about to drop. Prism of Eternal Now CD on Kranky comes out October 1st. The double-vinyl gatefold fancy version on Marriage is available NOW. Secondly, the sequel to SunShifts called SKY DRIPS DRIFTS is coming out on States Rights very very very soon. White Rainbow will be on tour with Dirty Projectors and YACHT on the west coast in early September 2007. Check the white rainbow page or myspace or virb for the dates.
Valet, White Rainbow and Rob Walmart are all playing the second annual Halleluwah Festival here in Portland. This time Aug 31st thru Sept 2nd at Holocene, 21+. We play our own sets on friday the 31st and then on sunday the 2nd we play with Damo Suzuki as part of a portland improv super group of 'sound carriers' as part of Damo's ever expanding Network.
Also, this fall Valet and White Rainbow are playing an all-day festival at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, California with a bunch of cool groups including Whysp, Akron Family and other weirdos. The show is called "((3D)) PICNIC: A Musical and Visual Arts Gathering." Saturday October 13th. Get in if you fit in! White Rainbow will be in full vibe-hut healing prism audio/video formation, after dusk.
Lots of famly-band collaboration going on all summer. I just helped T Greenwood and the JOMF crew finish up a new record called 'Valley of Fire', which should drop from the Textile label by year's end. Both Honey and I have been playing lots of cool jams with Adrian Orange and Curtis and anybody else who stops by the Marriage Records Official Jam Room and Club House upstairs from Yarnlazer HQ. Honey's been working with M. Evan Burden of Silentist on her new record, which is rad and cool. She's also working on starting a new vintage store in portland tentatively titled Rad Summer. No direct relation but also rad is my deeply un-official title of Assistant Regional Manager (Northwest and parts of Asia) of Rad Records Skateboards and Other Sundries, a new sub-label of Marriage Records curated by Kyle Field of Little Wings. People should check out the first release on Rad, Little Wings' Soft Pow'r.
Today Valet's Blood is Clean has been officially released. Go to your local cool guy record shop and pick yourself up a copy! or order it now directly from Kranky!!!
Brainwashed.com reviewed it: (so did aquarius records...)
from brainwashed:
Valet, "Blood is Clean"
Written by Lucas Schleicher
Monday, 16 April 2007
I remember hearing a supposed "recording from hell" on Art Bell's Coast to Coast radio program years ago and upon hearing the latest project from Honey Owens (Jackie-O Motherfucker, Nudge), I was immediately reminded of those apparently satanic vibrations. Blood is Clean isn't particularly vicious, tormented, or evil in character, but Owens' ghostly voice and hazy songs on this record are uniquely haunting.
The sixth of April is associated with a number of events throughout history: the earliest recorded solar eclipse in 648 BC is attributed to this day, Petrarch's first vision of Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon also occurred on April the sixth, it was the day that the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, and it happens to be the day that Robert Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole. "April 6" is Valet's introduction to the world and it's probably helpful to think of each of these events as analogues of a sort to this record. Honey Owens is at her best on her Kranky debut, ushering alien and mystical sounds out of her mind and into the air, converting submerged rhythms into occult ritual, and turning out songs bathed in unquiet isolation and immutable violence. The supernatural are at work, conforming Owens' hands to a position reserved for an afterlife blues and shaping her lips into coded messages for the dead and the devils.
"April 6" opens with her spectral voice moaning wordless sounds into the air and is closely followed by ceremonial drums and tumbling winds. The sound of errata blow about in this storm of sound slowly closes the track, leaving an uneasy feeling in my belly and arousing suspicions about what might follow. Owens could've led the record down a predictably bombastic path at this point, rendering "April 6" nothing more than a prolonged tease in anticipation of some outward explosion. Instead, "Blood is Clean" converts all the stock piled tension into an internal hemorrhage, a whirlpool of fuzzed out guitars and rumbling bass. Her lyrics bring to mind no immediate ideas, but rather vague hallucinations of symbols and emotions that seem equally inviting and disconcerting. The guitar solo on "Blood is Clean" is perhaps one of the most phenomenal things I've heard all year. It tumbles out of the mix and practically destroys the rest of the song and pictures of war-torn landscapes or fire-scarred cities slowly evolve out of the music. It's a moment of musical and sonic brilliance, setting the tone for the rest of the record and completely erasing whatever preconceptions I might have had concerning Owens' music.
The whole of the album isn't quite as structured as "Blood is Clean;" songs like "Burmajuana" and "Tame All the Lions" sound less like songs and more like slowly evolving pictures that never quite acquire enough definition to become recognizable. Even when Owens sings, her voice is so removed and cold that it's hard to imagine it as an intentional part of the recording. It mixes well with the music, but instead of providing any order to the songs, it increases their apparitional qualities and further distances them from reality. They're elegant songs that evolve patiently, even if they don't immediately bring to mind traditional song structures. That is, perhaps, the stroke of artistry that sets Blood is Clean apart from the pack. So often artists will pretend to play with the idea of the song, stretching it beyond its classical limits either by destruction or some lesser form of decay. Owens' own approach maintains the artistry of song-craft and simultaneously expands its horizons.
By fluctuating between abstract and concrete music she creates a bizarre tension that's both enjoyable to the mind and entertaining in general. "My Volcano" combines these two approaches almost perfectly, mimicking the sometimes wandering nature of the otherwise well-defined and structured blues and inserting the more free-form nature of modern guitar performance into that style. It's my favorite piece on the album and perhaps the best thing Owens has ever written. "North" closes the album with a blur of washed out sound, a sound that brought to mind blizzards and the harsh landscape of the planet's polar regions. In a way it's a cleansing piece of music, washing away whatever relations to the world the rest of the album established by way of metaphor. In another way it calls to mind the strange and supernatural spirit of gothic America, immersing me, along with the rest of the album, in a frame of mind partially familiar, nightmarish, and wholly intriguing.
from aquarius records:
VALET Blood Is Clean (Kranky) cd 14.98
One of our favorite blasts of murky, moody cd-r bliss finally re-issued as a REAL cd by the fine folks at Kranky. And what a fine fit it is too.
Originally released on her own brilliantly named Yarn Lazer label, Valet is the work of one ex-San Franciscan called Honey Owens, who also does time now and again in Jackie O Motherfucker. We've mentioned it the past a few times, but there definitely seems to be a preponderance of vocal based music surfacing lately, Grouper, Bastard Wing, Pump Kinn, Lichens, and now Valet, who all use the voice as a major component of their sound. For Blood Is Clean, Owens twists and stretches her voice into broad sonic strokes and dreamy drones. But it's not just vocals, she also weaves darkly delicate little sound worlds, of muted tribal percussion, dark cavernous rumbles, lots of buzz and creak, alien transmissions, clattery minimal percussion, crumbling guitar grit, murky swirls of reverb and delay, the perfect sonic backdrop for all manner of processed and unprocessed vocals, ranging from sultry chanteuse like croon, to chopped and delayed Boredomsy "boop boop"s to breathy ambiance. Really beautiful and understated.
Packaged in a simple and striking cardstock sleeve, an expanded version of the original cd-r artwork...
im seaking reader advice regarding a couple of ongoing projects.
first, i am looking for a way to do high quality scans of some very small artwork that Kyle Field has sent me for my new album. the drawings are about 2inch by 4 inch and they need to be scanned at such a quality that they will be at 300 dpi when blown up to 12 and a half inches square..anyone have any thoughts? is there a scanner at an art school or fancy lazer print shop or screen printing place or something that i could use?
secondly, i am in the market for a video projector. my price limit is $1000. This would be an all purpose projector for weird installations, for video backdrops for performances, possibly projecting from inside my zome huts, if any of you have seen them. i've been to all projector review sites, but none of them are very conclusive about what's best. my key factors seem to be "throw ratio" where i want the biggest possible picture from the shortest distances, also looking for brightness and i guess image quality. none of the sites i look at are geared towards art installation usage of projectors, more for home movie buffs or power point presentations.
so my question is: if you had to pick one sub$1000 projector to purchase, what would it be? not looking for more inconclusive advice. looking for suggestions for specific projectors.
anyway, if any of you reading this have any ideas on either of these things, please email me at adamforkner @ yahoo.com
thanks!
ps ROB LAWMART FROM REMOTE LOCATION PIPED IN LIVE VIDEO AUDIO FEED AT HOLOCENE TONIGHT - (other bands are pash and ghosting and a band called strangers die every day, which is, incidentally, my favorite butthole surfers song)
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!!