here is the debut music video from my newest musical project, Sissy Fists. it is becoming more like a pop band, by which i mean there are vocal melodies in many songs. this is a thing i haven't done in a long time. ramon is the drummer. shot in beautiful bleak and bleary oakland:
the other musical still-goings-on are No Babis of course, writing more songs drawing on more composers and getting more musically out-there-- full length coming out in spring; yacob solo stuff which has shifted to performing with pre-recorded tracks so i can jump around-- music ranging from hardcore to electronoiz to free vocal improv to synthpop to bass clarinet art songs. i would still like to record the ten completed TFFW'z songs, but who knows when that will happen. and Sissy Fists is a song writing machine, working on our second tape currently. i am trying to do more scored music, or at least come up with the theories to apply before playing the instruments....
so instead of writing here, i have been scribbling in tiny pocket sized notebooks that served as tour journals (which i shall one day transcribe) and making lots of song fragments for the new sam cooke meets the swans style band i have started. anyway i just found this short story fragment which i enjoy, makes me want to write more and maybe put a zine together:
"Everything about work is terrible. Everything leads up to nothing."
These words could have been hanging up on the drooping banner instead of Happy Tenth Anniversary To The Company, but were certainly spelled out clearly enough on the faces of dejected, be-collared, party-hat-wearing workers who were confined slump-shouldered to folding chairs. Across from Alex sat two of his coworkers. One smiled vacantly, this being the one who always took the attitude of a stern parent correcting the mistakes of a stupid child. The other stared somewhere just above his head, perhaps imagining happier places, better times.
The manager had called them all there to discuss an important merger within the company that would affect all of their furthered careers. Nearly half of their human resources were being downsized, outsourced, and replaced with Mud People, courtesy of MudFuture Industries. They had all watched projected multimedia presentations with poor analogies of how bricks were made from mud and the company was like a house. Everyone feared for their jobs, and the supervisors rejoiced because mud was such a cheap market commodity.
The party took an even more sour turn when a mud person began slopping its feet into the room and gurgling and ruining all of the trail mix in the giant metal bowl.
Someone graciously and wonderfully is documenting most of what I did and remember about our litle music scene in Daphne/Mobile Alabama up until age 19 when I moved away. It has pretty much every band i remember from high school on it and alot of the Devolution Summer bands too...
The Difference Engine was my first band with Sean and later Ricky, started at age 17-- also there is the earliest version of No Babies uploaded-- Conflict Hymens was a means of provoking people for fun by writing songs about them and my first time drumming in a band and was the start of Devolution Summer 2K6-- AC Slater was another band from that period that I recorded the first EP of and still love-- xOrder Upx was a jokey pizza straightedge band that I played drums with for one show & was the other pillar of Devolution Summer, the best part of their shows was seeing how many times they'd cover Barfight-- Bailey Turner was the most popular musician of the entire DEvoSum scene and sent Conflict Hymens hatemail-- Hence the Plagues were best when they had both singers but they were definetly breathing some life into our cold dead scene (I got to do some improv vocals with them a couple times).....
Other bands on this blog were some of the first bands I ever saw (although that honor formally goes to Pain) and were either inspirational, or what I was clearly reacting AGAINST.
Here is my video for the RURARY song "parthenogenesis". It was written in reaction to the ridiculous woman-hating law recently passed in Utah that deemed that miscarriages "caused my negligence" are prosecutable as murder (for instance in the case of the woman found guilty for falling down the stairs). I suggest that women turn to parthenogenesis as whiptails lizards do, render men unnecessary, and sentence them all to Utah. Watch your favorite male historical figures rampage through the countryside and relegate the expressions of their frustrations to incessant sodomy of each other!
Last night I played at the Oakland International Noise Conference and I wanted to write a little bit about the experience (TF set, murder murder set, blandness of most sets).
First, simply concepts: I have a weird hangup about the term noise because I don’t really believe it exists. Noise is something which you do not choose to listen to, which disrupts or overthrows what is predictable in our lives as far as sound goes. Doesn’t a gathering of people somewhere all with the intent to hear “noise” completely negate the validity of the term?
I think from what I saw of the show only a handful of bands genuinely engaged me, maybe enough to put together to make one really good show….The majority of the performers were kind of unexciting stand-in-one-place-and-make-drones-with-crinkle-noises-on-top-of-it-for-a-few-minutes-then-stop types.
If, suspending my unbelief in noise as a generally viable artform, I do allow for a definition of it (the one posited by Luigi Russolo and the futurists seems well thought-out), noise is part of the avante-garde, meant to complete subvert tonal music, push tension and dissonance and extreme timbres to their absolute limits, and to make use of sounds not typically associated with something someone would choose to listen to (machinery, electronics, etc).
By this definition, I think most of the bands wouldn’t even fall in this category. Most of the noise music sounded so similar I would be hard pressed to make a distinction between many of the bands, sometimes wondering if it was another performance or just the house music feebly blurting and buzzing through the amplifiers. There was so much drone I felt like I was in a Krishna temple, which complete eliminates any sort of tension in the music for me. There was no sense of unpredictability in any of the music. No one utilized silence, space, or time as means of organizing the sound. Bands were essentially sound on, sound off, from one to the next. “Noise” is a genre, and all of these people must be drawing from such similar influences, so noise as a concept is dead. No one even seemed influenced by no wave, which I felt would be an easy way out of the chains of pedal effected guitars and electronics and mumblecore vocals. I feel like the majority of people were making it because it is easy to do.
Despite my dissatisfaction with a lot of the music, oftentimes this can be made up for by performance, but almost no acts tried to elicit any emotions either in themselves or in the audience. These are not people who think about what they are doing, these are not people who feel anything in reaction to it, therefore I don’t give a fuck.
To be honest, I was watching videos of Hanatarashi and GISM the other night, where the singer of the latter band turned a flamethrower on the audience causing members to scatter in terror over chairs, and Yamatsuka Eye of the former drove a bulldozer through the wall of the venue then destroyed the stage while screaming into a microphone while a drummer played behind him.I don’t think anyone can top performances like that, nor would I actually want to. In contrast, everything else is basically a pop band. But to view what Hanatarashi were doing as sound is an intense elevation of the audience’s conception of sound as art, and probably as far as noise can go. I digress, but these are things influencing my thinking…..
on the above clip go to about 5:30
Now let me talk about the performances I did like:
Murder Murder: consisting of Paul on sax, microphone, and feedback, Chris on drums (both from Death Sentence: Panda!), someone else on a weird noisemaking tin thing, and misha and me on saxophone and trombone. This was a case where I feel like an ensemble really boosts what is interesting about music. There were many elements of chance to the music, but also a lot of freeassociation as I felt everyone was listening to the other players in the collective improvisation to make a whole sound. Filling in where it seemed appropriate. The plan was 5 or 6 short blastbeats of noise at about 10 seconds long each, then one 5 minute long jam. The flow of ideas had to be just as rapid and I felt like this kept the energy and interest in the music up. I really liked the connecting improvised factor of Paul playing between the different high and low feedbacks of his two amps with me and misha making staccato quiet gurglings into our horns underneath it. We hadn’t planned on playing with murder murder but I’m intensely glad that we got to. Eden recorded it and I’m eager to hear the results.
TFFWz: I know this makes me sounds like an extreme egotist but that’s just how I feel. We got on the show at all because we showed up with our instruments and asked if we could play. We were probably the most rock n roll band of the night, by which I mean we were the only band performing prewritten songs. To quote ricky marler “it’s funny how the bands you play with can make you feel like ac/dc”. We go to set up our stuff in the corer and there is no PA. I think for a brief moment and we say fuck it we’ll go acoustic. Afterwards some people told me a microphone would have helped my vocals, but I think it is liberating for us to declare our independence from electricity, and I felt confident in my projecting abilities after our tour of 24th st in san Francisco a few weeks earlier when we played at a skate park, in front of st francis café, and in front of the bart. Since it was a “noise show” misha used his less controllable mouth piece and I think we all felt we could be a bit more free with the arrangements. I screamed at the top of my lungs to announce we were playing, which ended up being louder than everyone talking in the whole warehouse, and we did a really hyper five song set which I think was: snails / lil kid / filmic / mexico / cacophony. I tried this one kudoro move a couple times where you throw yourself backwards to the ground but I don’t quite have it. Lack of any electric instruments makes me feel even more naked as a performer, which is a good state to be in. I ended up doing one move I haven’t done since klacto days, throwin myself onto my head…hurt my arm and knees, as per usual. During the last song I swung misha around by his shirt so he couldn’t even play the saxophone and he threw me into the drums which got throw everywhere at the end. I love that, it always means we’re done. Afterwards everybody kept partially tongue-in-cheek commenting on how all the drummers were biting us by throwing their drums everywhere at the end of their sets. Post Addendum: I don’t mean to sound like an asshole by talking about my own band on here, but I believe in what we are doing, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it. I can’t really appraise our set because I was too busy playing it, but people seemed to be feeling it.
Ettrick: both of the people in this band are just amazing musicians, and drummers, with unique styles playing off of each other in a pure form of energy music. I must have missed any of the tenor sax solos, but the alto was doing nothing but playing overtones and altissimo while hitting a squelching noise electro pad periodically. The music had real tension and buildup to it, and it felt like the musicians were really interacting with each other. I think one time I heard someone say the noise scene just takes all the people who aren’t good enough to play jazz, but I feel with Ettrick and murder murder we have some really talented and choppy improvisers in the scene, with a lot of technique and thought put into what they’re doing. (I already ranted on the people who I think don’t).
Seven lies about girls: I watched this cuz it was my friend dave playing. There was some squeally prepared guitar going and a couple of toms and bass drum that made fairly ineffectual backbeat to the music. The drums began to get away from dave and his sheer anger perfectly matched the music, which was propelled by this performance full of, I dunno, things not going right, defeat, ineffectiveness. The mic stand fell over, was kicked away. The microphone was screamed into and swung til the cord snapped. The drums were throw till the heads were busted and came dangerously close to the audience at times, each spare hitting at a breaking open drumhead given voice to the inaudible unamplified screaming of dave. When he lifted the drums above his head onto his back and screamed in all directions at the audience there was real fear that he was gonna throw the whole thing and kill somebody, everybody did a little move behind the person in front of them. The set ended without violence, but the emotion was pure and is what I think noise bands should have.
There were other bands I had some interest in but who didn’t hold it for the entirety of their whole 15 minute sets. So, INC 2010 was a pretty good experience, and maybe I’m just a square who doesn’t get it, but these are some things it made me think. I mean, this kind of music is literally a hundred years old. Do something new with it!
And this is what is what I was singing all night, besides some made up shit about Misha wearin a big woman’s shirt:
applique-style pegasus collage from war images...kim did the silouhette and i picked out the images and placed them inside it. this will be used for a flier for the upcoming foot village show on may 22nd i think.
You can watch your capillaries pulse and wriggle across it
Forecast tonight is entire world being removed by absence of cognition
My eyes will constrict telescopically like
Lampshades when there is an excess of light
I daze as my car careens into pointillist pines
I wish NPR was playing instead of forecast at nine
this song was written for an NPR contest for making a song in one weekend using a select word such as lampshade. It focuses on two of my biggest fears, the second unstated one which is dying by driving a car off the side of an icy mountain. As our protaganist falls asleep at the wheel this is what happens to him, and in his last moment of cognizance he wishes another radio station was playing, as did I when a shitty country station was on and my band’s van was spinning out across two lanes of icy interstate and down a hill and towards what I supposed was going to be death. The song appends RURARY and is the only one without the lyrics included, as they were in a notebook that had been washed in a pair of pants I rarely wear and not rediscovered until today.
Slothantua began to feel that there was a general lack of depth to his activities and interactions with other people. This realization struck him at perhaps not the most inopportune moment, as he had just vanquished his most recent foe the Evil Former Lord Emperor of the Dust Beings, Shhhhwuntopung, and subsequently had a little bit of free-time. Slothantua tossed aside Shhhhwuntopung’s head and sat down on a green rock dimpled with tiny craters to contemplate this sudden troubling notion.
“There has to be some aspect of my life with which I am satisfied,” he thought, gazing at the bulging of his muscles against the stretchy thin silver glitteranium spacesuit he was wearing. Perhaps fulfillment was to be found in his public life as his secret identity, Nathan Slothan. The business suits were certainly more comfortable than the skin-tight all-too-revealing get-ups he wore as a defender of the solar system. The random array of clashing day-glo colors, each suited to a different planetary environment or climate, were enjoyable, perhaps a subconscious throwback to his teenage flirtations with drag-shows.
Of course the Incident had ended all of that. A poor decision as a young adult to enter a medical study of “non quantifiable risk” on similarities between humans and sloths, determined by experimental radioactive equipment, had left Nathan as a powerful half-man-half-beast with no recourse but to become a registered Extraordinary Being and Planetary Defender.
The closest he got to normalcy these days was as a particularly hulking employee of a home décor magazine, Interior Accents Quarterly, arranging and photographing displays of earth-tone monogrammed bath towels. Lately, though, even that felt hollow.
Slothantua gazed up at the two glittering blue moons in the sky, and the passing swarm of small deerodactyls that snatched at tiny winged crustaceans as the sun set. Nothing to do now but wait for the spaceship bearing the other four of the Mighty Fistful, on its way back to Earth.
Was it attention he was after? What sort of debt did he feel he owed to people to utilize his supposed gift in such a way? What really constituted good and evil? Didn’t entire races of planetary species get eliminated either way? Slothantua began to absent-mindedly trace one of his six claws in the purple sand, creating patterns and then erasing them soon after.
Maybe it would help him to evaluate his life if he thought of his aspirations before becoming the giant radioactive sloth beast that the world adored and whom cretins of the Universe feared. What had he wanted to be? A firefighter? An Astronaut? He did both activities perhaps daily, and neither actually felt as rewarding as they were in his joyful childhood crayon imaginings. Routine had turned an ersatz cheerful take on his extraordinary mutation into self-pity and doubt. Was all this strength worth the loss of opposable thumbs?
The fist-shaped spaceship appeared suddenly as it pulled out of the fourth dimension immediately in front of Slothantua. Sammy Grillosphere, the man with the power to heat up individual layers of the atmosphere so that planes fell from the sky but kites, balloons, and birds were unharmed (or vice versa) stepped outward from the side portal on the pinky fingernail.
“Splendid work chum. I see you foiled one of our most Significant Nemeses,” Sammy said, glancing over at the headless torso with the Dust Emperor’s insignia on it. “He’ll certainly have a hard time finding a way to get A-HEAD now, won’t he? Heh heh heh.” Sammy chuckled at his own witticism.
“Yeah I guess so,” said Slothantua, still staring dejectedly at the ground.
“Heeeeeeeeyyyy. You sound kind of like you’re in the dumps. Anything wrong? Need a vacation? You did a GREAT JOB pal!!” said Sammy encouragingly. Slothantua looked up slowly.
“No. I mean, I guess I am feeling a little down. I mean….do you ever wonder what you’re doing with your life? I mean, I know why we’re doing this, saving the planets and all, but sometimes I wonder if it’s for me, this kind of life…”
Sammy stared wide-eyed, paused in a slow intake of breath, and then slapped Slothantua on the back with a return of his trademark frozen-faced smile. “OF COURSE it’s the life for you! Excitement! Adventure! Accolades and Adoration from the Rescued Masses! Not to mention that beautiful wife you’ve got at home! Even MOVIE STARS would be lucky to have a lady like THAT!!!”
Slothantua thought about his wife. She had a propensity for getting into trouble, and had been a young co-worker at Interior Accents Quarterly alongside him. He had rescued her so many times it seemed like they were destined to be together. Recently she had revealed to him that she had placed herself in the clutches of so many villains merely to get a strong heroic husband, and somehow this seemed to cheapen the apparent fatedness of their relationship. Slothantua was typically taciturn, but this had been an irreversible unspoken change to the dynamic of their marriage. Even that didn’t feel right anymore.
“Well. I guess. I just don’t feel….happy, I guess.”
Sammy blinked and continued to smile, leading Slothantua toward the ship with a firm hand pressing against the expanse of his back.
“You know I think you just need to forget your troubles for a while. The things we deal with are a lot, I MEAN A LOT to deal with! No Joe-Average-Schmoe could do it everyday like we do and still keep a level head. AND I’m NOT suggesting you go out drinking. OH NO! We sure had enough brain damage already from Mentalio’s Mind-Wipe Ray, heh heh! No, take your wife out to A MOVIE. Or maybe to a BIG FANCY RESTAURANT.” Sammy waved his free hand across the empty air in front of him, as if painting the wonders of which he spoke.
“Yeah,” said Slothantua stepping into the Fist Ship, the chromanium fingernail portal slamming shut behind him.
Farnly was exhausted after a long day of work at the Planariatarium. He removed his vinyl jumpsuit with its slowly dribbling unconstituted flatworm particles and hung it on the drying rack over the draining grate.
“You think about what I was saying about workers rights an all ‘at, alright?”
Farnly was accosted thusly by his coworker Cranford.
“Yeah yeah.”
“I mean it “ Cranford said fixing his throbbing veined bloodshot eyes on Farnly’s, and briefly digging in his teeth. “We work hard at what we’re doing. They need us. The people who need planarians need us. They can’t keep dickin’ us around. You oughta come to one ‘a these union meetings.”
“Yeah of course. You know. Just let me know.” Farnly felt extreme antipathy.
“Alright Buddy.” A hand descended to uncomfortably rest on Farnly’s shoulder, unpleasant whisps of processed corn chips intruding into his nose. Boiling vats of hydrogenated oils filled his imagination, the bubbles popping in thick clouds of gas with every word his coworker spoke. “I’ll see ya next shift.”
Freed from the oppressive manhandling of casual acquaintanceship, Farnly made his way out into the world of bleary swiftly fading sunlight. Greyness abounded and he could almost see the air shimmering in the witching hour with the tiny bodies of airborne pathogens, more than likely simply the retina-reflected pulsing and wrigglings of his own eye’s capillaries.
Keeping his head down, eyes averted from all faces of passersby, he made his way walking home as a germ alighted on the cusp of his inner ear.
“I have a message from the germ world for you Farnly…” He was silent in response
“We think what you’ve been giving the family in exchange for protection hasn’t been nearly enough. And a couple of those antibacterial soap slip ups-- tsk tsk. We cant let the genocide of your hands natural fauna go completely unaddressed now can we? All I can say is, your probiotics aren’t gonna know what hit ‘em. You owe us. The fam’ is pissed and we’re takin’ some compensation.”
Intimidation came at him from all angles, from coworkers to his body’s natural ecosystem. He ignored the germ’s warnings of bacterial warfare but ended up vomiting, hunched over the toilet, shortly after arriving home. A blow dryer was running in the bedroom so his wife didn’t observe him in his moment of weakness, which was as it should be.
“Oh honey you’re home? How was work going? I don’t like you working these long hours and then walking home, you could be robbed you know.”
“Oh. Well we started making a new model planarian today”
“Really now? Did they make them bigger again? I thought five feet long was pretty big.”
“No. The ones we were pouring out today, apparently they’re capable of love. They’re gonna be really hot, you know, might mean maybe bonuses even”
“Oh that’s terrific!” His wife’s effusion turned into materialistic babble. Farnly hated feigning interest in his work but it gave their relationship some meaning to pretend to have some kind of emotional investment or interest in their outside lives.
Sliding his body underneath the covers, Farnly stared at the ceiling, mottled from decades of patching and seemingly exuding a faint blue white light, traces of the street lamps that crept in below the blinds. After his wife’s song-like labored nostril-less breathing started, Farnly rose and traced the dark memorized footpath to the bathroom. Many hazards such as nightstands, tables, and chairs took half-formed demon-like shapes, which he knew to avoid due to past toe stubbings and habit.
Once in the bathroom, under the unflattering fluorescent light, Farnly stared into the mirror and prepared to have a silent conversation with himself.
He observed his hollowed-out looking eyes with pronounced baggage underneath, the wrinkling of his jowly cheeks, being slowly dragged from his face to the grave as he continued to age irreversibly. He stared deeply into his own passive cow-like eyes.
Abruptly his nose fell off.
It sputtered blood into the sink and was propelled downward against the drain guard. In short order, each of his other facial features and limbs fell with soft “puh”s to the linoleum, as though his body was made of poorly arranged and placed together clay.
After all bits of his human likeness had deteriorated from the outside of his body, Farnly surveyed his new limbless and slightly phallic shape with dispassion and disinterest. He wondered if he could learn by eating chopped up pieces of other people now.
He flopped his head to the ground and slithered by pushing his foot-like underbelly all the way back to the covers of his bed. His wife adjusted herself in her sleep mumbling something incomprehensible. Farnly felt it proper to respond.
“I don’t think I’m one of those ones built for love though,” he told her.
Albacore Records is a small label I have been running since I was 15. This blog is for all related detritus (art, prose, writing, downloads) for the label. I currently play in the bands No Babies (guitar, clarinet, 2nd drums), Sissy Fists (vocals, guitar), and TFFWz (screams, trombone, bass clarinet). My name is Yacob and I am 24.
