Nat Roe (FMA Admin)

A couple weeks back LA noise titans slash cultural lynchpins Robedoor did me the honor of recording a live session in WFMU's studios during a rare and excessively brief East Coast tour. Although Robedoor began as a two-piece drone band with dozens of releases on just about every cool noise label out there, the recent addition of Geddes Gengras as a drummer has brought the band closer to the unholy realm of doom metal.

Alex Brown supplied (among other things) keyboard riffs that form the backbone of the jams - his rig is so bass heavy that I actually couldn't tell whether he was up too loud in the mix or whether the floor was just shaking. Britt Brown played guitar and vocals, with a slew of pedals to throw off any semblence of the concept of a "song". The track "I thought you were the Devil" is off Robedoor's recent LP on Important Records, Burners. Parallel Wanderer, by far the longest track in this session, will appear as a full side of a yet untitled upcoming LP. This seems to be following Robedoor's usual method of writing songs: jamming it out with live improv until the completed song idea emerges from the murky depths.

Or maybe the secret to Robedoor's success is putting beer in every meal they eat? Alex runs an excellent and hilarious food blog called Hot Knives that seems to indicate a predilection for hoppy breakfast dishes. Speaking as somebody who loves nothing more than the rhetoric of high end menus, the Hot Knives archives are great because you get classy dishes with rock and roll commentary. For god's sake, he teaches you how to make the "über pre-choucroute", Kimchi from scratch!

Then again, Robedoor's ability to touch on a hundred genres at one is probably because Robedoor members are so involved with underground noise culture. Britt Brown runs Not Not Fun records, which has released a ton of material from many perennial WFMU favorites. I'd explain more, but there really aren't words. I'd recommend blasting this live session over your best sound system while nerding out to lists of releases from Not Not Fun and Robedoor on discogs.

Thanks to Jason Sigal for these photos and for help with engineering the recording.

Story by Taraka Larson

Forget what you have heard about chill wave, kill wave, no wave, new wave— this week’s theme is SOLAR DEATH WAVE. On Tuesday, there was a coronal mass ejection from a sunspot the size of earth aimed directly towards our fragile spinning planet, causing a “solar tsunami” to race 93 million miles across space. Lucky for us our protective magnetic shield displaced the explosion and transformed it into the most awe-inspiring aurora borealis of the century, but more “solar violence” is predicted to occur as the week goes on. Scientists say there is a slight chance that a potentially major solar eruption capable of destroying satellites and wrecking power and communications grids around the globe could occur TODAY, AUGUST 5th 2010.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, whether this proves to be true (in which case you probably wouldn’t be reading this right now) or not, PC WORSHIP is here to provide the score to cosmic battle zone. Allow them to imagine the most insane possible hypothetical situation.

Drop the needle. Side A. Live Reduxion, PC Worship’s latest 7” EP (co-released earlier this year on Shdwply + World War Records) begins this scenario on a deceptively sunny note; hazy beams of warm fuzz radiate across a beachy dance floor of multiple guitar riffs gliding together to a timeless surf-rock beat, sparkling with confidence, trembling with vulnerability, swooning at each other, bumping into each other, exchanging awkward exchanges through palm fronds, laughing at the present through the tears of the past, and overall creating an Eden of nostalgia where love can be created and resurrected anew again.

Then all of a sudden a foot-full of sand gets kicked in your eyes. The guitars screech to a halt, their playful choreography frozen by skull-pounding drums warning of impending doom. The sun that has felt so nice and warm on your skin seems to grow exceedingly hotter and brighter until gradually the godhead above is enveloped in a hairnet of fire and the air grows dense and thick with celestial hell. Suddenly, a cloak of blackness drops over the surface of the globe. In a single flash, the past 150 years of modern discoveries in the fields of electricity, internet, and telecommunications is rendered obsolete. The guitars soon lose all sense of time and poise and begin hailing their own mortality in a squealing celebration of the chaos about to ensue as Justin Frye’s monotone voice chants “wake up in the dark and there’s nothing going on”.

Switch to side B. “Salvic Garden, Prophecies of Hell” returns us to this paradisaical Eden that opened the EP only now we find it in a state of infernal decay, inhabited by mutant guitars dragged across the beach by monster trucks with bleary-eyed recollections of James Byrd. “Gravity” pulls us inward toward the center of the record and deeper into its post-apocalyptic--Island of Dr. Moreau—style visions of madness. Frye chants “they were all dead, they were all dead” in a dramatic last gasp at a lo-fi pop song that dips back and forth into the sinking tidal pool of noise and structural amnesia held together by fist-pumping power chords that offer a thread of hope before trailing off into a shredding oblivion. Thus, PC WORSHIP, a self-proclaimed “mutant soul band” is born to venerate the drugged-out memory of PCs and other myriad artifacts of the long lost era of electronic communication before they were wiped out by the solar wars of 2010 A.D. Their resulting sonic temple is truly worthy of devotion.

When I first heard the trio play a live set a few months ago at Shea Stadium, I was completely blown away.  With Hexbreaker Quintet headlining, I was expecting a night of low-key, mellow drone, but everybody in this trio was furious.  Jeffrey Shurdut's guitar squealed with high-pitched feedback, matched with wild soloing at the top of the neck.  It was a perfect analogy to the high, nasal tones of Tamio Shiraishi's saxophone.  I was just staring at Shiraishi like he was a golden god, dressed completely in white and occasionally bending over to shout raspy Japanese phrases into the mic.  Brian Osborne's drumming filled out the sound of the other two and placed the band solidly into the free jazz realm.

Although this is a new trio with no previous recorded material, all three players are veterans.  Tamio Shiraishi relocated to NYC from Japan several years ago after having collaborated with many of Japan's best improvisers (check out this video of him with Keiji, Otomo and Tori).  Brian Osborne and Jeffrey Shurdut have already collaborated together in their band George Steeltoe Ensemble, with a few records out on Osborne's own imprint, Heat Retention records.

What was incredible about the live set the trio gave on my radio show a few weeks back was how much more dynamic depth the band was able to achieve.  This set is more meditative than I expected, dwelling at times in near silence (for a few moments, the only sounds heard are the squeaks from a chair that Shurdut asked the engineer Bill Bowen to mic).  Though Shiraishi dwells entirely in the high regions of the reed, an effect produced by biting the reed, his characteristic sound reveals itself anew in the varied contexts of Osborne's and Shurdut's meanderings.

When Japanese laptop noisician Marqido came through Rob Lim's Janitor From Mars program five years ago, Marqido probably never would have foreseen the musical direction he would take when returning to my program last week with his duo 10.  South Korean crooner Itta began collaborating with Marqido several years ago after Marqido toured through Seoul's experimental venue Yogiga.

As 10, the duo is just finishing up their first American tour, promoting their recent album, Kitsch.  Fans of 10 will be surprised by this live session (or by any of their live concerts for that matter), since 10's electro-pop is highly improvisatory.  Each of the three performances I've seen personally in the past weeks have been completely different.  Wave No Wave is taken at half tempo on this recording, for instance, and all the songs are significantly lengthened.  Marqido makes great use of an optical theremin (which is already at the top of my Christmas wish list) and feeds Itta's vocals and both members' keytars through Logic on his laptop.  10 has been one of my favorite mutant-pop bands for a few years now (especially their album Nomad), so it's been particularly illuminating to see the free improv that underlies the pristine, taut pop on their recordings.

Lord, this one sounded too good to be true when I heard it was in the works a few months back.  And it also helps confirm my suspicion that all the stuff on Judge Judy, Maury, Springer, what have you, are totally made up.  On Monday's episode of Judge Judy, Teeth Mountain's Kate Levitt accused Jonathan Coward, AKA Shams, of killing her cat by throwing a TV on top of it.  The witnesses are Andrew Burt from Teeth Mountain and Narwhalz, who unfortunately doesn't speak much in court but who distinctly refers to Judy as "Mama".  For you animal lovers, this story is not true - although Shams does fuck around with dead birds on stage and burn them as part of these...like...satanic rituals or something.  I'm not sure if they're dead when he finds them.

Teeth Mountain are on tour right now in the Northeast US, making their way to Mexico in March -- tourdates here. More Teeth Mountain on the FMA here

Service sans shirt and shoes.

I ran into this guy today who named his dog Adolphus, which is pretty weird and slightly offensive.  But Volcano The Bear's Aaron Moore is definitely weirder since the bear is a bizarre pet and Volcano is no kind of name for any animal.

I first heard about Volcano The Bear through an old issue of Bananafish, which already billed Volcano The Bear as a prolific, well established band.  At this point, Volcano the Bear is downright legendary, having collaborated and intermixed with dozens of other prominent avant gardists.  Their eclectic, bizarre soundscapes blended experimental with pop long before Animal Collective brought freaky ass folk music to the general public.

Often loosely tied in with the Weird New America movement (despite being from England...), Volcano The Bear exercizes musical sophistication and a vocabulary of extended techniques on par with much more pretentious avant gardists.  Their surreal, Jodorowskian moods made them prime candidates for collaborations with Nurse With Wound's Stephen Stapleton.  After VTB ringleader Aaron Moore came to WFMU for a live broadcast on Daniel Blumin's show last August, the FMA was able to fanagle a whole mess of mp3s from Volcano The Bear and its many sideprojects.  Click here to download a handful of classic Volcano The Bear albums and read below in this post for more information on each of the side projects featured on the FMA.

I first ran into Kyle Bruckmann's oboe shredding insanity while listening to the (recently uploaded on the FMA) comp of Chicago avant-gardists, Winter Construction.  Turns out Bruckmann's garnered quite the reputation for his improvisations. 

As of late, I've been really enjoying the free saxophone improvisations of Kang Tae Hwan, and Bruckmann's solos are definitely in that vein - tons of reaching through overtones (especially the highest reaches of the instrument) and exploring the extended faculties of the oboe.  I always used to kinda scoff at circular breathing because of the Kenny G connection, but listening to music like this makes me realize how crucial it can be to give proper space for an idea.  You can find Bruckmann's homepage here and listen to his other tracks on the FMA here.

Full disclosure, most of what I've been listening to on the FMA is from the Old-Time/Historical section.  I feel like our ADDified culture has almost completely forgotten about what popular music was in the first half of the 20th century.  The result is that old music sounds completely fresh to my ears.

But by the same token, when I came across Singing Sadie in the Historical section of the site, she sounded...a little fresher.  The music sounded typical enough, but those slightly shrill vocals...And I never expected a lyric like, "You went out and caught the clap. penicillin for you.  Come now, don't be so upset, just 'cause your doggie's dead."  And does that off-kilter tap dance interlude sound quite right?

And then I realized it was a hoax.  Singing Sadie is a post-modernly leaning Aussie in league with the Dual Plover label.  Get it?  Good, right?