“Postal Workers Canceling Stamps at the University of Ghana Post Office” – field recording by Jim Koetting (File expires on December 14th.) .
This is a remarkable field recording that I first encountered in Rod Knight’s world music class at Oberlin College. “Postal Workers Canceling Stamps at the University of Ghana Post Office” is a pretty well spread track, and I imagine it gets taught in many/most world music courses, but there’s no harm in spreading it further. The content is exactly what the title implies, yet it still surprises and floors me just as much as it did the first time I heard it. From the textbook we used:
The men making the sounds you hear are workers canceling letters at the University of Ghana post office… This is what you are hearing: the two men seated at the table slap a letter rhythmically several times to bring it from the file to the position on the table where it is to be canceled (this act makes a light-sounding thud). The marker is inked one or more times (the lowest, most resonant sound you hear) and then stamped on the letter (the high-pitched mechanized sound you hear). As you can hear, the rhythm produced is not a simple one-two-three (bring forward the letter — ink the marker — stamp the letter). Rather, musical sensitivities take over. Several slaps on the letter bring it down, repeated thuds of the marker in the ink pad and multiple cancellations are done for rhythmic interest… The other sounds you hear have nothing to do with the work itself. A third man has a pair of scissors that he clicks — not cutting anything, but adding to the rhythm…. the fourth worker simply whistles along. He and any of the other three workers who care to join him whistle popular tunes or church music that kits the rhythm.
(Blast, I see that WFMU recently blogged this track, too. Fuckers. This has been in my backlog since October.)
o Reportedly, Bob Dylan recently gave Neil Young a copy of this box set as a gift. Gotta git my hands on that one.
o Get yourself a Team Zissou identification card.
o Earlier this year, the Coen brothers and writer Charlie Kaufman (“Being John Malkovich,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) created “sound plays” for the Theater For the New Ear. Scored by longtime Coens’ collaborator Carter Burwell, the one-acts starred (among others) John Goodman, Philip Seymour-Hoffman, Steve Buscemi, and Meryl Streep. Burwell has posted some excerpts on his website. They’re ridiculously tantalizing, if a bit cryptic without context. Hopefully, they’ll see full release in the future. (Particularly bitchin’ and self-contained is Kaufman’s Computer Love.)
o JEFF GOLDBLUM IS WATCHING YOU POOP! (Told you.)
I guest-blogged again over at LiveMusicBlog.com. Could the story be over? Is it an end or the beginning?
I sometimes have a hard time expressing how important Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea remains to me. (Sometimes.) Without getting all obsessive, some links of interest:
o Some “new” old Jeff Mangum tapes have been posted online. They’re very much in the vein of the other pre-Avery Island projects that have been circulating. “How did Aeroplane happen?” people ask. The answer — as these tapes prove — is very slowly.
o Over at John Darnielle’s Last Plane to Jakarta, there’s a very thoughtful discussion about the ethics of circulating old tapes and demos, with a few chimings from the head Mountain Goat himself. Given the totally inspiring Elephant 6 enthusiasm for exchanging music, I don’t think it’s wrong to be circulating these. For that matter, I think to call them “demos” is to sell them short. Just because they were never issued on CD makes them no less important. In fact, it makes them more quintessentially E6.
o This week also sees the publication of Kim Cooper’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea volume in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series. I read it over the weekend (thanks, Wendy!), and enjoyed it quite a bit, though it’s more of a play-by-play than an attempt to channel or explain the album’s beauty. More of an emphasis on the latter, I think, would have served the former. But, hey, it’s added invaluably to the way I understand Aeroplane without robbing it of any of its mystery. In fact, I think I’ll listen to it right now.
o In the fall of 2002, Jeff Mangum hosted nine radio shows for New Jersey’s WFMU. The only way to grok their mind-bending diversity is to peep the playlists. Or, better yet, check ’em out yourself. A spoiler of sorts: episode 1 begins with one of Jeff’s rare post-Aeroplane creations, a spectacularly weird Korena Pang sound collage, “To Animate The Body With The Cocoon of the Her Unconscious Christ The Mother Removes Her Death Body of 1910 Only To Be Reborn In The Same Spirit as a School of Blow Fish Believing in the Coming of the Milk Christ.”
o In early 2001, Jeff and Elf Power’s Laura Carter played a show at a random-ass bar in New Zealand, where they were camping and visiting (and recording) with the Tall Dwarfs. It remains Jeff’s only public performance of his own songs since 1998. It took, I think, two years for the news of the show to reach the States, and another two years for the tape to circulate. It’s an ultra-crispy soundboard, and — for reasons Jeff explains — an ultra-powerful performance. Perhaps a bit unforgiving, it’s well worth hearing any Aeroplane fan. Check it.
1:02 am Asian markets provide respite.
1:04 am Jealous of silicon, neon broods behind grated shop windows.
1:24 am When society’s dominant sensual paradigm finally switches from sight to smell and cell phone manufacturers are forced to provide odor messaging, this picture will (retroactively) make a lot more sense. Flowers trapped under bodega awnings are just the best.
3:05 am On the First Avenue subway platform, MTA employees cluster, seemingly unmindful of what appears to be a human body several feet away from them…
3:06 am…or, perhaps, they put the dummy there to fuck with people (though that doesn’t explain the fishing twine) (nor the rectangular legs) who are waiting patiently to go home and crawl into bed.
“Playmate” – Pearls Before Swine (file expires on December 8th)
from One Nation Underground (1967)
reissued by ESP-Disk (buy)
Watched a fair bit of Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home Dylan documentary last month. In it, Dylan talks about how musicians began imitating him, doing “some kind of jingly-jangly thing” (I think that was his phrase). He doesn’t name names, but — clearly — Pearls Before Swine’s “Playmate” falls under this heading. It’s got a jangly thing going, alrighty: the still-fresh organ-driven buoyancy of Blonde on Blonde backed by a rhythmic hook lifted directly from “Desolation Row.” And vocalist Tom Rapp sounds more like Dylan than Dylan (at least on this cut) (1). It’s pretty alright, as far as these Nuggets-style derivatives go. As Dylan himself (most likely) knew, there really was a peculiar emotional effect created by that particular combination of carnival organ and electric guitar that probably couldn’t be described as anything but jangly. There’s material on One Nation Underground — recently rereleased by ESP-Disk — that’s far more original (and, er, “influential”), but “Playmate” is certainly a curiosity for the cabinet.
(1) Rapp grew up nearby Dylan in Minnesota. If you believe what you read on the internets (and why shouldn’t you?), Rapp once beat l’il Bobby Zimmerman in a songwriting contest (finishing 2nd to Zimmy’s 6th). No shit? Maybe when they’re singing they’re both doing imitations of the Iron Range’s regional ghosts?
For those of you who didn’t end up here via my post at LiveMusicBlog.com: I made the first of what will hopefully be occasional guest entries over thar, a rant on the aforementoned.
For those of you who did end up here via that post: hallo!
Either way, Brewster’s post at archive.org restoring access to many Grateful Dead recordings seems to conclude this misfit-brand news cycle, though there’s plenty left to the story, though.
High school in Northport, New York was made oddly bearable by the fact that I ended up hanging out with some truly gifted and committed geeks. In autumn 1993, a year before I transferred in, they staged a mammoth production of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Nature Trail To Hell (in 3-D)” as part of the school variety show, replete with note-perfect metal shredding, a choral arrangement, a dude ripping his shirt off, and my friend Evan hacking up Cub Scouts with a plastic machete. Pretty impressive for a bunch of 15 year-olds.
On Thanksgiving, three Al tunes came up on my shuffle; on Friday, Bill (the bassist in the video) heard “Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung” in a bar (“they just went back to normal bar music after that… it’s like I hallucinated it,” he texted me), and now Matt — the keyboardist dude at stage left — finally digitized (and subtitled) the video. As he blogs, “Geeks rejoice! A crowd of rowdy teenagers will cheer for you. Especially if you’ve got a guy on stage with a machete chasing around a bunch of cub scouts.”
Totally lo-fi, totally inspiring. Thanks, Matt.
Here it is, in all its glory: Nature Trail to Hell (in 3-D). (8.5 MB, wmv file).
Besides obvious, everyday web tools — Wikipedia, the All Music Guide, the Internet Movie Database, Flickr, and such — I’ve come across a few other handy useful digital devices and information sources. Some are more utilitarian than others. There’s a lot of bullshit on the web, this blog fully included, and I have a certain fondness for pages that exist with genuine purpose.
o YouSendIt — A simple way to temporarily share files among groups of people without emailing them to everybody. Perfect for mp3s.
o BugMeNot.com — Shared logins for websites that require both free and paid registration, like the New York Times and MediaBistro. BugMeNot doesn’t always work but — when it does — it’s frickin’ sweet.
o PodWorks — This is one of the only pieces of downloaded software I have ever paid for. For a whopping $8, I can now copy music from my iPod back onto my computer, which is awesome, since my harddrive just isn’t big enough to hold all the music on my pod. By allowing me to copy songs, playlists, and albums, it converts my iPod from a play-only memory box into a functional harddrive.
o iWannaSleep — I like to listen to a really long shuffled playlist of quiet, purdy tunes while I’m falling asleep. This cute-as-a-button app is a sleep function for iTunes. Simple.
o Oblique Strategies widget — I have an old HyperCard edition of Brian Eno’s wondrous Oblique Strategies deck, though it clumsily opens OS 9 whenever I fire it up. I haven’t yet upgraded to OS 10.4 but, when I do, this Oblique widget will be my first download.
o Find A Human — If I call a customer support line, it’s generally because I can’t find the information I need online and would really like to speak to a person. I hate, hate, hate the hierarchy of menus I often have to go through to get there. Enter the IVR cheat sheet, which has come through with flying colors both times I’ve used it. Like the washing machine in the basement of my building that secretly only requires one quarter in the middle slot (shhhh!), these are video game codes for real life.
o The Hidden In-n-Out Burger — As a lifelong right-coaster, I admittedly have no practical use for the complete secret menu of In-n-Out Burger (those are good burgers, Walter), but some you westerly weirdoes might.
Perhaps because it’s so stressful, air travel is a mighty reliable source for Zen in the new, weird America.
1. An early morning shoeshine in MacArthur Airport’s imperial new extension.
2. Iconography.
3. In which we achieve levity.
