Saturday 10 August 2013

Northern Spy presents third annual Spy Music Festival featuring Loren Connors ...


Another day, another indie label closes its doors. This time around it's Baltimore label Public Guilt succumbing to the harsh realities of the financial burdens involved with running a record label in the shrinking marketplace of physical media. Man, was that a sentence or what?


Anyway, formed in 2004, Public Guilt put out a pretty diverse collection of albums. Zu, The Psychic Paramount, Aluk Todolo, Max Bondi, Ala Muerte, and Cream Abdul Babar are just a handful of the artists to have released recordings through the label.


The folks over at Public Guilt are discounting basically everything they have left in their backstock. If you've been looking to pull the trigger on any of their releases, you can check that out here. As they say, going out of business is great for business. It's a shame you can only do it once.


* Public Guilt: http://www.publicguilt.com



C. Spencer Yeh is a chameleon. No, I mean literally. Dude is a little green creature of the class reptilia and the order squamata that can change his appearance based on his environment. Apparently he got transformed some time back around the year 2000 after dabbling in a little bit of unsupervised hedge magic. Ever since, he's been all like, "Hey, music writers, gimme a hand in transforming back into my human form," and music writers have been all like, "No way dude, this is the first time we've gotten to use a cliché and have it actually mean what we mean. Make a bunch of different kinds of music, then maybe we'll help you."


As a result, Yeh's done pretty much everything from collaborative improvisational drone, to solo and slightly less-improvisational electro-acoustic composition, brain blasting cacophony, and heck, he's even released some pretty straight-up indie rock. Because music writers have not yet made good on their promise to undo the magic that has been done, Yeh is yet again planning to try something new. According to the Primary Information site, some time next February or March Yeh will offer his first recorded work focused entirely on the voice. Entitled Solo Voice I-X, the LP seeks to combine Yeh's past work into something that uses the concréte reference points of Henri Chopin, Sten Hanson, and Bernard Heidsieck to pushes things into an entirely new direction. Details are pretty thin at present, but we'll keep you up to date as more info trickles forth.


As for whether Yeh will ever return to his human form, I'm not really in any position to speculate. I did just learn that chameleons' eyes can move independently of one another, and that they can get as big as two feet long, so I think that maybe Yeh might do well to think a while on how good he's got it, since those are some pretty cool science facts.


* C. Spencer Yeh: http://www.dronedisco.com * Primary Information: http://primaryinformation.org



I bet you thought that all Steve Gunn, John Truscinski, and Cian Nugent knew about was "guitars" and "complicated drumming patterns." Wrong! They also know an awful lot about the various ways in which infants shit themselves. And they better, what with their recently announced full-length album/diaper endorsement deal entitled Cat Mask in Huggie Temple, brought to you by the waste-absorbing fabrics of Huggies® diapers and MIE Music.


Recorded in part on the hallowed ground of the Temple of the Diaper, Cat Mask in Huggie Temple is the first official release to feature the collaborative work of these three men as Desert Heat (a phrase which doubles as a band name and an evocative description of babies' butts when covered in Huggies® diapers). These three men have worked alone in the past, with Steve Gunn releasing his solo album Time Off ( TMT Review) just earlier this year, and Nugent's 2011 release of Doubles. And of course, Gunn and Truscinski have collaborated in the aptly named Gunn-Truscinski Duo many times before. But only on the occasion of this prestigious diaper endorsement deal have they recorded a full-length together. Consisting of two extended tracks, Cat Mask in Huggie Temple stretches long, semi-improvised, psychedelic- and raga-influenced jams to their limits, showing these men to be just as flexible as the waistbands on Huggies® diapers.


The album, which comes in a limited vinyl edition of 350, is out September 3 on MIE Music, distributed in the US by Revolver. If you're in the UK or are an American willing to pay in squiggles instead of cash, you can also preorder it right now direct from MIE. According to this infant I just found, it's "the most delightful thing I've heard since I became a sentient being." I bet you didn't know infants could talk. They can't. Shut up.


Cat Mask in Huggie Temple tracklist:


01. Cat Mask in Huggie Temple 02. Chimay Blues


* Steve Gunn: http://steve-gunn.com * Cian Nugent: http://cnugent.tumblr.com * Gunn-Truscinski Duo: http://threelobed.com/tlr/tlr087.html * MIE Music: http://mie.limitedrun.com



Danny Brown and Action Bronson are high. How high are they? 2 HIGH 2 DIE. Personally, I think that's pretty darn high. That knight from The Seventh Seal had things all wrong. Instead of playing a dumb nerd game like chess, dude should have rolled a mega-blunt and spewed weed smoke in Death's face. If you're not a film buff, here's a more contemporary example: take the movie Speed. Replace Keanu Reeves with Action Bronson and Danny Brown. Now, the movie is about two guys who must maintain a certain level of highness at all times, else a bus explodes. Also, I guess Action Bronson and Danny Brown are on the bus, smoking an endless supply of pot. Which is basically what they will probably be doing on their upcoming 2 HIGH 2 DIE tour.


Brown and Bronson will begin their trip during September in Calgary, then will proceed to flaunt their immortality to another dozen or so cities. "Spread your healing smoke upon us, the unwashed masses" the unwashed masses will say. The two rappers will look down and say "Naaaaaah, we will be the only immortals alive." After they laugh about their endless existence, they will tell everyone about the new projects they've got on the horizon. Brown's long-awaited album Old will be coming out this fall on Fool's Gold, while Bronson and producer Party Supplies will soon be dropping Blue Chips 2, the sequel to last year's acclaimed mixtape that has a title you can probably figure out. Take note: Action Bronson is an immortal, so soon could be many decades from now.


Danny Brown and Action Bronson dates:


09.10.13 - Calgary, AB - Republik 09.11.13 - Edmonton, AB - Union Hall 09.12.13 - Vancouver, BC - Vogue Theatre 09.17.13 - Denver, CO - Ogden Theatre 09.20.13 - Milwaukee, WI - The Rave II 09.22.13 - Minneapolis, MN - First Avenue 09.24.13 - Bloomington, IN - Bluebird Nightclub 09.25.13 - Grand Rapids, MI - The Intersection 09.27.13 - Philadelphia, PA - Theatre of the Living Arts 10.01.13 - Toronto, ON - The Danforth Music Hall 10.02.13 - Montreal, QC - Telus Theatre 10.03.13 - Boston, MA - Wilbur Theatre


* Danny Brown: https://www.facebook.com/xdannyxbrownx * Action Bronson: http://www.actionbronson.com



Cowboy Jack Clement, a legendary figure in Nashville as a producer, arranger, songwriter and performer, died this morning after battling liver cancer, The Tennessean reports. He was 82.


Elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame earlier this year, Clement leaves behind a remarkable legacy in country music. He was close friends with Johnny Cash, for whom he wrote "Guess Things Happen That Way" and arranged the horns on "Ring of Fire." At Sun Records in the 1950s, he was the first producer to record Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis. He helped integrate country music by introducing the singer Charley Pride, produced Waylon Jennings' outlaw classic Dreaming My Dreams and co-produced several tracks on U2's Rattle and Hum.


Clement, who was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1973, was the subject of a 2005 documentary, Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan. Most recently he was heard as a DJ on Sirius XM Satellite Radio's Outlaw Country channel on Saturday afternoons.


"One of my favorite people on the planet," Kris Kristofferson said recently of Clement. "An amazing character. Totally supportive of the right things in music, and funny on top of it."


* Cowboy Jack Clement: http://www.cowboyjackclement.com


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