ELEPHANTITIS

Friday, April 29, 2011

catch this mix number 12

so...y'all ready for summer? am I jinxing it, speaking whilst stuck in the swampy center of finalstown (THE FINAL finals, whaat!)? But I think it is dilutive and improper to be superstitious about a summer. I'm crazy about this 1901 postcard of the Cliff House and I hope it is an appropriate representation of this particular collection. I am unusually fond of these eleven songs and feel extra specially excited to share my love of these with you all. There are many different shades of joyful in here and all of them (are there any that don't?) should happen at the shore. If there were a way to have a disco ball at midsummer nighttime beach...that's where I would want to hear these. Come visit us in the bay this summer, and I may have it all rigged! Enjoy...

CATCH THIS MIX #12

haunted world

thanksdylan

Thursday, April 28, 2011

"THE GREAT LOST KINKS ALBUM"

"hello, we invented the sun"

I'm bursting! This is huge. If you need convincing, you don't deserve it.

GREAT LOST KINKS

Saturday, April 23, 2011

wanderlust appreciation day

I would imagine that one would either have built-in receptors for these sounds or not. For the former, the music this individual has crafted does things to your psychic landscape...that really nothing else can. When I'm undertaking a day of Dirty Beaches listening (it feels cheap to do anything less than), open up my brain and you're in post-apocalyptic death valley where theres an albino wild horse problem, flash tornadoes, avocado trees with fruit the size of melons, re-populated ghost towns, blissedout sock-hops that last weeks...and david lynch is the gatekeeper (funny, I read this just after writing that. it's one of the best interviews I've read). Alex Zhang-Hungtai is a showman, a postmodern alchemist. He is uniquely, refreshingly divulging and honest about his creative process (like a gleaner, something we are all so weirdly good at now) and personal histories (transiency) shaping his music. Reading his phenomenal blog and various interviews have me behaving like a hungry puppy. Is there really so little of this level of wisdom, poeticisms and absence of jadedness in the young music world these days that comments he has made ("I wanted to create an abstract narrative about someone that's been possessed by the road" or "Friends are your family when you’re a stranger in a new town") made me sigh with something like pleasurelief, loudly, in public? I love that people writing about Dirty Beaches and the man himself have described his music as 'filmic' and 'restless'. It is so visual, and the images are marked with wildness and movement. I think a lot about what's going on within the neuroses of the little micro-generation I am part of (hello, thesis!), and though it remains difficult to articulate, Badlands could easily be its soundtrack. Certainly a junction of many media arts–just the fact that I trust this person to have come to creation with a weight of study, cultural reference and joy is so precious, when so many folks seem to be getting away with just fuckingaround (and no harm in that).