Had to do one of these for The Fall eventually, otherwise be stuck forever listening to only the first one-third of their career, beginning roughly in late 1977 when they recorded their Bingo-Masters Break-Out! EP, and ending roughly a decade later in 1989 when Brix left the band. The truth is, they were making a record almost every year and playing shows constantly for another 28 years after that, right up until Mark E. Smith passed away in 2017, and that’s too much music to ignore.

To try and wrap my brain around this sheer expanse of a career and overwhelming body of work, I’m dividing it into four periods. I’m sure some would argue with this (and here’s someone on Reddit also splitting the band into eras, more nuanced and refined than my own), but for me there’s the early raw “primal” Fall from 1977-1982 (The Fall as a punk band but mostly as a post-punk band and perhaps the greatest post-punk band of all), and then the Brix years from 1983-1989 (in which The Fall continue their post-punk reign, now with their own post-punk pop-star queen), followed by the post-Brix and increasingly-techno 90s Fall from 1990-1999, and then finally 21st Century Fall, from the year 2000 until Smith’s death in 2017, essentially the Elena Poulou years, which I’m lumping together as a single unit because Poulou was in the band and married to Smith for most of it (2002 to 2016), during which time she appeared on eight consecutive studio albums.

All of which is ultimately nit-picking, because like John Peel said, The Fall are “always different, always the same.” Nonetheless, even though I listened to the following songs in a completely random order, I’ve decided to list them here chronologically so we can see how they lay out in the context of the band’s constant static evolution. (And I promise to not make a single joke about grannies OR bongos.) Without further ado, we begin with . . .

PRIMAL FALL (1976-1982)

“Various Times (Extended Version)” from Live at the Witch Trials (1979, U.S. Version on I.R.S. Records). This was first released as a 45RPM B-side in November 1978 (sleeve pictured above), where it clocked in at a fairly hefty 5m14s, but this version preserves another 1m25s that was faded out for the single, giving us a 6m39s “extended version.” This longer version was also released at the time, a few months later in March 1979 on their Live at the Witch Trials debut LP, but only on the original U.S. edition. In either version, “Various Times” is a great early example of the band’s ability to extend and extrapolate and incantate through repetition (more on that later) (more on that later) (more on that later) (more on that later). Starts with a killer simple bass line by Marc Riley that is quickly doubled by Martin Bramah on guitar. Yvonne Pawlett contributes her trademark ‘great keyboards/questionable tone’ balancing act that makes the Witch Trials LP particularly unique. Then you’ve got the master extrapolators going to work, Karl Burns laying back and letting the Riley/Bramah central riff be the timekeeper so he can both drive and vary the groove, and of course Mark E, who starts the song playing a Peruvian nose flute and then with an “alright we’re gonna go BACK” goes into literary role-playing that spans distinct time periods (I guess the song is called “Various Times,” duh), from a disgruntled Nazi concentration camp guard in the first verse, to an indistinct dystopian future in the third verse, maybe even our social media-infected present, where “they got rid of time” and “time [is] mistaken/three places at once.”

“Psykick Dance Hall” from Dragnet (1979, Step-Forward). Stone classic from The Fall’s second album Dragnet, recorded in August 1979. This was Steve Hanley’s first album as bassist and Craig Scanlon’s first album as guitarist, allowing for the two-guitar lineup of Scanlon and Marc Riley, the latter moving off the bass guitar he played on Live at the Witch Trials behind now-departed sole guitarist Martin Bramah. You can sure hear how great Scanlon and Riley play guitar together on this track, one doing the greatest rockabilly riff ever, that you would swear is an exact quote from Eddie Cochran or the like, until it keeps climbing and shifting and weirdening, while the other guitar plays constant great counterpoint that also shifts and morphs. (I have no idea which is Scanlon and which is Riley, and to this day after 14 different albums I still don’t hear Scanlon play guitar, I just hear music by The Fall, which is a very cool thing.) The whole band is so good and unique, Hanley playing some kind of mutant disco bass, although the ever-mercurial Karl Burns has already been replaced on drums by the more stalwart (but also short-lived) Mike Leigh. Notable lyrics include Mark E. already concerned about data centers just like we are now: “My garden is made of stone/There’s a computer centre over the road.” (Look at mother nature on the run in the 1970s dept., and see also “Hard Life in the Country” below for more of that nkroachment [sic] of the hyper-paved tech hell world over our druidic garden.) Also this nice elegy for himself: “When I’m dead and gone/My vibrations will live on/In vibes on vinyl through the years/People will dance to my waves.”

“Fiery Jack (Live)” from Totale’s Turns (1980, Rough Trade). The Dragnet line-up again, Smith/Scanlon/Riley/Hanley with Leigh on drums, though by the time this live record was released in mid-1980 he had already left the band and taken his pinging roto-toms to steadier work on the cabaret circuit. This is that classick “country and Northern” sound, the world’s weirdest Johnny Cash/Sun Records mutants recorded live in concert at Bircoats Leisure Centre, Doncaster, on 27 October 1979. In fact, this Doncaster show, which the first side of the Totale’s Turns LP is taken from, took place the very day after the Dragnet album was released. As best as I can tell from the fully overwhelming “Fall gigography” page for the year 1979 at thefall.org, the band was trodding the boards as always, in the middle of an extensive UK and USA tour that had started in Swindon on Tuesday, October 23, continued in Sheffield the next night, then Leeds on October 25; Dragnet was released the next day, with a gig in Scarborough that night, and then on the next night October 27 it’s this gig in Doncaster that you can now hear on side one of the Totale’s Turns LP. Smith’s Fiery Jack character is one of his most memorable, a hard-living barstool would-be poet: “Cause I am Jack/From a burning ring/My face is slack/And I think think think/I just think think think/Too fast to write/Too fast to work/Just burn burn burn…” (Note the outright Johnny Cash “Ring of Fire” reference to go with the outright Tennessee Two vibe of the music.)

“Fantastic Life” from Hip Priests and Kamerads compilation LP (1985, Situation Two). Here’s a great song that was recorded in 1981, essentially an outtake from the Slates EP. Slates was released in April of that year, and “Fantastic Life” came out a few months later as a 45RPM B-side to “Lie Dream of a Casino Soul.” This was essentially the Slates lineup but with the ever-mercurial Karl Burns back in on drums, so we’ve got the Burns/Paul Hanley double drummer corps as well as Craig Scanlon on guitar and Marc Riley on keyboards, all creating great drive and motorik beat, Mark E dropping crypto-factionist current-event heat in the third verse with “Met a fifty-four year old dustbin man/In forty-eight he’d been in Jerusalem/Sold surplus oil to Arab fighters/For M-cocktails to burn Jewish terrorists/What a turn-up!/Fantastic life!” and as if that wasn’t enough, in the fifth verse we’ve got him twisting up psychedelics and conspiracy and Jack the Ripper into an alternate history that spans from paganism into Christianity with “The Siberian mushroom Santa was in fact Rasputin’s brother/and he didst walk round Whitechapel/to further the religion of forgiven sin murder/Fantastic lie!” (Yes, I believe he also deliberately mixes up “fantastic life” and “fantastic lie” throughout, though I could be wrong.)

“Just Step S’ways” from Hex Enduction Hour (1982, Kamera). Gotta represent Hex on here somewhere, as it’s probably the consensus ‘best’ pre-Brix Fall album, although this track might come off as a little more standard country & northern rockabilly than Hex’s more eldritch reputation. Until you listen a second time and can’t deny that irrepressible Fall swing, especially what a YouTube commenter calls a “crazy Motown beat,” which is one-million-percent true (Hex was the first Fall full-length to feature the double-drummer lineup of Karl Burns and bassist Steve Hanley’s younger brother Paul, who was only 17 years old at the time). Of course the lyrics are notable too, the Big/Hip Priest persona appearing again to give you permission to just side-step off the conformist treadmill, off the beaten path, etc: “When what used to excite you does not/Like you’ve used up all your allowance of experiences/Head filled with a mass of too well-known people/(This is an important aspect of Big Priest/His hypnotic induction process/His commercial last chance)/Just step sideways from this world today/Just step sideways round this place today.” Can’t help but think of George Clinton emceeing his own Parliament LPs under various host guises, the Hip Priest being to The Fall as Starchild, Dr. Funkenstein, and Wellington “Mr. Wiggles” Wigout are to Parliament.

“Hard Life in Country (Live)” from Fall in a Hole (1983, Flying Nun). From the notorious live album recorded in Auckland, New Zealand in August 1982, on tour at the very bottom of the world and at the very end of the primal years (Marc Riley left five months later in January 1983 and Brix Smith joined the following April). The studio version of “Hard Life in Country” had already been recorded and was released the very next month on the Room to Live LP, right at the end of the primal period and a definitive primal years song, being one of their trademark slow ominous dirges. It’s surprising to see how many songs per album, even in these more punk-adjacent years, would stretch past 5 minutes in length and often into the 6-7 minute range, always using deep repetition/minimalism/motorik approaches, holding onto these doomy clattering riffs for dear life and giving Mark E the space to develop the songs slowly and carefully through lyrical declamation and incantation, which he proved to be highly skilled at. Yes, they were influenced by the simple repetitions of krautrock and dub reggae, but I would also chalk this approach up to anecdotal circumstances described by original guitarist Martin Bramah in an interview with Simon Reynolds (pg. 210 of Totally Wired: Postpunk Interviews and Overviews, 2010, Soft Skull Press): “And then we discovered psilocybin mushrooms were growing in Heaton Park for free. Someone told us that there were fields of these mushrooms. So from that point we were kind of pickled in magic mushrooms and LSD . . . The effect on us was that it added an element of . . . eerie. Like it was putting us in touch with our ancestors — a lost voice, a strange pagan Celtic flavour. The LSD gave you the sixties psychedelic experience, but the mushrooms gave us a darker slant on things, awakening things in our souls that were forbidden. Wicca kind of stuff. Druidism as a lost knowledge.” I find this all very heavy, especially considering how Mark’s lyrics on this song lean into a paranoid vision of suburbia encroaching on and devaluing that implied primal Celtic/Wiccan/Druidic past. “It’s hard to live in the country/In the present state of things/Your body gets pulled right back/You get a terrible urge to drink,” and then stretching it out in later stanzas with amazing verbal riffs like “Let us not kid around/New Jersey upstate U.S. is like your village in 10-15 years TIME-uh/Carparks permeated by D. Bowie sound-alikes!” Meanwhile, the band keeps grinding away at and piling onto the riff, holding onto tight to that inexorable undertow of geologic Druidic time.

[Before we move on to the Brix Years, this is a good write-up of these early years by one Jake Cole.]

THE BRIX YEARS (1983-1989)

“Tempo House” from Perverted by Language (1983, Rough Trade). This is the first Fall album that Brix appears on, but it’s only on the track “Hotel Bloedel,” so not on this 9-minute epic, one of their longest and most dragged-out dirges, notable for being in a relatively major key, and for having very little guitar (perhaps even none?), Scanlon mostly just supplying an excellent doubled vocal on the chorus. It is a Mark Smith/Steve Hanley co-write, and truly that’s about all we have here, a typically relentless Steve Hanley engine-room bass line, pushed with rhythmic extrapolation from the Karl Burns/Paul Hanley double drummer corps, and vocal/lyrical extrapolation from the relentless Smith (who also plays some extremely sparse and very mental keyboard noise stabs — watch the video linked just ahead). He begins the tale thus: “A serious man, in need of a definitive job/He had drunk too much mandrake anthrax,” and then the “Pro-rae, pro-rae, oh Loron . . .” refrain,possibly nonsensical, that haunts the whole song. After that there is an emphatic chorus — “PUT YOUR CLAIM INTO TEMPO HOUSE/GO ROUND THERE AND HAVE A GROUSE” — but it doesn’t completely matter as this is a ritual incantation as much as it is a story, recorded live at the Hacienda in July 1983, a gig that was also filmed, and would you believe you can watch them play the album track live on YouTube? I’d have to research what a “tempo house” actually is, and why one might be putting a “claim into” one as a way to “have a grouse,” but there are quite a few quotable Smith lines here, of course, more of that crypto-factional business such as “God damn the pedantic Welsh” and “the Dutch are weeping in four languages at least.” And just when you think that’s just Mark being his usual silly crypto-factional self, the original Annotated Fall reports that “there are indeed four officially recognized languages in the Netherlands (Dutch, English, Frisian, and Papiamento) and several regional dialects ("at least").”

“Bug Day” from The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall (1984, PVC/Beggars Banquet). Another of those slow-burn dirge-tempo long tracks, this one bringing in even more sound FX and dubbed-out noise-scapery, i.e. a whole lot of that sound in between, becoming one of those true avant-garde/experimental/collage tracks that occasionally rear their head in the middle of a Fall album, here coming on the original U.S. version of The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall after two of their more poppy/friendly/fun classics, “Slang King” and “No Bulbs.” Now that the “Tempo House” video has entrained me with visual evidence, I can easily hear the Burns/Hanley double drummer corps and how they play off each other and elasticize the beat. (Wonderful and Frightening World is considered by many to be the definitive album of the Brix years — it’s either that or the next one, This Nation’s Saving Grace — and as far as I can tell Frightening is the only full LP of the very classic lineup of Smith, Smith, Scanlon, Hanley, Burns, and Hanley.)

“Gross Chapel - British Grenadiers” from Bend Sinister (1986, Beggars Banquet). And yet another slow-dirge mood piece in the 5-to-7-minute range where Steve Hanley grinds away on engine-room bass which allows the guitars (Brix and the perennial Craig Scanlon) to needle and simmer in brilliant spindly/moody/melodic post-punk fashion, and which allows the drummer (Simon Wolstencroft, on this album starting an 11-year 11-album tenure with the band that continued until 1997) to cook and surge Karl Burns-style with fewer backbeat requirements. This song does have a relatively upbeat and triumphant and even beautifully prog-rockish chorus that remits the dirge. Also major shout-out to that 4-note keyboard hook that pops up in the verses here and there . . . Mark E, Brix, and Simon Rogers are all credited with keyboards so one of them killed it here . . .

“New Big Prinz” from I Am Kurious Oranj (Beggars Banquet, 1988). One of the all-time Fall classics, and being from 1988 perhaps the last great song from that first one-fourth, the golden age of Primal Fall through the Brix Years. And of course this song is particularly notorious for the live performance that same year on the Other Side of Midnight television programme where Tony Wilson refers to cocaine in that ridiculous intro, and then Mark does something that seems important but makes very little sense with his cassette dictaphone before the song starts, and Brix is the prettiest person who ever lived in that stunning green shirt, and as if that wasn’t enough you’ve got some prime rare footage of Marcia Schofield on keyboards, and, oh yeah, the band is killing on this relentless dirge groove.

90s INCREASINGLY-TECHNO FALL (THE BUSH/NAGLE YEARS?) (1990-1999)

“Shift-Work” from Shift-Work (1991, Cog Sinister/Fontana). Just one of the most beautiful songs by The Fall, really. I swear to you, after only listening to it once, for the very first time, I was singing the title/chorus/through-hook “shift . . . work . . .” under my breath in that sweet lad falsetto for weeks, not to mention walking around muttering “now now now now now now” like Mark E. does in the final minute, a quintessential example of how musical he could in fact be, even with his extremely limited harmonic range. Mark E. was a true music lover, and in all honesty he was a true musician, and these “now now now”s prove it, as single-note-perfect as Neil Young’s guitar solo in “Cinnamon Girl.” This song is also very powerful lyrically, blending lost-love lament with kitchen-sink drama in a story of a man kept apart from his woman because capitalism requires them to work opposite schedules. “I thought shift-work would work/but it’s good as broken us apart” . . . “shift-work, you let me down/gave me a hard heart/you just cracked my mind/you split us apart” . . . “Raise your wages per year one grand/by shift-work/but I can see me go, go, going from this land/because of shift-work.” Very stripped-down one-guitar no-keyboards lineup of Smith, Scanlon, Hanley, and Wolstencroft.

“Free Range” from Code: Selfish (1992, Fontana). Damn, talk about increasingly-techno 90s Fall, this is super good live-band jamming with electronics, and I’m now realizing that the credit for the whole “increasingly-techno 90s Fall” thing should go to Dave Bush. He’s the only member on Code: Selfish that doesn’t have their own Wikipedia page, but this was his first album in the band on “keyboards, machines,” and he had a huge effect on the band for four years and four albums before being replaced by Julia Nagle for The Light User Syndrome in 1996. As for Mark and the text herein, I love the way he incorporates “Also Spake Zarathustra” into the chorus, and how he sings the last verse with a cool background vocal counterpoint from Cassell Webb (she’s an interesting thread herself, having been a member of Mayo Thompson’s Saddlesore back in 1971!), but I’m not sure what he’s on about with the lyrics: “A life code, 2001, free range/Insect posse will be crushed/Moravia, trouble, Moldavia, Europa/Every second third word/Europa/It pays to talk to no-one no more!” I know he says “second third word” instead of “second third world” but I can’t help but think he might be talking about the people of Eastern European countries such as Moravia and Moldavia as third world “insects.” Or he’s using artistic license to play a character who thinks like that, in order to explore his own inherent crypto-factionalism, duh. As Dave Thompson wrote, “war torn guitars and keyboards cut through with muttered samples, as Smith’s chilling vision of a pan-European society regulated according to the Nazi/Nietzsche-ian ideal was borne out by the near-simultaneous eruption of the war in the Balkans.” Turns out this track was, in a way, The Fall’s biggest hit (?), their “only self-penned Top 40 single” according to Wikipedia, and as long as we’re shouting out Dave Bush, his four album run does coincide with The Fall’s greatest commercial success.

“Lost in Music” from The Infotainment Scam (1993, Matador). I really adore this one, a moody and dreamy cover of a disco classic by Sister Sledge. For all of Mark Smith’s acerbic detachment and inscrutable snidery, he really is a music lover, whether it’s the Can and Captain Beefheart and dub reggae and punk rock that initially inspired The Fall, or his willingness to bring in the “Madchester” sound and its incorporation of soul and disco via the aforementioned Dave Bush. This track always hit me as a deeply romantic ode to the power and majesty of music, but Steve Hanley, who should know, had a different and more ominous spin when he wrote about it at length in The Big Midweek: “The bass lines are a challenge; the funky runs go straight out but the rest remains intact. Behind it, a backing track of sound effects and a dash of house piano. It’s as dancy as The Fall get but, once the vocals are in place, it goes from feeling like the happy disco celebration of the original to something more sinister. Mark’s vocal style, often tending towards the snide, coupled with a savage editing of the original words, results in the emphasis being much more about the trap than the music. The more we hear it, the less it feels like a positive thing. It could be about all of us, doing this because we don’t know anything else. Having gone too far to turn back, we’re lost in music and he’s lost for words.” It’s also nice to hear Mark speaking some French (“l’argent est sur la table” — maybe he’d been screening a Bresson film or two?), and quick shout-out to The Infotainment Scam in general, hands down my favorite 1990s Fall album, having bought it very cheaply on vinyl and spinning it all the time back then. So many bangers: “Glam-Racket,” of course; another moody/dreamy/unlikely cover in “I’m Going to Spain”; “It’s a Curse” with that haunting “operation: mindfuck” lyric, not to mention “I do not like your tone, it has ephemeral whinging aspects”; obviously any track with the title “Paranoia Man in Cheap Sh*t Room” is going to be a banger; “Light/Fireworks” is a very cool experimental closer, etc.

“15 Ways” from Middle Class Revolt (1994, Matador). You can hear the softer 1990s production and playing, the generic college rock of it all, but this is still a great pop number, coulda/shoulda been that massive hit that Steve Hanley wondered why they couldn’t ever achieve. After all, it is another Dave Bush joint (and shout-out to that weird 20-second false-start intro that sounds like a different Dave Bush joint entirely). The lyrics even have a pop-song vibe, Mark doing a straightforward love-song relationship-drama kinda thing, making the sweet/sly moves on a woman who’s dating someone else.

“Don’t Call Me Darling” from Cerebral Caustic (1995, Cog Sinister/Permanent). As I dig deeper into The Fall, I realize they never really released a truly bad album, but that Cerebral Caustic is a pretty solid bottom third (with bad cover art to boot). This song is more garage-y than “15 Ways,” but still has that soft 1990s production. Definitely mediocre Fall . . . but you know, it’s still pretty good. The band always kills it, and this was the album on which Brix made her unlikely return to the band, doing a great whisper-to-scream gang-moll second-vocal on this track, a bit of post-divorce role-playing therapy.

“The Mixer” live on VH1 Take It To The Bridge programme, June 1996. One more from Brix’s 1990s return, and bookending the 1988 “New Big Prinz” clip posted above, this is the other great Fall-with-Brix television performance (albeit here uploaded with terrible audio). This happened eight years later in June of 1996, just before her second and final departure, and the venue was the VH1 UK program called Take It To The Bridge. They performed “Powder Keg” from the then-current album The Light User Syndrome, but preceded it with a track from all the way back in 1991, “The Mixer” from the Shift-Work LP, giving it an absolutely sublime re-arrangement that runs circles around the original studio version. The violin part has been transposed very nicely to Julia Nagle’s melodica (nodding to UK punk’s great understanding and appreciation of reggae music, particularly Augustus Pablo), and Brix is just killing it on heavy-wrist-action 12-string acoustic guitar overdrive. And of course there’s Mark, singing this haunting and delicate song very well, and once again doing something inscrutable at the beginning with a dictaphone.

“The Ballard of J. Drummer” from The Light User Syndrome (1996, Jet Records). Another album I had not stepped to yet, and it’s hard to say that this a representative selection, as it’s some sort of cinematic Western tale about how “Johnny Drummer” comes to town, complete with a performative/programmatic marching-band drum-roll that is played by either Simon Wolstencroft or Karl Burns. The Annotated Fall suggests that the song is in fact an ode to Karl Burns, and how he held true to good old trap-set rock drumming in the face of the increasingly-techno/rave 1990s.

“Scareball” from Levitate (Expanded Reissue) (1998, released 2018, Cherry Red). Nice little “ba-ba-ba-ba” hook, windy little garage-rock number, great background vocal counterpoint from Julia Nagle, fuck it, another great song. Released as a non-LP extra track on a February 1998 CD single for the song “Masquerade,” which was from the 1997 album Levitate, the last album on which both Steve Hanley and Karl Burns ever played, before both being notoriously fired during the subsequent U.S. tour, onstage at Brownie’s in New York City on April 7, 1998.

“Ol’ Gang” from Levitate (1997, Artful Records) and “Ol’ Gang (live)” from “Masquerade” (CD single 2) (1997, Artful Records). This song is a nutzoid kraut jammer where the vocals don’t kick in until well over halfway through, the band grinding away on an expansive garage-prog-psych chord progression. I like the live version, also from the 1998 “Masquerade” double (!) CD single as well as the expanded Levitate reissue from 2018, the way Mark counts it off with a sneak-preview of his “I was walkin’ down the street just the other night” lyrical trope, and how the overdubbed atonal keyboards and electronics from the album version are deemphasized so it can be all about that cosmic heavy garage riff, as played on guitar here by . . . I’m not sure, actually. The credits aren’t clear. Damon Gough from Badly Drawn Boy? Possibly Mark E. Smith himself? It’s really good psych/punk guitar playing.

“Shake-Off” from The Marshall Suite (1999, Artful Records). This song is nuts, Mark going off about “strong pot” and “eyeball-injecting” and “microplastering,” whatever that might be, over relentless club/jungle/drum&bass and a barked “SHAKE OFF” refrain. From the Marshall Suite album, released 1999, another stone completely unturned by me until right now. This could be the culmination of increasingly-techno 90s Fall. Julia Nagle is on keyboards and possibly the primary musical director. I’m realizing that if 83-89 are the Brix years and 2000-2017 are the Elena years, then maybe, just maybe 90-99 should be the Bush/Nagle years (Bush was 1991-1995 and Nagle was 1995-2002).

21st CENTURY FALL aka THE ELENA YEARS (2000-2017)

“Bourgeois Town” from Live At The Garage - London - 20 April 2002 (released 2007, Hip Priest). An excellent example of leaving no stone unturned when it comes to The Fall, this is from a scorching April 20, 2002 live gig with the quite anonymous and transitional lineup of Ben Pritchard on guitar, Jim Watts on bass, and Dave Milner on drums. This was just a few months before Elena Poulou joined on keyboards in September (and recorded The Real New Fall Album aka Country on the Click in December, the actual start to these so-called Elena Years). The band, whoever they are, is just crushing here on a bone-heavy E-to-G bone-riff, actually a cover of the Leadbelly song “The Bourgeois Blues” that had appeared on the previous 2001 studio album Are You Are Missing Winner? That recording also had Pritchard on guitar and Watts on bass, but the drummer was Spencer Birtwistle, who had left the band before this live gig but then returned for one more studio album, Fall Heads Roll (2005), before he and the entire band except Poulou notoriously walked out in the middle of a United States tour in 2006.

“Mountain Energei” from The Real New Fall LP (Formerly Country on the Click) (2004, Narnack) and live at Øyafestivalen (Oslo), August 11th, 2006. And here’s one from The Real New Fall LP, perhaps the definitive track when it comes to 21st Century Poulou-era Fall. I really only say that because of bumping across a YouTube of the band playing a crushing version of the song live at some Euro festival, which was my introduction to the Elena years and my first realization that all eras of The Fall were completely worthwhile. The song also has that geologic Druidic undertow, apparent in the title itself, again a riff on the purity of “water flowing down the mountain” encroached upon by suburbia and capitalist growth percentages (“Mr Blairstowe and Mr Partridge, they said to me/‘To get a mortgage, you need an income lid’/I THOUGHT IT WAS FREE”). Again The Fall, no matter the lineup, are adept at piledriving and entrancing a simple dirge-riff; as one of the YouTube commenters says (original syntax preserved), “The slow, but eventualy real, realization of the audience, that Mark E. and The mighty Fall had hypnotized them.” And yes, the live version linked above is better than this original studio version. I find the production of The Real New Fall LP to be disappointing throughout, but it’s also a completely different lineup, Smith/Poulou/Pritchard/Watts/Milner, while the live version above took place just 4 months after that band’s aforementioned mass walk-out and features the emergency-replacement lineup of Americans, “the dudes” as Smith and Poulou affectionately called them: Tim Presley on guitar, Rob Barbato on bass, and Orpheo McCord on drums, who were in a Los Angeles band together called Darker My Love and ready to get in the van.

“Get Out - Early Rough Mix” from Reformation! Post-TLC (Expanded Edition) (from 2007, released 2020, Cherry Red). Being originally released in 2007, Reformation! Post-TLC was certainly an album I had written off and knew nothing about, but damn this instrumental demo kicks super hard, and once again the credit should go to “the dudes,” Presley/Barbato/McCord. Reformation! Post-TLC was the only album they made with The Fall, and it is a late-period gem. On this outtake, we have a drum machine + live drums combo, raw electric guitar, disgustingly lardacious synth (?) bass, and no Mark E. Smith at all . . . although he does appear to have the sole writing credit. That is one thing you learn from listening to Steve & Paul Hanley’s essential Oh! Brother podcast: Mark was inconsistent with the writing credits. To paraphrase Steve, sometimes you had nothing to do with the song and still got a credit, other times you completely co-wrote it and didn’t get a credit at all. There is no other song in The Fall discography called “Get Out,” so I think this is an instrumental demo that stayed that way and never got lyrics.

“Victrola Time” from Re-Mit (2013, Cherry Red). Another total kraut jammer, rhythm section fully locked-in motorik-style (David Spurr on bass and Keiron Melling on drums), with a grotesque and ominous synth melody/riff winding through (Elena Poulou on keyboards and Peter Greenway on guitar). The band is great, from 2013, who knew? As it turns out, Greenway, Spurr & Melling, along with Poulou, were the most stable Fall core after the Scanlon & Hanley core departed, staying with The Fall for essentially 10 years from 2007 until Smith’s death in 2017 . . . as Wikipedia points out, this Re-Mit album “marks the first time in the history of the Fall that the group have released four consecutive studio albums recorded with the same line-up.” As for “Victrola Time,” your mileage may vary on the way Smith dives right in with a high-pitched squeal of an old-crone vocalization, but at least he’s pushing into new territory. None of his lyrics or hooks here stand out in particular, but it’s still a wild vocal performance, with a lot of vocal overdubbing and counterpoint — “No Respects Rev.” is another track from this album where the band just kills it garage-style and Mark growls and shapeshifts his way into a frenzied final-chorus final-boss ad-lib/overdub monster movie climax.

“Quit iPhone” from Sub-Lingual Tablet (2015, Cherry Red). From the 30th and penultimate Fall album, released in 2015, and recorded by the increasingly stalwart core of Smith, Poulou, Greenway, Spurr, and Melling, but with a return to the Burns/Hanley-style double-drummer corps via the addition of a second drummer named Daren Garratt. This is the album closer and it’s a wild rant, Smith continuing with the same concerns about technology that we first mentioned here regarding “Psykick Dance Hall” as far back as 1979. Imagine what Mark would think of us today, wandering around trapped in this 2026 virtual hellscape that is the Metaverse. The original Annotated Fall says this about the lyrics, but it works as a summary of the entire Mark Smith aesthetic: “Thanks to Thop Daverty from the Fall Online Forum for transcribing. He admits uncertainty about much of this, and I can scarcely do better...The lyrics occupy a twilit zone between words and scatting. The effect is transfixing in a particular way that one can only imagine Mark E. Smith pulling off: that mixture of humor, rage, message, anti-message, sense, and nonsense which has been, in one form or another, the signature of Fall music for four decades.”

“Couples vs. Jobless Mid 30’s” from New Facts Emerge (2017, Cherry Red). This is it, the 31st and final album by The Fall, released on July 28th, 2017, six months before Mark E. Smith passed away on January 24, 2018. It was also the first Fall album since 2001 without Elena Poulou in the band; she ended their marriage and left the band in 2016. Their last gigs were in November of 2017, with their very last public appearance on November 29 in Bristol, when Smith was too unwell to appear and the remaining members took the stage only to apologize for the cancellation. There are photos from another of those final November performances at thefall.org, with Poulou’s replacement Michael Clapham on keyboards and Smith performing in a wheelchair (and, perhaps even more disconcertingly, wearing a goatee). Mark’s disturbing psychic prescience was haunting the band right until the end, as the album featured a song called “Victoria Train Station Massacre” that was completed and sequenced and announced, artwork having already been sent to the printers, just one week before the Ariana Grande concert bombing on May 22nd, 2017, which occurred in a foyer connecting Manchester Arena to the Manchester Victoria train station and killed 22 people and injured over 1,000. That song is less than 2 minutes long, a truncated bit of not-very-much, while this one runs almost 9 minutes, a grotesque collection of various lumbering bone-dirge bass riffs and keyboard/electronic noise over which Mark rants and growls and cross-overdubs his way through a dark and delirious kitchen-sink horror sequel to “Shift-Work”: “His grin is elf/Makes 10 copies/To his mother spouse/She tortures him in big house/Don’t forget that/Birthday/Look at me, kids/Is irrelevant to your latent sex/and shock your lizard/(Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho) . . .”

CLOSING REMARKS FROM “COLIN”
Well, we have to stop somewhere, even though we’ve still only scratched the vast surface. Let’s give the last word to former Fall roadie Colin Burns, summing up the hypnotic entrancing magic that The Fall always seemed to bring, and that we’ve encountered time and time again during this random sampling. (Those who have read Steve Hanley’s essential memoir The Big Midweek will likely remember Colin, especially due to the endlessly charming license that co-authors Hanley and Olivia Piekarski take in transcribing his accent, but also because of how good he was at his job when working with The Fall. You can get to know him a bit more here.)

“Tonight, you guys blinded me so badly my retinas are still on fire. Ah’ve toured with so many baaands and no one is remotely touching you lot. And ah’ll tell you exactly why. All my life ah have prided myself on being able to look at the stage and to instantly know which of the musicians ah am seeing is playing the various things that ah am hearing. When ah was younger my nan who was a music teacher believed this ability as the first signs that ah had perfect pitch. But with you guys, ah’ve been noticing this for a while now, but ah ain’t said naffin in case you all think ah’ve gone completely whacko-ed, but ah’m telling you, ah hear extra things for which ah can find no physical point of origin on the stage. It is as if occult entities or beings from another dimension are trying to harmonize with you. Believe me, sounds come from that stage that are doubtless being generated in another universe . . . Mark, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if he’s psychic. Ah think, now bear with me, ah really think he’s got The Power. And when he’s on stage with you guys and you’re just so on it, ah’m beginning to believe this power of his is strong enough to overcome local temporal reality as we know it.”

Thanks of course to Mark E. Smith and all 65 of the other members who have passed through The Fall; special shout-out to the person or people who made the original Annotated Fall website, now holding on at archive.org, and also to those behind a new attempt that isn’t well-annotated but at least has all the lyrics.

Quick one this week to tell you that one of the greatest songs of all time, “Somebody Else’s Idea” by Sun Ra (and sung by June Tyson), has been covered beautifully by the one and only Excepter. They laid this down on Mother’s Day 2026, and it’s now on Bandcamp in 6-minute and 14-minute versions. And, this is on the heels of Excepter releasing a great new album Displacer, their first in some time, on May 1st. (Blastireview here.) Clearly 2026 is the year of Excepter, and May of 2026 is the month of Excepter. Long may they except!

Also important to note is that this version of “Somebody Else’s Idea” marks the return of Jon Winfield “Porkchop” Nicholson to the Excepter fold. I asked Google’s exciting new environment-friendly “AI Overview” feature “when did porkchop last play with excepter” and it knew exactly what I was talking about, promptly answering that “Jon Nicholson (better known as DJ Porkchop or SSPS) last played with the experimental collective Excepter around 2011, following the release of the 2006 full-length album Presidence and their early touring era. While Nicholson was a core synthesizer and drum-machine contributor during Excepter’s initial Brooklyn years, he subsequently pivoted to focusing entirely on his solo techno-industrial project, SSPS. Excepter has since trimmed its primary lineup to a duo (John Fell Ryan and Lala Ryan).”

I’ve always been blown away by the Sun Ra song, such a subtle and measured protest song, with lyrics that are so clear and direct and applicable, whether somebody else’s idea of somebody else’s world is the Jim Crow South, or somebody else’s idea of somebody else’s world is fait accompli A.I. dominance, or somebody else’s idea of somebody else’s world is just explored through conversational point and counterpoint. The full text:

Somebody else’s idea of somebody else’s world
Is not my idea of things as they are.
Somebody else’s idea of things to come
Need not be the only way
To vision the future.

What seems to be, need not be.
What need, had to be
For what was is only because of
An adopted source of things.
Some chosen source as was
Need not be the only pattern
To build a world on.

Excepter really do justice to this beautiful text, as sung in and out of falsetto by Nicholson, and keep the vibe of the original while freshening it with cosmic harmonic synth programming and a drum machine beat that really knocks. This is a way to vision the future. A pattern to build a world on.

On Bandcamp:

Regarding the Sun Ra original, this is perhaps the most definitive of many versions, recorded in “NYC, early 1970” (according to Robert L. Campbell) and released in 1971 on the My Brother the Wind, Vol. II LP:

Not unrelated T-shirt purchased by the author at Mississippi Records (Portland OR) in March 2026:

If Chicago is the Second City, then the Art Institute of Chicago is our Met, which makes the MCA Chicago our MOMA and then some, always with great exhibitions in a space that is multi-gallery and multi-floor but can still be mostly digested in two hours or less. This year’s monumental Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind show was no exception; shout-out to the curator Jamillah James who once welcomed me with a PBR to a Flying Luttenbachers/Get Hustle show she was putting on at her live/work venue Pink Section way back in like 2002, and who describes herself as “deeply into psychedelic music” in the exhibition video. Hey, me too! And indeed, with the deeply psychedelic side-long jam that is Yoko Ono’s “Mindtrain” always coursing through my head (“DUB DUB”), I wanted to go to Music of the Mind right away when it opened back in October, but somehow managed to delay attending until its very last day of February 22nd here in the year of no lord 2026. It was great, and worth the wait. We walked around and took pictures, and here’s what I saw and felt.

One crosses from the main fourth-floor MCA hallway into the exhibit proper by stepping on Painting to be Stepped On (1960), the first of Ono’s 22 original Instructions for Paintings that defined her pre-Lennon career as one of the world’s great post-war artists (I said it), and its fourth great conceptual artist after Duchamp, Cage, and Rauschenberg. (Hey, I just did a Mount Rushmore.) The MCA displayed 11 of Ono’s original 22 text pieces as they were published in Japanese in 1961 and 1962, each placard also translated into English and Spanish. The MCA’s introductory placard described the concept very succinctly (and refers to Ono’s AG Gallery exhibit which took place in 1961 in New York City, one year before these very instruction cards were displayed at a concert/exhibit in Japan): “Each text is an instruction for an artwork to be realized, whether in real life or in your mind . . . While Ono’s Instruction Paintings shown at AG Gallery comprised both the instruction and a physical artwork for the viewer to engage with, these Instructions for Paintings include only an instruction.”

Because that’s all you need, an instruction, because those words create meaning, and meaning creates image and feeling. This is the perfect and only way to begin this exhibition, by granting us all with the ability and permission to fully realize an artwork in our mind. Again, we have a name for this magic trick — “conceptual art” — but the aforementioned conceptual art big three of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg were all still stuck in the world of visual and physical representation, until Yoko Ono finally opened the last frontier beyond the fourth wall by allowing the artwork to be a mere written or typed phrase, a mere piece of paper sharing an all-important activation code. Why actually paint a canvas all white when you can already imagine the idea and know what it would look like and how it would feel to be standing in a gallery staring at it? Or, if an orchestral piece of music is just 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, with no instruments being played, why can’t you and I just perform it right now? (Spoiler alert: we can, and we are. Right now as I type there is an approximately 1’52” left of this particular iteration. Or will this be an extended remix?)

(Side note: while researching the actual timeline of conceptual art, a fancy way to say that I spent a couple minutes reading the chronology of “precursors” on Wikipedia, I came across the purported text piece work of Rhea Sue Sanders circa 1955. This purported work does have strong similarities to Yoko Ono, but honestly the deeper I try to dig into Sanders, the more I wonder if she might be a conceptual art hoax in and of herself. Even if she really was creating protypical instruction pieces in 1955, I can only find two of them online, and that was apparently after Yoko Ono’s first instruction piece Secret Piece, which is dated “summer 1953.” It should be noted that Wikipedia fails to put Yoko Ono on their precursor timeline until the 1964 publishing of Grapefruit, and that she should be on there at least as early as her aforementioned July 1961 debut solo exhibition at New York’s AG Gallery, and in fact earlier still if we go by this summer 1953 dating, which seems at least as definitive as what can currently be found on the internet regarding the highly enigmatic Rhea Sue Sanders.)

At MCA Chicago I took photos of two of the eleven displayed instructions; I apologize that the English text at the lower left of my photos is a little small and low-resolution, but hopefully you can still make it out. These instruction sheets were created in 1961 and 1962 and hand-written in Japanese by Yoko’s then-husband Toshi Ichiyanagi so as to be “shown in the lobby outside Ono’s first concert in Japan in 1962.” As mentioned, two years later in 1964, these and many more instruction pieces were collected and published in English in Yoko Ono’s landmark book Grapefruit. (It bears repeating that she did all this well before meeting John Lennon in 1966, another Great Man theory shot to shit.) The first one I engaged with after Painting to be Stepped On, meaning the first one to be realized only in my mind, was Painting in Three Stanzas (1961):

“Let a vine grow. Water every day. The first stanza — till the vine spreads. The second stanza — till the vine withers. The third stanza — till the wall vanishes.” Indeed a painting that can really only take place in your mind, because it takes months if not years for vines to spread (the first stanza) and wither (the second stanza), and walls don’t just vanish, they crumble over decades if not centuries (the third stanza). And wait, paintings don’t even have stanzas, poems do, which makes you wonder if these instructions aren’t paintings at all, but poems. After all, where do poems take place, on the page or in your mind? In your mind, of course — so is Yoko saying that poems are also instructions? And that instructions are also poems? And while pondering all of this, I realize that the first two stanzas of this painting are more or less already taking place in my backyard, on the garage behind my apartment building, where a huge vine or network thereof has spread across the entire back facade, and every spring and summer we watch it green and spreading, and every fall and winter we watch it brown and withering. Here’s a photo of the latter phase (well into the second stanza), taken on March 15, 2026:

Painting to Let the Evening Light Go Through is actually quite actionable. “Hang a bottle behind a canvas. Place the canvas where the west light comes in. The painting will exist when the bottle creates a shadow on the canvas . . .” So, all you have to do is hang an actual glass bottle and stand a canvas near it, so that the sun, for at least a couple hours each day, will cast the bottle’s floating shadow on the canvas and create a temporary moving painting. Call me crazy, but the MCA Chicago might have had this set up. I’m not sure. Granted, there might not be a lot of places where sunlight comes into their galleries just right from the west, and even if there was, the painting would only be viewable for, what, an hour or two each day? So maybe they didn’t set it up, and even if they did, there was a lot there to look at and walk past, so yeah, I missed it. Postscript/tangent/connection: this piece kinda feels like a sequel to that Wallace Stevens joint, you know the one, “I placed a jar in Tennessee,/And round it was, upon a hill./It made the slovenly wilderness/Surround that hill.” That was written in 1918 and as fate would have it, first published 107 years ago in the October 1919 issue of Poetry magazine, whose offices at the time were just a few blocks away from where the MCA Chicago now stands, at what is now the intersection of Wabash & Grand. (Shout out to Harriet Monroe.)

Painting to See the Sky (1961) is an actual painting, as it were, not just an instruction for one: a piece of paper or canvas with an actual hole in it. In its first iteration Painting to See the Skies, the instruction was to “Drill two holes on canvas / Hang it where you can see the sky.” Having it framed and hung on a wall as pictured above obviously defeats the purpose, but it was mass-produced as a postcard in 1971, so those are shuffling around out there, and you could easily go and “paint” it yourself right now by poking a hole in a piece of paper — any piece of paper — and taking it outside. All of which again begs the question, as only a Zen koan can: why don’t we just throw out the canvas altogether and not bother with the peephole, and stare at one of the most amazing constantly regenerating paintings ever made, the sky itself? Which reminds me of a song I once wrote, that was musically very Dead C influenced, and was lyrically, I now realize, very Yoko Ono influenced: “Sky portrait/you can’t paint it/you can’t hang it/IT’S THE SKY.”

Two of Ono’s more physically actionable instruction pieces were realized in 1966 as 16mm films, both shot by cinematographer Peter Moore at 2000 frames per second so that their brief actions would play back with exquisite poetic slowness. The MCA Chicago had these two films projecting onto the gallery walls to excellent effect, though I did not take pictures or videos (the accompanying stills are used without permission from the internet). Lighting Piece is very early, from 1955 (eleven full years before she met John Lennon), and was realized by Ono and Moore as Fluxfilm No. 14: One aka “Match,” slowing down “light a match and watch till it goes out” so that it lasts 4 minutes and 30 seconds. It’s not on YouTube “due to a copyright claim by Yoko Ono Lennon” (oh wait, here’s one that’s hung around for 5 years). The other Ono/Moore collaboration projected was Fluxfilm No. 15: Eyeblink, which as far as I can tell is not related to a specific instruction piece. I believe it only runs for less than a minute and is currently viewable on YouTube here.

Here’s a fun photo; not only do you get four separate instruction pieces in their entirety, Tape Piece and Strip Tease for Three and Fly (which, as you can tell by reading it, should not to be conflated with her quite unrelated 1970 film and 1971 album of the same name) and Cut Piece, you also get to see the reflection of the live projection of a filmed 1964 performance of Cut Piece on the opposite wall. (This may have been intentional, and if so, wow, good job MCA Chicago.) Both Cut Piece and Strip Tease for Three could be said to ridicule the idea of a strip tease, and the idea of visual titillation in general, reminding us that imagination is where sexuality really lies, and that what exists in the line of sight is only the tip of the sexual iceberg. Not to mention another running theme of Ono’s, a sort of desexualization of nudity, which can also be seen in her notorious 1967 film Bottoms which was also on display at MCA Chicago, though not otherwise dealt with in this piece.

Pictured above are several more instruction pieces, all from 1963. I’ll let you squint or pinch-zoom and read them yourself, and will only comment that Earth Piece — “Listen to the sound of the earth turning” — strikes me as another way to approach Cage’s 4’33” while adding such definitive Ono concepts as epochal duration and geological time. And of course Cage will and should come up in any survey of Yoko Ono; not only did his monumental work pave the way for hers, he also attended her early 1960s shows in New York City as both a mentor and a follower, both as a friend and as a friendly rival whose work was in active dialogue with hers. (There is photo documentation of this in the exhibit.) They even went on tour together, as an essay by Carter Miller written for the MCA exhibit details: “Also in 1962, Cage and Ono toured Japan where they gave performances of their work and continued to develop their artistic relationship. Cage wrote 0’00” (subtitled 4’33” no. 2) and dedicated to Ichiyanagi and Ono that year in response to her challenging Cage on why 4’33” had to last for a specified period of time. Ono later wrote that ‘[Cage] talked about how in the West you had to have a frame, so he dedicated [0’00”] to me.’ Whereas 4’33” highlights the unpredictable ambient sounds of a concert venue during a span of exactly 273 seconds, 0’00” lasts for an indeterminate duration and prioritizes the agency and creative freedom of performers. The score itself consists simply of a directive to ‘perform a disciplined action.’”

Also on display, but not suitably photographed by me, was Eternal Time from 1965 (still pre-Lennon, just saying). Another great concept: a clock with the hour hand removed. I guess it’s just that simple; when you remove the hour hand, you are living in the present. (I wasn’t happy with any of the photos I took, so I’m including one above from a different exhibit that was found on Pinterest.) In addition to the modified clock, the piece also includes a mounted stethoscope, as was also displayed at the MCA, “to listen to the never-ending sound of time passing.” There’s that geological time/epochal duration again, and by the way, when you first come around the corner and look at this fully mounted piece head-on, especially right after viewing Cut Piece with echoes of Yoko’s dress in your mind, it all kinda has a surrealist psycho-sexual woman-shape “bride stripped bare” effect. (The clock is the head and brain, ticking away, the stethoscope is the shoulders and waist, the snug-fitting dress, etc.)

Pictured here are selections from a series of 48 ink-on-paper drawings called Franklin Summer that Ono started making in 1994. As the placard explained, “Using her dot-drawing style, Ono created hundreds of drawings exploring natural forms, sometimes with facial or phallic imagery, as well as planetary and stellar motifs.” It’s great to include these, should viewers think that Ono’s instruction pieces are too ‘anyone-can-do-that’ because they don’t require actual paint on canvas or any of the other recognized and traditionally required skills of the visual artist. Franklin Summer demonstrates that Ono has the required skills if she wants or needs to use them, and I find it to be some of her most visionary work.

Um, speaking of visionary, and the MCA Chicago gets lots of due credit here too for the realization, how about Add Colour (Refugee Boat)?

And this is my last photo from the Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind experience, and I mainly threw this in there as a palate cleanser and a little something for all the jazz heads out there, a flier for a London gig at the Royal Albert Hall in 1968. L-R: Charlie Haden, Ornette Coleman (on trumpet), Ed Blackwell, David Izenzon, and Yoko Ono.

I know this piece is about Yoko Ono, but it’s also about a museum that has meant a lot to me in the 25 years I’ve lived in Chicago. Every time I leave the MCA, I leave charged up, and the city streets outside — Chicago Avenue, Pearson Street, Mies Van Der Rohe Way — all suddenly appear as large-scale durational works of art that have been running for decades and in fact two centuries and counting. This time, I took that charged vision across the hall into two adjoining, concurrent, and also fantastic MCA exhibits, both still up as of this publication date: City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago (July 5, 2025 - August 16, 2026, you’ve got all summer to catch it) and Firelei Báez (November 15, 2025 - May 31, 2026, if you’re reading this today, May 17, you’ve got exactly two weeks!)

The City in a Garden exhibit needs its own multi-page report, a great Chicago art exhibit and a great queer art exhibit. Just go see it, if you haven’t, or see it again if you have, before its last day of August 16, 2026. For now I’m just going to point to one of its pieces, a display of a Soundsuit by Nick Cave (and just to be clear, this is not Nick Cave the Australian singer of the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds, this is a completely different Nick Cave who is a sculptor from Fulton, Missouri who has long been based in Chicago). Here’s how the MCA describes this Soundsuit:

I found an incredible resonance and rhyme between Cave’s Soundsuit and a work exhibited just across the hall in a fantastic show by Firelei Báez, who I had not heard of before, her painting Adjusting the Moon (The right to non-imperative clarities): Waning.

Like Cave’s soundsuit on display less than forty feet away, Adjusting the Moon depicts a human figure standing on two human legs, facing directly back at a straight-on viewer, and from the waist up they both become a riot of multihued color. There are major differences, of course, with Cave using sculpture and Báez using paint, and Báez using imagery that is literally more explosive, but I feel like both placards say the same thing as well. For Cave, Soundsuit is a “suit of armor that conceals markers of identity” while the theory Báez cites of “opacity” makes sense even in its basic dictionary definition of “being difficult to see through,” in this case, as with Cave, because the markers of racial and sexual identity are concealed.

Firelei Báez was born in the Dominican Republic, moved to Miami at age 8, and then New York City at age 20 where she still works today. She also clearly listens to Drexciya, having created an installation called A Drexcyen Chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways), a sort of imagined underwater royal gallery to Drexcyen queens that was part of her MCA exhibit.

And with that, I will leave you with one more painting by Báez, Memory Board Listening (June 7th), which, although it was painted four years earlier in 2015, could fit right into the pantheon of the Drexcyen Chronocommons:

THANK YOU FIRELEI BÁEZ

THANK YOU NICK CAVE

THANK YOU MCA CHICAGO

THANK YOU YOKO ONO

Dinner was grabbed at the Steak & Shake on Oakton Avenue, long a family favorite but apparently now an openly MAGA/MAHA corporation, though inexplicably playing a song from Hats by the Blue Nile while we ordered our food at the kiosk. (It sounded fantastic and the last Snickers milkshake I will ever purchase from Steak & Shake was delicious.) Then, straight to Northwestern University (shout out to the NU Lakeside Parking Structure on Campus Drive just north of Sheridan Road, still free and still never full in the evenings, even after all these years) and the Mary B. Galvin Recital Hall, a beautiful room with a beautiful view that was soon filled with the beautiful music of John Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts, specifically the first part “Quietly Flowing Along — Summer” as performed by the quartet of Amina Knapp (violin), Lucy Nemeth (violin), Jacob Westerbeke (viola), and James La Fayette (cello). I was not previously familiar with this piece, but noted that director Alan Pierson’s essay in the program called it “one of my favorite works of all times,” and I could really see why, even in an understandably reserved (perhaps even slightly timid) performance by these students. Any reservation aside, they were still pretty damn good, and certainly put across Cage’s strange architecture, and the haunting melodic and harmonic fractures and fragments within.

The four parts of “String Quartet in Four Parts” weren’t played consecutively, but used as a sort of greek chorus or recurring interlude throughout the program. After completing the first part, there followed a brief performance of Cage’s 0’00” as a segue, where each member of the string quartet took a turn following the score, which in its entirety reads “In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.” The disciplined action here was for each to move their well-mic’d music stand loudly from the front of the stage where the string quartet had performed back into the semi-circle of the full ensemble (Knapp’s interpretation was the most memorable of the four).

Thus situated, the entire Northwestern U. Contemporary Music Ensemble began their first full performance of the night, six of Ono’s Pieces for Orchestra from 1962, each with a score that consists of nothing more than a single-word instruction, to be musically interpreted however the performers decide. The six instructions performed were “Peel,” “Peek,” “Take Off,” “Tear,” “Touch,” and “Rub.” For “Peel,” in the center stage space where the string quartet had been, ensemble vocalists Maddy Zuckerman and Isabel Yang and three or four others who may have been musicians from the ensemble, or perhaps stagehands joining in (I lost track), all sat on the stage together talking and laughing salon-style while peeling and sharing an actual grapefruit or two. It’s been two months now as I’m still completing this report, and for the life of me, I can’t remember what the semi-circle musicians were playing behind them to interpret the instruction “Peel.” I do remember how they did the next piece “Peek” as a kind of random-cue game-piece, hiding behind their music stands and then peeking out at a different ensemble member, both of them playing notes and sounds at each other, staccato and aleatoric sharp-attacks. Moving quickly, spending what seemed like no more than two or three minutes on each piece, they interpreted “Take Off” as a kind of collective major-key reverie rising-cloud-of-joy type move, one of the more purely diatonic moments of the evening. “Tear” was very effective, with the musicians tearing actual paper up close to their microphones while the aforementioned vocalists Zuckerman and Yang took up the entire front center of the stage tearing a very large piece of cloth perfectly in half. Wish I’d gotten a picture, but again was happily engaged with the happening-ness that was happening and the last thing I was going to do was clutch at my phone. For “Touch,” I seem to remember more diatonic melodic ambient/drone improvisation, Zuckerman and Yang supplying yet another visual element by performing slow duo dance poses that brought the title/instruction to life. Finally on “Rub,” the musicians literally rubbed and scraped and made abstract gestural sound with their instruments, a tried-and-true improvised-music extended technique that worked well here.

The ensemble’s string quartet of Lucy Nemeth, Amina Knapp, Jacob Westerbeke, and James La Fayette then returned to front center stage to perform the second part of “String Quartet in Four Parts,” “Slowly Rocking — Autumn,” followed by another stand-scraping rendition of 0’00”, followed by the whole ensemble launching into a frankly stunning rendition of The Beatles’ “Revolution No. 9” that was a lot more note-for-note than I expected it could be. Those random orchestral string flourishes and cresecendos? The ensemble played ‘em. Those weird garage-prog guitar riffs that fade in and out? The ensemble played ‘em. They did the “block that kick” chants too, and the creepy “we become naked” whisper, and several other fleeting note clusters that sounded extremely familiar from many youthful days blasting The White Album in my bedroom. (The arrangement was by Matt Marks, who was not part of this performance and in fact passed away at age 38 in 2018, RIP. It’s all coming together in that Marks was a founding member of the Alarm Will Sound orchestra in 2001, playing contemporary classical music along with the aforementioned Alan Pierson, conductor and director of this evening’s concert and still with Alarm With Sound. Pierson was born and raised in Chicago, but moved to the Northeast where Alarm With Sound was formed by Eastman School of Music alumni. I’m seeing back in the 00s they beat Shane Parish to the punch by performing music by Aphex Twin and Autechre, gotta check out their Acoustica album.)

After the final notes of “Revolution #9” faded away, the string quartet returned to center stage to perform, not “Good Night” with Ringo Starr on vocals, but “Nearly Stationary — Winter,” the third and longest part of Cage’s piece, and once again held it all down in beautiful fractured forward/backward stasis, no small task. The title of the piece resonated with the freezing night lake scene behind the great window, and the music certainly did as well, setting the scene for what followed, a true climactic move (kudos to the co-directors Pierson and Ben Bolter for the excellent pacing and overall vision of the entire program) in which four (!) distinct pieces were performed simultaneously: Cage’s “Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58),” as well as his Song Books (Solos for Voice 3-92) (1970), apparently some of 0’00” back in the mix for its third performance of the night (I wouldn’t have known any of this without the program notes by Carter Miller in a nice printed and stapled program that was handed to each attendee on the way in), and finally Ono’s Sky Piece to Jesus Christ (1965). Ono’s piece allows, and in fact requires, another piece (or why not three) of the director’s choice to be played simultaneously, so that the performers of “Sky Piece” can wrap these other performers in gauze until they’re no longer able to play the piece(s) they’ve chosen.

As for the backbone of this section, Cage’s “Concert for Piano and Orchestra,” its 1958 NYC premiere has been compared to that of Stravinksy’s The Rite of Spring in Paris 1913, “including an audibly disgruntled audience.” These kinds of sounds have been mainstreamed by mystery/suspense/horror film and television, but are still quite jarring to hear, especially in person. The pianist Amy Bao was very good and quite physical, moving under and around her instrument to accomplish certain passages. Percussionist Jacob Scheidt also stole the show a bit by performing two of the arias from Cage’s Song Books, Aria 15 which “instructs performers to type a text meaning that the ‘artist does not have the right to waste the listener’s time unnecessarily’” — and yes, he was typing away on stage with an actual typewriter — and Aria 64 which “instructs performers to shout ‘Nichinichi kore konichi!’ (a Zen Buddhist proverb roughly translating to ‘try to spend every day meaningfully’) in a manner ‘like a football cheer-leader’ all the while ‘keep[ing] score audibly’” — and yes he did all that too. The chant was perhaps the only sound made during the entire evening that I found unpleasant, and he kept score “audibly” by making hashmarks with actual chalk on an actual chalkboard.

After several minutes of this, Sky Piece for Jesus Christ began as its performers took the stage, six visiting “members of the Fluxus Movement Seminar” led by professor Hannah B. Higgins of UIC (University of Illinois at Chicago), and if her name sounds familiar it is indeed because her father was Dick Higgins, who founded Something Else Press in 1963 and was there along with Ono for very early Fluxus movement activities circa 1962. They slowly got to work wrapping and subduing the musicians with gauze, visually very striking and conceptually . . . who knows? Still working on that one. After about 10 minutes into the Sky Piece portion, it became clear that wind instruments weren’t going to stop playing, and therefore the piece wasn’t going to end, until the Sky Piece performers chose to wrap the musician’s mouth. To not only bind them, but to gag them. Okay, there’s some conceptual heft there…

And by the way, while all of the wrapping was going on our friends Lucy, Amina, Jacob, and John from the string quartet performed the last and shortest part of the “String Quartet in Four Parts,” “Quodlibet—Spring,” but they were set up in the back of the auditorium. So there were actually five pieces being played simultaneously, with performers all around the room, roaming the aisles, breaking down all walls, fourth and fifth and beyond, Scheidt taking an actual cellphone call and telling the caller he was “finishing up a performance,” the stage a shambles of gauze, the entire evening taking a ‘descent into madness’ trope that made me think of certain films as much as anything, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954, d. Kenneth Anger), the Suspiria remake (2018, d. Luca Guadagnino), you name it. Writing it all up again here really makes me thankful that I got to see and hear it, and I wish I could see it again.

And that concludes our “Evanston Show Report,” the first of two Blastiletters documenting my humble reactions to Yoko Ono’s great 2025-2026 visit (albeit not in the flesh) to Chicago. The second will be published one week from today and will be my report on the larger Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind exhibit that was at the MCA Chicago from October 18, 2025 to February 22, 2026. It should be noted that the Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensemble and members of the UIC Fluxus Movement Seminar also performed at the MCA Chicago just five days after this on February 18, 2026, as part of that larger exhibit that you’ll read all about next week.

ZACH ROWDEN When the Gloss is Removed LP (GERTRUDE TAPES) Pretty hardcore solo experimental release from 2022. Entire credits are “double bass, tapes.” No immediate reason to believe it isn’t performed and recorded live. Side one sounds more like tapes than double bass, with a wild/hypnotic loop or two going, even some sampled spoken word, over which Rowden may or may not be live-layering looped acoustic noises played on his double bass. Side two is explicitly solo bass, deep drony arco work that is almost certainly being live-looped and overlaid with live-played higher-pitched arco work, getting into deep Niblockian realms. Anyway, I like to think both sides are single-take live recordings, and yes I concern myself with such minutiae. Speaking of which, I thought Rowden’s name sounded familiar and I think it’s because he played with Crazy Doberman (suddenly realizing we haven’t heard much from Crazy D lately — nothing after 2022 on Discogs). He’s a New Haven-based musician who has played with Tyshawn Sorey, Henry Birdsey, and quite notably “with Iancu Dumitrescu and the late Ana-Maria Avram’s Hyperion Ensemble as member and soloist.” Side note: both sides of this LP close with very clean lock grooves, seamless and smooth, that you may find yourself listening to for longer than you’d initially expect, even if the one on Side A sounds like you just opened a door down a hallway in a black lodge onto a night-time rainforest filled with distressed howler monkeys.

FORMANT Onrays LP (GERTRUDE TAPES) More hardcore experimental music released on vinyl by Gertrude Tapes, a nice run of LPs as of late from them (see also: the previous Zach Rowden LP review and the following Dennis Callaci & L. Eugene Methe LP review), Formant being a duo of Henry Birdsey on pedal steel and Austin Larkin on violin. Right from the opening track “Dolmen” (nice) they are each grinding out deep luminous sound fields from their respective instruments that clash and blend into each other to create a dense acoustic spectral music. It never really lets up for the rest of the LP, and I don’t want it to. Otherworldly and uncanny, non-Euclidian type shit. And somehow still plenty musical.

DENNIS CALLACI AND L. EUGENE METHE The Last Chance Lottery LP (SHRIMPER/GERTRUDE TAPES) Haven’t checked in with the song-based work of either of these underground long-runners in a few years, and even when not knowing what to expect I was still a little surprised to hear just how ‘late-period Scott Walker’ this new long-distance collaborative LP is (recorded in 2024, released January 2026). Methe creates creepy dungeon-folk dissonances and unsettled tape loops out of strings, piano, and other intangibles in his Omaha, Nebraska hideout; these clash, pulse, and lurch their way into late-Walkerian soundbeds over which Callaci writes the lyrics and croons/intones/wails them from his Claremont, California garret, perhaps less operatically melodic than Walker, but with a similar pre-and-post-millennial tension. And then it all ends with “Don’t Ask,” which is Callaci solo on vocals and guitar (until Methe’s work re-encroaches at the very end as a chilling reminder, the metaphorical “FIN” at the end of the novel), a relatively tuneful number with regular chord changes and everything, albeit still quite heavy and a little dark in its imagery and feeling: “Don’t ask/Don’t ask/A world of bottomless windows/we’re all lookin’ in/And I called out to you/like the lift of a broken sash/See them across the street/They are just rushing by/All of us and everything/We’re all just rushin’ by/If it’s true that nothin’ lasts/then lets take this to heart right now/for how long I don’t know.”

JULIANNA BARWICK & MARY LATTIMORE Tragic Magic (INFINÉ) OK talk about heavy music, in all styles and volumes . . . hadn’t really heard anything by Julianna Barwick before stumbling across this brand new release from January 2026, and the second she starts singing in the incredible opening song “Perpetual Adoration,” I’m floored. It sounds like nothing less than religious choir music to me, which I’m sure has been said throughout her career with the way she can sing crushing solo lead while also mass-overdub her voice into celestial vocal choirs. Mary Lattimore’s stately harp playing fits right in to a religious connotation too, as does the fact that the album was recorded at Musée de la Musique in Paris, using harps that are 300 years old and were very likely used by churches in their past lives. The important thing for me about Tragic Magic is that it works as wordless religious music (even when the songs have lyrics — apparently “Perpetual Adoration” does, I just hadn’t thought about it until now because so much was being said without them). No deity is named, so no divinity is invoked other than the only true divinity, which is the wordless divinity of the natural world. Sun, air, trees, water, animals; they may not speak a speech-based human language but they’re all much bigger than us and/or they can kill us, so these are the things we should worship, and not some anthropomorphic deity that is really just a stand-in for humans to worship themselves. Because as soon as you worship a who (God, Yahweh, Christ, Allah, etc) and not a what (the natural world, the universe, the cosmos) you start the business of hierarchy and control. In-groups and out-groups inevitably follow, and the only end game for in-groups and out-groups is fascism, war, slavery, and death — not to mention climate collapse. When I listen to Tragic Magic I’m feeling (not saying) a non-denominational prayer in the face of all of that.

YHWH NAILGUN 45 Pounds (AD 93) A very original rock band, which I don’t find myself saying too much anymore. Drum & bass industrial but with a deceptively chill growling singer and amazing live drummer? After listening a couple times I’m finally looking at the credits on Bandcamp, and somehow it is a pretty traditional quartet: lead vocals by Zack Borzone, guitar by Saguiv Rosenstock, synth & electronics by Jack Tobias, and drums by Sam Pickard, but the synth & electronics really do dominate as far as the melodic instruments go. I go long stretches without being sure I’m hearing a guitar at all — either it’s heavily synthesized, or Rosenstock is just that subtle of a player. Maybe both, which makes this almost like a Future Islands model, gruff vocals and synth/keyboard as the lead instrument, but now with a more darkly agitated worldview (Borzone’s singing is just as charismatic but more guttural, less melodic, less hopeful, all of which I appreciate) and a very ripping drummer Brendan Canty-ing all over the grooves.

PUBLIC CIRCUIT Modern Church (À LA CARTE) Ye ole hat tip for this one goes to music blogger John over at yon music blog that bears his name, which has been great for getting me out of my comfort zone and listening to everything from Milwaukee hip-hop that came out last week to Midwest emo from like 2015-2020 to bands like Public Circuit, who are also from New York City and released this album in 2025. What does Public Circuit sound like? Well, they sound like the 1980s, but with an industrial-techno swag that strikes me as super-fresh. I can just picture a cool nerd with piercings and/or a mohawk and/or glasses and/or chain accessories and/or leather pants strutting around the stage barking out these deceptively melodic vocals. I know I could just google what they actually look like, but I’d rather just believe in my version a little bit longer...

STRANGE Souvenir Album LP (SHADOKS) Found out about this one in 2016 from John Olson’s massive record-review-a-day-for-one-whole-year book Life Is a Rip Off. Otherwise I probably still wouldn’t know. Did someone say strange? This is definitely a strange album by a strange band, particularly strange in that they’re a band of Olympia, Washington teenagers making music in the mid-1970s that somehow sounds like it was made by the weariest soft-rock adult crashing out, mid-30s at least, holed up in a fleabag Hollywood hotel recording songs with an 8-track portastudio and a few other acid casualty session musicians that also stopped getting hired. It ends up like Richard Baskin at his Welcome to L.A. weariest (1976, d. Alan Rudolph . . . if you know you know) but with no horns and backed by the Amon Duul Paradieswarts Duul band, only now they have guest ringers playing really good fusion-jazzy piano and better electric guitar solos. And forget Richard Baskin singing in a movie, there’s something quite a bit more real with Strange, so real it actually hurts a little, which I chalk up to the disarmingly emotional vocals and lyrics of singer/songwriter David Chamberlain, the way his searing snatches of laser-beam confession zap you between mumbles, like on track two “Somebody”: “I’m tired of decaying . . . and feeling every [mumble] . . . so I force my eyes closed . . . [mumble mumble] up my spine . . . [mumble mumble] . . . my brain is like a window . . . [mumble mumble] . . . I’m not here at all.” There’s no shortage of biographical and aesthetic detail offered by Chamberlain himself in the copious liner notes, but somehow it’s all nullified every time you put on the album and listen to “Somebody.” David Chamberlain remains a mystery. Perhaps this is ego dissolution on wax, happening right before your ears. Perhaps that is what these endlessly haunting songs are about, the melancholy nature of an ego lost and never to be regained. A similar effect is created by a suitably terse and slightly weird interview in It’s Psychedelic Baby magazine with another band member, guitarist Tom Hackett. “The ‘hippie’ spirit was gone from mainstream, but you were still keeping your freak flag fly.” “Yes, Moody Blues, Jefferson Airplane, Zappa., CSNY, ELP (locally very little interested me. Maybe the local jazz scene).” “Were you experimenting with psychedelics?” “Yes.” Hackett also mentions without further explanation the notorious 1980s child/outsider/”post-punk” music project Human Skab — was the Skab a child or little brother of one of the members? Checks out regionally (Skab home base Elma WA is a 30 minute drive from Olympia WA), but again, no other explanation. Anyway, I’m going to close with a track-by-track of this strange Strange record before it completely slips through my fingers yet again, like scribbling with ballpoint pen in a bedside dream journal. Before I start, just to get some bearings, I will state for the record that the most consistent lineup of the band would be the aforementioned David Chamberlain on guitar and vocals (but also some piano), Robert Rensel on piano, Tom Hackett on guitar, Don Morris on bass, and Rick Rackleff on drums. That said, many of them switch instruments, or drop instruments, or add instruments, and this includes vocal roles and guests (i.e. sometimes the quintet becomes a quartet or trio or back to a quintet but with guests in the place of some of the members just listed). Rensel is probably the biggest factor after Chamberlain, his soulful riders-on-the-stormy electric piano consistently elevating Strange above base North American Duul-ism into more mystical and jazzy realms. We start with A1, “Segment from Barapp,” a lo-fi fanfare that, at 74 seconds long, fades out just as it gets going — did they know they were playing krautrock? A2 “Somebody” is the one I was quoting lyrics from above, and again fully establishes this David Chamberlain fellow as a wunderkind of desolation. Although, if you read the liner notes carefully, you’ll learn that this track is actually by another high school project closely related to Strange called the Carl Dexter Band . . . and then you finally squint and read that tiny print you had noticed at the bottom of the front cover, and it says “including ‘Somebody’ by the Carl Dexter Band.” Lol. I’m telling you, almost everything about this record is odd and awkward, and A3 “The Ballad of Hollis Spaceman” is where it really gets crazy with an awkwardly blistering sci-fi prog-rock opus, by far the most (I think only) upbeat song on the album. The musical ambition is a little ahead of the band’s skill set, so the pitch isn’t always perfect and the recording levels are disorienting — but that’s exactly why it shreds so hard. Killer progressive lead guitar by the aforementioned Tom Hackett. A4 “Four Eyes” is another searing David Chamberlain haunter, back to full-on Paradieswarts Duul acoustic guitars-and-bongos campfire mode, Rensel layering in gorgeous electric piano to infuse it with a spectral aura that elevates it past other mere Tyrannosaurus Rexian practitioners of psychedelic bongo folk. Seriously, listen to this track if you haven’t. I almost feel like headz ain’t ready. Bonus points for how Chamberlain abruptly says “that’s fine” at the end, sounding totally passively bored with the entire universe, followed by an awkward ‘boom’ sound like he’s disdainfully dropping his guitar or something. B1 “Segment from On Winning the War” is even more of a segment than the segment that opened Side A, this one only 42 seconds long, blink your ears and you’ll miss its distant shit-fi eastern caravan jamminess. B2 “A Faced Dream” has a great awkward psychedelic title and is another extremely melancholy dream-yearner ballad in the now-recognizable Chamberlain mode, although for this one he’s on piano and Rensel is singing the vocal, sounding almost exactly like Chamberlain. For B3 “Rick’s Song,” it’s Rick Rackleff’s turn to sing the majorly depressive ballad (opening lines: “my mind is a shattered image/and my love is unknown”), which he apparently does from behind the kit while Rensel’s piano and Chamberlain’s electric guitar solemnly orchestrate. B4 “Segment from Mushroom Wednesday” is only 41 seconds, extremely echoed-out with a band crudely jamming somewhere in the far haze, and then comes B5 “Lies by Poetic License,” possibly the closest Strange’s balladry gets to approaching actual corniness, but still waylaid by pure narcotic desolation, Chamberlain at his most Richard Baskinesque (again, IYKYK), switching onto piano for this one too so Rensel can play stately french horn (!) while Rackleff leaves the drum kit silent and instead plays shimmering deep organ. B6 “Twelve Boats” was written by Tom Hackett and sung by Chamberlain, though it stays in the forlorn ballad mode, given a bit more of a heavy rock arrangement than the more piano-forward songs, and devalued a bit by distant-fidelity bad-acoustics room-mic placement. B7 “The Last Song” closes things off appropriately with more of Chamberlain singing his guts out while spinning alone somewhere in the cosmos, Rensel sweeping the arpeggios and the Rackleff/Morris rhythm section leaning into the downer groove. The band hits the last chord and a live audience is revealed, clapping in the distance. Chamberlain speaks with that trademark weariness and mild disdain: “Thank you very much. Good night.” And that’s the album.

What does Miles Davis mean? I think he’s warning us that, because the emergent great musics of the 1980s — hip hop, house, techno, et al — are largely made by machines, it may be too easy to lose that sound in between — those fluid human tendencies like improvisation, syncopation, polyrhythmic layering, and on-the-fly motivic reshaping.

Like when Donald Byrd played “Black Byrd” live at Montreux on July 5, 1973, and when the man himself played live just three months later on October 27, 1973, not too far away in Stockholm, Sweden with one of his very best bands (Henderson, Foster, Cosey, Lucas, Mtume, Liebman). Watch closely and see what deep listening to the sound of surprise actually looks like:

But it’s not just jazz, it can show up anywhere at any time, like with the Velvet Underground a few years before that — John Cale’s entire role in the band could be described as that sound in between, kinda like Irmin Schmidt’s in Can. There’s plenty of TSIB in Fleetwood Mac playing “Everywhere” live in a bourgeois theater a coupla decades after that in 1997, or an underground folk-rock LP released in 2026, practically yesterday, by Jana Horn and her superb backing band.

^ Here’s more Miles with Pete Cosey, recorded exactly one week after the previous clip on the same European tour, the two of them having a particularly nice back-and-forth that starts just before the 11:00 mark and runs for a good 10-15 seconds.

^ And here’s the full 10/27/1973 performance excerpted in the previously embedded Instagram post. Jump ahead to 44:20 for the full context of those 90 seconds, and stick around past 45:45 where the IG clip cuts off and hear Miles really start cooking on a super-quiet wah-trumpet move in side-convo with Mtume’s super-quiet free-rolling conga playing. If you want to dig through Mtume’s 2018 interview with Adam Rudolph and/or his 2014 Red Bull Music Academy master class, you can hear him talking about percussion being able to move from “solid, to liquid, to vapor.” Here, Al Foster on trap kit is the solid, while Mtume on hand drums moves from liquid to vapor and back.

^ For some reason I never thought I’d see footage of nyabhingi masters Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation at all, let alone footage this good. One of the most supreme examples of that sound in between is their style of Jamaican nyabinghi drumming, the polyrhythms of the smaller akete/repeater drum inside the mother rhythm of the thunder and funde drums. These two rhythms create concentric spinning circles, the inside child spinning faster while the outer mother spins more slowly, thus creating the multigenerational circle-of-life interplay that resonates throughout all reggae music, and also in reggae’s American baby hip hop, where the boom-bap kick-snare pattern is the thunder/funde, and the akete/repeater comes from the handclaps, the hi-hats, and of course the record scratching (as referenced by Miles on Arsenio) and the syncopated verbal rhythms of the rapping itself.

^ Did you know that Alice Coltrane once sat in with The Rascals? On a post-hippie double LP from 1971 called Peaceful World on which all of side four is a mostly-instrumental title-track fusion jammer? It’s actually a pretty tepid jam, which surely has something to do with why I and maybe you didn’t know, or want to know. Side three is the best side, opening with the aforementioned Alice Coltrane collabo “Little Dove” and following with two more extended groove jammers, “Mother Nature Land” (ringer flautist Hubert Laws tearing it up) and my fave, the legitimately funky “Getting Nearer.” Still not a great record, definitely not as great as the Rascals’ earlier/straighter “A Beautiful Morning,” which is truly beyond great, or even “Groovin’,” which certainly does the two-chord modal-jazzy groove thing as well and far less self-consciously than the too-intentional Peaceful World.

^ Thanks to someone somewhere on the internet — I just can’t remember who — for pointing out the greatness of Dr. Orlando Owoh. A multi-decade recording career of one side-long jam after another, concentric circles of TSIB forever.

^ Refuse Stealing Band are some jammers in Ndirande, Malawi, original video above (uploaded 15 years ago by Dr. Pete Larson himself), discovered via OJBP’s sublime “Stealth Edit” thereof as heard while hanging over at the CD Esoterik podcast (Episode 15). When one googles “Refuse Stealing Band,” these two links I’ve already shared are pretty much the only thing that come up as of early 2026. But, when googling the phrase “kukana kuba” as it appears on their sign in the original video, a whole bunch of results come up for the Kukana Kuba Kasambwe Brothers Band, which is clearly the same band, and how just last year in November 2024 they made their first trip to America where they played shows and “recorded an album at Mass Moca Studios with veteran producer Harlan Steinberger.”

^ Plenty of that sound in between can be found on this surprise 2025 release from the Meat Puppets (or, ahem, the Meat Pupkets). Definitely their Grayfolded, or perhaps their “Dark/Weld” or “Ark/Star” as Jay Babcock suggests in his h/t over at his Landline substack.

^ Whoah, Neil and Crazy Horse concert footage from 1976, a 12-minute “Down by the River” and a 7-minute “Danger Bird.”

^ Wild to randomly hear Robert Wyatt refracted through Peter Jefferies on this random Wyatt studio album cut from Shleep. It sounds so much like Peter Jefferies to me, almost as if Wyatt was influenced by PJ and not the other way around! Last Great Challenge in a Dull World was 1990 and Shleep was 1997, just sayin’ (and in case you were wondering, Neil/Horse and R. Wyatt = TSIB all day) . . .

^ OMG, “Tricky Tee Rap” by Troy Rainey is insane. Put this on a bootleg 12” single with “Beat Bop” on the other side and blow your mind all nite long. Lots of TSIB via shaken percussion presence, drum-machine syncopation, and most especially non-stop nutzoid stoned rhyming. Thing is, “Tricky Tee Rap” was apparently released almost 4 full years before “Beat Bop,” although details are vague on Rainey and the internet seems to know very little about him. A.I. search tells me the record was released in 1979, but Discogs has the year of release as “unknown,” only putting a year on an unoffical reissue from 2008, but the record has Heavenly Star Records catalog number 722, which falls right between Heavenly Star Records 721 (“Death Rap” by Margo’s Kool Out Crew) and HSR 723 (“Sweet Naomi Rap” by Naomi Peterson), both of which were released in 1980. So it’s at least three years older than “Beat Bop.”

v Wait, WTF is this?

JOY GUIDRY Amen (WHITED SEPULCHRE); Five Prayers (JAID) A seed was planted by an article in Maggot Brain #19 back in the winter of 2025 (thanks again to Ana Gavrilovska always writing about the good stuff), and just this last week in the winter of 2026 it started breaking ground when I finally sat down with the two most recent albums by bassoonist Joy Guidry, Amen from 2024 and Five Prayers from 2025. Might be the first time I’ve ever actually sat down with an album by a bassoonist, come to think of it, let alone a visionary one like Guidry, who uses Amen to carve out a few different possibilities and on Five Prayers chooses one of them to great effect. Amen gets into deep gospel-infused jazz (“Pick and Choose” into “Members Don’t Get Weary” and also “Angels”), and a sort of deep drone ambient spiritual with Guidry’s incredibly lyrical and haunting bassoon soloing pulling us through (“Psalm 138:7,” “Day by Day”). This last ambient spiritual path is the one taken on the masterful Five Prayers, as of now a digital only album that I do wish I could own on vinyl. It’s certainly the right sequence for vinyl, four shorter songs making up a 20-minute side A and then the 16-minute-plus side-long zone-out “I Know You’re Always With Me” on the flip. As far as lyrical soloing over electronic ambience goes, this album belongs right up there with other keystones from this 2020s sub-movement such as Promises and New Blue Sun, and I personally think it’s more special and powerful than both of those. All five tracks are deep into the same zone, with the slight exception of (what would be) side one closer “Myles” that teases some exquisite ethereal house beats for a couple minutes. That epic closer “I Know You’re Always With Me” is essentially a collaboration between Guidry’s bassoon soloing and synth/electronic/keyboard beds by Diego Gaeta, a Los Angeles producer who has worked with Carlos Niño and in fact was on a couple tracks on New Blue Sun. He was also behind some of the more ambient tracks on Guidry’s Amen including its best track “Day by Day.” The only thing wrong with “Day by Day” is that’s it’s 3 minutes long instead of 33 (or 333), but “I Know You’re Always With Me” at least gets halfway to correcting that, which is plenty for now. Once again . . . if only it was on vinyl!

JULIE BETH NAPOLIN The Void Stands Between Us (SILVER CURRENT) Continuing to catch up to the Best of 2024 with this massive cosmic folk-rock tree that fell in the forest when I wasn’t there to hear it. Julie Beth Napolin was in the band Citay back in the ‘00s, and since then has worked as an academic and written a book called The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (Fordham UP, 2020) which I would love to dig into someday, but for now I’m busy digging into the resonance of this debut solo album of hers, seven delicate and tender yet vast and power-droning songs that play like she’s standing on a sea cliff and her guitar and voice is louder than the ocean. Terse and enigmatic lyrics (with an apocalyptic undertow), and that heavy-strummed guitar accompaniment that keeps the changes minimal, working as a canvas for sparse-but-cosmic coloration from guests like Tom Carter of Charalambides on the opening track and others here and there (a role played by Ethan Miller of Comets on Fire, Howlin’ Rain, Heron Oblivion, Orcutt Shelley Miller, and Silver Current records on Napolin’s digital-only Live at Richard’s Goat album).

DAGMAR ZUNIGA in filth your mystery is kingdom/far smile peasant in yellow music (AD 93) Jeez, you’d think I was doing some kind of “women in rock” special issue here! Let’s get a cover photo shoot together ASAP! Just kidding, but we do have one Dagmar Zuniga here, with an album initially released on cassette back in 2025, copies of which are already going for a good $60-$100 on Discogs. I can see why, as this is eerie and haunted underground folk music, vibes aplenty, including a startling cover portrait of the artist complete with witchy sigil on forehead, and an album title that is appropriately bold and inscrutable. All said, I’m finding the music — the creepy-child nursery-rhyme melodies, the hissing noise beds, the serial song-truncation — as ultimately forgettable as it is immediately arresting. I do like the title track “in filth your mystery is kingdom” after hearing it first and thinking it might just be part of a great album . . . but even that song has a change in it that’s a little too close to “Something” by the Beatles and it bugs me a little bit more every time I listen to it.

ALAN LICHT Havens (VIN DU SELECT QUALITITE) Here I go, continuing to catch up with 2024. This one gets on here because after being smitten by the Julie Beth Napolin LP, I was poking around to see who else had written about it. Of course Mosurock had, in timely fashion too, and compared its “wrist charge” to this double LP by Alan Licht. Of course, Havens, on the VDSQ label. Why hadn’t I listened to it yet? Could it be this whole “only so many hours in a day” thing? I mean, when am I going to find the time to listen to all the good old albums, all the good new albums, read the 27 books on my bedside shelf (no joke, I counted), AND finally view the entire filmographies of both Michael Snow and Fredric Wiseman? Either way, I’m glad I found the time to deep-listen to Havens a few times, essentially a solo guitar work of long-form overtone-rich deep-reflection trance-strum, on its own profound wrist-charge trip with no overt obeisance to the usually inescapable “American Primitive” or “guitar soli” styles. (The slide guitar hook on track two “Five Chords and a Sword” may be A.P.-relevant, but the cold and glistening organ drone the piece evolves into is decidedly not.) The palindromic A1-A2-B1-C1-D1-D2 double-LP sequence gives plenty of space for these tracks to dig in and resonate and reward relistening, and Havens feels like one of the richest works in Licht’s long and always interesting career. (P.S. It was fun to hear him reveal on episode 1015 of the Kreative Kontrol podcast that the album title was partly a nod to one of the great wrist-charge moments in rock history, the opening solo salvo by Richie Havens in Woodstock, 1970, d. Michael Wadleigh.)

EXCEPTER Displacer (EXCEPTER RECORDS) I see Excepter mentions at ye olde Blastitude.com going back as far as 2007, which is NINETEEN YEARS AGO; even this new album to be released in May 2026 is their first full-length in over a decade. The long-revolving lineup has pared down to the core husband-and-wife duo of Lala Harrison Ryan and John Fell Ryan, and they kick things off with a frustratingly perma-timely cover/reimagining of Bob Marley’s “War” that sounds more like Tom Smith/To Live and Shave in L.A. than I was expecting. This switches up into the pure 21st-C. dreamtone of “Follow” and “I See You,” Lala’s ethereal vocals floating over drony dubby electro-beds. “Time Travelin’” is another JFR vocal and now I’m getting Vega/Rev vibes (albeit without the psycho yelp factor). The final two tracks “Between the Wall and the Mirror” and “Black Moon” are another Lala-sung haunter and an instrumental ride-out respectively, closing a tight and cohesive statement where they nail this singular electro-shoegaze thing to the wall. More pertinent info: “For DISPLACER, Lala wrote, sequenced, and performed all the music. JFR programmed the drums, mixed and processed the album. Lala + JFR alternate vocal duties and share production credit” . . . “EXCEPTER are releasing the LP on its own Excepter Records imprint, and distributed through its own Bandcamp account. Release date is the first of May 2026, but DISPLACER is available for pre-order now.”

First off, we were greeted by . . . this guy, possibly baby Jesus himself. Shoulda wrote it down. Okay, research reveals this to indeed be El Niño Jesús (The Infant Jesus), ca. 17th century, polychrome wood, artist Anonymous/Anónimo:

Second thing I took a picture of was a small detail, really just two tiles out of the eighty (!) that make up a huge chaquira beads piece directed in 2003 by the Huichol artist Santos Motoapohua de la Torre called El nuevo amanecer (“the new awakening”):

Again, in my close-up photograph, there are only twelve tiles visible, only two in full, and the rest only barely. In person you see eighty of these tiles in a full-color riot of dense non-repetitive imagery. This mind-blowing artwork by de la Torre set the tone for the entire museum visit, and by the time we left one hour later I had said the word “psychedelic” out loud to Angelina at least twice. All art museums are inherently psychedelic, but the NMMA is a completely free museum, and you can view the whole thing in one visit, both of which factors embolden and enrich the psychedelia; it also helps that the art on display is mostly modern and contemporary, often large-scale, and that it uses bold and extremely dynamic bright colors.

Of course, after saying all that, the next piece I photograph is relatively small-scale and not particularly colorful. Nonetheless, it is still quite psychedelic and perhaps even Lovecraftian in its implications. This is Carlos Mérida’s Image of Cabracan, his vision of the Mayan god of earthquakes and mountains as a fractalizing creature of non-specific dimension, a (single) colour out of space, Lovecraft’s primordial Outer God Azathoth visualized as a geometric void.

The next piece, Primitive People by Carlos Almaraz, is where we get back into a more traditionally psychedelic use of color. Stand back and stare as Almaraz’s colors start activating; it’s as if you’re right there in the rain forest where different degrees of sunlight are poking through the canopy, exposing different aspects as angles change, making you realize that what you thought were trees are in fact people, and vice versa, a sensation not unlike the emergence of the monkey-ghosts in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010, d. Apichatpong Weerasethakul) or perhaps certain moments in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, d. Werner Herzog). It may not work with my photo as reproduced in the .jpg below on Substack, but it sure did work in person.

Then there’s We the People by Chaz Bojórquez, an artist from Los Angeles. From my memory and from reviewing my photograph below, this 2007 painting seems to represent a small world or globe within a deep darkness, decorated — or perhaps infected, in a Burroughsian language-is-a-virus sense — by Rick Griffin-style calligraphy. I see the title of the painting, “we the people,” inscribed both on the globe and (partially obscured) behind it, but all of the other calligraphy seems to be even more non-figurative and text-free, to where I almost think of it more as an extreme microscopic close-up of the tiny pollens and fibers attached to a mote of dust, which makes the title and text on the painting ironic, because it implies that we the people, no matter how many of us there are, don’t amount to much more than pollen and fiber floating somewhere in the vast darkness between the two nearest stars.

As if that wasn’t a cheery enough thought, we then get to the first of three works that I consider “death tableaux.” That’s the phrase that popped into my head while staring at the first one, the terrifying and depressing La Madre Tierra (“Mother Earth”) by Salvador Vega, a painting from 1973 by an artist from right there in Pilsen. Of course the title made me think of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” in which George Clinton says “Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time, for y’all have knocked her up” on a record released in 1971, just two years before this painting was made, or Neil Young more gently singing “look at mother nature on the run in the 1970s” another year before that in 1970. And that was almost 60 years ago. How’s Mother Earth doing now, after all of those years and in the age of an anti-environmentalist war pig like T*#*$*p?

Death tableau #2 was right across from Mother Earth, in fact facing it off in a deep reckoning, a smaller but detailed and powerful sculpture by Chicago artist Roman Villarreal called See, Speak, Hear, Yet the Bullets Continue. Impossible not to correlate these two neighbors, though Villarreal’s 1998 sculpture is more specifically about 1990s gang violence in the Little Village neighborhood southwest of Pilsen, “the Bloody 90s, when youth shootings were at an all-time high.”

Death tableau #3 was around the corner from the Vega and Villarreal tableaux, a painting by Marcos Raya called The Legacy of Manifest Destiny. Raya is another artist from the Pilsen scene, born and raised in Mexico but moving to Chicago at age 16 in the year 1964. This one has a skeleton in the lower left corner and ghoulish bodies laying prone and hooded figures overtaking a death-headed bishop and big artillery guns and turmoil and unrest; whether it’s soldiers massacring indigenous people in the Mexican-American War of 1846 or sick pig fuck ICE agents racially profiling Chicagoans and Minneapolitans and other Americans today, you can find it and feel it all when viewing this painting.

But hey, the museum isn’t all one big death trip. Look at this 1996 painting on the way out by Mario Castillo, which I can only call a life tableau. The title is Las memorias antiguas de la raza del maguey aun respiran and it depicts strong humans standing tall and glowing with soft colorful light among plants and vines also growing green and strong. The title translates as “the ancient memories of the maguey race still breathe," maguey being the Spanish word for the agave plant that is native to the arid regions of the Americas. Castillo is another artist that, like Marcos Raya, was born in Mexico and moved to Pilsen in Chicago as a child, in Castillo’s case at age 10 in 1955.

So that was one substance-free psychedelic trip through the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen, Chicago, Illinois, USA, December 2025. Looking forward to another. And if you go and happen to work up an appetite just like Angelina and I did, may we recommend walking 5 minutes to 5 Rabanitos Restaurante & Taqueria at 1758 W. 18th St. and getting the Platanos Fritos and/or the Street Elotitos and then a Taco Dinner.

Stay tuned for the next blastallment of Chicago Art Report, when the Dolmans visit the Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind exhibit at MCA Chicago on its closing day of 2/22/26, coming right after the next Chicago (well, Evanston) Show Report, which will be about the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music Contemporary Music Ensemble performing the music of John Cage and Yoko Ono on 2/13/26 at the beautiful Galvin Recital Hall. At least that’s the goal — I’ve still got some writing to do!

JANA HORN s/t (NO QUARTER) Had not heard nor heard of Jana Horn until taking a tip from over at the Heathen Disco and next thing you know I’ve listened to her new self-titled 2026 sleepy/dreamy/mumbly singer/songwriter-with-stripped-down-band album at least six times this week. I like the tone and vibe of Horn’s soft and sparse vocals, though not a lot of specific hooks or phrases stay with me, even after all these listens. She apparently has a “Christian screamo” past in her native Texas, but nothing about those two words, separately or together, resonates here, though I do think that’s completely by design — it’s almost like Horn is sublimating ego and subduing her expressiveness because it’s how she tightens the strap that holds these songs and band and entire Pandora’s universe of musical possibility they suggest into the careful presentation that is this album. (Ah, here it is: “And so I’m wondering whether the screamo that maybe you got out of your system as a teenager, does that influence your music in any way? Or is it just no part of it? “Yeah, I just got it all out. So now I can just whisper.”) And it is the killer held-in band here that I keep coming back to: guitars, bass, and drums laying down skeletal bones of tracks not unlike slowcore grandaddies Slint, or Codeine, or (another Texas band) Bedhead, or of course the great-grand-dad-mom of ‘em all (VU’s 3rd). These bones are given wan and luminous skin by extremely judicious piano, clarinet, and flute parts, not to mention some very subtle synthesizer work. On the arresting opening track “Go on, move your body” there’s either a cello imitating a synth or a synth imitating a cello, but looking at the credits it can only be the flute of Adelyn Strei, and it’s like that throughout the album; whatever instrument is making whichever sound, there will be fascinating and understated egoless interplay going on within the band. You’ll continue to hear new contours and interactions on repeat listens while Horn’s careful (that’s Heathen Disco’s word btw) vocals keep the whole thing tightly in frame.

KEIYAA Forever, Ya Girl (XL RECORDINGS); KEIYAA hooke’s law (XL RECORDINGS) These two KeiyaA albums have officially blown my mind, Forever, Ya Girl from 2020 (which I only just heard last year) and now hooke’s law in 2025. KeiyaA was born and raised in Chicago and moved to New York City in 2016 where she still lives and where she made these two monster records, five years apart. I get the sense she’s doing all this in her apartment, music in the tradition of Sly and Marvin and Prince and Solange, where a visionary artist holes up lo-fi and lays down sick futuristic R&B tracks and then multi-tracks sick vocals over the top, calling and responding and harmonizing with themselves across deep inner space. (The bedroom photo of the artist on the hooke’s law lyrics insert might even be an intentional nod to the inner sleeve bedroom photo that was in Prince’s 1999, you know the one.) The portal that pulled me all the way in was “Do Yourself a Favor” from the first album, a song that hovers in place more than it progresses, KeiyaA meditating on a phrase or two from a 1963 pop song (you know the one), “if you see me walking down the street / and I start to cry / walk on by,” fragmenting it, repeating it, false-starting it, withholding and reconsidering and updating it, all while Bernie/Junie synth squiggles rise and pop like thought bubbles and super-syncopated synth bass offers duck-and-parry counterpoint, as do those ever-subtle and deceptively complex vocal overdubs. Eventually a stuttering drum machine beat kicks in to take it home but the track never loses its hall-of-mirrors state of inquiry — and when I say sick tracks, I mean these tracks are sick. Crazy beat after crazy beat, especially on hooke’s law where a jungle/drum & bass influence comes to the fore along with the quiet-storm R&B and Chicago house and Detroit techno (and just a little bit of trap & drill) that was already there, her intangible instrumentation floating and flowing through it all. According to this article, “While most of Forever was composed with a Roland SP-404 sampler and a MicroKORG synthesizer, Keiyaa made Hooke’s Law with a much wider array of tools: the Octatrack sampler, a modular synthesizer with custom sound patches, and the digital audio workstation Ableton for virtual instruments, drums, and post-production work.” On hooke’s law there is also non-virtual piano, flute, and saxophone, overall point being there are always many levels of sonic creativity and imaginational activity in these tracks; from KeiyaA’s deeply introspective emotional lyrics to her excellent singing to that wild multi-layered production, these songs are a feast for the ears and mind (and heart too, right from the beginning of the first track on the first album “I Thot There Was One Wound in This House, There’s Two” when KeiyaA is singing “why won’t you love me?/I’m so damn easy to love…”)

SHARP PINS Balloon Balloon Balloon (K/PERENNIAL) Feels like absolute heresy to say it, especially when this entire Horsegirl/Lifeguard/Sharp Pins/Hallogallo/New Now scene is in fact awesome and already one of the 10 or 15 great movements in Chicago music history — but this LP is a bit of a snooze for me. Awesome cover art, great looking musicians, perfect-sounding lo-fi home recording of underground guitar pop, check, check, and check — but after a couple listens I still couldn’t recall a single hook, line, or song. I know I said that about the previous two records a bit too, but Jana Horn had that arresting soft precision, and KeiyaA had those constant layers of surprise, and they’re three very different artists anyway. Sharp Pins is more like Guided by Voices, which I could swear every single other review of this album has also pointed out, and GbV fans will probably appreciate Balloon Balloon Balloon as well — just don’t expect anything like “parallel lines on a slow decline” or “dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee, kicker of elves” blasting in your brain the next day.

THE LAVENDER FLU V1: Mirror Bright (MEDS) You’ve got to admire the audacity of a band that usually plays composed songs (which they do really well, by the way — when it comes to evolved 2025 post-garage psych-pop Tracing the Sand by the Pool was the real Balloon Balloon Balloon but I apologize for implying a competition) releasing a fully improvised piece as a full-length, but beyond that I don’t hear anything especially radical or new here. Not that music has to be “especially radical” or “new” for me to praise it, but for all of side one here it sounds like a band playing improv, not improv playing a band. The latter is where the gold is, and even the greatest can’t just get there at at the snap of a finger, and to their credit the Lavender Flu definitely get there on side two, especially as they hit an extended pulsing groove starting around the 9-minute mark. The piece devolves back into freenoisery, but the second side does retain a charged musical possession that the first side doesn’t have. Hard to always edit out the search, I get it. Sun City Girls sure didn’t, as any Carnival Folklore Resurrection completist will tell you. I’m sure Can did their fair share of searching too, but were lucky enough to have Holger editing it out and leaving it on the cutting-room floor, right there during breaks.

ABRONIA Shapes Unravel (CARDINAL FUZZ/FEEDING TUBE) Brand new one released just a week ago from the indefatigable Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube international underground assembly line, yet another well-seasoned and professionally encased band I’ve never heard of before with unique and experimental tendencies. Abronia are from Portland, Oregon and play a kind of widescreen cinematic sad balladry, a bit of the ole themes-for-imaginary-Westerns action, the Morricone guitars and whatnot. Epic soundtracks, if you will. The songs are kinda straight, traditional, and fairly static, and one thought I had on first listen was that they sounded like the soundtrack-loving side of the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, all grown up and cleaned up. The Thinking Fellers really did keep things gnarly, a consistently raw and noisy band, whereas Abronia is more reserved and refined, even when songs begin melting and fireballing as does side one closer “Walker’s Dead Birds.” What really stands out before that side one Rubicon-crossing, and throughout side two as well, are the lead vocals by Keelin Mayer. She keeps the band honest and they keep her honest, and that feedback loop intensifies as the album progresses. The band may start out sounding rather traditional, leaving Mayer to carry them on her shoulders with her bold and cutting vocals, but after going through that portal on “Walker’s Dead Birds” the band get into and stay into deep and heavy grooves that in fact lift Mayer up just as much.

WALNUT BRAIN Weird Wire (PETTY BUNCO) Took me a while to get to this August 2025 release but this is the kind of improvisational music I’m always looking for, where I get to use the adjectives I don’t get to use enough with improvised/experimental music, like understated . . . haunted . . . purposeful . . . rhythmically assured . . . laser-focused. This time the improv is playing the band, and the band is Walnut Brain. They’re a Philadelphia duo of diddley bow and electric guitar, but their music is so minimal and stripped down that it almost comes off like a duo between two percussionists. (They also remind me of that Gong Gong Gong band from Beijing if you know ‘em.) Physically released on cassette only and sold out at source, but I believe Midheaven still has copies. (At least, I think when they say “MC” it means “manufactured cassette.”)

EQUIPMENT POINTED ANKH Eggs a Little Late (PETTY BUNCO) I did already tell you about this album in the Blastitude Best of 2025 piece back in December, but it does bear repeating with a review here, as it might otherwise fall into the “headz just ain’t ready” category and is already being misunderstood and overlooked as we speak. Even we headz can only barely be ready for crystalline and playful post-ragtime progressive American instrumental rock music of such a high caliber, but believe me, ready we are. Now I’m thinking “Faust if composed and arranged by Van Dyke Parks” for shorthand but that still doesn’t quite explain something like the unabashedly lovely side two opener “Every Night Since Harry” which is like floating down a lazy river into a Renoir painting scored by Cluster with Klaus Dinger sitting in on drums.

COLD SUN Dark Shadows LP (GUERSSEN) I had always heard that this album was a great lost/overlooked American early-1970s psychedelic rock underground classic, heavily endorsed by no less than Paul Major and the late Patrick the Lama, but somehow I’d only listened to it once, and that was ten years ago, and even then it was only the first two or three songs. To be honest, it freaked me out a little too much, like seeing a ghost or being forced to stare into the sun. Too intense to continue, and I really think it’s because vocalist Billy Bill Miller sounds so much like Roky Erickson that it’s actually quite unsettling, full uncanny valley, like a weird doppelganger or warped mirror reflection of Roky that emerged in 1970 just after his 1969 institutionalization, as if Roky was controlling Miller from the asylum, singing through him via some form of psychedelic psychic possession. It doesn’t help — or perhaps helps way too much — that Miller is scarier than Roky, this being evident from the very first line of the slow-burn opener “South Texas”: “You have seen the eyes of the gecko/Staring out watching from the crack in the wall.” Yikes, and the second verse doesn’t let up: “You have heard the voice of the geckos/Tellin’ each other here comes another human (robot)/It’s a swarm of night climbin’ dragons/Crawlin’ out, searchin’, just walkin’ ‘cross the ceiling.” Fuck that noise, am I right? The band is similarly uncannily comparable to the Elevators, but where Stacy Sutherland was always at heart a country & western guitar player, with a sharp clean tone and rhythm sections that followed suit, Cold Sun frankly sound a little more like Black Sabbath, the killer guitar by one Tom McGarrigle quite distorted with acidic fuzz, and the rhythm section of Mike Waugh (bass) and Hugh Patton (drums) more rolling and tumbling and hyper, notably looser than the Elevators’ tighter cowboy funk. Add to that Miller’s frankly amazing autoharp playing which sounds to me like Alice Coltrane playing rock and roll, evident right from that “South Texas” jump, and I’ve finally gotten over my fears, 10 years later. There’s too much greatness here and I am now able to listen to it all the way through multiple times. Still a little scary, but also very enjoyable and enriching.

I’m a couple months behind on writing up this heady afternoon of live music presented by the annual Catalytic Sound Festival at the top-notch Chicago venue Constellation, so here we go, quick and dirty: first up at 2pm was the Lane Tech High School Workshop Ensemble with Ken Vandermark. Lane Tech College Prep is the selective enrollment high school on Western Avenue just four blocks north of Constellation, operational since 1908, alma mater of Edgar Bergen, DJ Colette, Theaster Gates, the mononymed comedian Godfrey (hilarious Trump impersonation), Stuart “Re-Animator” Gordon, Ken “Word Jazz” Nordine, Johnny “Tarzan” Weismuller, and Adrian Zmed himself, but for this performance it was some of the best and brightest musicians in Lane Tech’s current student jazz program volunteering their time to work with Ken Vandermark on three compositions of new music. They only had three rehearsals, but still hit it with aplomb at Constellation on this wintry Saturday afternoon in December 2025, playing long pieces that went in and out of various small-group combinations as they built to whole-group sections. Maybe a little tentative, which is very understandable considering the limited rehearsal and first-show jitters, but man, these kids can play, no worries there. Not to mention that one of the tenor sax players even sometimes put a traffic cone in the bell of his horn to distort and amplify the tone; Don Dietrich of Borbetomagus was in the audience and also a performer elsewhere in the festival — a passing of the prepared saxophone torch, perhaps?

Ikue Mori was up next, after a nice introduction by Ken Vandermark where he said that she had “reinvented music three times,” first with DNA, and also for her solo laptop work which we were about to hear . . . and I can’t for the life of me remember what the third example was. If anyone remembers, put it in the comments, please! I do remember all three of Ken’s examples being quite credible, and her laptop set that followed was indeed exquisite, shifting planes of inquiry modulating out from one to the next, sometimes percussive, sometimes drony, mostly somewhere in between, theoretical objects abutting and overlapping invisibly in theoretical space. I could only close my eyes and allow my consciousness to travel along at 87 million miles an hour, or perhaps more accurately, at a speed of one Planck Length of 1.616255×10^-87 meters divided by a Planck Time of 5.391247×10^-92 seconds (because consciousness travels within infintesimal theoretical space, not in the vastness of physical space, an inversion of infinity, and any quantum physicists out there reading who would like to rebut or clarify this quite admittedly absurd theory — please do!) Now I want to hear Mori improvising with someone else, another voice and timbre interacting with these shifting theoretical planes of inquiry, which I could’ve done the night before at the Hungry Brain when she did so in a duo with Ken Vandermark, on a bill that also included the aforementioned Don Dietrich and his partner Camille Dietrich performing as the Dietrichs, but alas, you just can’t see and hear everything, can you?

At least I got to see the next and final act of this chill and deep Saturday matinee concert — and I just want to stop here and say what a pleasure it is to catch a chill new music concert on a wintry afternoon at such a great venue in such a great city. Thank you Catalytic Sound and thank you Constellation and thank you Chicago. Even if the final act was the least chill ensemble of the afternoon, Mike Khoury’s Spite of Darkness, a visiting Detroit quartet made up of two violins (Khoury and Indira Edwards) and two trap set drummers (Ben Hall and Ali Allen Colding). Khoury and Hall were part of the Khoury/Shearer/Hall trio who put out a couple CDRs on the Public Eyesore label way way back in the very early 2000s; Hall was also in the Graveyards trio with John Olson way back in the mid/late 2000s, while Edwards on violin and Colding on drums are musicians new to me, and there’s something about a double duo of violin and drums that really piques my interest. Maybe it’s because my favorite heavy metal album of all time is the violin/bass/drums Revolutionary Ensemble album Vietnam 1 & 2 (at the peace church) as released in 1972 on ESP-Disk; the Spite of Darkness instrumentation isn’t quite the same, but they certainly brought that heavy strings-and-drums spirit, Hall and Colding getting the polyrhythmic waves breaking so that Khoury and Edwards could surf on them with melodic themes and wild improvisational extrapolations in a head/solo/solo/head format. The music was deeply inquisitive, sometimes angry, sometimes ecstatic, and always high-energy even when chill (during one segment Hall played an extended solo and it was like he was barely tapping his drums even as multiple multi-directional vortices of sound and activity filled the room).

OK, I could throw some more metaphors your way and roll it all up with an astute summary paragraph, but I don’t want to delay this further so here you are. If there were three of me, we would’ve attended every set of this 2025 edition of the Catalytic Sound Festival, including Sharon Udoh’s Potluck Sextet, the aforementioned Mori/Vandermark and Don & Camille Dietrich duos, a trio featuring Mori, Tim Daisy, and Jason Adasiewicz and another one featuring Fred Moten, Bonnie Han Jones, and Ben Hall, not to mention a solo set by Ava Mendoza. Maybe next year?

1. Google results: “toward or towards.” To put it in plain “American and Canadian English,” I’m trying to work toward(s) an understanding here . . .

2. Derek Bailey interviewed by Henry Kaiser KPFA 1989 (Full Interview). Good podcast episode, from before podcast episodes were invented…

3. Marc Masters video uploads on YouTube. In which Mr. Masters is responsible for a tab open on my phone for a second straight installment of this popular “Tabs Open On My Phone Clearinghouse” series. (Previous Masters-mentioning installment here.) This one might just have to be given perma-tab status for its treasure trove of videos shot on the Sun City Girls East Coast tour of 2004. By my count there are five full Sun City Girls shows on here (Amherst, Boston, two from NYC, and Philadelphia, not to mention Rick and Alan Bishop discussing their Sublime Frequencies video travelogue films at Anthology Film Archives in NYC), and lots of other mostly-early-21st-C. live footage from the likes of No-Neck Blues Band, Sightings, Will Oldham, Alan Licht, Eyvind Kang, more . . .

4. Dead Tank Records T-shirt shop. Damn, Christmas is coming up, folks . . . if you’re in doubt, I’ll take that dope Thin Lizzy shirt, black background, size L please . . . I also like “Strong Communities Prove Police Are Obsolete” because I believe it to be 100% true, even if not all communities are allowed to prove it. UPDATE: Christmas is no longer coming up. Do not purchase any shirts for me. Spend that money on shirts for yourself. And on a subscription to Blastitude, of course (best deal $36/year).

5. ChrisWind.com. Another discovery from the CD Esoterik podcast (episode 13), fifteen full-length albums by this indeed esoteric Canadian composer/musician. I randomly play Dreaming of Kaleidoscopes and marvel at how perfectly it would’ve played at last ish’s Record Hang as it slots so directly into that eerie Collection of the Late Howell Bend vibe . . . AudioVisions is good too, especially closing track “invisibles,” damn . . .

6. Whatever Trap Set with Joe Wong interview I’m on right now, either in the middle of, or just finished. The frequency has slowed way down, but the archives are rich. Joe is a really good interviewer.

7. I’ve been haunted by this footage of Alice Cooper playing “Eighteen” on Beat Club in 1972 ever since I saw it as an impressionable teenager on Night Flight back in the 1980s. It was the drunkest thing I’d ever seen on television, Dean Martin notwithstanding, but Alice is still able to sing his guts out with so much soul and showman’s panache and it’s great even when completely sloppy. I find the moment at the beginning when he improvises “oh mama, where are you now?? la la la la, la la la la la,” red-eyed and drunk as a skunk, to be absolutely heartbreaking.

8. Another YouTube I have to revisit once every couple years, currently open on my phone for just that reason, Huggy Bear playing “Her Jazz” on The Word in 1993. Niki Elliott is so incredible on here — the wig, the shoes, the moves, the singing just as good as it is on the record. She even sings “you and me were struck/struck by lightning, FUCK!” just like the record and it’s uncensored! And then Jo Johnson on guitar, looking like someone who probably really will drop a legendary synth album in 21 years.

9. Kraftwerk “Ruck Zuck.” Still the most amazing live clip, from 1970, before they went fahren fahren fahren auf der “Autobahn” and still had Klaus Dinger in the band bringing the punk edge on drums, a very different approach than the mighty synth pop they became famous for. (This clip from the same concert is also the greatest, with some good jokes in the comment section.)

10. Lost Weekend by Erase Errata. I really enjoy this ‘comeback’ (lol) ‘reunion’ (lol) EP that EE released in 2015. (Dang, 11 years ago? Guess it’s time for another comeback.)

11. Maaaaaassssive interview with Jim O’Rourke at toneglow.substack.com, another website densely packed with deep music thinking. This interview is nuts, Jim O not only recounting how he was visiting Derek Bailey in London at the age of 14 and playing major experimental shows in Europe at 20, but also how he was a 12-year-old ECM Records fanatic in Northwest Chicago, listening to the Panic Records & Tapes/Voidwatch crew doing their noise/collage all-nite flights on WZRD 88.3 FM (check out tracks 8-13 here) from right in his backyard at Northeastern Illinois University…

12. YouTube.com/BuzzardBrain. The home of Plague Time Television, as presented by Colour Out of Space, aka the homie Dylan Nyoukis himself…

    

13. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert. Was trying to watch this on my phone, lol. Don’t think it’s going to happen. Just me wanting to maximize my beloved Criterion Channel subscription, where watching a mere 2 or 3 films a week still gives me severe FOMO.

    

14. Louis Malle’s God’s Country. Also on the Criterion Channel, this is a phenomenal 1985 documentary film on rural midwestern America, even if (or perhaps because) it’s by an interviewer/director from Paris, France. When I watch this I see exactly when and where I grew up, even though it wasn’t exactly Glencoe, Minnesota, but a rural Iowa equivalent 350 miles due south.

15. Scrolling through photos of Carvoeiro, Portugal after reading in Rob Young’s All Gates Open that Michael Karoli of Can vacationed there in the summer of 1973 and then returned back to Köln to hole up with the rest of the band at their Inner Space recording studio and create the languid and very Carvoeiro-informed Future Days album. I love thinking about Future Days while staring at these photos, dreaming of being on those beaches and narrow village streets overlooking the mighty Atlantic Ocean. Then I Debbie Downer myself into thinking how Portugal was also the inventor of the Atlantic slave trade, and boy did they profit from it, this tiny rocky country that isn’t even as big as Indiana becoming wealthy by colonizing Brazil and enslaving Africans to do it. (Wikipedia sez: “The Portuguese, in the 16th century, were the first to engage in the Atlantic slave trade. In 1526, they completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil, and other Europeans soon followed.”)

16. James Davis on Bandcamp. Top-notch contempo rural blues from Georgia, USA, apparently released on CDR only back in 1994 (wait, did they have CDRs then?), h/t 50 Miles of Elbow Room.

17. “Flood Victim” by Windel Haye & Captain Morgan. Always love a good 12” Discomix on Studio One, where the vocal A side and the instrumental B side are mixed together into a single 6-7 minute track. This one is the B-side of “Water More Than Flour” by Johnny Osbourne.

18. Love this story, and love “Junior Dad.”

19. “Don Letts, Stratetime Keith, Steel Leg, Jah Wobble — Steel Leg v The Electric Dread - 1978 - Full EP.” Read about this record in the Trouser Press Guide entry on Jah Wobble’s solo career. (I actually went through the entire guide A-Z. Impossible to read every entry, of course, but I did read at least half, and now my brain is filled with intrusive Ira Robbins quips.) Stratetime Keith is Keith Levene, so basically a PiL side project. Haven’t listened yet, kinda scared to.

20. A Pistol Love by The Maxwell Blast on Bandcamp. Already couldn’t remember why I opened this one up, but the URL is the-new-now.bandcamp.com which I think was related to the New Now cassette compilation series on the Hallogallo label here in Chicago (aka Kai Slater from Sharp Pins). Maybe? We’ll never know because that entire Bandcamp URL has been taken down.

21. The Audion Guide to the Nurse With Wound List. This is a really great tool for music discovery and education, a recap of the famed NWW list where, for each artist, Audion suggests “the recording we believe that the artist is listed for.” Part of the larger Audion Guide to Nurse With Wound, which looks fascinating if you’re actually going to listen to Nurse With Wound. Maybe someday I actually will! (I mean, I’ve listened to two or three albums, it’s not a complete blind spot.)

22. “Henry “Hank” Cosby — Tribute to an Original Funk Brother: I Hear a Symphony.” This was a QR code I scanned at the Motown Museum when I was in Detroit back on November 1st, still open on my phone.

23. “Never So Much Seething: Twenty-Five Liner Notes and a Poem for Fugazi” by Philip Metres. Been listening to a ton of Fugazi lately, for some reason, especially Steady Diet of Nothing and In on the Kill Taker. Well, the reason is probably because they’re a completely killer band. Not sure how I ended up on this article, but it’s cool. In the 90s it would’ve been a one-off zine you’d find at a record store.

24. Fluids in Motion EP by Azu Tiwaline & Forest Drive West on Bandcamp. This is a super good electronic/dance/techno type album. It keeps algorithming its way back to me, and each time I say “who the hell is this again, it’s so good,” and when I look it’s always Fluids in Motion. Plenty of groove and swing and that sound in between . . .

25. Discord & Rhyme episode on Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, a True Star. I like A Wizard, a True Star so much that I’ve left this podcast episode where people talk about it open on my phone for months, even though none of them are Todd Rundgren, or anyone else I’ve heard of. Still haven’t listened to it.

26. “Chicago sees fewest summer murders since 1965 as Trump pushes for federal troops.” Don’t believe the American Gestapo and their swarming armies of human pigs and internet bots. Chicago leadership is doing very well on these issues, and undocumented immigrants are a 99% vital and welcome part of Chicago’s fabric, so please kindly fuck the fuck off with your federal concern-trolling false narratives that actually are ruining lives, you sick pig fucks.

27. “Opting Out of the Rot Economy” by Jay Hinman. Thanks to Jay for laying it down so simple and making it all seem possible as I continue to battle my phone every day and it continues to distract me dozens of times per hour.

28. “Required Listening: ‘Ton-Ton Macoute’.” Had no idea this record existed and that it was basically an Allman Brothers prequel until I heard “Walk On Guilded Splinters” needle-dropped during one of those dizzying History of Rock Music in 500 Songs podcast episodes (can’t even remember which one).

29. “The End of the Road: A Tour Narrative” by Allen Ravenstine. This issue’s random article from Perfect Sound Forever that I have open on my phone is some sort of autobiographical (?) fiction (?) piece by Pere Ubu electronicist Allen Ravenstine.

30. “Royal Trux interview: Glimmer Twin Infinitives” by Ed Mabe. Another random one from PSF.

31. “The Black Iron Prison” by Joshua Glenn. I keep this probably-depressing essay open on my phone mainly just to convince myself I’m intelligent enough to read it, even though I fear I may not be and probably won’t.

32. “Paul Kirchner’s The Bus (1978).” Paul Kirchner is the writer and illustrator who did the Dope Rider comic strip for High Times magazine. I knew about that, but I didn’t know about another quirky surrealist strip of his called The Bus, which he did for Heavy Metal magazine. “In every strip the mundane premise of man waiting for a bus quickly escalates in a surreal and humourous world of labyrinthine cities, weird characters or giant insects. In less than six or eight worldless panels, Kirchner turns a completely conventional situation into a world where it is impossible to refer to the usual categories of logic, scale and dimension.”

33. Tom Johnson The Voice of New Music: New York City 1972-1982 (A collection of articles originally published in The Village Voice). Stumbled across this rich archive when I was looking for stuff on Glenn Branca’s awesome short-lived band The Static, and came across Johnson’s essay on the band in which he was apologetic for deigning to write about “pop forms,” lol. You might also remember a review of this book by Alan Licht in Forced Exposure #17, which is how I learned about Tom Johnson in the first place.

34. Closing out this one, literally and figuratively, with a couple more Bandcamps: Light from a Curious Sky by Ryan McIntosh Ryan (ECM-Core from 2023!) and

35. Vol. 1 by Vampire Bluesss, from one of Doug Mosurock’s many year end lists, containing surprisingly few overlaps with my own year-end list, in a great way, and on that note don’t even get me started on Thurston Moore’s “350 Best Records of 2025,” which has a grand total of three (!) records that were also on my list. Our cups truly runneth over . . . a jug of love will not run out, and never cease to spill . . . when will it melt ICE?

The Supremes “Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart.” Our session begins informally at the home of Subject B, with Subject A and Subject B trading recent MeTV-FM bangers. House rules are visitor always goes first, but Subject A is still finding their track and defers to Subject B who plays a lesser known 1966 hit by The Supremes (#9 Pop, #7 R&B), having heard it for the first time ever just a few days earlier on MeTV. It sounds like other Supremes songs, nothing too original, but still a fine song and a nice way to ease into the hang. (And weirdly, less than two weeks after this session, the song came up again while Subject B was reading a random extensive article on Margaret Doll Rod by legendary rock biographer Jimmy McDonough as published by Nicholas Winding Refn’s weird online magazine BYNWR, wait what?)

Rocky Burnette “Tired of Toein’ the Line.” Subject A has now found their MeTV-FM banger and it is “Tired of Toein’ the Line” by Rocky Burnette. Little is known about Rocky Burnette, but the tune is nice. Subject B considers it to have a glam rock sound, and Subject A agrees that the horn refrain has a similarity to certain Roy Wood arrangements. Discussion winds its way to an internet theory that the B-52s are krautrock, and our subjects, in this Burnette-soundtracked moment, cannot fully determine whether or not this assertion might be accurate. Perhaps, perhaps not. For one, they are not German. Could they be . . . Amerikraut? (The first of this session’s references to Subject B’s recent participation as a guest host on the CD Esoterik podcast.) (Only later, off the record, does Subject B concede that Fred Schneider’s stentorian vocal style is not unlike certain krautrock moments like “Der Narr,” the opening track on Walter Wegmuller’s Tarot album, or perhaps certain songs by La Dusseldorf.)

The B-52s “Roam (vocals only).” Regardless of their status as krautrock, this mention of the B-52s inspires Subject B to play “Roam (isolated vocal version)” for their turn. Both subjects marvel at the preternatural growl of Cindy Wilson, and Subject B posits that Wilson’s harmony singing with Kate Pierson is “like, Roches level.”

The Beatles “Rain (Take 5/Actual Speed).” For their turn, Subject A riffs on Subject B’s own isolated vocal track move with “Rain (Take 5/Actual Speed)” by the Beatles, which had an internet moment circa 2023 for both subjects when mutual social media friend Marc Masters posted about its surprisingly ripping tempo, which set off a nice 50-60 comment conversation among various underground rock cognoscenti slumming it on social media platforms.

Collection of the Late Howell Bend “Ruby in the Dust,” “Dominated by Splendor.” Back to Subject B, who plays the entire first side of the Beasts For While 11” [sic] LP by Collection of the Late Howell Bend, released in 2010. Both marvel at the distant spectral haunt and eeriness of the prime Tallahassee-era C-of-the-L-H-B sound (Moon/Dorsey/Davis trio lineup). Subject B confesses a recent obsession with the group, after not listening to them at all for at least 10 years. Without intention, Side A of Beasts For While became the theme for the night, the orbit that a few of the following records seemed to get pulled into and/or the hazy distant light around which small weird metaphorical musical moths continued to hover.

Absurd Cosmos Late Nite “Dental Records,” “Nite Sweats.” So inspired, Subject A plays the first small weird metaphorical moth, a strange nocturnal window-bleared vision of ambient music from Australia, with conversational vocal mutterings over the top that could be described as “spoken word,” or at this stage of the 21st Century, “AMSR.” This is from a 2CD archival release called 2016-17 on the Index Clean label, compiling and reissuing the project’s first three cassette-only releases (Absurd Cosmos Late Nite, the source of these two tracks, as well as The White Drifters and Lost Wages, all from 2016), and adding two live performances.

Janis Martin “Drugstore Rock’n’Roll,” “Let’s Elope Baby.” Somehow during the Absurd Cosmos Late Nite listen the topic changed, welcomely, to Janis Martin. Subject B had never heard of her before, and learned from Subject A that she was a 1950s rockabilly singer from the rugged and rural hills of western Virginia who became known as “the female Elvis.” Both of these songs rip.

Jamaladeen Tacuma “Rhythm of Your Mind,” “Naima,” “Rhythm of Your Mind (live on VH-1).” The turn went back to Subject B and they chose this recent vinyl purchase from Hyde Park Records. The relative mold-smell of Subject B’s purchases at Hyde Park led both subjects onto a small tangent griping about the quirks of various local Chicago record stores (though both quickly conceded that they were only griping out of love, like one might gripe about family members, and had no intention to stop shopping at these ultimately beloved local haunts), but they got back on track with Subject B’s sharing of the real reason they had bought the Tacuma album in the first place: a ripping live duo performance of the album’s “Rhythm of Your Mind” track from VH-1, as archived on YouTube. (All of which was already written about here.)

Fanny s/t, “Beat Club 1971.” Back to Subject A who shares their current obsession with the all-female American hard rock group Fanny, founded in 1970 by Filipina-American sisters June and Jean Millington on guitar and bass and produced by a young pre-Carly Simon pre-Pointer Sisters Richard Perry. Subject A decides the admittedly slick production of Fanny’s 1970 self-titled debut LP leaves a bit to be desired and calls an audible, shifting gears into the much more raw and all-the-way live Beat Club performance from 1971. Here pianist/singer/songwriter Nickey Barclay asserts as a bandleader in her own right, belting out hard blues rock vocals while hammering down the barrelhouse piano.

Ron Hardy “Live at the Muzic Box, 1985.” Subject B had just played an excerpt of this full Ron Hardy DJ set from the mind-blowing Gridface archive while guesting on the CD Esoterik podcast; this guest appearance was later that month published by the whole Esoter-sick crew as Episode 12, but Subject B just had to use this next turn to share the same excerpt with someone sitting in the same room instead of virtually on Zoom (not that the latter wasn’t also very fun). Both subjects were in awe of Hardy’s original ugly edit of “No Way Back” by the Dells, taking a mere 30 seconds from the track’s intro and turning it into at least 6 minutes of deeper-than-Bohannon hall-of-mirrors grind-funk-mantra hypno-resonance. They were also in awe of how Hardy segues into this deep “No Way Back” meditation from Loleatta Holloway’s proto-diva “Hit and Run” and out of it into a stunning Kraftwerk-worshipping all-instrumental edit of “Music is the Key” by J.M. Silk. (Timestamp of excerpt in the linked Mixcloud is roughly 12:20 to 26:10.)

Steve “Silk” Hurley “Jack Your Body.” Subject A allowed Subject B to play one more track in order to further exemplify deep Chicago house. Out of the dozens of fantastic tracks that could have been chosen, Subject B went with the admittedly obvious “Jack Your Body” for two reasons. One, they had just seen a copy of the 12” for $10 during the aforementioned Hyde Park Records dig and kinda wished they’d bought it, and two, while listening to Ron Hardy they were talking about Hardy’s legendary ability to work his Muzic Box constituency into a dance floor frenzy, which naturally led to discussion of the 1980s Chicago dance trend known as “jacking,” that is “a freestyle dance move in which the dancer ripples their torso back and forth in an undulating motion” that “emerged within the context of Chicago house music in the 1980s.” (Thanks, Wikipedia.) Oh yeah, and because “Jack Your Body” is awesome, a perennial obvious choice for that reason. Played, but never played out.

C.R. Odette Millett Sway. Back to Subject A who shifted things back into the theme that had been established by Collection of the Late Howell Band and Absurd Cosmos Late Nite, essentially blurry and spooky late-night dream-haze, by playing this killer weird tape from the present-day Detroit underground that was released in 2023 on Ginkgo Records. Subject B tells Subject A that they’ll be going to Detroit in less than one month and were already planning on stopping by the recently opened Ginkgo Records shop, and that they have now decided to buy their own copy of Millett Sway when they get there. All of which does come to pass, but at the time of the record hang in question, lives entirely in the future, as does this succinct description of Millett Sway: “20 minutes of solo misterioso repetitive tape-fogged keyboard playing.”

XV s/t LP. Delving further into the Ginkgo Records connection, Subject B pulls out their copy of the debut album by XV, a band in which Ginkgo Records proprietor Shelley Salant plays bass. They listen to all of side one. It seems that the music of XV is more rewarding of close attention than Subject B had realized; in fact, it almost seems to require it. As an accompaniment to conversation, it almost sounds like bashing and undifferentiated noise; only when paying close attention does one follow the surprising intricacies of their (mostly? entirely?) improvised punk rock.

Olivia Block The Mountains Pass. Back to Subject A who keeps to the theme of eerie cinematic keyboards and female vocals by selecting a new (April 2024) album by Olivia Block, also a longtime part of the Chicago creative music scene, The Mountains Pass being her first album on Oren Ambarchi’s esteemed Black Truffle label, with its chilly and beautiful opening track “Northward” leading into side one closer, the 12-minute epic “The Hermit’s Peak.” Both subjects agree that this is a really good album.

Equipment Pointed Ankh Without Human Permission. Midnight approaches and our subjects are yawning. Not only are they tired, they are weary, and could sleep for a thousand years. It is decided that each will take one last turn by requesting something from the other. For Subject B’s final turn, Subject A asks to hear a band that they had previously only read about in Blastitude, the mighty Equipment Pointed Ankh of the Kentuckiana metropolitan region. Subject B heads to the main stacks and pulls the LP that started their own EPA obsession, the 2022 release Without Human Permission, skipping the false-start opener “French Holland” and hitting the central core of Side A, “Blue Folding Room,” “Rainforest Cotillion,” and “Olympics III.” Subject A immediately digs it, while Subject B assures them that the EPA has only gotten better since 2022 (yo you gotta check out their new one from 2025, Eggs a Little Late — ed.).

Claire Potter & Bridget Hayden I Am Come From a Place. So many wonderful choices still remaining in Subject A’s bag, perhaps most notably the 2025 Waxwork Records 2LP edition of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre OST, but Subject B chooses this 2018 cassette release by Claire Potter and Bridget Hayden on the well-sought Fort Evil Fruit label, mainly for a final example of the night’s theme. It immediately fits the bill perfectly with strange female spoken word (“throughout the morning the hillside is deserted . . . the plastic white lounges are empty, their parasols collapsed . . .”) over bending electronics and what sounds like it could be distant pipe organ improvisation. They listen to side one in full as it drags them deeper into its haunted light . . . no longer yawning . . . their eyes begin to glaze and glow . . .

. . . and that is where the manuscript trails off. Subject A and Subject B were never heard from again.

See the original Anatomy of a Record Hang installment from October of 2019 by clicking here.

Great Chicagoan alert: Check out historian Shermann “Dilla” Thomas answering the question “why is it so many abandoned homes in Chicago neighborhoods?,” also useful in understanding various situations we looked at in Detroit a month ago. “You live in these type of neighborhoods you can’t get business loans. A neighborhood that can’t get business loans can’t get jobs. You can’t get jobs, shorties gonna trap. When the shorties trap, you got crime. And that’s why the houses look like this in Englewood.” In addition to his informative social media presence, 6 Figga Dilla also gives in-person historical neighborhood tours as Chicago Mahogany Tours.

Great Poet Alert: when Don Van Vliet as Captain Beefheart sings “I look at her and she looks at me/And in her eyes I see the sea,” well, I think that’s really beautiful. It almost brought me to tears just now. For the next line he drops the intensity and goes for self-deprecating laughs by continuing to play with the word “see,” singing “I can’t see what she sees in a man like me," and then rounds out the verse with a final “She says she loves me,” which I also find a little heartbreaking because by including “she says” he implies that he doesn’t necessarily believe “she loves me” as absolute truth. Then, all deliberation is waylaid by that unbelievable holy chorus statement (I really do consider Don Van Vliet to be one of the great American poets of the 20th Century): “Her eyes/Yeah, her eyes/Her eyes are a blue million miles.” That’s pretty much all of the lyrics, those few lines repeated and resequenced, along with a single one-line four-bar bridge, also a bit heartbreaking: “Far as I can see/She loves me.” He just never sounds convinced that Miss Blue Million Miles loves him as much as he loves her. Also heartbreaking is his emotive voice, just one of the best rock’n’roll singers ever, and that sweet/moody/delicate Harkleroad/Boston/Estrada/Tripp ensemble accompaniment.

If you have any interest in Phoenix AZ punk rock, Placebo Records, Sun City Girls, or JFA, go take a listen right now to both episodes of the Burning Nerve Ending Magic Podcast in which Placebo Records proprietor Tony “Victor" Beram is interviewed. Fascinating stuff, including this quote where Tony gives his long view on world issues and what a Sun City Girls interpretation thereof might be like if they were starting now instead of in the 1980s: “As far as them mirroring the craziness of the United States or the world, I think it doesn’t matter if you’re sitting in 1982 or you’re sitting here in 2025, things are always close to falling apart, and then you find yourself 50 years later and they really haven’t fallen apart. I guess if you look at something close enough — if you take a magnifying glass and you look into the grains of wood, you’ll see a lot of chaos if you look close enough, but then if you focus even further into it you’ll see order and then you focus even more and it’ll be chaotic again. So pick your layer and live in it.”

OK, OK, finally someone is making fun of Werner Herzog without making fun of Werner Herzog at all. Bravo to maestro Paul F. Tompkins. This was unexpectedly the hardest I’ve laughed at a YouTube in at least 10 years. All those Key & Peele vids are now tied for 2nd place.

Welcome back to another edition of “WTF Did Neil Young Just Sing?” The perennial preeminent example is of course, “Tell me why/tell me why/is it hard to make arrangements with yourself/when you’re old enough to repay but young enough to sell?,” but today we’ll be taking a look at a single stanza from the haunting closing ballad “We Never Danced” on the weirdly produced and understandably disliked 1987 album Life: “Between heaven and earth/there’s a fallen floor/where the couples glide/in the evermore.” I hear that drift by and I’m like, “wtf did Neil Young just say?,” but Google tells me he actually sings “ballroom floor” instead of “fallen floor,” which totally makes sense but certainly reduces the poetic heft a bit. (And P.S., speaking of Neil, just wanted to grab this unrelated quote for unrelated mulling from Shakey on the influence of Sgt. Pepper: “In the long run it had a negative effect, ‘cause it made us all into record producers and geniuses and we really should’ve just been in the band playing.”) (And P.P.S., one more NY tidbit, just had to share that my “shuffle all Neil Young” setting finally yielded what was meant to happen since “shuffle all” was first invented by computer scientists back in the 1960s [citation needed — ed.], that being “Will to Love” from American Stars ‘n’ Bars and “Lotta Love” from Comes a Time were just played back to back, Neil’s two great 1970s “la-la-la-la” songs with “love” in the title.)

Rube Goldberg, Carol Channing, Dian Fossey, Bill Bixby, hip hop artist Paris, and Margaret Cho all went to the same high school, which was Lowell High School in San Francisco, CA, but that ain’t nothin’ compared to Susan Miller Dorsey High School in Los Angeles, CA, where David Axelrod, Charles Bukowski, Eric Dolphy, Robert Irwin, Arthur goddamn Lee and Johnny Echols, Mike Love, Marilyn McCoo, Billy Preston, and Jody Watley all attended.

I’ve decided that Cindy and Horsegirl need to go on a two-month-long 1980s USHC SST Records style tour. It’d be the (vaguely aforementioned) 1984 JFA/SCG US/Canada tour of this generation. I also can’t believe that Free Advice by Cindy is already from 2020, and even the Horsegirl debut Versions of Modern Performance is already from an increasingly distant 2022. And even though I really like Horsegirl’s second album Phonetics On and On (2025) and saw them play a great show featuring a whole lot of those songs at Chicago’s Pritzker Pavilion this past summer, I still like their debut even more. It’s just a little more youthful and perhaps even a little more facile (in a good-nay-great way), with a whole lot more glorious guitar noise gaze/wash than the spiky clean-tone approach they’re going for on Phonetics.

And finally, reminder that this currently exists on the internet:

And finally finally, the Four Full Flutes stuff and specifically “Winterbloom Too” is/are probably my favorite Phill Niblock piece(s) on a strictly musical level:

Hey, I’ve done four of these year-end lists in a row now. Consistency and discipline are my middle names. It started in 2022, when I made a list with no descriptions and then added a guest list by Shawn David McMillen where the actual rock writing got done, and goddamn did he tear it up or what? So good, go read it, or re-read it, right now. I did lists in 2023 and 2024 too, no guests, and here’s the latest for 2025, still no guests, essentially a holiday clip show at this point, where I just recap most of the year’s records I managed to review. But other stuff sneaks in there too, as you’ll see. In order of release date:

SPECTRE FOLK Quabbin Winter (ARBITRARY SIGNS/SOPHOMORE LOUNGE) (January 3rd) Remember fellow rock critics, when making our year-end lists, let’s not forget the records that were released back in January, in this case as early in the year as January 3rd. In fact, I probably listened to this shaggy swaggy loose (mostly-)one-man-VU psych-jammer more in 2024 than I did in 2025 (advance copy, ya know), enough that it even got mentioned on last year’s list. Time to get it back out. Original review here.

EMILY ROBB Live at Jerry’s (NO LABEL) (January 5th) Original review here, all the way at the very end of the piece. To quote myself: “. . . sounding more ‘VU boot’ than ever, using a loop pedal to be both Sterling and Lou . . .”

WILLIE LANE Bobcat Turnaround (CORD-ART) (February 19th) Original review here, one of my favorites of these favorites.

MULTIVERSES/MULTIDIMENSIONAL COWBOY Spring Morning at Pepe’s (TYMBAL TAPES) (April 17th) Lincoln NE keeps keeping on, original review here.

NATURAL INFORMATION SOCIETY & BITCHIN BAJAS Totality (DRAG CITY) (April 25th) Original review here, and I’ll bet the other Natural Information Society release from 2025, Perseverance Flow on Eremite, should go on here too — but I haven’t heard it yet.

JERRY DeCICCA Cardiac Country LP (SOPHOMORE LOUNGE) (April 25th) Original review here. Sometimes a guy singing and playing simple/patient/heady contemporary country tunes on a guitar is all you need. Especially when the legend B.J. Cole is sitting in on pedal steel, Red Rhodes-ing and Ben Keith-ing his way through pure vistas of dreamtone.

A SINGLE OCEAN s/t (SHMEE) (May 2nd) Originally mentioned here as part of 2025’s fabled “ECM-Core Watch 2025” piece.

MAZOZMA Bathing in the Stone (SOPHOMORE LOUNGE) (May 16th) Original review here. Really love this one and the slow-stone earth-time way its enigmatic folk-song meditations roll out.

MARSHALL ALLEN’S GHOST HORIZONS Live in Philadelphia (OTHERLY LOVE/ARS NOVA) (May 23rd) Listening to Sun Ra Arkestra guitarist DM Hotep interviewed on the Transmissions podcast a couple weeks ago was how I learned (or was reminded) this album had gotten released in 2025, excerpts from a series of recent-past shows in Philadelphia where Arkestra bandleader Marshall Allen, limited in ability to tour by his corporeal centenarian age, stayed home and played a series of loose improvised concerts with revolving guest musicians, including Wolf Eyes, who sound great on two tracks (“Back to You” and “Warn Them”). That’s who got my attention, but almost every track on here has a different lineup; Allen is also joined by no less than Luke Stewart, Chad Taylor, Tcheser Holmes, William Parker, James Brandon Lewis, Mikel Patrick Avery, and several Arkestra members as well (including Michael Ray who tore it up on trumpet in between Kool & the Gang tours during that extremely choice Lanquidity etc. run by the original Arkestra in the late 70s/early 80s). It also has “Square the Circle,” in which a power trio of Allen on sax/synth/electronics/vocals with James McNew from Yo La Tengo on bass and Charlie Hall from The War on Drugs on drums play some of the most killer tranced-out American Krautrock of 2025.

NUKE WATCH “Wait For It…” (IMPATIENCE) (May 23rd) Original review here, also part of “ECM-Core Watch 2025.” Frankly not ECM-Core, but it’s also not any other one thing, like, at all, so put it wherever you want and let it braindance the night away like no one is watching.

PHI-PSONICS Everything is Possible (GONDWANA) (May 23rd) Also part of “ECM-Core Watch 2025,” specifically one of the very best currently doing that modal/ambient/spiritual thing going on in L.A. lately. (Scott McDowell at his Jazz Realities substack calls it “Gorp Jazz,” but yo, that’s an even worse name than ECM-Core! More focused description and primer though, thanks Scott!)

JEFFREY ALEXANDER & THE HEAVY LIDDERS Synchronous Orbit (CARDINAL FUZZ/FEEDING TUBE) (June 13th) Tried to get a review of this done last ish, but got hung up on trying to find a Joe Carducci quote that may not actually exist, a beautiful Carduccian concept in which the art of jamming is how rock music creates its surplus value. I even sat down and skimmed through all 424 pages of Rock and the Pop Narcotic and still couldn’t find it. (Calling all Carduccians out there, if you’ve got a citation with page number, please leave it in the comments below.) Just wanted to bolster my point that Jeffrey Alexander & the Heavy Lidders are some of underground rock’s most unapologetic and effective jammers that we have left in this day and age, and are creating a rich and wealthy surplus value thereof over many releases and tours. This album from 2025 has three long tracks, breezy sunny folk-pop giving way to the jam on side A, and a side-longer on the B where the Heavy Lidders are joined by saxophonist Isaiah Collier, pulling that Branford-with-the-Dead move quite well.

A MAGIC WHISTLE The Solar Cell (LAMPSPEOPLE UNIVERSAL/PUBLIC EYESORE) (July 13th) Original review here, from a mere two weeks ago. This one was released in July but my complimentary review copy had been hiding halfway back in the ‘On Deck 1A’ pile for a few months until I finally put it on three weeks ago and it surprised the hell out of me. I thought Andy Puls aka A Magic Whistle was someone I’d never heard of, who came from out of nowhere with “the synth/folk LP of the year 2025 A.D.,” but it turns out I used to see him play crazy sets all the time over 20 years ago in Chicago with his band Neon Hunk. They lived in Milwaukee and were essentially a Chicago local band during that noise/now wave/rainbow rock heyday circa 2001-2003. Another full circle moment for us lifers . . .

RYAN DAVIS & THE ROADHOUSE BAND New Threats From The Soul (SOPHOMORE LOUNGE) (July 25th) Original review here. Everyone from Time Magazine to Rolling Stone to The Economist (?) have sung this record’s praises. I’ll even quote Rolling Stone because one J. Blistein was quite on point about what RD’s songs do and comment on: “It’s a mammoth meditation on fleeting success and failure’s shadow, the existential agony and malaise caused when expectation and reality collide.” Not to mention that the band and arrangements are superb as they comfortably take almost every song into the 8-12 minute range.

OREN AMBARCHI, JOHAN BERTHLING & ANDREAS WERLIIN Ghosted III (DRAG CITY) (August 29th) For me this was the year of Ghosted, or Ghosted, or I guess I should say the Oren Ambarchi/Johan Berthling/Andreas Werliin trio, who have now released three albums, Ghosted I in 2022, Ghosted II in 2024, and this one from this year, Ghosted III. I discovered the first one this year, even though it was released in 2022, and then quickly caught up with the other two, all of one rarefied experimental/ambient/jazz/world/groove piece and basically a triple LP. (For the record, I think the II is the best one.) (Oh yeah, original review here, also from a mere two weeks ago.)

SARAH CLAUSEN With Many Hands (EMPTY STAGE) (September 1st) Dedicated readers may remember a little something I wrote about seeing Chicago saxophonist/etc Sarah Clausen play a great set a couple years ago, and learning that she was working on an album; well just this morning, 5 days before press-time, I learned from Leor Galil’s “best overlooked Chicago records of 2025” in the Chicago Reader that she had completed said album, and that it was released on September 1st. And man, it’s very good. Still largely driven by saxophone and real-time looping/sampling/processing, but different than the set I saw (or is it?), something more like thick ethereal noise ambient (or is it?), with very striking vocals on two tracks. This doesn’t sit comfortably in any obvious genre, and that’s always a good thing.

ORCUTT SHELLEY MILLER s/t (SILVER CURRENT) (September 5th) Original review here. I was in a bit too jokey of a mood when I wrote that one, as this is a serious album with some serious jamming (yes, plenty of guitar/bass/drums surplus value created here as well). I particularly love how Ethan Miller uses the bass to drive the jams, not only rhythmically in tandem with Steve Shelley but also harmonically and melodically so that Bill Orcutt can rip pure energy and extrapolation. This is the record that got released so far, but one gets the sense that any of the many shows they’ve played in 2025 could’ve been just as much of a record, offering just as much surplus value. Anyone wanna tape trade? Can I send you blanks & postage?

SHUTARO NOGUCHI & THE ROADHOUSE BAND (SOPHOMORE LOUNGE/FEEDING TUBE) (October 17th) The Roadhouse Band strikes again, this time with original Equipment Pointed Ankh member Shutaro Noguchi stepping to the forefront for an incredible album that takes us on an epic journey through Tori Kudo appreciation, Amerikraut Trucker-Funk, Wyatt-worthy scat-singing, city pop melodicism, and probably even more, as if any more was needed. Our cups runneth over! Oh, original review here.

WEDNESDAY KNUDSEN Atrium (FEEDING TUBE/SPINSTER) (October 24th) Original review here, also from that fabled last issue where a lot of year-end business got settled. It’s funny, if you dig back into Shawn David McMillen’s Best of 2022 writings linked above, you’ll read his praise of Knudsen’s 2022 CD release Soft Focus Volumes One and Two, which was also the subject of a profile on Knudsen in the February 2023 issue of Maggot Brain (#11, young Pharoah Sanders on the cover). Reckless had a copy last week and I’m playing it right now. It’s not quite as laser-refined, but you can really hear her carving out the lush spectral territory that is fully inhabited on Atrium. It’s only been three years b/w so much happens in three years.

UNCHAINED Frontalier (STERN RECORDS) (October 24th) One more that you can read all about last ish.

JIM WHITE & ZOH AMBA “Grand Central/I Don’t Do” (DRAG CITY) (October 24th) I love how Matt Korvette, Vish Kanna, and myself, Larry “Fuzz-O” Dolman, have all separately declared “Grand Central/I Don’t Do” from the Jim White album Inner Day, featuring Zoh Amba on co-lead vocals, to be our favorite song of 2025. Surely others have declared this too, or will soon enough. Please do watch the official music video embedded above for the proper experience. The rest of the album, it’s all just keyboard sketches, and . . . I don’t know. As of now, I do not do. I think Korvette described it very well in his record review column linked above: “…he doesn’t sound particularly rehearsed, or that he considered what he would be playing before he started playing it. His synths wander, and the drums tend to follow like an off-leash dog on an empty trail, running up ahead, lagging behind, mostly just sniffing around.”

NATURAL INFORMATION SOCIETY Perseverance Flow (EREMITE) (October 24th) Yep, had to check it out quick, nine days before press-time, and see if it belonged on here, and . . . I think it does. Weird one, though. New direction for them, more mechanical and synthetic and robotic than the previous albums, and it oddly seems to be coming mostly from Lisa Alvarado’s harmonium, but also from Joshua Abrams’s sparse electro/echo “dubs” (as they are credited). There’s also a section from roughly minute 23 to minute 29 when Abrams’s guimbri kind of goes off the rails rhythmically, and I can’t tell if he’s boldly intentionally going off or if the piece wasn’t fully locked in yet. I honestly think this version captured live at Roulette in NYC on October 13th is even better than the record that was officially released 11 days later, more relaxed and spacious at least (“Perseverance Flow” starts at roughly minute 42 and pretty much goes for a whole hour itself, but man the whole entire video including opening act Kalia Vandever and the NIS version of Coltrane’s “Naima” is worth your time). Either way, I woke up the next morning with this thing still blasting in my head, long may it perseverate and flow.

NATASHA PIRARD Fernande, Cecile (DEEWEE) (November 24th) This one’s only been out a couple weeks as I write, so this is my first review. Cosmic melancholic elegaic mother-goddess synth composition by an “experimental electronic musician based in Ghent, Belgium,” dedicated by Pirard to her mother and grandmother.

EQUIPMENT POINTED ANKH Eggs a Little Late (PETTY BUNCO) (November 28th) The Roadhouse Band strikes again, for the third time on this list, although here appearing in their original experimental research & development guise as Equipment Pointed Ankh. (At least that’s how I took the liberty to describe them in my guest appearance on the CD Esoterik podcast back in September, an auspicious event that should also be mentioned in this year-end clip-show.) Yet another last-minute add, as it was released on November 28th and I first listened to it on December 12th, only 9 days before publication time. Of course Eggs a Little Late needed a chance to be on this list; Equipment Pointed Ankh are one of my favorite bands, Petty Bunco one of my favorite labels, and Max M over at the Philadelphia Record Exchange IG account, who would know, did call it the best Equipment Pointed Ankh yet. After only two back-to-back listens, with many more to come, I would have to agree. Not only their best, but their most expansive, relaxed, and spacious work yet. How much can be going on with a record when you say that it’s like a Faust/Caravan library-music team-up but with more lap steel guitar and occasional guest vocals by Kathy Morton of “A Letter from Home” and/or Lydia Tomkiw from Algebra Suicide, and still have all of that be far too inadequate to describe it? Spectral math, perhaps?? (You’ll have to listen to track two to get that last reference.)

OK that’s it for now. This space reserved for me to come back from the future when you’re not looking and update with the inevitable best of 2025 releases I haven’t heard or even heard of yet. (Walnut Brain Weird Wire and KeiyaA hooke’s law so far . . . oh hey, add Joy Guidry’s exquisite Five Prayers to the list.) Thanks for all the music, world. Thanks for the whole world, music. Thanks to you for reading today, and thanks to you who have read all year. Thanks to all of you who subscribe, and huge thanks to all of you who pay to subscribe. ($5 a month or $36 a year = $3 a month = cheap!) Happy Holidays, Happy New Year.

A MAGIC WHISTLE The Solar Cell LP (LAMPSPEOPLE UNIVERSAL/PUBLIC EYESORE) In which someone I hadn’t heard of before named Andy Puls drops the synth/folk LP of the year 2025 A.D. There was a time when a record like this might have been called by the cringe-term folktronica, but even for music so clearly built from the folktronica two-step cocktail of solo electronics + solo guitar, and recorded in “a small hut in the Cascade Mountains of northernmost California” no less, that rightfully disparaged term is fully inadequate here. The record is called The Solar Cell, the name Puls records under is A Magic Whistle, and the highly musical compositions and miniatures within (there are 21 tracks and 14 are less than two minutes long) are too bold to rest passively within any cheekily-named subgenre in which synths merely add genteel electro-burble to guitar-based folk music. The synths here take the lead with mini-symphonic chord changes and melodies, always played with a non-bucolic nerded-out and even slightly aggro edge, augmented further by superb guitar overdubs that bring out the more earthy and human harmonic possibilities from the less forgiving electronics. In addition to “acoustic and electric guitars,” there is an instrument built by Puls called the “Cascadian sympathetic steel guitar” . . . he also credits “home-made sequencers and synthesizers” . . . and would you believe Puls also built the aforementioned small hut where all of this instrument-building and album-recording takes place, pictured abstractly on the front cover, photographically on the back, and called, like the album itself, the Solar Cell? “My studio workshop hut is just a tiny little space, 8ftx12ft, on our property, which is off-grid itself. When you are in the Cell, you can’t help but experience the natural world around you. It is like a little space capsule, with a big circular window facing out into the canyon,” says Puls in an interview/article by Brad Rose on Foxy Digitalis where you can read more about all of this and see more photos. But most importantly, please get this album and listen to it. Don’t worry, I’ll remind you again in two weeks when the Blastitude Best of 2025 issue hits your inbox . . .

WEDNESDAY KNUDSEN Atrium 2LP (FEEDING TUBE/SPINSTER) In which Wednesday Knudsen makes a double LP of true 21st Century ECM-core. Seriously though, I can’t help but think of the ECM label when listening to Atrium and its hauntingly austere and exploratory reeds/flute/more multitracking, both improvisational and compositional, but this is a very deep record in other ways and deserves more than a cheekily named subgenre tag (I did that in the previous Magic Whistle review too — bad habit). For example, the reeds playing that kicks off the album with “Fair Aegis” comes more from minimalism than ECM, from a post-Arkbro or even Niblockian space, and the choral wordless vocals I suddenly think I’m hearing in track five “Conversation, Chaconne” are in fact so wordless and blended with the other instrumentation that I start to wonder if there have been vocals throughout the first four tracks as well, and that I just haven’t evolved into hearing them yet. Those are the kind of depths we’re working with here . . .

OREN AMBARCHI/JOHAN BERTHLING/ANDREAS WERLIIN Ghosted LP (DRAG CITY); Ghosted II LP (DRAG CITY); Ghosted III LP (DRAG CITY) This month’s winner of the “Album that Popped Up on the Shitify Algoshitm That Was So Good I Immediately Went and Purchased a Copy at My Local Record Store Instead of Listening to it on Shitify” award goes to Ghosted on Drag City, a rarefied improvisational groove setting played by a normal-appearing trio of guitar (Oren Ambarchi), acoustic bass (Johan Berthling), and acoustic drums (Andreas Werliin), slowly and patiently unspooling and simmering in an ambient (mostly) acoustic world/jazz style. Ambarchi’s electric guitar takes the form of abstract ambient electronics (I didn’t recognize it as a guitar for at least 5 or 6 listens and only after finally reading the credits) in a sort of subdued-(Keith)Rowe tabletop style, like soft light flickering, or the use of light color by painters. Props also to Werliin on the trap kit, keeping the groove rooted and locked but also bringing constant subtle extrapolation and syncopation, plenty of “that sound in between.” And finally, props to the eerie (yet basketball-themed) street photography on the cover. But wait! This record review ain’t over yet: the Ambarchi/Berthling/Werliin trio has actually made two more of these records now with the addition of Ghosted II from 2024 and Ghosted III from 2025, both also on Drag City, and it’s so welcome to hear their patience and focus as they stay in the exact same acoustic/ambient/groove lane, the way Berthling locks into bass ostinatos and holds on tight, which lets Werliin do that aforementioned extrapolasynco thing (a portmanteau I just coined, though it admittedly may not catch on), the two of them implying soil which implies sunshine which allows Ambarchi’s gently unfolding guitaristics to grow and every now and then flower into unforeseen ripples. Every time it happens, it feels like suddenly briefly understanding entire phrases in a new language. POSTSCRIPT: Just before presstime, I’ve learned that Berthling and Werliin are the rhythm section for saxophonist Mats Gustafsson’s group Fire!, who have made many full-length records themselves over the last two decades, including one from 2012 called In the Mouth — a Hand that includes Oren Ambarchi in the group as co-producer and guitarist, a full ten years before these sans-Gustafsson Ghosted sessions started happening, the rabbithole becoming a veritable warren. Believe me, I’m going down and in — but not in this record review.

BALANCE Live at the Congregation (NO LABEL) This is the second BlastLetter in a row where I’m mentioning the Detroit jazz duo Balance and an article about them by Ana Gavrilovska that was published in Maggot Brain #16. What I didn’t say about Gavrilovska’s article last issue is that within she describes attending a live performance by Balance at “the Congregation, a restaurant-venue that has maintained the original architecture of the former church it now occupies, including those blessed ceilings and a 150-year-old organ. For this show, the duo decided to bring along their electronics on a whim.” “The additions that night were fairly minimal, mainly consisting of a synthesizer with a sequencer and delay/looper pedals…” “…they recorded that set at the Congregation, and it turned out so well that they plan to do a digital release.” This is that release, recorded in December 2023 and released as a digital album in April 2024, indeed a new development in the duo’s sound, as their first two albums were strictly acoustic and real-time; on Live at the Congregation the duo of Michael Malis and Marcus Elliot still play their usual respective piano and saxophone, but the addition of the aforementioned electronics and time-distorting overdub-approximating loops is a whole other level, especially when the performance remains fully improvised. Hard not to think of what Jeff Parker and Josh Johnson are doing with loops and delays in the ETA IVtet and the influence thereof, but Live at the Congregation still fully sounds like Balance, still hanging out in deep jazz/gospel zones as on “Chorale” or “Single Petal of Rose” (the latter by Duke Ellington, the only non-improvised piece on here), but also getting into wild modular synth that could have grown in Alvin Curran’s Giardino Magnetico as on “When We Come Home” and “To the Source.”

COFFIN PRICK “Side Splits” LP (SOPHOMORE LOUNGE) Crazy new(-ish) record I forgot I had in the stacks alert: a compilation of Coffin Prick remixes by no less a weird wrecking crew than (in sequential order) YoshimiO (crazy tribal tom-tom drumming as would befit the drummer from The Boredoms), Ian Williams/Battles (very deconstructed weird rhythm track but the original chord changes from the song “Laughing” do fight their way through), Ed Sunspot (the bass line and some vocal snatches from the original synth-pop dirge “Rusty Lemonade” remain and a lounge/exotica bongo/theremin trip is built around them), John Herndon, Melt Banana, Gel Set, Tim Kinsella, Dan Bitney (the two remixes contributed by Tortoise members Herndon and Bitney are really good, Bitney’s take on “Swimming” transforming the original into something more like funky dungeon synth, with the use of a nasty vocoder on the vocals that really brings this whole Mecht Mensch/Mechanical Man thing full circle), Shit and Shine, Dream_Mega, Beau Wanzer, and Roadhouse (Roadhouse being Ryan Davis solo, the “small, mobile, intelligent unit” version of the Roadhouse Band).

UNCHAINED Frontalier (STERN RECORDS) Damn, Nate Davis aka Unchained really did tap into his inner Marcus Miller with this one, just like I suggested he do in my “ECM-Core Watch (2025)” piece from three months ago. But hey, Frontalier was surely in the can before that piece was published, and I was of course 90% joking, though 10% of any joke is that hard kernel of truth within, and the hard truths here are that I do love the ECM label, think Marcus Miller is a bad-ass, and I’m digging what’s happening here on the new Unchained album Frontalier, even (especially?) if it’s a little smoother and slicker than the previous Unchained album Gabbeh. In fact, Frontalier might mark the full-circle moment where we’ve gone from underground heads scorning smooth jazz in the ‘90s, to liking/playing it ironically in the ‘00s and 10’s, to liking/playing it with zero irony as on Frontalier in 2025. The definition of the French word frontalier is “habitant d’une région frontière,” or “inhabitant of a border region,” and the border region here is where jazz, post-punk, experimental, smooth, slick, cheesy, raw, and home-recorded all hang out together. Dig how the tracks are built over simple drum machine patterns (on side one at least) for that lo-tech home-recorded vibe, use traditional supper-club jazz-guitar chord changes and solo licks for that no-longer-ironic smooth/slick/cheese vibe, and then how those changes and licks inevitably start splitting off from each other like small tree-branch systems through the magic of multitracking for that experimental/improvisational/fractal vibe. A layered experience, one might say.

From Gingko Records/27th Letter Books it was a pretty quick drive past Sacred Site #8, the Grande Ballroom, still standing but completely unused like so many buildings in Detroit are — but of course that would happen when an infrastructure built for 1.85 million (1950 census) ends up housing only 645 thousand (2024 estimate). I stood outside and took the obligatory photos while easily imagining in total awe the jams of the MC5 kicked out and pulsing through the brick walls and bouncing off the night sidewalks and alleys and onto Grand River Avenue outside.

We recalled hearing about the Moondog Cafe the day before at the library and how it was on the west side, which is where we thought we were, and indeed my phone said it was a 4-minute drive from the Grande Ballroom to the Moondog, so away we went. The neighborhood was indeed quite desolate; we only saw a few people, and they were all on the main Grand River drag. There did not appear to be a single soul on the side streets, only shredded and semi-collapsed houses, though at least one in every few were clearly occupied and relatively cared for. (That 645,000/1,850,000 statistic again.) At least that’s what we glimpsed in our 4-minute drive before parking on Linwood Street, right in front of the Moondog, and walking into a cozy friendly environment where 7 or 8 people were kicking it, good music on the stereo, and you guessed it, a nicely curated record stall in the back. While Angelina ordered some hot green tea, I stepped right to it and started digging through the 3 for $10 bin, finding something right away with Tony Williams Joy of Flying which has a buncha tracks with no-longer-guilty pleasure Jan Hammer and, who knew, the LP closer is an 8-minute duo jam with Tony and Cecil Taylor himself. Also grabbed Herbie Mann Live at the Village Gate (no Sharrock but it grooves hard, three nice long tracks), then set both down for a sec so I could join the conversation Angelina was having with the sweet staff about how the previous night’s Wolf Eyes show had gone past midnight. Going back to the bins I noticed a guy was walking back to his table with the Tony Williams LP — my Tony Williams LP! I couldn’t help but say “aww man” out loud, and he immediately started laughing and said “oh did you want this? I saw you looking at it!” He gave it back to me and we kept laughing and shared a reverie about how heavy and weird Emergency is, and how good Allan Holdsworth is on Tony’s Believe It LP, and agreed that the Jean-Luc Ponty Imaginary Voyage LP still sitting in the bin should be my third choice to round out the $10 offer. Detroit is the best, seriously. Not to mention that as soon as I sat down with my records and sipped some of Angelina’s delicious tea, we realized that the Moondog was hosting a listening/viewing event and it was just about to start, Detroit pianist/keyboardist/composer Michael Malis presenting a video of a duo piece for church organ (played by himself) and french horn (played by Zara Teicher). Here’s an Instagram post from 10/31/25 advertising the very event that we had stumbled onto (also showing an excerpt of the performance itself): “Retreat Michael Malis & Zara Teicher 11.07.2025 LV014 lowversions.com - Join us Nov 1st at 4pm at @moondogdetroit for a viewing of the full video performance.” (Another Instagram post from 10/31/23, exactly two years earlier, leads me to believe that the original performance was on 11/11/23, at St. Anthony’s Catholic Cathedral in Detroit.) The performance was quite heavy while still being beautiful weekend afternoon music, Malis blasting slow changes and movements on the church organ with Teicher standing above in the balcony blasting long minimal/melodic tones of her own on french horn. Both blasting nicely too, with full and deep respect for the greater tranquility of the church. Only later did I realize I had already read about Michael Malis and his jazz duo Balance in an article by Ana Gavrilovska as published in Maggot Brain #16 (Spring 2024), and had listened to Balance’s music on the internet. This is all very Detroit, a big weird strangely chill and beautifully genuine 2/3rds empty city where rad things are happening everywhere you know where to look.

In fact, things are so happening on this Saturday in Detroit that we can’t even stay at the Moondog Cafe and enjoy all of the Malis/Teicher piece, not with the Destroy All Monsters Mythic Chaos opening night party starting rather soon at 5pm, and being almost a 30 minute drive all the way up in north suburban Bloomfield Hills, and we still have one more essential stop on our way, Circle Game Records on 20611 Grand River Avenue, another musician-run store like Gingko Records where composer/drummer Ben Hall sells records (and because it’s a shop in Detroit, a lotta good books too). Another place where you really have to dig through every single record in the store, and I only had 20 minutes, so maybe only dug through 10% or so, but still could’ve bought 9 things. Foremost would’ve been the record Hall was playing in the store, various instrumentals from Ghana with a nondescript cover, looking like it was released in the 1970s or early 1980s, just one beautiful musical setting after another, some tracks with a nightclub/band Ethiopiques sound and they’re interspersed with more pastoral solo/stringed instrument tracks, priced very fairly at $60 but I’m just not quite that big of a spender. What I did buy was a lovely beat $5 copy of Curtis by Curtis Mayfield, which I’ve never actually owned, and a great compilation (of sorts) called Chicago Blues that was released in 1964 on Spivey Records, the label founded by blues singer Victoria Spivey. I say “(of sorts)” because when you dig into the credits, it’s really a hootenanny where a trio of Evans Spencer and Homesick James on guitars and Washboard Sam on (you guessed it) washboard play the blues with a rotating cast of singers/players — Sunnyland Slim, John Henry Barbee, St. Louis Jimmy, and last but not least Koko Taylor herself on a couple tracks, back when she was still spelling it Cocoa.

Reluctantly but necessarily, we literally and figuratively left the Circle Game and headed on to Bloomfield Hills, apparently one of the wealthiest zip codes in America, and our final destination of the Cranbrook Art Museum within the secluded campus of the Cranbrook Academy of Art. (Which, by the way, is now the second time this institution has been mentioned here on the BlastStack as Harry Bertoia was an alumni and faculty member.) Entering the quiet tree-dense Cranbrook campus, we quickly realized that there was going to be nowhere to park, and ended up in a lot on the edge of campus where they were running a shuttle to and from the museum, a good old-fashioned yellow school bus. We now knew that in Detroit it’s normal to immediately make friends with whoever you’re talking to, and indeed did so with our shuttle driver, learning about how her uncle owns a private island on a lake near Ottawa, Ontario. At least I think I’m getting that right, but the conversation ended relatively abruptly in two minutes when we were dropped off at the Cranbrook Art Museum and made our way through the bustling scene to the exhibit.

Okay, yes, the exhibit. Mythic Chaos: 50 Years of Destroy All Monsters. The reason this whole trip happened and this travelogue exists. The final boss, if you will, and yes, it was very cool and fun to see the Destroy All Monsters collective get this high-end treatment, hanging out and milling about with all these great people from Detroit and beyond. And when I say high-end, I mean it — Mythic Chaos takes up three large rooms at the high-end Cranbrook and, in addition to all the smaller normally framed and hung art, it includes installations, mixed media sculptures, records by and films of the Destroy All Monsters band, and at least three giant hung banners that are basically as big as highway billboards. The smaller framed art features examples of Cary Loren’s colorful, dense, and disorienting collage work, such as my favorite A Game Board for the Afterlife, which is also the cover of Blastitude #13, originally linked out to the pages of the magazine and animated by Anneke Auer, now replaced by a non-interactive cover photo taken by Cary of this very Mythic Chaos hanging. I took a picture too:

There are also fliers for imaginary lectures that were made by Jim Shaw and posted around the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. Very strange work with a somewhat jarring mix of academic jargon and surrealism using real people’s names:

There were pen-and-ink Wolverton-style caricatures drawn by Mike Kelley, which I found quite visionary and surprising. Kelley’s work is often surprising, as he worked in multiple mediums. He’s not unlike Bruce Conner in that respect. Cary did say at the party that these drawings of Kelley’s came a little after the initial 1974-1976 heyday of Destroy All Monsters, after he moved from Ann Arbor to California:

And there is, above all, The Crème Filled Palace, perhaps both the alpha and the omega of the Destroy All Monsters corpus, a mixed media sculpture developed by Cary Loren and Mike Kelley with attribution intended for the Destroy All Monsters collective. It was first fabricated in Japan in 1996 by faxed instruction from Loren and Kelley, and “after that,” Cary says, “later versions were done for the Hungry for Death DAM exhibitions in Europe under my direction.” The edition pictured below (photograph by Angelina Dolman) “was the first to be made in the USA and was created with the help of Cranbrook students and staff.”

Before I knew this sculpture was called The Crème Filled Palace, I referred to it as the “melted cheese/Quatermass” sculpture because it made me think of the monster in the original Quatermass Xperiment film (1955, d. Val Guest). Cary replied, “You are correct. It does have a relationship to organic monster films such as the Blob, Caltiki, or Attack of the Mushroom People, and Mike Kelley’s Silver Ball sculpture was made around that time —also Jim Shaw’s early 70s drawing of the Blob Monster which we used as the poster in Japan was an inspiration.”

And hey . . . I think that’s all I’ve got for you, dear reader. I was rather bedazzled by the whole exhibit and didn’t take any more pictures than that. This is partly because, as those of you who have patiently joined me throughout this travel piece have surely already ascertained, I am a resolutely amateur photographer who uses his iPhone hastily and never wipes the lens (which apparently is a thing you’re supposed to do). But it’s also because of the sheer difficult-to-photograph scale of a lot these works, and the scale of the exhibit as a whole. Either way it’s best to see it in person, which you can do at the Cranbrook Art Museum between now and March 1st, 2026.

After a couple hours, we were getting hungry. We tided ourselves over with art-opening cheese cubes and veggies, and split a glass of wine because Cary gave us a drink ticket; he had to run off a little early and get feted by another major Detroit institution, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCAD), being an honoree of the museum’s 2025 gala, which happened to be scheduled on this very same night. Busy guy! Angelina and I had a little more time on our hands, so we blasted back into Detroit for a late dinner at the original Buddy’s Pizza on Conant, and goddamn . . . I’ve said before that I’m a pizza pluralist and will house any pizza or pizza-related dish you place in front of me (shoutout to Domino’s), but Detroit-style pan pizza at Buddy’s in Detroit is — I’m going to say it — my favorite pizza that I’ve ever had. I’m not even going to say “best” — that’s for you to decide — but definitely my favorite.

Sunday, November 2nd

Saturday had been a day of music and records and books and art, but on Sunday morning we only had two things to do before hitting the highway back to Chicago, and they were not music, records, books, or art things: spend the beautiful fall morning in Belle Isle Park, and then have a nice coney dog lunch on the way out of town. And, not to worry, we were still playing great music while driving, mostly leaning on a Shitify playlist called “Detroit Techno Classics,” the expected Derrick May and Juan Atkins et al, expanding into Galaxy 2 Galaxy, Carl Craig, killer Moritz Von Oswald remixes of said Detroiters, lots more. Oh, and we had to get a quick breakfast treat on the way from Royal Oak to Belle Isle Park, so we pulled over at Woodward & 7 Mile and got some Dutch Girl Donuts. We knew we were in the right place when one of the guys from Moondog Cafe waved to us on his way out, box in hand. Me and Angeline got the half dozen for $10 and damn, those are some good donuts. Get the sour cream for sure — we got 3 — and whatever else is poppin’ that day — strawberry, chocolate, sprinkles — they’re all good.

Belle Isle Park is a city park on an actual island in the middle of the Detroit River, the United States on the north side and Canada on the south side (not a typo) and it was très belle indeed, especially when we got to the east end of the island and parked our car and hiked into a small but awesome stand of woods with good trails that ended at the park nature center, where in the parking lot we found ourselves welcomed into an honest proper bird-banding session by author and naturalist Allen Chartier. He even let us hold the little fellas.

Finally, folks, if you want a fine Coney dog when you’re in Detroit, well, you can probably get one within 3 blocks of wherever you’re standing at any given moment. But you might want to make the trip to Mexicantown, a little west of Clark Park, and pay a visit to Duly’s Place Coney Island at 5458 Vernor Highway, who are not a Mexican restaurant but have been serving Coney dogs and other fast diner fare in that same location since 1921. (For the not-so-quick at math, yes, that’s 104 years. Took me a minute too.) We had the vegetable beef soup (superb), a side of fries (excellent) with mayo, and two classic Coney dogs with everything. Exquisitely hearty meal and tip-top countertop service. Perfectly fortified for a road trip back home, we leave the diner, get into the Blastmobile (aka 2012 Honda Civic), resume the “Detroit Techno Classics” playlist, and drive straight to I-94 West and out of Detroit. Somewhere between Jackson and Kalamazoo we switch to the aforementioned new self-titled LP by the Matthew Smith Group and its quasi-orchestral post-Wilson sunshine psych-pop (with Roxy Music/Andy Mackay undertow). Buoyed by beautiful music, beautiful feelings, and beautiful fall colors on the trees of the I-94 Corridor, before we know it we’ve blasted past Benton Harbor/St. Joseph and Michigan City, on through Gary, and up around the great lake bend back into Illinois and sweet home Chicago. Great to be home, but thank you to Detroit for being such a sweet home away from home, and thank you to Destroy All Monsters for 50 years of Mythic Chaos. Until next time!

And thank YOU for reading the third and final installment of “ROAD TRIP REPORT: Detroit 2025.” If you’d like to start over, Part One is here, and Part Two is here.

Saturday, November 1st

Got up at 7am and began notes for this piece while laying in bed and resigned to the free in-room Keurig coffee option; by 8am it was time to go foraging for stronger stuff and to start our day’s adventures. Stopped on the way to view the morning sun from a church parking lot, found that strong coffee thanks to a multinational corporation that we surely should be boycotting for multiple reasons, then pulled into the deceptive Oak Park, Michigan strip-mall parking lot of Sacred Site #5, one of the greatest bookstores in America, the Book Beat, co-owned and co-operated by the aforementioned star of our show, Mr. Cary Loren.

The Book Beat does not have used books, as far as I can tell, so let’s cross that off the list. What it does have is portals and connections everywhere you turn your head, as if dozens of Cary’s aforepictured glass cases at the Detroit Public Library had manifested around you in a fractal hall of mirrors. And part of that array, depending on which phenomenological horizon you focus on, is a normal suburban bookstore with the latest fiction, Pulitzer Prize winners, New York Times bestsellers, children’s books, arts and crafts, etc. Less than one minute after walking in, Angelina had easily zoned in on one of her current areas of interest and was happily sitting reading about the explorations of Roald Amundsen, while I had stumbled without trying onto the sci-fi section, which immediately passed my Blast-standard Butler > Delany > Dick scan test with flying colors and plenty of options for all three. Glancing at the spine of Butler’s Clay’s Ark I immediately thought to myself “what a brutal book,” and seconds later I was thumbing through a new-to-me and new-to-the-world (published in 2025) Octavia Butler bio by Susana M. Morris called Positive Obsession: the Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, and my eyes landed on a sentence on page 120 where Morris uses the same word: “Clay’s Ark is also incredibly brutal, especially for an author who never shied away from violence.”

From there I made my way to a box labelled “Zines” on which a baby doll was perched as guardian, but no sooner had I moved it out of the way and was about to dig in when in walked Cary for a regular store check-in. Needless to say, it was great to chat some more with an old friend; seemingly every time our conversation referred to a certain author, artist, style, or movement, he would disappear and come back with an appropriate book or two, such as a Halloween-themed photography book by Cameron Jamie, or a short story collection by original Twilight Zone writer Charles Beaumont, to name just two of many. I was able to distill these dizzying options down to two wonderful take-home tangibles; one an extremely generous gift from Cary, his own visionary photography book called Cary Loren: Polaroids (2022, Editions Patrick Frey), and a killer Book Beat T-shirt that I was more than happy to pay for. (And back home, I realized I had already written much the same Book Beat reverie 23 years ago, after my one previous visit to the store, in my introduction to the #13 Eternity Blast Special.)

And we’d probably still be wandering the fractal halls of the Book Beat today if it weren’t for a scheduled and ticketed 11:30am tour at Sacred Site #6, the Motown Museum. What can I say, that was incredible too. I don’t think I knew that Berry Gordy had bought out the whole Grand Boulevard block, eight houses in all, from 1959 to 1966 as his hit-making empire quickly grew, but now I do. It started with the famous first house at 2648 W. Grand with the “Hitsville U.S.A.” sign, where to this day on a tour you can still walk into the well-preserved administrative office, then past the tape library and the control room, and right into Studio A itself, where everything from “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” to “Stop! in the Name of Love” to “My Girl” to the celestial glory of “What’s Goin’ On” and more earthbound glory of “Inner City Blues” were recorded, and stare at the same piano Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye et al played. Recommended if you like music.

After this heady Motown visit it was time for lunch and we ended up at Supino Pizzeria in the Eastern Market. This was some great Italiano autentico pizza (the appetizer of fagioli was even better) but it wasn’t Detroit-style pan pizza, so we immediately made plans to hit up the original location of Buddy’s Pizza on Conant later that night, the place where Detroit-style pan pizza was invented in 1946. (Having pizza for both lunch and dinner is considered a Blastitude Holiday, to be celebrated at least once a year, you choose the date, or more accurately, let the date choose you.) After eating it was time for coffee and records so we walked over the freeway and around the corner to what I consider another Sacred Site (#7), the Trinosophes Cafe/Peoples Records storefront on Gratiot Ave (pronounced grass-shit, I shit you not) in Eastern Market. Also recommended if you like music. Trinosophes has been a crucial music venue and cafe for almost 15 years now, and also subterraneously legendary to me as the location where the very deep Temporal Relics LP by Viands was recorded, and Peoples Records was important to me because not only have I always heard it was a great store, but also because the owner/founder/proprieter Brad Hales put me and my aforementioned touring band up at his communal house in Ann Arbor way back in 1995, accompanied us to said Zoot’s Coffee gig, and let us listen to his then already mindblowing record collection (including the first and I think still the last original Saturn Records LP I’d ever seen, not counting museums and galleries, an O.G. Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy that in my memory had actual foil pasted onto the cover). Brad barely remembered me, but he didn’t not remember, and was as sweet as ever about it all while running the shop, cleaning and playing and sorting records, wheeling and dealing on the phone, chatting with customers, doing it all, and then the entire Detroit visit peaked as Angelina and I were sitting having coffee at Trinosophes and someone hopped onstage and played improvised solo spiritual jazz piano for 20-30 minutes, then hopped right back offstage, a midday music break free to the people.

From there it’s time to hit another record store, specifically Gingko Records within the 27th Letter Books shop/venue. A record stall, really, quality over quantity, probably not unlike the Rock On stall in London’s Soho flea market that Jon Savage wrote about in England’s Dreaming and Phil Lynott sang about in “The Rocker.” And by the way, I have to pause here and just enthuse about how well curated all of these shops are in Detroit, the Book Beat and every single other store mentioned in this article, even the informal/donated/community library housed in Trinosophes. Every book store has a killer record section, every record store has a killer book section, every cafe probably has a killer version of both, and every single one of them is probably also a live music venue too. Proprieter (and musician in Tyvek, XV, solo as Shells, many more) Shelley Salant was working the Gingko counter and sold me the Claire Cirocco Drawing Circles Around the Center LP that I didn’t even know existed (it reissues the Commute CDR that I reviewed 5 years ago (what?) as side one with a few more lovely Sunday-morning Satie-style synth miniatures on side B). Also grabbed the C.R. Odette cassette on Gingko Records, the label (and learned the name can be pronounced as one word like “crodette”), 20 minutes of solo misterioso repetitive tape-fogged keyboard playing. Shoulda also grabbed what happened to be Gingko’s last copy of XV’s On the Creekbeds On the Thrones LP while I was there too, one of a few shouldas on this trip, including the Dr. Pete Larson & His Cytotoxic Nyatiti Band Damballah LP and any number of soul/R&B 45s at Peoples Records, and the brand new archival Griot Galaxy 2LP at a ll the shops (as released by the Two Rooms record label, which just happens to have the same Gratiot Avenue address as Peoples Records).

TO BE CONTINUED (AND COMPLETED) with Part Three . . . tomorrow?

Friday, October 31st

It’s Halloween weekend 2025 and the occasion is the opening of the Mythic Chaos: 50 Years of Destroy All Monsters exhibit at the Cranbrook Art Museum in the Detroit exurb of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. This is a massive multi-room career-defining exhibit for the artists Cary Loren, Niagara, Jim Shaw, and Mike Kelley and their sprawling early/mid-1970s art/film/music/theater collective that became known as Destroy All Monsters. This exhibit has a nice long run from November 2nd, 2025 all the way through March 1st, 2026; as of this posting, you still have plenty of time to see it, but don’t let it get away from you, or else next thing you know another 50 years will have passed. That may sound like an exaggeration, but it’s already been 24 years since Cary Loren and I first met and became correspondents. The year was 2002 and Blastitude was only 2 years old and still in its nascent “dot com” era, while Destroy All Monsters had recently celebrated its 25th Anniversary. Cary had ideas for a few articles, and I immediately asked him to guest-edit the entire next issue, Blastitude #13, which resulted in “the ETERNITY BLAST SPECIAL,” which, despite a certain amount of (hopefully charming) web 1.0-ness, you can still read to this day and hopefully forever when you click over to Blastitude.com/13. And so, this Halloween weekend of 2025 trip to Detroit was also an occasion for this collaboration to reunite and culminate in another Blast Special of sorts, this “Road Trip Report” newsletter that you’re reading right this very second.

It begins at 7:00am on the morning of Friday, October 31st, 2025. The place is Blastitude HQ in Chicago, Illinois. My sweet Angelina and I have each taken a day of PTO from our respective day jobs. By 8am the car is packed and ready (new tires and ball joints what’s up, $800 well spent at Rodriguez Auto Shop) and we hit the road on an increasingly familiar path thanks to our increasingly frequent getaways to the “Harbor Country” of Southwest Michigan (shout out to Out There MI and WRHZ 93.5 FM and Silver Harbor Brewing Company and Warren Woods Forest Primeval), taking Dusable Lake Shore Drive from Rogers Park all the way down to the Stevenson and then to the Dan Ryan and finally to the Bishop Ford East, but this time we fly right past New Buffalo and Sawyer and St. Joseph/Benton Harbor and after a total of four and a half hours in the car (five and a half on the clock), to the bittersweet strains of “It’s Halloween” by the Shaggs and “Halloween” by Sonic Youth and all the Cramps songs about monsters (my fave is “Human Fly”), we’re cruising past the giant Uniroyal tire and into metropolitan Detroit at about 2pm. Cary is playing a special free gig with his band Monster Island at the Detroit Public Library main branch at 4pm, so with just a little time to kill we land in the Cass Corridor and quickly check out some sacred sites. To wit:

1. The former home of Zoot’s Coffee at 4470 2nd Avenue, where my young scrappy Nebraska-based touring band played a gig in 1995 and the neighborhood truly was a little sketchy, which it truly isn’t now. I still remember that day at Zoot’s well, sitting around bored in that eternal distance between soundcheck and start time, waiting for someone/anyone to show up (no one really did, even though we were opening for Boner Records recording artists the Warlock Pinchers, remember them?), having one moment of semi-starstruck nerd-excitement when we noticed Laughing Hyenas/Mule bassist Kevin Monroe furtively walking down the stairs and out the front door (apparently he lived upstairs).

2. 3958 Cass Avenue, the former location of the Freezer Theater, where Midwest Hardcore went nuclear over the course of 7 months, at least according to the gig list on page 186 of Why Be Something That You’re Not: Detroit Hardcore 1979-1985 by Tony Rettman (2010, Revelation Records Publishing), which lists twelve shows at the Freezer in total, the first one on December 12th, 1981 and the last one on June 18th, 1982. Negative Approach played 8 of them. Bored Youth played 7, and the Necros played 6. The Meatmen played 3 times, and L-Seven and the Crucifucks each played twice. The notable one-offs are The Fix, The Misfits, Government Issue, and, headlining that final June 18th, 1982 show, Minor Threat. Back here in 2025, I couldn’t find a building with the number 3958 on it. I believe it’s been torn down and replaced with a parking lot, but hey, I didn’t get forensic about it. I didn’t even get out of my car!

3. The original location of the Detroit Artists Workshop at 1252 West Forest Avenue in 1964, as founded by John Sinclair and other young Wayne State University radicals. Whatever house or building they were in, it’s long since been cleared out and replaced with bland housing.

4. And last but not least, (funky) drum roll please . . . one of the most sacred Detroit sites of all, United Sound Systems Recording Studio, still in its original location at 5840 2nd Avenue even as this address is encroached upon by I-94 and Detroit’s still-expanding superhighway system, with ongoing talk of having to demolish or, if historical preservation can have its way, relocate the building. It actually blew my mind a little to stand right outside the place where George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic recorded basically everything from Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow in 1970 and Maggot fucking Brain in 1971 all the way up through “Flashlight” and “Funkentelechy” to Computer Games in 1982, imagining everyone in there laying down all those rhythms and horn parts and keyboard orchestrations and one legendary vocal hook and harmony after another, not to mention George walking the same desolate streets we were standing on and then bursting into the studio and laying down the sheer unhinged genius of the “Atomic Dog” vocal. (I could also go on a tangent about how Bob Seger recorded both “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” and “Heavy Music” at United Sound, but not today.)

After this heady exploration (which took about 15 minutes total because of how close together everything was in that Wayne State University/Cass Corridor nexus) we decamp to the Third Man Records block on Canfield Ave and have a bite to eat at the Jolly Pumpkin brewpub next door. Certainly cool to see the Third Man shop/venue/pressing plant situation, and I write this on the weekend that the White Stripes are being inducted to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, which is a big deal. The bins of $8 Sun Records exact-repro 7-inches were impressive, and I also thought about grabbing Gina Birch’s super-fun I Play My Bass Loud as released on Third Man in 2023 (not to mention her brand new 2025 release Trouble, also on the label), and it was also cool to see what was probably the entire run of Maggot Brain magazine on display, including the brand new issue #21 that I don’t have yet, reminding me that I need to renew my subscription (which I did as soon as I got home), and seriously shout-out to Jack White for being one of the greats and building these hubs . . . but it did give me strange feelings too, with the cute dessert boutique next door and the gift shop across the street. I do think it’s all an improvement on what I saw of the Cass Corridor back in 1995 (through an admittedly naive and touristic lens, then and now).

By now it was almost 4pm and time to drive through Wayne State University’s sprawling urban campus to the Detroit Public Library main branch (5201 Woodward Ave) for the Monster Island gig. They were performing up on the third floor and getting there felt like wandering through the stately halls of a quiet and dimly lit castle. In the hallway leading up to the performance room, Cary had created an exhibition called Noise, Vision & Ruins, a few “cabinets of wonder in glass vitrines,” which, like the larger exhibit at the Cranbrook, is viewable at the DPL main branch as of this writing and until March 2026. Cary’s book/record/flier/poster/etc collection is like his collage work is like his bookstore The Book Beat, all one big non-hierarchical and non-linear romp through the imagery and poetry of certain recent subhistories . . . and even within subhistories of subhistories, things can quickly become too big and untidy to order onto a timeline, so these vitrines are like microscopes that reveal the lives teeming within: Sun Ra, John Coltrane, John Sinclair, Ira Cohen, Iggy Stooge, Ron Asheton, Patti Smith and Petra Vogt, to name just a few.

At 4pm Monster Island hit the stage with a four-person lineup: Cary Loren on synthesizer, sampler, electric guitar, and vocals, Jim Shaw on vocals, Matthew Smith on electric guitar, and Efe Bes on sun drum percussion. They begin with purpose and travel the spaceways for an hour straight, Cary setting the tone with synth beds and looped samples over/under which Efe establishes and extrapolates grooves while Shaw vocalizes endlessly and brilliantly, sometimes using heavy fx, sometimes not using fx but still sounding heavily effected (before entering the hall I could hear them soundchecking, and was certain that his voice was someone playing flute), sometimes dipping into certain established texts (“It’s After the End of the World,” “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”), mostly just going off omnitextually, astrally travelling. Meanwhile you’ve got Matthew Smith (who just band-led and released a very different album of rust-dappled Beach Boys underground pop, check it out) grounding things on psychedelic electric guitar, flowing through dreamy leads and chordal interpretations or dropping into proto-metal E-chug, only as the jam calls for, never too much or too little. In my (always humble) opinion, Shaw’s deep participation made this performance more of a Destroy All Monsters reunion (with a couple newer members replacing Kelley and Niagara) than the Monster Island performance it was billed as, because the latter is often a more psych-folk/rock and songwriterly project (you’ve gotta check out Dream Tiger, on CD only, from the year 2000, I love that album so much) — I’m pretty sure they went into the main riff from DAM staple “You Can’t Kill Kill” at one point too — but it’s all one shape-shifting thing and the name Monster Island of course suggests a DAM spin-off.

The performance ended at about 5pm and, even though this year Halloween fell on a weekend, Angelina and I could only think about dinner and bedtime. This even after learning that Wolf Eyes themselves were playing a Halloween gig in a few hours at the Moondog Cafe, a relatively new place hosting experimental music shows (“in a part of town where the only other thing to do is run away from street gangs” said one half-joking attendee at the library), but there were going to be three opening acts on the bill, and we couldn’t imagine Wolf Eyes getting on any sooner than 10:30pm or so, and we’d been up since 7am running around all day, and are literally old and completely out of the practice of any/all shenanigans that will keep us out later than 8pm, and since first seeing them in 2001 (!) I’ve seen Wolf Eyes more than any other live band, and and and and and, so we quietly repaired to our Airbnb in quaintly suburban Royal Oak and turned in early.

I forgot to bring the book I was reading (Health and Safety: A Breakdown by Emily Witt, really good) in from the car, so contented myself with reading what was sitting on the quaint Airbnb bedside table, The Detroit Almanac by Peter Gavrilovich and Bill McGraw, from which I pulled one crucial factoid in particular, that the notorious decline and hollowing of the Detroit city limits started after 1950, the year its population hit an all-time peak of 1.85 million. This hollowing was essentially due to the city’s largest single employer, the Ford Motor Company, implementing its post-war relocation project from the city to the suburbs during the years 1947 to 1955. The riots of 1967 were a symptom and certainly not a cause.

GO TO PART TWO

“The Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp, February 2025” by Marc Masters. Pretty impressive that Marc cranks (pun not intended!) these columns out nigh monthly, each one featuring ten records and artists that even a weirdo like me has barely heard of. For just one example, let’s look at this February 2025 installment that I still have open on my phone here some 9 months later. I know I’ve listened to at least some of these particular ten records, because I wrote an actual review of the Pond Life cassette by Tara Cunningham and Jack Cooper, but I still want to listen to the rest, such as those by D.C. lifer Chuck Bettis, L.A. lifer Vinny Golia (unless it’s someone else actually named Vinny Goila as spelled here, but I’m pretty sure it’s Vinny Golia), Polish musician and possible lifer Olga Anna Markowska playing zither, cello, and electronics, Omaha’s own (possible lifer) Cast Off Form, and that just accounts for half of this column that is only one out of the 28 tabs currently open my phone. And the next tab is even more massive…

“Rettsounds: Materiality of Existence with Richard Meltzer” by Tony Rettman (February 2, 2012). Revisiting one of the better Meltzer interviews out there, thanks Tony.

16. Google search results for “how many individual leaves are on a large tree?” I was doing my regular 8am sunlight viewing one morning not too long ago, zoning out at the trees swaying gently on my block, when it occurred to me to look this up. Estimates range from 100,000 leaves on a 3-foot wide trunk maple tree to over 5,000,000 on a mature American elm tree, so one might say each leaf is like a person and each tree is like a city of leaves. The leaves (people) all work together to keep the tree (city) nourished and thriving. Some of the leaves are different colors and slightly different shapes but they’re all basically the same. Leaves/people are always leaving the tree/city and new ones are always coming in. Etcetera.

17. Cassandra Miller “I Cannot Love Without Trembling.” Turned onto this unfathomably deep Canadian contemporary classical composition by Episode 11 of the CD Esoterik podcast.

18. Destination: OUT with Jeff Golick: Playlists and Archives. I always forget there’s a million mind-blowing archived radio shows at wfmu.org, like this page for just one long-running program specializing in free jazz and all of its outward spirals.

19. Home Boy (Sister Out) by Don Cherry. Wiki page for this underrated 1985 jammer that Cherry recorded in Paris with guitarist Ramuntcho Matta, whom I discussed in an earlier BlastiLetter, at which time I either didn’t remember or didn’t even know about his production role on this album.

20. Joanne Robertson Blurrr reviewed on Pitchfork. The Shitify algoshitm still delivers every single day, challenging me and educating me and edifying me, a harsh truth I can’t deny, like when it told me Joanne Robertson had a brand new album out as of September 2025. I had forgotten I knew who she was, but while listening to and investigating Blurrr it started coming back to me, a time 10 years ago when I became briefly obsessed with her album Black Moon Days and was close to ordering it online but unfortunately never did. (It’s kinda pricey now.)

21. Rabbit hole: The Strangeloves. While trying to see if J. Geils Band had more than like 4 good songs (spoiler: they don’t) I was reminded that in 1980 they did do a decent cover of that Nuggets nugget “Night Time” by the Strangeloves and I enjoyed it on album-oriented radio as a 10 year old (shout out to Z-92 FM “The Rock”). I found myself digging into the Strangeloves a little and found that for a fake band of faceless studio musicians orchestrated by some post-Brill NYC songwriting nerds, they were pretty hot. And also apparently recorded the backing track of “Hang on Sloopy,” onto which Rick Derringer overdubbed vocals and lead guitar, which was attributed to his band The McCoys even though he was the only actual (real) McCoy on there.

    

22. Znowhite. Uncovered a little sliver of Chicago music history I knew nothing about when someone in my Instagram reels recommended I Hate Therefore I Am by Cyclone Temple as one of their favorite thrash metal albums. It’s not on Shitify, but it is on YouTube, and not only had I never heard of Cyclone Temple at all, I was surprised to learn they were from right here in Chicago with a guitarist Greg Fulton who was African-American and had spun off from a previous band called Znowhite that were three black dudes and a white lady singer playing ripping thrash metal, Fulton playing under the stage name Ian Tafoya with his brother Sparks Tafoya on drums (real name Tony Heath — not sure if they were actual brothers, or half-brothers, or fictional brothers). And, they absolutely rip; click here to listen to their 1984 debut EP All Hail to Thee.

23. What do phenomenologists mean by “horizon”? One of the guys on the aforementioned CD Esoterik podcast used the phrase “phenomenological horizon” so I googled what that might mean and ended up on this page. I’m going to try to paraphrase what is says so I can learn it better, and I’m going to do it right now, while you’re reading! Let’s start by defining “horizon” as whatever you can see right now. Sometimes right now you can see all the way to the actual horizon, like if you’re on a mountain or looking out over water, but sometimes you’re sitting at your desk like I am right now in my basement where my visual horizon is just the stuff on my desk and the posters and art on the wall right behind it. Either way, I am seeing “presence,” which is made up of what is “being at hand” and what is “ready to hand.” “Being at hand” is what is clear, foundational, easy to agree on universally: the desk, the carpet under it, the wall behind it, the art and posters displayed on the wall — but what the posters themselves mean to different people with different phenomenological horizons is where “being at hand” becomes “ready to hand.” One viewer might just see a small painting on my wall of a long-haired man singing into a microphone and playing guitar, and that is all that is “ready to hand” for that viewer, but I see a painting of Roky Erickson, the vocalist for the 1960s Texas band 13th Floor Elevators, that my friend Bruce Nails painted me for my birthday one year. I see it and I think of specific 13th Floor Elevators songs and not only of Mr. Nails but also of his wife and their young son and the party they hosted a few months ago that my own wife and I attended. That painting is “ready to hand” for me in different ways than it will be for any other viewer. As the article says, “the idea of much recent phenomenology is that differences in our experience of the same thing are traceable to differences in the horizons through which we experience them.”

24. “Jazz Contrafacts and Reharmonization: A Creative Approach to Jazz Standards” by Eric [sic]. I learned what a “contrafact” is in an interview with the solo R&B vocalist Keiyaa, and by the way, if you haven’t heard her 2020 record release Forever, Ya Girl, oh my god. You gotta. It’s nothing less than the weird What’s Goin’ On of the 21st Century so far. And would you believe I learned about this album from the CD Esoterik podcast too! (Via Episode 4, which also offers the world the vital concept of “responsible shredding.”)

25. Alien Weaponry 2025 tour dates. My mom sent me a picture of my cousin who lives in New Zealand smiling over coffee and wearing a T-shirt that clearly had a metal band logo on it (i.e. I couldn’t read it). I asked her who the band was and she said Alien Weaponry, “best described as heavy metal haka,” the haka being the traditional Maori war dance of New Zealand, and that Alien Weaponry were in fact going to be touring the USA soon, and indeed they’ll be playing just a couple miles from my house on Tuesday, December 2nd at the Riviera Theater. Maybe I’ll go, get out of my comfort zone a little, mosh it up with the tribally-tattooed dreadlock-whipping haka-chanting nu-metal demimonde of Chicago . . .

26. “The maestro of Sound & Gravity” by Jamie Ludwig in Chicago Reader (September 4, 2025). A feature on Chicago drummer and deservedly highly esteemed live music promoter Mike Reed, on the occasion of his new festival Sound & Gravity, which just happened a couple months ago in Chicago.

27. Google results: “Lake Michigan outflow.” I’m obsessed with the physical geography of the Great Lakes, which isn’t surprising considering I live less than two city blocks from one of biggest, and the location of all that collected fresh water is my absolute spiritual center, my temple, my altar, my outdoor (self-taught) meditation class, etc.

28. “Will Ferrell Refuses To Discuss The Bird On His Shoulder.” OMG.

Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath and Beyond by Geezer Butler. This and Brothers by Alex Van Halen are what set the whole thing off when I borrowed both from our wonderful Chicago Public Library on the very same day. I had already read Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath by Tony Iommi, which was cool, but my quip at the time was if the editor had cut out all the times Tony says “fucking hell” the book would’ve been 17 pages shorter. Geezer only says “fucking hell” a couple times in his book, but overall it’s pretty similar to Tony’s, maybe even a little redundant. I still devoured each one in a couple days, and both made me really re-binge Black Sabbath, who still somehow sound better than ever, this time Geezer’s bass playing naturally sounding especially sick. The way he, Iommi, and Ward interact in real jam time is still completely astonishing and unique. Constant metal malleation, evocative and alive. Ozzy too, of course — the human voice is also an instrument, and Ozzy is no joke — but I’m talking about that guitar/bass/drums nitty gritty. As for what Butler writes in the book itself, my main takeaway is that these guys were true rock’n’roll maniacs, and not really in a good way. Like when short-lived post-Ozzy vocalist Ian Gillan and one of the band’s roadies were literally bombing each other’s belongings with leftover tour pyrotechnics on the grounds of the old mansion where they were recording Born Again, or how Ozzy, Geezer, and Tony basically almost killed Bill Ward at least two different times via non-hilarious drunken ‘pranks’ like painting him gold or lighting him on fire. Apparently on purpose!

Brothers by Alex Van Halen. Funny to read this right after Butler’s book because both tell their version of the same 1978 tour in which Van Halen, very much on their way up, having just released their smash debut LP, were opening for Black Sabbath, very much on their way down, having just released the disappointing Never Say Die! LP, Ozzy to be fired the following year. Other parts that struck me were Alex quite graciously defending David Lee Roth as an essential part of the Van Halen chemistry (while not glossing over the fact that he was also a hyperactive pain in the ass) and repeatedly emphasizing how gosh-darn sensitive his brother Eddie was. Hadn’t really thought about it that way, but it’s true — it’s why he could be such a prickly character when he wasn’t flashing that million-dollar smile. Oddly, I can’t recall one single full sentence about Michael Anthony.

Sonic Life: A Memoir by Thurston Moore. Really just wanna say that this guy loves music, and that this memoir is about discovering music and building a life in music above all. I swear he discovers and rhapsodizes about two or three bands on every single page of this lengthy but breezy tome. Wish it had an index; had to spot-dig back through to re-read what he said about the debut and only single by Glenn Branca’s trio The Static, a record I had never actually heard until Thurston’s thrilled description made me have to immediately, and wow, it is indeed great. After that experience I made a note of two other passages to remember, not necessarily earth-shaking, and there could’ve been many more, but on page 411 he reminisces about the exact scene that I came up in myself, especially in the mid-late 1990s when I was in my 20s (seeing Dead C open for Sonic Youth in 1995 was certainly formative), “a huge and growing underground scene investigating freshly liberated ideas of drone, psychedelia, jazz, punk, folk, ambient, and electronics, all unifying around a new creative identity. It manifested itself outside of any ambition toward mainstream acceptance — almost in direct resistance to it.” And then, on page 427, he puts into words an heretofore ineffable feeling I’ve always gotten from a good noise record, specifically on cassette: “I loved them all, though — each one a harsh wall of sonic destruction. The sounds blowing off those fat ferrous oxide cassettes transcended the violent provocation of their creation, becoming otherworldly, as if unleashed from radical meditation.” Yep. Radical noise meditation. Fat ferrous oxide. I’ve experienced all of that too. (It’s a concept I call “blastitude.”)

A Thousand Threads: A Memoir by Neneh Cherry. While reading the Moore memoir I came across “Thurston Moore’s Love/Hate List” on the Dream Baby Press substack, in which he writes, “A memoir that I recently loved so much I read the entire book aloud to Eva, was Neneh Cherry’s autobiography A Thousand Threads: A Memoir, and Neneh’s memories & life stories brought us both to tears in so many unexpected and moving moments.” Upon reading this I immediately went back to chipublib.org and reserved it, and it’s indeed a lovely book about Neneh’s life of music and art and motherhood, and also a lovely book about her own mother, the great visual artist that was Moki Cherry, and about her stepfather, the great worldly musician that was Don Cherry. She writes, “I believe that Don took me out walking to share his truths. He is one of the few people in my life who was always entirely and straightforwardly frank with me, whether I wanted to hear it or not.” She is also frank about his use of heroin, telling a story from 1976 when she was 12 years old that just might be one of the ones that made Thurston and Eva cry: “The brothers in the bedroom had been examining their veins, playing that game. On the sixteenth floor on 96th Street, death came into the room, sitting on Don’s shoulder. The snakes were up in his veins, awake. And the sun would not stop shining. Don was high — really high. I saw and felt it for the first time. and I knew that it could kill him. That made me grow up.”

Waiting on the Moon: Artists, Poets, Drifters, and Goddesses by Peter Wolf. I didn’t expect the very best rock memoir of this entire run to be the one by Peter Wolf. Let’s face it, the J. Geils Band may have been truly incredible live but in the studio they made like 4 good songs tops, the rest basically Sha Na Na for the 1960s instead of the 1950s. (For the record, the hands-down best J. Geils Band studio recording is the 6-minute album version of “Give It to Me” with the killer extended ride-out jam. That bass line has been going through my head for weeks. There are other tracks, maybe even more than a coupla; I love the live version of “Must of Got Lost” but mainly for Wolf’s extended Woofa Goofa intro rap, and wait, I already said they were a great live band. I know the esteemed and venerable disc jockey Brian Turner always rides for “Rage in the Cage,” which was indeed great when I last listened all the way through (age 12), and I will always shed at least one small tear for “Angel in Blue,” but I really don’t think Freeze Frame otherwise holds up.) Nonetheless, Wolf has always been absolutely cool as hell, and in his book he comes off even cooler than that, while still being quite humble and vulnerable, especially when remembering scenes from his marriage to Faye Dunaway. Told as a series of isolated moments, more like a book of short stories than a novel, Wolf also recalls his various interactions with a vastly entertaining and usually quite surprising cast of icons such as Bob Dylan, David Lynch, Muddy Waters, Andy Warhol, John Lee Hooker, Van Morrison, Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, Robert Lowell, Harry Nilsson, John Lennon, Julia Child, Tennessee Williams, Ahmet Ertegun, Sly Stone, David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen (them again!), Martin Scorsese, Aretha Franklin, and last but not least Don Covay, with whom Wolf wrote that killer “blast blast blast!” hook from the otherwise almost impossibly 1980s production that was the “Lights Out” single (#12 on the Billboard Hot 100).

Rebel Girl by Kathleen Hanna. Something odd and unplanned about this run of rock memoirs is that, with the exception of Peter Wolf (1946), I read them in the order the author/subjects were born: Butler (1949), Van Halen (1953), Moore (1958), Cherry (1964), and now Kathleen Hanna (1968), the only one born after 1964, which means she is the only one classified as Generation X (born 1965 to 1980) and not as a Boomer (born 1946 to 1964). It follows that she would be the one most explicitly challenging the legacy of white patriarchal supremacist gatekeeping of representation and participation (although of course all of these artists push back on it in their own ways, even Geezer Butler with songs like “War Pigs” and Alex Van Halen with his biracial Dutch/Indonesian heritage). I was born in 1970 and experienced Bikini Kill’s radical “girls to the front” edict on October 13, 1994 at Le Cafe Shakes in Lincoln NE (which I think Kathleen mis-remembers as Omaha in the book, but I’m sure they played there too, although huh, maybe not). This was honestly life-changing for me, even though there were certainly change-resistant Nebraska rock dudes grumbling about it as they hit us with new challenges and non-binary thinking, a feminist band employing a male guitarist and making other non-hierarchical moves like instrument-switching and inviting younger guest vocalists from the audience. Her stage banter too of course, like in the live video linked above when she introduces the song “Sugar” and says “This next song is about working in the sex industry, because I worked in the sex industry for seven years on and off, and it’s about sort of like how it affected my brain, but it’s not like saying bad/good, it’s saying . . . affected.” I believe Kathleen Hanna helped me learn that our biggest problems have to be solved through non-binary (and non-profit) thinking, because when big problem-solving is done through big binary bad/good thinking (and for profit), even if it improves things for awhile, it can only lead to war, displacement, internment, and interment. This book is a really good read, unflinchingly honest with others and herself, while still entertaining and very funny.

Shakey by Jimmy McDonough. Oh wait, this isn’t a memoir, it’s a biography, and I didn’t get it from Chicago Public Library but from my bookshelf. Either way, after this very fast run of memoirs I was ready to slow down for a victory-lap re-read of the greatest rock bio ever written, in fact even better than I’d remembered, rock journalist and culture writer Jimmy McDonough somehow arriving at the perfect time with the perfect amount of access and landing on the perfect form, which is to take a mammoth candid transcribed interview with the subject and interpolate excerpts of it throughout the more traditional biographical passages, which actually aren’t that traditional, because McDonough is himself a not-subtle character within who often takes license to cast his own subjective opinion onto Neil’s great body of work. As I typed all that out, I wondered if perhaps I was describing a Boswellian biography form . . . and indeed I was! I wonder how many times I’d already learned that in high school and college. At least two or three. (P.S. McDonough himself refers to Boswell in this 2011 interview with Jonathan Penner for the Los Angeles Review of Books.) (P.P.S. Whoah, in this same interview, a little further down, McDonough offers his own version of my Tony Iommi quip from above, in reference to Shakey: “Take the word ‘fuck’ out of that book and it would be 96 pages.” That’s it, this piece has come full circle. This is where I stop.)