Tag: music

Guitarsk

My friend John is playing a concert at UCI this Saturday night that might be of interest to guitarists out there. It’s all on Russian seven-string guitars, which are unique and not heard much here. He and his partner Oleg are doing this together.

geetar

UCI Chamber Series presents
The Czar’s Guitars

Sat, Oct 8, 8 pm

Winifred Smith Hall, $12/10/8

Oleg Timofeyev & John Schneiderman performing on Russian seven-string guitars.

Potpourris and arias from Glinka operas Life for the Tsar and Ruslan und Lyudmila, 19th-century transcriptions of Glinka’s orchestral, vocal and piano compositions.

Box office info here.

The Omnichord

What a strange and terrible instrument this is; a revenant from the Before-Time of the 1980s, unexpected and antique and terrifying like the Balrog in Lord of the Rings. Except cheesier. It combines the best features of the Ultimate Preschool Teacher Instrument, the autoharp, with the 1980s Beep Boop Not Quite a Casio Synthesizer. changeng wields this awful weapon with grace, panache, and a creepy grin. Especially while playing “Having my Baby” or “We Built This City”.

omnichordhands

Purchase sampler: I buy, you win.

I got my package from Aquarius Records, including the new Jello/Melvins opus, the 1981 L.A. no wave/postpunk compilation “Keats Rides a Harley”, a two volume set of Tibetan Buddhist rituals, some pipe organ madness, and the Jack Palance album. It’s everything I can handle, and more!

Here’s a sampler of mp3 from each. Links likely to expire, please mirror if you want to spread, etc.

Jello Biafra & The Melvins Kali-Fornia Uber Alles 21st Century (Live). Everyone made the lame joke about the DKs redoing “California Uber Alles” after we got governated. Jello and the Melvins did it, and very very well. There are better tracks on this CD but here’s the crowd pleaser.

Jack Palance, Hannah Jack talks his way through one hell of a tearjerker country ballad in his very best psychotic murderer voice. This will either be much better or much worse if you’re drunk or tired. Let me know.

100 Flowers, Salmonella (from Keats Rides a Harley compilation) This compilation came out in ’81 and has a load of L.A. weirdos I used to know: Leaving Trains, the 100 Flowers/Danny and the Doorknobs axis, the Meat Puppets, all doing weird underproduced stuff. It’s really good, especially for people with obsessive interest in underground rock of the early 1980s. Hello, obnoxicant? Twenty years later people called this music “Indie” but it was dead by then.

Georges Montalba, The Washington Post March PIPE. ORGAN. MADNESS!

Long Trumpets Auspicious Ending from the Tibetan Buddhist Rituals set. No one makes a really long series of honking noises sound as cool as Tibetan Buddhist monks. I want these guys to play my wedding.

The Ballad of Jesse Frederick

This is a marvellously obsessive guide to the career of the guy who wrote the themes to “Family Matters”, “Full House”, “Step By Step”, and “Perfect Strangers”.

There are far, far too many mp3s. I also found out that Mr. Frederick did the theme to a show from 1997 in which Bronson Pinchot played a space alien named “Meego”. I never thought Lovecraft was adaptable to sitcoms!

Via the always worthwhile waxy links, syndicated here as waxy_org

No joy in guyville tonight

After having my fourth conversation in a week about the provincial pathos of the local music scene, I agreed tonight with Movie Dan that someone needs to make a “Waiting for Guffman”/”Spinal Tap”/”American Movie” film about the South Coast scene around Detroit Bar. What a cast: The skinny, fashionable boys in the mediocre bands, the pretty girls who sleep with them, and the armies of not-quites who end up sleeping with each other instead after the insiders reject them. What a scene: The sadness of an elite hierarchy of rock gods fifty miles south of the real thing. What a golden phrase for the whole mess: “The Costa Mesa 500”. What a lot of beer Detroit sells with this genius marketing strategy.

And of course, the people who don’t give a fuck, or as Dan said don’t even give a fuck about giving a fuck, who are just cranking out music on their own terms.

I imagine it set as the last gig of some local hot-boys-in-tight-pants band, hair dripping into their eyes. They’d lost their clothing company sponsorship maybe, or one of them got in a real band in L.A., so this was their last big hometown hurrah. They think it’s “The Last Waltz”, but you know it’s “A Mighty Wind”.

That scene deserves a good long hard sarcastic razor-born look. Some of the music is good, but every time I’m in with that bunch again I keep thinking “What the HELL are you guys going on about? You’re not all that! If you are, what the fuck are you doing in Costa Mesa?”

And your kid has a face like a walnut from the ice cream.

I saw Leo Kottke perform this song in 1986 or so? Dunno. It was at McCabe’s. He introduced the song by saying that he’d stayed up really late one night and smoked a whole lot of cigars while playing guitar in an effort to become Joe Pass. He did not become Joe Pass. However, he woke up in the state of mind the next day that caused him to write this song.

This is how I, and many of us, feel in the morning.

Jack Gets Up (.mp3, 6.5 meg)