Fell off the roof, into the hedges. Curse of the dead dog bones.

Gayngs, Regrind EP

An almost mathematical exercise in trackbuilding, in which Gayng’s first full-length album Relayted was pulled apart into “stems.” Remixers were invited to pluck any ten stems and transform them into new tracks. What still made them Gayngs songs was everyone’s adherence to the band’s trademark 69 beat-per-minute tempo.

It ain’t Dangermouse’s Rome, but there’s a similar suspense and mystery and thematic build to these scattered yet relayted snippets of sound. More than ambient, less than lyrical, a track like “Cologne & Water” (reground by Paper Tiger) makes me want to go grab a modern movement troupe and stage a dance piece, while the Lazerbeak regrind “Sprinkle Juice” deserves to be transcribed and played live by a classical/rock ensemble.

Chocolate graham crackers

Regular graham crackers

Marshmallows

Hershey bars

Juice

Fake sausage

Fake meat

Cheese

Bagels cream cheese

Tortillas?

Beans for burritos

Fruit salad things

Potato salad things

Pasta salad things

Green salad things

Ice cream

Allergy pills

Bread?

Coffee

Tea

Grains of sand at the beach. That’s what the crowd seemed like for -\ at D’ollaire’s last Friday. Sandlike not just in volume but consistency. You could wallow in them. So singer FMan did, stepping blithely out onto outstretched hands and heads as if he were waking into a pool.

Its an extraordinary thing to witness. Not just the defiance of gravity, though that’s pretty darn miraculous. The implement trust. Its an image no song can enhance, only soundtrack. We’re the proof. Except floor two songs(certainly not the hits), we have no patience for -\’s music. But boy do we live to watch.

Limited clubgoing this week. Blame holidays and vacations. A March Against the Fourth revolutionary hullabaloo is the big deal at the Bullfinch, though it’s really just a couple of solo sets by tired punks… Cook-out on the sidewalk outside Hamilton’s, but no bands inside… D’ollaire’s closed, doing their serving-to-minors penance…

Spent the day sunning myself on the roof.

W-H-I-T-E

From the start of its new video, you’d think “Fountain” was another indie road song, a journey toward nodding enlightenment. Instead, the turns into a freakish bout of mutant enlightenment, much of it homebound. The music is sweet and flowing and lulling, so much so that you keep expecting it to lift off in a violent new direction. But except for the drums, which occasionally move to the forefront, it’s all airiness and light.

I’d never been to Los Angeles, or California at all, before last week. Now the West Coast suddenly seems real to me—even if the NEA/Annenberg program I went there to attend seems like a wonderful dream from which I never wish to wake.

This week’s Entertainment Weekly mentions that a scene from the upcoming season of true blood was filmed at “the famed Biltmore Hotel.” To think I was just at the same famed place, attending the Theatre communications group conference.

On the other hand, the whole time I was in downtown L.A. I couldn’t stop humming songs from a quintessential New York show, Guys & Dolls. Not just because there was a seminar with Broadway producer Jack Viertel (of the Lincoln Center Encore! Series), but because of places like Biltmore and Roxie scattered throughout downtown L.A. Just a couple miles from Hollywood, all those sunglass-and-shiny-skin stereotypes fade, and downtown L.A. struck me as startlingly similar to any number of other big cities I’ve been in.

It took a year of planning, a cast of dozens, and the support of an 88 year old knight of the realm, but the Poise Snatchers persevered, and last Sunday afternoon on the college on the hill they presented Sir Franz Laporte’ s opera Pera in its four hour entirety, with the composer in attendance.
” it was originally meant to be on a much smaller scale,” marveled the Snatchers’ lead snarler Moe, who played the lead of Maurice. It’s not coincidental that the singer and his character are so similarly named—Pera is a favorite opera of Moe’ s parents, who saw the work’s world premiere in Muhlenberg on their first date in 1972. A self styled academic brat, Moe brought the punk project to campus for the annual Off Road Summer Arts Festival of scaled-down chamber projects before even considering the Bullfinch, which will be hosting a revised version next week. “it was [Bullfinch booker] Q’ s idea to divide it into three separate sets,” Moe elaborates. If the project persists beyond campuses and punk stages, “We have a two-act version in case we can’t get the Act Three chorus together.”
All of which is cool with the eminent European composer Laporte, whose trip to town was sponsored by a college residency and support from various embassies and international cultural agencies. “He’s completely unfazed by what we did to his opera,” Moe emotes. “Seventy years ago, he was hanging with some of the fringiest art scenes in Europe. He’s seen it all. This is nothing to him. Flying to America when you’re pushing 90, that’s the big excitement.”

Once the opera smoke clears, it’ll be The Piccolas, Encompass and Rochester Factory at the Bullfinch, hitting the anvils… The Wolf Trap and Open Victoria at Hamilton’s, hitting the classics a little too hard… After a streak of elite indie encounters, D’ollaire’s returns to its mainstream focus by flouting the vocal waverings of Bay Ruth and Rich Bayer. From Bay to Bayer…

I’m never going in that dog- ghost yard again.

SBTRKT: SBTRKT
Techno flourishes and high-pitched vocals aside, this widespread collaborative work by a six-initialled artist reminds of nothing so much as High Llamas. There’s that same sense of ambient drama, the same need for melody amid the found chords, the same sense of a finely painted backdrop. It sounds distant and full at the same time.
A lot of folks will say Moby, but I say High Llamas. No, there’s nothing Beach Boysy about it. But that sense of stormy, effervescent tranquility is hard to nail, no matter whether you’re coming from an ocean-surf or a warehouse-rave direction. Cool keyboards are cool keyboards, and there are probably ‘50s lounge-LP fans who’ll fall for SBTRKT tracks like “Ready Set Loop” and “Go Bang.”