Sade Sundays: That’s How I Remember It, Season Finale (Best of 2010).
December 26, 2010
Part One: Michael Tapscott
1. Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (DefJam)
Kanye West - 'Runaway'The most controversial and real public figure almost caused a fist fight between Joshua and I at this year’s Thanksgiving. While Josh contended, correctly so, that Kanye’s public persona ruins his art, I contended, also correctly, that it heightens his palette and that the persona is in and of itself a fine work of art. We worked it out, but I was prepared to never speak to one of my best friends again for the cause.
2. Jerry Lewis – Cracking Up (1983)/Tex Avery Cartoons
In one willful and lonely Saturday this year, I went too far in my quest for entertainment and am now a great believer that the French were right all along about Jerry Lewis. His comedy is just as fascinating and mind-blowing as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton or Jaques Tati, if you’re in to that sort of thing. Watching old MGM and Warners Bros. cartoon shorts by Tex Avery that same day, I realized these guys are human cartoons. I sort of like the cartoons better though.
3. Deep Magic/Deep Tapes/Dreamcolour
One of my favorite collectives of the new age/experimental/ambient scene is the Bay Area label Deep Tapes. The Deep Tapes producers released or were connected in someway to some heavy classics out of this increasingly rich and expansive field in 2010. Deep Magic’s Planetary Roots and Soul Vibrations were favorites, as well as work by uber-group Dreamcolour, Olympus Mons and Psychic Handbook. I’m a Facebook fan….
4. Donovan Quinn & The 13th Month – Your Wicked Man (Soft Abuse)
San Francisco’s Donovan Quinn is weathering a moment in time when his music is a little out of fashion, and we are all at a loss for this. In my year, it was the best singer-songwriter record I’d listened to and had an urgent poignancy for my own lost generation. I hear all the bad and lovable things about my friends in this area of the world throughout this record. It comes on a real healthy slab of vinyl too.
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Sade Sundays: To The Ends of Bear Gulch Road and Back, Year 0.
October 31, 2010
Part One: Joshua Rampage
This thing could write itself; last weekend Mike and I went to find Neil Young’s house. It was a little too easy to track down the latitude and longitude coordinates of his compound, but with no GPS device we’d have to do it like gentlemen. Using a crumpled Google map I assumed the role of navigator as Mike steered us into the dark blue beyond of the Santa Cruz mountains.
Rounding the steep switchbacks and overgrown hillsides of the Land That Time Forgot, it occurred to me that this might be the last and only place on earth where Neil Young would dig in and stake his rock + roll camp of unrequited love. Besides, where else would he have this much room to set up all his model trains?
As we passed an imaginary waterfall of natural spring water, Mike says he’d love to palm some into his mouth, maybe even take a bath; and with this bizarre imagery in mind, I began to contemplate Neil Young as an artist. Personally, I feel his defining moment came when he was sued by his record label for not sounding like himself. God bless that rickety old hatchet of a man, I think I’d like to shake his hand.
When Mike first told me about Le Noise, Young’s new solo record featuring the production of sound manipulator Daniel Lanois, it seemed as if it was to be the heir apparent to Trans, Neil’s 1982 electronic album that buzzed with vocoders and digital trickery. However, when I sat down for a first listen I got bummed – it was as if he and Lanois got high, but not high enough to make the far-out statement they really wanted – or did they? Shit man, I don’t know – we were lost in the woods and Neil Young’s house was beginning to feel like a figment of our damaged imaginations.
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Sade Sundays: Post-Apocalyptic American Pastimes v.9.21.10
September 26, 2010
Part One: Joshua Rampage
When I think of attending baseball games I picture Indian Summer nights, patterned green grass under bright lights, hotdogs + beer + peanuts, and thousands upon thousands of rabid fans cheering for their respective teams. Not anymore. Those memories were obliterated this past Tuesday when Michael and I attended the A’s vs. White Sox game in Oakland.
The wind was ripping off the bay at a chilly 20 knots while we attempted our own version of tailgating, Mike leaving his party-ready station wagon at home, opting for his wife’s 4-door sedan instead. Brilliant. Popping the trunk, it just wasn’t the same as lining the bed of a pickup truck with plastic and filling it with water while floating on a Budweiser raft. We drank bottled Pacificos and lamented the fact we had no available entertainment at our disposal. No baseball gloves, no football, and Mike knew it was too windy for Frisbee, but complained we didn’t have one anyway.
Mike goes, “don’t worry, it’ll be warmer insideâ€. Lies. Upon entering the park, I noticed the frigid continuity in temperature as well as a distinct lack of electricity in the air; games I had attended in the past were veritable bee hives of activity while this one appeared to epitomize the impending doom our honey-making friends are currently facing. In one sweeping observation, I discovered that out of the 1000 or so people in attendance, (Oakland Coliseum baseball capacity: 35,067) no one appeared to give a shit whatsoever.
This all-encompassing indifference seemed to sharply reflect my feelings towards contemporary music at the moment – I hadn’t found anything to pique my ear’s interest in months. I felt like one of those bees you see on a cold day right after a heat wave; slowly moving around on the ground, waiting on eternity.
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Sade Sundays: Leggo My Eggo, Season Three.
August 29, 2010
Part One: Joshua Rampage
Mike “In Case You Didn’t Know I’m The Big King Over Here” Tapscott managed to leave work early (read: his 4-Square round-robby was cancelled) so we could play miniature golf and savor the remaining pockets of heat in the Bay Area. After an aberration of abbreviated warmth, things are back to 55F and foggy in SF, just the way nature designed this coastal town in Northern California.
Herein lies my boggle: the mind recalls with vivid detail the island adventure I just returned from, the very trip that inspired this Sade Sunday’s latest musical undertaking – Monster Rally. But now everything is terribly distorted: jackets, long pants and shoes trump the tanned skin, cut-offs and bare feet of my mind’s isle, creating a paradox within this report. Where is the rum and warm water when you need them?
As we drove south, I regaled Mike with tales of oceanic escapades in an attempt to distract his growling belly from hunger, but no. His blank face held eyes that fixed on the road, staring miles ahead to the Recreational Family Food Fun that awaited us at Malibu Castle. Upon our arrival, he said he’d “get us straightened out” at the food court while I dispensed 3 PBRs into his water bottle for consumption during mini golf.
Everything was going as planned until the bottle overflowed and beer spilled all over the crotch of my jeans. The situation became touchy when I asked a Malibu Castle staff member where the bathrooms were located. I put on my best “it’s not what it looks like” face and walked bravely into the Family Fun.
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Sade Sundays: America First! Isolationist Prose Chapters I and II
August 1, 2010
Part One: Michael Tapscott
I’ve come to realize that I love America. Perhaps it is reading Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, a Jewish nightmare novel that imagines Charles Lindbergh defeating Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, sealing an Icelandic deal with Hitler and beginning frazzled out Semitic programs of his own. Viewing one’s country ripped apart instills a sort of swarthy patriotism in me and I am trying my hardest not to scrutinize things through a nostalgic lens, but I miss Bo Jackson and I miss trail mix with M&M’s in it.
To think of the suburban American male’s first taste of true darkness I must think of the Doors. A joke of a band, but between the lines in that we as lovers of Americana have one critical testament to our youth in Jim Morrison’s posthumously cobbled An American Prayer. A spoken word record with music taken from Doors outtakes, live recording, regular recordings and new recordings of funky porn music, the album is pure bait for Morrison hatred. To regard this record as a joke is to be incredulous at best and tedious at worst.
This suburban boy feels no nostalgia, he thinks and feels only new thoughts, and his new thought laying back in 70s style reverie and decadence (which means leather couch – wakka chikka) is this is fantastic. Morrison is very funny and epically elliptical at the same time, and though I make no claims at being a poetry expert and would expect that his would be scoffed at by true literary torch carriers, I find the imagery and meter a solid perk of the experience. The production is immaculate, winkingly highlighting Morrison’s words with stupid guitar licks and vocal effect trickery, and any music that uses nature sound effects is a-ok in my book.
If I look into this for some greater point about life, I must worry that Joshua and I have to make yet another point about aging. He, taut with dysentery, and I, thoughtlessly transgressing 1) the morals which our parents taught us, and 2) roads that lead nowhere except to wax idiotically, painfully, droning on and . . . And here I must admit that I am lost . . .
When I began I thought of a line I once read in Wire about Ian Curtis, in which the writer suggested that even though Curtis had been dead for 30 years and stayed the same age he seemed to continuously get older. I feel this too is true of Morrison. I do not see this experiment in the metaphysics of the Doors as a nostalgia trip in which Joshua and I come to terms with the embarrassing cultural taste of our youth. I am now thinking about how I am older than Morrison ever was and wondering if he would have been making records like this in the seventies but more Leonard Cohen and Windham Hill, further and further down this road. Would it have been good? Or would the brittle American money machine be too tempting for a washed up whale man?
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Sade Sundays: Adrift In the Sea of Perdition XXVIII
June 20, 2010
Part One: Michael Tapscott
I was a loaded pistol or at least a loaded squirt gun this past Wednesday night. I felt like I’d let you, the reader, down in recent months. Sade Sundays had been taking time off for no good reason, being sort of half way here with you when we were here at all. Suggesting random tunes and Randy Newman videos, and perhaps the worst came when I offered a two sentence review of the new CocoRosie record last month.
I’m here to apologize, and if this article doesn’t seem as a grand apology full of witticism and tremendous recommendations of the best records you’ll ever hear, know at least that it started with an apology.
The idea was undemanding, Joshua and I would sit in his overstuffed room in the Mission and listen to the new Dolphins into the Future record, The Music of Belief (Release the Bats), and see where this happening took us. Josh had recently awoken to the world of mysticism in ambient  music, which I have been a long and gaudy proponent of. I’ve spoke to you at least twice in the past of this Belgian master of the ultramodern tome poem, most recently earlier this year with the baffling great A Horseback Ride to the Temple of Montu cassette he released under the moniker of Duncan Cameron.
The new album is long, over an hour, but the range of emotion in a seemingly uncomplicated and palpable sound was shocking. There was an urgency Josh noted audibly and I noted physically as he mentioned, “once you’re already under water any more movement and you’re just wasting oxygen.†We were drowning. Hard and heavy is life and after both taking trips back to our Midwestern homelands recently the failure of us as “normal†people had become quite obvious.
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Sade Sundays: Girl, It’s a Photoshoot Part IV.
May 23, 2010
Part 1
By: Joshua Rampage
As we approach mid-2010, the situation can be described as languid at best; adventures have been put on hold while I pace slowly up and down this long hallway, stirring up dust bunnies. Snoozy weather and sinus infections have the weird ability to cull the right kind of music for the moment, and I’ve been submerged in hazy ambiance ever since Die Antwoord depleted all of the serotonin in my brain with their impeccable taste. I’ve since grown comfortable within these walls of soft interiors. Set adrift in the haunted depths of The Caretaker, I’ve made myself at home in room 237. (YouTube video features the art of Andrei Polushkin).
Mike doesn’t care for rhythm-based music any more than I give a shit about the genre Americana. He says “BE A PATRIOT” and bangs the steering wheel like a dictator would his fist against a podium. I say, “I’m moving to Switzerland to go skiing and eat chocolate.”
I suggested that Flying Lotus is picking up where a long-forgotten DJ Shadow left off. The sampled textures are even dustier and the layers of poly-rhythms make me think of elephants dancing with their trunks, swaying in a way that makes people want to bounce their shoulders. Flying Lotus’Â new album, Cosmogramma, hurtles into an electronic oblivion, creating new constellations with its staggered production.
Flying Lotus – “Do the Astral Plane”
Part 2
By: Michael Tapscott
The album art is ridiculous, the “found” sounds are the same as they were six years ago, and perhaps the joke is still on us. CocoRosie, congratulations: you made another good album.
As I become re-acquainted with the long, lost friend that Josh scared me off of years ago (it’s a plant, dude), I only see myself as a fly on the wall, or better yet, like GOD in the sky. And what does GOD the bug see? He sees Michael repeatedly watching Randy Newman YouTube videos of a concert with the Rotterdam Philharmonic from 1979.
See, it’s not that the two of us can’t have fun anymore Joshua, but it’s all so serious now. These decisions that we make have lasting impressions on the quality of our shriveled 70 year old bodies. You should be tired friend, you should be listening to ambient music. What daily use do you find for Flying Lotus anyway?
Men as brilliant as us should not have been expected to take an uncomplicated path. Next month, more drinks, more pictures, no other obligations. Deal?
As evidenced below, we took some pictures to commemorate this opaque portion of the season: [More...]
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Sade Sundays: Whispers From the Diary of Innocence, Chapter 8
May 2, 2010
“Mein vater! Hochgesegneter der Helden!”
“My father! Let me join you in death!†is a cry from the last act of Wagner’s space-age opera Parsifal. I feel the depth of this noble line as I grow older and my experience feels circular and futile.
Nietzsche wrote of the opera, “Parsifal is a work of perfidy, of vindictiveness, of a secret attempt to poison the presuppositions of life – a bad work. The preaching of chastity remains an incitement to anti-nature: I despise everyone who does not experience Parsifal as an attempted assassination of basic ethics.”
To destroy the destroyer is no small task, and Wagner was the greatest of the grandiose, a composer of immense talents and questionable ethics. In Indignant Senility’s Plays Wagner (Type Records), sounds artist Pat Maherr destroys some Wagner compositions into unrecognizable pulp with some David Lynch-sized darkness. I only wish Maherr made space for Wagner’s famous deep brass and rhythm to connect with us in the outside world. To hear such beauty being decayed and shot through the space between the ears as a marching tone to death leads one to a quantifiable dark space.
09PlaysWagner9.mp3
Indignant Senility – “Plays Wagner 9″
I am dying. I feel it as I choke back bad habits and unpredictable weather patterns paste my sinuses to some undisturbed place. I feel it as angry passions morph into happy complacency. Over chicken and waffles and beers in Jack London Square with Josh, his reliably infectious nervous energy was water off a duck’s back. He became the scamp, the lovable troublemaker who was no more a part of my physical space as was Huckelberry Finn.
