Spin #43: Resurrecting in Edmonton, Alberta

 Hi, I'm back. Elvis says "hi!"

There is stuff that needs addressing...

First off, Figment Bee . It is the bandonym handle for Tim Butler, formerly of Green Ants Dream, The Garble Rays and Tim McCarroll-Butler. 

It's not the Psychedelic Furs guy, ergo the use of the bandonym. Kind of like why I'm Mole/Spin Turlock instead of Bruce Mowat.

Cicadas, the title of Mr Butler's first release in 15 + years, hints at an approaching apocalypse without hysterics (Luxury), offers domestic bliss without being cloying (Alyha), has a song about a park in my old Hamilton hood, (Beulah Park) and all the metaphysical musings you can eat (just about every other track), and set to some winsome tunes. The guy's still got it: the chord changes that sneak up on you, the essentialist forward movement (don't say minimal) of the drums n bass parts that recall Moe Tucker/Modern Lovers, and the genre smash n'mash approach that makes him equally not at home at folk AND rock festivals.

What's different this time around is a) this stuff is now available worldwide through the miracle of the Internet. and b) the jay-uzz touches, which come courtesy of his daughter, Naomi McCarroll-Butler, a serious player in her own right.

Listen to it and Buy it here

Some of you have been poking around the Back Spins. Good, because I've written about Iconoclast before.So click on this and catch up...

...got that?

So there's been a few Iconoclast releases since I last posted. The most recent one is Demolition Of Wisdom.

The salient point here is "chocolate ice cream tends to taste like chocolate ice cream the first - and the last time - you taste it" Iconoclast is consistency itself and this recording is just as great as the previous one, except for the first.

Everything I said about the duo in the past still applies..you have thrashing, shrieking, percussion mayhem galore, screamalongs, and faux drunken sentimental drinking songs. I can't play these recordings at home without using headphones because they drive Shirl crazy, but I enjoy the texture and consistency of each and everyone. Even more consistent than Bo Diddley (and the duo has been a going concern for 32+ years). Someone pointed out that this album has a blues feel. I would say in response that it's extra-terrestial blues influenced.

Given all of that, the song titles should be able to fill you in the rest of the context: Tour of the Wild Moons, Indulgence No. 505, When I Was Naughty,(and it's follow-up, When I Was Nice), and who could forget The Lurking Tumbleweed.

Like Ice Cream, baby. Chocolate ice cream. Go here

Other stuff I've listened to: Mdou Moctar, Khun Narin, Moonlight Benjamin, and The Shangs

I work for the latter group, true, but I still listen to their latest, Sonny Bono, Tear Down This Wall Of Sound

A lot of this recording germinated in the Saucer73 reunion recordings , which featured four out of the six members of the 1973, pre Cyborgs edition of Simply Saucer. That outfit was more into improvs-cum jams, and was collectively responsible for auto-generating the loudest sound heard in Hamilton since World War II.

So a lot of this will sound jarring to young ears. Especially the one-two punch of Betrayal and In the Shadow Of The Stars (part Two). Personally, these are my favourite bits...but only on the phones!

The more conventional song pieces are unconventional in their own right: you have tribal hippie anthems inspired by the Manson Family ("Eleven"), neo-bossa nova pieces caught in a head-on collision with Marty Rev ("Love Charade") and skewed b-movie soundtracks (The Secret of the Purple Reef)

I haven't been reading much about this on the web, except for this bit. I imagine people saying "too..": too noisy, too soft, too this, too that, the singer's voice is off. "

Too bad. Your loss

WWW of Spin Turlock #42: We Spin Your Mail!

People keep sending me music stuff in the mail. I admit, it’s kind of groovy getting a package delivered to the Middle of Nowhere here. It’s especially far out getting stuff from people you thought had fallen off the face of the earth.

 Iconoclast has spent the last 25 years or so consistently falling between the genre cracks of Western Music. Neither fish nor fowl, they do their own thing on a consistent basis. That enough people get what they do is a small miracle in itself. You can pick out bits of jazz, orchestral bits from the past three centuries, speed metal, kitsch exploitation soundtrack music, and all sorts of stuff in their musical make-up if you’re clever. Mainly though, they do inner film music: the sort of private soundtrack your head plays back to you when faced with certain adrenaline-charged situations – pro AND con - in life.

Don’t believe me? Read the titles of Naked Rapture, the group’s tenth – and latest recording: How Fast Is Evil?, Fragile Summer, No Time to feel Good, The Ruin of the Pure. Don’t deny it, I saw you in my mind’s eye, you were at those movies, wearing a trenchcoat. So was I…

The group works in a foreshortened duo format. Julie Joslyn plays saxophone, percussive violin, percussive percussion, and horror-inflected vocals. Sometimes she uses live electronics to doctor the results. Sometimes she just lets go pure, naked sound.

Leo Ciesa is the other half of the act. Imagine a hard-hitting, free-flowing “free jazz” drummer, unconstrained by the niceties of key and chorus structure. Then imagine said musico going all out PUNK on you. Rashied Ali, as raised by speedmetal wolves. He sings rubby chorus pieces occasionally and effectively, too: far more convincingly than Tom Waits ever did (does?). He also tinkles the keys when the occasion calls for it. This speaks well of him.

Both of them write their own material.

I first saw them in November of  1990 in a loft on the now-trendy James Street North strip. Hamilton Artist Inc. put on the show for all 15 of us gathered, and I was suitably impressed. They were a smart drink before the term existed and they had physical oomph, which set them apart  from the majority of the loft generation.

Naked Rapture is the name of their new recording, their tenth in more than 25 years. It has all those titles I mentioned before, plus 18 other big and small (the duo has a way with short - one minute and under - pieces) Iconoclast hits, plus their renditions of Night in Tunisia and The Revolutionary Etude. Neither Dizzy Gillespie or Chopin could be reached for comment, but I feel safe in saying the authors never imagined their work done up like that. Get it here

WWW of Spin Turlock #41: More Kendra Steiner/ The Programmatic Genius of Bill Shute

I always enjoy getting stuff from Kendra Steiner Editions. Small press, stapled chapbooks of poetry. Numbered edition CDRs of stuff with "no commercial potential". Mix tape CDRs culled from digitized flea market vinyl finds .

The last bunch I received was no exception. We start with the red herring first: "Polymorphous Urban poems for Lou Reed". I like the writing styles of ALL the participants involved (inc. the publisher Bill Shute) but I think ...it's the idea of Lou Reed celebrated here, rather than any specific thing Reed did per se. Meaning: don't buy a Reed/Metallica collaboration based on this, or any other, tome.

A more enjoyable work is Someplace on Anywhere Road , which ostensibly starts out w/Texas references, but , as the title states, ends up in anywhere. Which is a good place. Shute has a personable style, a tough thing to pull off when metaphysics is a major element in your work. If I had to recommend a starting point for novices, "Anywhere" is as good as it gets.

KSE also does music/poetry sound collaborations.#271 features Shute teaming up with Hamilton, ON.'s second or third greatest musical export, Fossils. The results are awesome, if not exactly easy listening fodder. Fossils has a knack for finding the correct amounts of skronk and whirrrrrr, and "plays well with others", as they used to say in our Kindergarten report cards. These things are music -related , but sound artists (hello, Victoria Fenner!) should find these sets interesting, too.

Finally, if you throw in a few extra books, maybe Bill will share some of those mix tape Thrift Store CDRS. Sample titles include: "One Sided Cumulous Cakeshop Kittens" , which included a Jowe Head re-work of Swell Maps "Cake Shop Girls" ...and I was just listening to the Swell ones,  "Jane From Occupied Europe"!.
 I haven't listened to the Massimo set yet, but I assume it's good. The link at the top of this article will take you there.
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Shirley graduated from University . She is now Shirley B. Comm. I am still hawking TVs and hi-fis. Life is good in Northern Alberta. Thanks for asking.

WWW of Spin Turlock #40 : Read any books lately?

Gods Of the Hammer: The Teenage Head Story
Geoff Pevere
Coach House Press

My past keeps coming back to haunt me: you can take the guy out of the Hammer - Hamilton, ON. - but you can't take the Hammer out of the guy. Not without forceps, anyway...

Case in point: this wee book (136 pages) which landed in my distant outpost, tells the story of Hamilton's most notorious musical export to date. . Teenage Head was the most successful band to come out of the Toronto punk milieu of the late '70s, possibly because a) they were from Hamilton and b) there was more to it than "punk" per se. The Head mixed rockabilly, punk, garage-rock and pop sensibilities in a way that has never been successfully replicated. Moreover, they evangelized their efforts by touring across the country repeatedly over a period of 30+ years, until the death of lead singer, Francis Hannah Kerr, aka Frankie Venom, on Oct. 15th, 2008. With the addition of new singer, Pete MacAuley, they may very well continue for another 30 years.

The book is written from the vantage point of a fan, and objectivity be damned, Think of the book as a very big fanzine, comparable in heft to an old print issue of Next Big Thing. Which is not to say it's lacking in analysis: there is a very good breakdown of the Head process. Pevere, who is best known for his writing in The Globe & Mail, concentrates mainly on the Glory Years (roughly, 1977 to 1982). He does, however, articulate how, - in the band's infancy - the combination of the individual members musical and social backgrounds merged into one collective Head.  An advantage Hamilton, ON. had at that particular point in time was that it was NOT a major media centre: you could woodshed and hone your craft before getting distracted by Image and the neighbours. By the time the Head hit Toronto, it had the extra edge of said experience. These days, I don't think that would be possible: you would have to hail from, oh say, Grande Prairie, Alberta, to produce a similar sitch.

Conversely, Pevere does a good , if cursory, job of how and why the Head unraveled, and re-raveled (is that a word? It is now..) in the 1980's. You get an insider's take on the management woes, the car accident in 1980 that put the brakes on the band's momentum, and the internal dynamics that saw the band split into competing organisms and then recombine at the end of the 1980's, like some chemistry project gone awry. You also get a front-row seat to the group's most infamous performance: the June 2nd , 1980 Ontario Place show, which made front page news in Canadian newspapers when the fans who got turned away from the show started overturning cop cars and such.

Pevere gets points for giving the Head's long-suffering original manager, Paul "Kash" Kobak, his due in print. Points are deducted, however, for leaving out a mention of Brian Baird aka "Slash Booze" the band's "Inspiration”; name-checked on virtually every Teenage Head LP sleeve. Where does Slash fit in the book? Come in Ralph Alfonso Pg. 59: "Whoever was feeding Teenage Head...their choice of covers was brilliant;" That would be Slash...a paragraph or two would have sufficed.
Had it been my tome, I would've added an entire chapter about the gallery of misfits, colourful characters, and technicolourful hanger-ons surrounding the Head. Their lighting tech, Stewart Pollock, for example, runs a well-known Toronto art gallery now. Rob Sikora of Volume should've been in there: he did the original, hand-crafted picture sleeves for the Picture My Face 45 and has a whack of great photos from those early days. And yes, Virginia, there really was (and still is? she was last spotted in Caledonia, ON...) a "Lucy Potato".

I can't complain too much, though: it's a decent enough tome, and worthy of a few bucks.

The e-Mail Diaries: Letters From Hell
By “D” & “P”
Smashwords Press

The electronic age has brought us many mixed blessings. E-Publishing, for instance. The good news is anyone can now write and publish a book. The bad news is anyone can now write and publish a book. This e-book is a testimony to that two-edged sword of truth.
This is a longer book than the first book reviewed. Technically, it is 256 pages, but a few of those are pages with pictures and those epigrammatic pages ,you know,  like one paragraph for the whole page.
It reads like a barfly’s feckless rambling, unedited, unfettered correspondence to his buddy back home: a dive bar raconteur recalling his low-life exploits in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Mainland China. Brothels, bars, STDs, tropical diseases, Immigration woes, and gold-hued fecal matter play major roles here. Suffice to say, it's not for the squeamish.
. The ultimate objective here…who knows? For $1.68 – that’s less than a half-pint of suds in a Canuck dive bar – you get to share the authors advanced state of degeneracy and possible brain rot.

( P.S. I can’t find locate it anymore on the Smashwords site)

An aside: teenagehead.ca is NOT what you think it is....
Next issue: we review more good, good offerings from Bill Shute and Kendra Steiner Editions

WWW of Spin Turlock #39: "Bigfoot Popcorn Jubilee: the Best!"

"Bigfoot Popcorn Jubilee" is the best thing I've heard in weeks. What it is: Bill Shute took about $10 worth of thrift store (I'm guessing each item cost about 25 cents a piece TOPS)  vinyl record finds, an MP3 converter, and burned thematically-linked American pop, gospel, how-to recordings and whatever else struck his fancy. The results are sublime . Never mind "Americana", this is Ameritrashcana.

I don't know anything about the Party Boys , but We Gotta Party , both Parts One AND Two are swell no-brainer fun. As is Linda Laine & The Sinners "Low Grades And High Fever", and WHO could forget "Stella Got a Fella" by the Fireflies. I couldn't ,possibly because I never remembered in the first place.. I don't have to tell you anything about these presumably late fifties /early sixties dated sides, the titles say it all. The Ken Nordine flexi included is suitably creepy: an ad man pitch for the flexi disc media ("look what happened to Ronald Reagan") corporate Christmas giveaways.  You surely "get" the drift here...

I'll do a thing on the legit releases of Shute's Kendra Steiner Editions (Massimo Magee), but this comp shook me out of my stupor. The Spin is back!

WWW of Spin Turlock #38: No news is good news

Fighting cancer in a family unit requires the effort usually directed towards tertiary concerns, i.e. me and my dog's blog, to be redirected and focused elsewhere.

"It's been a long time since I've spoke to you. Has it been too long?"

Point is: we beat the cancer, got through the school term, got a promotion at work (i.e guaranteed hours, benefits etc) and just lived. In times between, I listened to about 40 CDs from the Harvey box, half of which ended up in the discard pile. Of those I liked enough to retain: The Misunderstood (featuring Glenn Ross Campbell), Hackamore Brick (likeable early 70's outfit that came off as a  B version of the Velvet Underground), The Parliaments (Funkadelic king George Clinton's soul/doo wop outfit) & Morgen (late 60's homemade heavy rock hysteria) stand out.

I got back onto Facebook. I use an alias, and only deal with those people I want to deal with. It's been good. They can have all the personal info of a person who does not exist. All the ding dong day...

Hamilton, ON., my old home town, is very much long ago and far away. Toronto is the same, except w/less rose tint on the bifocals. The Interior of British Columbia still calls out. Go where it's not happening. This seems to be where the universe is vibrating. In the words of an avatar: Spin Out!

WWW of Spin Turlock #37: Loose Cannon on the deck

As per last issue: Several things you need to know about the music-related output of Kendra Steiner.

1) Some times, the KS poets read their stuff on disc w/musical accompaniment e.g. Bill Shute & Anthony Guerra. The music plays more of a complimentary, rather than as a component, per se. This is not a bad thing.

2) Song format is generally absent e.g.Nick Hennies, ST 37...This is not a bad thing, either. It will help you to listen deeper. The Ernesto Diaz Infante CDR is especially good for depth charges. IMHO, as the kids say.

3) Do not be afraid of the teeny weeny lil' CDRs. They can fit on the spindle of your computer disc media player, no problem!

 4) Send money, cash, money order or PayPal. Tell them to 'surprise you'.

 For 30 years, I didn't watch regular TV programming. I had TV sets, per se, mainly as video monitors, but no cable/satellite per se. Thanks to Shirl, I indulge now: HGTV, Food Network, The Weather Network, Storage Wars, Anthony Bourdain's various concerns. Not as good as You Tube, but it's entertainment. Shirl has noted - with some concern - that I warble along w/the adverts. I think I'll be ok. "Get back, get back to normal, whoooah" McDonalds ads sound like indie pop did 10-15 years ago. To think: all those indie kids who rebelled against their parents musical hegemony have been reduced to Mere Product. And so QUICKLY too. Gosh.

Open-ended questions are always welcome. Send them here.