Heatslave

And damn. I figured everybody might be spending more time working on reddening up their flesh or at least porchifying their lives during this time of year, but here I come ready to play nice in the gentle wave pool of the internets and Monsieur Rettman goes and turns it in or something. I'm sure dude has his reasons; fuck he doesn't really need a reason, but I hope his spew continues to seep from varied sources on occasion. Time will tell. Time never shuts up.

In his stead I can at least offer solace on the local level as beloved Franc is upping his ante. Unchained on his own unedited and ununderwritten endeavor, he's favored pick 'round here to "run the game", which in Madison blogosphere terms is most like a dented Mouse Trap with half the pieces missing or cracked, but I can picture him diligently working a lighter underneath some plastic army men, trying to fuse some extra cage-links out of repurposed green bazooka-chunks. Hope remains.

Summer reading aside, I'm buffing a few "pieces" (of crap, natch) to uphold my promise of content-gush. Radio playlists and casts will resume after this Friday. In the short term meantime, a brief overview of what I "feel" I've been listening to most lately:

Charlie Parker - Laird Bird 4CD - Quadromania
Pink Reason - Cleaning the Mirror - Siltbreeze (yup, still!)
Blues Control - Puff - Woodsist (ditto!)
The Go-Betweens - 16 Lovers Lane - Jet Set
V/A - Box of Dub - Soul Jazz
CV313 - Dimensional Space - Echospace

Shocked? Thought Nought. More soon! Haggard smiles!

A Week Late and a Weak Lay: Quincy duz the Fork

The original pitchfork festival, circa 1909

Much like noted jazz-hater Tom "Samhain" Breihan, I went to this year's Pitchfork Festival. This may initially seem at odds with my general game plan, based on what I post here, but let me offer the following reasoning: though perhaps one might think I'd generally go to like the X-Million Tongues Festival or Terrastock or Mutek or whatevs, I was generally broke then. This was cheap, I wasn't technically broke, and I had a ride. Plus, why do I have to explain myself to you? I'm a goddam web presence, no matter how minor. Going to P-Fork was practically my duty, as such.

I didn't even make it to the big Friday hullabaloo, which was I guess okay by me because "living" music and blah blah plus I've never bothered to listen to Spiderland. No reason. Anyhow, what I did actually make of the dustbowl tourney on Saturday and Sunday I rather enjoyed. For the most part, music was secondary, which is I think maybe the average P-Fork obsessives unofficial motto. Auditurus esse inconsideratus, according to one translation site.

And that wasn't a bad thing at this event. I knew a bunch of people in attendance, and they were friends and often had cigarettes to bum. I reunited with a kid my high school cohorts and I used to give an extremely hard time to 10 years ago and won some kind of moral victory over him when Clipse did not, in fact, suck. I got to catch a bit of Craig Taborn, whose Junk Magic I picked up based on (yup) a Pitchfork review several years ago and who were more psyched out than any of the "psych" bands that I glimpsed at the fest. And De La Soul somehow made me feel like I was in 11th grade again and just discovering Stakes is High (my fave for whatever reason I care to choose), a grade for which any association would usually be horrid but was pretty much alright by me at this time.

But back to my cynical/cliche'd view that P-fork attendees don't give a fuck about music. Is it a testament to the never-winding-down digital music turnover that, one week after the fact, you totally think that the fact that I'm writing a post on this festival is far too little, far too late? Yes you did. And if you didn't, well, then fuck me. 'Cause that's the basis that the next few paragraphs hinge upon.

Tom "Jinja my Ninja" Breihan (note: I actually think he has a fairly strong batting average of posts for someone who has to write something every day; I'm just making these names 'cause I'm smallfry and poking fun is rad) this week brought up how fractured the music industry is. Long tail ish, a bunch more bands are selling a lot fewer records. P4k's rise as a cultural entity along the same time that filesharing blew the fuck up lead to it being a major player within a certain fragment of the shattered coke mirror of the music industry. Sure, major player is now a relative term, but I'm fairly confident stating without having done any research that there are at least a few bands that don't have day jobs any more based on the strength of Pitchfork reviews.

I know that this is all shit you've probably heard before, and you're starting to panic that my recently mentioned new found stability is leading me into the deep well of "refried beans" style blogging. Truth is, I've been peeking at Pitchfork on a daily basis since 2000 or so. Sure, I actually read a lot fewer of the reviews these days and don't really check the news and kinda wish they still had a little special daily section of track reviews instead of the incorporation of streaming tracks with little commentary (though I guess their commentary has in general become less meaningful to me as well...), but they maintain enough connections with critics of generally good taste that there are still reviews of some very worthy releases that slip into the mix, not to mention their "Month in..." columns.

As a whole, I suppose Pitchfork has become some kind of morning comfort-zone habit, along with half a pot of coffee and a back slicked with sweat from overlayering on my walk to work. I think it's like this for an awful lot of people. Sure, their canon doesn't always push my "give-a-fuck" button, but it's nice to check on something that so many people go to to feed on for their dose of aural culture. And this year's festival rolled with that aesthetic completely, with reasonable prices, lines that (at least for me) moved a lot more quickly than I thought that they would, and scores of midwesterners standing and swaying amicably at assembled talent from around the globe. Truly the potroast of the festival circuit.

Even with the shortcycle trendwatchery so pervasive and so maligned (unless we're over that by now), the Pitchfork brand and namesake festival are both somehow consistent, dependable entities that can still cause large numbers of people to assemble and smoke grass together in a dingy baseball field. And that's something that I can at least partially get behind, even if I've only heard Glostick Koran once, and against my own will. Now excuse me; I must run and have my Xanax scrip refilled before my next post.

Mental Mastication, or How I Learned to Start Thinking Through a Straw

I've been entering and exiting loops of such varied curvature and circumference that while it might seem outrageous for me to attempt to placate you, deer-reader, with bold claims of Things is Gonna Change Round Here, but I assure you that that is indeed the case.

After a couple months worth of shattered bank balances and hopeful flailing there have been some seismic shifts that have left me one pancreatic dancer. Old endings. New beginnings. I can now put down my paranoia-stick and lack-of-funds-bucket and focus on the important stuff. Also, I can focus on this blog.

May be that you're quick to forgive. You may have been under the impression that, this being the rare Wisconsin season of "summer", I may have been off and away from these jelly-stained keys, sipping hefeweizen on patios far and varied. Though there will be a marked increase in this kind of activity, I've decided that I might as well be the prick wiping jelly off his keyboard while abusing the plethora of free wireless signals puncturing the skulls of this city. I'm also getting some sort of a haircut. It has to be this way! We grow old!

Anyways... yup, changes. While I'm certainly not sinking so self-indulgently low as to come up with actual claims to format or frequency ossification, I will be bold enough to state that you can expect an increase in updates, and I'll even hint at vague non-linear correlations between said increase in verbiage and scope of "coverage".

I'll get back to the music shits as well right quick. I am just now settling in enough to dig through recently acquired stacks, some of which include some gems that are now downright dusty in this eAge, not to mention I oughta be in town to take care of my radiowave duties for the foreseeable future. And holy shit! I've just now had time to give full listens to Blues Control's Puff and Pink Reason's Cleaning the Mirror! These fab jams deserve (and have received elsewhere) a great deal of praise that I'm not gonna take the time or space to elaborate on now; we just went grocery shopping for the first time this month and I've got some toffee crunch cookies that look better than you do at this moment. But I'll be back -- Fasten yr seatwelts and prepare for siftoff.

Bean Cry

I finally get a meager new batch of skree to absorb when malevolent intent ships me off to Boston for a week without an iPhone or anything. Primates! So if anyone knows of worthy evening doings between Tuesday and Friday nights in the greater This Old House area, please let me know: quincyhoist@gmail.com. Otherwise I'll be yellowbooking the names of FE employees offa their top ten lists and looking for clues in my trusty ol' DFW. Stupid shit like that.