Glazyhaze released Sonic in March of this year. The sophomore album from the band has received a lot of positive press for its refined take on shoegaze, with physical copies selling out very quickly and having to be restocked hastily.
With shoegaze being such a global phenomenon at this point, you wouldn’t necessarily pick up on Glazhaze’s Venetian origins. Still, singer Irene Moretuzzo’s aquiline nose and Neapolitan beauty, and the gratuitous smoking in the video for “Nirvana” are some clues. The band cites DIIV as a major influence, and it comes across in their music, which is full of glide guitar and ethereal textures.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the importance of the gatekeepers. Even in an era where doing it yourself has never been easier, the patronage of entities like book publishers and record labels remains important.
The case in point that revived my thoughts on the matter is the new EP I Call This One by Gileah Taylor. Taylor blends folk-country sounds with a desert-noir vibe on her latest release for Velvet Blue Records. The soft, forlorn ballads that comprise the four-song EP hit a sweet spot for me during this oppressive summer heat.
We met with some rough waves on our trip to the beach this year. Even when trying different spots along the beach, the high winds meant choppy waters that threatened to shred you up. I had to boogie board, especially since previous years have sometimes been too calm to make that activity very rewarding. At one location, close to the point where the ocean meets the inter-coastal waterway, the waves were ripe for getting on top of and riding the crest until it dropped you in a rush to get to the shore. I managed to catch a few sweet rides in before a menacing wave forced my board into a vertical position and then threw me down into the surf. I was forced through a somersault, after which my back hit the shell-coated shoreline.
Getting up quickly, I rubbed down my wounds and walked back into the waves, wanting to redeem myself after such a heinous slam. My sons were watching from the tent I had set up on the beach. They didn’t spend much time in the water. My youngest took a pretty hard hit and decided that was it for him. My oldest just thought the waves were too rough to begin with and opted out early on.
Years ago, a friend a colleague mentioned to me how she gets choked up at daddy/daughter songs. I thought to myself that I couldn’t even name a single song that would fit into that description. It’s interesting how our interest in different musical genres put us in touch with varied subject matters. With Scout Gillett’s “Enough,” I can finally say I have at least some idea of what my colleague was talking about.
Gillett’s last album, No Roof, No Floor, brought her Midwest rural sounds to the city, reflecting the urban environment of Brooklyn where she had relocated. The videos that accompanied those songs made a subject out of life in New York. Gillett’s new singles, created after her move to Los Angeles, bring to the foreground some of the earthiness that always bubbled a bit beneath the surface of her songs. The sunny California setting works alongside her new sun kissed look.
Chris Stewart from Black Marble sets his Joy Division-like post punk to footage from a rodeo, what appears to be a county fair and a horse race. He plays his icy synth on the outskirts of a concert crowd watching a band that seems a much more likely rural attraction. Stewart doesn’t stray far from the sounds of his Brooklyn origins, despite the subject matter of the video. It’s a strange juxtaposition, but it works in a slice-of-life kind of way.
My Sabbath days are rarely boring. My wife Shira and I often have guests for Shabbat meals on Friday nights and Saturday lunches. And just about every Friday night, Shira and I play Scrabble, a board game that is perfect for Sabbath observers: no electricity and no writing (another Sabbath prohibition). How do we keep score? We each have a big fat book where we match our score with the page number. If you get forty points, you turn forty pages. (Shira usually wins.)
Here in Raleigh, NC, we have a park that opened a few years ago on the site of a former mental hospital. Dix Park has been an impressive undertaking, though I’m sorry to say I’ve never been there. The latest edition to the park is the sure-to-be-popular Gipson Play Plaza, which opens this weekend.
This new ginormous playground looks like a kid’s dream. Featuring several different sections such as Sensory Maze, Slide Valley and Watermill Mountain, the park spreads out over 18 acres (!!!). It makes me wish my sons were back to playground age and we were headed there today.
When someone complained about the surface noise that came with listening to music on vinyl, the late BBC disc jockey John Peel (a notable lover of the format), was said to have replied, “Mate, life has surface noise.”
It’s hard to argue with Peel’s assessment of life in this mortal coil. Who among us wouldn’t wish that things were different, though?
I’ve come to a point of frustration with my record collection where even new records have an amount of surface noise (crackling, pops) that are hard to ignore. It’s especially irking when you pay so much these days for any music pressed to vinyl. I’ve tried various methods to reduce the noise:
A new stylus
An anti-static brush
A Big Fudge record cleaning set
A Milty Anti-static gun
A Spin Clean record cleaning set
Homemade cleaning solution recommended by several sites
Nothing has made a substantial impact. I still have newer records that sound like they’ve been gathering dust in the attic for years. I even have some older records that won’t play. Here’s video of one of my favorite records with the needle skating across it.1
Independent records labels, in particular, have gone all in on vinyl. I get countless emails from various labels touting their latest releases on wax. I just received an email from Polyvinyl Records today about new vinyl variants of albums by the band Alvvays. These are in edition to several variants that are already offered by Polyvinyl and at places like Newbury Comics. You can hardly blame the artists and the labels for milking this cow for all it’s worth when opportunities for compensation from making music are drying up.
Despite being sympathetic to the plight of the recording industry, vinyl is a market that I’m becoming less likely to participate in.2
I couldn’t replace this record, even if I wanted to. It’s long out of print, like many vinyl releases. ↩︎
This especially holds true in a world where so much music is available for little cost in the hi-res streaming format. ↩︎
Inspired by a post by @Jonah on Micro.blog, I looked into the art of Daniel Matsui.
One of the images that captured my attention was the “INVENTION of the HOLY CROSS.”
The image came with some apocraphyal stories to which I have become accustomed in the Orthodox Church.
In the year AD 326, St. Helen, the mother of the emperor Constantine, travelled to Jerusalem to seek the True Cross. One of the scholars of the city knew its location: a hill upon which a temple dedicated to Venus had been built. This was a secret that had been passed down through his family since the time of the Passion. Helen had the temple razed and the ground excavated; there, three crosses were found. To distinguish the cross of Jesus Christ from the crosses of the two thieves, each was held over a corpse. The deceased came to life upon contact with the True Cross.
Matsui also includes an explanation of his rendering of particular elements.
