Canned Dragons

Mountains don’t need my accolades, but here we are. My first true encounter with Blondie was in the eleventh grade, digging their disco-inflected "Heart of Glass." Being exposed to their genre-hopping as they absorbed the fertile New York scene via venues such as CBGB’s was revelatory. Still hanging on to the spirit of punk while exploring well outside those boundaries shows their restless spirits and inegnuitiy. The spare, economical, but incredibly effective guitar solo on "One Way Or Another" is still one of my favorites.

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Everyone has been posting about the Aadam Jacobs collection. Since I love indie music from the 90s, I’m certainly going to spend some time with the massive 10,000 live recordings collection. I went to the page on the Internet Archive and one of the first recordings I saw was Rachel’s at Lounge Ax. I bought The Lounge Ax Defense and Relocation compilation created to save the venerable Chicago club when it released.

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I first heard the song "Trouble Man" on Pimps, Players and Private Eyes, a collection of songs from blaxsploitation films. The compilation is one of my favorite discs and although I prefer the songs from Isaac Hayes and Willie Hutch, Marvin Gaye makes a solid appearance. The whole Trouble Man soundtrack is jazzy, soulful and adventurous. It's enjoyable as a statement about urban noir.

Every time I finish a novel in which I have invested a lot of time and emotion, I feel a bit unmoored. What other worlds are out there now that this one is gone? It’s like the characters in that world died and will be grieved. Some even after entering a new story.

After I wrapped up reading Demon Copperhead last weekend, I had these feelings. I almost shed tears at the end of the book. There are no novels piling up in a stack for me to read, so I was bereft. I was almost present in Lee County, that little corner of Appalachia where most of the book takes place, for some period. My own trip to Appalachia recently only reinforced that feeling.

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My wife and I have long been devoted to music from the band Stars. It’s hard to pick a favorite album, but I especially treasure a few of the songs on No One Is Lost. The 2014 album was recorded in a studio the band built above a gay discotheque and seems to have absorbed some of the dance vibes, if not the sexuality, through the floorboards. Stars doesn’t spring the title track on their listeners until the very end of the album, but it’s a massive banger to bring things to a close.

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By the time I got to college in 1994, Seamonsters was already considered a stone cold classic by the owner and manager of the local record store. This was before Wilco’s heyday, and record store owners had to have something to get deeply into. Now the Wedding Present is touring to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the album. The Albini-produced album revealed a harsher and more wounded side of frontman David Gedge and did so in the constraints of a spare and stripped down recording.

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According to a recent profile on the Morr Music record label done by Hayden Merrick, Vertigo Days is the most pure distillation of the Morr Music sound. Surprisingly, the album didn’t come out until 2021, a full two decades into the label’s existence. It’s hard to argue with the assessment, though. With a warm, organic, and sometimes understated electronic sound, it fits the Morr Music ethos extremely well. I got into the Morr Music catalog about midway through the aughts via bands like The Go Find, Styrofoam, and Lali Puna, but then lost track of them until recently.

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Earth Sized Worlds by Mandrake Handshake reminds me most of Stereolab, especially when it comes to lead singer Trinity Oksana’s lilted buttery smooth vocals (even the backing vocals from Rudy Mae Symonds invoke Stereolab bee bops). However, upon repeated listening, other inspirations reveal themselves in the form of the psychadelic elements of Khruangbin or Chicago post-rock. Mandrake Handshake just performed a session for KEXP. Check it out here. This hits hard with the full band performing some of their strongest tracks in a cool studio space.

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These tracks are part of a collaboration between stalwart ambient artist Good Weather for an Airstrike (Tom Honey) and Izzy Johnson, the founder of Entrails Magazine, which focuses on art made by those with IBD. The songs focus on the loneliness and disorientation that bowel-related illness can cause. “Isolation” peppers the languid pace of the instrumentals with ethereal vocals and buried samples that sound like medical texts read aloud. “Liminality” embodies the track’s title, with waves of sound and spoken word poetry infused with soft vocals that come across like an attempt to part the veil that separates the conscious from the unconscious.

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Not many people profess a love of advertisements on the internet. Among people I follow, particularly on the indie web, few really like Instagram, either. There’s a distaste for big web companies like Meta who make their money on data harvesting and targeted ads.

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