Mycomorphic Man

“Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.”

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Here is revealed the common sentiment of the western mind toward fungi – being loathsome strangers in a world we insist on calling our own, and ours alone. Is the fungus not the patient reaper of stardust flora, humble co-dependent of tree, shrub and herb, faithful companion of mycotrophic beetles, ants and termites? Walking in the woods we often encounter a tiny, yet impressive slice of mushroom diversity displaying a breathtaking array of form, colour, odor, flavor and texture. Mushrooms - impressively denuding the dream-like peripheries of nature's imagination - are but a hint of the dendritic thread work that bore them. But the fungus shares in none of the poetry of beauty held aloft for plants and animals. We dismiss fungi as “morose and gray” toadstools associated only with death and decay, a testament to our willful ignorance of this advanced kingdom of life. Fungi are reviled for their hermetic mystique - from the woven reticulum of hyphae exploring dark forest humus to the overnight temple-building of autumn mushrooms. Need we be so bitter toward such abominable mysteries: illusory spontaneous generation; magico-curative properties of the meek Panaleous and stately Ganoderma; reconciled dualism of celibacy and fecundity. The mushroom - a divining rod pointing away from the teeming network of conjoined sexes that bore it - is certainly a resident of the damp, foggy dawns of autumn, and we are often intrigued, if not repulsed, by what we find growing beneath the litter. But are these not the very companions we ought embrace in our human conditions of suffering and celebration (often commingled, a sugared medicine)? Could we not improve our relationship with nature by shedding our reflexive anthropomorphisms and instead view ourselves through a mycomorphilogical lens: The ecstatic emergence of mushrooms into nature's cool breath, the alchemical yeasts transforming sugar-water into wine, and mineral-mining lichens cultivating food-providing partners under a blanket of protective mycelium. Fungi are the quite wanderers linking all that is contacted, willfully moving through the darkness, toward the future, and ultimately into the light. Of Nietzsche’s last line, I wholeheartedly feel this is true: this world preys/praise/prays on the credulous. But we would be wise to consider fungi as integral, welcomed residents of our well-tended gardens. Gardens becoming, and gardens being.

Bee-faced Mushroom Man
Prehistoric rock painting
from the Tassili Plateau (Southeastern Algeria)
Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna

10v3 FeeF

::COGNOPHYTA - PT.1::

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cognition: the act or process of knowing; perception. Random House Collage Dictionary

Communication: action on the part of one organism that alters the probability pattern of behavior in another organism in an adaptive fashion. E. O. Wilson

Cognophytology: a nascent branch of natural science that recognizes plants’ ability to perceive and respond to environmental cues, especially those originating from other plants and their direct symbionts, and that approaches plants as the cognitive foundation of environmental dialogs. FeeF


What do you experience when you walk around town? Ears passively receiving birdcalls, the near and distant din of hominid passers by, the dirty cough of cars’ combustion. Through our eyes enter the familiar shapes and colours of automobiles, buildings, people... and probably more plants than you can count. Snow-draped hibernating trees and shrubs, resting following an autumnal translocation of foliar foodstuff to their roots, and snow-veiled lawns of denuded herbs. Indeed, Earth's still-green land is painted in an organic patina of plants. Upon the return of spring and the snows retreat, the landscape unfolds in a silent slow-mo explosion of sticky buds and eager shoots popping out from the nodes of reinvigorated vegetation accompanied by their myriad olfactory signals; the multifarious spices of life and the musts of decomposition. Plants we see, smell, taste, and touch. However, despite the ubiquity and abundance of plants - or perhaps because of it - we are passively trained to ignore them throughout our everyday lives, encouraged to trade leisurely contemplation of botanical beasties for all manner of technological and social amusement. We are filtering the flora out of our sight and, because we are masters of the visual field, our awareness. This “plant blindness” is exasperated by the very otherness of plants. There is an inborn empathy for all manner of animals – from the cute, innocent scuttling of a lost ladybeetle to the uncannily self-reflected behavior of primates – that is not easily afforded to plants. Here is perhaps the major roadblock to animating the botanical: plants are sessile organisms, meaning they are immobile and fixed in place, giving an impression of permanent stasis and passivity. Plants don’t seem to be doing anything at all interesting, save perhaps the quick foliar jaws of the Venus fly trap or the undeniable beauty of orchids. “Sure, plants can eat light,” we note with a yawn, “but isn’t there anything extraordinary about plants?” My response would be that we are not looking for the extraordinary, which plants posses in abundance, but rather we are looking for some self-reflected familiarity, some shared aspect with plants that will reconnect us with the natural world and provide an easy ‘in’ to the life of plants. How then can we forge empathic bridges between the plant world and our own? Perhaps it is our inability to recognize, to hear, the language of plants.

Contemplating the idea that plants might be actively communicating with other organisms in their environment has titillated the minds of children, hippy flakes, and serious biologists alike for who-knows-how-long. We wonder at the playful interaction of bee and flower, the way insect herbivores locate their particular food plant amongst a sea of diverse species, and why some plants seem to be spared the ravages of herbivore outbreaks. Scratching our collective heads, we ask, "how does the bee find the flower? How do plants defend themselves against a world full of voracious herbivores?" On the flakier end of things are questions like "can plants hear music; do cabbages feel pain; can human anger give plants bad vibes?" These trite questions, dressed up in a facade of profundity, motivated the book 'The Secret Life of Plants', published in the early ‘70s, which proposed that plants are able to experience pain, pleasure and fear in ways analogous to humans. Now, if this isn't the most glaring example of wishful anthropomorphism, I don't know what is. This may sound cynical, but why would a plant care about what you or I think or feel? How would a plant benefit from an ability to discern between the subtle nuances of Mozart and Motorhead? And what type of sound system would plants prefer anyway? Headphones for the lettuce? Ear-buds for the corn?! Garbage. But it was precisely this garbage that crippled serious scientific inquiry into plant cognition – the hypothesis that plants perceive and respond to communicative signals received from local co-inhabitants. Throughout the 70s and 80s, any research that even suggested that plants were sentient, responsive life forms was denied significant funding and shelved due in part to the associated stigma of new-age pseudo-science. We have thus retained the outdated notion that plants are passive, unresponsive (and therefore "lower") life forms. Exacerbating the problem, the pitiful treatment plants receive in elementary and high school science programs makes much of the new plant science seemingly out of reach, or at least intimidating and/or uninteresting, to the vast majority of people.

We now understand that plants have evolved responsive strategies to defend themselves quickly and specifically against biotic stress, such as viral, bacterial and fungal pathogens (disease-causing organisms), and insect herbivores (plant eaters). In contrast to plant defenses that are expressed constantly, such as the thorns on a rose bush and the hypersensitizing toxin of poison ivy, so-called induced defenses are only “turned on” in response to particular stimuli. While constitutive defenses protect the plant from the initiation of herbivory, inducible plant defenses determine the dynamics of subsequent attacks. These principles of plant behavior, still infant in their articulation, have emerged from the cumulative work of plant biologists interested in how, and to what effect, plants are able to modify their chemical composition and expression of defense- and resistance-related genes, and how these modifications impact ecosystem processes (herbivory, predation, reproduction, etc.). Indeed, the past decade has witnessed a quiet revolution of plant science that has transformed the very idea of a plant from 'static sack of sugar water' to 'dynamically communicative participants of biotic entelechy'. In particular, the rapid advancement of molecular biology (the study of DNA, RNA, proteins and their interactions) has unveiled a breathtaking world of orchestrated chemical interplay; a veritable botanical Shakespeare. Plants are highly communicative beings, interacting with insects, fungi, bacteria and other plants. Unlike the visuoauditory communication of people, plant communication is chemically mediated, an adaptation to their sessile lifestyles, which precludes us from directly apprehending the meaning of their botanical whispers. A rewarding peppery spice on our palate may communicate deadly danger to a hungry caterpillar. A puff of scented gas released from a wounded leaf might transmit a message to neighboring plants warning of a potential attack, providing undamaged plants with an opportunity to build up their defenses before being directly attacked. We call the study of the chemical underpinnings of biological interactions ‘chemical ecology’, a term that upon hearing for the first time made my smile widen and brain spark - here was an approach to animating chemicals as cooperative messengers and appendages of higher levels of biological emergence.

A simplified, yet scientifically grounded example: In the spring, a female butterfly lays her eggs tenderly under a leaf of a (seemingly) suitable host plant, knowing that her brood will be born onto a veritable feast of foliage. Once the caterpillars begin their meal, the plant, perceiving specific chemicals (called elicitors) in the saliva and regurgitant of the caterpillars, activates specific metabolic pathways (a series of chemical reactions occurring within a cell) that may result in an increase in unpalatable and/or toxic chemicals (nicotine, in the case of tobacco) that will potentially limit the amount of leaf tissue consumed by the developing insects. Consumers are less likely to eat food that is less nutritious or more toxic than they are naturally adapted to. In conjunction with this process, the plant will begin synthesizing air-born chemicals (called green leaf volatiles). These volatiles (terpinoids and octadecanoids, for the especially nerdy reader.... Hanni) have been shown to act as signals to insect predators of the offending caterpillar, attracting parasitic wasps that locate their prey (the caterpillar) by sensing increased levels of these signature phytochemicals (plant-produced compounds). Once located, the predator will attack the herbivore and lay eggs in the herbivores’ body. As the eggs develop and eventually hatch, the herbivore is killed, thereby limiting further damage to the plant. This tri-trophic interaction – involving three distinct organisms linked in a food web – can be seen as a highly evolved regulatory mechanism that helps to control herbivore populations, and can be viewed as a plant’s cry for help. Furthermore, undamaged neighboring plants perceive these green leaf volatiles, which induce the production of defense-related compounds, effectively priming these plants against an imminent attack.

Plants normally release small quantities of volatile chemicals; notice that healthy plants often emit a particular odor. However, when an herbivorous insect, such as a caterpillar, damages a plant it will release a larger quantity and diversity of chemicals. Furthermore, and perhaps most relevant to this discussion, the types and quantities of chemicals released varies with plant species and with the species of offending herbivore! This means that in response to a hungry caterpillar, a tomato plant will respond differently than a tobacco plant, even though tomato and tobacco are very closely related species, and each plant will respond differently to an aphid relative to the caterpillar. Not surprisingly, the defense response elicited by a particular offender (pathogen, herbivore, etc.) often appears to be most effective at protecting the plant from further damage by that specific pest. In short, plants recognize and respond to specific threats in a targeted, species-specific manner. It is as if each plant species is endowed with its own botanical dialect, distinguished from each other by points of emphasis (defense vs. healing, for example), breadth of vocabulary and syntactic complexity.

In part, these discoveries recast plants as highly dynamic (plastic), communicative, and cognitively sophisticated organic beings. From the self-regulating intra-plant regulation of circulating hormone-laden sugar water through a plants' complex vasculature, to the multi-Kingdomed tri-trophism of induced plant defenses, plants provide the widest display of crypto-cognition known to exist.... foliar transmitters of volatile organics - fruity esters commingling with spicy terpenoids – guided towards compassionate stomatal receivers. Chemico-linguistic signals escaping from an exposed, caterpillar-chewed wound, damaged cells eagerly announcing the attackers presence to familial neighbors and passing parasitic wasps. Neighbors’ leaves passively inhaling this vegetable syntax motivate preemptive defenses, synthesizing an arsenal of chemical weaponry targeted to the particular herbivorous offender. The controlled chaos of chemically mediated plant communication represents most nakedly the emergent dialog of nature herself, a vegetable polyglotism.

Here's looking back at you, plants.


lOve fEEf

FeeF's tOp 10 albums of '07

get your head out from those mags
and websites who try to
shape your style
take a risk just for yourself
and wade into the deep end of the ocean

- Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear)

Yeehaaw! Godamn, 2007 kicked some serious ass wha!? Honestly, judging by my swiss-cheese memory, 2007 was one of the single best years for new albums, impacting the foundation, architecture, and ornamentation of my musical megalopolis. The sheer abundance of records that fell within my musically-perverted purview made it especially challenging to whittle this here top-10 list... OK, I admit, this is probably more an exercise in bald-faced narcissism than it is a useful guide for the casual music hearer (especially considering that, besides me, there may be one or two people that actually read this rubbish), but I would invite all brave ears hungry for something new to spend some time exploring these wonderfully ripe musical fruits plucked from the otherwise diseased nettles of contemporary musical entertainment. Indeed, music of this caliber fortifies the feeling that music can help us understand our reality and experience - while simultaneously contributing to that experience - acting as a map-like skein of the human condition, a fleshy focusing membrane selectively permeable to choice, empathetic album cuts. So strap on the ear goggles, relax, and prepare to get critical!



Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam

I anticipate new releases by the AC like no other, and am consistently rewarded like a Fun House champion year after year. 7 albums in and the AC continues hitting a wild and unpredictable stride with Strawberry Jam, tossing guitars aside to tickle the mod knobs of synthy whathaveyou, layering untraceable loops like an alien aural sediment. Core members Avey Tare and Panda Bear (emerging as the John and Paul of the new generation?) sound as fresh and alive as a dewy electric bamboo shoot. Tare's singing is the most striking evolution presented on SJ, moving away from the buried and heavily effected toward a more clean and present sound. He's mic skills have never been better, hitting broad vocal ranges and sinuous melodies never before heard on an AC record, stringing together the oh-oh-woo-eee-aahs like a real pro. It was further gratifying to hear Tare pull of some of the complicated vocals live, especially on Fireworks. Panda Bear's voice, of course, sounds as fantastic as ever, giving us Person Pitch fanatics even more sugar in our ear bowls. The early-mid album run of Chores --> Reverend Green --> Fireworks is the probably the strongest trio since their debut, 'Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished' (still their best, in my opinion). Fireworks, my favorite track on SJ, was my get-up-and-go song of the past 6 months or so... stepping out of the apartment, the world breaths with the accompaniment of steam engine chugga-chugga snare drums, shivering bass yawns and wordless melody sung to the sun. Lyrically, this feels like the most human tune the AC have penned:

I can't walk in a vacuum, I feel ugly, feel my pores. It's the trees of this day that I do battle with for the light. Then I start to feel tragic, people greet me, I'm polite. "What's the day?" "What are you doing?" "How's Your Mood?" "How's that song?" Man it passes right by me, it's behind me, now it's gone.

So yeah, another crazy good album from one of the most vital and creative collectives in show biz. Strawberry Jam: another way for the AC to say hooooo-ray.

Super duper bizzaro video for 1st track, Peacebone.

Fireworks video. Stunning.



Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity

When i was a candy-crazy kid, few things excited me more than the approach of Halloween... running around outdoors with brothers/friends in search of bag fulls (literally bag fulls!) of candy. Now, as a jaded late-20s solipsist, the release of a new Deerhoof album, like finding a strange new fungus, is one of the few things that brings back this childhood sense of pants-peeing excitement. Like Halloween, Deerhoof releases typically come around once a year and combine the fun with the frightening... unlike Halloween candy, which usually lasted for a week, Friend Opportunity lasted me all year long, never loosing a bit of freshness. Deerhoof's exuberant collective imagination is all colour and renegade fun, like a pirates treasure chest brimming with multicolored crayon coins. Their past 5 albums have been front-to-back fantastic, each documenting an unpredictable development of a truly formidable group. Still strong into this stride came Friend Opportunity - the first 2007 album I heard that year - smashing the musical egg open and mightily raising the bar for all who followed. The drums, maned by boy wonder Greg Saunier, are a tightly structured backbone bearing wings of auxiliary percussion.... blocks, bells, the bumpy thing you rub a stick across, etc. Satomi's sweet girlie voice remains complimented by her bass-punk raw power, emitting blasts of bottom-end rock riffage under inviting hop-scotch rhymes. Along with Animal Collective, Deerhoof are vitalizing the modern "indie-pop" (I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth) musical landscape, naturally attracting large and growing audiences of people craving rewarding challenges. Deerhoof: balancing bold experimentation with candy-bag pop maneuvers since 1996.

Wonderful gynecological video for Kidz Are So Small.

Video for the opening track, The Perfect Me.



Grinderman - s/t

Took me a while to get around to listening to this album, partially due to the horrendous cover art (which I still loath... fuck I hate that green monkey) that made me think Grinderman was some kind of meth-fueled techno trash. Turns out that Grinderman is actually a quasi-side project of Nick Cave! Yup, Cave and a few of his baddest seeds sound like they're tag-teaming lady Rock on an ashy couch cluttered with dog-eared Henry Miller and empty Yagger bottles. Grinderman are all booze-soaked ballzy swagger... wild-eyed lucid intoxication, yelling poetry at the night. Fast paced rockers like Depth Charge Ethyl and Honeybee Let's Fly to Mars are interspersed with the brooding dirges of Go Tell the Women and the title track, Grinderman. electric-eel guitar riffs and noisy solos are balanced by the spacious production that allows each layered element of the group to ring out clear and well defined. No Pussy Blues was one of my most listened-to tracks of the year, providing me (and, I'm sure, others with chronic NPB) with an all-out blues-noise anthem addressing the often teeth-grinding frustration of failed bodily pursuits.... instead of forlornly sooking about constant rejection by the opposite sex, Cave lets his aggravation loose with atmosphere-tearing electric mayhem, the sonic equivalent of taking a ball bat to a windshield. Such balls.

No Pussy Blues.

Honeybee Let's Fly to Mars!



Group Doueh: Guitar Music From the Western Sahara / Group Inerane: Guitars From Agadez

Sublime Frequencies is an aptly named record label that dishes out heaps of mind-rewiring never-heard oddities from around the globe, focusing mainly on South-east Asia, the middle-east, and northern Africa. Handpicking the most wild sounds currently happening in alleyways, dirt huts, occult festivals, and over no-fi radio waves, the SF label is providing what many consider an invaluable ethnomusicological bank of modern world music. Not surprising that Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls, Alvarius B, Uncle Jim, etc.) is the main agent behind SF, and if you enjoy the otherworldly output of Sun City Girls, then you must dive into the SF catalog. These two records are the first vinyl (only) releases from SF, presenting some killer guitar music from North Africa. Group Doueh is led by Doueh, an agile maniac on the electric guitar, with his wife and best friend playing backup. Bishop and his pal heard some of Group Doueh on a local Moroccan radio station and were so impressed that they traveled around the countryside asking locals where they could find more... at one stop, a store owner walked them down the street to where Doueh lived. Guitar Music From the Wester Sahara was compiled from Doueh's personal cassette tapes (the recording quality could be described as sandy), revealing an unsung wizard of the electric guitar. Despite the obvious western influence (supposedly Doueh heard James Brown or Hendrix at an early age?!), this music is really different from what our lazy ears are accustomed to. Same goes for the astonishing music of Group Inerane, the star band of SF's dizzying DVD documenting tribal folk music from the Agadez region. Gonzo ethnomusicology.

Sampling of Saharan sublime frequencies.

Sampling of the music from Niger. First group shown is Group Inerane.



Islaja - Ulual yyy

Islaja - my favorite Finish chanteuses and sound sculptor - offers up a new strange brew of haunted meditations. Her first two albums, Meritie and the extraordinary Palaa Aurinkoon, were welcomed infusions of gentle, brooding femininity for the splintered Finish underground (Avarus, Paavoharju, Es, Kemialliset Ystavat, etc.). Islaja is primarily a visual artist, and her songs tend to emerge more like abstract paintings for the ears than easily recollected tunes. Ulual yyy is certainly her most accomplished work - immaculately sculpted - yet it retains her unique voice, sounding conjured from foggy woodland memories... half-forgotten remembrances of departed seduction, reconfigured into an abstract auditory collage; sacred eulogies to the slow-burn whimper of loneliness and the erosion of imagination; allegories for the death of humanity and the unfamiliar journey back toward life.

Video for Pete P.

An older video for Rohkaisulaulu. Nice.



Kan Mikami - Kanryu: Debut Live in Korea 2006

A modern mythic troubadour of the Japanese underground, Kan Mikami has been bleeding a unique blend of blues, folk and improvised rock since the sixties. Despite his tenure and prolific output, Mikami's music remains planted firmly underground... he is, however, one of the most highly regarded elders of modern Japanese music. Mikami vaults violently from yearning whispers to impassioned screams, often within a single breath, generating impassioned climaxes that transcend language in their emotional resonance.... I have no idea what he's singing about but it's hitting me in my core with an angry kindness. At times, it sounds like Mikami is gargling rusty razorblades, spiting out indictments against a troubled world, alternating with open-throated operatic joy and cooing lullabies. The singing is the most structured component of the music, sung over wildly strummed guitar, building minimalist gardens of raw emotion - anger, love, loss. It took me a while to warm up to Mikami, I think mainly because I felt linguistically alienated from his supposedly hyper-political and social tirades... and his guitar playing sounded kinda sucky at first listen. These first impressions quickly melted away once I stopped squinting my ears, listening for the light, and surrendered my full, passive attention to the emergent totality of Mikami's craft... he's singing tales of collective humanity directly into my ventricles as his reflexive, asymmetrical, but fluid guitar playing hugs the contours of these jagged aural roads. Having embraced him for what he is (or, at least, offers) a few years back, this record was an immediate up-my-ally mind blower.

Certified raw, grade 'A' Mikami.

Yume wa yoru hiraku.... feel the Mikami.

Song from a '73 film soundtrack?... kicks in at ~:45seconds.



Magik Markers - Boss

For the past four years, MM have been releasing a steady stream of CD-Rs, live bootlegs, and cassettes of confrontational punk squeal, idiot-savant no-wave improvisations and plain old fucking around. This DIY ethic, along with their hipster-baiting 2girls-1guy lineup, has won the Markers a loyal following of pretentious music critics and masochist laymen... yes, including me (but please don't hurt me for real). Most of their releases have been hit-and-miss affairs (exceptions being A Pangeric to Thing I Don't Understand and their debut, I Trust My Guitar) that documented a few moments of brilliant nuevo-punk fucknoise and a whole lotta scrambling meanderment. This is why Boss surprised me more than a Trent Reznor country album - Boss is a fucking great album, front to back, and contains songs.... yeah, like, real songs with choruses and structure and shit... and the sound quality is fantastic... and, most mind-melting of all, the vocals are clean, clear and spine-tinglingly powerful. Elisa Ambrogio emerges as the parthenogenic love child of Patty Smith and Kim Gordon, all ballsy attitude and heady poetics... hot like boiling mercury. The first minute of Boss is classic Markers guitar squall before kicking into a spacious stoner-rock riff - from this soil of undulating plasmas bursts comes Ambrogio's voice. The real surprises are the sincerely sweet ballads included on Boss... Empty Bottles is a, fuck, lovely song sung over a simple, clean piano line (piano?!). Taste is probably the strongest track on the album, if not for the the central position on the album than for representing most directly everything that succeeds on Boss... killer riffs, heady vocals, tight power... sweet and dirty.

Taste... killer tune, killer video.

Some insight into the bands approach to playing followed by a fairly typical live clip.



Panda Bear - Person Pitch

"i'm not trying to forget you
i just like to be alone
come and give me the space i need
and you may find that were alright"

What can I say, Person Pitch is probably my favorite album of the new millennium. If I had the resources to commission a legion of sun elves to construct a perfect album just for me, I imagine they would produce something like Person Pitch. I've been listening to this for a whole year, and fuck me, it's not just held up to my initial breathless impression, but has grown into something of a life-long sacred album. I'm taking this one to the grave.

Video for Comfy in Nautica.

Video for Bros.

Fan video of Take Pills.



Tenniscoats - Tan-Tan Therapy

Here collaborating with Swedish instrumental group Tape, Tenniscoats sound like a troupe of jazz-trained babies playing lullabies to their mothers. Relative to my preferred breed of underground Japanese music - low-fi psych rock overloads and murky twilight dirges - Tan-Tan Therapy came as a shockingly clear and sunny surprise. The opening tracks, Baibaba Bimba and Oetsu to Kanki no Nanoriuta [Given song by sob and joy], are revelations of perfect song, alchemically combining crystalline layers of plucked acoustic guitar, light-touch piano melody, swelling horns, electronic abstractions and brushed drums. The emergent songs - far greater than the sum of their parts - are queened by the heart-melting voice of Saya... lots of similarities with deerhoof frontwoman. The translated lyrics of Uta ga Nainoni (Like No Songs) perfectly captures the mood of Saya's sweet, floating voice:

In the night which i can sing
There seems to be no sound
Moon lighted here and my singing
Like there is no other sound

Intensely beautiful and kind music, these unhurried quasi pop songs born from the memory of a seeding field of wildflowers. This harried world should listen to more Tenniscoats.

Baibaba Bimba, live and ripe.

Live instrumental piece. gorgeous.



Yellow Swans - At All Ends

Along with Sightings new album, Through the Panama, At All Ends revitalized and redirected my excitement over modern noise rock. Yellow Swans is a duo who play mix of analogue and digital electronics along with guitars and voice to create a godly reticulum of psychedelic lightning. At All Ends opens with tranquilized Wookiee yawns, slowly wandering into an ice storm, boarding the SS low-tone, the great whale beckoning from the deep black ocean. Mid song, Chewbacca has been left to die in the snow and the microbial rot begins to scream, when suddenly the Swans lay down this glacial melody that sounds so goddamn huge and beautiful - evoking Hendrix standing wide on the mast of a pirate ship, caught in a blizzard of ice as the ship crashes through 100-meter waves, playing a farewell anthem to the unseen sky. Hold onto the headphones, folks, or your brains may shoot out of your tingling ears. The sequence of tracks on AAE is perfect, making for an ultra-cohesive whole-album listening experience. The third track, Our Oasis, evokes a dying star sucking into itself before rejoining the dark fabric of the universe in a terrifying supernova... dozing on the beach when, unexpectedly, a mountainous iceberg crashes down on you, carried by a slushy tsunami. BIG stuff. Listening to At All Ends, I can feel my cheeks redden from the lashing winter winds blowing clean through my brains. Best album for nightly winter walking.

I Woke Up - killer track from the 2006 album Psychic Secession

Another great track set to a mesmerizing video. Hell yes.



Bonus subjective opinions!
...here are some more killer albums released in 2007 that I thoroughly enjoyed and would highly recommend... with tasty Youtube links. word.

Boredoms - super roots 9
Six Organs of Admittance - Shelter From the Ash
Deerhunter - Cryptograms
Sir Richard Bishop - While My Guitar Violently Bleeds; Polytheistic Fragments
Rick White - Memoreaper
MV & EE - Gettin' Gone
Up-Tight - Early Years
Wooden Shjips - Wooden Shjips
Nadja - Touched; Radiance of Shadows
LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
Burial - Untrue
Sightings - Through the Panama
Acid Mothers Temple - Myth of the Love Electrique
the Tuss - Rushup Edge
Major Stars - Mirror / Messenger
Fursaxa - Alone in the Dark Wood
Black Lips - Good Bad Not Evil
Radiohead - In Rainbows
Les Rallizes Denudes - Yodo-Go-A-Go-Go
Eric Copeland - Hermaphrodite
Justice - [cross]
Oren Ambarchi - In the Pendulum's Embrace
Kemialliset Ystavat - untitled
Burning Star Core - Blood Lightning
Boris vs Stupid Babies Go Mad - Damaged


lOve FeeF

To Bee or Not To Bee: the current plight of Apis mellifera

It's been a tough year for the gentle honey bee. Starting last fall beekeepers all over the U.S. began to notice that their bees were disappearing en mass, causing a severe nation-wide collapse of entire hive colonies. Currently known as 'Colony Collapse Disorder' (CCD), the causal agent(s?) of the epidemic remains shrouded in mystery.... Adult bees disappear from the colonies, never to return, choosing to die somewhere away from the hive where bee babies and the queen have been abandoned along with ample food reserves (honey and pollen). This could suggest that some kind of microbial infection is at the root of the problem, with infected bees hesistant to return to the colony for fear of spreading the infection. But, like I said, the robust, scientifically savy bee community is scratching their collective heads over the root cause of the population decimation. With CCD, once the disease hits a colony, an entire hive can be decimated within a week. The few dead bees that are found near the hives are typically riddled with several deadly viruses and fungi; a virtual cornucopia of pestilence... but what came first, the carcas or the fungus?!

The scariest thing about this ongoing collapse is far from the prospect of no honey tonight in your coffee, no honey tonight in your tea... Bees are responsible for pollinating 1/3 of all U.S. crops - including almonds, apples, blueberries, peaches, avocados, cranberries, sunflowers, cucumbers - and all over America beekeepers are reporting loses of between 30 and 90%. According to a study conducted in 2000 at Cornell university, bee pollination adds $14.6 billion annually to U.S. agriculture. Keep in mind that bees are also important vectors of non-commercial plant sex, pollinating wild plants throughout the North American. It's like if all the storks that deliver babies to humans were all sickly riddled with fungi and viruses - human populations would crash. Remember: seeds are plant babies and fruits are ovaries... of course you'll never see a creationist or militant vegan protesting against seedless watermelon or 'two scoops of ovaries' cereals. I digress. The main point is that when bee populations decline, so does plant reproductivity and agricultural food production. Think of it this way - bee pollination is directly responsible for every third bite of food you eat.


An Historical Perspective...

Honeybees have experience several devastating epidemics over the last two decades. The first, appearing back in the neon '80s, was caused by a couple of nasty mites - the tracheal and varroa mite - both of which have developed some resistance to the insecticides used to limit their effects and may now be contributing to CCD. The tracheal mite is so small (~0.175mm!) that it actually lives inside of the bees' tracheal tubes (breathing holes lining their chitinous exoskeleton) where it bites into the tube wall to feed on the bees' haemolymph (insect blood)... Kinda like having ticks living inside your lungs. The varroa mite, Varroa destructor, is, as the name suggests, the most destructive pest of bee colonies. Like the tracheal mite the varroa mite feeds on haemolymph which weakens individual bees. In the process, however, nasty viruses are transmitted from mite to bee which cause deformities in wing development and eventual death. Next in line was an outbreak of a bacterial disease, American foulbrood, which infects bee larvae (aka brood), turning them into a stinky, gooey mess stuck to the bottom of their honeycomb cell. American foulbrood has also developed some resistance to the antibiotics used to treat this devestating childhood disease. Yes indeed, the noble matriarchy of Apis mellifera - one of humanity's oldest animal companions - has been experiencing a series of severe plagues which potentially threatens our own food supply. Unfortunately CCD is the most devastating epidemic on record to hit modern apiculture. Fortunately CCD has not officially been reported in Canada, although colony losses for the 2006/2007 year have been unusually high (see this statment from the Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists) which may indicate that CCD is knoking at our northerly boarder door.


Here are just a few suspects suggested to be implicated in this developing tale of tragedy:

- Agricultural pesticides, especially a group of toxins called neonicitinoids, are potentially compromising the imune systems of bees which could make them suseptible to the myriad fungal, bacterial and viral infections observed from affected bees.

- Signals from cell phones... this was suggested from a small study conducted at the University of Landau in Germany that reported that bees' inate navigational capabilities were disrupted when exposed to radiation similar to that produced near cell phones and cell phone towers, making it difficult for bees to find their way home. This hypothesis has since been widely rejected since many areas hard-hit by CCD are nowhere near constant cell phone radiation... also, cell phones have been widespread for several years before CCD was reported.

- A nasty little beetle-yeast combo. The 'Small Hive Beetle' was introduced into North America in 1998 and is attracted to honeybee alarm pheromones - volatile chamicals secreted by bees to signal danger - which guides it to the bee hive. As the they scuttle around inside, munching bee babies and pollen and shitting in the honey, the beetles spread a symbiotic yeast (a unicellular fungus!) which begins to grow on the pollen. Now listen up, this is crazy... this yeast, as it grows, actually produces bee alarm pheromones in relatively huge quantities, atracting more and more beetles (and fungus!) to the hive!!! Listen to an mP3 of an interview with Peter Teal, the research director behind this study (link at the bottom of the summary).

- A combination of environmental (i.e., changing weather conditions), chemical (i.e., pesticides), microbiological (i.e., diseases) and managerial (i.e., long-distance transportation of bees to agricultural land; misuse of antibiotics) factors, each individually being compromising to bee health but together becoming deadly.


Many people have been pointing to GMOs as the main cause of CCD saying that the transgenic toxins produced by these plants are being ingested or absorbed by bees. Transgenic corn and cotton is modified to make a powerful insecticide, Bt, naturally produced by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. Bt toxin is fairly specific to caterpillars and beetles and is not considered effective against bees, wasps or ants. When pestilent leaf herbivores (folivores) take a bite of the GM plant, the Bt toxin contained therein disrupts the insect gut, causing death. In principle, this removes the need to spray exogenous Bt on the crops and targets only specific leaf-eating herbivores. So why would this effect bees if bees are not herbivores at all, but rather welcomed guests of their plant hosts who dine on nectar and pollen? The pollen of GM plants does contain small amounts of Bt. However, bees don't usually collect corn pollen (corn is wind pollinated), and visit cotton flowers for nectar, not pollen. Not surprisingly, most scientific studies have concluded that GM pollen does not negatively effect the health of honeybees. A summary of the evidence was recently published by the Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium regarding the suggested link between GM plants and CCD stated that "While this possibility has not been ruled out, the weight of evidence reported here argues strongly that the current use of Bt crops is not associated with CCD". Oh GMOs, the favorite boogeyman of lefty sheep. A similar knee-jerk reaction against GMOs happened in response to a decline in monarch butterfly populations in the late 1990s. People were blaming GM corn because, hey, it's designed to kill caterpillars, right?! Since monarch caterpillars feed on milk weeds (Asclepias spp.), scientists conducted studies to see if there was enough Bt corn pollen landing on milk weeds to effect the caterpillars. Result? Not even close. I suspect that the GMO argument for CCD is on equally shaky ground.


That's all for now... of course if you're interested in digging deeper than this meager melliferous synopsis there is a ton of information buzzing through the internet... again, the Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium would bee one of the best places to start.




lOve F33F

10 Japanese PsychRock Juggernauts

"For me Rock refers to all kinds of cool music and the spirit that lodges therein. So, for me Xenakis and Stockhausen and troubadour music are all Rock. On the other hand Aerosmith, Nirvana and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers are not rock. They are just pop music, causing no appreciable harm and no appreciable good.[...]Psychedelic rock is a type of rock music that evolved under the influence of the drug culture. Because of that, there's some wonderful groups from that era that accidentally peered into the abyss of music. However, most of it is happy with seeing the dimension that drugs have given access to, and it doesn't attempt to reach the next stage... Anyone who has glimpsed that next step on the path towards the cosmic principle will be aware of these sounds - even without the help of drugs. And those sounds themselves are a big clue towards finding the cosmic principle."
- Kawabata Makoto

Ok, it's been a few years now that I've been digging into the mysterious soil of non-traditional/Western-inspired Japanese music and I'm here to let y'all in on some secrets. This is for all of you who hunger for rockier cliffs than the traditional "home of rock"-type radio horse apple hits from the "golden age of rock" and you who crave music with enough freedom and force to splatter your rainbow cerebrum. So step away from the modern ironic laptop synth dance rock and the crowded yawning land of "indi" rock and follow the lava-brick-road into a buried eden of brain-banging rock-and-mutherfuckin'-roll.

Central interrelated ideas are:

Deconstruction - reconditioning the lazy music consumers mind to experience music, beauty and power in novel soundscapes; transmutating structured songs into walls of feedback, minimalist tapestries, and/or heavy free-jazz freakouts; deconstructing (and reinterpreting) the history of American rock music.

Freedom - improvisation around structured motifs; freedom to put your whole self into musical expression; freedom to stomp on taboos (i.e., recording quality (often very low), song length (often very long), record distribution, etc.); freedom to rock out, loudly.

Psychedelia - mind manifesting; sonic manipulation of perception and induction of altered states of mind; revelation through meditative repetition; ecstasis; dark mysteries of the night; reverb, distortion, delay, and feedback.

Space/time - Stretching the space between notes like taffy; minimizing, to the point of eliminating, the space between notes; super-saturation; body-stone stasis; slow crescendoes; thrash-fast fist-pumpers; ecologies of frequencies; rock you like a volcano.


OK, Let's Gooooo!!!


live '77 - Les Rallizes Denudes

Les Rallizes Denudes (aka Hadaka No Rallizes) are the most mysterious, cultish, and arguably best of the Japanese underground. Their influence on the current wave of Japan's psych-rockers is massive, making them, and especially this record, a linchpin of the whole scene. Together from ~1967-1995, LRD never released an official album and would play only rarely around Japan. Their live shows, however, are legendary for the their ridiculous volume emanating from a wall of Marshal stacks and their use of disorienting light show and other visuo-cerebral accoutrement. Nearly all of their material that is available now is taken from live bootlegs, and even unofficial copies (i.e., burned CDs) fetch at least $30. This double album (2CD), documenting a show in March of '77, is the absolute best of the bunch and is all the Rallizes you really need. Beginning with a slow, lazy delay guitar noodle, soon joined by a stoned plodding bass and lightly-delayed drums, Enter the Mirror is one of the most beautifully blissed out pieces of rock to ever enter my ears. Behind closed eyes I imagine flying placidly over undulating summer pastures as my body expands to fill the sky and folds upon itself like origami... waves of screaming feedback cut through the mind's eye while Mizutani Takashi's desperate voice, saturated with delay, bleeds like mercury from heaven's broken radio, at once coalescing into a great lake of reflective fluid metal and shattering into a constellation of electric hail. Behind the mercurial mirror we enter the garden... beautiful, strange and oh so heavy. The greatest psychedelic rock record ever. period.

Heavier than a death in the family!

Legends at play


Absolutely Freak Out (Zap Your Mind) (2002) - Acid Mothers Temple & the melting Paraiso U.F.O.

Kawabata Makoto is a figure that pops up across the Japanese psych-rock landscape like dandelions in spring. Guitar god, translator of cosmic hums, and long-haired Zen freak, Kawabata plays guitar like he's dragging the zombie corpse of Hendrix behind a spaceship made of pure aurora borealis. He's been active in the Japanese underground since the late 70s, playing on well over 100 albums ranging from single note meditations to break-neck speed supra-metal. Acid Mother Temple, forming in the late 1990s, is currently Makoto's main squeeze and deserves recognition as the first japanese psych-rock band to really "tap into America". Thanks to the relentless output of the band (average of 4-6 albums a year!) and the sheer otherworldly power of much of their material (not to mention their insane live shows!), AMT have become the most popular psychedelic group to come out of Japan. Absolutely Freak Out is my favorite AMT album and would be an excellent introduction to the band as it covers a huge amount of ground over it's 2+hours, showcasing AMT's gentle synthy bliss-outs, mantra-like sound cycles and, of course, blistering over-the-top rock freak outs. Probably the "trippiest" album listed here. The title is a play on Zappa's first two albums, Freak Out and Absolutely Free, paying homage to one of their key influences. Plus, the recording quality is excellent (no hiss or red-line). What more do you need!?

Listen to them on their MySpace page!!!

Suddenly Like Flames (2002) - LSD March

The current torchbearers of Les Rallizes legacy led by guitarist/vocalist Shinsuke Michishita, LSD March explores both gentle, dark isolation and heavy electric squall with lucid intention and zero irony. Members of LSD March have played with psych stalwarts Fushitsusha and High Rise, making them sound wiser and more mature in their song crafting than would be expected from a band on their second album. The first half of Suddenly Like Flames is stunning echo-chamber melancholia, dripping with delayed vocal yearning, restrained rhythms, and sprawling guitar pleas. The opening track, The Lamp-Tomorrow's Godard, in particular showcases the gloomy beauty accessed by this heavyweight trio. Watch out though, when the title track hits LSD March go into blasted in-the-red mode, with bass lines coming at you like devil punches and guitar and drums jockeying for sonic saturation. One way ticket for the night train through Hades. Bonus points for the washed out venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) cover photo.

Listen to LSD March on their MySpace page!!!

High Rise 2 (1986) - High Rise

Besides being one of the progenitors of modern psychedelic Japanese rock, High Rise represents the hottest mix of straight stone-faced rock, punk and freakout volume on this list... searing guitar solos saturate the space between reverb vocalized verse, drums pound out Bonhamesque fill-bent rhythms, and the fuzzy big-belly bass comes through loud and heavy. The songs here are mostly short, satisfying blasts of riff-laden, air guitar-inducing force, hitting blastoff choruses with a firm hand on the whammy bar. Bass and vocals band leader, Nanjo Asahito, has been active in the Japanese underground since the seventies, but High Rise will probably go down as his most significant group that inspired the dawn of a new branch of psych rock, most importantly with the release fo this album. Dudes were the first group released on PSF records, which has since become the purveyors par excellence of Japanese underground music.... the label itself takes it’s name from High Rise's original name – Psychedelic Speed Freaks – although they have since rebranded themselves as Poor Strong Factory records. Whichever, PSF is the nom de plume of all music obscure and Japanese.

Psychedelic Speed Freaks

High Rise Live in Tokyo

Mellow Out (1995) - Mainliner

Imaginative Plain (2001) - Mainliner

So, Nanjo Asahito from High Rise began to feel limited within that lineup and set out to form a new group that took the power and intensity up several notches.... in other words, he thought the guitarist in High Rise was a bit of a pansy (too MC5) so he replaced him with Kawabata Makoto (reigning guitar demi-god) to really blow the roof off your head. Result? Mission a-fucking-complished. Mainliner takes the High Rise format to its extreme, playing so heavy and in-the-red that the boundaries of the auditory sense disintegrate under duress of the violent, relentless rock onslaught. Mainliner makes Cannibal Corpse sound like kid stuff ("yeah, you guys go on singing about eating babies, we're busy tearing the universe a new black hole. sound is love."). Mellow Out, Mainliner's debut, is a revelation of the limits of heavy music and sounds down right terrifying when listened to at proper volume... Kawabata's relentless solos feel like I'm being incinerated by the Emperor's finger-lightning attack, filling in every concevible space between the pounding, repetative bass line and hammer-of-god drums. The vocals, also maned by Asahito, are nearly drowned in the mix, bleeding through the cracks cloaked in delay. Imaginative Plain has become one of my all-time favorite rock records and is the one I listen to the most out of all those listen here. Much faster than Mellow Out, every single second of Imaginative Plain is full throttle, in-the-red, blown-out rock insanity. This is my day-time psych record, assaulting my brains on those gorgeous sunny days traveling through the city, evoking images of buildings crumbling to dust and the sky being torn apart like tissue... put this guy on and you'll feel invincible.

Mort Nuit (2003) - Ohkami No Jikan

A veritable who's-who of japnese psych revolving around High Rise and Mainliner head-hauncho Nanjo Asahito, Ohkami No Jikan have been playing for many years before putting this debut album out. The 1st track, Israel, occupies most of the album, clocking in at 30 minutes. Opening with a minute of free-form blasted psych rocket science, it quickly falls into a plodding, impossibly-heavy repetitive rhythm over which 2-3 guitars (no liner notes or credits?!) weave a dark, otherworldly sonic tapestry combining clean whamy-bar wails with screaming distorted flourishes of technicolored dream space. The vocals echo through mind's dark matter, patient and hypnotic. The resulting quality is spectacular, allowing the attentive listener to appreciate the careful layers of deep dark soul-shredding rock power. Not even kidding. Puff the magic dragon, turn it up to 11, close your eyes and ready the self for takeoff... this is the sound of falling into a black hole, as time disintegrates along with your senses.

Where the Spirits Are (2006) - Suishou No Fune

I'll just let the band explain it in their own endearing english translation:

"Suishou no Fune usually make much songs by adlib, sing the song which make the best use of the japanese poetic beauty.The songs of "Spirit, Light and Darkness, Soul, Love and Hatred, Shamanistic, Life and Death" will touch your heartstrings. You will enjoy the sound of Japanese verse and their psychedelic world, if you don't understand Japanese. Suishou no Fune is magic music."

Adorable. It's all true. Suishou No Fune are a newish psych group in the same vein as Miminokoto and LSD March, straddling introspective isolation and fearless rock abandon. These two aspects are displayed magnificently on the opening track of Where the Spirits Are. Vale of Spirits begins with an unhinged freeform sonic fuckfest of frequency and drum thunder... ~2 1/2 minutes in the bass and drums hit a deep riff plunging the song into the metalic mud while the dual guitar centerpieces of SNF engage in a dialog of feedback and single-note punctuation. The vocals are heavily delayed, giving a huge, dream-like urgency to the whole record. Your Tears Drop From the Sky follows with a slow, spacious come-down, looking up from under the galaxy as occasional meteorites crash into your chest... this placidity is gradually torn apart by the fierce emotion of the voice and two guitars. Keep an ear out for these guys and a girl, they're on to something special.

Videos of Suishou No Fune

Overhang Party 2 (1994) - Overhang Party

Stooges-blues power rockers Overhang Party keep the riffs plentiful and rock-steady while pushing the boundaries of traditional psych rock. The song Blue Sky would be perfect along a summer road trip driving down open highway, as is the folk-tinged neil youngy Traveler never Return. On their more blasted tracks, the guitar refuses to excuss itself before peppering the paisly sky with a million kisses. To the casual listener, these songs will sound more carefully constructed and nuanced than most of the other stuff listed here, and there might be some truth to that. While OP can get pretty abstract and "out there" at times, they are certainly more structured and in line with classic hard rock and early metal, a la Sabbath, than, say, Acid Mothers Temple or Les Rallizes. This record would be an especially great place to plunge into this crazy, abstract genre.

Read their mission statement

Check out these videos from their website!!!

Orange Garage (2005) - Miminokoto

Miminokoto formed in 2000 and constitute a vital part of the modern wave of psych bands emerging through Tokyo and Osaka. Combining elements of Les Rallizes slow-burning, folk-tinged placidity with High-Rise's fast-paced rock shredding, Miminokoto sound wonderfully diverse and full of intention. Orange Garage, composed of various live tracks, begins by gently coercing the listener into a world of dark dark night dreams... a lazy rhythm supports a repetitive, clean guitar mantra, slowly growing into an emotionally devestating peak. It's really the singer (and guitarist), Masami Kawaguchi, who kills me on this record.... he's voice sounds so passionately pleading and lonely, immediate but somehow distant, like Roy Orbison singing into a carboard fridge box. Even on the next track, Tokedasu, a deadly quasi-surf-rock burner, Kawaguchi sounds like he's on the verge of tears. Also, the chorus sports an infectiously bouncey bass line that gives the song some seriously triumphant momentum. From here there's equal amounts of downer, bleakly-beutiful ballads and straight finger-waving rock mayhem. The guitar solos on the slower tracks are patient like poured hunny and just as sweet, taking long, deep breaths of the volatile ambrosian haze curling away from the band.



l0ve FeeF



*pssssssst - you can find all these albums on SoulSeek.

Merging Moon & Cocoon

love f33f

Autonomic Fly Fishing (Woman As Bait)

love feef

Invitation to Psychosymbiosis

lovE fEef

Valentine's Rose

LoVe Feef

[---]

love FEef

Germinating Spore - A Portrait

Love Feef

You're My Honeybee

My favorite insect in the known universe is the honeybee, Apis mellifera, those busy, fuzzy buddies of plants and people. The one thing most people know about bees is that they make honey, that golden saccharine gloop prized the world over... lets elaborate on the process and raison d’etre of honey production; the how and why.

Flowers and bees have a long, passionate history of cooperative dependence. Bees are flower miners, obtaining all of their food resources from the multitude of colourful blossoms blooming within ~3-4 kilometers of their hive. Flowers produce two primary food substances important to bees: pollen and nectar. Pollen is the tailless male sperm cells (the male gametophyte) of flowering plants; the yellow ‘makeup’ kids and hippies smear on their faces with dandelions. Pictured to the left are pollen grains from various plant species. Each tiny pollen grain is packed with proteins, vitamins, and minerals – essential for its germination and growth of the “pollen tube” when/if it lands on a compatible female flower part (i.e., the stigma). This makes pollen one of the worlds most nutritious foods and natural multivitamins, and is the only significant source of protein for the bee community. Once the snow thaws in the Spring, bees emerge from their hive (they don’t sleep through the Winter) and start collecting pollen from the early-flowering trees, packing the pollen grains in tight, colourful balls in special pouches (‘pollen baskets’) on their hind legs (see picture of foraging bee). This pollen is used to feed the developing larvae that have hatched from the eggs laid by the all-important queen bee and supplements the diet of the adult worker bees. In turn, the trees and weeds are pollinated/impregnated. A single colony will collect about 34 kg of pollen in a season!

OK, nectar. Nectar is a dilute, sugary liquid produced by specialized flower cells adapted to attract pollinating insects, like bees. If you’ve ever pulled out a pinch of clover flowers and sucked the bottom for a sweet nibble, you’ve experienced unadulterated nectar. Honeybees have a specialized, internal pouch to store this nectar, called the honey stomach, which is separate from their digestive system. The hive’s legions of field workers return from the field with full honey stomachs and deposit the raw nectar in the many cells of their honeycomb. Here’s where it gets a bit crazy.... other in-house bees then beat their wings over the nectar-filled cells, evaporating off most of the water to condense the nectars’ sugars and minerals.... this is ‘honey’! Honey is pure, 100% plant nectar, condensed 5-to-8-fold (i.e., 1 ml of nectar produces ~0.2 ml of honey) to maximize the hive space used for food storage! ... if you’re vegan and don’t eat honey for ethical reasons, you’re an idiot. Once the cells of the honeycomb are full, the bees will ‘cap’ them with a thin layer of wax... where does the wax come from?! This is just fantastic: the bees eat the honey and turn it into little flakes of wax that they secret from special “wax glands” on their bellies! Check out the picture of the bee abdomen secreting leaves of wax. Bees need to eat 10 grams of honey to produce 1 gram of wax. This capped honey is used to feed all the bees in the hive; except for the queen.... the queen is fed ‘royal jelly’, a richly nutritious substance secreted from the heads of worker bees! Royal jelly tastes really bad. Amazingly, it is their diet of pure royal jelly that allows the queen to live for a few years, while other worker bees, living on honey, have a lifespan of mere weeks. So, honey is the bulk food supply of the bee hive, feeding the colony through the long, cold months of Winter and fueling the growth and eventual multiplication of the bee community through the warm, flowering months of Spring and Summer. Lucky for us, bees store much more honey than the hive needs, which allows us to take a certain amount without affecting the bees. A strong colony may produce 500 kg of honey and the beekeeper will be able to take 100kg.... yes, the bees will eat 400kg of honey through the Fall and Winter!

So what’s up with different “kinds” of honey? Yes, indeedy, you can get buckwheat honey, clover honey, blueberry honey, cactus honey, etc. The kind simply refers to the source of the nectar the bees used to make the honey! So blueberry honey is the condensed nectar of blueberry flowers, and nothing but blueberry flowers.... this is because bees will only harvest one type of flower at a time. If bees start collecting apple blossom nectar, they will not mix it with other nectars, even if there is an abundant diversity of plants flowering at the same time. Right now, I’m enjoying a spoonful of New Zealand ‘manuka’ honey, a condensation of nectar produced by Leptospermum scoparium, a relative of the Australian tee tree and eucalyptus... thick, dark orange and dripping with exotic floral aromas and tastes. Remember, don’t buy pasteurized honey! as the heating destroys the medicinal properties of the honey and compromises its subtle bouquet.

And that's the bee's knees of honey!


10V3 f33f

Panda Bear - Person Pitch

I’ve been catching my breath for the past week trying to formulate a coherent rant about Person Pitch, the upcoming solo album from Animal Collective member Panda Bear (aka Noah Lennox). My immediate thoughts upon hearing the absolutely gorgeous, transcendent sounds occupying PP went something like this: “uuummmm.... ahhhhhhhhh!!! wooooOOhhhhhHHH!!! yes!!! love, man, pure love, jesus christ the love, I’m in love, I love everything, I can make it; I will remember to have fun; this is what a baby’s brain must sound like when they look at their mother; this is so dubby” and so on. I’ve listened to PP about 25 times in the past week, constantly discovering new textural layers, lyrics, rhythms, and samples, continually building upon my initial excitement. Those smitten by the Beach Boys Pet Sounds album might find themselves in familiar territory. Now, Person Pitch doesn’t really sound like Pet Sounds, as much as it feels like Pet Sounds (i.e., pure love), but without the up-front issues of self-doubt and alienation. The extreme humanness of the music, more than anything, binds Panda Bear to Brian Wilson; this despite the heavy electronics - vertigo vocals drenched in echo and delay, sequenced drum machining, and ambient droning backdrops. The music on PP is actually more in the vein of Lee Perry and King Tubby than the beach Boys, although the multi-layered vocal harmonies immediately smack of the Beach Boys. Regardless of the fragmented sonic lineage, PP is undoubtedly a modern record that snuggles up nicely to the Animal Collective canon. However, PP abandons most of the unhinged, explosive exuberance of AC in favor of a patient, psychedelic blossoming of one man’s self. Also, to those familiar with Young Prayer, Panda Bear’s previous record inspired by the death of his father, PP is a very different affair. It is not surprising that PP was written over the last couple years when Mr. Lennox was building a new life in Portugal with his wife and newborn baby girl, a potentially transformative experience for this young man... No doubt that fatherhood in particular has contributed to the sense of wonderment and love that permeates PP.

The album begins with the shimmering Comfy In Nautica, a multi-layered vocal piece arranged overtop a slow clapping march. Panda Bear is the highly inventive drummer in Animal Collective (him and Greg Saunier of Deerhoof are probably the most impressive “rock” drummers of this generation that I’ve heard), and his rhythmic prowess is manifest throughout the arrangements of PP. The sustained deep drone at the end of Comfy is massive, and sets up the second track, Take Pills. Take Pills is where I was completely won over; specifically the transitional halfway point, when the initial slow, druggy dreamscape is transformed into an upbeat, finger-wagging slice of delicious psych-pop. And then.... an owl hoots, and the first of two 12minute+ centerpieces of PP is poured into our ears like liquid rainbows. Bro’s is a masterpiece, I don’t know what else to say... the tambourine just makes my insides move, and when the shakers and other unidentifiable sounds hit at around 3:20, I’m flying high in the friendly sky. Each layer alone is really quite simple, but their collective arrangement fuses into an organic whole expressing much more than the sum of its parts; this can be said for the album as a whole. Good Girl is the other centerpice and its probably my favorite piece of the album. The first third is a bit jarring as a quick tabla-like drumbeat is looped slightly off-rhythm to the swirling electronic sounds and cut-up vocals... this is the most manic and dense that PP gets, and it may take a few listens to shake some of the anxious tension. The second third, however, emerges beautifully, returning to the more even-paced feel of the first three tracks. Anyway, I’ll let it speak for itself (see link below).

Listen, I know I might be setting you up for disappointment by painting such an impossibly heavenly picture. Also, a lot of people are going to hate this shit out of sheer offense to their personal musical tastes, and you might be one of them; it does get pretty weird at times (e.g., the first third of Good Girl), and some may find the near childlike wonderment a bit too precious. Personally, this is pretty much perfect music to my ears. Combine this with the fantastic album art collage by Agnes Montgomery and you couldn’t ask for more. Person pitch comes out on Paw Tracks, Animal Collective’s label, on March 20th.


Good Girl mP3


LoVe feeF

Truffles and the Smell of Pig Sex

Amongst the gastrophilic cognoscenti, no earthly fructifications are revered as highly as the truffles. Truffles have been called “the diamond of the kitchen” by snooty French gastronomes (the little bearded people living inside your stomach, turning the food brown) who pay $1000-$2000 per pound for choice specimens of the white truffle, Tuber magnatum. The taste and odor of truffles is said to be a pungent (I’ve heard ‘stinky sock’), walnut signature; although I’m sure professional gastronomes would name a litany of superlatives and adjectives to describe the truffles’ subtleties rarely found outside of the wine industry. Last year, a Chinese couple paid $160,406 (USD) for a single Italian white truffle weighing an extraordinary 3.3 pounds (pictured on the left), the highest price ever paid for a fungus. Honestly, if I were a billionaire, I’d have bid $160,407 (besides, the money went to charity).... I’d keep this tri-loafed soil-born Buddha in a secret alter in the woods (a la Fred Penner), making rare pilgrimages just to imbibe the fetid fumes of fungus in quiet pagan reverie.

What exactly are truffles?
These dense, underground (hypogeous) mushrooms are, like all mushrooms, the reproductive organs of fungi. Truffle-forming fungi mostly belong to the Ascomycete genus Tuber (just like we call hypogeous storage roots, like potatoes and yams, tubers). Within the truffle body resides the multitude of spores, the atomic reproductive/dispersal unit of fungi. Truffle-forming fungi grow in mutalistic symbiosis [both partners benefit by ‘living (biosis) together (sym)’)] with the roots of certain tree species (oak, hazel nut), with the fungus forming a sheath-like network of mycelium (webs of fungal tissue) around the tree roots and an internal network of mycelium that grows within the root cortex (see diagram). This close association allows the fungus to obtain carbon-rich sugars from the tree, manufactured through photosynthesis, while the tree obtains phosphorous and other nutrients and minerals from the fungus. This mutualistic carbon-phosphorous trade-off exists between fungi and plants in various forms among ~90% of all plant species on Earth.

How do truffles disperse their spores if they are growing underground!?
Like many plant seeds, various fungi have evolved strategies to exploit animals as agents of dispersal. It’s no coincidence that cherries taste so good to us animals - the hard cherry seed needs to pass through the acidic gut of an animal before being shat out some distance away from the mother tree, thereby spreading its seed to new localities. Dispersal is thought to be a major selection pressure (referring to natural selection – the fundamental mechanism of evolution) on the evolution of sweet tasting fruits and nectar-secreting flowers that attract seed dispersing animals and pollinating insects, respectively. OK, back to truffles. You may know that pigs, specifically female pigs, are often used by trufflateurs (truffle hunters) to locate the hidden gold lurking just beneath the soil. When a female pig (preferably looking for some hot pink pig sex) finds a truffle, she goes crazy and immediately starts digging for the fungus. This is because truffles produce a volatile (air-born) steroid called 5-alpha-androstenol (related to testosterone), which is the exact same compound produced in the saliva of male pigs in heat to advertise their sexual availability. So, when you march that pig into an area rich in truffles, she thinks she’s the homecoming queen at the Italian pig orgy, digging out all of the would-be suitors trapped under the soil. In this way, the truffle is brought to the surface and its spores are carried by the pig to other parts of the forest for future colonization. The pig, I imagine, becomes extremely sexually frustrated and confused until.... “hey, where’s that hot fetid man-pig stink comming from!?!?!" Digdigdigdig... "NOOOOOOINK!!” ... Over and over again, to the supreme delight of the now-rich trufflateur. Bon Appetit!



loVE FEef

Ed's Magic Morels

Ed Folks is a mushroom hunter, has been for decades, bounding throughout the maritimes and the West coast in search for Chanterells, Boletes, pine mushrooms and Hydnums. But the most prized and elusive of all are the Morels, species of the genus Morchella. I had a golden chance to talk fungi with Ed the other day, which turned toward the morels after our discussion of Psilocybes. Unlike most edible mushrooms, which belong to the phylum Basidiomycota, the morels are the kingly fructifications of an Ascomycetous fungus, appearing almost by magic throughout the woods of North America. The conical honeycomb-like cap - pale yellow, olive, brown, grey, or reddish depending on species and variety - make the morels one of the most recognizable groups of mushrooms on Earth... they are also considered one of the tastiest foods to spring from the ground. Unfortunately I cannot elaborate on its taste, as I have never had the fortune of plunging into the subtle gastronomical delights of the Morel. yes, this does leave me sad and upset. I blame my inexperience primarily on the near impossibility of cultivating morels. Burn sites (areas of last years forest fires) throughout Western North America are the typical haunting grounds of the mighty morel, although the exact reason for the association remains a mystery... are they growing from the decaying roots left behind from the fire? are they quasi-mycorrhizal with their associated trees? Are there special nutrients or chemical by-products formed by fires that stimulate mushroom formation? what about water, sunlight, temperature and CO2 requirements/conditions?! 'Shrouded in mystery' is no overstatement when speaking of the elusive morel and its environmental predilections. Reproducible cultivation of morels represent the holy grail of the mushroom industry. Campbells, the soup people, have been investing millions in morel cultivation research hoping to someday corner the 'cream of morel' market (bits and pieces of morels, too small to sell as whole mushrooms, are used to flavour many foods). Back to Ed. Like many people before and since, Ed had experimented with morel cultivation for years with limited success. He didn't get into the specifics (substrate composition, spawning, humidity, etc.), but he managed to produce abundant sclerotia (compact masses of mycelia packed with food reserves that can detach from the fungus and sprout mushrooms in favorable conditions)... he said that the sclerotia themselves were pretty tasty (a mushroom, after all, is essentially a mass of aggregate mycelia, similar to sclerotia). Check out the best-guess lifecycle diagram by Tom Volk below. Note the multiple pathways, only one of which results in mushrooms.

Ed talked about how the aboriginals view morels as magic, with a lifestyle that is impossible to understand and a mysterious ecology that cannot be solved, never allowing itself to become a willing slave of human agriculture. He talked about the old, experienced morel hunters who recognized an enormous amount of diversity among morels, far more than the few convenient species tags elaborated in the literature. I heard about how filthy people get picking morels, getting covered in sooty carbon from prancing around burn sites for days and weeks on end. Ed recounted a story about calling up Fungi Perfecti, the preeminent mushroom farm and research center, and discussing the intricacies and inner-circle secrets of morel cultivation with Paul Stamets himself, founder of Fungi Perfecti, mycowarrior, and author of the two most highly regarded books on mushroom cultivation (The Mushroom Cultivator & Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms)... a phone consultation that would cost most people ~$500 (Stamets' fees are astronomical) was provided gratis because of the mutual respect between mycophiles, because Stamets got as close as Ed to success (but no more), and because Ed's one motherfucker of a mushroom man. I heard tales of picking a hundred pounds of the hallucinogenic Amanita muscaria (the red-and-white Fly Agaric), until he was literally high just from all the handling (very interesting, as mushroom toxins typically need to be consumed or excreted to be effective), how the Amanitas and Boletes are "chummy" with each other (beyond being mycorrhizal/symbiotic with similar tree species), and how to prepare fresh specimens of morels for transport and clonal propagation from the fresh tissue. Some of this is the type of information that you simply cannot find in textbooks, journal articles, or the internet... true knowledge of the Earth, not of the intellect. Thanks Ed.



love fEEf

Live and Dearly Departed, 2006

Ho Ho! Here's a breakdown of 10 of the best shows I seen/heard all year. Yes, this is a way for me to gloat, but also I get to reflect on some of my favorite events of the year... in no particular order:


Animal Collective

The first truly great show of the year, Animal Collective spewed pulsing life over the carrion crowd gathered at La Tulipe, smashing my high expectations, blasting me ecstatic and giddy into stratospheric ear-space. Cracking open the night with dark brooding drones and echo-layered chants, I could tell, just from the sound quality, that this show was about to destroy their great 2005 performance at Sala Rosa. For the uninitiated, Animal Collective's live manifestation is quite different from their studio output, bleeding cathartic open drones and repeat rhythms into more structured songs, which themselves take on new dimensions, tempos, timbres, and rhythms from their recorded counterparts. Dudes are fresh as hell, playing ~1/2 new material not on any of their 6-7 albums, and I gotta say that whatever they put out next is going to be mind-melting.... darker and heavier than their last two records (Sung Tongs and Feels), the new stuff had me mouth agape and blissed way out. Memorable highlight: 30min encore when they blasted into 'We Tigers' where the whole band is just fucking loosing it on stage, jumping all around and screaming 'tigertigertigertigertigertigertigertiger' without loosing the manic beat, manlove streaming like plasmodesmata between the guys. No doubt in my mind that AC are one of the best bands of this generation. No joke. I felt this one. God, did I feel it.

We tigers!


Deerhoof + Fiery Furnaces

Halloween night, 2006, Deerhoof treated me to pillowcases full of molten ear candy, melted by the hot intensity of their agile, angular strangepop; a razorblade-laden taffy apple. Deerhoof combine contradictions with serendipitous brilliance, nailing baby faces onto the hydra's heads - childlike vocals and dancing accompany twisting noise rock, sweet convoluted melody splayed over octopus nail-gun drumming, lyrics about flowers and pandas with loud/abrasive pop posturing... like a White Mage wielding Excalibur and making it work. Their angularity is reminiscent of Beefheart, with Greg Saunier's utterly unique drumming really forcing the global feel of the music into rarely-reached heights of invention, allowing the guitar and bass to organize into unexpected and just plain bizzare logic. There were a couple of times during the show when they would be in rapturous free-form freakout mode and then suddenly all stop on a dime, just for 3 seconds, before jumping off ensemble in a new direction. Keeps you giddy, wide awake and dying for more. They played some of my very favorites from Reveille and Apple 'O (flo-wer flo-wer fla-oo-ah!) and some killers from The Runners Four. Honest to goodness, one of the best bands now or ever, and one of the best shows I've ever witnessed.

Clip from the show
video from their website


Comets on Fire + the Donkeys

First time experiencing the Sabbathy bombast of local folks the Donkeys, and they kicked some ass. Tight, heavy rockers with armloads of pre-chori and surprise feats of misdirection molded into thoughtless stomp, the Donkeys put on a hell of an energized show and brought the goods to the straight-rock potluck.... the stage banter was even kinda entertaining, despite the (familiar) tepid response from the Montreal crowd. Keep yer ears open for these boys and girls, they could do wonders for that emo/indi cancer you've been courting. And then... Time to light the heavens on fi-ya!!! Yeeah Boys, Comets On Fire were back in town after laying waste to the Sala crowd last year with their mushroom-drill metal a la Blue Cathedral. The whole comets crew made it (Ben Chasney/Six Organs of Admittance, Beelzebub bless you), and their spirits were high (talking to them pre-show they expressed their love for Montreal with sincere hippy smiles), ready to bring it once again. Holy fucking sun cakes, did they bring it! Comets live often sound like they're this close to running right off the tracks into the side of mountain, paralleling the sound and style of their studio album Field Recordings From the Sun... thing is, even when they do get obviously out-of-collective-whack, the sounds of them all smashing into that mountain is literally awesome and makes it sound like drunken celebration when they steer the ramshackle further space ship back on due course. They were all covered in sweat by song three. Even the kinda chill songs on Avatar sounded like exploded rainbows falling into a volcano. Wailing echoplectic guitar solos chased by tom-wrecking, cymbal-denting, hammer-smashed drums (and dude has one of the sparsest kits I seen!) while thunder-rumble bass keeps some semblance of cohesive rhythm over which Chasney can freak his cometic self out. Full on body flails. Probably burst some ear vessels, but the non-stop sweaty booze-breath love bath more than compensated for the investment. Rock and fucking roll boys, rock and fucking roll.

Clip from the show


Wolf Eyes + Thames + Pengo + John Weise

Look at that line up!? JesusMaryJoseph in a row boat, that's a killer group of ear-gouging maniacs to satiate the noise fan for weeks! Local boys Thames opened this night off in good form, although I admit that my memories of them were more-or-less erased by the subsequent onslaught. Pengo mixes distorted drones and high-pitched squeals with a mish-mash of acoustic fare, such as recorders, percussion, and other home-made soundy stuff. This breed of visceral music, being so immediate and supra-"musical", is very hard for me to put language around... what do I say, "it feels like I swallowed a nest of iron hornets that proceeded to build nests from my torn bowels, and it felt great", "sounds like a hyper-amplified rusty porch door slowly opening and closing while your bat-shit crazy grandpa whistles through his city-sized wooden alp horn"? What the fuck does that mean?! but it's the way I felt, and it was spectacular. John Weise is a noise music god, and I was very excited to hear his set. Standing in front of his laptop looking kinda like that asthmatic nerd who always sat gym class out, bespectacled Weise generated extremely LOUD, abrasive and fast-paced fuck-noise for an very satisfying 35min set... OK, felt/sounded like being shot out of an atomic canon into a mountain of sharp growing crystals that ripped the flesh off until all that was left was a quivering puddle of protoplasm. Good stuff. Now, Wolf Eyes. This was the fourth time I was seeing Wolf Eyes, and it turned out to be the best. Beginning by building deeeep swirling tones/drones until reaching gas-giant planetary proportions, Wolf Eyes looked possesed with the spirit of sadism, bracing themselves behind shaking fists held toward the ceiling of Club Lambi before exploding the hadean core in a violent spray of scalding hot sonic shrapnel. And me without earplugs. "Fuck", thought I. As my eardrums were being mangled by wolves my body literally shook in harmony with the lupine howls, and I surrendered to the beautiful metallic slop.... Alright, it felt like having molten lead slung at my magnetic head while Stravinsky's synthetic tinnitus raged externally all around. I was positively giddy following the evisceration, so I made it over to my friends party where I danced to Michael Jackson until the sun was coming out.


Tim Hecker + Nadja

While the rest of the Montreal POp cognoscenti was out fawning over Joanna Newsome, trying to regain a gram of lost childhood innocence (I do think she's great), I was awash in the deep, dark drones of Nadja and Tim Hecker. Nadja is described (not by me) as "Canadian ambient doom metal", a fairly apt tag for this project of Aidan Baker and his wife(?). He conjures glacial, distorted guitar drones, overlaying beautiful electronic tones/sub-melody and buried percussion, while she lays down the huge bass underbelly. They both vocalize languagelessly over the resulting dark matter, giving the music a deep depersonalized beauty... slow down My Bloody Valentine to a crawl and bury it six feet underground and you might approximate Nadja. Tim Hecker was headlining in support of Harmony in Ultraviolet (see Sweatin' to the Newbies), likely the first time he would be playing that material for others... the music Hecker made was ecstatically submersive, swimming me out to sea before the hypothermia layed my mind bare on the marine floor as tiny fish and crustaceans swam through the space between my ears. Eyes closed, keeping the mind quiet, subsumed by the unbroken hour+ set, the dynamics of Hecker's music on full display (much more movement than Nadja), Molly is sneaking me beer from the bar, blissed out stranger faces packed into the small corridor of Casa... magical stuff.

Hecker playing with Isis


Bardo Pond + The Hylozoists

Second only to Eloe Omoe for loudest show ever, Bardo Pond brought the heavy psychedelic thunder from Philly to Sala for part of the incredible Suoni Del Popolo festival. I knew these guys were legendary for their live shows, and I was really digging their album Ticket Crystals, so I went (alone, as usual) expecting at least a good concert. Wow, these fellas sure seem confident diving into such extreme drug-inspired rock madness, stepping up and just smashing everyone into outerspace. Extended jams moving from slow dirge-like dronescapes to soaring space-ship celebration, the intensity of it all pushed the extreme from the sheer volume and complimented with slideshows of mushrooms. Amanita mushrooms. Beautiful, deadly, psychedelic mushrooms. Bonus. The beautiful, crush-worthy front woman played amazing flute during most of the show, showering the dark psychedelia with tender winds of light. They played for an eternity (like, 2 1/2 hours!) and by the end I felt like jelly and my ears rang really loudly for three days after... the only time I've ever been sincerely worried about the damage I might have just done to my ears following a show... I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

Clip from somewhere else


Sunburned Hand of the Man + Eloe Omoe + the Believers

Second night of two for Sunburned Hand of the Man brought back openers The Believers, who put on a much more inspired show than the night before... dirty no-wavy art rock, reminded me of a cross between Magic Markers and The Raincoats. hated them the night before, kinda loved it the second night. This shit happens. The real treasure of the night was Eloe Omoe, a two piece headed by this beutiful bass player, Samantha (I asked her for a light outside, and she was all sweet and asking me about plants). Sam nearly ripped the face off evry person in the house as soon as she hit her first note, leaving everyone scrambling for ear plugs, cotton, hummus, anything to salvage the rest of their hearing. OK, I play a bit of bass and try to stay hip to both old and modern music, and I'm telling you this: I have never heard anyone play bass like this before. A bass equivalent to guitarist Keiji Haino. My jaw was firmly soldered to the floor. My ears hurt, but I was immobilized. My body shook, yet I stood on the front lines and took it like a lone solder facing an army. What the fuck?! Her eyes were gently closed, her left hand danced up and down the fretboard with great knowing and agility, while her right picked furiously through the strings, amplified by two marshal stacks and a distortion pedal made from the bowels of Satan. Sam looked lost in her own improvised spell, throwing out thunder, clapping fault lines together with enough force to snap mountain tops off like winter twigs. Shiva, the destroyer. Her buddy boy drummer kept things sparse but cookin', punctuating the madness of the bass and bobbing his springy hair all about. Probably the loudest show I've ever heard. Sunburned Hand of the Man were in great form, although I preferred their set the previous night. These guys put on one hell of a show. The guitarist wearing a full-scale horse head mask was particularly menacing.

Awsome clip of Eloe Omoe! highly recommended.


Pink Mountaintops + the Black Angels

I remember few specifics from this show... non-ironic rock posturing with the tunes and boogie to boot, gettin' all Doorsy at times, bringing the dirty sex riffage and stoned wailing to the Sala Rosa... I know this was an awesome show 'cause it made me get blindingly drunk and dance and be one of those obnoxious rock dudes that's trying to scream over the music (unpossible, as the amps were krrrranked) to his friends about how awesome the band is and wondering where all the ladies are at. I was beaming all night long. Molly, Linus and I punching each other in the face between bands and waking up with a bruised jaw made me feel particularly rock'n'roll. Good times.

Clip of Sweet 69.


Jack rose + Emerald Cloud Cobra

Emerald Cloud Cobra is Emanuel Cote, adored local shy-guy and music maker extrodinare. Playing sitar over a drum machine never sounded so good... however, I was a bit disappointed, only because I remember seeing him at (I think was) his first show, wearing a mask and playing an absolutely killer set of sitar and experimental guitar work that now seemed much more inspired than his structured ECC project. ECC's recordings might be hard to find but more than worth the postage. Jack Rose is a big burly man who plays guitar like an angel. A big bluesy drunk-with-inspiration angel. He becomes the guitar, meditatively massaging his strings into swirling mandalas of Mississippi mud and Indian tapestry... the way he combines striped-to-the-core blues forms with Indian ragas is spectacular, forcing third-eye ruminations face-down in the earth, reconnecting our high-level mental faculties to the soil we tread. Forced to sinlence the constant jabber of the mind, I watched quietly and with much love as Mr. Rose would carry me down a placid river, thick with bull rushes (family Juncaceae), for a thirty minutes of passive heroics. Virtuous guitar finger picking, wielding five fingers like they were fifty, generating the smart hillbilly blues I came to hear. Not much to say. He was tremendously great. His stage presence was self-deprecating and shy. Funny guy. His more recent show on December 8th took us even further down the rabbit hole. Wow.

A clip from the show
Another killer clip


the Books

the Books got one of the best shows going, taking their incomparable compositions - a brilliant fusion of found-sounds with cello, guitar, banjo, keyboard, and bass - and actually succeeding in performing these astonishing songs live with just the two of them (although their jaw-dropping show from 2005 had Anne Dorner on board... so good). They apply the same aesthetic of ridiculous collage to their film work, which accompanied the music to a T, showing manipulated (sped up, slowed down, backwards, filtered, etc.) clips from god-knows-where stitched together in a breathtaking patchwork. Did I see some mushrooms in there?! Older dutch buddy plays a helluva cello, pulling off some high acrobatics to accomplish some of their processed cello lines from the studio work, while younger stoned guy uses plays guitar with his own unique phrasing/rhythm and softly speaks cerebral lyrics of everyday being. Their stage presence is down right adorable (seem like really humble, good humored guys) and they take their art seriously, despite the laugh-out-loud humor stitched into the music. It feels really good when an audience is so obviously enthralled by what they're hearing and seeing.

Great clip of live Books



Honorable Mentions (check out the miscellaneous links!)

Califone
Josephine Foster + Diane Cluck
Akron/Family + Beirut
TV on the Radio + Grizzly Bear
Excepter + Feu Therese + Thames
Residual Echoes + Mammatus
Vashti Bunyan
Tetuzi Akiyama + Crank Sturgeon + Pengo
Ariel Pink + Psychic Ills
Damo Suzuki w/ Aids Wolf + Feu Therese

Ritual Dance of the Dreaming Sweet Potato

Dancellaneous

10V3 F33F

Where's the Beefellaneous?!

Where the f*!# did the f33f311@ne0u5 go?!

Yes indeedy, after a 3+ month sabbatical, le petite Feefellaneous is slowly returning, determined to continue the pseudo-lingual exploration of lifespace via web-based miscellaneous musings. Like a winter lily bulb sensing the impending frost bite, it's time for me to head underground into synthetic cyber soil and cultivate a small plot of discourse concerning plants, music, fungi, youknow. My sincere appy-poly-logies to the expectant and devout (wordup, Sir Siteman!) for the absence of new nervy-verb micro-rants, but I can explain, kinda. My thesis ('Early Transcriptional Responses of the Model Legume, Medicago truncatula, to Caterpillar Herbivory') wrapped up through August and September, providing a time of nervous relief after a summer of frantic work. Ahhhhmmmm...!!! The ol' brain was a bit burned after that, leaving me hesitant to post the knarled word-weeds growing back in the leached cerebral soil after the fire... sorry, but t'was for your own good. Also (!), moved into new rooms with Jack, my new platonic husband*, in Little Itali where the living has been >/- easy and autumnally breezy. So. Back into the fray!

Check out the links... Sneakin' Out the Hospital is some of the most entertaining writting I've ever read, so you best check Mr. Mike Gillis out for a day trip.... Mike G's the cheese and we're the macaroni. View tubfulls of seriously funny drawings at the Cheddarplex, ubber nexus of flexed comic solarplexes. For all you freaky geeks, get your brain-on at Of the Contrary, master blog of brother Hanni... excellent, of course.

*(that, ladies, was a joke. How you doin'? let me know @ 555-feefellaneous)


L0\/3 f33f

Sweatin' to the Newbies

As the burning vitality of 2006 begins to set on the wintery horizon of 2007, I am reminded of the great albums this beautiful and harrowing year has wrought. In no particular order, here is a quick synopsis of mind-blowers and body-burners that are more than worth your $20 and time. seriously.


Scott Walker - the Drift

Within the musical landscape, Scott Walker sticks out like a towering rarely-flowering sore thumb tree. the Drift is something wholly ‘Other’. Pitch black, sweet and terrifyingly dramatic, like being drowned in a sea of molasses and flagellated razor blades. The Drift is the product of a ten-year pregnancy, gestated from within the nightmare-damaged brain of Scott Walker, a former 60s boy-band heart-throb... 40 years later, Mr. Walker has traded in the Jacques Brel chansons and lime-light lip-synched posturing for punching giant sides of raw pig meat (literally) for percussion and invoking dark still waters that hide a menacing undertow that will catch you completely off-guard before hurling you onto the side of Mount Mind-Fuck in a murky tsunami. Why should you be interested in such an experience? Cause it’s probably nothing like you’ve ever heard, and within the bleakness and poetic abstraction lays some of the most profoundly emotional sonics you’ve never heard (most of which emanate from the drama of Scott’s deep, yearning, pitch-perfect voice). The Drift is a masterpiece, lyrically and musically, following the direction of Tilt, his equally-brilliant album from 1995 that is also highly recommended for those patient and daring enough to sink into these thick beautiful terrors. Expansive claustrophobia.

Check out the boggling video for Jesse


Califone - Roots & Crowns

Man, Califone never disappoints. If you like the very-america sound of Wilco, meet their wiser, more patient and soulful brethren. Convoluted poetry splayed out leisurely atop bottomless rhythm (deeeep bass drum and all manner of electronic and acoustic percussion), rootsy guitar twnag, and sub-structured miscellanea. These guys have been making some of the best music out there over the past 6 years so, based on the greatness of their first seven albums, I could have forgiven Claifone for throwing out a dud. No dice, boss. Califone pitch us Roots & Crowns like a 150 mph curveball caught in slow motion (fuck making sense). Nothing fancy on the surface, Roots & Crowns bedazzles with unending layers and combinations of percussion, string swells and Ti mRutili's grungy voice. Their live show, despite missing Ben Massarella, was cathartic, soulful, and delightfully unpretentious. Real men reimagining the heart of the West through clairvoyant collective musical expression. Close to the best band ever.

Fantastic video for Spider's House!


Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. - Have You Seen the Other Side of the Sky?

AMT are fucking back in tippity-topless formation, offering up a disk with more than 3 tracks (!) that steers their cosmic freakship head-on into the whistling meteor shower of love. The great fun and energy of AMT is immediately apparent from the opening track, Attack From Planet Hattifatteners. Sure, the rocks are big and menacing, and many may cause sever pain upon collision with your eardrum, but that’s what I signed up for when I knelt at the alter of Father Moo and surrendered my mind to the Promethean fires of AMT’s hyper-sex electric gamma ray-gun. The slow-burners, like Asimov’s Naked Breakfast: Rice and Shrine, are classic Temple nebulae, swirling through both ears to manifest the “emergent third ear”... the melodic flute and tortured orgasm noises in the hind-field provide the feminine infusion that helps define the best Acid Mothers music. The incomprehensibility of Japanese lyrics has always been welcomed by me (exception: Kan Mikami – what the fuck are you saying?! I must know), providing that extra-aural mystery sauce that leaves you convinced that this shit came from outerspace. Kawabata Makoto (guitar god) is as nimble and unhinged as you may remember from earlier AMT U.F.O. releases like Absolutely Freak Out (Zap Your Mind!) (*maybe my favorite AMT ever), which is heard in all it’s contorted glory on I Wanna Be Your Bicycle Saddle. This band is a full 5-gram heroic dose of psychedelic madness, replete with the expansive beauty and subtlety that blankets the ground underneath the tangled brambles of distortion and the rocky heights of the Acid Mothers Temple. Hell yes.

AMT absolutely freakout live!


Comets on Fire - Avatar

Damit, I love Comets on Fire! Bringin’ the west-coast electric eel monster onto shore and into your living room for a frantic dance of deadly kiss-and-chase. Not as in-the-red as Field Recordings From the Sun, Avatar stretches its paisley limbs outs like a psych-rock snow angle, sky-gazing and wonderstruck by the magnitude of their earthly bass tones and heavenly metalic squeals. Although their noisy elements are a bit reigned in (that’s not a bad/good thing... just necessary), their live interpretation still blows holes straight through 99.9% of all the ‘heavy’ and ‘hardcore’ music being slung around these days... or any days, for that matter. Metal head, meet psychonautic freak-nik... You had me at Dogwood Rust.



Uncle Jim - Superstars of Greenwich Meantime

'You're all dead log nostril phlegm floating in a toxic pond
Fuck your cold pussy improve downtown clique-fuck angular shit-fest and the dark-turd art scene grave-loft stuffed shirt empire store-house, and your cock-folding pickle-drip pumpkin dry-rot and every stolen-soul pufferfish amped-zombie culture scenester overhyped dragmuffin'

... and that's just the first 25 seconds of Graduation Day. Superstars is a necessary CD release of last years scathing spoken-word-with-beats+ indictment of humanity. Uncle Jim is the lucid wild-eyed clown that’s tossing monkey dung at the half-dead onlookers, wrenching the wheel of this parading Western shit-show. “I can smell cleverness from a billion light years away, and you don’t smell clever” and “You wouldn’t know ‘cool’ if you were a Charlie Parker horn solo” make up a thousandth of the blister-raising beating delivered to this perceived faux-couture. This is prime-cut cynicism, and we’re all fair game for the chopping block. Can you dig it? “Prove me wrong, and I will love you truly”.



Dead Moon – Echoes of the Past

Thunderbolts and nightsticks
Coming out of the sky
Flames overhead
Rain until you cry
My baby's on the highway
Come in from the cold
Never going home, never going home
D for disaster
E for my eyes
A for my anger
D before i die
M for mona
O oh good
O oh good
N for the night
Dead moon night

I’m not usually impressed by what the music merchants are playing over the store speakers, but this double-disk sucker had me jaggin’ and finger jivin’ as I distractedly flipped through rows of random bullshit... not that I new that most of this other rocky bric-a-brac was so limp and tepid until I heard the raw-as-a-pumping-beef-heart blasts of Dead Moon. This is rock ‘n’ fuckin’ roll. Main musty man Fred Cole (guitar+voice) and his J.D.-soaked wife Toody (bass+voice) have been screaming their heads off in the rock scene for forty years and counting (sometimes their grandchildren work their mech table! awwww) with Dead Moon keeping the core spirit of rock alive for the last two decades. Echoes, a double-disk retrospective, is about 60% quick-stomp chugga-chugga riffage, 40% beer-soaked quasi-balladering that gets you right there; you know, the liver. And that’s what’s being demanded here, living.... Why can’t we/I wake the fuck up and live the love, revel in the rusted dreams, and quit actin’ all hard and shit? Well, here’s as good a home-grown remedy as any... this shit’s like seedy ditch weed you dragged through the mud to your ramshackle fort in the back of your buddy’s place for the best Summer of friends-as-family get-down you can imagine.

there's a fire in the western world...


Tim Hecker – Harmony in Ultraviolet

The idea of paying to see a “show” of laptop drones and rhythmless melody may seem to many people a waste of mommy’s money at best; an act of willful torture and surrender to insanity at better. I am slow-ly go-ing cray-z in love for Mr. hecker and the planetary entelechy contained within that ‘puter of his. I can report to you, dear reader, that hearing Tim Hecker generate his dark brooding gumbo of Earthly frequencies, from the organic topsoils of Canadia straight down through the eroding bedrock, gurguling water-table, and magmalian liquid mountain took me to some interplanetary places. Harmony in Ultraviolet (killer title, and very fitting) rewards attentive, submersive listening... like a winning lottery ticket that you can cash in just by pushing ‘play’. Sweet. I win.



Niobe – White Hats

So Tomlab kinda had to commission Niobe (aka Yvonne Cornelius) to make a “straight” record of “songs” in an attempt to bring her luxuriant, otherworldly voice and electro-syrup sound-collage to a larger audience... I don't know, her first three records (Radio Ersatz, Tse Tse, and Voodooluba) sent me into such an impassioned tizzy that I was a tad affraid that Mrs. Cornelius' wild/warm experimentalism would be reigned in for commercial appeal. hA!hA!hA! Don't worry, little feef, Niobe has returned to force-feed that full heart of yours with more strange and achy-sweet spaceship lullabies, twisting her voice around your ears like a sex-hot soupy tongue. Upbeat sub-dance numbers interspersed with her characteristic drifting guitar-pluck space-folk beauties. Niobe's music has always smacked of understated sophistication and dark elegance, even at her most frenetic, drawing the curious ear deeper into the music, like a fisherman drawn into deep waters by the siren calls echoing just over the horizon. The sweet timbre of her voice alone, sung in english and german, is enough to melt glacial memories and water our desertified emotion. Despite her flawless output, Niobe remains criminally unknown in ADD-addled-land (North America)... White hats is certainly the best entry point for the Niobe-newbi and is probably her only album you can find at respectably record shops. Join me, the trip is strange and oh-so lovely.

climb into White hats... sweet video


Beck - the Information

Yeay Beck! The ludicrous cowboy MC is back with more electric hay bale rust-bucket-boggie. Now, Guero left me mostly cold and dissapointed, which might have had to do with my massive expectations following Sea Changes, perhaps Beck's finnest. All is forgiven with the Information, sounding like a confident reconciliation between the tin-can rhyming of Mellow gold, the dance party mania of Midnight Vultures, and the expansive production of Sea Changes. Sonically, the Information is 9-layered love cake slathered in space-butter, and ties with the Drift for my favorite producion of 2006... the fatty aural meat is flattered with a set of high quality headphones. The track flow is great, creating the cohesive listening experience characteristic of Beck's masterpieces (Odelay, Midnight Vultures, Sea Changes), which makes the Information an album you want to listen to from start to near-finish (the last5 minutes are a bit of a throwaway). Awsome. Fucking Awesome.

busted wicked vid 4 Elevator Music... n-n-nice.
Chameleon Headhunter funk of Cell Phones Dead
the Information... nuff sed.



Wolf Eyes - Human Animal

The title of the last track says it all, 'Noise not Music'. This is the 2nd album Wolf Eyes have released on SubPop and it's a doomy doozy, and perhaps the best album I've hard to introduce one to the whole genre of 'noise'. Much like Wolf Eyes' live show, Human Animal takes it's time building menacing Gaudian cathedrals of noise before detonating the sonic dynamite, obliterating the towering edifice into twisted-metal rubble. Climbing jagged cliffs as the storm-of-storms coalesces high above, only to descend in booming bolts of lightning and razor-rain once you reach the peak. Absolutely humabananamals. The SubPop albums (Burned Mind before this) are super great partly because of the relatively high fidelity production that allows a deeper listen experience... The tortured saxophone on Rationed Rot is clear but buried behind the mix of slow/low rumbles and trebly squeals, segueing abruptly into the Stabbed-In-The-Face-esque terror stomp of Human Animal. The 1-2 zombie massage of Leper War and The Driller settle violently into the murk before unleashing the final uppercut of Noise Not Music. Their recent live show here was the best I've ever heard from them, reinforcing their high place in the noise pantheon. In a royal rumble, these wolves tear the flesh off all the other 'Wolf' bands combined. Respect.

Get yer Humanimal on



Black Lips - Let it Bloom

Black Lips’ music is like a naked pink infant running laughing from a wild boar, covered in dandelion pollen and dog feces. I know, sounds fucking awesome, right? Mega-awesome. These little boys in their barely-20s are spilling over with trashy garage rock, soaked trebly distortion and gritty bass assaults, screaming in strained harmonies about life, love and not-giving-a-fuck in general. Supposedly at a show, dude pulled out his junk and pissed in his mouth, spitting it over the crowd, before playing his guitar with it until it was bleeding all over the place. That’s a pretty accurate visual to convey the drunken-fun abandon these boys play with. Grimy, quirky, psychedelic and irresistible community-hall finger shakers and giddy-mosh-makers. The Beach Boys on PCP. So what if it was released in 2005, this shit is new to me. Think playfight-in-the-garden dirty, happy and carefree as the rotten tomato seeds bake on your flesh under the summer sun. Rock out with your cock out, indeed.



10V3 f33f

A Fondness for Cephalopods

"The mind and the body of the octopus are the same and hence equally visible; the octopus wears its language like a kind of second skin. Octopi can hardly not communicate."

- Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods (1992)

Summer's high heat has driven my melting mind into the cool marine sanctuary of ocean octopi. The octopus is an allegory of objectified linguistic potential. A fleshy sac containing an octopoid alphabet, they are able to shuffle and configure their language in what is surely nature's most advanced game of sharades. Bonelss bodies able to contort instantly into complex 3-D forms, made to resemble coral, sand, "walking stones", algae (see laugh-out-loud amazing 6 second clip below), etc. Some octopuses can even make themselves look like eels and other dangerous creatures as a form of defense! Splayed over the surface of their shape-shifting bodies, innumerable chromatophores (responsive pigment sacs) camouflage the octopus according to its surroudings, allowing the octopus to literally become one with its environment. The ability to change colour rapidly and with unparalleled variation defines the octopus and its interactions with other octopi, displaying an exquisitly evolved dialogue between potential mates and competitors. Ahhhh, you can just imagine the unobscurred liguistic intent - not attempting to mean what you say, but actually being what you mean. I dream of literal reincarnation, and that i may emerge an octopus into the society of cephalopods... I'd wear my tentacles like a moustache, wrestle with sharks and sploshing beach goers, walk disguised as kelp and corral along ocean floors, sauce the ocean with sporadic ink sac bombs, in my octopus’s garden in the shade.

I might suggest watching this video without the sound... put on some strange mood-music and be amazed!

Nothing but octopus, morphing into a tangle of ocean algae...

OK, get this. When under attack, some octopuses can - and will - spontaneously self-amputate an arm, which will crawl around and distract the predator while the 'pus escapes. This phenomenon is called autotomy and occurs in lizards and geckos, which will shed their tail in defensive mis-direction if provoked. I witnessed atotomy with my brothers as kids in Egypt when we were chasing a lizard and it's tail poped off, wriggeling like a headless snake in our hands... we were so giddy about this occurence that we forgot about the lizard and it got away - clever little bugger.

The complete occlusion between the octo-body and the octo-mind is manifest in the fact that 2/3rds of the octopus neuron are contained in the arms.... image the hug intensity. If you show them, octopi can learn to open jars and other chimp-smoking-a-cigar-like skills, and are no doubt the most intellegent of invertibrates.



Wow, sometimes you hit the random-octopus-search jackpot... check out this frightning episode of a Japanese childrens show from the 60's, keeping current world affairs in mind.... I tells ya, them Japanese got it goin' on, wha?

Gimme Gimme Octopus!

~Love Feef

Psilocybinoid Mysticism

Psilocybe cubensis

“I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.''

- Alexander Shulgin

My friend Nathan, one of my favorite cerebral-fun-brothers ever (hi naffer!), sent me a very significant paper that just came out in the journal Psychopharmacology entitled: Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance (Griffiths et al., 2006).

This is huge. Huuuuge. Some condensed background:

-------------------

Psilocybin is the chief "ingredient" of so-called magic mushrooms and occurs in ~>100 species of fungi, mostly in the basidiomycete genus Psilocybe, although only a handfull were seriously used as shamanistic tools of ecstasy throughout human history. There are some ancient rock paintings from a highly cultured and ritualistic civilization in the Sahara Desert of southern Algeria that are very suggestive of psychotropic mushroom use (see bee-faced pic), dating back to the 7th millenium BP. These people of of the Tassili Plateau also lived with many grazing cattle, potentially bringing the people into contact with Psilocybe cubensis, a pan-subtropical specie of mushroom that growns on cow dung. (P. cubensis is essentially the only species of "shroom" sold on the street, due to it's relative potency, large size, and ease of cultivation). The existence of psychoactive mushrooms was loosely documented in the writings of Christian missionaries around the 15th centruy, which refered to natives claiming to literally speak to/with god through the use of these 'foul' mushrooms, a supreme heresy to the christians, who probably felt threatened by the native use of a functional eucharist in place of their symbolic waffer. The Aztecs called these mushrooms Teonanacatl, which translates to 'flesh of the gods' or 'divine flesh'. The greatest diversity and density of psilocybin mushroom species occurs in Central America, and it is there where the use and existence of hallucinogenic mushrooms was first documented by the Harvard ethnobotanist, Richard E. Schultes, back in the late 1930s. An american banker named Gordon Wasson, who had become completely overtaken with facination for mushrooms and their place in human history, travelled to Mexico and was the first gringo to experience the revelatory experience elicited by the mushrooms in 1955. Samples of the mushrooms were sent to Albert Hofmann for chemical analysis... Hofmann, while working at Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland (a pharmaceutical drug company), invented LSD, synthesizing it from chemicals extracted from a different fungus (Claviceps purpurea), and was the first person to experience the lucid mind-blowing effects of the drug. Hofmann isolated two compounds from the Teonanacatyl mushrooms, psilocin and psilocybin, and realized they belonged to the same "family" of chemical as LSD, known as tryptamines. Tryptamine hallucinogens act by mimickng serotonin in your brain, binding selectively to subsets of serotonin receptors. Serotonin, or 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT), is one of our major nurotransmitters (componds that transmit nerve impulses across a synapse), playing an important role in regulating mood, sleep, appetite, and sexuality, and is linked to various psychophysiological disorders. Many antidepression drugs (eg., prozac, zoloft, paxil, etc.) target the serotonergic system, acting by inhibiting the "re-uptake" of serotonin, which increases the amount of extracellular serotonin acrtively binding to their recetors in the brain (that's why these drugs are called 'selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors', or SSRIs). When you eat hallucinogenic/entheogenic mushrooms, the psilocybin is dephosphorylated into psilocin, which enters the blood stream, crosses the blood-brain barrier, and binds to certain types of serotonin nerve receptors.... you are essentially antagonizing your serotonergic nerve system (i.e., the raphe nuclei clustered in the brain stem).

*psilocybin (4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine) on the left, serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine)

OK, so psilocybin was introduced to the western world by the holy trinity of Schultes, Wasson, and Hofmann, and was being researched for potential theraputic applications, setting the stage for some serious cultural head-butting of the emerging "counter-culture" with frightened parents and politiciens. The percieved abuse of hallucinogenic drugs by hordes of wannabe hippies in the late mid-sixties prompted the american government (among others) to catagorize hallucinogens as schedule I drugs, the same calss as heroin (cocain is now schedule II), essentially barring any further scientific research into the pharmacological, psychological, or chemical aspects of the fungal metabolite. The DEA sets the following criteria for schedule 1 substances:

(A) The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
(B) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
(C) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.

Wow, none of these criteria can legitimately aply to psilocybin, yet it remains illicit, taboo, and veiled in misinformation propagated by credulous youths ("dude, taking mushrooms is just a form of food poisoning", "mushrooms make your brain bleed" "LSD is cut with rat poison" "real LSD makes you trip for daaaays man" .... I've heard all of these lies pontificated with absolute certainty). True hallucinogens (psilocybin, LSD, DMT, mescalin) have no risk of becomming addictive (ever heard of an LSD addict?), has been shown repeatedly to elicit positive and theraputic experience under appropriate conditions/dosages (see the work of Stanislav Grof), and they're extremely physiologically safe (ever hear of anyone dying from magic mushrooms? me neither).... so, compared with alcohol, tobacco, driving, fast-food, etc.... yeeeaah, the "war on drugs" is a crock of shit. The physiological safety of hallucinogenic drugs is related to their similarity with serotonin - the same enzymes (monoamine oxidase) we use to recycle and degrade serotonin act to metabolize other tryptamines. Now, psychologically, hallucinogens need to be treated with a great deal of care. Perhaps the most (only?) useful knowlege generated by 60's drug bozzo#1, Timothy Leary, was to stress the importance of the "set" (psychological state) and "setting" (the environment where you have the expeience) when approaching a psychodelic experience. For the cerebral psychonaut searching for the mystical, being dragged off to the dance bar at the peak of a mushroom trip by your bubble-headed roommate can cause a great deal of anxiety (aka "bad vibes").

It was only in the mid-late 1990s in Europe that some research into the psychological and perceptual effects of psilocybin was reinitiated. The hot-off-the-presses paper by Griffiths et. al. is noteworthy not only because of it's empirical findings (i.e., that psilocybin can induce profoundly meaningful experiences that persist over time), but also because it signals a re-initiation of research into the neropsychopharmacology of psychotropic tryptamines. The stated objective, taken from Griffith's paper:

Objectives: This double-blind study evaluated the acute and longer-term psychological effects of a high dose of psilocybin relative to a comparison compound administered under comfortable, supportive conditions.

The comparison compound was ritalin. Their sample size was small, only 36 volunteers, and all participants had never taken an hallucinogenic drug before. Subjects were randomly assigned psilocybin or ritalin and were monitored over an 8-hour period. They filled out surveys about their experiences immediately afterward, and again two months later. So, what did they find?

Results: Psilocybin produced a range of acute perceptual changes, subjective experiences, and labile moods including anxiety. Psilocybin also increased measures of mystical experience. At 2 months, the volunteers rated the psilocybin experience as having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance and attributed to the experience sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior consistent with changes rated by community observers.

So, psilocybin, administered at a high, safe dosage (take that DEA, part 'c'!), produced mystical experiences in drug-naive adults, which had positive effects on their attitude and behaviour that persisted for months after the experience (boo-ya DEA, part 'b'!). These results are certainly not surprising to me, I could have predicted them, but this kind of careful, well-executed scientific study gives legitimacy to the widespread claims that psilocybin mushrooms can provok profoundly positive and meaningful experiences when used safely and with good, clear intention. Hopefully the science will continue, and the government will realize that they made serious mistakes by criminalizing the curious for using safe natural plant and fungal compounds.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large - this is an experience of inestimable value to anyone...

- Aldous Huxley, the Doors of Perception, 1954

()\/3 fEEf

Same old 'laneous, different day

The dream, the dream, I've forgotten the dream
Once long and alive as a tender green bean
The night turned to light, and the price I have paid?
Personal myth, bled from my pillow, was lost as I layed

Waking perception, under days Sun
Began as a crawl and then started to run
A face out of place, in my mind not my arms,
Calling me forward with day-dream alarms

To search outside for one that's within
May seem to you foolish, impossible to win
But without fevered day-thoughts of love in the light
The Sun would be dim, and I'd not want the night

1Ove F33F

Volvariella! I just met a girl named Volvariella...

...and suddenly I found, new love born from the ground, Volvariella. Say it lound and the volva breaks, say it soft and the mushroom escapes, Volvariella!

Wowie Zowie. Downtown montreal walking away from Hanni's place (hanni my freakishly brainy brother) listening to Os Mutantes, I passed a tremendous tree stump (>1 meter diameter!) and noticed something peculiar resting on the sidewalk... it looked like a giant sparrow egg with one distended end. As I bent down and touched it my mind exploded into fungal fantasy and my eyes saucered... the cool soft flesh of fungal fruitbody beckoned to be held. A new mushroom, the size of a human heart in love, layed waiting for me. Some Friday-night drunkard probably ripped this beauty from its source - a wound in the tree stump - ignorant of the fleshy destiny contained within this 'egg'. What filled this vessel? Tearing open the outer layer of the egg revealed a pure white/silver mushroom, thick and fleshy, that would have been 6 inches wide if allowed to emerge naturally from its enclosure. Holy Mother Nature, what a symbol of purity to be found along tar-covered city streets, among the urban herd. The outer covering, like a thick spongy blanket, is known as the 'volva' (yes, a mushroom vulva, penetrated upon maturation by the enclosed phallus), or 'universal veil'.... it protects the developing mushroom inside, breaking open when the mushroom matures and extends itself into the open air to release its spores. The white polka dots that give Amanita muscaria its distinctive red-and-white cap are actually the remnants of the volva that stuck on when the mushroom burst through it like a hatching bird.

Her name was Volvariella bombycina, the genus being named after their defining egg-like universal veil, or volva. I can't believe how lucky I was to have found this beautiful mushroom in the middle of the city. A great recycling ghost hidden in the truncated corpse of maple, a gentle reaper harvesting what it helped sow.


Check out the Mushroom Expert for all the juiucy details


















10\/3 f33f

These are are a few of my favorite things, pt.II

Greetings!

Continuing with my foolhardy top-ten list of "best albums ever", in no particular order (except Zappa's Weasels, naturally), here are five more demented beauties that deserve inclusion.

It goes without saying that each of these albums deserve a deep head-phones-in-the-dark listen, but I realize that several of them may be difficult to find... 330,003 Crossdressers is near impossible to find (~ $100 on ebay, maybe), and expect to shell out >$50 for Fushitsusha double live. Beefheart's Lick My Decals Off Baby is nortoriously rare, with CD copies sold individually online for $75-150. My advice remains the same: download the complete albums from soulseek, buy what you like of what you can find. I'll try to get a 'feefellaneous' folder together on my soulseek client ('shireef') where you can download the albums I mention here. Also, I wanted to mention that I realize this is a ten-best list populated solely by male-dominated "rock", even if gathered from the far corners of the vaguely-defined genre... this glaring bias decieves the breadth of my musical tastes, and the compromises made for this list hurt me more than listening to Fushitsusha hurts you. I'll just have to make Feef's best lists of soul, funk, Jazz, outsider, noise... whatever. Let's get to it, you and me...



Sun City Girls - 330,003 Crossdressers From Beyond the Rig Veda (1996)

I listened to this album repeatedly for 12 hours in one day, walking around Victoriaville in the chilly rain waiting for Boredoms to play. That was a great day. 330,003 Crossdressers is impossibly diverse and cohesive throughout the >2 hours of double-disc delight. Don't be too scared when the album starts and you're treated to a demented screetchy voice "singing" about "a yellow patch of shrubbery where a couple of civets tango" as guitar lines stumble over each other before becoming a repetative tuneless stomp, finally breaking into a complex Indian-inspired melody with rhythmic lite hoove clomps. My dictionary tells me that a civet is a slender nocturnal canivorous mammal with highly-developed anal scent glands native to Africa and Asia. But honestly, you can put this album on with friends (try it on, how does it fit?) and have a great big bizarre good time. These girls - who are actually three older men - apply their bursting talent to twist(ing)(ed) melodies, multilanguaged rants and chants, interpretive underworld jazz, achingly beautiful eastern-inspired jams, and quick-tilt rockers. Crossdressers was released during a particularly prolific time in the Girls career, appearing simultaneously with another double-disc gem, Dante's Disneyland Inferno, which is downright frightening in it's story-telling perversion (a masterpiece, but not for the faint of heart). The uninitiated may find Torch of the Mystics more approachable, and I can't say it's not as good as Crossdressers, but the sheer breadth of musical ideas fleshed out on Crossdressers makes it a winner in this Feef's ears. Cruel and Thin = mix-tape gold.

a slice of song from Crossdressers, live
richard bishop playing a song from Torch of the Mystics solo (soo good with the trioo!)
...and other SCGellaneous...


Fushitsusha - double live (PSF 15/16) (1991)

Do NOT put this on at a party or any other such social event! If you were turned off by Sun City Girls, then grab your cinnamoned mug of hot milk and hide under your bed, cuz Keiji has come for your fucking head. Keiji Haino is a Japanese guitar god who unleashes Hadean fire from his hyper-amped lightning-rod instrument and Belial screams from his tortured soul. This is not "normal" music in any sense, despite Fushitsusha being considered Haino's "rock band"... still, Haino has emerged as the absolute cream of the too-good-to-be-true Japanese underground for over thirty years. This untitled double live album is considered perhaps the greatest album of the whole scene ("genre" makes no sense here). The bass provides a super low-end frequency murk, through which Keiji's guitar erects like electric stalagmites, thrashing wildly as eels at the end of Leviathan's fishing pole. Drums round out the power trio, adding improvised punctuation (as opposed to "rhythm") when necessary, but rarely becoming full-force... the few tracks that all musicians are playing full-tilt (eg., track 3, disc 2) feel like you're being chased by Shiva, three eyes wide open, swinging a sack of imploded stars at your head. Menacingly psychedelic sonic S&M!

Fushitsusha live
Keiji solo hurdy-gurdy


Van Morrison - Astral Weeks (1968)

I don't think I could trust anyone who doesn't like Astral Weeks. What to say? This is one of the most affecting, gorgeous "rock" albums anyone has ever layed ears on. From the begining, Van paints stream-of-consciousness poetry into winged sonic blossoms, tending to our human afflictions... Astral Weeks has been there for me, when I've been depressed and heartbroken, consoling me without condescension, lucidly articulating the language of the souls' dark night.... it's been there with me for moments of passion and peaceful longing, capable of inducing states of near-ecstasis and forgiveness. Where Fushitsusha is dark sorcery, Van is pure flesh-coloured magic. Some of the best medicine ever cooked up.

Check out Lester Bangs' writing on Astral Weeks for the real story. I'm speachless.


Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven! (2000)

An instrumental bon voyage into the stratosphere and back, riding on the back of an undulating rock orchestra (+9 musicians), Lift yr. Skinny Fists is the zenith of the whole crescendo post-rock aesthetic - in fact, moving far beyond it into unpredictable surprises and gorgeously complex arrangements that develop more organically than the A-->B line (i.e., quiet/slow --> fast/loud) that charaterized some of their earlier and later work. Godspeed was responsible for spawning a slew of copy-cats, but this is the real thing in all it's visceral glory. Four songs articulated throughout 90 minutes of simply great sonics - strings and horns and drums and guitarses coalescing into a slippery electric hydra, oscillating between sleep-time dreams and waking nightmares. Kinda reminds me of when Atreyu is riding that big flying dog at the end of Never Ending Story, chasing down the bullies. Godspeed hikes around-and-around the ying-yang, finding themselves at turns in a land of minimal tranquility and heart-pounding grandure.

I saw Godspeed play live three times, three nights in a row, a year after Skinny Fists was released... those live experiences remain some of the most intense auditory experiences of my life, and was one of the rare times that I felt the collective musical environment shifting under my feet. Too bad they'll never play again (mark my words)... a lesson to keep yr ears to the ground NOW!

A live Godspeed clip, but really, headphone the studio albums.


The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds (1966)

Oh, that's not obvious enough Feef. How about the Beatles? Or fucking... fucking Beethoven?' I know, Pet Sounds is already enshrined in the North American consciousness as "one of the greatest albums of al time", but honestly, this shit is pure kryptonite, killing our super-powered ego and confronting our doubts and anxieties with soft pulsing green love. When we were ~8 years old, Chris and I used to dance around my basement to the surfin'-safari brand of The Beach Boys, just lovin' it. Still do. I think that's why it took a little while for me to get into Pet Sounds - it's a radically different idea. Sure, you still have the lush vocal harmonies and teen-anx lyrics, but the palette of sounds that issues forth from track one is massive and unparalleled in the boys cannon. After really emersing myself in Pet Sounds a few times, I understood what all the fuss was about. Many, many more attentive listens and here it is in The Ten. Huge.



Love fEEf

These are a few of my favorite things...

Greetings!

I'm setting out a personal challenge for... myself. Of course. Ahem. In the mind of FeeF, what are [some of] the gretest albums that Feef has heard. Subectivity is the key here, my dear readers (...right, no one), as this is merely ment to offer some reflection of my musical judgment to any friends that might stop by the ol' Feefellaneous... albums worth checkin' out with open ears and mind to boot.


Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention - Weasels Ripped my Flesh (1970)

:: This is my favorite album of all time. Weasels gets the short end of the stick among many Zappa fanatics, and usually gets beaten with the stick by Zappa-deniers. The arguments are moot (as are all musical arguments about preference). No other album has twisted my mind around so completly, making me shake my head in utter disbelief, laugh till I was crying over instrumental music, and still surprise after a roughly-estimated 200-300 listens. I could go on forever about the greatness of the music Weasels contains, and I most likely will on a future post....

phenominal performance of Florentine Pogen (for you Jack!) from the album One Size Fits All...
This exact lineup of musicians is my favorite (aka the fucking best) music group of all time, #1. That's right.
Alright, you don't need to be all Busta Rhymes about it, I'll give you some more:
Inca Roads, live at the Roxy in New York... tour de force claymation by the amazing Bruce Bickford.


Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band - Lick My Decals Off, Baby (1970)

"Love has no body, no body has love, I love you, you big dummy".... where Beefy condenses and refines the tone and ecology of Trout Mask Replica into a menacing mix of untethered poetics and flailing sonics erupting from the magic band's hands. Lick my Decals, along with Trout Mask (usually considered Beefheart's finest statement), firmly establish the Captain as one of the most unique figures in recorded music's brief history. Continuing to channel Howlin' Wolf, Beefheart applies his swamp-water wail to issues of extinction (the Smithsonian Institute Blues), vegetable entelechy (see below), and misguided modernity (Space Age Couple). Art Tripp contributes a devastating marimba in place of the second guitar that characterized Trout Mask, perhaps the most obvious difference between the two masterpieces. Here's a few lines from the belly of the Beefheartian beast:

I wanna find me a woman who'll hold my big toe till I have to go
I wanna find a blue swirl plastic ocarina
About five miles long
And play with them sweet potatoes all night long
'cause them yams have all them eyes that yawn
'yearn down yonder below the ground
'n their golden hair is ah dirty brown

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Don an Vliet (the captain) is my favorite lyricist and vocalist. That issues of ecological conservation and warnings of the emerging technocratic culture were being espoused by a guy called Captain Beefheart back in 1970 is a testament to van Vliet's genius and iconoclastic interpretation of music-as-organism; Ouroboros spinning wildly above the musical landscape. Whatever. Check it out.

Smithsonian Institute Blues (Big Dig) with miscellaneous Beefheart pix


Bob Dylan - Bringing it All Back Home (1965)

Or, Dylan goes electric.... at least on the A side. My favorite Dylan album, which necessitates it's inclusion in this here list-of-the-best, sees our ramshackle hero pluged into the emerging electric rumble, shaking America like a baby phoenix. Subterranean Homesick Blues begins by blaring Bob bombs at the ossified edifice of "folk muisc", permutating the sonic landscape into something...new? Doesn't matter; this album stands the test of time, beginging to end, reflecting an enormous slice of the human condition. Side B could almost appear as a devolution to old folk ways, but songs like Gates of Eden and It's Alright Ma are some of the most arresting Dylan-as-bard nuggets ever vocalized by the man. Once you get beyond Tambourine Man (I've heard it enough, thanks) you're treated to some serious evocations of the persisting cultural paradigme. A real mind-f*$#. Sweeeeeet!

Subterranean Homesick Blues.... beyond classic (first music video ever?)
...and for further analysis of the Dylans extended influence through time, here's Weird Al


Animal Collective - Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished (2000)

Welcome to the new age! No, not the Enya/Whale-music variety. The debut album from the Collective is so fully formed and unique that it kinda pulls the rug out from under the feet of established musical sensibility. Largely indecipherable lyrical beauty splayed over cartoonish bass lines, piano melodies, and walls of noise emerge as a unified whole. Most people will certainly prefer the Collective's more accessible albums like Sung tongs and Feels - fantastic albums in their own right - but Spirit They're Gone remains their highest peak.

Video for Leaf House, from the album Sung Tongs
Video for Grass, from the album Feels


Grateful Dead - Live/Dead (1970)

One of the most sacred albums to Feef's ears. This is the zenith of the Dead; in terms of recordings, they were never better, before or after. Live/Dead is where you get to hear what all the fuss was/is about. A rare display of collective consciousness among high-minded musicians, Live/Dead takes you from the astral plane (Dark Star), to the mythos of man (Saint Stephen), to peaking exuberance (the eleven), straight to the dirt-dancing free-love catharsis of Turn on Your Love Light. More than any other album, Live/Dead is like a good friend smiling with you during times of turbulence, crisis, and celebration.





That's all for now folks! I'll attempt to turn this 5-best into a 10-best list soon... stay tuned.


LoVe feeF

Of Men, Trees and Bees

Greetings,

My friend Isabelle and I were talking about the role of the male in child rearing and she commented that it was a shame that men didn't experience the same kind of intimacy and attachment with their children that women experience. I half-heartedly agreed, but responded that the same is true for trees and rats... which promted a look of restrained shock.
Many of the tree species around here (temperate Canada) produce some the earlies flowers of Spring, with male and female flower parts (anthers+pollen sacs and carpels, respectively) produced on the same or separate flowers. Most of these trees are wind pollinated. The pollen (male gametophytes) is liberated into the air stream in mass quantity (springtime allergies, anyone?), which allows it to spread it's genes when it encounters a female nearby. When a male lands on the female flower part (the stigma) it develops a long "pollen tube" that grows through the style toward the ovule and fertilizes it when the two - male and female - finally make physical and chemical contact. I'm feeling randy just writting it. Here is where the role of the male appears to stop, as the female ovary swells into the ripe fruit and the fertilized ovules it contains are nurtured into baby seeds, gestating within the body of the female reproductive apparatus. Mom houses and feeds baby as the male has been digested by the mother and child after leaving it's genetic imprint on the future generation. Sure, this benefits the society of trees as a whole, maintaining genetic diversity and adaptive faculties, but what of the role of men in eusocial cultures where the man remains whole and alive following fathering?


Let's look to the honey bee, Apis mellifera. Eusocial organisms are those that are organized into a functional hierarchy of individuals performing specialized tastks - a division of labour. A worker bee (a sterile female), for instance, performs different tasks at different periods of it's life: For the first ~2 weeks the bee will be a nurse, tending to the queen (feeding her potently nutritious royal jelly, a glandular secretion), cleaning the hive, and raising the larvae :: At midlife, from 12-20 days, the bee helps build the honeycomb by secreting thin layers of wax from abdominal glands, and stores pollen and nectar collected by the older bees foraging in the surrounding flora.... the bees get to explore the surrounding flora for nectar and pollen during their final days. "But where are the men?", you may be asking... they are the haploid male drones of the colony, raised as a minority, they offer no immediate service to the colony, just buzzing around and being fed quite well by the female workers. There only function seems to be to mate with the virgin queens of other colonies, spreading the mother-colony's genes, delivered by a translucent endophallus. These beemen take off on mating flights where they will chase a virgin queen loking to get her spermatheca (sperm storage sac) filled up... the queen flies high and fast, weeing out the weak, mating with a few good menbees, ripping off their endophallus (penis). The queen starts her colony, laying ~600,000 eggs over three years, and the males drop dead to the earth (feeding some entomophagus fungus, no doubt!). OK, so this seems to be the major difference when discussing the genus Homo: our children take a long time to mature (if they do at all!) and require a lot of loving care before they can fend for themselves. Mom nurtures the children while dad brings back the bacon. We can't just toss our babies into the wind and hope the land on a fertile plot of land, like trees, nor can we rely on a 'queen' to birth hundreds of babies a day based on a single sexual encounter, like bees.
....just some miscellaneous thoughts on the (non-)utility of manhood.


Honey bee sex... post-coital emasculation of the drone.

loVe feEF

The Majestic Fungus

Concerning the Subjective Biomajesty of Fungi ... part I

Meditating on the Fungi - the society of species populating the kingdom Eumycota - I am transported into the soil. The soil: broadway stage of the play of life, sandbox of the worms, beetles and moles, anchoring forest and meadow in place. Soils of near infinite variety house a large proportion of the terrestrial mycota (the fungi-sphere). Fungi grow as a hidden network of filaments, linking ecosystem components together the way roads and rail link towns and cities...but fungi typically link the dead with the living, mediating the movement of nutrients from non-living organic matter (dead wood, leaves, insect carcasses, whathaveyou) back into living organic matter (plants, bacteria, insects, fungi). 10-100X thinner than a human hair, the filaments of a fungus explore the microniches of the soil (and your bathroom ceiling) with more precision and efficiency than any plant root or tiny insect, wrapping it's tubular body around soil particles and bits of organic matter. When it finds something to eat, the tips of these filaments secrete their digestive enzymes onto their meal and absorb the nutrients unlocked from the substrate. Think about a cement block with chocolate-chips stuck all through it... you need to break down the entire block if you want to access the good stuff. There's typically >2km of these filaments (called hyphae) in a single gram of forest soil! The mushrooms we see burst above ground are the magnificent genitals of the sprawling body hidden within the dark, moist soil. Mushrooms communicate the presence of something far more grand underground... the fruits of a subterranean jungle spewing out plumes of spores, the atomic unit of the Fungi.

love feEF

Let me take you to the beach

Ventura, California... attending a conference on plant-insect interactions (amazing), but managed some engaging sitting-on-beach time (not to mention some killer Pacific hacky-sac... flagellating limbs in homage to the source).

------------------------------------

My eyes are awake, they see the tides return and the water's play. Water awaiting re-marrage with the February sun that now hangs a foot above her liquid night. The birds are foreign to me, but their beauty cannot be eluded. Dylan sings for me today as I sit surrounded by Pacific waves. The hills of Ventura are bathed in a hazy sunset. I am content, but full of a joyous doubt and remain uncertain about my life, my will, my humility, my capacities. But all that is being dwarfed by this site, by this sight. I have seen the February wild flowers, I have witnessed the urban mushroom. Colours surround me; I am freed from snow white and brown gutter-slush. My shoulders carry no weight, my mind has cannibalized the head... meat turned thought turned to nothing turned to salty waves of ocean's sound. My brothers, christylersergiojoshrobin, my sister jocelyn, be with me soon, you're stars remain the brightest in my sky. I watch the sunset from a rock I have never known, but a rock from our earthly body none the less, over which I have spread my own body. The hue cast on the leafy horizon is familiar, but rare. I am drinking life in, imbibing from every pore. The birds, the water, the sun, the sand, the hills, the smells... they are one and together, from which nothing is born, and I am nowhere.


lOVe feef

fEeFellaneous in the cITy

* fEef & Jim photo by Linus

Weeding out the feefellaneous thoughts on city streets......

What are these faces, who were their mothers
Who is our mother superior, ultra mom high above
Heavenly cookies raining down to feed these faces
Faces that look broken by the streets and solicitations
Walking with our heavy gait and heavy shoulders
Dreaming of flying, reminiscence of dreams long abandoned
Old memories bitting into the heart of being

Don't let yourself build fortresses on shallow foundations
Leave your moat clean to let the babies bathe
Keep your crocodiles for the village circus, they could use the company

Is this all written on our faces like a fleshy brail?
Is this enough to invite fingers to caress our language?
Will I wear my tounge on my sleeve for once?
Every face here in unison a different answer
Your broken backs speak volumes
I cannibalize these bodies language
Fare thee good and well, I'll plant your knees in the soil
Far from city centers and watch them rot,
and watch the flies grow strong,
and watch the frogs leap up from their ponds,
and watch the birds carry our ancestors high into the hills


lOvE FeEf


*A drawing of miscellaneous forms run through the Photoshop

The Great Bufo

Greetings,
Today I'll try to keep the airy-fairy analogy machine up on blocks. Let's talk about some of the miscellaneous music currently blowing sonic bubbles into my rubber soul.

Alvarius B
Alan Bishop, also known as Alvarius B, is notorious for his membership in the inimitable Sun City GIrls, a trio of gentlemen that have been making some of the most flavourfull and virtuous no-holds-barred music ever leagally released over the past 25 years (check out the albums 330,003 Crossdressers from Beyond the Rig Veda, Torch of the mystics, and Dante's Disneyland Inferno for evidence). Mr. Bishop is no less ambitous, if less prolific, in his solo output, which centers on his hillbilly-Beefheart guitar and acerbic lyricism.... hang on, I'm turning into a loath music critic when I'm trying to tell you, the reader (i.e., no one), why this shit is worth your hour... let me drop the needle on his most recent album, Blood Operatives of the Barium Sunset (can't you just picture the little bits of scabby polyp escaping from an x-ray enema). First off, this isn't music for the kids, as Alvarius cackles and croons behind Belial masks of murder, blood drinking, suburban terrorism and defiant demons... might give your little boy the blues. Here's a smidgen of what is found within this guy's lungs:

This boy had effortless deceptive qualities
Looked so sad whe the little fuck went way down on his knees
Our funny little fella laced-up shiny leather boots
Looked like some classy corporate bitch in a 3-piece sharkskin suit
With mucus-layered focus and a specter he once knew
Came from corners of indifference crowning evil next to blue

This story-time delivery/devilry permeates Blood Operatives of the Barium Sunset, with Bishop talking through his twisted tales. This is in contrast to Alvarius B's first self-titled album (1994), which was completely instrumental and contains some seriuously beautiful guitar pieces... not to say that Blood Operatives doesn't have it's share of stripped-to-the-truth beauty, it most certainly does, and these are the tracks that stick with me most deeply. I've put two of these songs, Missy Undertaker and Shenandoah, on an intense "damn-I-love-you" kinda mix-tape. Here's a piece of the former:

There's two coffins, one for me, one for you
And they'll stay empty 'till our buisness is through
Deluxe appendages drape down for the ride
And the old ditch'll be my bride
And I can't wait to be by your side in the ground
Well this world's one big canvass of blood to splatter
I love it when you say you don't care who cuz it doesn't matter
And if I killed em all for you then you'd know my love was true
Miss undertaker, take me down
Missy undertook me beneath the ground

Only 1000 copies of this album were made, and only on vinyl, so if you can't find, play, or order it (suncitygirls.com) don't feel so guilty about downloading (soulseek would be my first suggestion)... it might get you interested in the Sun City Girls humongous output (~80 albums), which would only be a very good thing for your ears and where they lead to.


As an interesting side note, the Colorado river toad, Bufo alvarius, is the only toad known to produce hallucinogenic compounds (5-Methoxy-dimethyltryptamine and bufotenin), serotonin agonists that need to be smoked or injected, but not licked! The 5-MeO-DMT is nearly identicle to the drug found in "magic mushrooms" (but aren't they all magical?... yes, yes indeed), except there's a hydroxyl (OH) group on the '4' position of the indole ring instead of the methoxy group at the '5' position. Much more on plant and fungal hallucinogens (entheogens, please) in the future!


For the especially truth-hungry cynic (looking at you Colin!), check out the recent spoken-word (with crazy wicked backing musicians) album by Uncle Jim called Superstars of Greenwich Meantime. Uncle Jim is another aka of Alan Bishop, but more of his smoking-drunk ranting too-sane side, spitting in the face of cellphone-starbucks america. Equally brilliant, more fun, and more goddamn words, fellas!

loVe Feef

Just a Moment...

"Life stretches out from moment to moment in stupendous infinitude. Nothing can be more real than what you suppose it to be. Whatever you think the cosmos to be it is and it could not possibly be anything else as long as you are you and I am I. You live in the fruits of your action and your action is the harvest of your thought."
- Henery Miller, from the Tropic of Capricorn

Blue belly sky stretched overhead like a torn balloon, a bloated berry pie sky; sun button solar center makes the plants dance, jumping water electricity, they'll breathe your breath and bray with blossoms, forgive your words but not your litter. Cells and celestial bodies whirring together in a common drone, holographic harmonic patchwork of size and shape scattered maddly across the Whey. The air is cool and white, a refuge of the tree pollen swarming to its destiny, be it stigma or sinus... the men of maple, birch and oak float unassuming past one and other, to find a mate and escape into the future, or die buried in the soil, recycled by a waiting fungus. I face the wind and declare the Winter fully vanquished by Spring, by the billion raindrops bathing the buds, by this sweet air of yesteryear's broken limbs rotting their final days away.

lOve feeF

Let the Feefellaneous Begin!

"Maybe when a thing is percived as being absolutely direct yet absolutely unnecessary it becomes absolutely genuine."
- Tom Robbins

My passion flower (Passiflora incarnata) is blooming by my window. Pressed up against the dusty glass like a wistful purple spaceship, the flower, a 72-virgin pollinator paradise, is an elegant response to the sun and my loving watering. Genetic potential hidden behind a green veil of tri-lobed leaves and spindley stems now manifests itself in the guise of this ornamented temple of purple-pink flesh, a transient explosion of reproductive desire that will be quelled by tomorrow. The pollinators are absent here, so i can't hope to witness the transformation of passion flower into passion fruit.



Waking Walking Day Dreaming,
I threw my pennies in the garbage and ventured into the titillating horror of Western urbanity. Heads raced around skyscappers poking at the celestial dippers, a pinched face too aware of it's own desparation, everywhere snake oil peddeled as remedy. What is out there, I cannot comrehend... the busyness, the human flesh and it's economy of kisses and compliments, the look in her eyes, the scowl on his, the structure of my neuroses, the archetecture of the whole conflagrant society, and how we manage to keep this 6.5 billion-person shit-show on tour.

Ahhhh, but the city is a seductress, and onto her sweetly rank streets I ventured. The human industry is on display in all it's gaudy glory, a glinted oil-slick shinning in the new season's sun.... and then rain. Springtime, the rainy season, umbrellaland, a time for pristine leaves to flaunt their perfection before the caterpillar explosions and sun-scorching afternoons of Summer... time for reinitiation of the fungal matrix extending underground, recycling winter dog shit and old autumn leaves, perfuming mother nature with her finnest musk. My friend Tracy brought me a few bright red mushroms of Sarcoscypha coccinea, one of the first Ascomycetes to appear in the new year... she knows my predictable joy at recieving such earthy jewels.

love fEEf

Yeah, right...

Welcome,

Here goes... something.

I'm initiating myself into this swirling infocosm of uploaded mind and musing, walking the plank into a Cambrian ocean of wagging thought-tongues, hydra-headed critics and other cyberbiotic miscellaneous... and for what? Self-reflective genuflextion, bending over to kiss my own ass?.... well, Zappa said "Nobody looks good with brown lipstick on", so I'll try to avoid the excessive mirror-gazing psychoanalysis (not that it would be a self-flattering affair, let me tell you dear reader). Self-indulgence? Certainly. Isn't that what this hole weblog phenomenon is fueled by, the liquid schwartz rocketing these cries-in-the-night toward the satallites and back? But there is more... A quick condensation of what might be expected to arrive on these pages, the donkey butter I'm liable to churn out:

Fungi - the Kingdom of life most ignored and criminally abhored occupies a special place in my world view... my heart is a mycangium; my mind, once wooden, has been spawned into a teeming garden of Termitomycetous mycelium. From biology to mythology, I'll be using this hackneyed blog to celebrate their beauty and significance.

Music - well, how wonderfully original, right? Some faceless drone spewing out quarter-baked opinions about why my favorite radio jingle can beat up your favorite emo band, slinging sludge at the Britney-lovers just to make my shit looked bronzed? Right. I'll be ruminating about obsessions (japanese psych), unfailing love affairs (eg., Zappa and Beefheart), and other miscellaneous (Harry Pussy). Expect the occasional mix-tape playlist too (yeay muffins!).

Playing today are the Sun City Girls (Horse Cock Phepner), Acid Mothers Temple (New Geocentric World), loads of Stevie Wonder, Al Green, and some Bonnie 'Prince' Billy.

Plants - plants and fungi go together like watermellon and feta cheese, like left and right, like B and F#... from mycorrhizae (fungus-plant mutualisms at the root interface) to that rotting log transformed into a feast of oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus), plants and fungi have grown up together, intertwined in an elegant dance of cooperation and antagonism since the dawn of terrestrial life. I may meander into botanical analogy fairly often in an attempt to enhance the vegetable undertones of everything we participate in... after all, this wordsmithery is fulled by photosynthesis (whole-grain bread, sprouts, spinach, perfect avacado, and coffee for breakfast), and this petroleum plastic keyboard was once a happy community of algae and micro-marine animals.

...and other miscellaneous - The greatest focus of this journal will be the miscellaneous word-weeds I'm capable of harvesting with articulation. The internet is chalk full of miscellaneous bric-a-brac. Time to throw my own tire onto the fire.

love FeEf