I am starting to archive my photos.
BS2000 Drum Head after Bowery Ballroom show. (NYC)
Craig Wedren at the First Love, Last Rites show. (NYC)
Merzbow at CBGB’s. (NYC)
I’ll post more as i scan em.
PHOTOS
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ROCTOBER 44
CLAWS OF LIGHT
My friends, The Dust Dive, just released their second album ‘Claws of Light’
They are a hard band to describe, so I won’t try…
-but here’s some info on the record for ya:
Weird, warm, and enigmatic, the Dust Dive returns from another long field trip with Claws of Light, the captivating follow-up to their critically acclaimed debut, Asleep or Awake Walk. “Like modern Huck Finn tales where the Dionysian clashes with the suburban” (in the words of D. Shawn Bosler of The Village Voice), the Brooklyn-based trio’s new covey of songs soars with gritty equanimity and uncommonly vivid verse, evoking an urban-pastoral world that is mutually arcadian and trashy, dreamy and deadpan, magical and everyday. Claws of Light also maps a wild and curiously deranged sonic landscape, spanning from punk to classical, pre-war American folk to psych, gypsy violin to naturalist field recordings, and classic rock to outsider Americana. When asked to describe their sound, Dust Dive organist Ken Switzer, who spent much of his youth in the backwoods of rural western Massachusetts, offers up the label “experimental campfire music.”
Dust Dive multi-instrumentalist Laura Ortman (an accomplished film-soundtrack composer, session violinist and member of the White Mountain Apache tribe) describes Claws as “party songs without the party music.” The method of recording this album surely fueled the party. In an effort to preserve their relaxed homegrown ambience, the Dust Dive asked Sebadoh and Fiery Furnaces member and veteran guerilla engineer Jason Loewenstein to record the songs at the band’s namesake fort*—a cozy half-railroad apartment located on Flatbush Avenue. (Chief vocalist/lyricist and Kansas native Bryan Zimmerman calls Brooklyn’s strange and colorful thoroughfare “our river.”) Throughout last autumn and winter, Loewenstein dove in and spent weekends recording Claws within a labyrinth of acoustic forts rigged from scrapwood and blankets. Air-drumming during playbacks eventually compelled him to pick up his sticks and crown the record with drums on the leadoff “Babyface in a Pickup Truck,” as well as “Rope Swing 2000” and “Green River.”
*As an added bonus, Claws of Light also features one track immaculately recorded and mixed by Patrick McCarthy (Latitude/Longitude, Enochane) at the cozy Seaside Lounge, which also ultimately served as the mix-to-tape clubhouse for Claws.
They’ll be touring Europe in March…
Check em out!
Vinyl Requiem Interview
The fine folks over at Vinyl Requiem recently asked me to do an interview.
You can check it here: MCAxVR
Hello Friends…
First post, yes, hello…
I was recently thinking about blogs & the interweb & computers & all this new stuff I have seen come into existence in my years & of course the internet is a wild one – you could spend all day & night for many a’weeks searching and looking and digging up all sorts of goodies & bizarreness, and like everyone at one point or another I find myself spending too much time wasting time on the computer web & not actually having interaction with actual people, this isn’t a major problem in my life – but even still – it made me think about what i enjoy doing with friends, new or old – and i think that one of the things that ranks up there is going out an’ eating pizza, so i figured a good first post would be to invite all or any of you that might be reading this to post up in the area for comments (I think you can comment on here.. right?) But yea, comment up your favorite local Pizzeria & if ya wanna mention maybe a fun pizza story that you may have had with one of your friends – that’d be nice too.
Hope all is good & I hope you enjoy wasting a few minutes of your time in the future checking out my blog here at the Format.
piece out,
MCA
