Learning Music Monthly - Short Tempered [mp3]
Along the lime green pillar hangs a clock that tells the time and at the time, it told the man living inside underneath the hands swaying in a clock-wise direction, with clock-like wisdom chock full of whimsy, that it was time. And so at this now appointed time, with almost no time to prepare and with little time to consider, the man lifted his body up and out through the face of the clock. Inside of the clock, the man was two-dimensional and only his face and shoulders were visible. It seemed reasonable to think that maybe the man had nothing more to his body but then, here was now and there it was, the rest of his body. Brought into the third-dimension at the instruction of the third-dimension, the man stood for a time until such a time came that the sensation of standing wasn’t a frightening sensation. The weight of gravity upon his shoulders and the reactive force of the floor on his feet are the sort of things that one doesn’t find inside of a clock. All around him were people dining and drinking and reading political blogs and discussing the snow storm. The man turned on his heel, gazing for a short time at each person his eyes ventured across and thinking to himself all the time, “The addition of another dimension is a complex and wonderful thing.” After a time, he faced a window. He continued to turn for a time, peering with perplex at the snow falling from the sky at the time. If the man knew what a snow globe was, he might have remarked that the scene outside, as seen through the large windows, had the effect of making one feel like they were trapped inside of a snow globe. Except in this snow globe, there were no Christmas trees or NYC landmarks. Instead there were eager to please, hard working, fun loving, blindly idealistic (or relentless jaded) world changers and political wonks. There were laptops on every table and many patrons chose to frequent the cafe uncompanioned in a physical sense, but quite happy to be accompanied by Internet. The tables were large and strangers mingled, knowing that they could ignore the person beside or across by simply staring intently at their computer screen and listening loudly to their iPod tethered ear buds. But the man had never seen a snow globe from his limited vantage point inside of a clock hanging from a trendy cafe wall. In fact, no metaphors occurred to him as he stared. The snow fell in a soggy blanket, thick with moisture and destructive intent. Outside, people walked with umbrellas and cars traversed barely the roads saturated with white. The city was shut down that day in advance of the storm so that the citizenry would not have to danger tending to the issues facing our country. Or else, errands. The man lost track of the time as he stood retching his mind, attempting to contort his feelings and beliefs in a manner that could justify the growing expanse outside. And then, a large dog and a small dog passed each other for a time on the sidewalk in front of the window. The large dog scarcely noticed the small dog shuffling through the 8-inch layer of snow and the small dog understood this advantage. It lunged bravely, but briefly, at the large dog’s front paw with incredible violence. The man wondered how such a small animal could possess such an intense look in his eye, even if only for a brief period of time before being dragged away. The man decided that his time here was sufficient and that he needn’t see anymore of this multi-faced world. The man looked at the clock and asked, “Do you have the time?” The clock responded, “It is time.”
Learning Music Monthly is a rhythm and blues band from Los Angeles. The featured song is from the album This May Also Be It. Purchase the music at Cash Music.
Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea [mp3]
It was the saw that got my attention and he could tell. “That’s a musical saw he’s playing there.” Ben turned up the volume. Behind us, Cara, Dan and Allen stopped talking because the music was too loud. Instead, they looked forward at the back of our seats with blank expressions. Maybe they were thinking about nuclear weapons. In the front seats, Ben and I stared forward through the windshield at the traffic. The car on our right had Alaska plates and I wondered if they just drove into Des Moines today and why. Maybe they took it’s geographic location to mean that it was the spiritual center of the continental states. I started to think something else but the musical saw came ambling into my mind again. At least I assumed that the depressed warbling aloft underneath guitar fuzz and the depressed warbling voice of Jeff Magnum was a musical saw. I had never heard a musical saw before. I remember once while working on my Uncle’s pallet farm, dropping a standard non-musical saw from a short height and the sound it made was kind of nice and remembering it now, I thought, “That sounds kinda like the saw I dropped once.” Then I started to reminisce about the fort I built in the pallet stacks with my brother and we would watch the working men walking to their pallet posts through the spaces between each slat of wood, throwing rocks at the ones we didn’t like and making farm animal sounds at the ones that we did like when Ben started to shout.
“This is definitely one of those albums that you remember the first time you heard it. Where you were and who you were with. Last album I heard like that was OK Computer. It was Independence Day and I had my headphones on and I was laying on my back in the grass on a hill staring up at the fireworks exploding in the sky. Occasionally, I would forget what was happening and then my girlfriend’s face would come into my periphery as she neared in for a kiss. She would kiss me and behind her a firework would create a halo around her head.”
Ben had to yell his story and it annoyed me a little because I had to concentrate to understand his strained words over the music. I wanted to tell him that I don’t care about Radiohead right now. In the end though, I thought that the story Ben told was kind of charming and it made me want to listen to OK Computer. I had never listened to it before, I realized. Reflecting on what he said as the song came to an end, I wondered if I would remember all of this, as Ben suggested I might. I thought that I would but it depressed me to think that in several years time, I would listen to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea only to be returned to this dank van in Des Moines, en route for Dowling High School to compete in a debate tournament. I would remember that I spent one weekend in March discussing the policy implications of nuclear disarmament, or maybe a ban on nuclear testing, or else some strategic change in defense policy and that during that weekend, I was the victorious debater only twice in six tries. I might even begin to fret at the enormous threat posed by nuclear weapons the second I heard the opening chords.
I was worried and I was young. The rest of the album proceeded without much consideration for the impact my weekend might have on future listens. Instead, I thought about Cara and how I might come to have sex with her. And I forgot the fact that I should be depressed by my poor showing at Dowling in the future when I heard this album and so it was, until now.
Neutral Milk Hotel is a rhythm and blues band from Athens. The featured song is from the album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Purchase the music at Amazon | Insound | eMusic.
HEALTH - Before Tigers [mp3]
In the middle of the stream, in the rapids, on a log sits another universe. In this universe, spice and sand reign supreme without subtlety. On the banks of this stream sits still another universe and across the way on another log on another bank, another universe that is the same. In these mirrored universes, bombs drop like the upside down letter V, marking the places whereby sexual encounters will determine the fate of the Allied Powers. Further up stream, on a rock, another universe again, another again and again and again. The water sags on the rocks before rapidly flowing into the crevices of the centrally-located log. Time is frozen there, occasionally, for undress and with lavish care the clothing is re-adorned so as to give the impression of having never left. These universes all sit with legs dangling in the stream, the feet at the end cold from the water and bare for the travels. Up above through the tree limbs, the sun is meandering, a maundering steamy haze lifting in evaporative waves and it passes before the page, with each turn of the page and the light changes shape casting shadows on each next.
For each of these universes, time operates according to the rule of the page and in that stream, time passes according to the laws of the universe and after a different time, on a different page, in a different mind has passed its past, a rejoinder relieves the responsibilities inherent in literature. The universes step from their logs and their rocks and their banks to assail the foodstuff residing inside and they discuss the implications of such a peaceful passage of water through the graves, there are graves under the water and they agree that the earth is a grave.
HEALTH is a rhythm and blues band from Los Angeles. The featured song is from the album Get Color. Purchase the music at Amazon | Insound | eMusic.
Ah Holly Fam’ly - Loneliest City [mp3]
by Travis Meyer
We recall the shape of our dreams through the song of the break of day that clings to the evening, as if handling the places we’d been were a moth’s appeal to the ceiling, skimming invisible wings toward the big window’s view out into our lives like fixed dioramas of different, lonelier cities we’ve survived. The past isn’t a matter if you can manage forgetting the pulpy misadventures that brought you here, she said. And we can lie awake in the untamed air of this February indoors, pretending we’re at the shore of what our former selves imagined we’d have learned by now. No doubt they’d look at us like we’d returned from Antarctica, with mermaids for wives and fur aureoles encircling our chapped faces, our souls impossibly underwater, muted by an afterthought of the almond orchards along the gravel roadside. It was better to leave our clothes for later — our labors redivided — and pretend we were characters in an Antonionian reverie, spinning the globe and putting our fingers down, hoping we might catch ourselves where the ocean sprays at an igneous footing and evergreen ghosts sweat blueberry mists in the morning. You against the glass. You against the murk of an imitative pond tinted nicotine for the effect your eyes have watching the seagull ascend motionless in the Pacific wind. You against the white wall naked but for a black sheet draped like a night wind around your hips, goosebumped flesh from the cold that space heater doesn’t make up for, you’re spinning the globe again for a lonelier city, a place for coffee and bare boughs and ice cream with a matinee alone.
Ah Holly Fam’ly is a rhythm and blues band from Portland. The featured song is from the album Reservoir. Purchase the music at Amazon | Insound | eMusic.
Michael Yonkers with The Blind Shake - Carbohydrates Hydrocarbons [mp3]
There is this little white orb and it bounces. It is of a plastic polycarbonate slightly perforated construction and it bounces. We in our hands, each right, each night, hold tight, we rhyme a paddle with our saddles and it bounces. Probably it is not polycarbonate but it bounces. We drink beer and it bounces. He looks across the table with a glare gleaming as I lay in wait dreaming and it bounces. A sip, we sip, another sip before he lifts into the air slightly tumbling a trembling, it nearly nears the pergola ceiling before neatly attacking the near nothing and it bounces. For a time our gaze guides little lasers into the corner without so much as a shuffle, our weight leaning back and forth before a slice recoils and it bounces. He is no grander gardener than I as he tramples the dying daffodils daring a playful prayer, it propels into the air and it bounces. Something like a scuffle with the fence, a left and a right into the wooden planks before a kick dislodges with might, we might, she might, let’s might and say we did but it bounces. “Holy shit!” and it bounces. Consecutively we flail forgetting the laws of physics, we slide a cradle under the little brittle blur bouncing leaps and bounds, it travels leaps and bounds, I leap and he bounds bullets blasted and bucked, bending and ending with a “pong” neverending and it bounces. Something like awe overcomes the contestants competing for no prize, a thirst for a sip abates with rapt attention, the ball travels together with hopes healing a long dormant rivalry recalled, he thinks, “Remember when we used to do this all the time?” and it bounces. These clicks, his clack with such power performing under pressure was never his game but it bounces. A blast for the win is caught from his knees but then an elated return, a deflated reply, the point is his and it bounces underline.
Michael Yonkers with The Blind Shake is a rhythm and blues band from Minneapolis. The featured song is from the album Carbohydrates Hydrocarbons. Purchase the music at Treehouse Records.
Bibio - Haikuesque [mp3]
She asked, “Have you been in a perpetually liminal state for a long time?”
Out the window, the dark side of the road passed slowly shifting shapes and shadows lifting up into his eyes sifting through his thoughts and inside resides, sitting upon a rocking chair without a rock the bus burling a beast bowling down the icy lanes and highways drifting drops just right of insight outside of momentum. The days December deceive and become January joining. Those nights watching the little litany weaving wisps of wherewithal, they would laugh at the convolution contorting control over a crevice of discovery, designing doubt and delight with delicate care. He wonders where it all began before, and being existence extols elaborate ideas brewing beyond. But this is all a ploy he would ponder, perfunctory remarks reveal a revolving relapse rehearsed and repeated. She felt forever that way last night and he believed because.
In clear blusters, they hold hands and recite, “Hello, I’m glad.” Walking willfully bliss, a theoretically blasé affair predicated on an airing of grievances an airing of gravity an airing of gratuitous thinking for the sake of feeling, a thought about felt and he felt he thought he feels she thinks and a circular conundrum of collected misunderstandings and interpretation imbues something like mystique mistook for an always myopic perception. This mystery of movement of massive drifting and the snow falls fleeting filament landing lashes and batting, they speak in mistakes and poorly translated traversing telling tales tallied toothlessly and perfect, performed aside alleviating an alienating ellipses until.
He answered, “Yes. But you would understand.”
Bibio is a rhythm and blues band from the UK. The featured song is from the album Ambivalence Avenue. Purchase the music at Amazon | Insound | eMusic.