I have seventh heavened myself to death knowing that flash fiction trailblazer Meg Pokrass jumped on board to be the first train out of the station for Bamboo Dart Press, a new publishing arm that Mark Givens and I have partnered on. Pokrass’ book “The Loss Detector” is out this Friday. You can pick up the book this Friday direct from Bamboo Dart or at brick and mortar shops as well as large distributors/online portals Revolver USA, Grapefruit, Ingram, Amazon, Mid Heaven et al starting October 22nd. The trailer below features script from the book and images of the author over a bed of music by Callaci.
Nima Kazerouni’s new song and forthcoming Shrimper tape
Nima Kazerouni is a busy guy. Besides being in So Many Wizards (first Shrimper appearance on the double CD “Smooth Sounds” six years back), he is also in the bands Nectarines and Crown Plaza. What is striking to me about Kazerouni and the projects he is involved in is his unique style of singing, his twist of a phrase and his lack in this day and age of adding digital whip cream all over everything. I ordered the pancakes, sure, but I am an adult. Please don’t blueberry smiley face, coat them in powdered sugar nor chemical lick the back of their faces as you prepare my plate. I ordered three, face down. I am going to pour this gin on them, so save your syrup for Sufjan Stevens or what’s her name. Hey, nothing against them, nothing against them at all, I am only just saying I ain’t into confectioner sugar.
Nima’s latest song is one of them home recordings with him alone at the board. Those are the kind of final exams I love. You get to see every aspect of the artist in plain sight, wholly, in that light. They are writing the script, casting the actors, directing the movie, scoring the piece. The kid just supple wristed my high score on Defender with this song, it is a bruiser. Nima is at work on a full length release due in the new year on Shrimper. The Pancakes you ask? well I hop, I Denny’s, I drilled a hole in my coffee cup with my car keys as a trick on this here waiter for an endless refill. I had time. That waiter, he hated me. He checked on my coffee after forty minutes, asked if I was interested in buying the restaurant, then disappeared again. I was unsurprised when it became another boarded up building in a bored old world. This tape by Nima, it will fit in your one hot little hand in the sweaty little city that we reside in come 2021.
Horde of Two
Have I ever read a piece on the ten best guitarists that grew like redwoods out of the underground post 1988? No? No, I don’t think so. Sure, you’ll see bleeds from the seventies here, but I am talking penultimate sounds, releases, carbon dating. 1988 forward. Now, having blown the preamble to bits, allow me to write the abbreviated version. Michael Morley, Loren Mazzacane Connors, Ira Kaplan,Jandek, John Davis and David Lester – those are them. They play the guitar like John Bonham plays the drums. Sometimes brash back beat meaty, and at other times sliding around the dials of a voice or bass or drums or a piano, barely there, but fully present. I listen to everything that the six of them do, or I thought I did until May of this year. I found something that was lost to me this past Spring in the thick of the thick. Like a fifty hidden in a Zadie Smith book, I couldn’t believe my luck to have stumbled upon it. Horde of Two.
David Lester, known for his work in Mecca Normal and his work as an illustrator is my kind of guitar hero. If you know his style in either field, you recognize it immediately. Horde of Two is a duo with Lester on the guitar and Wendy Atkinson on the bass. Is that a bass? Is that a cello? Is that an airplane? Their debut has that Mike Watt & Kira Roessler magic of improvisational swing even during quiet passages. There, at the root of their more tempered and ethereal surveying of the landscape prior to the build, it swings there too. The instrumental record “Guitar and Bass Actions” weather maps me in, gets me lost in the terrain. I am simply a passenger on this train. My book is back flapped on my lap, as I can’t stop looking out my wing of the railroad car noting that we are moving from an arid alluvial band to some kind of tundra sun beam glare of blinding light. Prince, he had a few good lyrics, and what he said to me about this record near thirty five years ago is still full on correct today. Prince said “This is not music, this is a trip.”
Lester & Atkinson, as Horde of Two, are at work on a follow up record which will only be available in the air. But wait! They have agreed to allow me to put out a cassette version of the new record when it is out this spring, a better spring than this past one I am forecasting. See, I begged, and then on my knees I pleaded. I said to David and Wendy “I am headed to Taos with a sandwich bag suitcase and a wallet. I have no phone, just my trusty old Walkman. Would you allow me to make a cassette of your second release available to other fellow travelers like me that are still on the path of divorcing themselves from this material world but still in need of a physical fix?” When they nodded in agreement I bought my ticket right there and then. I am salivating in wait. You really need to hear their first release in the meantime. Live with it for awhile. It is an independently minded little beast. Don’t be surprised, if like me, it redecorates the entirety of your surroundings. You, in a spell, mesmerized at how well garland, pine needles. broken bell jars and ice cubes can redefine space.
https://hordeoftwo.bandcamp.com/album/guitar-and-bass-actions
The Mountain Goats “Getting Into Knives”
I can’t hand out nor hang candy from the trees for trick or treat this year. Instead, I have made a mix tape with an answer song to every track on the new Mountain Goats record. I have dubbed 200 copies of it over the last week. It is odd, because nearly the entirety of the call back tape is that record by the silver fox, Charlie Rich, “Behind Closed Doors”. The tape begins with the 1973 cover by Tom Jones of the title track, but the rest is all Charlie, Charlie and his wife and the song his teenage kid wrote for the record. Tom Jones, all that bravado couldn’t mask the insecurities of the narrator in the title cut, the hurt under the brag. It serves as a touchstone to many of the songs on the new record, including my favorite, “Get Famous” which could have been written by the same cat, except this time he is pissed and shellacking that bouquet of rose reds with poison. I left hand mention this to John Darnielle as I prep a box of his Nurse With Wound and early Human League records that have resided in my garage for a decade to take a trip home to him. “That Song, “Get Famous” is really is one of the meanest songs I’ve ever written. The narrator is a guy who is not used to actually saying “fuck you.” He says this in reference to me mentioning that the voice in the song sounds like the voice of one that has seldom cussed. Fuck. I was right. Right again to an answer that doesn’t matter much.
The walls of Sun & Muscle Shoals studios where the record was recorded seem to have lent a laconic slow bake to the tunes on the new record. Pudding skin on top of skin growing over the soft, vulnerable innards which are still fully in tact and waiting for you to dig into. I have taken to digesting the record slowly, falling in love with it over the end of the summer as I pace the floorboards with the headphones on, trying not to wake up my wife or kid. Time was a cassette with 4 songs would be slapped in my hands every other week with new tunes that were freshly recorded on that boombox heard on the cassette of John’s released this past spring, but this one rings truer to the arena of those discoveries than that cassette did.
Trick or treat. I am ordering a bunch of them large candy bars, and am going to hand deliver 100’s of them on each doorstep in my neighborhood on Halloween along with the white shell dubbed tape. Something small and sweet that is a way for me to tell my neighbors that I love them, anonymously even if they have a ring camera on me. I will be dressed up in my same old clothes, but they won’t recognize me for I will be in an ecstatic state of peace, having digested and ridding myself of a near year of our misery. I miss you my dear friends, my arms length compatriots, you sweet old stranger that I talk to twice a year but think of more than you would know. We have all been residing behind closed doors for so long without a ring at the door, that we have forgotten what that chime sounds like when it sings. May I leave this sweetness at the foot of your threshold, far enough away so it isn’t trampled on, but close enough that the racoons and rats don’t wander it away? I am slowly getting into knives, slow enough that no one is going to get hurt. I will use them only for opening up other worlds, Okay? Other worlds that have been here, before me, in wait.
Franklin Bruno et/as The Human Hearts “Day of the Tiles” EP
Back in the days of yore, say June 20th of this year, before there was a Shrimper website, Franklin Bruno released a new digital EP with his band The Human Hearts. The first full length Human Hearts record made it’s debut on Shrimper in 2012, and playing on a theme is something Bruno loves to do as noted by the next 2016 Human Hearts release, and now, as a send off to our morbidly obsolete president, we have his 2020 entry. As we doze and awaken to the same ashen sky with only our shadows cluing us in that time has passed in our absence, it has become difficult to tell when anything truly comes out anymore, if those records I ordered and received a few months back still belong to me or have in fact dissolved into a sea of other records, mimicking and finally becoming the jackets and pressings of records I had owned previously. Another record by Bill Callahan, Feeway Bill, Bill Withers, Bill to Spill, Bill Direen & The Billders, Bill at Will, Bill To Power, Chico DeBillDeBarge etc. I get lost as they morph and lose their shape melting into one another.
Having written that, I can say that the aluminum burns that are eating away at my carpeting thanks in large part to my addiction to physical goods, in this case my freshly burned CDR of this Human Hearts EP is worth the damage it inflicted on my place as its freshly minted backside and sharpied face dripped from the library to the kitchen. It appears to be a trail of something resembling mercury, rolling on the floorboards when my weight tips the scale of the house. So I tiptoe and hop quick to keep from disturbing it. I need to hold onto these tiles, all of them. They have all of the elements of Franklin’s and the bands strengths, these tracks. The inventive language, diminished G flat to A major, the unexpected ballad neighboring a block of hooky reels, they are here in spades, clubs, diamonds and, ahem, hearts. What a wonderful treat to be listening to new songs by one of my favorite songwriters as he and I make fun of one another via VHS cassette swaps in the mail (SLP mode kills me with all the sexy extra panty lines it piles on me).
There are physical reissues due from the Bruno/Shrimper vault, possibly before the new year. Whet your whistle now, but be cautious of not over doing it. Dry whistles in NM+ shape go for big bucks on the Oculus imaginary aquarium feeding sites. Virtue reality, I enjoy being back with your honest John kind.
https://thehumanhearts.bandcamp.com/album/day-of-the-tiles-ep
First Shrimper & Refrigerator tapes reissued
As noted in earlier posts. limited edition reissues of the first cassette on Shrimper from 1990 & the first Refrigerator cassette “Lonesome Surprize” from 1991 are out today. Available via Revolver, Grapefruit & Midheaven. The PSST Shrimper compilation cassette features a replica of what morphed into the first Shrimper catalog tucked into its coffin shell. The Refrigerator cassette includes new liner notes by Allen & Dennis Callaci.
Read earlier posts for the history of both as well as listen to a rare Prince cover from Refrigerator’s “Lonesome Surprize” cassette.
Shrimper + Pelekinesis = Bamboo Dart Press
I am thrilled to announce a new collaborative imprint between Mark Givens & myself, Bamboo Dart Press. Like Shrimper and Mark’s Pelekinesis books, we will be issuing a uniquely curated line of literary & art related releases. As Bamboo Dart Press our aim is to allow writers and artists to godspeed works into the physical world without the hoops and machinery that slow the process of finished-to-physical work in the realm of books and LPs that are the day jobs of the two parent companies. The initial offerings from Bamboo Dart Press will focus on modestly priced chapbooks that retain the spirit of the DIY spheres that comprise the origins of both Pelekinesis and Shrimper. The chapbook series launches in October 2020 with “The Loss Detector”, a novella-in-flash, by flash fiction superstar Meg Pokrass. Hot on the heels of this spectacular first release will be collections by John and Ann Brantingham, Dennis Callaci, Stephanie Barbé Hammer, Jonathan Lethem and Anna Moschovakis, Nicholas Williams, Joel Huschle, Victor Gastelum, and other notable literary luminaries. Microfiction, essays, short stories, poetry, graphic arts, biography, and independent voices will all feature prominently in these small books. Each chapbook will be available via all of the shared distributors between Shrimper & Pelekinesis, meaning that besides buying them direct from the Bamboo Dart Press website, you can couple these books to other orders you might do at Revolver, Grapefruit, Ingram, Midheaven, SPD, Amazon, and brick & mortar retailers everywhere. More to come soon, here is a sneak at the cover art for the first three books with art by Callaci & layout by Givens.
Falcon Eddy “No.2 Record” out digitally
Don’t call me Man. Don’t call me dude. Don’t call me ma’am. Tonight is all we have. Word is spreading downtown and out. There was a was a bunch of poetry tumbling out of the car window after I drove away from that building that we used to work in. Wait, that is from the cassette of an early mix of the second album by Falcon Eddy called “No. 2 Record” that I need to bump up the volume on as that glass building burns itself back down to sand in the rearview. Oh shit, I forgot to pull that guy I used to work with up off the floor after that fast food Fast Times at Ridgemont High bathroom wave he gave me made out of neon and gas fell as I exited. I need to go back. I can’t go back. I don’t want to go back. Pillars, all of them now as I hop on the 10, maybe those ghosts have reversed and turned into glass. An old song in my head underneath this one by Falcon Eddy duets with “Don’t look back, you can never look back”. The fact is that even if the rewind worked on this deck or this car or your phone or that stickered Bubble Yum laptop, I wouldn’t employ it. I have this cassette in the sternum console, stuck and not only don’t I want to perform surgery to get it out from the pin and spinning rubber wheel that is keeping it in, but I don’t want the loop that we are in to end. “No. 2 Record” by Falcon Eddy has twelve songs on it just like “No. 1 Record” has a dozen songs. I have to drive with the one on and the other in my mind making comparison and contrast notes in the dust of the dash. That post bend pop in your ear, when you can finally hear clearly after hopping on a dirty scrimfoot, warm salt water down the nape of my neck from that canal. The two records I am on about both have that quality. It is a note perfect flawed record from a friend that retains enough off the cuff reed and spit that you know it is legit, legit like that episode of Combat that Altman did on TV, like Cassavetes guesting in a Hollywood Bowl episode of Columbo. Bumping the McLuhan mediums up into top drawer grade A’s.
One more thing.
The new Falcon Eddy is available on bandcamp right now, and there is some shit about someone or other waiving fees and all sorts of comma dash hiccups that aren’t quite of my understanding on street date, September 4th, but the point in my panting is that it is available now & for some time after that. Steve Folta not only plays on the thing, but lovingly recorded and sweated over months of mixes. Amy Maloof’s songwriting and lyrics offer surprise at every turn. Why is this song already over? How did I get from Philly to Yemen during that ninety second song in my mind? Oh right, I followed the pixel dotted script that rounded me through the atlas of thought and time. Maloof is hard at work on a follow up release due out next year on Shrimper in the duo version of Falcon Eddy with band mate Erica Tyron.
“One more thing; I noticed your corsage fell off before you hit the stage at the Hollywood Bowl, maybe just after the sound check. We found an exact match at the scene of the crime, your fibers on it.” Cassavetes slumming, we do that too, but at night we moonlight with the second job that we have. That job rules. “No. 2 Record”. Falcon Eddy. I burn every building I drive by with the spark of each song exhaling. I am doing sixty in a twenty five, unnoticing.
When I die, I will purchase it at Diablo’s Discs and Guns in Jupiter, Florida, maybe Departed Platters in Tempe or the Secondary Sister Store of Mercy in hell as though the earthly version of those bricks and morticians are gone, in the afterlife, they live on. Here in this purgatory non physical world, buy it here:
John Davis “Pure Night Plus” Double CD out September 25, check out this previously unreleased track Premiere on Magnet
Refrigerator reissue first cassette only release on September 8th
The earliest Refrigerator recordings surfaced in 1991 on the Shrimper cassette “Lonesome Surprize”. Lovingly remastered from the original sequenced tape by Steve Folta, this limited edition cassette reissue features brand new liner notes by Allen & Dennis Callaci recalling the origin of these songs. The hand painted covers offer an upgrade to the first edition, with the shell containing its sharpied “X” that also figured on the orignal issue.
The cassette features the brothers along with Joel Connel ex of Pillsbury Hardcore and then a budding member of Man Is The Bastard. The majority of the cassette was recorded live on the air at KSPC, with a few live to one track acoustic stomps rounding out the recordings. You might be most familiar with the title track as a duet that The Mountain Goats covered on their “Nine Black Poppies” release with Allen on the other side of the world delivering his vocals, or maybe their cover of the Prince song “Annie Christian”, retitled here with a hardcore lean that you can check out below. The following year, childhood friend Chris Jones would return from college and take over drumming duties, which he still does to this day. The cassette is out September 8th, available via Grapefruit, Revolver, Midheaven & finer independent record stores like Pickles, Piss and Broth in Madison, I Get So Emo Philips in Bensonhurst or Steve Bannon’s Yacht in Long Island Sound.