and if I could introduce them to you,

I would make the elite folk of Nantes know about Beirut's "Nantes". I feel sometimes I might have been conceived in France, rather than in Great Britain. 'Rents took the wrong honeymoon train, maybe? I enjoy these sounds; they are calling to shambled, heartbroken people everywhere, or to the friendly train-dependent, late night peeps of the underground--ever lovely, ever patient. The ones who only get noticed when things haven't gone as planned. To the little boy and his grandma in Nimes: this is yours.

I'd also recommend, for all my good buddies around the world, all my sad friends in lit-up cities and quiet down provinces, to the sounds of Leonard Cohen's "I Loved You in the Morning". Pretty much my go-to song for when I start to miss everyone.

Sam Beam is the Samwise to my Frodo

Not even a new song; this one's for nostalgia.

Lion's Mane - Iron & Wine

Find it, serenade it, make babies to it. Do with it what you like. But please, get this in yer head.

thee old ricemilk list:

many years ago I'd be here:

slow jam - four tet
cut up piano and xylophone - fridge
great ghosts - mt. eerie
flag in hand - a northern chorus

funny how life turns.

L.

k i n g o f k i n g s

Time to talk about a good ole dirty ditty. For a while now, whenever a song seeps into my veins, I play it over and over, even enduring unhappy twists, just to arrive at some blissful melody. Oh, do I enjoy a good melody. This time, I'm taken with DJ Kentaro and his freaked out upsideways, cross-dressing ooh mixture of Wagon Christ's King's Lynn. Had I the means and knowledge to do so, I would put up a convenient implantation of this song on this very page, but as it is, I'm still kind of code illiterate. So this link will have to do:

King's Lynn.

Did you get it? I hope so. It has just enough majestic nostalgia and simplistic melody I can sink my fangs into. If I could make a tattoo version of this on my person, it would come across as rainbows and cordial-yet-fun-loving Englishmen (Phil Selway and Ian Wright come to mind) riding atop polka-dotted, red & white shrooms. And it'd be raining everywhere droplets of chilled plum wine.

They've Conquered The Fucking Force

Septmeber 18, 2008
Rodrigo y Gabriela at the Grove

What had happened to me just days ago, what tore open the cavity of listlessness, and pulled out a singing sparrow? God, Rodrigo. With your manic finger stomping. And Gabriela, dear Gabriela, hot hands and thumping. How could you have known? That newly opened cavern I call a heart now rests atop a flame of EFFIN HELL, I WANT TO LIVE THIS LIFE. Total flooring of the heart.

I didn't even mind the peoples pseudo-dancing, running amuck in the mid-section posh pit. It was that good. Ne're did I peel my eyes off the two, bouncing to and fro like a scene from a glorious ping pong movie. Rod stood mostly, occasionally observing and strolling the stage like taking his best friend out for a walk. Gab sitting and striking, a lovely bird with a tiny voice, hard sounds.

Led Zep or Metallica in the key of R Y G. Tamacun, Diablo Rojo: two crowd-favorites. We clapped to their beats, dis-rhythmic, yet pleasing. She beat the heckfire out of that guitar, and probably her hand, too. And he would request our voices to join in their choir. I imagined for a second what it would be like to live, day in and out, playing these songs for a room of mostly strangers. I wondered how strange it was to be out of their context and transatlantic, far far away from their homeland. Did they miss such noise and chronic bustle of the city, did they long for tacos de lengua? They travelled from their native Distrito Federal, Mexico. Land of ladrones, microbuses, telenovelas and life-size quesadillas that come alive in your mouth, then make your tongue quiver. Esos Chilangos...

Three flight cancellations and several hours later, (Gab: "It was like the fucking force was against us"), here they were, before a sea of stunned Vaders, each in his own way, breathing irregular, doting on these landscapes of latin-metallic sounds. I stood squealing when Gab's furious hands made unapologetic demands on her guitar. You could say she was a carpenter, in her own way. Molding the wood to create just the right shapes. Slightly grazing the strings to make scratchy shishasshish effects. Rod would look at her, then gain momentum as he perhaps remembered a time in Ireland, where they for a time bussed and scrapped for food money whilst playing for the guinness-guzzlin' fightin' folk. That's my version anyway.

It certainly has been quite some time that I have been so moved this way.