“Torch’d Circular!”

filmed by dear compatriot, mr. seth  w. owen.

beneath february and its awful bluster, we gussied up the jamspace and played the song through.

while howard tracked it to 8-track reel-to-reel, nadia made a red-hand mobile out of twigs and cellophane and sweet li’l nina disco-danced with yellow earmuffs on.

invited attendees= hrair, matana, mischa, j.d., wilke, juliet, glen, heistek, corri-lynn, peter.  everybody looks be-gloomed ’cause it’s mid-winter, and sometimes in montreal we just roll that way naturally.

bird on the t.v. is a cockatiel in a wind tunnel.  poor fella.

(almost back on track, almost on top of moving on…)

and sorry, but no thing to say for awhile, just grief and fever, and a snowsqualling wind blowing through the streets like wolves let loose and running…

did a bunch of interviews last week, shipwrecked in bed with pneumonia, like trying to wrestle goldfish in a bathtub full of motor oil, the words kept slipping out of reach and into the fog, blinking forlornly…

good news= tours are starting to take shape.  will post all the dates once they’re confirmed.

right now europe is march/april= france, UK, ireland, belgium, switzerland, italy, holland.  (germany’s looking bleak, but maybe munich.)

we’re trying to book another tour in august/september= eastern europe, and russia if we can.

U!S!A! U!S!A! U!S!A!———> (short one for now, but more in the fall.)  this is us in may= boston, nyc, philadelphia, baltimore, d.c., asheville, chapel hill, atlanta, nashville, louisville, chicago, detroit.

that’s all for now.  but a lot more later…

i know, with a terrible certainty, that one day my son will turn to me and ask, “why are they called mix-tapes? huh what’s a tape? why isn’t it called a ‘mix-file’?”, and like a melancholy robot, overcome with nostalgia for the lost tactility of certain dead technologies, and keenly aware that me too i’m a dead technology, i’ll put my dumb arms around him and weep like a motherless child.

“OLD THUND’ROUS-VOLUME ONE“

tracklisting:

• 1- shirts off- billy childish + armitage shanks
• 2- MRA- chris mcgregor’s brotherhood of breath
• 3- love henry- judy henske
• 4- delia- blind willie mctell
• 5- prove it (demo 1975)- television
• 6- wheels- the flying burrito brothers
• 7- our lord and savior- soul messengers
• 8- babylon- swan arcade
• 9- the bass line generator- raymond scott
• 10- you’ve got big hands- crass
• 11- borderline- mc5
• 12- i forgot to be your lover- william bell
• 13- it’s all over- ben e. king
• 14- sommarlåten / the summer song- international harvester
• 15- prizadujumal- kletka red
• 16- everything must change (live 1977)- nina simone
• 17- brahms violin sonata No.1 in G major, Op.78: I. vivace ma non troppo- itzhak perlman & vladimir ashkenazy
• 18- six white horses- waylon jennings
• 19- la messe ethiopienne: litanies de la veillee de l’assomption- l’eglise orthodoxe ethiopienne de jerusalem

———————–—————->L!I!N!K!<—————————————

autumn into winter, full fucking bore!, and a pale trembling frost every morning.

soon’ll be 5 foot ice-drifts, tender trucks of fallen snow, and the bones of trees with their necks bent into the wind.

the mt. zion band, post-recording, is still up on blocks. come january we’ll crawl down under there with worklights and hammer at the rusted differential!  (and am longing to be back in the middle of jamspace-reek, summoning the anxious squall…)

rough tour-plans=europe mid-march to may.  eastern america=mid-may to june.

we’ve got 2 new songs on the go, unfinished leftover’s from the last bout.  one of them’s a bonehead-riff, circa 1974, and the other one’s just a dozen words repeated over five bass notes.  other tasks at hand= have to retool the arrangements on two of the songs from the new record, and get up on a few of the older tunes that we haven’t played in years. possible covers this time around- “death of a clown” by the kinks, and a slo-mo cover of “manimal” by the germs.

best/worst interview question anybody ever asked me= swiss radio, after “horses in the sky”- the goyishe radio-dude tells me that the record reminds him of the history of the jewish people, wandering the earth searching for a home.

what i told him= everybody in the band has an apartment.  20/20 hindsight= should’ve hit him up for some hidden nazi gold.