But that’s not the subject of this post, it’s just the backdrop.

The subject of this post is raw materials.

So hear this: I wanted one of my characters to be a musician, a mixed-media artist with a musical focus. But, as previous album and concert reviews on this blog will indicate, I am a neanderthal when it comes to things artistic.

Yesterday I spent some time at the Toronto Reference Library reading the compilation book “Arcana”, a John Zorn project. In it, I found an essay written by someone who exactly fits the mold of the character I wanted in my book.

How did this essay end up in my bucket of spare parts?

I can tell you how it happened. In 1985, I occasionally visited my youngest uncle. He had a Texas Instruments computer that ran on audio tapes. This introduced me to video games. Specifically, though, it introduced me to computer games. Atari and Nintendo were cute, but I still wanted a keyboard in front of me.

I suspect that this is the reason I became a computer scientist. But that’s a different story.

Back to me liking computer games. Computer games are sometimes hard. They are so hard, in fact, that there are communities of people out there who write up guides on how to beat them. In 2001, I was tinkering on GameFaqs.com, the largest such community, presumably looking up FAQs on how to beat one of these hard games. I was also a fan of heavy metal music, and I noticed that there was a heavy metal message board on the site.

I clicked around and discovered that quite a few people were raving about a small “astral metal” band called “maudlin of the Well”. Someone posted lyrics from one of the songs, and I almost gagged at their cheesy-gothicness.

Back then, I was in the habit of actively seeking out things to deride. So, I went to their label’s website. (At the time, this was the label “Dark Symphonies”.)

Lo and behold, they were selling all of motWs discography at a massive discount. (I noticed this with little surprise.) I bought their entire discography of 3 albums for something like $10, shipping included.

It arrived at Christmas of that year. I listened to it obsessively for the following three years. It was really captivating, and I quickly forgot my initial impression of the band. I was a convert.

maudlin of the Well eventually became the band “Kayo Dot”. The lead influencer of Kayo Dot, Toby Driver, also eventually signed with Tzadik Records, John Zorn’s label.

Some years later, (in 2009 or so, I think) Toby Driver wrote an essay for a John Zorn compilation book called “Arcana IV: Musicians on Music”, or something like this. I knew this because I was on his mailing list. I was curious, because I’d read a few interviews by Toby, and I was always inspired by his words.

Since the book was labeled “Arcana IV”, I inferred that there should also be an “Arcana I”, an “Arcana II”, and an “Arcana III”. (Possibly even an “Arcana V”.) I looked them up, and they were available on Amazon for prices that more or less overcame my curiosity about them. So, I never got around to buying any of them.

Fast-forward to this month, where I found myself reading bad interviews of art school grads and dancers, and thinking to myself, “What would be the next best source of inspiration for this character?” I suddenly remembered the Arcana book I’d wanted to read, and so looked it up on the Toronto Public Library website. The very next day I was pulling it off of the Performing Arts shelves in the reference library, and discovered exactly what I was looking for.

I’m not sure what provoked me to share this story, other than that it was sort of brewing in the back of my brain while cycling around the city. Hopefully someone out there finds something to take from it — perhaps in 20 years or so, some trace of it will even appear in a bad novel somewhere.

In the alley, the dragon in hand, he approached the blackened nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt.

He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed. Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind’s eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien.

From “Neuromancer” by William Gibson

(BLACK MADONNA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

I’ve had the CD for a week now, and I’ve been listening to the 20-minute piece a couple of times a day. I just now decided to shut everything off and _really_ listen to it.

Kayo Dot really has 2 categories of music for me: Blue Lambancy Downward, and everything else. I liked Blue Lambancy Downward, but I _really_ like everything else. I’d say this fits into the latter category.

The first few moments of Stained Glass have this feeling of teenage awkwardness. The lyrics don’t seem to fit the tone, and it sounds like Toby is channeling Death Cab. After this initial (and likely intentional) weird tentative period, the track hits its stride really hard.

Up until the ten minute mark, there are a bunch of different movements and buildups, and then the last half feels thematically similar and sort of drifts off into an airy conclusion.

Stained Glass sounds to me like Hell and Heaven decided to meet up for an evening stroll. Heaven is represented by the stunning variety of chime-y and bell-y sounds that form a rhythmic theme, while Hell is the spooky, raspy square wave sound of the synth. I swear there were parts in the last half that sounded like the synth was playing chunks of the Space Quest IV MIDI soundtrack. It weirded me out hardcore.

I think my favorite part of all of this is how the chimes and bells contribute a feeling of fragility and delicateness that one would associate with a stained glass window. But maybe I’m just projecting what is written on the album sleeve.

As for the lyrical content, well, I’d really like to know where Jason Byron comes up with this stuff. I’ll spend entire verses wrinkling my nose at how goofy it sounds, but the overall effect is really creepy, and every once in a while I stumble across a passage that hits me in the gut. In Stained Glass, I was particularly tweaked by the last couple of sentences:

Remember all ye that though the body falls among the years, it is as a discarded walking staff on the hedgerow beside the Path.

Anyhow, the high-level summary is that Stained Glass is a really interesting overlay of spooky and pretty, and you should try sitting in the dark and listening to it sometime.

It doesn’t look like there’s a digital download version of the album for sale yet, but you can buy the CD from kayodot.net or pre-order it from the Hydra Head store.

I’d review Gridlink’s spastic masterpiece for you, but why bother — the entire album fits into one youtube video. Chang and co. compressed twelve full-length thrashy tracks into 11m:48s of playtime. It really feels like they wrote a full-length Slayer album and then just played it fast enough to fit it into that ridiculous timeframe. Despite the speed, it’s surprisingly catchy. Although I really need to stop listening to it on the subway, it makes me want to rage on all the people walking slower than me. Which is everybody, when I’m listening to this stuff.

My favorite part of the whole album is the very last sound you hear, which is this loud twanging reverb from the guitar. It sounds like the guitarist played the last chord and then fell over dead from the exertion of channeling whatever demonic thrash-spirit possessed him. Also, the blastbeats from the drummer sound a lot like when your foil tin of popcorn has reached that super-fast-poppy-temperature in the microwave.

You can listen to the whole album on youtube. For reasons I don’t understand, this dude went and split it into two videos:

Part 1
Part 2

My general impression is that there was too much outer space. I hate outer space about 75% as much as I hate time travel. However, there was at least one story in the collection that did it well (“Hinterlands”), where governments send these poor folks into this weird slipstream thing because they know they’ll come back from some unknown place with high technology. This is the first time I’ve heard of the the theme of the “cargo cult”, so it was worth the read for that alone:

A cargo cult is a religious practice that has appeared in many traditional tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically advanced cultures. The cults focus on obtaining the material wealth (the “cargo”) of the advanced culture through magic and religious rituals and practices. Cult members believe that the wealth was intended for them by their deities and ancestors.

Thanks, Wikipedia. You can go back to begging for money now.

My favorite story by far was “The Winter Market”. It’s about this girl who is completely paralyzed, but is able to retain mobility by wearing this exoskeleton thing that jacks into her brain and moves her body for her. A wheelchair on steroids, basically.

It’s really a story about ambition and the nature of circumstance, though. She’s hellbent on landing a contract where she can upload her entire being into a computer and let her body die, and the story is written from the perspective of an editor of “dream albums”, since buying and sharing albums of the dreams of “dream artists” is this story’s equivalent of the music industry. The main character is wigged out by how determined she is, and then he’s even more wigged out when he catches glimpses of her in a moment of weakness the night before she suicides her way into the bitstream. It’s one of those tales that makes the back of your spine tickle a little, and sort of coerces you to look at your own foibles in a different light. (Or any light at all, depending on your personality.)

The collection was definitely worth the read. The thing I like most about reading really early work from successful authors is that the quality of their writing usually isn’t too far from that of a beginner — namely, myself. And it’s pretty evident that they got where they are now by practicing their craft, a LOT. So that’s sort of inspiring, huh?

Check it out here

Ironically, I think it was the sheer output of Toby Driver’s related acts that caused this to happen. Kayo Dot isn’t the kind of band I can just listen to casually — it’s usually too discordant to have on while I’m working, it’s not angry enough to listen to at the gym, and there are very few other times of the day where I’ll have music on. So I never really paid enough attention to any particular album to feel strongly about it one way or another.

Which is why it’s always awesome when Kayo Dot comes to town. First of all, they are freaking phenomeonal live performers. Second of all, it forces me to do nothing but sit there and listen to them.

I saw Kayo Dot this past Wednesday in Toronto at Sneaky Dee’s, which was way better than the last venue I caught them at (Wrongbar, where they don’t turn the heat on because they figure the sweat of hipster nerdrage will supply the necessary thermal energy). They played a short set, because there was some douchey dance party coming up afterwards, but I was absolutely fixated for the whole 40 minutes or so that they were up there.

The setlist, as far as I can tell, was:

1. Calonyction Girl (Coyote)
2. Abyss Hinge 2 (Coyote)
3. Wayfarer (Choirs of the Eye)
4. __On Limpid Form (Dowsing Anemone)

I bought Coyote as a digital download the day it was released, and listened to it maybe 10 or 15 times. It never grabbed me. After seeing those two tracks live, I have been listening to it obsessively over the last three days. That album fucking crushes. It is really heavy on percussion in comparison to the last couple of albums, which I never noticed before, and the rhythmic pulsing of the horns is really freaky. Abyss Hinge 2 was especially monster.

Wayfarer took me into another place completely. It’s already a pretty spacey track, but the volume and density of the live performance was just incredible. I remember hearing the last notes fade and feeling like I was actually just falling back into my body. And that was only after my first drink.

On Limpid Form was definitely the performance of the night, though. It seemed an odd one to pick for a concert, firstly because I believe it’s the longest track in their discography (just shy of 20 minutes), and secondly because when I’ve listened to it before, it just feels like it doesn’t really do anything except repeat the same 20 second long theme over and over again.

Not so. The last 5 or 6 minutes of the track produce the sound that I imagine a city would make if all of its buildings simultaneously collapsed in slow motion, and when this is done in live performance, HOLY SHIT. The entire band took out these pieces of metal shrapnel and banged on them with sticks while they were still occasionally playing their own parts, which was freaking awesome.

Anyhow, seeing these guys live again reminded me that I should just pay attention to my music once in a while. You know, lie back on the couch, crank an album, close my eyes, and just _listen_ to it. I know, who has time for that shit anymore? But it’s worth it.

The opening acts were enjoyable too. GATES (mentioned in a previous post) produced some truly epic sound. They were apparently playing some solo material from the founding artist, because the actual tracks on the debut album are too processed to be reproduced live. I can only imagine what the people in the dining area downstairs were thinking as they heard the Lovecraftian nightmare that was pouring thickly out of the amps when GATES was on stage. I kinda wish I had seen it.

The second band was called Kosmograd, which really weirded me out because I _just_ started reading Burning Chrome, William Gibson’s short story collection, and I’m pretty sure it’s a story in that collection that the band draws its name from. (Kosmograd is the name of some Russian space station in this story.) They kind of confused me because if I wasn’t listening closely, they seriously sounded like the Neskimos with vocals. However, after they walked off the stage, I concluded that they were more like indie bitch rock meets Amon Amarth. But what do I know. They were entertaining.

Anyhow, the show was stellar and I’m really thankful I had the chance to catch it. If I hadn’t previously sent email to Kayo Dot to rant pathetic gushy fanboy crap at them, I never would have been put on their mailing list, and I totally would have missed this show. So ha, sometimes acting like a besotted child pays off. If Kayo Dot was on MuchMusic, I would totally be one of those glistening pustules sticking my face against the glass, screaming maniacally, and showing them my boobs.

I bought Kayo Dot’s newest EP “Stained Glass” at the show, and I’ve had a few good listens to it now. I’ll write something up about it shortly. After I’ve had a couple of more good, long, attentive listens to it, of course.

P.S. Youtube has some decent videos of Kayo Dot live performances. For example you can get some idea of what the outro to __On Limpid Form looks and sounds like here.

You made Kurt Cobain man of the year, and if anything he left an indelible last message that the easy way out is to blow your fucking head off.

– Dave Mustaine, commenting on MTV’s decision to ban the video for “A Tout le Monde”

Not a bad piece of work. It kept me turning the pages, but often at a rate that signified I was just trying to rush ahead to the next plot point at the expense of missing big chunks of prose. The biggest sticking point I had with the book was the deliberate fakeness of the dialogue. No kid would ever be capable of talking with the simultaneous crassness and sophistication that the main character has. Not even this one.

I guess I should actually talk about the book itself. It goes like this. Walt is born in 20s America into a particularly base geneaology. Some urbane dude called The Master finds him in the street and promises him fame and riches. If Walt is not famous by his 13th birthday, the Master agrees to let Walt chop off his head.

The Master teaches Walt how to levitate. He does this through a 33-step program, most steps of which involve some sort of torture. At first, the Master appears to be completely infallible, and mostly evil fellow. As time goes on, you find out that he does have many flaws, and that he is actually quite a stand-up guy. It is really hard not to like him. He and Walt bond closely.

The rest of the story describes Walt’s (literal) rise to fame, which is quickly followed by massive failure and the death of the Master. In the wake of Master Yehudi’s passing, Walt occasionally picks up a successful venture by virtue of his own grit, but without the strong value system imposed by the Master, his victories are always fleeting.

I guess the Master is supposed to represent the combination of virtue and ambition (and the willingness to trade them off) that was the spirit of the early 1900s America. Auster practically rams the spirit of the book down your throat on the last page, but the way it is done was actually rather enjoyable, in my opinion:

We’re not as tough as we used to be, and maybe the world’s a better place because of it, I don’t know. But I do know that you can’t get something for nothing, and the bigger the thing you want, the more you’re going to have to pay for it.

…

Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us — every man, woman and child — and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of duplicating the feats I accomplished as Walt the Wonder Boy.

They love and they hate, they grapple and spoon, they want and don’t want, and as time goes on they each sink deeper under the other’s skin. It’s a real show, patty-cake, the follies and the circus all rolled into one, and dollars to donuts it’s going to be like that till the day they die.

From “Mr. Vertigo” by Paul Auster

Not so in Virtual Light, which makes some of the more adventurous scenes appear overconstructed. One that sticks out in my mind the most is when an assassin asks his soon-to-be-victim for a Coke, giving her the chance to spike it with a massive overdose of drugs that she just happened to find a few moments earlier.

I also FINALLY finished Eric Brighteyes, after starting it almost 6 months ago now. It was good, but very, very long. The Broken Sword is a much more distilled experience, and more interesting to boot, but it’s also a hundred-odd years more recent so it’s hard to knock Brighteyes for that…

It’s weird how I won’t read any fiction for a year, and then I’ll suddenly devour thirty books and then stop again. Like, whoa.

Seeing it from up there, a certain nostalgia came over me, a wistful rag-tail of a dream accompanied by a faint longing for the place that was this place’s namesake to me in a vanished shadowland of long ago, where life had been just as simple and I happier than I was at that moment.

But one does not live as long as I have lived without achieving that quality of consciousness which strips naive feelings as they occur and is generally loathe to participate in the creation of sentimentality.