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.

I was recently traveling in Nova Scotia, and I stopped in at a used bookstore in Halifax. My eyes alighted on a strange, thin book that almost appeared to be self-published. Called “Marjorie’s Missile”, it was printed in 1986 and typeset in fixed-width Courier.

It was written by a computer science teacher who was teaching programming to young “Indian” (I guess they were still calling them that then) students on a reserve in Alberta. Envisioning something like Neuromancer meets Dances with Wolves, I was piqued. I immediately searched for it on the web.

I couldn’t find anything. As in, not a single hit for the search term “Marjorie’s Missile”. I suspected that Bing was simply being obtuse (there is the occasional disadvantage to WP7), but the prospect of potentially owning a book that hadn’t fallen under the gaze of the WWW was enough to make me buy the book on the spot.

When I ran the term through Google later, I did turn up a single hit, but it was simply that of an antique bookseller. I just searched again now, and there is an entire page of hits today (including one on Amazon.com), but again, they are only from booksellers liquidating inventory. There isn’t a single review to be found. The author doesn’t seem to have any Web presence, either.

So now, I am a bit curious. What happened to Colin McKinlay, the author? He obviously had an early predilection for computers. Did he die young? Disappear into the North? Publish Marjorie’s Missile under a pen name? I hope that someone who knows the answer will someday stumble across this post and tell me. Until then, all I can do is briefly summarize the book for you.

Marjorie’s Missile reads sort of like a Kurt Vonnegut-style novel, in that the setting is very plausible but the events that occur in that setting verge on fantastical. The main character Marjorie is a computer programmer who works a cushy job for the CIA. When a cruise missile is lost during testing in an Alberta Native reserve, she is offered a field job to retrieve it. If she succeeds, she will be given 1 million dollars and the option to retire. She accepts.

The other main characters in the novel provide most of the interest. Lionel, Marjorie’s “temporary” husband for the mission, is an eccentric white Canadian man who has been accepted by the people on the Reserve. He teaches computer science to the kids there. (Sound familiar?) The main Native character in the book, “Earthman”, lives in a high-tech building that he has built for himself that he has called “High Rez”. He is also the ferryman for the Reserve. He claims to be over 100 years old. The main villain is a prototypical despotic American CIA agent who has gone rogue, and basically exemplifies North American greed and cronyism.

There is a smattering of other Native characters in the book, and they are all quite interesting as well. I found the Native characters and their stories to be the richest part of the novel by far — I’m guessing that a lot of the authors’ personal experience with the Natives on his reserve found its way directly into this book, and even though most of the stories are bizarre, they are believable in that “truth is stranger than fiction” sort of way.

The other white characters and the delivery of the story itself are thin, but still better than I expected. The bulk of the plot is progressed in one giant chunk through flashbacks, which are extracted by Marjorie when she adminsters truth serum to her “husband” and a Native companion of his. After that, the story dashes quickly towards its absurd but comical conclusion, which includes Marjorie falling predictably in love with the Natives she once considered to simply be fleshy obstacles between her and retirement.

The book is short enough and weird enough that I’m glad I read it. The question is, did anyone else? There was a page of reviews printed in the back of the book, the most significant of which was from the Edmonton Journal, but I can’t tell if these were falsified as a self-deprecating joke or not.

Assuming this was a first novel, there was enough potential here that I feel like the author could have made a career of writing. The answer is probably out there on the Internet somewhere…

Murakami’s style is dreamy, riveting, and occasionally exasperating. For a book in which almost nothing happens (and at almost 700 pages, that is a lot of nothing), it is astonishingly hard to put it down. My favorite aspect of his writing is that you can’t tell what is fantasy and what is reality, and you quickly find yourself not caring, as this is obviously not of any real consequence to the characters involved.

All of this contributes to the feeling that you not really reading the book, but that you are instead meandering through a very lucid daydream. This is an impressive feat, given that the English version was actually a translation from the Japanese.

After turning the last page, I had the feeling that I had subconsciously learned some subtle lesson that I couldn’t specify in words. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that was simultaneously so raw and yet so … delicate, like cotton candy made from gossamer cowflesh.

If you have the patience for this sort of thing (e.g. You can read Nabokov for enjoyment), I’d strongly recommend it.

P.S. this is the first blogpost I’ve ever written from a smartphone. Big ups.

P.P.S. I’ve previously read ‘After Dark’ by Murakami as well, a good long time ago. I remember really enjoying that as well.

P.P.P.S.: This is one of the first books I’ve read where I had a hard time finding plot synopses / discussions online. Now I’m stuck using my own brain to interpret the significance of major plot events, which kinda sucks.

“HOLY FUCKING SHIT.”

I first discovered Chang & co when I downloaded the Hydrahead sampler, and one of the Hayaino Daisuki tracks appeared on it. HD is like, the distilled essence of everything I love about thrash. I personally prefer HD to GridLink, but only in the way that I prefer slightly better beer to beer.

What HD is to thrash, GridLink is to extreme metal. (Pick your genre preference, I don’t care — if your average Slayer fan would listen to it and say, “whoa, that sounds like noise”, I just label it as “extreme”.) It’s like Chang and company have extracted the essence of what makes extreme metal awesome, distilled it to toxic levels, and injected it into the best 12 minutes of your life.

When I first picked up Amber Gray, I could only listen to it once through before needing a break. In comparison, the tracks on Orphan have much more variety. There are a few songs where you can even identify a chorus among the verses, which is quite the feat for an album where the longest track clocks in at 1:28. I bought the digital download mere moments after it became available, and I listened to the album for a straight hour before finally hitting my saturation point.

As an added bonus, if you buy the Orphan + Amber Gray combo pak (or vinyl), you actually get the remastered edition of Amber Gray, which is totally ninja. When I first hit play on the remaster and the new, shiny snare fill ripped into my skull, I had the distinct feeling that this was the best thing I’ve ever spent money on.

I hope GridLink does well enough with this album that they can continue to churn stuff like this out. As for me, it’s time to get back to the grind.

\m/

Buy the digital download here

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

I prepared to take notes, but I instead found myself just copying quote after quote out of the book. This seems to recapture my feelings about it much better than anything else I could have done. Here are some of my favorites as I arrive at chapter 12.

Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.

and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.

I have finally taught Dean that he can do anything he wants, become mayor of Denver, marry a millionairess, or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races.

They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

I climbed in and there he was, sleeping with his girl, Lee Ann — on a bed he stole from a merchant ship, as he told me later; imagine the deck engineer of a merchant ship sneaking over the side in the middle of the night with a bed, and heaving and straining at the oars to shore. This barely explains Remi Boncœur.

I suddenly began to realize that everybody in America is a natural-born thief. I was getting the bug myself. I even began to try to see if doors were locked.

The one about Remi and the bed is definitely my favorite so far.

Holy shit.

Like seriously, for a guy who listens mostly to extreme metal, experimental compositional sludge, and electronic to rave about someone who describes herself as a mix between “Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash”, there must be something going on here.

If you get a chance to see her in concert, do it and bring all your friends, for serious.

lindiortega.com

(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.