TwoHospitalsOnChristmas 7/2/07

another dress rehersal for the synchronized dance the stars will do before they all burn out simultaneously leaving us all in a dark and strange moment ripe with tension, fear, and awkward silence so unnerving your armhair will get goosebumps of it's own.

TwoHospitalsOnChristmas August 2008

Red Light

From the deep, deep well of sonic possibilities, sounds cry out for affection and compete for face-time with the bachelorette of improvisation; the beat.  

The quiet space between songs is spattered with the sounds of coughs, cans opening, lighters flickering, and poetic ramblings of intoxicated minds. 

The production quality is piss poor, which allows it to lovingly be called "lo-fi", lowering the standard for listenability while maintaining the integrity of high-concept-art- in-it's-more-experimental-and-purposefully-abstract- state.

The memories are often blurred. Distant yet decadent, even if sometimes barely recognizable, spurts of sounds, noises, and drugs appear on screen one tiny megapizel at a time throughout a timespan that knows no years but unknowingly knits a quilt out of moments of clarity, regrettable decisions, blackouts, cat tranquilizers, love, and pain.

The musicians are driven by a passion that get sparked like a glass pipe full of methamphetamines in the alley next to your nearest local shithole club on techno night. Quickly and without consideration to the harmful effects of such chemical indulgence. 

Both exhausted and from a hard day of work at the office/factory/restaurant/record store/weed spot/grocery store...each player erases the stagnant and mundane doldrums of the hustle and bustle of everyday working life in society today, making room for guided meditations and other-worldly musings to come bellowing out of the deep, deep well of inhibition and dance accross the atmosphere with precise strategic spiritual measure.

The microphone dangles from the pair of fluorescent bulbs that crudely protrude from the ceiling, almost close enough to capture the lead paint chips as they fall and threaten all life forms below.

The fans are only friends, acquaintances, lovers, and co-workers of the band members.  The congregate on practice nights like old women in church, dressed in their least beer-stained t-shirt advertising hard liquor, a nightclub, or an opening act from a recent tour.

Chords and rhythms weave intricate patterns of unity and solitude, unintentionally composing the spontaneous play-by-play soundtrack to the collective inner dialogue of each soul in the room.  They shout over the symphony into each other's ears about headlines news, local sports teams, ex-girlfriends, criminal backgrounds and access to black market products like drugs, guns, and false documents as they hear but don't listen to another standard version of the only song that references a specific incident they often recall such as that time they all took ecstasy and spent most of the night chewing on bottle caps in the back of a breadvan in somebody's backyard....

....Or perhaps that night the lead singer ate over 30 hits of acid and had a full-on seizure in the local pot dealer's basement, leaving everyone contemplating whether to call for help or just stand there and hope for the best because nobody wants to explain to the police how they watched someone have a medical emergency while passing around a bong and taking kodak-moment-esque snapshots.

Then there's the story about how everybody at the new year's party back in 01 fucked the same girl in the same room at different times and never told each other about it until she died suddenly of an anyeurism caused by the stress of being incapable of providing for her twin baby boys that were most likely concieved that night with the help of at least one of the crew of 13 losers that provided the band nightly with security, production assistance, psychoactive drugs and scantly clad, underage, slightly overweight girls for their rock-star wannabe employers to impress, undress, disapoint sexually and ultimately humiliate for a backstage audience of hidden cameras, footage of which will be edited together in post-production and sold on various amateur porn websites to raise funds to pay for various vices and addictions.

But enough run-on-sentences strung together by obsurd analogies and littered with urban legends that never left the small circle of deviants who spoke dialogue from which their tale is derived yet are easily exaggerated into grandoise posteuring worthy of socio-pathic fraternity brothers who mask their homosexuality with hardly plausible bravado, masquerading as masculine, all-american men in a desperate, transparent attempt to validate the many hate crimes they commit in order to display their unquestionable desire to appear as acceptable members of upper middle class suburbia and it's over-landscaped lawns.

This is about more than words, punctuation, and grammar.  This is about band practice, bruised egos, dark secrets, and glorified substance abuse.

this is the flipsco recording company's practice tapes......part one.

please listen at high speeds, immense volume, and dangerous intersections.  exercise caution and free will.  and sing out loud to yourself alone, "AND THE HOOOOME....OF THAAAAAA.....self-indulgent materialistic shallow shells of humans as they embarrass themselves in disgusting scenes that appear almost as rich in pretentious exercises in sensational shockvalue as they are vacant of logical thought, a cohesive timeline, and remotely likable characters.

to be continued....

Flipsco Practice Tapes