Lemon Meringue

Swollen is the debut LP from no wave noisemakers Stickers, out August 12, 2014 on End of Time. www.endoftimerecords.com

Stickers - Outlet

Our new track “Knees On The Ground” might benefit from an explanation. This is the most unguarded I ever intend to be when writing about Clipping.

What had happened was this: our very brief UK/Europe trip got called-off the day before we were supposed to get on a plane to London. Since we didn’t have any other plans, we met up in the studio with an idea to crank out a new track. On our list of songs to finish was one particular piece aimed directly at the club (or, at least, our twisted idea of what clubs should play). But none of us were in the mood for it. Each of us had spent the previous several days following the news of protests in Ferguson, MO. It was the only thing on our minds. We couldn’t bring ourselves to think about anything else, so we decided to direct our fear, our revulsion, our heartbreak into a new track.

The problem was that we’d defined our band — in interviews and to each other — as decidedly-not-an-activist-project. Diggs’s lyrics have been criticized for seeming apolitical, at least in comparison to what many listeners (perhaps rightly) expect to hear from an ‘experimental’ rap group. I have many times said (perhaps naïvely) that our politics lie in our structures, in our formal engagement with the rap genre. We love its conventions, its clichés, and we’re not above them. We see our participation in rap as something resembling an old punk flyer — an out-of-context collage of charged images with an fractured, contradictory, multiple point-of-view. I hope that our more dedicated listeners hear this and understand that we’re not interested in spoon-feeding them a position. At the same time, I’ve always assumed that they pretty much agree with us on most issues anyway. (We have yet to meet the misogynist, homophobic, white supremacist Clipping fan with an MBA and an NRA membership).

So what do we do when all we can think about, all we can feel, is a profound injustice — yet another young unarmed person of color is murdered by a police officer? How does a band, which overtly rejects affect and the emotions, address something that is, for its authors, a deeply felt, deeply affecting topic? Well, we don’t entirely know. But the fact is: there’s more truth in Diggs’s lyrics than we generally let on. “Inside Out” describes a drive-by shooting in Oakland, “Chain” is about three stick-ups. They are presented with a lot of detail and specificity (perhaps the result of personal experience). But at the same time, they represent archetypal scenarios within rap music. One trope we had yet to explore as Clipping was the anti-police rap — the lineage of Public Enemy, NWA and Paris, straight through The Coup, and all the way into the ‘stop snitching’ panic of the early 2000s. “Knees On The Ground” is a paradigmatic white-cop-kills-an-unarmed-black-kid-and-gets-away-with-it tale — a story that happens all the fucking time in the US. What we have learned — from our first hand experience in Oakland in 2009, and from the media coverage of Ferguson in 2014 — is that the second part of this story involves a police response better suited to a war zone than to an American city. Cops think they’re playing Call Of Duty when they’re supposed to be part of a community. If Ferguson were in Iraq, Obama would have sent in an airstrike already.

This is the least obtuse Diggs’s lyrics will ever get. We’re embarrassed by the timeliness of this track. We do not intend to capitalize on what is, undoubtedly, a terrible tragedy. But journalists make think-pieces and we make songs. Writers write what they know, and this is what we know right fucking now.

— William Hutson, Clipping.

Knees On The Ground

Girl! (featuring Kat Porter)

ON SUNSET by NICHOLAS KRGOVICH (LP/CD/DIGITAL) out OCTOBER 7th, 2014 courtesy of NK WORLD SERVICE

City of Night

A Blast from the past and a journey through time.  
Rainbow Connections' set from Dale Packard's inaugural 'PARTY EYES' club night at HUGS + KISSES.
Friday 11th July, 2014.






"PARTY EYES #1" Mix

We remixed this version of Julee Cruise's "Falling," from the Twin Peaks soundtrack for a Halloween party back in 2009.  Vibes borrowed from Touch Sensitive for the bassline.

"FALLING"-rainbowconnection EDIT

Taken from the Paris quintet's second album, "Juillet", released worldwide by Trouble In Mind Records on January 24th, 2020. (www.troubleinmindrecs.com)

En Attendant Ana "Do You Understand?" (Trouble in Mind Records)

From Deeper's Sophomore LP "Auto-Pain" out March 27th on Fire Talk.

What do you do when pain blots out joy? How do you learn to take care of yourself? What happens when the things you think are helping end up doing the most harm? 'Auto-Pain' is the Sophomore album from Deeper, a record that finds the band embracing open space, using synths to create shadows where bricks of guitars once would’ve blocked out the sun. The group — singer and guitarist Nic Gohl, bassist Drew McBride, and drummer Shiraz Bhatti — were all graduates of Chicago’s rich DIY scene who came together around their love of Wire, Devo, Gang of Four, and Television. While the new record is still within the Great Lakes post-punk tradition of their debut, the album isn’t as insular as its predecessor; it’s less interested in pile-driving and more willing to dwell in liminal spaces. Guitars enter the picture precisely, locked bass grooves propel things forward. Drummer Shiraz Bhatti, who is half-Pakistani and half-Native American, embraced the drumming patterns he’d heard growing up at pow-wows, channeling the anxieties of his heritage into his playing and keeping the group grounded when they switch into all-out percussive attack. The result is an album both more nuanced and catchy.Auto-Pain represents the constant wave of depression felt by many in everyday life. Stemmed from Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, Auto-Pain is a concept meant to be an inverse to soma, a pill in the book which makes everything numb. The idea of auto-pain is to epitomize the desire to return to a connection with thoughts and clarity, which comes at the expense of feeling everything simultaneously. The album artwork features the now-demolished Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago capturing the band’s rounded-off brutalism, and the album title appears in Urdu, a nod to drummer Shiraz Bhatti’s Pakistani heritage. The record was recorded and mixed by Chicago scene luminary Dave Vetraino (Lala Lala, Dehd) and mastered at Chicago Mastering by Greg Obis (Ne-Hi, Melkbelly).

Auto-Pain

Deeper - This Heat

2nd single from The Hazy Seas debut s/t album due January 2020

Release date:
03 January 2020

Old Clothes

Peel Dream Magazine is the musical vehicle for NYC's Joe Stevens, who launched the band in 2018 with the critically acclaimed album "Modern Meta Physic." With it Stevens created a mysterious, liminal tribute to the hazy end of ‘90s dream-pop – a masterful mix of first-class songwriting precision and train-window sonic impressionism that duly found its place on numerous "Best of 2018" lists.

After 18 months of writing and live shows with a shifting cast of band members, Peel Dream are back with "Agitprop Alterna," an album that pushes the group's dreamy, motorik-heavy sound to a deeply melodic and beautifully discordant place. The album pays homage to a strain of mod-ish U.K. pop that spans early My Bloody Valentine and Talulah Gosh, up through early Stereolab, Belle & Sebastian, and even Broadcast. It's also indebted to stateside pop bands that were cut from a similar cloth -- Rocketship, Lilys, Yo La Tengo, and even "Nevermind"-era Nirvana.

Where the creation of "Modern Meta Physic" was a solitary pursuit, "Agitprop Alterna" found Stevens channeling the collaborative spirit of the band's ever-rotating live incarnation in the studio. The album is ultimately defined by the tension of difference: between itself and its predecessor; intertwined male-female vocals; the music's languid dreaminess and concrete sonic immediacy.

Deeply rooted in the Brechtian ideas of art as a tool to spur action, "Agitprop Alterna" deepens the connection between the existential and the interpretive first explored on "Modern Meta Physic," giving the listener space to find their own meaning in shimmering guitars, fuzzed-out synths, and buzzing organ drones. It is a rejection of manipulation in all its forms and a buzzsaw against complacency – soft-focus pop whose clear-cut message is that you get to decide the message. It's a rare trick to agitate without being obvious: perhaps that makes "Agitprop Alterna" the most Peel Dream Magazine-like statement yet.

Agitprop Alterna

Agitprop Altern

Peel Dream Magazine - Pill

Roundelay

LAKE - She Plays One Chord

OFF TEMPO is a Pacific Northwest-based music documention project and record label. It's been capturing Northwest underground sounds since 2007.

Futurist. Gamer. Modernism. Archetypes. Promoter of thoughtful innovations. 
-Check out my show in the link below. 

LAKE - She Plays One Chord

OFF TEMPO

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