In Aaron J. Trumm’s 21 years in the studio and on stage, the theme that continues to come up is “balance”, or as some would say it, “fusion”.  He balances dark with light, with lyrics balancing edge with positivity; he balances new with old, putting modern twists on traditional methods, like putting rap and singing on top of a live band; and he balances life, refusing to let dreams go by the wayside, while simultaneously prioritizing health, family and life outside of art.

Aaron’s influences are wide and varied, from The Roots, which he loves because  they continue the oldest hip-hop tradition of honest, creative story telling without all the gangster posturing, to Rage Against The Machine, who called to Aaron because they’re revolutionaries who can rock, to Johhny Cash and Bob Wills, who remind him of his roots, but buck the stifling traditions and closed mindedness of the country establishment, and were constantly looking to collaborate with people outside their box.  He fuses these elements and becomes something wholly new – a rappin, rockin, blues man, lover AND warrior, who will move between rapping and singing even within lines, and is equally at home behind the mix desk as he is behind the piano or the mic.

In “Livin Is Bling”, Aaron’s rhythmically complex raps say in no uncertain terms that he won’t be stopped, and hopes you won’t either.  He invites you to “sing it with me if you think that livin is bling”.  Life is GOOD, and don’t you forget it!  “Be Like Me”’s lively rap and reggae like chorus admonishes us all to be what we are, and in “Slumberland”, he takes on heartbreak, loss, desperation and the surreality of someone being gone.

Aaron’s latest work seeks balance and life, drawing on this wide variety of influences which seem completely eclectic, but he sees as similar.  The Roots may not be anything like Rage Against The Machine to you, but to Aaron, they’re both rappers and revolutionaries who decided to put a good ‘old fashioned BAND on stage.  Neither of them may seem like the Man In Black, but to Aaron, they’re all standing on the shoulders of the jazz greats, country crooners, blues masters and hip-hop  pioneers, all of which are telling the story of living, breathing and lifting up.

Along the way, Aaron has been on stage everywhere in the U.S. and some places outside, he was the 10th ranked slam poet in the world, his techno/classical fusion project Third Option was called “Wicked, totally amazing” by BBC Radio I’s Annie Nightingale, he’s earned a Master’s degree from Stanford University, and he’s built NQuit Music, which at 21 years old, is now one of the oldest still operating independent labels in the U.S.

With the change of the millennium, came a change in musical tastes that would ensue a lifetime for one man. The art of just experiencing music would no longer be just that. It would now be transformed into capturing, manipulating, and creating, eventually becoming a way of life. From that day forth Kruser would ultimately devote his life to underground electronic music, a change that wouldn't be obvious to even himself for many years. A man of "many hats" Kruser cannot be pigeon holed into any one category, or genre of music, truly having an endless spectrum in musical tastes.
Having come from a small, closed minded community he felt the need to be different, or against the grain. With his heart on his sleeve, Kruser worked at bringing a new sound to an old town. But it wasn't until he ventured to Milwaukee were his motivation, determination, and musical achievements would truly start to bloom. With almost a decade of promotions under his belt, countless mix tapes, original productions, and sharing the stage with some of the biggest names in the game, Kruser has found his true passion.

"I have spent most of my life dedicated to music. I love it, I live it, I make it, I dream it, I perform it, I bring it to others as a promoter, and I make it sound great as a live sound engineer. 
I have found through my life experiences that music is the ultimate thing. It can take you anywhere, it can remind you of a feeling, a time, the first kiss, it can make you happy, or make you cry. It can make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, and give you goosebumps. Music is the international world language understood by all that choose to hear it.
The best part about my job is watching someone being instantly changed by music whether it be emotional, or physical. When you can make one person get up and feel what your feeling, and enjoy it, that is one of the best things I have ever experienced.
I love my job, my work, my determination to provide something I am so passionate about to you and your friends. Tell me, what truly moves you?"
LOCKED DOWN PROD:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=88492960826
DUBFUNK:
http://www.dubfunkmke.com
BOOKING INQUIRES:
joshkruse414@gmail.com

i am just a typical 25yo green-eyed girl. some say i am way too tempting, some say i am quite finicky but all i really care about are my exotic shorthair cat and post-dubstep and garage house music.

Seraph:
Noun
Plural Form: Seraphim
1. These are the highest order in the ninefold celestial hierarchy of angels, the ones closest to God, in charge of guarding His holy throne. They help to rule over heaven and maintain order. They often are depicted as beings of pure and radiant light or fire. 
2.The uneasy darkness that settles over your bedroom at 3AM, when even the crickets fall silent and the streetlights go dim. Your memory is hazy and your eyes are bleary, but you're too exhausted to cry. You are empty and unfeeling, and your blankets feel uncomfortable against your skin. Something is wrong, but you can't quantify it. 
3. Your childhood best friend, with a midnight smile and twinkling eyes. All of your pictures together are faded and worn, but they still remind you of a happier time. You blink away the dust from your eyes, and suddenly, you can't remember if they ever existed at all.
4. A closed rosebud, a radiant sunset eclipsed by storm clouds. A book of sonnets and poetry that smells like the earth and rain, with yellowed pages and words obscured by water damage. You are shivering and your fingertips are cold. There are bronze and silver tears on your cheeks, but you haven't been crying. You can vaguely recall your mother breaking down into a sobbing fit when she drove you to the psych ward. There is an ache in the bottom of your lungs. You get the feeling you are going to die alone. 
5. I miss being alive. I really want to go home. I can't go on like this anymore. It hurts so much. Please forgive me. I'm sorry I wasn't strong enough to do this.

for further information: moth3rh00d@gmail.com

http://www.myspace.com/570044050

Gigs: 

26 January: Heroes, Camden 7pm. THE RETURN OF GIGS!

24 November: Launch of Thank You, My Dog EP; George Orwell Tavern (Essex Road) w/No Colour, Frog Morris, and Great Men plus special performances by Paul Haworth and an exotic film screening. Video teaser (expect this and much more, homie(s)): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sg4jJ0YVow

17 November: Blag Club (Notting Hill Gate) (acoustical)

15 November: Monto Water Rats (Kings Cross) w/Sweet Sweet Lies

13 November: Start the Bus (Bristol, UK) w/Jeff the Brotherhood (video below):
http://blip.tv/yourmusic-productions/13-11-11-at-start-the-bus-motherhood-pt-1-5738117

8 November: The Good Ship (Kilburn)

29 October, The Enterprise (Chalk Farms/Camden)CANCELLED FOR SOME UNKNOWABLE REASON

20 October: St. Paul's

15 September 2011: Book Launch Partnership Friary Road House: 

Just to announce that the increasingly legendary South London Publishing House Friary Road House and Motherhood are working together to draw attention to FRH's latest almighty poetry anthology: "noetpy"--doing my best to mimic the cyrillic orthography of the journal with Roman letters. 

Among the amazing writers included are Bobby Dowler, Vincent Clay and the incomparable Alexander Nemser 

Motherhood is including a free CD complete with artwork/lyrics sheet and a lovingly crafted personal message with copies of "noetpy". If you'd like a copy of the anthology, just email us here and we'll get it out to you. The collection is £6 plus postage. 


9 August, 2011, Buffalo Bar (video of "Punk for Life/Punk for Death")

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR1xr3U5Flo


17 August, 2011, Good Ship (Kilburn) 8pm.ish.

in the meantime, a pseud0-bandifest0 for downpressing grourmandisers who recreate the punk club of their youth in Vegas:
 
			Motherhood Manifestations 

The markets reject sleep. The European vortex howls outside. Null and void, full of economic rationalisations, the confrontation of the past, with the bad dream. Horrible, misplaceable freedom is dancing in the cappuccino froth. The sea monster roils beneath, scrapings from the drama are reconfigured and sold back via satellite packages and living room sets. Daily anthracite inhalings, arctic seepage, briefly, heavenly forgotten poisons are inhaled in spas; back in style. Turn every page, hoping that the last newspaper will disintegrate before dawn. Listen to every plane and helicopter as it passes, chopping its way into deeper darknesses. Which will be the day it chops for you? An X-Factor Saturday?

Primordial scouring of the ideologies is producing nothing, writers blocs and idiolecterns for the worst. It’s fun to drag flags through teargas and watch the club descend into hazy double vision. Dog runs are breeding, rats and hocus-pocus are breaking teeth on the gates of Vienna in the dream of an extraordinarily stupid ape.  Tune in for the carcass videos, and the fright-faces of the masters and their press secretaries, securities and exchanges are commissioned, call me a fledgling, I’m fledging my allegiance to the only thing I’ve ever loved: hiss and noise and total disobedience. 
Nostalgia for air raid sirens, motility of borders, the old fashioned in-and-down-and-out. Common enemies proliferate in the auto-recessional and in the mildew towers. Jubilee year came and went without any jubilation. The securitisation of the cathedral seat also came and petered out. Enter the venerable mosque paranoia, the soul on icicles and icecap retreat. I’m feeling the stoppage of the genre, the inevitable every day slowing of the thermo-haline deregulation. Aristocrats love Aristaeus, written on papyrus, buying copies of Frieze and The Big Takeover, reading until fingers bleed and consciousness manifests itself as something greater than a fashionable malady. Inside the mouth organ, inside the portcullis, David Foster Wallace fell out of race for rattiness, what does the aerial surveillance tell? The coconut and tear ice cream is melting on the sidewalk, suck the spoon until all the goodness goes out. After dinner mincing, supply lines are tight, the fear of a dark future looms on a black planet, that there won’t be enough black blood to keep the tanks and caterpillars humming. Harmony is a kind of conspiracy. 

 Down at Lourdes, various accidental members of the human race accrue. Dive into the illustrious illusions, accidental interpretations accrue. The kids of yesterday become the eternal kids of today, the calumny of the 1970s is being rerun, nurturing the harrow of the 1980s, homogenising the milk of the 1990s, which is lead, sleepwalking, in a financialised sleeping bag called the 2000s. We’ve counted up to slaughterhouse six now, preparing to unleash our special brand of mistake on everything, Klingons, giraffes, the noble presence gone absent since something like the Edwardian age, the pointless in-between. 

Tear gas for tear masks, hobo jamborees erupted from the nothingness in the wake of the RNC Welcoming Committee and the media flare gun pointed at its heart. Credit line lassos evoked Buffalo Bill et al. defunct. The zero radiates and pulls the unhappy constant of the present into one piece. No one has a freedom pass any more for the freedom bus. Neal Cassidy and Ginsberg are rotting beneath the Stealer’s Wheel licensing fees and T-Shirt assassins gathered at the foyer. Welcome to the industry, kid(z). 

Gone commando, the night before I enlisted, I decided to drink that beer and enlist the jizz goggles and all that entails. I peered into the future for long enough to realise that all the world is a stage and all in it are soundmen/soundwomen waiting for Gyges and the Lychees to take the stage, to emerge from the cave and give us a round of ring-around-the-warhead before departing on the private hell-jet to nowhere, to play a gig for Ilham Aliev and companies—Spoek Mathambo on percussion. Before they left, I stole the set list which contained Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recipe for rock’n’roll rebellion: push a button and nothing drips out. As soon as an idea bubbles over it is frozen by the coolness of the advertising avant-garde. Sob if you will, ideally on to a plate of bone china porcelain with intellectual property rights, to be projected on the Jumbotron. Farewell, moon. 
Flowers and allergies, and rhapsody can be imported. Punching a hole in the romantic outlaw is a fine way to pass through time. Camelot was a lie before it became a legend, now there’s only the Barbary pirates’ radio station brought to you by supermarkets and monks retreating down the demand curve, obsessed with giving something back to the no ones and antibodies.  As soon as you feel it, you can buy it because someone felt you while you were feeling it. 

All manifestations are the reification of irrelevance. How can the present be different from the past when the past is sitting there drunk and passed out on the couch with a dick drawn on its cheek and “Obama 2012” written on its shin-bone?  A loop, as they say, is a loop, is a loop is a wolf is a woolf is an allegiance to a particular place and time and estimate of bohemian credibility. You feel strangely attached to it, but still want to see it ruptured and its guts spilling on the ground. 
Sooner or later someone asks you to stand outside yourself and make a long list of plausible things to reject:


 				Bullet Point/Going Ballistics 
--Art is a strawberry jar effect followed by a strawberry fields effect.
--Art is a long haired dude effect (black T-shirt with oozy writing optional).
--Art is a cleansing of the synaptic cleft.
--Art is a Tom Petty and the Heartbroken effect.
 		--Art is a sustained love for that which can and does destroy you effect.
 		--Art is a modality of crapulence effect.
 --Art is an I didn’t do it and he throws up his hands; I was only robbin’ the  register, I hope ya understand effect. 
 		--Art is a subsidiary of the cigar effect. 
 		--Art is a worst left to the professionals effect. 

This is the day of the fetishising of the lunatic. Donks have touched everything. One sunny afternoon, irony vomited misogyny into its present form; no amount of hate is too volatile to be commodified. Rock’n’roll was born as a paisley camera, and a floating signifier after a shipwreck, as a cartoon starring Savonarola, micro-fish mircosoflty melting in an endless desert of the unreal, annealing in the endless descant that is glass, from the friction of its own masturbation. 

Today donuts are rock’n’roll. Rock’n’roll is as much of a ritual as the sex it parodies. But rock’n’roll is a mistake worth repeating. Rock’n’roll is the bellhop for hip-hop. Rock’n’roll is a designer balaclava. Rock’n’roll is an allusion to the Battle of Sevastopol made on Rue Sebastopol. Rock’n’roll is sodomy with a cigar. Rock’n’roll is the plosive and the fricative in history.  Rock’n’roll is a pig destined for Serrano ham. 

Q: What makes a band start pyres? 
A: Paranoia about 19-year-olds not going broke to feed the bonobo dairy farm in your backyard. 

Self indulgence leads to cultural gout—were you too gently raised to feast upon yourself, Bajazeth?  Rock’n’roll is the machine without the ghost. It runs all night and only scares itself. Rock’n’roll needs a good schism. 

Type powerlessness into search engines: there’s an image of a bar-back in a band. Turn the lights out once a generation and watch everyone eating their young in the narcolepsy of cheap holidays: express the same hopeless, powerless, shamelessness in a different city with a language barrier and, fatally, the barrier persists when you wake up, unaware how you got home, as you thread the passersby in the streets. Caring becomes a subculture, compassion a mode of assassination of the political discourse as permitted and mitigated. Leaving water in the desert of the real is understood by the barbarians who created it to be the act of greatest infamy.  Criminalising humanity will be the final test and expression of professional credibility. 
Long shadows of power stretch back into the dark ages and create strange topologies. The Creature from the Black Lagoon was a communist, same as aliens and virons of various stripes are stand-ins for Orientalist spiders in the present. We end up, sooner or later, on one side of the glass partition, where the past and the future stand staring each other in the face in blind terror as plastic reinforcement lends greater flexibility and licensing the blind thrashing continue without fear of splinters. 

Nothing so beautiful as glass breaking, nothing so beautiful as the silence of sarcophagi, nothing so beautiful as the mound built of love sloping and exhaling beside you, nothing so beautiful as money exposed to daylight. All children will be trained in business suits and graduate into permanent retirement. The fortunate sonneteers who learn the corporate bleat fluently-fruitlessly will man the pilotless reconnaissance reapers, telling us what we think of ourselves and providing the subject matter for photorealist meditations on the distance between post-democracy and desire. 
In the next life (more or less), we will write poetry that is easy to understand and be invited to the White House Press Dinner so that we can shake hands with our own hubris and timidity. Gideon hisself will read the Bible to the taxidermist who immortalised Rocky Raccoon. The discussion will centre on the pleasures of watching yourself evanesce without disturbing the galaxy or, more referentially, the universe, and the pleasures of dealing yourself out of the fun and games and into the chain gang. 

Sooner or later, the permanent disorder pays off. The heavy hands blunder in to a Fashoda Incident by for and of the cameras, expect any faces you see to be dispersed like cherry blossoms as soon as they appear, in transit to the cherry moon. Come on, you wilderness enthusiasts, come on, you wolf children with wolf shoulders who name your bands after wolves. Come on, you up-and-comers. Come on, you down-and-goers. Come on, you fuckwads and fucksticks, and fuckwits. Lets meet in the utterly ruined roses, the pansy-dotted flunky city farms. Come on, last bad ideas! Let’s meet in the fragment of the frangipani future bequeathed to us. Let’s have our table talk, our autumnal folk flutter, our embrace before the wings close over us. If one person can change, lots of people can transmogrify. Don’t you dream of a bike basement made out of rosewood and lover-fuckdom? Of a woodland compound and the song of deliquescing nymphs in the shower? Of punks falling into your reflection in the black water of home? No? 

excess = success = excressence.

Rock on, dog.  




∞
 
Life is inconsequentially beautiful despite the infinite chaos that consumes it.
 
I am more than that which surrounds me, and yet I am nothing at all. 
Floating – always floating – and always to nowhere.
 "I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can't remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world's still there. Do I believe the world's still there? Is it still out there?... Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different."
 

"...and on really romantic nights of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion."
Speedy Levitch \\ Waking Life
 
"Life is a flying popsicle."
 Sam W.
 
☾
 

"Hey, I'm glad you're still alive... Who else would I have adventured with this summer?"
 Andrea S.
 Tuesday, 3 July, 2011.

On the back of Mississippi Heat's CD Footprints On The Ceiling, there is a photograph of a man with his eyes closed, playing the harmonica with such passion, that one is almost stunned by the actual silence of that frozen moment. Yet when he is heard live or on record on his harmonica, the listener is caught up by its fervent, inspiring presence. The man behind the harmonica is Pierre Lacocque, Mississippi Heat's band leader and song writer.

Pierre was born on October 13, 1952 in Israel of Christian-Belgian parenthood. However, shortly after his birth, Pierre's family moved to Germany and France before going back to Belgium in 1957. By the age of 6, Pierre had already lived in three countries. A preview to his future musical career on the road. Pierre's childhood in Brussels resonated with the intense and impassioned Scriptural upbringing of his father, a Protestant minister, now living in Chicago, who became a worldfamous Old Testament scholar. Pierre, his brother Michel (Mississippi Heat's General Manager) and his sister Elisabeth (who did the artwork design on the Heat's first three CD's) went to a Jewish Orthodox School in Brussels. After the Holocaust, Pierre's parents and paternal grandfather (also a minister) felt that their children and grandchildren should learn about the suffering and plight of the Jews, as well as about Judaism in general and its philosophical and theological depths.

At the Athenee Maimonides (Brussels) they were the only non-Jews ever (and since) to attend. At the Athenee Maimonides they learned old and modern Hebrew, all the religious rites and prayers, as well as studied the rabbinical commentaries on the books of the Old Testament. With the devotion to his studies, there was little time or room for much else. The family culture and priority was on intellectual pursuits, not on play such as soccer or music (two old interests of his). Serious studying, the reading of existential philosophers and theologians, were the only worthwhile activities condoned and encouraged by Pierre's parents, his father in particular. But thanks to the radio in young Pierre's room, there was just enough opportunity to unravel the subtle auditory endowments of Destiny. From the radio he heard and was moved by such soulful singers as Ray Charles, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin. Pierre was careful to keep the volume down. This is where he began to appreciate African- American music. ...

The sound of the harmonica was first introduced to him when he lived in Alsace, France. His father was then a minister in a small village called Neuviller (1955-1957), not far from Albert Schweitzer's birthplace in Gunsbach. Pierre's father had bought him a green plastic harmonica toy. He was about three years old at the time. He remembers blowing in and out of it and feeling a surge of sadness that felt so familiar. As he experimented with the toy he often cried listening to its plaintive sounds. It was not until he came to Chicago in 1969, however, that he finally detected his destiny: playing the blues on the harmonica. He had never heard the blues saxophone-like amplified harmonica sound until then.
In 1969 Pierre's father received a full-time Old Testament professorship at the Chicago Theological Seminary, located on the University of Chicago's campus. The family decided to move permanently to the Windy City and leave Belgium for good. Pierre was sixteen years old.

The golden era of the 1950's electric Chicago sound was still having a vibrant impact on local bands. Luminaries such as Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Little Walter, Junior Wells, Elmore James, James Cotton, Howlin' Wolf, Jimmy Rogers, Jimmy Reed, and so many others, were still dynamic forces to reckon with in the late 1960's. Unfortunately some had died by the time Pierre arrived in Chicago. Little Walter, Pierre's mentor and main influence, died in 1968 following a head wound he acquired during a fight. ... Otis Spann, Muddy Waters' long-time band member and perhaps the best blues piano player ever, had also recently died of cancer.

On a Saturday night in the early Fall of 1969, Pierre decided to go to a concert being held at the University of Chicago's Ida Noyes. He had no exposure to Chicago Blues before then, and had no expectations as to what he was about to hear. As he listened to the band playing, he became overwhelmed with emotion and excitement at a sound he never heard before: A saxophone-sounding amplified harmonica! In his own words, " I was absolutely stunned and in awe by the sounds I heard coming from that harmonica player and his amplifier ... It sounded like a horn, yet distinct and unique". The harmonica player went by the name of Big Walter Horton, a name he had never heard before but who changed his life forever. What he heard that night, the music, the mood, the style and sounds, moved his soul.

From that moment on, Blues music, and blues harmonica in particular, became an obsession. Two days later, on a Monday morning, Pierre bought himself his first harmonica (or "harp" as it is called in blues circles). Next he was buying records, instruction books, anything to do with the blues harp. He was talking to people, picking up new knowledge wherever he could. Obsession led to passion and intense dedication, and Pierre was practicing the harp six, seven hours a day, notpaying attention to the clock (although he is known to check the clock now to remind him when he needs to get off the stage, because if it was up to him he would keep on playing beyond the scheduled sets! His band members tease him about that).

Pierre eventually finished High School (like Paul Butterfield, Pierre graduated from the University of Chicago's High School, better known as "The Lab School". The two never met, however, as Butterfield had left the school before 1969). Pierre then left Chicago to go to College in Montreal, Canada. He played harp through his College years, making a few dollars here and there. While at Stanislas College and later, at McGill University, both located in Montreal, Pierre got his first live experience with a local blues group named the ALBERT FAILEY BLUES BAND. About a year later, Pierre joined another band: OVEN. That was in the early 1970's when he lived for six years in that French-Canadian city (1970-1976). OVEN gigged regularly, and eventually won the Montreal Battle of The Bands contest in the summer of 1976. Unfortunately, the promoter who promised the winner $1,000 Canadian dollars and a record contract skipped town, and was never seen or heard from again. The news of the winand of the shady promoter did make the Montreal newspapers though...

Not having the ill-fated Canadian blues career anymore, Pierre, 24 at the time, and disillusioned, came back to Chicago. Although playing the blues on the harp could never be more fitting as it was at this point, it couldn't pay the bills. And it was at this point (1976) that Pierre described his life as going "the intellectual route". Pierre decided to further his education in Clinical Psychology. It was during this period that Pierre met his Social Worker wife Vickie, and began working as a clinician at a Mental Health center in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. For the next decade, Pierre was involved with his psychological work and research, finishing a doctorate at Northwestern University and publishing professional articles and a book, until a major insight took place in 1988. Pierre, an accomplished 36 years-old man, who had been studying Existentialism, Theology, History of Religions, etc. began to feel a void in his life. He began to re-evaluate his life and look into his own heart. Eventually he heard the answer loud and clear: He missed playing the blues. The awareness struck him like a beautiful horn, coming from an amp, distinct and unique, and yet a sound he had heard before, hidden all these years, but definitely not lost.

And this is where Pierre's passion revived, his fire and "joie de vivre" rekindled, his ability to take what was lost inside of him all these years and turn it into the raw, powerful heat that it is today.

Quinn Rafferty is following