‘The Narratologists’ indeed. Welcome to the mind of John Acquadro, AKA Goodbye the Band. I should say little about his actual music, as it speaks for itself, but I’ll at least say this: to me it’s about the production of ideas. Explorations. Experiments with and without hypotheses. New and temporary worlds. As if Ween took a bunch of speed and scored a soundtrack to some garish sci-fi TV series on fast-forward, their tonal choices avoiding pastel shades for neon. The gestalt of his last decade of home recordings (of which there are over a thousand) strikes me as being ‘about’ the experiences of thought-saturation, over-stimulation, hyper-activity of the mind, inquiries at times sublime, at others self-destructive… basically it sounds like multimedia artist Ryan Trecartin and sciencey cut-up writer William Burroughs getting Apple desktops with Cubase and Reason and posting all their best results on the web. Please enjoy.
Listen: SAFE EP by SAFE
SAFE is the multi-talented Chris Edley, writing, arranging, and singing his own really great, super-heartfelt, super-feelable songs. Lotta sweet synth stuffs on here. Was singing these songs a lot this year.
Got introduced to his music through the descriptor, “the black Arthur Russel”, which is true in at least the sense that his work is always pleasantly soft, always somewhat timeless-sounding, always full of ideas yet still focused, still grounded. Refreshing. The man’s got a beautiful voice. And pretty much all his arrangements on the SAFE EP are impeccable. Now, live and on SAFE’s newer material, his bud Jesse Hadden plays guitar and adds creative support. Full album later this year? Woo!
DUTCH WAVE ‘81-‘85 VOL. III // 13 TRACKS, 11 ARTISTS, 47 MINUTES OF LEFTFIELD PROTOINDUSTRIAL QUASIDADA ODDNESS // WRAPPIN UP THE SERIES // MIXED BY LIL BEN 02.24.11 FRESH // TRACKLIST + BONUS TRACK INCLUDED
DUTCH WAVE ‘81-‘85 VOLUME 1 // 22 TRACKS, 11 ARTISTS, 81 BLAZIN MINUTES // MIXED BY LIL BEN 02.21.11 FRESH // TRACKLIST INCLUDED
SOUNDS OF 2010: A 9TH FLOOR RADIO RETROSPECTIVE
An hour of podcast-surfing, channel-skipping, and culture-sampling in Oakland, CA by myself, LIL BEN. Some of every program on www.9thfloorradio.com got repped. In a pretty A.D.D. way. Music and words, music and words…
Ex Princess is the experimentinclined dudeartist Adam Harms of Oakland, screwchopping his own bodily sounds and samples of damaged electronics into upbeat, industrial musicbeats. Art as colorful and pepfueled as the dude himself. In drag. Stream the album below; download it here:
