Last Wednesday was a beautiful evening of music. The most significant testament to the show was how well three somewhat disparate genres meshed in an aesthetically sensible way. Many thanks to everyone who came out!

The evening kicked off in a dream state thanks to Softcheque. This was my first time seeing them (I missed them when they opened for Phantom Family Halo), and I was extremely impressed. Though they were missing a member due to a last minute work conflict, the group sounded thick and tight. Though Softcheque is often known as a group of Sapat members, Sapat in no way overshadows what Softcheque brings to the table. While Softcheque toggles between many genres, the soft, pointed vocals of Dane Waters over slow-tempo, orante instrumentation evokes a serious Broadcast and/or Pram vibe, minus some of the retro kitsch. I’ll let the video speak for itself:

R Keenan Lawler was up next, and killed it as usual. Lawler is a one-man act, using hollow-body guitar, a bottle neck, a mixer, and effects pedals to create Martian mountain folk. Lawler plays it claustrophobic and intense – you don’t need visuals or distractions to keep your attention focused on the man sitting on the stool noodling away.

Detroit’s Oblisk closed the evening with the loudest performance. Walls shook, the strobe light blinked, and there was lots of smiling before a few faces melted off. Super resonant Big Muff distortion makes me emotional. I almost cried. I’ll be reviewing the group’s latest, Weather Patterns, later this week. So good. Enjoy a couple of minute-long nuggets (I wish the video was longer, but alas, camera fail):

When you take the LSAT, many of the questions you answer require you to make inferences and deductions based only what’s on paper, essentially asking you to forget any outside knowledge or understanding you have. Let’s take that approach with Slint’s Spiderland. If you knew nothing else about the group or their seminal album, you wouldn’t have a lot to go by outside the strange bobbing heads staring through your soul on the front. From the music, you could glean the group had interests or training in jazz, classical, psych, punk, and noise, and had a weird thing with pirates and insects. From the imagery and album inset, all you would know about the context of Spiderland is that they had Palace Brother Will Oldham go swimming with them one day at the Utica Quarry in southern Indiana (and took pictures), the band prefers you listen to this on vinyl (as stated on the CD and cassette copies), and they were no longer interested in mumbling narratives by themselves.  The latter is what seems most interesting to a lot of people. That makes sense considering the band melted down either during or shortly after Spiderland’s release and the fact that, other than the track titles, it’s the only real, tangible information included on the album cover.

interested female vocalists write
1864 douglas blvd. louisville, ky 40205

My apartment is about a seven to ten minute bike ride from this address. It was a nice Saturday afternoon, I was listening to the Slint EP, and thought, what the hell? Let’s go on a vision quest to find the Slint house!

I rode my bike south down Bardstown Road, the main strip in The Highlands neighborhood in Louisville. The Highlands is our gentrifying but not yet douchey young, creative neighborhood on the city’s near east side. The neighborhood is an odd but awesome pastiche of densely packed two-story homes, apartment buildings, historic mansions, and Victorian architecture meshed with hundreds of eclectic local shops, restaurants, and clubs. As far as the meeting of music and aesthetics, you hear the industrial despair of Manchester in Joy Division, or the foggy flower power haze of San Francisco in Moby Grape, or the western-tinged reverb of Austin in the 13th Floor Elevators, or the… well, you get the idea. The Highlands, and the majority of this side of Louisville, is a really lovely and scenic place -  not the type of milieu you’d expect scary-ass Slint to emerge from.

As you leave the heart of the Highlands (where massive music haven ear X-tacy lies), you reach an area called the Douglass Loop. The Loop is an island of shops and businesses inside three intersecting streets. Until 1947, this used to be a streetcar station where the Bardstown line trains would loop around and change direction – kinda like The Loop in Chicago, but smaller of course. And at the terminus of the Douglass Loop is, indeed, Douglass Boulevard (notice the Slintsters misspelled it).

Heading east down Douglass Blvd., I realize I’ve never been down this street before, and it’s decidedly more suburban, and remarkably arboreal, than the majority of the Highlands. Since The Highlands, by and large, has not changed a whole lot visually since the ’60s and early ’70s, the street was probably fairly similar during Slint’s late ’80s/early ’90s residence. Douglass mostly consists of larger family homes spread further out with really well maintained lawns. Kids are playing wiffle ball and eating ice cream and shit – a pretty pleasant place no matter how you slice it.

After two blocks, I found it on the left hand side: 1864 Douglass Blvd.

[Note: If you live at this address, came across this article, and are totally weirded out by it, send me a message and I'll remove the photos.]

I didn’t stay too long, just enough to inconspicuously snaps a few shots. I didn’t want to be all creepy like – roaming around the perimeter of a home taking photos and looking generally suspicious.  And then… I biked back toward my end of the neighborhood. There wasn’t much to see, save for the sweet enclosed patio on the east side of the home. It looks like an addition, so Slint might not have enjoyed the luxury of an enclosed patio. Perhaps this was the origin of the despair found in “Don, Aman.”

The house is quite large, looked to be four bedrooms or so, with a living room, basement, dining room – everything you’d expect in a nice single family home. And it certainly didn’t seem like the type of place a band would squat. Maybe they did – there were four of them, right? But the home was just too nice to believe that a group of artsy raggamuffin dudes could afford the rent on a place like that. Maybe it’s Pajo’s dad’s house, I dunno. I didn’t ring the doorbell to check.

I’m not sure what I was expecting to find, really. Perhaps some the sort of strange fulfillment Elvis fans get from visiting Graceland. All in all, the locale was pretty anticlimactic. However, you could look at this as a testament to how insular Slint was. They didn’t sound like anyone else at the time (or today no less), didn’t take cues from outside influences, and managed to cultivate creepy, desolate, foreboding soundscapes amid rather picturesque aesthetics.

Then again, maybe they were much happier people than their music suggested. Douglass seems a rather cheerful place. Dave’s serious cheese there on the right-hand side demonstrates that you can separate business from pleasure.

As an added bonus, enjoy this bootleg of a March 1989 performance by Slint, wherein you hear the embryonic forms of Spiderland.

MP3 :::
Slint – Nosferatu Man (Live – Chicago, 3.3.89)
Slint – Ron (Live – Chicago, 3.3.89)
Slint – Nan Ding (Live – Chicago, 3.3.89)
Slint – Charlotte (Live – Chicago, 3.3.89)
Slint – Pat (Live – Chicago, 3.3.89)
Slint – [Unknown Song] (Live – Chicago, 3.3.89)
Slint – Breadcrumb Trail (Live – Chicago, 3.3.89)
Slint – Good Morning, Captain (Live – Chicago, 3.3.89)
Slint – Rhonda (Live – Chicago, 3.3.89)
Slint – Cortez the Killer (Live – Chicago, 3.3.89)

More on their way, probably tomorrow… in the meantime enjoy “I Only Said”.

Perhaps it was just the acoustics of the Frank Gehry designed amphitheater, but Califone got better since last time we met. Tim Rutuli’s vocals were at their most melodic and pop-aware, meanwhile the band was increasing their sonic depth before your very eyes, unfurling louder, thicker, trippier soundscapes that were strange even for Califone. Walls of thick ambience, collapsing structures and disjointed melodies, violins, horns, jingly percussion – Califone did not fuck around. Seeing them reminded me of why I like Animal Collective, as in, there were two very disparate forces pulling away from each other at the same time. While one segment of the music moved more into the major key pop realms, the other spun off into a noisy, marshmallowy sea of sine wave shredding psych. Jesus fuck, they were really good. The hippie contingent was out in full force, too, which is always fun to see juxtaposed with all the douchey fasttrack business folk.

Sorry about the shaky video. I wasn’t allowed to approach the front of the stage (“we ask that you don’t record performances”), so I was at a distance, in addition to having a lethal amount of caffeine pumping through me. But the sound quality is great! “The Orchids,” as I recently discovered, is a Psychic TV song, though Califone’s cover is rather righteous, especially live.

Save the date, coach. Freak roots/experimental folk pioneers and Thrill Jockey payrollees Califone will bring it proper for a midday concert this Monday, Aug. 11, at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park. The rockshow is part of the Audible Architecture Series. Admission is free and the show is scheduled to kick off at 12:15 p.m. There really are a surprising number of “New Weird America” rippers who work downtown (like me), and they will all be there geekin’ the fuck out whilst the Cloud Gate tourists remain righteously confused. It’ll be something to witness. My lunch break’s gonna rule.

And since Califone understands the toll recession is taking on folkheads these days, they’re playing another no-dough show at the Renegade Craft Fair on Sept. 14 along Division Street in the Ukranian Village (between Damen and Wood Avenues). Free love all around. You can also get your fix in Madison at the High Noon Saloon on Aug. 16, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on the 18th. You probably have to pay for those, though. No word yet on any studio action. Roots & Crowns still owns, though, so I’ll just keep coastin’ to that jam hive in the meantime.

MP3 :::
Califone – A Chinese Actor

The world’s most affordable summer festival, Pitchfork Music Festival right here in Chicago, is certainly a favorite of mine. If I remember correctly, 312s are only, like, $4 (muy bueno). The schedule was just released this morning, so I figured it would be poignant to post the set times for the shows that the Decibel Tolls is stoked/pscyhed/pumped for (a.k.a. relevant to this blog).

For the psych rock and psych pop fan, here is your personalized schedule:

Saturday:

1:25 – A Hawk and a Handsaw – Balance Stage
2:00 – Caribou – Connector Stage
2:20 – Icy Demons – Balance Stage
4:15 – The Ruby Suns – Balance stage
8:25 – No Age – Balance Stage
9:00 – Animal Collective – Aluminum Stage

Sunday

1:30 – Dirty Projectors – Aluminum Stage
2:00 – Boris – Connector Stage
3:00 – The Apples in Stereo – Aluminum Stage
7:00 – Spiritualized – Aluminum Stage
8:00 – Dinosaur Jr – Connector Stage

Obviously, the artist to watch during PMF2K8 is Spiritualized, as it’s been a looong time since we’ve seen the J Spaceman in action, and it’s entirely possibly that he will bring a 30+ member band with him to reproduce some of the nauseatingly thick rock action of Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space. Though I’m sure, since everyone has shorter set times anyway, that he’ll be focusing more on the equally excellent but more minimal Songs in A & E, I just have a feeling that Pierce & Co. is going to bring something really special to the table on Sunday evening. I’ve seen/booked a number of these bands before, so I’ll offer previews closer to the festival dates.

I will be working the CHIRP Record Fair part of the time, so please stop by to see us. Lots of crusty old records sold by even crustier dudes, as well as new jam hives, will be available, and a bunch of reps from Drag City, Thrill Jockey, et al. will be hanging out and slamming their free bottled water privileges. There will be tons of tables, so you can’t miss us (we might be the festival’s largest vendor). Plus, it’ll be nice to get out of the sun (the fair is held under a bunch of open air canopy tents). Proceeds will benefit CHIRP building an LPFM station in Chicago. We’ll have free schwag, too. LPFM is the new movement, so get hip.