The following is a list of albums that were released this year that I did not have the space to review, but recommend no less. Hopefully you’ll see something that catches your interest and inspires you to look it up. Ummm…… yeah, smoke babies. Oh, and P.S., go to www.slsknet.org for the best file sharing program ever. Pipes!
Category: DBOD
Dried Baby Organ Dispensary
Ivan Knows Best…
This is the final edition of this semester’s Record, and Wood Pipe (who will probably be called Peace Pipe as he takes over some of the work) told me that “IVAN KNOWS BEST” might be going down the pipe. This now gives me the chance to really, really fess-up. Yes I knew Best, but really not all that well. I only met her three years ago when she was working at Peaches. She was a bouncer, and I got bounced. That day (according to my weight calendar) I only weighed 153.5 lbs, so when she threw me out I rolled two or three time in the direction of Ha Ha Pizza. Best took pity on me and picked me up, told me to stop crying and that it would all get better soon. “Mama’ll take care of it.” She said. I kept crying cause I couldn’t see her mother anywhere. She should have been around because Best told me her mother was Better. I didn’t even know she was sick. Better came later and apologized ‘cause she had to visit Good. I didn’t ask and I didn’t care who Good was. So, the truth is that I do know Best, but not as good as Better, but better than Good. Here’s the truth: Best likes music, and when there is nothing for Better to do, she dances with her. Bad, the brother, just watches.
I beleive we would all agree that it is much easier to denigrate (how’s that for a word?), make fun of, and basically be unjustly critical of almost anything. One of the reasons is that criticism is unlimited and humorous comments are usually accepted in spite of their lack of serious reasoning. Which brings me to some of the writing I have enjoyed sending to the Record this semester. Such writing has attempted to be humorously critical and has avoided any serious reflection on the music I was asked to listen to. At first I really didn’t think that the “younger” generation would find any of this music interesting. All of it was relatively quiet, rhythmically controlled, and frankly very relaxing to me. – I was brought up on “one, two, three o’clock four o’clock ROCK, five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’clock ROCK..we’re gonna ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK TONIGHT… also “SHAKE IT ON DOOOWN BAABY, TWIST AND SHOUT…,we twisted, we jitterbugged, we were DANCING. The rhythm was what we wanted, what we needed, and what we got. The music was loud, and our brains vibrated in sinc with it. (It may not be necessary to mention that (even in college) we had no booze, and certainly nothing fun to smoke)…so we moved, we shook, we twisted and turned…and after that we got to our rooms, read, talked, or slept. This term, however, I listened to many hours of gentle, strange sounds…many of them quiet, produced without any strong beat, and eventually somewhat captivating. I still had to wonder…”What is going on?”…but eventually I realized that this were sounds musical or not, meant to reach the listener, encourage them to continue listening, and quite possible think, or relax. El perro Del Mar, for example, doesn’t make me want to jump out of bed and shake loose on the bedroom floor (I wear pijamas). Instead it provides simple, pleasant music with a clear but low keyed voice. I could listen to it, read at the same time and enjoy both.
So, I realize that I jumped two generations (I know nothing about the one in between, I had to do a lot of graduate studies and travel to far distances at that time) and I find that the music Dave gave me to listen to is very different. IGNATZ for example, provides an element of peace and (strange to apply to music) quiet…yes quiet!!! a quiet appreciation of productions that do not require people like me to shake and twist and turn. I learned, I expect to continue doing so, all of you don’t hesitat to come and help me!!!.
I promise you I have forgotten “jail house rock”
“Wood Pipes!”
-Wood Pipes
Dried Baby Organ Dispensary – 11-03-06
Welcome to the Dried Baby Organ Dispensary. Here at the D.B.O.D. we pride ourselves on collecting and recommending only the freshest of jams to smoke your babies to.
Album’S of the Week…
Dried Baby Organ Dispensary – 10-20-06
DBOD brught to you by Wood Pipes & Ivan Dihoff
Welcome to the Dried Baby Organ Dispensary. Here at the D.B.O.D. we pride ourselves on collecting and recommending only the freshest of jams to smoke your babies to.
I would like to open this week’s installment of the D.B.O.D. with a few words of praise for my esteemed colleague and partner in crime, the one and only Ivan Dihoff. Week after week Ivan continues to bring us brilliant and insightful, and brilliantly insightful meditations on some of this year’s most complex musical releases, often with very little time to do so. Ivan; I am unable to articulate the depths of my gratitude. This column would not be possible without you.
Also: I do not typically offer much in the way of a preamble for this column, this is intentional and it is how I usually prefer to conduct business, but this week I do have a few thoughts that I would like to share with you before I get to the reviews.
Firstly, I want to reiterate that I recommend all of the music that I review; I’m not going to waste your time with anything that I don’t think is worth exploring. That said, I would love more than anything for everyone who takes any interest in the music that I review to be able to hear that music. I do however realize that many of these releases might be somewhat difficult to get a hold of. Some of these records, for instance the Fujiya & Miyagi album that I reviewed last week, have yet to see their stateside release.
I have all of the music that I review. Unfortunately my music collection is temporarily off-line, due to a particularly malicious virus that has taken up residence in my computer. Once this problem is fixed and I get things up and running again, everyone connected to the Antioch network will have unlimited access to the entirety of the Dried Baby Organ Dispensary via iTunes.
For those of you outside of the Antioch community who have a little bit of pirate in your blood, there are always file-sharing programs. For PC users I would recommend Soulseek and for Mac’s I hear good things about bit torrent programs.
And, of course, you can always be a good fan and go to the record label’s website and put in an order.
Yo, this is a story stick?
Album of the Week
Beach House- Beach House
[Carpark :: 2006 ]
In a glass, star-lit ballroom on some deserted beach where it is always autumn, this album plays forever. Old, dusty memories waltz back and forth as you realize just how beautiful the summer was, and it makes your heart ache. Sometimes I find myself overwhelmed by brief moments of clarity where I realize that I am in fact still alive, and I think back to very happy places in my life and I feel sad. That is what this music makes me feel like. The sun never goes down because it is always night here. It’s hellish in a way; a never ending succession of almost and what ifs and once upon a times, and no matter which way you look at it it’s still just you, alone on a beach. I think most of us have had at least a glimpse of that sensation. It is a fairytale gone horribly, awfully wrong, much like the world that we live in and the lives that we pursue. But glory be, we all will die eventually; this music will not. What a nice beach.
Ivan Knows Best…
Ignatz – Ignatz
[ K-RAA-K :: 2006 ]
Wood Pipes:
Have you ever seen an old daguerreotype of a tornado? No? Well neither have I, but that’s kind of what this music kind of looks like in my mind. The album cover, as you may or may not be able to tell, is a picture of a lone house glowing through the darkness, waiting. This is also fairly appropriate imagery. Put the two of those together and you might find yourself with some weird and fantastic scene of a tornado sweeping through an old, candlelit ghost town somewhere on the dark side of the moon. But is the tornado singing to the houses, or are the houses singing to the tornado?
Ivan: I GNATZ
It has become apparent to this reviewer that producing music is an arduous task, by that I mean, “It ain’t easy?. In this C-D (note that A,B have already been eliminated) it is really not until track four (the tracks are in order one to eight, track four is therefore the fourth track), it is, as I was writing (myself just finishing track three), not until this track does actual music become produced.
This “music? consists of various notes following each other rather quickly and in some kind of order. With only a little effort to ignore the rest of life can one actually begin to move slightly to the rhythm and actually predict more or less what notes are forthcoming.
Within this is, of course, lies the appeal of music. In life no one ever does know what the next beat will be and how to protect oneself from it. In good music one does and can actually determine how to move one’s torso, lift a right or left leg, and do strange motions with their arms and hands. Some people otherwise endowed also manage to shake certain prominent parts of their anatomy and therefore add more interest to this reaction to music. I have heard people call this reaction to music “dense?. Maybe only stupid people can do it, I have no opinion on the subject, and I only review music. However I think it is nice for dense people to have something to do.
The last three tracks appear to allow the musicians to relax and just use their instruments at random. At times there are muted voices, someone seemed to be asking for a cigarette or some compound with which to glue certain thinks together, or a container for a house plant. This relaxed end to the C-D, teaches us that there is always some reward after hard work. As they say “ If there’s no smoking, how can you feel the fire??
Shows This Week:
- 10/21; Saturday: Wolf Eyes, John Weise, 400 Blows, Lambsbread @ Little Brother’s, 1100 North High Street, Columbus; 8 PM $12 ($10 adv.)
- 10/23; Monday: Xiu Xiu, Congs For Brums, Dirty Projectors @ Little Brother’s; 8 PM $12 ($10 adv.)
- 10/25; Wednesday: Del The Funky Homosapien, Mike Relm, Psalm One, Bukue One, A-Plus @ Little Brother’s; 8 PM $15
- 10/26; Thursday: Gang Gang Dance, El Jesus Demagico @ Little Brother’s; 8 PM $10 ($8 adv.)
- 10/26; Thursday: Deerhoof, Fog @ Wexner Center for the Arts, 1871 North High Street, Columbus; 9 PM $12
“Get cut!?
-Wood Pipes
The Dried Baby Organ Dispensary
Welcome to the Dried Baby Organ Dispensary. Here at the D.B.O.D. we pride ourselves on collecting and recommending only the freshest of jams to smoke your babies to.
 Telepathe- Farewell Forest EP[ The Social Registry :: 2006 ] In the dead of night, deep in the forest; in the shadiest of groves, the neglected, lost souls of this earth gather and cause a mighty din. And not in an A.A. meeting kind of way. This is sheer debauchery, a feast of sin even. It is urgent and sensual, incomprehensibly dark and devilishly alluring. Like swimming through the folds of the velvet blanket of night, and drowning, and sinking into it, endlessly…… And then waking up inside of a jack-o-lantern. Awful, demonic creatures are dancing around you in circles and laughing beautifully. Everything seems fluid and starts to blur, and you find yourself lost but comfortable, and the shadows creep over your mind like a coma. And then you wake up again, alone in the rain. The wind is blowing and the leaves are falling and you are staring at the face of eternity. It looks kind of like movement stuck inside of an aging polaroid photograph and…. then it’s gone. That’s it, party’s over. The way the details of a dream slip away from you as you watch the sun drift up over the horizon, it just goes away. |
 Fujiya & Miyagi- Transparent Things[ Tirk/Word and Sound :: 2006 ]Fully krausened. Chic and funky enough to turn David Bowie’s head. I have a creeping suspicion that these people work at the cloud factory. |
 Boards Of Canada- Trans CanadaHighway EP [ Warp :: 2006 ] There’s this Mogwai song that says that if stars had sounds then they would sound like Mogwai. Eh. I’m going to disagree and say that I think that if stars had sounds then they would sound like Boards Of Canada. Really though, it sounds like stars; stars exploding, or stars making love, you know, all that general kind of star stuff that stars do. I had a vision one time when I was tripping that in the future I would mate with a very tall, purple alien woman who could float. I mean, you know, it probably wasn’t a woman at all, I mean it was an alien and all that. But you get the idea. Anyways, I love Boards Of Canada. Although the music is almost exclusively digital, there is something about it that is more organic than dirt. Vibrating, breathing, neon tinged dirt. All over you. It sizzles and glitches like a robit in an acid bath as it interfaces with the hardware of your soul, and it will teach you the songs of the stars. Two thumbs up. |
 Time-Tested Quality BlendsWhite Magic- Through The Sun Door EP [ Drag City :: 2004 ] Some strange pastoral romance, written in blood and scattered about the plains for the wind to find. The wind found it, and recited it to the hills, and sang it to the sky, and screamed it across the deserts. And someone just happened to be there with a recording studio. It’s like magic and shit! The music on this album conjures the feeling of a train swaggering across some green, vast expanse. These are songs of love, transfiguration, and departure. Think Joni Mitchell worshiping Baphomet for roughly ten years and smoking just enough punk rock to get really dirty in it. Really an absolutely remarkable album. Straight-forward enough to be widely accessible and crafted with enough innovation and skill to please even the most pretentious of ear drums, I feel like I see most people enjoying this recording. I’d also like to use this space to plug White Magic’s forthcoming first ever full length release, “Dat Rosa Mel Apibus?, available November 14th. Don’t worry, you folks at Drag City can just send me a check later. |
| Ivan Knows Best….
|
 OOIOO- Taiga [ Thrill Jockey :: 2006 ]
Wood Pipes: Ivan: Another portion began with the unmistakable sounds of a galloping horse, followed to the best of my imagination by those of a screeching frog. Then some clear rhythms managed to catch my attention, basically the line sounded DA DA DEE DEE, DA DA DEE DEE, DADADEESEE, DADADEEDEE…The rapid succession of rhythmic sounds eventually compressed and produced in me a feeling of confinement and resentment. I was expecting the DA DA DEE DEE, to become as expected DA DA DA, DEE, DEE, DEE…DADEE, DADADA…But this expectation was for nought. This cede did certainly make an effort to communicate something important to its audience, unfortunately I could not begin to understand what that might have been. Having thought a few minutes since this last sentence I do come to the conclusion that such a ceede’s raison d’etre might indeed be to demonstrate to educated and long-lived listeners that they are clearly unable to cope with evolution in the musical world. I, however, intend to expose myself further to such art in order to determine exactly what these shiny round objects intend to do to our civilization. “Bring me some cereal” |