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
“It’s a wild place,†I remember my English teacher in University, an Antioch College alumna from the late 70s, saying when talking about the College back home in the Netherlands. In hindsight she could not have predicted just how right she was.