#20 years in a montana missile silo

[thevellaunderground]

Avant-Garage Visionaries: The Pere Ubu Odyssey

In the pantheon of post-punk pioneers, few bands have carved out a legacy as enduring and influential as Pere Ubu. Formed in the mid-1970s in Cleveland, Ohio, Pere Ubu emerged from the ashes of the proto-punk outfit Rocket from the Tombs, bringing with them a sound that was both a continuation and a radical departure from their predecessors. The Avant-Garage Sound Pere Ubu’s music, often…

[mariacallous]

Shortly before U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was slated to depart for Beijing on the Biden administration’s first cabinet-level visit, the trip was postponed. The last-minute schedule change came after a Chinese surveillance balloon was confirmed to be floating above sensitive U.S. military sites, including potentially an active nuclear missile silo field in Montana. Over the weekend, the balloon was shot down by a U.S. F-22 fighter jet once the expected debris no longer posed a threat to civilians.

The incident is reminiscent of those that occurred during the Cold War involving the United States and the Soviet Union—and it comes at a time when many are debating whether Washington and Beijing are now headed toward a similar relationship. Blinken’s now-postponed visit was an attempt to follow up on the Biden-Xi meeting at the G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, last year. Encouragingly, the summit provided the best recent opportunity for diplomacy between the United States and China—one that could provide some answers on how the two countries can best avoid a “new Cold War” and reduce the risks of unnecessary conflict and inadvertent escalation.

As was true during the Cold War, spy balloons are not the only things looming over the fraught relationship between the United States and China—nuclear weapons are, too. In addition to ever-increasing tensions over Taiwan, it is no secret that China’s ambition for a diversified nuclear arsenal and wider military modernization is accelerating, with Beijing expanding strategic and conventional forces to back up its “wolf warrior” diplomacy.

Since university researchers made it public two years ago that China is developing extensive missile silo fields and Beijing shocked U.S. intelligence services by testing a hypersonic fractional orbital bombardment system just weeks later, there has been a growing conversation on how Washington can adequately deter Beijing. However, there is another side that cannot be ignored: The United States and China must return to talks at the earliest available opportunity to discuss their shared responsibility to reduce the risk of nuclear war through crisis management and arms control.

While the prevailing assumption is that ​​China intends to move away from its traditionally minimal nuclear deterrent and build a larger and more diverse arsenal to ensure a second-strike capability, Washington has a limited understanding of both the technical and political motivations behind China’s shifted strategy. Is this a long-term strategy that has reached the next step? Have the Chinese simply become bolder because they got stronger? Or is it all because the domestic power structure has changed, and President Xi Jinping is doing whatever he wants?

Regardless of the reasoning, what the U.S. government has done so far has not been enough to get China to consider an alternative path. Policymakers in Washington have barely discussed how U.S. policies factor into Beijing’s calculations and, most importantly, how Chinese actions could be positively influenced away from their current arms-race trajectory.

China’s calculation of escalation risk is adapting to today’s geopolitical and technological realities, which have both increased the chance of conventional wars crossing the nuclear threshold.

Such developments should prompt Chinese leaders to speak with their U.S. counterparts directly about practical ways to manage potential crises and conflicts. However, a lack of political willpower seems to stand in the way of a sustained, structured bilateral dialogue on these issues.

The avoidance of nuclear weapons use during the Cold War resulted from a substantial amount of knowledge that could only be accrued through meaningful diplomatic, military, and scientific cooperation. However, any similar cooperation in the nuclear sphere between the United States and China at the moment will depend on whether China feels that such initiatives will disadvantage it or leave it vulnerable to manipulation. Those fears are why China has historically avoided crisis management and arms control measures.

However, times are changing, and such avoidance is increasingly untenable. Crisis management conversations should aim to result in formalized risk reduction measures, which are also inherently arms control measures. For example, the United States and China could revive the Crisis Communications Working Group that was only convened once in 2020 before China canceled the subsequent meeting in 2021. The group could work to address how the decades-old and seemingly moribund leader-level hotline and largely suspended military communication channels can be revived, expanded, and protected from technical threats. In particular, technical projects to make such hotlines more resilient in the face of emerging technologies such as AI-generated deepfakes would also be useful.

Blinken must make it clear to the Chinese that while the Biden administration is seriously interested in diplomacy, it will need proactive and positive Chinese engagement to sustain it. After all, many skeptics feel that they have seen this movie before. Direct conversations between the United States and China on strategic stability—namely, creating a stable security situation in which both sides are discouraged from initiating a first nuclear strike—have remained in a stage of infancy for too long. Across the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, high-level political commitments to pursue more robust bilateral talks resulted in only a handful of engagements.

The Trump administration subsequently burned already-fragile bilateral bridges, including on the nuclear front as Beijing became even more uncomfortable with the concept of arms control because of the coercive nature of U.S. tactics to get China to come to the table. Given that China only has a fraction of either the U.S. or Russian arsenals—currently estimated at around 350 warheads and growing, compared to approximately 5,500 U.S. and Russian warheads each—Beijing opposed calls to join quantitative limits unless the United States and Russia came down to its level.

As a result, in recent years conversations on nuclear issues between the United States and China have primarily taken place in a multilateral setting. However, the P5 Process—the multilateral forum for the five nuclear weapons states under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—has been substantially slowed down due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While P5 officials have met in Dubai in recent days to continue discussions on their positions on risk reduction, identifying common ground and practical measures to take forward as a collective will be difficult.

While the war in Ukraine has complicated such efforts, it has also highlighted to the Chinese—who have reportedly lobbied Russian President Vladimir Putin to step away from the nuclear brink—that cooperating in this area can improve China’s image as a responsible nuclear power, especially in the eyes of non-nuclear weapons states.

Strong communication on nuclear issues should therefore be seen as a central element of President Joe Biden’s bilateral agenda with China. While it may be too heavy a lift to obtain Chinese agreement on a full-fledged strategic stability dialogue immediately, the Biden administration should prioritize crisis management in the wake of the spy balloon incident. Nuclear risk reduction measures should be seen as a win-win proposition, just as they were during the Cold War.

Learning about each country’s risk perceptions would help sharpen the focus of future talks on the specific issues Washington and Beijing can work together on to lower tensions and reduce the likelihood of blundering into war because of misperception or miscommunication. As was true following the Cuban missile crisis, the pursuit of crisis management tools can pave the way for deeper arms control while protecting diplomatic space on various other key issues.

Chinese leaders must understand that engaging in direct discussions on managing risk with adversaries such as the United States is not an aspect of great-power competition but the very foundation of it. In order to improve chances for crisis and arms-racing stability, China’s unwillingness to discuss obligations that could provide guardrails around nuclear weapons use needs to change. If such efforts to reduce risks prove successful at building trust, qualitative (rather than quantitative) limits that focus on restraint from deploying certain types of weapons systems might also be of mutual interest in the long term. In the meantime, both sides lack a sober understanding of the other side’s nuclear intentions and have to start somewhere.

While luck often favors the bold, it also has a habit of running out. Crisis management would be a mutually beneficial and positive first step in the arms control process. As deterrence structures are made more complex and unstable, there is no sane option but for nuclear nations such as the United States and China to renew their diplomatic efforts. If they don’t, there will never be any hope of reducing the dangers that nuclear weapons pose. In the words of Stanford nuclear physicist Siegfried Hecker, Washington and Beijing are simply “doomed to cooperate.”

[dustedmagazine]

Pere Ubu — 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo (Cherry Red)

There is, perhaps, some irony that Pere Ubu’s 40-year career arc begins and ends under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. This the band, after all, that burst into antic funk-punk life with end-of-the-Cold-War singles like “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” and “Final Solution.” Now, half a lifetime later, as Kim Jung Un (and, let’s face it, our own president) threaten life as we know it, David Thomas and crew have sprung back into the vertiginous anarchy of their earliest days, with the fastest, hardest, rocking-est set of tunes from Pere Ubu in decades.

For this album, Thomas has added substantially to his band, now nine-strong and armed to the teeth with three different guitar players. Original guitarist Keith Moliné, himself known for technical tricks that multiply his own guitar voices in the live setting, now plays against and with Gary Siperko from Ubu progenitor-band Rocket from the Tombs and Kristof Hahn from Swans. Long-term members, including Gagarin on synths, Darryl Boon on a mournful clarinet, bassist Michelle Temple, drummer Steven Mehlman and electronicist Robert Wheeler augment Thomas himself in a kind of apocalyptic rock chamber orchestra. Yet though there are many people jammed into this particular missile silo, the songs feel the very opposite of bloated. Tight, lean and short (about half under three minutes), these cuts waste no time in locating one monster, off-kilter riff and delivering its weirdness with enough authority to sound inevitable.

The first four songs set the template, unsettling scraps of verbiage drifting through tightly wound, guitar-slashing landscapes. “Monkey Bizness,” the first single, is a continual car-crash, its jarring, octave-humping riff testing the limits, a squiggle and roar of synthesizer bubbling in the interstices, a racket of drumming and Thomas’ querulous, wobbly, rasping voice raised in outrage over “monkeys and clowns” who “will bounce around.”  “Funk 49” shares a title with a classic rock chestnut from the James Gang, but little else except a big swinging dick of a riff. Yet all is not well or sane or comfortable in guitar rock land, Boon wails in screech of agony over uneasy Thomas’ uneasy poetry, i.e., “I got a bit of soul, I keep it in a cage, I feed it cat food, I keep it ta-aa-aame.”  “Prison of the Senses” is slower and more sepulchral, more in line with The Bailing Man than Modern Dance, tension building in maniacal sticks-on-rims cadences and released in mad knife slashes of guitar. “Toe to Toe,” the sort-of title track (“20 years of a living hell, at the bottom of a missile well”), is the best of the bunch, just a monstrous, canted song, sliding off the edges of the known rock world on a tilted floor. It’s a minute and a half long. It will leave you gasping.

The second half of the album mixes up longer, quieter intervals of unreality (“The Healer,” “Walking Again” “I Can Still See”) with more bangers (“Swampland” “Red Eyes”), and packs less of a wallop than the onset. Yet there is no question that 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo is more like Ubu’s earliest material than anything Thomas has put out in years. Maybe the end of times is good for him. It’s certainly good for Ubu fans.

Jennifer Kelly

[curious-minx]

October 2010s Music Deep Dive!

A mock up poster for the only possible music festival line-up I would be willing to risk my life attending. Tony Allen’s passing has caused the entire Octoberfest to be cancelled indefinitely, but all proceeds from ticks will be given back to the community. 

Hope all of you special nobodies and overblown somebodies reading this right now are having a smashing start your first o November. All last month I had taken it upon myself to listen to as many albums and fragments of albums released sometime during the month of October spanning the entire 10’s decade, 2010 through 2019. This is all probably a result of drinking too much dead water, Quarantine brain, undiagnosed Autism, magical thinking and the death of boredom. I have created a Spotify playlist sporting 25 hours and 4 minutes worth of music with an arbitrary amount of albums getting multiple songs, but largely one song/album. This project did create a sense of madness because of the volume of music that gets cranked out. How can we expect anyone to properly criticize music when it is nearly impossible to keep up with it all? I largely culled these albums from Allmusic’s Editorial Choice section, but I did have to use Rateyourmusic to fill out the hip-hop and R&B gaps. In gathering up all of this music I am attempting to see if spooky music was relegated to the October season and any other possible trends. Even though October has been laid to rest her swelling calendar breast still contains a treasure trove of music worth discussing. Grab your broom, sharpen your heels and get the cobwebs out of your ears because we’re going on a Deep Dive! 

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The 2010s Old Souls and Musical Auteurs 

I consider any musician or band that endures more than a decade worthy of this veteran label. Music biz lifers seem found solace in the October release schedule. A trend that has carried onto the new decade with October 2020 offering revitalized releases by Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen reunited with the E Street Band. All three main members of Sonic Youth, Moore, Gordon and Renaldo are still harnessing that spooky Bad Moon Rising energy and carrying it over into their solo releases. 

KIM GORDON’s NO RECORD HOME

The first truly proper solo album by Kim Gordon following up her pretty good noise rock releases under the Body/Head moniker with Bill Nace. No Record Home towers over Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo’s mostly okay solo releases because of how truly experimental and refreshingly modern sounding No Record Home is. This album sounds like it could easily have come out from a young Pacific Northwest Trip-Angle (RIP) label upstart. Instead, Gordon is defiantly aging gracefully and remains an all around important feminist voice in experimental rock music. No Record Home did not pop up on a lot of “Best of the Year” lists in 2019, nor did Gordon embark on any kind of touring for the release. I am hoping that more people will eventually discover this great album and realize that Gordon was truly the best, most truly experimental aspect of Sonic Youth. Her vocals on this album are the best she’s ever sounded because she built these songs and sounds with the intergral collaborator, producer Justin Raisen. A glimpse at Raisen’s Wikipedia page is a who’s who of great artists of the past decade: Yves Tumor, Charli XCX, and Sky Ferreira. The collaboration occurred at an AirBnB shared between Gordon and Raisen and birthed the first single of the project “Air BnB.” A song that completely sets the tone of the album and features one of those amazing music videos in the same line us Young Thug’s “Wyclef Jean. “

Björk - Biophilia

Can you name the last album the rolled out with its own app? Nine years have come and gone and I certainly can’t think of another album with such wholesome ambitions. Björk was getting passionate about ecological concerns in her native Icelandic home with Sigur Ros and using her sphere of influence to try to good. 2014 the app has found a permanent home in the MOMA, but outside of this curio status the album itself is still a worthwhile addition to the Björk canon. Biophilia finds Björk in musical scientist mode using sounds captured from a Tesla coil and making a whole musical universe onto herself. The rest of the 2010s found Björk going for bigger and more ambitious projects that continue to frustrate those who wish she would go back to her poppier roots. She remains one of those most consistent solo artists around and someone no one will be able to predict what she does next. The only thing is certain is that it will be visionary and will probably include a wildly ambitious rollout and a new piece of physical art like Biophilia’s $800 tuning forks.

NENEH CHERRY - BROKEN POLITICS

Featuring production duties for the second time from Four Tet (who also pops up in the October playlist with his 2013 album Beautiful Rewind). Broken Politics in Cherry’s words, “is about feeling broken, disappointed, and sad, but having perseverance. It’s a fight against the extinction of free thought and spirit.” The music video for single “Natural Skin Deep” was filmed in Beirut, a backdrop made even more painful given 2020’s Explosion. Cherry is an artist with deep spiritual and blood connections with artists central to jazz’s history. Broken Politics also features songs built around Ornette Coleman samples. This is all to say that Neneh Cherry is always going to be someone tapping into a creative cosmic vein that spans generations, and with that comes a hard wisdom. Two years later we’re still dealing with the same god damn guts and guns of history. 

OTHER NOTABLES:

(Cat Power - The Wanderer; John Cale - Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood; Tony Allen - Film of Life ; Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Psychedelic Pill ;Bryan Ferry - Olympia; Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Ghosteen ;Yoko Ono - Warzone; Vashti Bunyan - Heartleap; Elvis Costello & The Imposters - Look Now; The Chills - Silver Bullets; Weezer - Everything Will Be Alright In The End;Laurie Anderson - Heart of A Dog;Janet Jackson - Unbrekable;The Mercury Rev - Light In You;  Rocketship - Thanks To You; Van Dyke Parks & Gaby Moreno - Spangled; Donald Fagen - Sunken Condos; Prefab Sprout - Crimson Red; Pere Ubu - 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo; Negativland - True False )

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TRILOGY OF BLACKSTARS

Three last albums released by three titans of 20th century songwriting. Two of them follow the trajectory of an older artist getting rejuvenated by a younger backing band. Lulu is beyond a meme at this point and is considered one of the most confounding flops since Metallic Music. Like Metallic Music, Lulu will get a reappraisal and find its audience. Mr. Blackstar himself Bowie considered  Lulu one of his favorite releases. “Junior Dad” alone makes this album a worthy addition in Lou Reed’s discography. Scott Walker invited some similarly hairy and intense younger rock studs into his private castle and pulls off a far more natural combination. Soused fits like a velvet glove on a elegant corpse hand swirling thick slabs of guitar and demonic percussion. Scott Walker effortlessly orchestrates between elegance and moribundity whereas Lulu wallows and thrashes against  the ugly riffage. 

No riffs or oozing wall of sound are  anywhere to be found on the sparse and pointedly elegiac You Want it Darker. Leonard Cohen never went full on sleazy I’m Your Man ever again but he didn’t become adult contemporary either. You Want It Darker finds Leonard and his son Adam Cohen. When Leonard passed away he was the only one to get a full David Bowie like museum tribute, Lou Reed only got a corner of a library. Cohen is far and away the most accessible mystical Jewish Buddhist monk with a penchant for fedoras and having a masked man with a leather belt beat him in the recording booth [citation needed]. You Want It Darker is the only one of these mortality laden kiss offs to win a Grammy. I do wonder if Cohen would have ever allowed a more adventurous production to touch his staid and timeless old fashioned sound. Tom Scharpling divides Leonard Cohen into his Pre-Fedora and Post-Fedora days. If you are being literal about that demarcation that still gives you a pretty vast body of music I just want sad bloated blurry black and white Leonard Cohen with a banana or the smiling cad on Songs of Love and Hate. Even the floppy fedora era has worthwhile albums and he sounds like if Serge Gainsbourgh was a muppet Gargoyle, he’s reliable. I will always beat myself for not buying that official Leonard Cohen raincoat at the Jewish Museum Leonard Cohen exhibit, but I hope someone has and they are finding comfort with Cohen’s music. A lot of his latter day period is comforting in a sardonic sexy mind bending nursing home sort of way. 

I am glad that these men were ultimately spared from having to deal with Covid times and even someone as tasteless as Brian Wilson’s Ghost can acknowledge that it’s more important than ever to keep your elderly loved ones locked away in a well ventilated pod. 

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(INSERT ARTIST HERE) SEASON

For a few sticky sweet select few artists the month of October proved to be a suitable release launch pad for more than one album. The Mountain Goats and clipping. have just joined the October two-timer club this year. The reigning queen of October releases is Taylor Swift and Adrianne Lenker. In chronological order swift released Speak Now, Red and 1989 probably Swift’s biggest run in terms of critical and commercial success. None of these albums have a particularly big place in my heart, in fact speaking on behalf of Brian Wilson’s Ghost Ltd. I’m not the biggest fan of America’s Sweetheart, Sweet Tea Poet Laureate.  All three of these albums all came out in the latter part of October and based on the Target brand synergy roll-out felt as inevitable as pumpkin spice. Haunted. Sad Beautiful Tragic. Out of the Woods. These are either song titles taken from these three albums are the names of the under utilized Romantic Halloween Horror Comedy genre. Lady Gaga might have been spooking it up on American Horror Story, but Swift gives a far more chilling performance in Tom Hooper’s midnight madness of Cats and I could envision Swift excelling really well as a horror film actor. Especially in a role like Scarlett Johansson’s Under the Skin. 

You cannot get more polar opposite from Swift than Adrianne Lenker. Who released her first solo album abysskiss   and the second Big Thief album of 2019 Two Hands. Lenker will have also gone on to make her third October release this year with her second solo album songs & instrumentals. Striking that such a ghostly autumnal band would have only released one album in October, but autumnal feeling albums are not beholden to release calendars. The song “Not” from the Big Thief album Two Hands is a watershed breakthrough moment for the band and put Lenker and her band on the map. In 2019 Big Thief became a band that could get booked onto a Goodmorning American performance slot and more or less made Big Thief one of the rare 2010s indie bands to become more or less a household name. 

Other notable artists to have released more than one album on October 2010s:

Less notable artists to have multiple October releases: James Blunt Korn

Calvin Harris 

Kings of Leon

Pentatonix 

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FORMER HARBINGERS OF HYPE

These are October releases from artists that once felt like whenever they put out an album a wider array of outlets and publications seemed to care more and would spill more digital ink over them. The big three artists that had the biggest drop off in attention and acclaim that stick out to me the most are Titus Andronicus,  Justice and Why? All three artists debuted with strong starts back in the aughts, but according to critical reception more or less crashed and burned. Titus Andronicus’ Local Business was one of the last times Titus Andronicus would get positive marks from Pitchfork. Local Business a fun and shaggy follow-up to one of the most self-serious concept albums of the 2010s. 

Justice’s Audio, Video, Disco similarly is a follow up to a highly acclaimed album that set the bar high enough to doom Justice into never living up to the hype. Justice’s 2007 s/t heralded them as the next Daft Punk, but unlike those soulful and thoughtful robots Justice mainly wanted to make big ridiculous unfashionable synth prog rock. Audio, Video, Disco is simply cheesy fun and even though we live in a world better off without parties and gatherings this album helps you feel like you are in high-def IMAX monster mash on the moon. 

The leaves us with Why?’s Mump’s Etc. an album that already had the job of following up an already divisive follow up record Eskimo Snow. Why’s Alopecia is a really important 2008 indie blog rap album that helped thrust the online indie blogs into the hip-hop genre hybrid experimentalism. Why? would never make another universally beloved album again and with Mump’s Etc. ended up permanently in Pitchfork’s hate pit. In the original release review the Pitchfork writer essentially deems this album an act of “career suicide.” The whole review is essentially an assignation of Why?’s figurehead Yoni Wolf and taking him to task for all of his awkward lyrical blunders and the fact he is narcissistic enough to be a musician writing about his career in a meta fashion. Yet when I listen to Mump’s Etc. I am more or less enjoying Yoni Wolf’s personality and find the whole thing to be pretty charming. A perfectly serviceable 3.5/5 release that a media outlet like Pitchfork turns into a flexing opportunity to show how that they have the power to make or break a career. 

A.C. Newman, an artist who appears on this playlist with his terrific 2012 Shut Down The Streets took to Twitter to scoff at the idea that a good Pitchfork review has done anything for his career. Shut Down The Streets currently remains the last solo album Newman has released under his name choosing to focus on his main gig with the New Pornographers. The Internet based hype machine is even more ADHD addled and twitchier by the day. The joy of doing this deep dive allowed me to revisit a lot of these artists and acts that I had fallen out of touch with. I had completely forgotten about King of Convenience’s Erlend Øye who released the album Legao in 2014. I rediscovered a good deal of bands like the Editors, The Dodos, Kisses, Black Milk, Crocodiles, Empire of the Sun, Juana Molina, Jagwar Ma, Here We Go Magic, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., YACHT, Peaking Lights, The Twilight Sad, Elf Power, Swet Shop Boys, Radio Dept, Allo’ Darlin, Foxes In Fiction, and HOMESHAKE are all bands not trying to change the world or challenge listeners with avant garde experimentation. Instead I feel like I maintaining relationships with old friends on the edge of obscurity. 

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A HISTORY OF CHRISTMAS IN OCTOBER 

A tradition stretching back as far as 2014 not October’s Idina Menzel’s Holiday Wishes, but Seth McFarland’s Holiday For Swing sweatily released on CD, digital, and vinyl on September 30, 2014.  2015 then brings us a Chris Tomlin and Ru Paul Christmas albums because every force of Neo-liberal good must be balanced with evangelical contemporary Christian music *shutters.* 2016 finds the Christmas in October era reaching a complete and utter nadir with R. Kelly’s final official LP 12 Nights of Christmas and A Pentatonix Christmas, but also buffered by Kacey Musgrave’s Christmas. 2017 only had time for Gwen Stefani’s You Make It Feel Like Christmas and no one else could evoke this feeling in October. On 2018, Michelle and Barack Obama’s combined one and only Christmas wish comes true, no not cancelling those drone strikes, but getting John Legend to join the October release jamboree; Eric Clapton claps open his guitar’s butt cheeks and hatefully squats out a half assed Xmas album defiantly opening the album with “White Christmas” [eyeroll emoji]; and finally 2018 found the Pentatonix announcing in October that Christmas Is Here. I apologize for all of that crude butt talk about the hateful racist Eric Clapton, but(t) I have festive gluteus Maximus on the mind, because in 2019 Norah Jones got her alternative country gal trio back together to remind us to shake our Christmas butts. Eat shit commercial shit, today’s Santa’s birthday! That’s the magic of the October release schedule! 

The hallowed Christmas in October tradition continues on in 2020 with Dolly I-Beg-Thee-Pardon  releasing A Holly Dolly Christmas right on time on October 2, 2020 (Carrie Underwood missed the memo and unwraps her unwanted My Gift in September 2020). Meghan Trainor, Goo Goo Dolls, and Tori Kelly released Christmas albums. Can you believe Seth MacFarlane comes up twice in this article, because his sleazy J. Michigan Frog croon is processed and grated like Parmesan cheese snow flakes all over a rendition of White Christmas.  What a time to be alive! 

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WHERE DID THEY GO?

A Brief Case For Class Actress’s Rapproacher

Among my October music travels I encountered one artist that really impressed me with her proper LP debut Rapprocher. The trio fronted by Elizabeth Vanessa Harper is essentially peddling the kind of competent moody 80’s inspired synth pop that belongs on a lost Donnie Darko sequel. Harper’s vocals are striking and expressive and they are melded with constantly propulsive bed of shiny synths and glossy barely-there gated percussion. Outside of an 2015  EP called Movies featuring exciting production contributions from Italo-disco icon Giorgio Moroder there has been nothing else from Class Actress. Highly recommend you check them out especially if you want to find the sweet spot between Chromatics and Kylie Minogue. 

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THE OCTOBER 2010s MASTERPIECES 

(Robyn - Honey, Big K.R.I.T. - 4eva is a Mighty Long Time  ,Miguel -  Kaleidoscope Dream, Crying - Beyond The Fleeting Gale , M83 Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming ,SRSQ - Unreality, Sufjan Stevens - age of adz, Joanna Newsom - divers, VV Brown Samson and Delilah, Kelela - tear me apart , Neon Indian - VEGA Intl., Fever Ray - Plunge , Antony and The Johnsons - Swanlights (goodbye album) , Caroline Polachek - Pang , Sky Ferreira - Night Time, My Time . Bat For Lashes  Haunted Man, James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual , Grouper -  Ruins , Kero Kero Bonito -Bonito Generation , DJ Rashad - Double Cup)

Maybe if I surround this VV Brown album with more well known artists she’ll finally get some more clicks? I should also mention that Joanna Newsom’s Divers is nowhere on my Spotify October Music playlist because Joanna Newsom thinks Spotify is bananas, and she hates bananas. I know I should also mention Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city and Tame Impala’s Lonerism. That’s the maddening thing about October music that just when you think you covered all your ground you find another hidden hump underneath the carpet.  I feel remiss without mentioning striking debut and instant hidden gem Tinashe’s Aquarius, which did you know has a new album art on Spotify. Death Grip’s No Love Deep Web. T_T I didn’t even get around to making a big verbal mosaic to Thom Yorke’s witchy Suspiria soundtrack.Corpus Christi! I forgot to highlight The Orb album in the collage with my other veteran artists!  As you can see this project nearly ruined me. I did not necessarily listen to all of these albums from front to back, but I did listen all of the songs on the playlist and chose them from the immense collection of October releases. I am pretty sure this is the kind of content for no one in particular but I really needed to get it out of my system. Let’s meet back up October 2030!!!!!

(Thank you to my beloved partner, best friend and Spotify provider Maddie Johnson XD)

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7sdLaNNaqWpKEKXRZ3jNqY?si=SLZxUwLMQYOQ5wA1xuZc7w

[allthatchernobyl]

Pere Ubu – 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo + Drive, He Said 1994-2002 (2017)

Doble lanzamiento este año para Pere Ubu, la banda under por excelencia del Rock norteamericano. Por un lado, un álbum recopilatorio que a diferencia de la mayoría de los álbumes recopilatorios merece una buena escuchada y por el otro, un estreno de repertorio 100% original y caótico como nos gusta a los amantes de David Thomas. Vamos cronológicamente: "20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo" es un regreso al pasado. Pero no uno deliberado ni forzado ni desesperado. Es un regreso natural, espontaneo. La gente de Exystence lo explica bien: Pere Ubu nacía hace 40 años en plena Guerra Fría. La sombra de la aniquilación nuclear presente entonces y ahora, con dos líderes megalómanos y tiranos como Trump y Kim Jung Un midiéndose las porongas parece ser un contexto que le viene bárbaro al Punk-Rock Apocalíptico de David Thomas. Basta agarrar esa joya en vivo titulada "390° of Simulated Stereo" y escuchar temas como "30 Seconds over Tokyo" (el primer single ever de la banda) para comprobarlo. Lo cierto es que hace rato que no se le escuchaba un disco tan bueno a Pere Ubu. No diré cuanto porque, claro, es totalmente subjetivo. Pero se ve que paso el afilador de cuchillos por la casa de Thomas porque aquel filo que en algún momento parecía desgastado vuelve a cortar el aire de un solo golpe. "20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo" presenta, como siempre, algunas novedades a nivel formación. Si bien hay una base que se viene manteniendo hace tiempo, David Thomas decide contraponer tres guitarras para este álbum. Los encargados son Keith Moliné (que reemplazo en 2005 a Tom Herman), Gary Siperko de The Tombs y el inmenso Kristof Hahn de Swans. Esta batalla de cuerdas discordantes y anárquicas consigue una atmosfera en la que el gordo Thomas se mueve como pez en el agua. Ambientes que oscilan entre lo denso y agobiante (sobre todo en la segunda mitad del disco) y que tienen también su impronta frenética, punky y acalorada que dotan a "20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo" de abundantes capas y un fascinante sonido cavernoso. También destacan varias letras de Thomas, dueñas de una poesía tajante y extraña a la altura de la banda. El disco fue lanzado el 6 de octubre por el sello Suma y es el decimosexto disco de estudio para la banda.

Por otro lado, tenemos la prometida tercera parte de un recorrido por la historia del grupo a cargo de Fire Records. Lo interesante de este recopilatorio es que deja de lado la ya gastada fórmula de "The Best of" que poco aporta y propone una serie de discos que reflejan a la banda por periodos y según su evolución. Por ejemplo, en 2015 se lanzó el primer álbum "Elitism for the People" que habla a las claras de la energía juvenil y voraz de los primeros años de Pere Ubu mientras que en 2016 fue el turno de "Architecture of Language", disco que explora el periodo en el que la banda se asumía en un espiral de ansiedad anti-rock y en este 2017 toca "Drive, he said" que aúna el material editado entre 1994 y 2002 y la arremetida de Thomas y Cia. Contra la idea del American Dream. Además de esta innovadora propuesta, Fire Records se encargó de entregar todo el asunto remasterizado y reempaquetado. "Drive, He Said", que es el que nos convoca, recopila tres álbumes: Raygun Suitcase, Pennsylvania y St. Arkansas así como un disco adicional de extras titulado Back Roads. Son discos que comparten un sentido rutero que se puede notar tanto en los títulos de las canciones, en las letras y las ilustraciones. Por ejemplo, en el tema que abre "Raygun Suitcase", Thomas se hace eco de las sesiones transcontinentales de Jack Kerouac así como de las palabras de Hunter S. Thompson y de su propia poética desolada e irreverente que no se queda atrás: In the ghost town inside of my heart / all the downtown is parking lots.

Una de las bandas más trascendentales de la historia del Rock estadounidense y sus dos lanzamientos en este 2017 tienen por supuesto su lugar en la lista de fin de año.

Genero: Post-Rock, Post-Punk, Punk-Rock, Rock Alternativo

Año: 2017

País: EEUU

Duración: 33:51 / 02:45:30

Compresión: 128kbps / 320kbps

Tamaño: 31,2mb / 375,3mb

20 YEARS IN A MONTANA MISSILE SILO

Tracklist:

1- Moneky Bizness  2- Funk 49 3- Prison of the Senses 4- Toe to Toe 5- The Healer 6- Swampland 7- Plan from Frag 9 8- Howl 9- Red Eye Blues 10- Walking Again 11- I can still see 12- Cold Sweat

DRIVE, HE SAID 1994-2002

Tracklist:

1- Folly of Youth 2- Electricity 3- Beach Boys 4- Turuoise Fins 5- Vacuum in my Head 6- Memphis 7- Three things 8- Don't Worry 9- Red Sky 10- Montana 11- My friend is a Stooge 12- Down by the River II 13- Woolie Bulie 14- Highwaterville 15- SAD.TXT 16- Urban Lifestyle 17- Silent Spring 18- Mr. Wheeler 19- Muddy Waters 20- Drive 21- Indiangiver 22- Monday Morning 23- Perfume 24- Fly's Eye 25- Wheelhouse 26- The fevered dream of Hernando Desoto 27- Slow Walking Daddy 28- Michele 29- 333 30- Hell 31- Lisbon 32- Mr. Steve 33- Phone Home Jonah 34- Where's the Truth 35- Dark 36- My name is Ellipsis 37- Surfer Girl 38- Horse 39- Electricity (Board Mix) 40- Dr. Sax 41- Slow 42- The Duke's Saharan Ambition 43- Ray Gun Suitcase 44- SAD.TXT (Live)

DESCARGAR 20 YEARS IN A MONTANA MISSILE SILO 

DESCARGAR DRIVE HE SAID

[sinceileftyoublog]

Pere Ubu Interview: Weave It Together

BY JORDAN MAINZER

When I ask Pere Ubu’s David Thomas whether we have any time limitations during our interview, he responds, “No. As long as you don’t get boring, we’re good.” It’s safe to say he takes the same approach to making music. In recording their latest record 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo, Thomas intentionally prevented the various band members from communicating after presenting them with the base songs. They’d go in separate rooms and only concentrate on what he calls “the integrity of the song” instead of playing off of each other during the recording sessions. While the results on paper may seem like chaos, the album, like any Pere Ubu record, is strange, flawed, and at times, brilliant. But it certainly isn’t chaos.

Distance isn’t new or challenging for Thomas. He moved from Cleveland to London over 30 years ago, eventually settling in Brighton, about an hour south on the coast. More importantly, however, the current incarnation of Pere Ubu--9 members on the album, 6 on tour--have been playing for so long and are such capable musicians that, around the time of our conversation two weeks ago, Thomas couldn’t have been less concerned about how the band is going to adapt the new songs on their upcoming “The MonkeyNet Tour.” “We generally don’t play the hard ones,” Thomas told me. “They take too much rehearsing.”

During our conversation, Thomas broke down various songs on the new record. He also talked about the central themes and characters of the album, the various box sets the band has released over the past few years, and why he wants to “fix” classical music. Read it below, edited for length and clarity, and catch Pere Ubu at the Beat Kitchen on November 18th [tickets can be purchased here.]

Since I Left You: What makes 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo unique as compared to past Pere Ubu records?

David Thomas: Well, most Pere Ubu records are unique in some way, which isn’t much of an answer. Every record, I start off with a different production method. I determine very early on how I’m gonna do it. That usually reflects what I want to do--the ideas that go on with it. This one, as I’ve said, I used a variation of the development of the Chinese whispers method called “the dark room.” It’s frequent with Pere Ubu records, certainly of the recent years. I try to minimize the influence of any musicians. Alfred Hitchcock once said, “The worst thing about making films is the actors. They ruin it.” I kind of feel that way about music. The worst thing about making music is the musicians. They ruin it. It’s a natural behavior to try to accommodate other people in your group. The guitar player has an idea, and the bass player wants to go along with it, and the drummer too. I don’t want people going along with people. At least certainly on this record. 

I want people to concentrate on the integrity and meaning of the song. One way you do that is to not have any communication going on between the musicians, for them to know as little as possible about what anyone else is doing or thinking. A song usually starts as an idea that one person plays, or I edit something together that one person plays. I encourage them to start working on it and do everything I can to prevent them from talking and cooperating with each other. They concentrate on the song--what it means. Everybody has a different view. My job is to weave it all together.

SILY: Why did you name this upcoming tour after the opening track on the new record?

DT: It isn’t really named after it, but it’s sort of a development of that idea. But why? [laughs] Why?!? Because! With any Pere Ubu creation, there’s a lot of different answers to the question “Why?” None of which I’m going to explain. Any Pere Ubu creation, there are a number of layers. I would venture to say at least five layers to everything we do. One of those layers is saying the absolute opposite of what you think the point is. The other layers are irrelevant to the narrative layer. That’s the way Pere Ubu songs have been since the beginning. They’re very complex. They’re a riddle. It’s not like listening to something on the pop radio, “Baby, baby,” sort of nonsense. You’re supposed to be encouraged to ask, “What the hell does this mean? Why is that sound in there? Why is the singer doing this instead of what he should be doing?” There’s a reason. We don’t arbitrarily throw things together.

SILY: But you generally prefer to keep the reasons for doing things layered.

DT: I’m not gonna explain what we do. There’s no point to doing it if you can explain it so easily. The next point is, which layer do you want me to explain? None of them on their own necessarily make sense or give you the complete picture. It’s not like asking Picasso why he uses so much orange. What do you mean, “Why?”

SILY: How did you decide upon the sequencing of tracks from this album?

DT: I told my manager to do it. I’m terrible at sequencing things. Anybody in the band, I know the songs better, for obvious reasons, because I’m the lyric writer and producer. I said to her, “You sequence it.” She had some ideas. There was a period I would run everything in alphabetical order. Everybody liked it the same as when I would slave for hours over it. 

SILY: Some of the standout tracks on the album are the slower burners like “The Healer” and “Plan From Frag 9″. What’s the story of the composition of those tracks?

DT: Those two particular tracks came together in very opposite ways. “The Healer” is essentially the same now as the demo I first heard. There are a few bits and pieces I refined, but it’s basically as it was presented to me. I knew immediately what I was going to do with it, and I knew it was going to be called “The Healer”. I just turned the machine on and started singing. I realized I screwed up the entry to the chorus, so I went back and re-cut the choruses. That’s it. One take. No thinking about it, no doing anything.

“Plan For Frag 9″ was the opposite. [Theremin and analog synth player] Robert [Wheeler] had recorded hours upon hours upon hours of synthesizer stuff. I sat there and listened through it all. I picked out the ones I thought I could make something from. What I could take I chopped it up and put it in line, and the drummer came in and did an astonishing job of making sure there was a sort of rhythm to it. It was pieced together. That was a real labor. Hours and hours just to get the synth track chosen. Hence the title: The pieces I pulled out, I just named them, “Frag 1″, “Frag 2″, “Frag 3″.

SILY: Do you have a favorite song on the album?

DT: I don’t know, do you have a favorite child? I like “The Healer” a lot, I like “Cold Sweat” a lot, I like “Red Eye Blues” a lot. I like them all--there’s nothing on there I cringe at or hang my head and bemoan.

SILY: “Cold Sweat” seems more melancholy than the rest of the record.

DT: It’s a melancholy sort of song. I was going for what exactly is there. There’s one line in it that women always find funny and laugh at, but men just go, “Huh.” I’m not gonna tell you which one. I knew that would be the case. But yeah, I was going for melancholy. But as with all Pere Ubu songs, it’s not one thing. All Pere Ubu songs are funny. I’d be stressed to think of one that’s not funny on some level. Not in an obvious way.

SILY: “Howl” is very bluesy.

DT: That was fun to do! You can imagine a bit more that than “Healer”. Just turn the machine on...there’s a number of tracks on the album that were just, “Turn the machine on and do it” in addition to the ones where you slave over the damn thing for days. “Monkey Business” was probably a one-take song. I generally get things within three takes, and then I do a fourth take because I’m a professional, but I never use the fourth take.

SILY: Is there anything specific the album title refers to?

DT: I chose that story as sort of the theme story for the album. Usually, on any album, there’s a song that sort of encapsulates the theme, and within that song, there’s a line that crystallizes the theme of everything. I was intrigued by the notion of a fellow who spends 20 years staring at the button to Armageddon and goes home at night. Wife asks him, “How was work today?” He’s gotta be the man that pushes the button, and he’s gotta be the man that deals with his kids and loves his wife. That was just something I wanted to work on. I don’t even know if there are missile silos in Montana. I assumed there were. I should have called it “[20 Years in a] Dakota missile silo,” because I know there are missile silos there. But I figured Montana’s gotta have some.

SILY: How did the album cover art come to be?

DT: It was a pretty brutal experience. In the end, again, my manager stepped in and said, “Here: This is what it should be.” I was intrigued by that photo of the man lying on the cot. I thought it was a Russian missile officer because it was taken at a Russian missile base. But it was actually a Scottish tourist [laughs] who was touring and did a blog on Russian missile bases. I found it moving and poignant--this Russian missile officer lying on the crappy bunk bed, and on the desk next to him is a single hot plate, and he’s waving to the camera, to the kids, to the wife. That’s how it came about.

SILY: Does this character exist in any of the songs on the record?

DT: No. I don’t think so. I don’t know. That sort of doesn’t matter to me. The character is there. It’s sort of a theme character to the record. Or that claustrophobic sense is fundamental to almost all of the songs on the record, which is why I point it out as the theme song. The way I do things, the narrative isn’t point A to point B to point C. Or, guy does this, guy does that. I have an idea, I have a picture, and I write to that idea and that picture.

SILY: How are you adapting these songs live?

DT: No clue. We’ve only done a couple rehearsals with 2-3 people at a time. We’ll go into Cleveland and rehearse for a week. We’ll find out. There is an issue that’s gonna come up. There are 9 people on the record and 6 people on the road. So, you know, as with all Pere Ubu songs, we’ll adapt them and find out how to play them live while doing them justice. It usually works out okay. The band has been together so long and are all of a quality musicianship. Things move pretty rapidly. We’ll play it, and I’ll say, “That doesn’t work.” Then, somebody will play it, and I’ll say, “That’s better!” And someone will say something and we’ll play it again and it will be right, and then all we have to do is remember it.

SILY: Over the past few years, you’ve released a ton of box sets. Do those give you an opportunity to really reflect on what you guys have done?

DT: All that stuff is in my head anyway. I know what I’ve done. But it’s interesting to have them grouped the way they were grouped in the construction of them. The two periods of what we call the classic era, Architecture of Language and the Elitism For The People boxes, are grouped the way we constructed them to be grouped. The Drive, He Said box set, those albums were written as a trilogy with one set of stories. I had always hoped that they could be released together. The Fontana box set, which is coming out early next year, those were all conceived in the same sort of pattern. I’m happy that the albums can be viewed as they were meant to be viewed. Grouped together.

SILY: What’s next?

DT: I don’t know. I’ll figure something out. I always have a five-year plan, a long-term plan of where I want Pere Ubu to go and how I want the musicians to work together. I have a dream of having a 15-piece band--I don’t know why 15--but I’d like to have a big band. I’d like to have an orchestra. Because at some point, I’m going to go back and fix classical music. There are a lot of those guys in the 19th century, you could tell they were anticipating or yearning for the coming of electricity, a technology they could have used and were desperately calling out for and were trying to come up with ways of achieving it. At some point, I’m gonna go fix that for them posthumously. And continue to work on getting more and more people in the band and expanding the potential and the palate and the versatility. We already have three different bands. Pere Ubu, the rock band. The Pere Ubu Moon Unit, almost entirely improvisational, taken over from the Two Pale Boys thing I did. And then the Film Unit does live soundtracks. It kind of becomes whatever I want it to become. It can do just about anything. When it can do everything, then I’ll be happy. 

[shadyshack]

If I had voted in the PnJ 2018

...there’s not enough time in the year personally or professionally to listen as much as I’d like to. But, if I had been asked to vote in the Pazz and Jop , this would be my ballot with points assigned. And, some albums I’d like to give a shout out to in the Lagniapppe section that just missed the cut. The dividing line between top ten and these is pretty thin. All listed below gave me a lot of pleasure amid a painful year, but these were the ones I’d truly return to again in the future. I’m not gonna list the albums that missed the cut but maybe I’ll start posting my listening habits here this year and that depends on how busy work and family keep me.  1. Waxahatchee- Out in the Storm- [25]

2. St. Etienne- Home Counties- [15]

3. Protomartyr- Relatives in Descent- [15]

4.  Fred Thomas- Changer- [10]

5. Robyn Hitchcock- S/T  - [10]

6. Nnamdi Ogbonnaya: DROOL-[5]

7. Starlito & Don Trip- Step Brothers 3- [5]

8. Slowdive- S/T-[5]

9. Replacements- For Sale: Live at Maxwell's 1986-[5]

10. Les Amazones d'Afrique- Republique Amazone- [5]  Lagniappe: Grateful Dead- May 1977: Get Shown the Light Prince & the Revoution- Purple Rain Remastered Deluxe Edition Pallbearer- Heartless Dylan Hicks- Ad Out John Moreland- Big Bad Luv Pere Ubu - 20 Years In A Montana Missile Silo Cloud Nothings- Life Without Sound Rolling Blackouts- French Press EP Harriet Tubman Trio- Araminta Craig Finn- We All Want the Same Thing The Perceptionists- Resolution Lorde- Melodrama Mastodon- Emperor of Sand William Parker- Meditation/resurrection Beth Ditto- Fake Sugar Mad Professo & Jah 9- Mad Professor Meets Jah9 In The Midst of the Storm Body Count- Bloodlust GirlPool- Powerplant Angaleena Presley- Wrangled Jay Z- 4:44 Rolling Blackouts- Talk Tight Orchestre Baobab- Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng

[scrambledsignals]

Twenty Twenty-Seventeen Releases That I Enjoyed: Blanck Mass - World Eater Richard Dawson - Peasant Exploded View - Summer Came Early (EP) Fovea Hex - The Salt Garden II (EP) Grouper - Children (Single) Ibibio Sound Machine - Uyai Robyn Hitchcock - Robyn Hitchcock Lau Nau - Poseidon Liars - TFCF The Magnetic Fields - 50 Song Memoir Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked at Me Parquet Courts with Daniele Luippe - Milano Pere Ubu - 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo The Proper Ornaments - Foxhole Sparks - Hippopotamus Surgeon - Convenience Trap (EP) Total Control - Laughing at the System (EP) Trupa Trupa - Jolly New Songs Xiu Xiu - Forget Why? - Moh Lhean

[daggerzine]

Pere Ubu- 20 YEARS IN A MONTANA MISSILE SILO (CHERRY RED/ UBU PROJEX)

You might not think after 40 years that David Thomas would have much left to say but you’d be wrong. Thomas and this lineup of Ubu (not sure how long these guys have been with him ) keep it tight and economical here at these 12 songs grunt by in just under 35 minutes (and apparently each member recorded their own parts separately and Thomas spliced them all together).  On “Monkey Bizness” Thomas and his motley crew define the undefinable and he gets downright heartfelt on “The Healer” which then leads right into the sonic kick of “Swampland (all 1:50 of it).  “Plan Frag 9” is the sound of a helicopter off (then crashing) and “Red Blue Eyes” swings with the best of any era Ubu.  Hey, I like when bands pare it down (especially bands who don’t normally do that) so for me a shorter/tighter Ubu is a better Ubu. Don’t think they’ve lost it, they haven’t    www.cherryred.co.uk  www.ubuprojex.com

[buymycomics]

Pere Ubu – The Long Goodbye – Vinyl, LP, Cherry Red Records, 2019 Pere Ubu - The Long Goodbye - Vinyl, LP, Cherry Red Records, 2019 Pere Ubu unveil their new album, THE LONG GOODBYE, nearly two years after their previous record for Cherry Red, 20 Years In A Montana Missile Silo.

[dothquoth]

Pere Ubu hasn't released an album since you were stomping in their same grounds . Another album was released in 2017. If you haven't listened, do so.

20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo

[muddyfatty]

Pere Ubu 20 Years In A Montana Missile Silo produced by David Thomas.

[bxlilithursus]

Favorite Albums of 2017

In no particular order

Bruce Cockburn, “Bone on Bone”

Mark Eitzel, “Hey Mr. Ferry Man”

David Childers, “Run Skeleton Run”

Emily Saliers, “Murmuration Nation”

Rhiannon Giddens, “Freedom Highway”

Valerie June, “Order of Time”

Pere Ubu,”20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo”

[infolibrary]

30 Interesting Facts About Mobs, Gangs, Mafias and Cartels – Part 2

New Post has been published on http://www.infolibrary.net/30-interesting-facts-about-mobs-gangs-mafias-and-cartels-part-2/

30 Interesting Facts About Mobs, Gangs, Mafias and Cartels – Part 2

Here are 30 Interesting Facts About Mobs, Gangs, Mafias and Cartels.  For part 1, click here.

1-5 Interesting Facts About Mafias and Cartels

1. Between the years 2000 and 2012, the U.S. government had an arrangement with the Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel that allowed the organization to smuggle billions of dollars of drugs into USA, while Sinaloa provided information on rival cartels. – Source

2. Arnold Rothstein, a kingpin of the Jewish mafia who was behind the Black Sox scandal, refused to identify his killer to the police, saying “You stick to your trade. I’ll stick to mine.” – Source

3. In 2011, the Los Zetas drug cartel kidnapped hundreds of innocent bus passengers in Mexico and made them fight to death like gladiators. The winners were then sent on suicide missions – Source

4. During the prohibition era in the 1930’s, a young Mexican kid smuggled whiskey from Mexico to Texas. That kid grew up to be Juan Guerra, the founder of The Gulf Cartel, one of the oldest and most powerful cartels in Mexico’s history. – Source

5. In Mexico, drug cartels have been capturing technicians and making them build their own private cell phone network – Source

6-10 Interesting Facts About Mafias and Cartels

6. Gregory Scarpa, Sr. of the Colombo crime family despised African-Americans so much, that he refused to get blood from a blood bank following an ulcer. He ended up contracting HIV from another Italian mobster who donated his blood to Scarpa. – Source

7. In 2012, Knights Templar Cartel, a Mexican drug cartel personally welcomed the Pope to Mexico, and pledged not to cause any violence during his visit. – Source

8. Iran contracted a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate a Saudi diplomat while in Washington, D.C. The plot was only foiled because the assassin was an informant for the DEA in the War on Drugs. – Source

9. In the 80s, the Medellin Cartel had a complex in the jungles of Colombia called Tranquilandia. It had 19 cocaine laboratories, 8 airstrips, running water, its own electricity system and bedrooms for the workers . When it was raided, 13.8 tons of cocaine was found and destroyed. – Source

10. 40-67% of the marijuana consumed in the U.S. is imported by Mexican cartels, which accounts for only 15-26% of the cartels’ drug-related profits (the rest comes from cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine, in addition to non-narcotic income from activities like kidnapping and extortion). – Source

11-15 Interesting Facts About Mafias and Cartels

11. After watching The Godfather, members of the Patriarca Crime Family started “philosophizing” and improved their grammar.

12. Almost 40,000 people have died in Mexico’s cartel wars since 2006. That is about 5.4 times more than all the combined US casualties from the two current wars, and 13.5 times the deaths during 9/11. – Source

13. Mexico’s drugs cartels operate an encrypted radio station across all 31 states out of the reach of the government. They have even gone green, with solar panels powering the radio towers. – Source

14. A Cuban-American FBI agent spent 3 years undercover in the Gambino crime family, convincing everyone he was Italian. He nearly became a made member of the family before the investigation was stopped. – Source

15. The Genovese crime family is considered as the “Ivy League” and “Rolls Royce” of The Sicilian Mafia, having only 5 members turn state evidence. – Source

16-20 Interesting Facts About Mafias and Cartels

16. American gangster Al “Scarface” Capone got his infamous scars when he told a woman “You got a nice ass” in front of her brother while working at a bar. – Source

17. Jazz pianist Fats Waller was kidnapped to be the surprise guest at Al Capone’s birthday party at gunpoint. He left 3 days later intoxicated with thousands of dollars in tips. – Source

18. Al Capone’s armored limousine, after being seized by the feds, was later used to protect President Franklin D. Roosevelt after the attack on Pearl Harbor. – Source

19. In 1986, 30 million people witnessed the opening of a secret safe of Al Capone, only to find dirt and empty moonshine bottles. – Source

20. Al Capone’s brother was a distinguished prohibition agent and acted as bodyguard to a US president. – Source

21-25 Interesting Facts About Mafias and Cartels

21. In 2005, Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera made an appearance at a restaurant where after taking his seat, his henchmen locked the restaurant doors, collected the cell phones of about 30 diners and instructed them to not be alarmed. After finishing his meal, he then left and paid for everyone’s bill. – Source

22. Colombo Crime Family had a gasoline bootlegging racket in the 1980s, where they collected the state and federal gas taxes and kept the money. At the same time, they were often selling the gas at lower prices than at legitimate gas stations. – Source

23. “Freeway” Rick Ross was a cocaine kingpin in 1980’s Los Angeles, who at one point was making 2-3 million dollars a week. He was illiterate and his cocaine supplier was the CIA, who sold cocaine to illegally finance the Nicaraguan Contras. – Source

24. The U.S. dropped drug trafficking charges against Manuel Noriega after a 50 lb. stash of ‘cocaine’ found in his freezer was revealed to be a 50 lb. stash of tamales. Noriega used the tamales for ‘magic binding’ rituals against his opponents and people he wanted to control. – Source

25. After William Leonard Pickard’s LSD operation was busted for the second time, there was a 90% drop in worldwide availability of the drug. AND he had a missile silo. – Source

26-30 Interesting Facts About Mafias and Cartels

26. Yakuzas operate openly in Japan. They have offices, make charitable donations, and even have large investments in mainstream companies. – Source

27. When Super Famicom (SNES) first launched in Japan, Nintendo had to ship the consoles in the middle of the night so that the Yakuzas couldn’t hijack them. – Source

28. Over 90% of corporations on the Tokyo Stock Exchange held their annual shareholder meetings on the same day and at the same time as a tactic against being blackmailed by the Yakuza. – Source

29. The new president of Ukraine (Oleksandr Turchynov) allegedly destroyed files pertaining to Semion Mogilevich (a crime boss wanted in the USA for defrauding over $150 million from people in Canada and USA, and is now openly living in Moscow, Russia). – Source

30. Don Corleone’s hitman in The Godfather, Luca Brasi, was played by real life hitman Lenny Montana. – Source

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[krakowergroup]

PR: VARÈSE TO REISSUE TWO LP RELEASES OF PERE UBU’S CLASSIC TERMINAL TOWER

VARÈSE VINTAGE CONTINUES TO REISSUE OUT-OF-PRINT ARTIST ALBUMS WITH TWO LP RELEASES OF PERE UBU’S CLASSIC TERMINAL TOWER Terminal Tower To Be Released As A Limited Edition Clear Vinyl Version (500 Units) And A Standard Version (Black Vinyl) “As punk was heating up in New York and London, it was also percolating in Cleveland, where Pere Ubu created an "industrial folk" that sounded post-punk in 1975.” ~ Rolling Stone Top 40 Punk Albums of All-Time

(July 25, 2018– Los Angeles, CA) – Varèse Vintage, a division of Varèse Sarabande Records, is proud to release two LP versions of Pere Ubu’s seminal album Terminal Tower on July 27, 2018.  The label will be releasing a limited edition (500 units) clear vinyl version and a standard black vinyl version.  Terminal Tower was named one of Rolling Stone magazine’s Top 40 punk albums of all time. Pere Ubu was formed in Cleveland in 1975.  Releasing 16 albums over a 40+ year career and continuously helmed by singer/songwriter, David Thomas, the band has been one of the foundations of Avant Garde and Punk Rock in the U.S. and overseas.  Their most recent new release was 2017’s 20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo. Originally released in 1985, Terminal Tower is an essential collection of the band’s early singles and B-sides – all released between 1976 and 1980.  The album is long out-of-print on both CD and LP formats, and has never been released digitally.  These LP versions of the recording have been fully remastered. TRACK LISTING:  1. Heart Of Darkness  2. 30 Seconds Over Tokyo  3. Final Solution  4. Cloud 149  5. Untitled  6. My Dark Ages  7. Heaven  8. Humor Me  9. The Book Is On The Table  10. Not Happy  11. Lonesome Cowboy Dave Varèse Vintage presents Pere Ubu’s Terminal Tower on clear vinyl (limited 500 units) and a standard black vinyl version.  Terminal Tower will be available wherever LPs are sold on July 27, 2018.   # # # www.varesesarabande.com For more information contact KrakowerGroup[at]gmail.com, or @KrakowerGroup on Twitter ABOUT VARÈSE SARABANDE RECORDS Founded in 1978, Varèse Sarabande is the most prolific producer of film music in the world, releasing the highest quality soundtracks from the world’s greatest composers. From current box office hits and top television series to the classics of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Varèse Sarabande’s catalog includes albums from practically every composer in every era, covering all of film history; from Bernard Herrmann, Alex North and Jerry Goldsmith to Alexandre Desplat, Michael Giacchino and Brian Tyler. Varèse Sarabande releases deluxe and expanded editions of special soundtracks for the film music aficionado. The Varèse Vintage imprint specializes in releasing new and re-issued albums by classic pop, jazz and country artists. Varèse Sarabande Records is distributed by Universal Music Group. Follow:  twitter.com/varesesarabande Watch:  youtube.com/varesesarabande Listen:  open.spotify.com/user/varesesarabanderecords Like:  facebook.com/varesesarabanderecords Buy:  varesesarabande.com

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Prison of the Senses by Pere Ubu