#alex butterfield archives

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

The Feelies - Daniel Street, Milford, Connecticut, July 22, 2011

We've heard a few of Alex Butterfield's live recordings of The Feelies — so here's another great one from the esteemed Connecticut-based taper. At this point in the band's second (third? fourth?) life, they had just released the Here Before LP, and the setlist at Daniel Street features a bunch of those tunes, all of which fit in perfectly with the classics.

I've obviously written a lot about live Feelies situations over the years, but let's take a minute to shout out a specific high point from this tape — Glenn Mercer's solo on "Higher Ground." I think you've gotta put it up there with things like Richard Lloyd's "See No Evil" break as one of the sweetest guitar instrumentals of the last half-century. In just about two glorious minutes Mercer takes us on a wild, yet-perfectly controlled trip, raging like Neil Young at one point and then bringing everything back to earth masterfully. I could listen to this piece of music over and over and never get sick of it. Bow down to Glenn!

Lots of other high points here, too, including rare renditions of Dylan's obscure "Seven Days", R.E.M.'s "Carnival of Sorts," and a surging "Slipping (Into Something)". You're also gonna want to stick around for the radical encore one-two punch of "Fa-Ce-La" and "I Wanna Be Your Dog." Lose yourself on the burning sands, friends!

PS - You can check out Alex’s own tunes over here and here, too …

[ao3feed-gwainepercival]

light of the sun (bodes well for others)

by Steamcraft

Merlin’s out of Camelot, and Arthur stands beside him, as the world everyone knew comes to an end. Magic, faeries, and dragons are real, oh my.

Words: 15862, Chapters: 1/20, Language: English

Series: Part 2 of live long in the minds of men

Fandoms: Merlin (TV)

Rating: Mature

Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: F/M, Gen, M/M

Characters: Merlin (Merlin), Arthur Pendragon (Merlin), Lancelot (Merlin), Gwaine (Merlin), Morgana (Merlin), Percival (Merlin), Mordred (Merlin), Uther Pendragon (Merlin), Gaius (Merlin), Nimueh, Hunith (Merlin), Ygraine de Bois (Merlin), original family characters, Aithusa (Merlin), Morgause (Merlin)

Relationships: Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin), Gwaine/Percival (Merlin), Gwen/Lancelot (Merlin), Leon/Morgana (Merlin), Elyan & Mordred (Merlin), Morgana & Morgause (Merlin), Morgana & Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Asa Butterfield Mordred, Alex Vlahos Mordred, Immortal Merlin, Touch-Starved Merlin, Protective Arthur Pendragon (Merlin), Family and Bonds, Big Brother Elyan, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, no beta we die like ao3, End of the World, Dark, Magical Apocalypse, Families of Choice, crashing through mythologies like a freight train, Virgin Merlin (Merlin), Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Kid Fic

source https://archiveofourown.org/works/48784828

[details2decern]

John Cale - Oxford Ale House, New Haven, Connecticut, June 20, 1979

Cale goes to Yale! Or New Haven, at least. Here we’ve got yet another killer tape unearthed from the Alex Butterfield archives — a collection that just keeps on giving. In 1979, Cale was in the thick of his paranoia-stoked Sabotage era. Raw, unforgiving stuff! While his old pal Lou was playing with a bunch of professionals, John seemed to be trying to conjure up the primitive spirit of the early Velvets (or maybe even the early Primitives, as it were). The funny thing is that it doesn’t really end up sounding like the VU; for a band that was so heavily influential, even its founders found it hard to recapture that special Velvety vibe.

But Sabotage and its accompanying tours were their own thing, totally confrontational and scarily feral, with just a few moments of wasted beauty thrown in there. The Oxford Ale House set is extremely tasty, with a nice you-are-there feel to the recording. Stick around for the unhinged 13-minute encore of “Pablo Picasso,” which out-“Sister Ray"s "Sister Ray” in its grinding monomania. Hey, maybe Cale could get back to that White Light / White Heat when he wanted to …

PS - You can check out Alex’s own tunes over here and here, too …

Source: doomandgloomfromthetomb

[ev3v4hn]

Travel & Leisure Magazines Archives

The stops within the highway are areas we’ve seen trend amid the pandemic. You can flip off paid, and lots of have, however earned media and social chatter don’t flip off, which is why communications is extra relevant than ever. It’s a cheap way to inform, educate, and entertain your important audiences throughout this time. The views expressed are as of the date given, could change as market or different circumstances change and will differ from views expressed by different Columbia Management Investment Advisers, LLC associates or affiliates. Actual investments or funding decisions made by CMIA and its associates, whether or not for its personal account or on behalf of clients, might not essentially replicate the views expressed. This information isn’t meant to offer funding advice and doesn’t take into accounts individual investor circumstances.

Belize Removes Use of Travel Health App Caribbean Journal – Caribbean Journal

Belize Removes Use of Travel Health App Caribbean Journal.

Posted: Sun, 16 May 2021 18:33:45 GMT [source]

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Our opinions are our own, and have not been reviewed, accredited, or endorsed by our advertising partners. During the years I worked at Travel + Leisure, ownership changed hands twice. Time Inc. bought the brand from American Express Publishing in 2013, and Meredith Corp. acquired Time in 2018. Use easy search and comparability tools to simply discover one of the best trip. Born in 1966, Butterfield and Robinson focuses Travel on higher end guided and self-guided biking and walking tours to lots of the world’s top destinations. We ship you critiques of freelance writing firms, assignments, and articles to help construct your writing profession. To get began, merely enter your e mail tackle within the type on this page.

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Trip Inspiration

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Feel good to be back on the field with my travel team. Fun day playing against some good teams. #e1prospectssd ⁦@ChicoState⁩ ⁦@GoJacksSDSU⁩ ⁦@AztecSoftball⁩ ⁦@CalSB⁩ ⁦@GoStanford⁩ ⁦@USDSoftball⁩ c/o2024

pic.twitter.com/mUnr6hwKB2

— Aaliyah Brown2024 (@aaliyahbrown_9) May 17, 2021

Agency VCCP develops a visual search device for the airline, allowing customers to instantly guide flights after a flash of social inspiration. Alex Knigge, SVP Corporate Communications, Marketing & Brand at The Emirates Group, shares how his team designs and implements buyer experiences along with business stakeholders and agile development squads. A complete guide to model building for any fashionable marketer. Read one of the largest reports on manufacturers based mostly on emotion and see how sturdy bonds are created. Read our detailed methodologyhere and evaluate the sources cited in this article here.

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[hammondcast]

Hammond Report June 6 2020 From Pandemic Quarantino Jon Hammond

#WATCHMOVIE HERE: Hammond Report June 6 2020 From Pandemic Quarantino Jon Hammond Jon's archive https://archive.org/details/hammond-report-june-6-2020-from-pandemic-quarantino-jon-hammond Youtube https://youtu.be/u-2bHpONJIA

Hammond Report June 6 2020 From Pandemic Quarantino Jon Hammond

by

 Jon Hammond 

Hammond Report June 6 2020 from Pandemic Quarantino 

Jon Hammond

Music and Stories from organist accordionist, today's story "Somewhere Over Taipei" Jon goes on a mission to check up on 'Kevin Saxophone', after cause for concern - we played a lot together while living in Frankfurt Germany. Sporadic sightings and unable to contact, first I did research where to find a Hammond organ in Taipei (thanks Shigeyuki Ohtaka! Hooked me up with 

Nobuki Kuwahara

at the 

Jazz Spot Swing

) finally contacted Kevin on telephone, but he said he was too busy to come and meet me for coffee in the Starbucks. Thanks very much Super Nico from 

Superlux

and Superlux Team Shannon and Letitia, we all descended on the Jazz Spot Swing organ lounge club and I did my best to swing the house with wonderful pianist musician 

Kenichi Toyoda

and while there visited my friend 

Alex Mingmann Hsieh

and the 

Pmauriat Albest

P. Mauriat 保爾‧莫莉亞 Taiwan

pro shop - then I split, so I hope he's OK! 

Last night was the big full Strawberry Moon at beginning of this film you'll see it as it appeared on health walk, enjoy and stay safe everybody! - Jon Hammond 

#HammondReport

#OnAMission

#TaipeiTaiwan

#JazzSpotSwing

#HammondOrganLounge

#StarbucksTaipei

#MissingSaxophonist 

Publication date

 2020-06-06

Usage

 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

Topics

 Hammond Report, Taipei Taiwan, Pandemic Quarantino, Organist, Missing Saxophonist, On A Mission, Organ Lounge, Strawberry Moon, Jazz Spot Swing, Kenichi Toyoda, Jon Hammond

Language

 English 

Addeddate

 2020-06-06 17:15:04

Identifier

 hammond-report-june-6-2020-from-pandemic-quarantino-jon-hammond 

Strawberry Moon last night! https://t2conline.com/how-are-we-coping-with-self-isolation-insight-from-around-the-country-and-the-world-with-jon-hammond/

How Are We Coping With Self Isolation: Insight From Around the Country And The World With Jon Hammond

Jon Hammond plays organ, accordion, piano and guitar. He attended Berklee College of Music and is currently the host of daily CBS radio program “Jon Hammond’s Afternoon Slide” on KYCY 1550 AM. 

Kenny Burrell 2005 NEA Jazz Masters Award Recipient Film by Jon Hammond 

Hammond performs in hospitals, nursing homes and prisons every month in addition to concerts world-wide. He is one of the premier B3 players in the world, playing professionally since age 12. Beginning as a solo accordionist, he later played the Hammond B3 organ in a number of important San Francisco bands. His all original group HADES opened shows for Tower of Power, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Michael Bloomfield. Eddie Money and Barry Finnerty, became musical associates.

In Boston he played the “Combat Zone” and in the striptease clubs during the ’70’s and the exclusive Wychmere Harbor Club in Cape Cod, where he was house organist and developed a lasting friendship with House Speaker Tip O’Neill. He toured the Northeast and Canada with the successful show revue “Easy Living”, and continued his appearances in Boston, New York. and Europe.

In 1981 Jon formed BackBeat Productions and his TV show “The Jon Hammond Show” became a Manhattan Cable TV favorite. Jon’s “Live on the street” saw him with Dizzy Gillespie, Paul Butterfield, Jaco Pastorius, John Entwistle, Sammy Davis Jr., Percy Sledge and many others. The weekly show is now in it’s 23rd year and has influenced the broadcasts of David Letterman and others. Billboard Magazine hailed Jon’s show as “The Alternative to MTV”. The Jon Hammond Show can be seen worldwide at various times streaming from www.mnn.org and on channels 56 and 108 in Manhattan.

T2C: What would you say is the difference of being in self lockdown between NY and LA?

Jon Hammond: In San Francisco it is less dense and pretty quiet, we can hear children playing outdoors, a lot of chalk challenge art on streets & driveways!

T2C: What have you been able to accomplish in this time?

Jon Hammond: Going through a lot of old hard drives, catching up on correspondence and staying on top of the news like a blanket.

T2C: What has this time stopped you from accomplishing?

Jon Hammond: I’m a long-time performer in nursing homes & hospitals, we can no longer deliver the music, and I had annual gigs in Europe canceled for first time in over 30 years.

Summer NAMM Show, Avid Stage, Funk Band, Hammond Organ, Nashville, Outdoor Concert, Horn Section, Rhythm Section, Live Recording

T2C: What kind of emotions does this time bringing out of you?

Jon Hammond: Sad, Nervous, Trouble sleeping, I’m upset in general, not only because of the pandemic, but old yellow hair daily tearing down our beautiful Country and he walked back Civil Rights 60 years at least!

T2C: If you were to equate this time to a song or song cycle what would it be?

Jon Hammond: I wrote a song some years ago to play in annual San Francisco County Jail gig, it is entitled: “Soon I Will Be Free” – sort of apropos during this time as we are waiting out a lot of things.

Jon Hammond

T2C: What message would you like to give the world right now?

Jon Hammond: Be kind, check in on your neighbors folks!

Hammond Report, Taipei Taiwan, Pandemic Quarantino, Organist, Missing Saxophonist, On A Mission, Organ Lounge, Strawberry Moon, Jazz Spot Swing, Kenichi Toyoda, Jon Hammond

[foryourart]

Photo courtesy of Noah Stern Weber. Image courtesy of REDCAT.

Thursday, November 9

37th Annual Sale, HENNESSEY + INGALLS BOOKSTORE (Downtown), 10am–8pm. Through November 12.

ArtOASIS Showcase, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (San Diego), 10am–12pm.

Young-Il Ahn and Ann Weber: Moon over San Pedro, Long Beach Museum of Art (Long Beach), 11am–8pm.

Alison Blickle Artist Talk, Five Car Garage (Santa Monica), 12:30–3:30pm.

Talk: Gallery Talk: The Art of Looking—Greek Goddesses: Reconstructed & Deconstructed, LACMA (Miracle Mile), 12:30pm.

Course: One-Day Workshop: Collage in Fine Art, LACMA (Miracle Mile), 1pm.

Garden Talk & Sale - Sex in the Garden, The Huntington (San Marino), 2:30pm.

LAND Sense of Place First Movement Reception, Santa Monica Pier (Santa Monica), 4–5:30pm. Reception to follow.

Gallery Talk: Erin Aldana, Guest Curator, University of San Diego (San Diego), 5pm.

Artist and scholar walkthroughs: Artemisa Clark, Hammer Museum (Westwood), 6pm.

Gravity's Peacock, MAK Center for Art and Architecture (West Hollywood), 7–9pm.

Danny Lyon: Vintage Works, Fahey/Klein Gallery (Hollywood), 7–9pm.

Conor Ekstrom, Hannah Hoffman Gallery (Hollywood), 7–9pm.

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA presents Poets, Artists, and Anarcho-super8istas, MOCA Grand Avenue (Downtown), 7pm.

Live! at the Museum: The Artisan Guitar Ensemble, Laguna Art Museum (Long Beach), 7pm.

Writing Now Reading Series: Fanny Howe, CalArts (Valencia), 7–10pm.

Paul Brach Lecture Series: Artie Vierkant, CalArts (Valencia), 7pm.

A.E. Stallings, Hammer Museum (Westwood), 7:30pm.

Film: An Evening With...Darren Aronofsky, LACMA (Miracle Mile), 7:30pm.

Boosting Your Side Hustle With Gina Delvac, Women’s Center for Creative Work (Frogtown), 7:30–9:30pm. $20–25.

Keeril Makan and Jay Scheib: Persona, REDCAT (Downtown), 8pm.

Persona, LA Opera (Downtown), 8pm.

Anne Bray Presents: How Can You Resist?, Echo Park Film Center (Echo Park), 8–10pm.

KCIA Presents: ACID TONGUE, CalArts (Valencia), 10pm.

Friday, November 10

"We Are CalArts" -The Role of the Spiral in Movement & the Body, with Babette Markus, CalArts (Valencia), 1–4pm.

School of Music Visiting Artist Series: Kate McGarry, Keith Ganz, Gary Versace, CalArts (Valencia), 2–4pm.

Documentary Screening: Frederick Hammersley: By Himself, The Huntington (San Marino), 3pm.

Off the Wall, Shoebox Projects (Lincoln Heights), 6–9pm.

Words and Music, LAST Projects (Downtown), 7–11pm.

Screening: Death by Delivery, California African American Museum (Downtown), 7–10pm.

Feminist Acting Class, Women’s Center for Creative Work (Frogtown), 7–10pm. Through November 12. $120–150.

William Kieffer: City of Fish, Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific (Long Beach), 7–11pm.

POP-UP MUSEUM: JOURNEY, Museum of Latin American Art (Long Beach), 7–8:30pm.

X-TRA Fall Launch Event: Candice Lin and Miljohn Ruperto in conversation, Ghebaly Gallery (Downtown), 7:30–9:30pm.

James Tenney: Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps, The Box (Downtown), 8pm.

The Seagull, CalArts (Valencia), 8pm. Through November 12.

Saturday, November 11

Quiet Mornings: Art x Mindfulness, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (Downtown), 9:30am.

Dance Resource Center's 3rd annual Day of Dancer Health, Art Share LA (Downtown), 10am–5pm.

Designer Con 2017, Pasadena Convention Center (Pasadena), 10am–7pm. Through November 12.

American Indian Arts Marketplace, The Autry Museum of the American West (Los Feliz), 11am–5pm. Continues November 12.

THE LATINO COMICS EXPO – DAY 1, Museum of Latin American Art (Long Beach), 11am–5pm.

Young-Il Ahn: When Sky Meets Water, ParticiPoetry with Karen Holden, and Ann Weber: Moon Over San Pedro, Long Beach Museum of Art (Long Beach), 11am–5pm.

Tony DeLap: A Career Survey, 1963—2017, parrasch heijnen gallery (Downtown), 12–3pm.

Vantage, Finishing Concepts (Monterey Park), 12–5pm.

LIT! A Menorah & Candelabra Clay Workshop with Ben Medansky, Craft and Folk Art Museum (Miracle Mile), 1–4pm.

Artemisa Clark: La clase de dibujo libre/Free Drawing Class (2000-2004/2017), Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena), 1:30–4pm.

Build a Revolutionary Bear Workshop, WILLIAM GRANT STILL ARTS CENTER (West Adams), 2–4pm.

Lani Trock: Free Food, Big Pictures Los Angeles (Mid-City), 2–5pm.  

PMCA 1234: Second Saturday Spotlight Talk, Pasadena Museum of California Art (Pasadena), 2pm.

In Dialogue: Film in Cuba, Pasadena Museum of California Art (Pasadena), 2:30pm.

LARISA LAIVINS: ONE DAY POP-UP SHOP, Arcana Books on the Arts (Culver City), 3–6pm.

Channing Hansen: Fluid Dynamics, Marc Selwyn Fine Art (Beverly Hills), 4–6pm.

Double Issue Book Release Party, Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena), 4–6pm.

Materials & Applications 14th Anniversary Gala, Navel (Downtown), 5–8pm.

Workshop: Lighting Design for Dance and Performance with Carol McDowell, Pieter (Lincoln Heights), 5–9pm. $30–50.

Hot Flat, Angels Gate Cultural Center (San Pedro), 5–9pm.

Yossi Govrin, Stephanie Cate & Deborah Lynn Irmas, barba contemporary art (Palm Springs), 5–9pm.

David Krovblit: Shells and John Nyboer: The Real Future: Dancers at The Lot, Los Angeles, Lois Lambert Gallery (Santa Monica), 6–9pm.

Jimi Gleason: Reflected & Absorbed, William Turner Gallery (Santa Monica), 6–8pm.

Art Circles, Getty Center (Brentwood), 6–8pm.

Emily Counts: The Associations, Garboushian Gallery (Beverly Hills), 6–8pm.

JOSH REAMES: Don't cross streams while trading horses, Luis de Jesus (Culver City), 6–8pm.

MICHELLE GRABNER: PATTERNS IN METAL AND OIL and Michael St. John: Portraits of Democracy, Edward Cella Art & Architecture (Culver City), 6–8pm; talk with Mary Weatherford, 5pm.

Nevine Mahmoud: f o r e p l a y, M+B (West Hollywood), 6–8pm.

Hecate, Various Small Fires (Hollywood), 6–8pm.

Aria McManus: Relieviation Works, AA|LA (West Hollywood), 6–9pm.

Anthony Miserendino: Aromi, Moskowitz Bayse (Hollywood), 6–9pm.

Camilo Restrepo: Mera Calentura and Claire Milbrath: Crome Yellow, Steve Turner (Hollywood), 6–8pm.

Andrew Brischler: Lonely Planet, Gavlak (Hollywood), 6–8pm.

Strange Attractors: The​ ​Anthology​ ​of​ ​Interplanetary​ ​Folk​ ​Art Vol.​ ​1​ ​Life​ ​on​ ​Earth, Redling Fine Art (Hollywood), 6–8pm.

Gary Simmons: Balcony Seating Only and Tomorrow’s Man 4, Regen Projects (Hollywood), 6–8pm.

Elizabeth Ferry, Grice Bench (Downtown), 6–9pm.

TELMO MIEL: Bit and Pieces, Odds and Ends, Torrance Art Museum (Torrance), 6–9pm.

TELMO MIEL: Bit and Pieces, Odds and Ends, Fullerton Museum Center (Fullerton), 6–9pm.

THE FUTURE MOVES SLOW, Schoos Night Gallery (West Hollywood), 7–10pm. 

Anja Salonen: new dimensions in recreation, Ana Segovia de Fuentes: Boys and Boots, and Ammon Rost: Paintings, ltd los angeles (Mid-City), 7–9pm.

Eric Leiser: Time Crystals, Museum as Retail Space (MaRS) (Downtown), 7–10pm.

Ghetto Gloss | The Chicana Avant-Garde, 1980-2010, Bermudez Projects (Cypress Park), 7–10pm.

Saturday Nights at the Getty Presents María Volunté: Blue Tango Project, Getty Center (Brentwood), 7:30pm.

Floricanto's Fiesta del Dia de los Muertos, Lee Strasberg Academy (West Hollywood), 8pm.

James Tenney’s Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps, The Box (Downtown), 8pm.

Sunday, November 12

Terrain Biennial Los Angeles, Ana Mendieta Performance Day, 3651 Mimosa Drive (Glassell Park), 10am–7pm.

MOCA Day Party, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (Downtown), 11am–5pm.

CREATE - Opposites Attract / Los opuestos se atraen, ESMoA (El Segundo), 11am–3pm.

Mini Clothes Fun: Doll Clothes Workshop with Ruth Root, 356 Mission (Downtown), 12–6pm.

Talk: Korean Art Lecture Series | Fugitive Contemporaries: Korean Art After 1979, LACMA (Miracle Mile), 1pm.

Open Studios, FlechtroNEONics (Van Nuys), 1–5pm.

God’s Eye Yarn Weaving: A CraftLab Family Workshop, Craft and Folk Art Museum (Miracle Mile), 1:30–3:30pm.

Studio Sunday on the Front Steps, Santa Barbara Museum of Art (Santa Barbara), 1:30–4:30pm.

Volunteer Appreciation and Recruitment, ONE Archives (Downtown), 2–4pm.

The Landscape Designs of Ralph Cornell, The Huntington (San Marino), 2pm.

How Does Nature Deepen Our Connection to the Sacred?, Getty Center (Brentwood), 3pm.

WORN IN NEW YORK: 68 SARTORIAL MEMOIRS OF THE CITY by EMILY SPIVACK, Arcana Books on the Arts (Culver City), 3pm.

Walkthrough of Axis Mundo with Joey Terrill, MOCA Pacific Design Center (West Hollywood), 3pm.

Hannah Greely and Upstairs: William T. Wiley, Parker Gallery (Los Feliz), 3–5pm.

Alex Israel and Jack Bankowsky, Art Catalogues at LACMA (Miracle Mile), 4pm.

Human Resources Benefit Party and Auction, Ghebaly Gallery (Downtown), 5–8pm.

Performance | River of Everyone River of No One, Main Museum (Downtown), 6:30–8pm.

My Mother the Doctor, Leiminspace (Chinatown), 7–10pm.

Film Screening & Panel Discussion: Fresa y Chocolate/Strawberry and Chocolate, Pasadena Museum of California Art (Pasadena), 7:30pm. 

Tuesday, November 14

Performing the Musical Body: Robyn Nisbet, Pieter (Lincoln Heights), 10am–2pm. $45.

Film: The Girl from Mexico, LACMA (Miracle Mile), 1pm.

Talk: Cur-ATE: Chagall and the Arts, LACMA (Miracle Mile), 6pm.

An evening with Analia Saban and Gabriel Kuri, Getty Center (Brentwood), 7–9pm.

Wednesday, November 15

Fall 2017 Visiting Artist Lecturer: Thinh Nguyen, Claremont Graduate University (Claremont), 4:30pm.

Heather Gwen Martin: Currents and Deborah Butterfield: Three Sorrows, L.A. Louver (Venice), 6–8pm.

AMBIGUOUS REALITY, Santa Monica Art Studios (Santa Monica), 6–9pm.

FOWLER OUT LOUD: MINDFUL MUSIC, Fowler Museum (Westwood), 6–7pm.

Wikipedia Fall Fundraiser, Annenberg Space for Photography (Century City), 7-9pm. $250–25,000.

Rethinking: Programming, Women’s Center for Creative Work (Frogtown), 7–9pm.

Distinguished Fellow Lecture - Did Early-Modern Schoolmasters Foment Sedition?, The Huntington (San Marino), 7:30pm.

[symbianosgames]

It seems like the majority of people working in or with small and middle-sized game studios and teams use the cloud-based chat app these days. Put a call out to game developers asking which of them use Slack and you will get a lot of responses.

This is perhaps to be expected given that Slack was conceived within the context of game development. Stewart Butterfield originally created Slack as a way to organize the multiple online conversations between the people he led while working on the now-defunct MMO Glitch. Unlike other chat services, Slack (an acronym for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge) splits the conversation across multiple channels, each of which can be given a designated topic. It also allows people to directly message each other privately and bring in others to that conversation if they choose.

On top of that, Butterfield intended for Slack to be integrated with the team’s favorite services, like GitHub and Dropbox. Source code and files from either can be imported to Slack so the whole team has easy access to them, can keep track of any changes, and collaborate on their development in the same online space. This integration remains to this day, years after Butterfield released Slack to the public, and has in fact grown to include many more services, such as Google Drive and Trello.

The ubiquity of Slack has us wondering about its impact on game development teams and how they work in recent years. Adventure game pioneer Ron Gilbert, recently tweeted that he considers Slack to be the “most useful tool [he’s] seen in game development over the past 30 years.” 

Speaking to Gilbert, he reveals the reason he made this statement is due to how Slack has changed how he works within game development teams. Before Slack, he used an instant messaging service, which only allowed for one-to-one conversations. With Slack’s multiple channels and group conversations he’s found a way to not only converse better, but to build a sense of community among his team, despite the distance between them.

"What Slack has allowed is building a tight team in a way that in the past would have required an office and everyone to be local."

“What Slack has allowed is building a tight team in a way that in the past would have required an office and everyone to be local,” Gilbert says. “Slack is more about building your team’s community than just communications. I can now go out and hire the best person and not have to worry about them being in Seattle, or moving them here.”

Even once a person’s work is done on a project, Gilbert lets them remain in the Slack group, where they can continue to be involved in the game if they wish, and also keep up with the team as friends. “I also really appreciate Slack’s billing,” adds Gilbert, “they automatically drop people from your bill if they don’t log in, and add them back when they do.”

It’s the accessibility of Slack that allows Gilbert to so easily add and remove people from his group. This is something that prolific game maker and member of six Slack groups, Alex Bethke, speaks about as well. 

“Most developers who use it do so for its accessibility - it’s just so easy to bring new team members on board,” says Bethke. “The barrier to entry is super low, which is very important for the adoption of any tool, especially across multidisciplinary fields like game development. The search features seem pretty clean and equally easy to use, which makes finding details a lot easier than something like email threads or Google Hangouts.”

"I like the way that even the team members not directly involved with a particular aspect of the game can see the conversation developing, and therefore have a good handle on the wider issues around the specific part they're working on."

As Bethke says, central to Slack’s accessibility is its channel-based setup, which many developers use to split up what were unwieldy conversations in other chat apps. That’s what Ricky Haggett of Hollow Ponds found especially useful when using Slack for the first time recently, while creating his roguelike Loot Rascals. 

“We ended up keeping the number of channels quite small, so as not to spread the conversation over too many places - especially for a game where so many of the systems interlock and overlap, but it was great to be able to have specialized ones, e.g. for audio + music,” says Haggett.

“I like the way that even the team members not directly involved with a particular aspect of the game can see the conversation developing, and therefore have a good handle on the wider issues around the specific part they're working on. And sometimes those people chime in with a really good idea.”

  via solidwhetstone

The idea that Slack helps to bring a team together as they collaborate is brought up by a lot of the game developers that use it. It seems to be an increasingly important goal for teams that are spread across the world, especially as governments introduce policies that make it harder to physically cross borders. 

"Almost every game studio I know uses it. I don't have to worry about managing multiple communication apps on my desktop, I can just confine it all to Slack."

Toronto-based Gabby DaRienzo is one of many people who has been working on a more international level since she started using Slack. She’s currently a member of 21 different Slack groups: one for her own studio Laundry Bear Games, others for the freelance game projects she works on remotely (Graceful Explosion Machine, Parkitect, Celeste), and many more for specific community groups she contributes to. 

“Before, we primarily worked with local folks because it was easier,” says DaRienzo, “but Slack's ease of use allows us to collaborate with anyone from anywhere, which opens up a lot of options for us that we wouldn't have considered before.”

It’s the fact that all these different teams and communities are using Slack that makes it possible for DaRienzo to participate in all of them. “It's a very convenient tool because almost every game studio I know uses it,” she says. “I don't have to worry about managing multiple communication apps on my desktop, I can just confine it all to Slack.” DaRienzo says she’s able to jump between the different teams with ease and manage multiple projects at once.

"English is not the mother tongue of our team. Slack allows us to look up translations before sending messages, making discussion less stressful and more efficient."

Another way that Slack has helped to unite team members from different countries is seen at Danish studio Bedtime Digital. The team is currently split across several ongoing projects that are made up of people with various nationalities: Danish, French, German, and Ukrainian. Many of them are based in the studio’s office in Denmark, so distance isn’t the problem that Slack solves, it is instead translation.

“As we communicate almost exclusively in English, and it is not the mother tongue of any of us, communicating [in Slack] allows people to look up translation for some words before sending messages,” says producer Emilie Mavel. “It helps make discussion less stressful and more efficient.” 

While Slack has helped to bridge people across countries and encourages them to collaborate across long distances, it is also used, perhaps even more commonly, to improve local office spaces. There are a number of ways in which Slack is used for this purpose.

"It's a bit like a large shared whiteboard that also supports copy/paste."

“Slack serves as the communication tool for everything that needs to be noted down somewhere,” says Simon Wallner, of four-person team Lost in the Garden. “Pasting links to the occasional Google Doc, festival entry form, or dropping stack traces and error messages. It's a bit like a large shared whiteboard that also supports copy/paste.” 

As the team at Lost in the Garden is based in an office, they enjoy a lot of face-to-face communication. But Slack’s accessibility and its integration with many important development tools and programs have made it the perfect medium for anything that needs to be written down or that needs multiple eyes and hands on. 

Tanya Short of Kitfox Games agrees with this sentiment. She says that, even in her team of six people, they might be discussing three projects at once, with some members involved in all of them. For her, Slack’s multiple channels, “where infodumps or files or questions can happen without breaking anyone's flow is valuable.”

"It has definitely allowed for fewer interruptions, fewer meetings, and a quieter workplace."

However, one complaint Short has with Slack is that it’s “tempting to use it for file sharing or archiving, which is way too messy and weird compared to ACTUAL file sharing solutions otherwise implemented (Dropbox, Google Drive, SVN, etc).”

Something else that she touches upon, and which is brought up by many game developers who use Slack, is that it helps to keep noise down in offices. “It has definitely allowed for fewer interruptions, fewer official meetings, and a quieter workplace, even though we have an open floor plan,” she says.

Paul Lawitzki, a coder at seven-person team Chasing Carrots, builds upon what Short says on Slack’s ability to keep noise down and allow for fewer interruptions. The biggest advantage of communication through Slack from Lawitzki’s coder perspective is that you don’t have to respond to requests immediately. Its multiple channels help to break up the conversation so he can skim them and prioritize based on what he sees. But he adds that, when he’s “in the zone,” he can ignore the requests completely and come back to them later, whereas verbal communication used to completely interrupt his flow.

“This is actually a big issue in programming,” Lawitzki says. “If you're in the middle of something, even the shortest interruption might basically reset your entire chain of thoughts.” He brings up a cartoon made famous around coders as it speaks to this common issue.

Jason Heeris's comic illustrates the interruptions that Slack can help to minimize

He also points to a thread on StackExchange that saw coders discussing how to explain to people why they shouldn’t be interrupted while they’re deep into their work.

“Slack definitely had an impact on our team’s communication,” Lawitzki continues. “Unless there is something urgent to discuss directly or to showcase, most of the talking moved from the office space over to the kitchen and lunch area.”

"It's a double-edged sword. If I need to concentrate on a specific piece of coding or writing, I may have to go off chat for a while — but that in turn impacts other team members."

However, Robert Zubek, coder at SomaSim, hasn't had such a positive experience with Slack. He calls it a double-edged sword. “The awesome immediacy also means that team members end up interrupting each other, and that can be acceptable or it can be damaging, depending on what people are working on,” says Zubek. “If I'm doing easy tasks I don't mind being interrupted, but if I need to concentrate on a specific piece of coding or writing, I may have to go off chat for a while — but that in turn impacts other team members.”

“It feels like we're recapitulating the same kind of interruption-related problems that people used to complain about with Outlook or Crackberries a decade ago — we've ended up with the same expectations that people will reply right away, and you have to carefully manage your participation,” continues Zubek. “I wish there was a one-click way to say, ‘enable do-not-disturb mode for all channels, except for these important ones.’ That would go a long way towards reducing interruptions.”

Adding a third coder’s perspective, Wallner has experimented with Slack’s custom integrations feature and found that  it can also have a positive effect on the programming process. His team at Lost in the Garden initially tried out a Bitbucket repo with commit notifications that posted to a Slack channel. But this was quickly swapped out for a self-hosted repo. What’s been more effective for them is having their build pipeline and upload tools posted to a Slack channel.

“Our build pipeline allows us to create a large number of different builds in one batch. It runs on our work computers and also has the option to shutdown the computer afterwards,” says Wallner. “Before I go home, I start the build and can still monitor the progress from home. We also integrated notification into our upload script in a similar way. All very easy with a single line of bash script.” 

Coders aren’t the only people who find it useful to customize Slack. Marketers and producers also tailor it to help them out with managing their teams and acquiring any assets they need. 

"My favorite feature is being able to set up bots to automatically notify the entire team about mentions and daily reports, instead of having to look up Google Analytics, Google Trends, Tweetdeck, Facebook, Tumblr, etc."

“As someone who is in charge of marketing, my favorite feature is being able to set up bots to automatically notify the entire team about mentions and daily reports, instead of having to look up Google Analytics, Google Trends, Tweetdeck, Facebook, Tumblr, etc, one by one,” says Camila Gomaz, business developer and artist at Chile-based studio Bura.

London-based developer Steven Yau has also seen marketing people use Slack and HipChat in a similar way but his experience is part of a team in a much larger company. “There would be one or several channels for notifications from JIRA, GitHub, Trello, Jenkins, etc to give a timeline on what is happening on the project at any point in time especially for non-developers,” he says.

“An example would be Jenkins sending notifications to HipChat/Slack for every incremental build and detailing the changelog so Producers and QA know what features and/or bugfixes have made it into each build,” continues Yau. 

He says that, as the team was in a single building, a lot of communication was done verbally, so these chat apps were customized so external people who, for example, might want to request game assets for marketing purposes, could quickly get hold of the person they needed.

The other reason to customize Slack comes from something Bethke picks out as one of its most unexpectedly important features. “The #random channel you get by default also seems to be a powerful but subtle concept,” he says. “This gives a dedicated place for people to talk and clutter up separate from topic-themed channels. People like to chatter, that's just a fact of life, so giving them a place to do that keeps it out of the places it would otherwise show up.”

"People like to chatter, that's just a fact of life. So giving them a place to do that keeps it out of the places it would otherwise show up."

It’s things like the #random channel that, as Gilbert mentioned earlier, allows Slack to help with building a community. One way towards doing this is creating custom channels that help a team discuss certain subjects or issues. This is something Joon Van Hove, one of three members of game collective Glitchnap, found to be a key feature of Slack.

“Something I learned from working remote, as well as from working on multiple projects simultaneously, is that there often isn't a good way to talk about small issues or friction that happens between colleagues,” he says. “Within a few months of using [Slack], we started a channel called #notimpressed. It was a way for us to vent on small things that others did that annoyed us, or when we are annoyed with ourselves, without having to go into conversation.”

Van Hove says most issues were dealt with in a lightweight or comedic fashion, and included bugs in codes, typos in pitch documents. But that channel was also used to notify each other if they were running late or would miss a deadline. 

“It removes some pressure, because without a separate space for it, these frictions would enter other conversations where they can only function as distractions,” he says. “Similarly we have #impressed (for shoulder patting and encouragement) and #puppets where we made emoji faces of each of us and have mock-conversations or re-enactments of funny events.”

  Glitchnap isn’t alone in embracing Slack’s custom emojis to find some relief from the workload. It seems nearly every game development team has jumped on this feature. “We added Sid Meier and Will Wright to our emoji collection, because somehow prominent gamedev personalities are part of some of our inside jokes,” says Lawitzki. 

“One of our team mates even made it into the collection and are used very regularly. It adds a lot to our own internal little culture. Yes, we goof around a lot. But it also increases our productivity.” As with many other teams, Lawitzki’s infused Slack with their own personality, which makes it a better place to hang around and to get to know the team better. 

Wallner and his Vienna-based team turned the “user icon for the build bot [into] Vienna's city mayor exclaiming ‘the cheap wine shall be brought in!’” As Vienna hosts the Sigmund Freud museum, the team also added his face as an emoji as he’s “always lurking behind every corner.” Other custom emojis in Wallner’s Slack group include Richard Nixon, Not Bad Obama, Grumpy Cat, and KHAN!. A few developers have said that communicating with custom emojis like this has helped to speed up communication as well as bring people closer over time.

Also mentioned a few times by developers as a treasured feature is the randomized GIF integration that Slack has with RightGIF and GIPHY. “You write ‘/gif anything-you-want’ and you get a terrible GIF which is NEVER right,” says game developer Pierre Corbinais, currently working on Bury me, my Love with an international team. “This is hilarious every time.” Not knowing what GIF will turn up when entering that shortcut into Slack has become a game for some teams that always results in a shared laugh. Again, it helps to establish a sense of community with long-running inside jokes.

By now, it should be easy to see that there are many reasons why so many people have started using Slack and stuck with it. But if you compare it to other tools and chat apps out there, there aren’t all that many differences between them and Slack. Why, then, did people switch over to Slack? Following are some answers to that.

“We switched from Skype because Skype doesn't travel well - specifically, it had this annoying tendency to constantly call old messages new notifications ,even if they'd already been read on other computers,” says Short. “Skype also tried to do lots of background surveillance, aggressive forced updates, and we have a general distrust of Microsoft, so... we tried the switch and it worked. I think the only other similar communication tool would be email, which feels cumbersome by comparison.”

Australian game developer Jarrad Woods, aka Farbs, also compares Slack to Skype, and brings up one of the same grievances as Short. “Being server based, you no longer need to be online at the same time as someone else to receive messages,” he says. “Watching Skype barf up three hours of messages because someone else logged in, while you were halfway through a conversation with someone else, was super weird and disorienting.”

"Now we don't have to bother with the server administration anymore, and all the little integrations make our everyday life funnier and more enjoyable."

Mélanie Christin, co-founder at French studio Atelier 801, found Slack to be a better way to unite technical and non-technical people in her team. “We used to have a jammer server with Spark, then Pidgin, and it was a hassle to maintain, and not very user-friendly for the non-tech profiles,” she says. “Now we don't have to bother with the server administration anymore, and all the little integrations make our everyday life funnier and more enjoyable.”

Ichiro Lambe of Dejobaan Games has been using text-based collaboration tools for game development since the late 1980s, “back when 2400 baud modems were all the rage.” Now he’s using Slack, which he sees as simply the next best thing for game studios to use in a long lineage of chat programs.

“In the late '90s, we used ICQ; during the '00s, we used Trillian; we eventually used group chats in Google Hangouts and Skype; and now, finally, Slack. In most cases, it was because the new tools gave us an incremental improvement over the previous method, and that's true here,” says Lambe. 

“Slack's not the only game in town (IRC, Ryver, etc.), but it's pretty easy to get new team members set up, and it ties together nicely with other tools - I can easily pop into a Google Hangout, for instance. And it's extensible enough so that we can integrate some of our own stuff (e.g. we have an integration that squawks every time Steam launches a new game, via What’s On Steam and @MicroTrailers).”

Offering a completely different perspective, Andreas Zecher of Spaces of Play, doesn’t use Slack, but has been using something very similar to it for years. It’s called Campfire, which he describes as “the old-school version of Slack, from a time when web fonts and loud, happy colors were not the UI paradigm yet.” His team haven’t made the leap to Slack as they’re still quite happy using Campfire in tandem with the project management tool Basecamp, made by the same company. 

“We've found that a chat system like Campfire or Slack works best for us to share news and updates between each other, but that important discussions need more structure and should best be done elsewhere: an email thread, a Skype call, or a Basecamp todo,” says Zecher.

One of the reasons that Slack is so popular is that it’s constantly being improved to address issues people have with it and to accommodate for the many different ways teams use it. With that in mind, some of the developers came up with their biggest complaints about Slack that they’d like to see improve in the future. 

"The client is not the fastest, and it's very memory-hungry - if you participate in 10 Slack teams, it will consume almost 2GB of memory just sitting there waiting for messages."

Speaking the words of many developers, Zubek’s complaint is that “the client is not the fastest, and it's very memory-hungry - if you participate in 10 Slack teams, it will consume almost 2GB of memory just sitting there waiting for messages.” Zubek adds that, in the past, he’s had to close Slack to free up memory for development tools so he could actually get on with work - not something he expects from a chat client. “I'm investigating alternatives to Slack for our team, because this is negatively impacting productivity,” he adds.

Lambe isn’t quite as jaded with Slack as Zubek but he has had similar issues that affect productivity. “I want it to act as a better note-taker. Current search is basic enough is that it's a hassle to find anything in its stacked list of keyword search results,” says Lambe. 

“Given the recent fervor around AI (e.g. this), I think someone's eventually going to come up with a tool that helps us summarize the sprawling conversations we have about design, or can intelligently collect and categorize the reference images and video we post for art. I could see a Slack bot becoming a project manager/historian for our team in the not-too-distant future.”

Yau has a similar request to Lambe, saying that he’d like the ability to archive or export messages in chat. “If a conversation about a feature occurs, for example, a link to that particular conversation could be generated and used as reference in a design document.” Yau would also like a way to manage access and viewing permissions on a per channel basis, similar to standard forums. “We could potentially create client accounts without having to expose other projects or company communications,” he says. 

Damian Sommer of Gloam Collective has actually abandoned using Slack for the reason that Yau brings up, now instead using Discord for his current multiplayer game project. “The main reason we switched is because [Discord is] a much stronger community-building tool. It pulls a lot more from IRC in that you can have users with different ranks, which allow us to assign moderation powers and roles that can gain access to specific channels,” says Sommer.

“We figured we're going to need to build a community for our multiplayer game, and if you look online now, most people playing games on PC have heard of or are using Discord. A private Slack group wouldn't gain as much traction. We could have technically used Discord for the Gloam Collective's public-facing stuff, and Slack for its private communications, but we wanted to reduce the amount of programs we'd need to keep track of.”

Sommer also notes that another big problem with Slack is that its price is far too high for small businesses. The current pricing model sees the Standard version costing $6.67 for each user per month, so long as you pay the bill annually. If you pay it monthly then it shifts to $8 per user. The Plus version moves the price up to $12.50 per user each month if you pay annually, or $15 per user if you pay monthly.

Millidge also found the pricing of the premium versions of Slack too high while being disappointed with what’s on offer in the free version. “The 10k post limit for free users does give a big disadvantage when searching for content that has fallen beyond that limit,” he says. “And I can't afford to pay the premium for each member, so I'd hope for an alternative solution, something indies could afford.”

Even with these complaints, most of the people spoken to who use Slack have very positive experiences with it and find that it’s a surprisingly helpful tool for game development. 

Looking at what Lambe says about the lineage of chat apps, with one replacing another as it brings in new improvements, it seems likely that Slack will one day fall out of popularity in favor of whatever comes next. 

But, for now, Slack’s designs and ubiquity has managed to encourage more international collaborations, helped increase productivity for coders and marketers alike, keep offices quiet, and gave teams something to laugh about during breaks.

It’s even managed to serve the needs of Rami Ismail, from Dutch studio Vlambeer, as he flies frequently between countries giving talks and meeting developers. It’s his main method of communication between his team. 

“A lot of things have become more like an 'online office', instead of a weekly Skype checkup,” Ismail says about using Slack. “The ability to drop throw-away remarks, easily share progress and things you're proud of, quickly grab something someone mentioned three months ago - it's all fast and seamless. It really changes the workflow for the better.”

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Sonic Youth - Toad's Place, New Haven, Connecticut, August 7, 1990

Look out, lamestains! The #SonicSummer has hit the 1990s. Grunge, Geffen, GOO! Yes, it would be a wild decade for Sonic Youth — and where else to kick it off than in New Haven, Connecticut. This fabulous tape comes to us from the voluminous Alex Butterfield Archives (you can check out many more of his recordings right here).

"We signed to a major label and got all professional — what can we say?" Lee Ranaldo announces at some point during the band's Toad's Place performance, which took place just a month or two after Goo dropped. Lee is kidding. Sonic Youth sound fairly ramshackle / shambolic for a lot of the set — but righteously so. Long tuning breaks, spontaneous hardcore breakdowns, bouncer baiting ("It's kind of a game, you against them!" Lee encourages the mosh pitters). Thurston keeps asking if his brother has arrived from Danbury yet. "Fuck my brother?!" he asks when someone in the crowd voices their displeasure. "Of course I've fucked my brother, I'm from Connecticut!"

In between all the tomfoolery, SY manage to rock the fuck out, don't worry. The new Goo stuff, which dominates the set, sounds incredible, whether it's a truly vicious "Kool Thing" or an explosive "Cinderella's Big Score" or a snotty "Mary Christ." Best of all is Ranaldo's teetering-on-the-brink "Mote." A new decade had dawned and Sonic Youth was ready to stare straight into the rising sun.

Bandcamp | Merch | Concert Chronology

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

The Cramps - Toad's Place, New Haven, Connecticut, February 20, 1992

Another trip back to Toad's Place courtesy of the Alex Butterfield Archives (if you've been paying attention, Doom & Gloom has shared tapes of Richard Hell, The Feelies, Tom Verlaine, Elkhorn, Guided By Voices, Richard Thompson and many more from this rich trove). Here we've got the mighty Cramps transforming the New Haven club into a gloriously trashy dreamscape for 90 debauched minutes. Lux Interior rages like a madman while Poison Ivy gives a master class in rock n roll guitar. This is a band that knew exactly what they wanted to do and did it with a passionate intensity. And it seems like they had a lot of fun along the way.

Lux Says: We’re just people who remain ever curious. We’re just attracted to whatever comes in handy. Again, like the Surrealists, anything you run across is actually beautiful; within a single city block, you find miraculous things. It’s a good planet — and good things can happen. People think that we’re funny. I kind of feel sorry for them, because it means that they think it’s a joke. We’ve spent our lives searching out incredibly wonderful things that most folks just don’t know about yet.

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Yo La Tengo - The Grotto, New Haven, Connecticut, October 23, 1987

The always-awesome Yo La Tengo is out there promoting This Stupid World in 2023, playing what some are calling the band's best shows ever to adoring crowds. It wasn't always that way! Not that this performance — another fantastic offering from the Alex Butterfield Archives — isn't killer. It's just that not many people at The Grotto seem to really know much about Yo La Tengo. You can almost count the hands clapping. "How ya doin', New Haven!!!" Ira Kaplan shouts, rock-god-style, at the outset, to a thoroughly muted response.

The band (then consisting of Ira, Georgia and bassist Stephan Wichnewski) had just released their second LP New Wave Hot Dogs and much of the set is devoted to ferocious versions of tunes from that (kinda underrated?) album. There are also plenty of covers, of course — a vicious "A House Is Not A Motel," "For The Turnstiles," Antietam's "Orange Song" and a ripping "Rip This Joint" to close things out. Also some rarities, like an Ira-sung "White Rabbit," which would show up about a decade later as "Demons" in a Georgia-led recording for the I Shot Andy Warhol OST.

And then YLT oblige a request for Ride The Tiger's "Cone Of Silence" — a request made by our taper himself. This stupid world might not have been quite ready for Yo La Tengo in 1987, but they were getting somewhere.

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Damon & Naomi - Best Video Film & Cultural Center, Hamden, Connecticut, May 12, 2023

Following up Powers / Rolin, we're keeping it duo-y this week with a fabulous tape of Damon & Naomi in the "almost pretty" state of Connecticut earlier this year. D&N were playing Best Video Film & Cultural Center, a nonprofit venue/community gathering space that honestly seems like one of the coolest places in the entire Nutmeg State. "I don't know why we haven't played a video store before," Damon marvels, later noting the unexpectedly excellent acoustics that a wall of VHS tapes provides.

And yeah, he and Naomi are wonderful as always, playing several tunes from their latest/greatest A Sky Record along with some welcome dips into their rich back catalog, which now stretches back over 30 years. I especially enjoy the songs in which Naomi picks up her bass — such a unique and absorbing sound. In the first issue of the highly recommended new zine Head Voice (more on that soon), Ben Chasny and Elisa Ambrogio go deep with Yang about that sound. "[I]f you play really low all the time, the club starts to vibrate and everything falls off the shelves. It's like a seismic sound, all those super low notes. But I think I really started playing higher up because I always write the bass lines by singing them, so that is where my voice is. I also just thought it sounded pretty and it cut through."

The laid-back setting also encourages banter, so we get to hear about D&N's newly adopted cat, misadventures on the Merritt Parkway and Tim Buckley's appearance on The Monkees. And hey, there's even a majestic rendition of the old Galaxie 500 chestnut "Another Day" ... though I'm also going to suggest you check out the radical version of this song from around the same time with Meg Baird and Charlie Saufley. (Oh and then maybe you can dig the quartet's radical Popol Vuh cover???)

In case you haven't guessed yet, this recording is another dig into the Alex Butterfield Archives, which have given us untold treasures over the past several years. Go dig through the tapes! Thank you, Alex!

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Sonic Youth - Mather Campus Center, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, July 1, 1992

For our 1992 installment of the #SonicSummer, we're back in Connecticut and back with another killer tape unearthed from deep within the Alex Butterfield Archives. After several years of hard touring, Sonic Youth had actually taken a fair amount of time away from the stage in the first half of 1992. But they were back on the road on the riot trail come summer.

This Trinity College gig comes right before the band's legendary Independence Day double bill in Central Park with the Sun Ra Arkestra — and also right before the release of Dirty, which hit the compact disc racks a few weeks later. With Nevermind producer Butch Vig twiddling knobs, Dirty was perhaps Sonic Youth's biggest grab for a commercial breakthrough; the LP didn't exactly burn up the charts like Nirvana, but it certainly brought the group to a wider audience.

In Hartford, the band warms up with some old faves — "Teenage Riot," "Burning Spear" and "Dirty Boots" — before offering the crowd a big helping of the Dirty stuff. Some of it is a little shaky, with a false start on "Drunken Butterfly" being the main offender. But otherwise, the new tunes are rad: the majestic swells of "Theresa's Sound World," the glam-noize of "100%," the sleazoid crawl of "Swimsuit Issue" ... Interestingly, Lee Ranaldo doesn't sing at all throughout the show. Was he still licking his wounds after his awesome "Genetic" was wrongly relegated to b-side status? Maybe! (That tune would be a regular setlist inclusion later on in the year, though.)

The evening ends with a soaring "Expressway To Your Skull," a tune that the band would soon retire for a few years. But it still sounds so good, that molten feedback flowing into your ears. The meaning of feeling good ...

Bandcamp | Merch | Concert Chronology

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

John Sinclair - BAR, New Haven, Connecticut, September 28, 2003

Poet / activist / MC5 manager / disc jockey John Sinclair passed away a few weeks back and the always valuable Alex Butterfield Archives have provided us with a cool artifact to check out: Sinclair holding court with a loose, improvisatory trio in New Haven back during the Bush II administration.

"It's a weird time to be an American," Sinclair remarks at one point — and yeah, it was weird back then. And it's weird now! And it was weird back in the 1960s and early 70s, when John was being harassed by the FBI and getting thrown in jail for marijuana possession. Maybe weirdness is the permanent condition of this country? I don't know. But hey, Alex's tape is very nice, with Sinclair's backing group providing loose-limbed jams that frame their leader's poetically curmudgeonly musings on politics, music, drugs and beyond.

John Says: Turning people on was the core value of our whole thing really. We wanted to turn people on. We just wanted to turn ’em on to art, poetry, and jazz. Then we started taking acid, ya know — regularly, and in groups. And then you developed this messianic feeling: you wanted to turn everyone on to everything. And you’d say, man, this works, you know, you might really like to try this. What a trip that was.

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

The Specials - The Great American Music Hall, New Haven, Connecticut, February 28, 1980

2-Tone in New Haven! The untimely passing of Specials lead singer Terry Hall last month sent me back to their Elvis Costello-produced debut for the first time in a while. And it definitely holds up as just a killer record, regardless of whatever genre affiliation you want to toss its way. Undeniable!

I haven't dug too deep into live Specials, but the Alex Butterfield Archives have come through yet again with a very nice tape of the band in the winter of 1980 on what I assume was their first stateside trip. It sounds like quite a party, with Hall and co. playing rowdy renditions of the early stuff, keeping the crowd engaged throughout. By the end, everyone's roaring along with them, heating up a cold Connecticut night. Do the Dog!

Billy Bragg says: The Specials were a celebration of how British culture was invigorated by immigration from the Caribbean, but the onstage demeanor of their lead singer was a reminder that they were in the serious business of challenging our perception of who we were in the late 1970s.

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Meg Baird + Chris Forsyth, Cafe Nine, New Haven, Connecticut, October 26, 2022

True story — my first exposure to the guitar stylings of Chris Forsyth came via Meg Baird's classic 2011 LP Seasons On Earth. Which is one of the reasons that it's cool that these old Philly phriends have been touring as a sweet double-bill in recent years. I pointed you in the direction of a tape from the Detroit stop of their fall 2022 run a little while back, and now, we've got another excellent recording from the ever-rewarding Alex Butterfield Archives. Thank you again, Alex! Keep it coming.

Accompanied by guitarist Charlie Saufley and the killer rhythm section of Doug McCombs and Ryan Jewell, Meg kicks things off with a set that's heavy on her most recent (though then-unreleased) LP Furling. A good thing — that album was one of my 2023 favorites, a collection that features some of Baird's best songs yet. It's great to hear them in a live setting, with Saufley's sensitive/imaginative leads complementing Meg's keys, voice and guitar. They wrap it all up by inviting Forsyth onstage for "Will You Follow Me Home?", Charlie and Chris getting into a nice Whitten/Young/"Cowgirl In The Sand" kinda interplay.

McCombs and Jewell remain on duty for Forsyth's subsequent set, which showcases the guitarist's most recent LP Evolution Here We Come. As per usual, the sterling six-string work is the main draw — but Doug and Ryan threaten to steal the show; check out the churning groove the pair kick up on the closing "Robot Energy Machine." Unreal!

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Public Image Limited - Toad's Place, New Haven, Connecticut, April 4, 1983

Another farewell, this time to pioneering Public Image Limited guitarist Keith Levene. In 2022, it might be hard to fully appreciate how seismic his approach was back in the day — Levene's style has been absorbed fully by the underground (and perhaps the overground, for that matter). But he's still downright thrilling on those first few PiL records, perhaps not sui generis (because what really is?), but pretty damn close.

Simon Reynolds: PiL’s chemistry came from the merger of Lydon’s muezzin-meets-Celtic approach to expressionistic singing,  the usurpation by Jah Wobble’s bass of the primary melodic role, and Levene’s harmolodic-in-all-but-name guitarwork. Indeed, in homage to that famous exponent of Ornette Coleman’s theories, Levene calls his signature technique, “the James 'Blood' Ulmer Effect.” Basically, this involves the deliberate incorporation of mistakes. When Levene would hit a wrong note, he’d immediately repeat the error to see if the wrongness could become a new kind of rightness. “The idea was to break through conditioning, take yourself out of one channel, and into another space.”

For a nice rarity, here's a very nice Alex Butterfield Archives recording of PiL towards the end of Levene's run with the band. A confrontational show — maybe all of this band's shows were confrontational. But in between the gobbing, Levene, Lydon and co. kick up quite a dust cloud of musical synergies, a wild and inventive sound. Like Johnny sings at the end of "Swan Lake": "Words cannot express, words cannot express ..."

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