#mike has the ears and tophat

[crayonverse]

Somebody get those kids outta the bear

Couldn’t be bothered including GF kid from the movie rip </3

Had fun with the ibis paint filters. Real cool!

[lucarioisinthevoid]

happy hallows eve! what are yall dressing as?

"EVERY DAY IS A GOOD DAY FOR HALLOWEEN!" Dave jumped up, wearing a full blown wolf skin on his head. Jesus Christ. "IMMA BE A WEREWOLF!" Phone Guy seemed a bit spooked, not realizing what was going on. "I- uh- what?" "COSTUME, PHONEY! WHAT IS YOUR COSTUME!? IT'S HALLOWEEN!" "W-wha- it isn't- uh-? What time is it?" Scared out of his mind, Phoney looked around, realizing that SOMEONE had put up pumpkins and cut out drawings of bats everywhere. "I, uh- my costume is... the devil's advocate...?" "That was MY costume!" Dave complained. "You stole my costume from last year, ya lazy fuck!" "Don't swear!" Jerry's voice sounded from the distance as he rushed up, giggling a little as he did so. "Oh my, look at the time, look at the time!"Proudly Jerry stood there, with white bunny ears coming from the tophat on his head and a snazzy little jacket that had a pocket watch attached to it. Expectantly he looked at the others, waiting for a sign of recognition. For a few second it was quiet because Phone Guy still had to figure out where he was, as well as the time he had spent staring onto a table and Dave had no desire to call out what costume he was, still hassling Phoney. Thankfully, Old Sport who came up from behind came to his rescue before he could get disappointed. "It's the white rabbit! You look great Jerry!" "Thank you!" Snickering he turned around, but then became very quiet as he saw... the THING that had arrived.A clown nose, clown shoes and weird pants. Vampire teeth and a cape. Werewolf ears and a tail. Devil horns over the ears and a weapon on hand. Also, he was colored green. "What the ever-loving heck?" Granted this was probably the most reasonable reaction he could have had. "I'm ALL THE COSTUMES! I'M A MUTATED CLOWN VAMPIRE WEREWOLF THAT MADE A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL TO BECOME A MONSTER! I think I'm a genius, I bet nobody ever has dressed like that before." He was PROBABLY right with that. Jesus. Excited the Purple Guy jumped up. "HELL YEAH! You're absolutely a genius, Sportsy! We're in partner look too! Look at us! I was probably the one bitin' ya, wasn't I?" "YES, GREAT IDEA DAVE!" One last person arrived at the scene. Old Sport spotted him first. "Oooooooh, Mike, looking GOOD! Finally you put on a costume!" Happily he gave him fingerguns. A very concerned and very confused detective stepped closer. "I'm not Mike and this isn't a costume-" "Suuuuuuuuuuuure..." Dave winked at him. "Totally NOT Mike, got it." "... I look very different from him, what are you talking about-" Old Sport didn't even give him another second. "How awesome is THAT, you dressed up like that weird detective dude!" "Weird-?" "I gotta say, that's impressive!" Dave jumped back in. "Ya even imitate his voice! Should've said sooner you're so good at dressin' up!" "Even an excellently drawn on semi-beard there, Mikey!" With Old Sport and Dave tag-teaming him, he had NO chance.Phoney tried to help. "I- employees, he really isn't-" "Yeah, yeah, we got it!" Purple Guy snickered."What CAN we call him? Should we call him CODE NAME: CROSS?" With a grand movement Sportsy presented that name. In a last ditch effort, Ethan called out. "You KNOW me! You have met me before, you can SEE-""Oh yes, sorry S I R, we know ya. Oh no, ya come to stop my werewolf-ways?! Came to bring me to jail, from where nobody can hear my howl?" Playfully Dave jumped around, ready to run. Old Sport joined in. "Mr. Detective, you cannot put an earnest clown to jail! Clowns never do anything wrong!" Finally Phone Guy stepped to Ethan's side and patted his back. "... wait until Halloween is over for them." Meanwhile Mike was having a breakdown in the backroom. He was trying to glue together a dragon costume, but with every attempt it looked worse and worse. No way he was going down with that.With an annoyed groan he started his 20th attempt to repair it.Henry seemed displeased. "Shameful no one of them put on the Nightmare suits." Wait. The Nightmare Animatronics doubles as suits?!But Henry only chuckled, not elaborating any further.

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume 3, Number 4

Jean-Michel Blais and Mike Silver of CFCF. 

We celebrate the “in like a lion” part of March with a blast of fresh Dust covering everything from pop diva post-disco (our first and perhaps only Robyn-related review) to a pair of tributes (Pharaoh Sanders and Bruce Langhorne) to a piano-and-electronics collaboration by Jean Michel-Blais and CFCF to hyper literate Americana from Frontier Ruckus.  This time around contributors included Bill Meyer, Ian Mathers, Derek Taylor, Eric McDowell, Justin Cober-Lake and Jennifer Kelly.  It’s an eclectic enough collection that, like the weather, if you don’t like something, stick around for 15 minutes, and it’ll be completely different.  

Mr. Tophat ft. Robyn — Trust Me EP (Smalltown Supersound)

Robyn may not have put out a proper solo album since 2010, but she’s kept busy. Interestingly, she’s mostly followed up on the premise of the Body Talk EPs she put out as a means of initially getting the LP of the same name out there, sticking to shorter lengths. However, she’s also been more explicitly/overtly collaborative, even as she seems to be moving further away from the pop structures she’s so famously good at. The Trust Me EP is no different; working with longtime friend and Swedish house producer Mr. Tophat and ABBA drummer Per Lindvall (as well as Lindvall’s bassist brother David), her blissed out vocals skim the surface of these three lengthy, sometimes introspective disco-based tracks, sometimes serving as a focus for attention but just as often getting out of the way.  

Robyn’s dance music bona fides are long established, and she brings a level of personality and charm to what could have been anonymous diva vocals, so whatever reason she has for wanting to take a less prominent role, it’s certainly worked out. At its very strongest, as in the swirling opening of “Disco Davato” or the honking breakdown in the middle of “Trust Me,” Mr. Tophat and the Lindvall brothers certainly prove more than capable of taking center stage on their own. The result is 35 minutes of enjoyable, sometimes vertiginous post-disco music that seems as suited for intense dance floors as for contemplation. Just don’t expect any “Call Your Girlfriend”s and you’ll be fine.  

Ian Mathers

Anthony “Crystalline Roses” Pasquarosa with John “Sunburned” Moloney—My  Pharaoh, My King (Feeding Tube)

My Pharaoh, My King by Anthony “Crystalline Roses” Pasquarosa with John “Sunburned” Moloney

The pharaoh in question actually spells his name Pharoah — Pharoah Sanders — and in this case divinity prompts inspiration but not imitation. There’s not much on this record that sounds like anything on any of the venerated saxophonists recordings; for a start, there’s no saxophone. If you want to find antecedents to this record, you need look no further than Sandy Bull’s experiments blending Middle Eastern string sonorities with jazz grooves. But where Bull and drummer Billy Higgins forged ahead like the middle channel of a river, guitar/oud player Anthony Pasquarosa and drummer John Moloney take their time stirring eddies that turn in upon themselves. With a cover like this LP’s you expect the sound to be pretty zonked, and the head rush that this duo delivers makes standing up quickly highly ill-advised. But they aren’t heavy-handed about it; in fact they aren’t heavy at all. Moloney tickles bells and brushes cymbals with a sensitivity that belies the weight of his recent tub-thumping with Thurston Moore, and there’s a lilt in Pasquarosa’s picking that’s as much high-on-life as high-as-a-kite.

Bill Meyer

:

CFCF and Jean-Michel Blais—Cascades (Arts & Crafts)

Two experimental musicians join forces, Jean-Michel Blais best known for nouveau classical piano, CFCF’s Mike Silver for minimalist meditations in electronic sound (with occasional forays into new wave-i-ness, though no trace of that here). “Hasselblad,” a slow-blooming reverie in sustained piano, is one of Blais’, revisiting themes from two tracks on his self-titled debut. Shivering electronic atmospheres and flourishes hint at Silver’s participation, without overwhelming the essential piano-based-ness of this track. “Spirit” a rework of “Exercise #4” from CFCF’s Exercises album, hews closer to an electronic palette, layering long, variegated drones, some breathy and organic like a pipe organ, others pristinely electronic like a synth built to approximate an electric piano. Bits of actual piano come in, high and clipped over the tone-wash, like bird song drifting into a shadowy interior. The cut is pensive, moody, introspective and very beautiful. There is a reasonably faithful nod to John Cage’s “In a Landscape,” one of the modernist composer’s most piano-as-piano works; Blais revisits the composition’s languid sustained note auras, its lucidly simple melodic progressions, as recorded voices natter in the background. It’s as if two stations were tuned at once, one serene and removed, the other, faintly perceived but tinged with conflict and conversation. The best bit, though, comes in “Hypocrite,” new piece composed by both principals for this very album. Here runs and swells of post-classical piano are buoyed by adrenalized crescendos of massed electronic sound, neither Blais nor CFCF but something greater than its parts.

Jennifer Kelly

 Various Artists—The Hired Hands: A Tribute To Bruce Langhorne (Scissor Tail Records)

The Hired Hands: A Tribute to Bruce Langhorne by Paul Metzger

You may not have heard of Bruce Langhorne, but there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve heard about him. He was a session player ubiquitous among 1960s folk sessions, and Bob Dylan memorialized him in the song “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Langhorne’s also remembered for supplying the haunting, string-dominated soundtrack to Peter Fonda’s superb but barely remembered follow up to Easy Rider, The Hired Hand. If John Fahey and the Takoma crew are the sun and moon of contemporary cosmos-evoking guitarists, that soundtrack is their North Star. Sadly Langhorne is in failing health, and one of those younger guitarists, Dylan Golden Aycock, has joined up with Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille to put together a tribute record in order to help defray the cost of his care. You could tile your bathroom with disappointing tribute albums that sport promising line-ups, so the presence of names like Fahey, Connors, Nathan Bowles, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Gunn, etc., is no guarantee of success. But this record delivers in part because so many of the contributors distill and decant the wondrous sonic glow that Langhorne’s playing infused into the film.

Bill Meyer

 Happy Place — Northfield (Exit Stencil Records)

Northfield by Happy Place

In August 2015 drummer, composer, and PhD student Will Mason made his impressive and ambitious recording debut with Beams of the Huge Night on New Amsterdam Records. Whereas Beams was an expansive effort — quarter-hour sprawlers played by an ensemble big and bold enough to host oboe, vocals, and a second guitar — his late-2016 follow-up with his group Happy Place is a somewhat pithier and punchier affair. Pleasingly symmetrical, Happy Place comprises Mason and Austin Vaughn on drum sets and Andrew Smiley and Will Chapin on guitars. Northfield’s suite of barbed, mostly short tracks with excited titles like “Fork!” and “Nurture!” was written in a state of sleepless anxiety, traceable in the album’s relentlessly pumping drums and manic guitars. A student of music theory with a special interest in the French spectralists, Mason may namecheck the likes of Ligeti, Grisey, and Haas, but he’s also a killer drummer who keeps good company, so all you need is a pair of working ears to appreciate these inventively grooving, infectiously knotty compositions.

Eric McDowell

 Lisa Mezzacappa – avantNOIR (Clean Feed)

Crime jazz far closer in orbit to Alphaville than Peter Gunn, bassist Lisa Mezzacappa’s avantNOIR pulls immediate literary inspiration from Paul Auster’sNew York Trilogy and Dashiell Hammett’s seminal 1920s work, most specifically The Big Knockover and The Maltese Falcon. Mining the spectrum of vintage to postmodern caper fiction, the music is at once an invocation of rain-soaked and sun-bleached urban environments and the unsettled mindsets of a multitude of fictional tough guys from the iconic Sam Spade and Continental Op to the comparatively contemporary in Auster’s doomed protagonist Daniel Quinn. Mezzacappa uses a variety of invented devices and constructs including chromatic schemes and cognominal alphabetical notations to translate page-bound noir themes to organized aural interplay. A palette of tenor saxophone, electric guitar, vibraphone and drums joins her samples-laced bass and the kaleidoscopic electronics of Tim Perkis in the exploration of a multiplicity of plot-plucked hardboiled moods and scenarios. Some of it feels a shade excessive in its archness, but it’s still easy to conjecture the perpetually beleaguered secret agent Lemmy Caution grooving stoically to the end sounds. 

Derek Taylor

 Illegal Crowns — Illegal Crowns (Rogue Art)

Cornetist Tayor Ho Bynum asserts in Illegal Crowns’ liner notes that creative music affords the opportunity for individuals and collectives to realize artistic growth without stunting either. For this to happen, of course, the collective’s members have to understand their own growth at least partly in collective terms, and this quartet shows longtime mates Bynum, drummer Tomas Fujiwara and guitarist Mary Halvorson putting that notion to the test. They have a long history of playing together in the bands each musician leads, Anthony Braxton’s projects and the joint venture Thirteenth Assembly, their quartet with violist Jessica Pavone. Illegal Crowns swaps Pavone for a musician from outside that scene, French pianist Benoît Delbecq. He brings a similar understanding that the decisions you make in order for the collective to work can be creative acts in themselves. So while you won’t get to hear his more atmospheric side and he uses his piano preparations sparingly, there’s a lot to appreciate about how he deploys his instrument’s potential for sonic bulk. It’s especially intriguing to hear how Halvorson, who usually gets a lot of chordal space to herself, handles the situation; she and Delbecq both ease back just a bit so that the music is uncluttered yet quite full of event and surprise.

Bill Meyer

 Frontier Ruckus — Enter the Kingdom (Sitcom Universe/Loose Music)

Matthew Milia and his band battle loss and decay with a sort of pop formalism on Enter the Kingdom. Milia's lyrics spin across clever wordplay, internal rhyme and scattered vocabulary words. It would all get a bit twee if he weren't so often on, his boyish vocals feeling light while sounding the dark places. The band itself is a bit looser, with its Americana and indie-pop setting a gentle roll across suburban unemployment and shared disappointment. In the album's world, something seems to have shifted in the 1990s (possibly the onset of adulthood), with the Gin Blossoms and dial-up modems holding as tethers to a pre-fallen kingdom. Working a space between Okkervil River's mouth and Neutral Milk Hotel's eyes, Frontier Ruckus doesn't let the prairie world become a wasteland, as Milia finds “a vivid new infinity” with just enough propulsion to keep him moving forward. As the album title suggests, there's an entrance to somewhere else, but it's secluded, and it's secret and it doesn't open easily. But at least it's there.

Justin Cober-Lake