#usa mexico

[dustedmagazine]

USA/Mexico — Live in Paris (12XU)

“Sludge” and “drone” are two musical monikers frequently attached to records put out by Texas three-piece behemoth USA/Mexico. There are trackable reasons for invoking the terms, but neither is adequate to the maximal slurry of sound the band unleashes. Sludge bands tend to be riff worshipers, but while there are distinct patterns in the two compositions (if that’s what we want to call the tracks — “songs” feels wrong…) included on Live in Paris, there aren’t riffs. Rather, the compositions articulate something anterior to the riff, an atavistic throwback to something more primeval. And drone? That might be a somewhat more accurate term for what USA/Mexico has released into the world. But there’s something intrinsically highfalutin about drone music — it inevitably comes with an artistic concept. Concept? These tracks don’t even have names. They are events. They happened. Someone recorded them. Beyond those bare existential facts, there isn’t a lot to say about “Side A” and “Side B,” because there isn’t a lot to think about them. You listen and you feel.

If you are able (or willing) to give yourself to this music, you will likely feel a lot. Not as much as the folks in that Paris performance space must have felt, subject to the raw volume and ill intent of the sounds. There is a truculent single-mindedness to the 22 minutes presented under the identification “Side A”: it’s mostly rumble, quaking and shaking along at a crawl’s abject pace — but the rumble is endowed with energies that sanction its demand of that crawling position, less so than embodying the thing that crawls. The abjection, then, would be ours, the result of the voluntary decision to make ourselves subject to this experience. The additional insult comes in the form of a horrifically pitch-shifted voice that cuts infrequently into the noise. It’s a variety of the death-metal growl, reduced to total incomprehensibility, less a vehicle for “lyrics” and more a monstrous emanation, a mark of the extent to which USA/Mexico wants to distance these recordings from conventional pleasure.

The gambit has its complications. Some folks find those sorts of pitch-shifted vocalizations funny, and humor would undercut the heavy here. Two of the players in USA/Mexico (Craig Clouse and King Coffey) have worked in other bands (Shit and Shine and Butthole Surfers, respectively) with lots of experience using mordant humor to intensify a satiric or upsetting musical gesture. But this current band has a different sensibility. If “Side A” is a variety of joke, it’s stretched all out of proportion, prolonged for far too long. And then “Side B” collapses into your field of perception; not quite so long at 15-and-a-half minutes, but slower, even more agonized.

There’s no selling this sort of experience to someone unwilling to endure it. But for those of us who actively gravitate toward it, “Side B” is worth enduring. Deliberate, precise in its idiosyncratic way, possessed of a nearly palpable sense of volume—not just the sheer noise, but the physical notion of volume, of a fully contained field, taking up space. The space moves into your head and occupies it. You can’t pay attention to anything else. It obliterates. Maybe this is what other people experience as meditation; your intrepid reviewer has never had much luck achieving that much-lauded psychological emptiness. But there is no transcendence here. Only quaking, mindless flesh, vibrating with the force of USA/Mexico’s intensities.

Jonathan Shaw

[thedialoguedilemma]

Google Maps has changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

The international community will still refer to this as the Gulf of Mexico.

Grocery prices are on the rise, egg shortages have been widespread, bird flu cases are increasing but this is the most important pressing issue to Donald Trump.

[cornistasiathecoblinking]

In case anyone wants to do anything about the whole “Gulf of America” thing. Here’s something we can all do!

[candela888]

Same-sex marriage in 2003 vs. 2013 vs. 2023

(20 years of change)

More info below:

----

2003:

Marriage : Netherlands, Belgium, British Columbia (CA), Ontario (CA)

Civil unions : France (including overseas territories), Germany, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Greenland, Rio Negro (AR), Ciudad de Buenos Aires (AR), California (US), New York (US), Hawaii (US), Vermont (US), Canary Islands (ES), Aragon (ES), Catalonia (ES), Andalusia (ES), Extremadura (ES), Castilla-La Mancha (ES), Castilla-Leon (ES), Madrid (ES), Valencia (ES), Asturias (ES), Basque Country (ES), Navarre (ES), Balearics (ES), Quebec (CA), Alberta (CA), Manitoba (CA), Nova Scotia (CA), Geneva (CH), Zurich (CH), Portugal.

----

2013:

Marriage : Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, South Africa, Spain, Portugal, France (including overseas territories), Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, New Zealand, Washington (US), California (US), New Mexico (US), Minnesota (US), Iowa (US), Maryland (US), DC (US), New Jersey (US), Delaware (US), New York (US), Connecticut (US), Rhode Island (US), Vermont (US), Massachusetts (US), New Hampshire (US), Maine (US), Hawaii (US), Mexico City (MX), Quintana Roo (MX).

Civil unions : Greenland, Colombia, Ecuador, Merida (VZ), United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Finland, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Australia

Recognizes marriages performed abroad : All 32 Mexican states and Israel

----

2023:

Marriage : Netherlands (including overseas territories), Belgium, United States, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, US Virgin Islands, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Malvinas/Falklands, France (including overseas territories), Spain, Portugal, Andorra, Germany, Slovenia, Switzerland, Austria, Malta, Guernsey, Jersey, United Kingdom, Isle of Man, Ireland, Gibraltar, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Greenland, Luxembourg, Faroe Islands, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, St. Helena, Pitcairn Islands, Gibraltar.

Civil unions : Bolivia, Italy, Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Aruba, Curaçao, Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, Montenegro, Greece, Cyprus, Estonia, Liechtenstein 

Recognizes marriages performed abroad : Namibia, Israel, Nepal, American Samoa

----

Future :

Same-sex marriage is under consideration by the legislature or the courts in Aruba, Curaçao, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, India, Japan, Liechtenstein, Namibia, the Navajo Nation, Nepal, Thailand, and Venezuela, and all countries bound by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), which includes Barbados, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Suriname.

Civil unions are being considered in a number of countries, including Lithuania, Peru, the Philippines, South Korea, Ukraine, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Latvia, Panama, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Thailand, and Venezuela.

----

[unconventiononthelawofthesea]

personally know like if you saw them you'd say hello. no random classmates or coworkers you've never spoken to. count online friends but not people you see online but don't talk to

[taher-blog]

This is a masterlist of palestinians and their families who are need your donation to survive the continuous genocide and leave gaza 🇵🇸

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Press the link one below the person name to redirect you to his campaign page

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If you can't DONATE please SHARE to communicate their voice to largest number of people

Please don't scroll or ignore the post and remember that your action can save a live

If you're in gaza and want to share your campaign DM me

[umgeorge]

📷 @.romeromarquez / instagram

[maureen2musings]

John Fowler

[dustedmagazine]

Water Damage — 2 Songs (12XU)

2 Songs by Water Damage

It’s likely that other folks have already discoursed on the apt nature of this Texas-based septet’s band name: Water Damage makes music that’s patient, relentless and most effective, ruinously so, when it goes on for a long, long time. Hence the band’s tendency to label their studio-produced songs “Reels”: on this record you get “FUCK THIS: Reel 11” and “FUCK THAT: Reel 13”. The nomenclature invokes the now-venerable medium of the reel-to-reel recorder with its long and steady spin, a technology that grounds us in analogue and in physical space. It’s material. It has presence. It degrades, but that’s part of its interest and its intensity. It won’t be around forever. And even though Water Damage’s Reels are long (respectively on 2 Songs, almost 19 and over 21 minutes), they don’t go on endlessly. They just feel like they could, and when you sink into their rhythms, you may wish they would.

It's also likely that some folks will assert that this droning, repetitive music is too familiar, that other bands and artists have already explored and mapped out the terrain. There are some reference points and comparisons: Steve Reich’s rigor, Nadja’s sense of dread, Oneida’s understanding of how austere minimalism can be made playful (that last word written without a whiff of condescending stink on it). You might hear or think of all of them when you spin 2 Songs, but none of those names or sounds is coextensive with Water Damage’s textural variety. The band combines heavy music’s impact and predilections for drama with drone’s more hifalutin conceptual thrust without diminishing the effects of either. That may not be surprising, given some of the players involved: Nate Cross plays bass in the art-damaged sludge band USA/Mexico; he also provides rhythms in Marriage, along with Water Damage bandmates Mike Kanin and Greg and Jeff Piwonka. Guitarist George Dishner makes thick, No-Wavey noises in Spray Paint. 

“FUCK THAT: Reel 13” may be the more interesting side of 2 Songs; certainly its dynamics are brighter and more complex. The song’s mutations and modulations feel tidal, more channeled than calculated. As it accumulates, “FUCK THAT…” slowly acquires a dissolute vibe, bottoming out into distressed, mechanical moans and aching scrapes. Imagine an industrial-scaled vacuum cleaner becoming clogged with some gummy, vaguely organic substance. The gears and belts try to turn, thumping and thrumming, lumps of matter spinning and catching and making patterned splats. Meanwhile, the tape spins away and the song keeps going, resisting the insistent logic of its own destruction. It’s not enjoyable so much as it is compelling. This reviewer has had it on repeat for at least a couple hours. Spinning and thumping, listening to that water pour. 

Jonathan Shaw

[hydrangea-blossom]

Guys, I want you all to simp for Gustavo Petro. My man just middle fingered Trump with 50% tariffs and is not backing down. I am in LOVE.

An eye for an eye, orange bitch.

Also shout out to the Mexican PM Claudia Sheinbaum for her "America Mexicana", Latino countries are really not pulling their punches against the American tursnip and I am so in.

[lizardsaredinosaurs]

My northern cousin thinks he's "greater". But which one of us is the archnemesis of Republican politicians and oil barons? That's right—ME.

Lesser Prairie Chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus)

Southern midwestern USA

Status: Endangered/Threatened in the US

You can find a summary of the chicken's battle with Republicans here. Thanks for that veto, Biden.

[candela888]

How to say "yes" in different languages in Europe + etymology

[mysharona1987]

[tubulars-stuff]

Hi CH Tumblr here's my artwork of @fadinglight3443 's Imperialist America AU and Mexico design, in the form of a propaganda poster!

[torakashu]

[haveyouheardthisband]