Music from Pregnant Neck, The Fugs, 35mm Dreams, Tsushimamire, Skurge, Mudhoney, George Duke, Electric Light Orchestra, Lightning Bolt, Unknown, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Dennis Brown, Wild Youth, Vibrato Fetish, Spanish Dogs, beNt, Cockney Rejects and The Temptations.
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful for my shower in the morning, to cool and refresh, and prepare for the day.
To-do list
Continue video editing ✅
Enjoy Baew’s birthday party ✅
Record TCRAH if time
Find warm up video and then exercise
Read some more – I want to finish this book! ✅
I enjoyed learning the video editing software today. Amy was obviously in her monthly bad mood so it was good to be out of the way. She was baking cakes too. I find it hard to deal with her when she’s in these moods and even she knows that she is not herself.
She was happy when we got to Baew’s though and we started eating and drinking. I had to stop after a little bit though because I was tired and I ended up sleeping for a couple of hours!
Music from Senyawa, Jamesy and Sean, Far East Family Band, Air Miami, Arcwelder, Flesh Narc, X_X, Deerhoof, Hidden Rifles, The Damned, Chepang, Lindsay Cooper, Tigermen, Fifty Foot Hose, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, F, Younger Brothers, Shadow Minstrels, Cypress Hill and Eddie and the Hot Rods.
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful for my computer. It enables me to do so many things. I wonder if I could live without it? Of course, I could but I don’t think I want to.
To-do list
More 1994ever ✅
Record TCRAH – spend time on this one ✅
Watch less TV today ✅
More drawing
Today is Tuesday. I haven’t been writing in here because I have gotten myself absorbed in some good TV and by the time I come to bed it’s too late to turn on the light and write.
I feel like things are coming together more in my room – nearly got all the CDs in their cases – after more than two years! Now I’m trying to get rid of the CDRs and thinking about all the DVDs I have and what to do with them.
I’m hoping to keep up with all the backlog of 1994ever and other bits and pieces of writing. It’s been enjoyable to go through all those, thinking about the past. It still feels like it happened to someone else. Even brief glimpses of mundane things pop into my head and it makes me think about what times and events that I’m part of now will pop into my mind in the future.
Life feels quite mundane and predictable though I also feel quite happy and content.
Music from Bob Drake, The Work, DMBQ, FLIRT, Neutral Sons, Prag, Brainticket, Grobschnitt, Appollonius Abraham Schwarz, The Sweet, The Dazzling Killmen.
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful to see Oh’s puppies again and thankful she gave us a place to stay for one night.
To-do list
Stay relaxed – it’s a mini-holiday ✅
Do another Smiling Mind meditation
Really savour something today ✅
3 acts of kindness ½
Only buy books on your want list
Went book shopping but ended up buying a couple of extra things because I didn’t see any books on my wants list.
In the morning we went to visit Jessica’s aunt and I really savoured sitting and talking with her in her garden. Whilst we were talking she mentioned a book she really enjoyed about Afghanistan. She couldn’t remember the exact title, something about a Thousand Suns. Just as I was leaving the bookshop I spotted on the shelf ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ and that was the book – so I bought that too.
I’ve been considering what content I can put here as some of my personal thoughts and feelings about this particular place I am now living (and enjoying) could cause me trouble. It’s funny how Thailand is known as the Land of Smiles but often times it feels like the Land of Fake Smiles. Having a couple of years experience here now, I understand these reasons but cannot fully support a positive attitude towards it. This is the balance I am trying to find in my world.
Perhaps that balance has always been there even in the other places I have lived but I haven’t noticed it so much and oftentimes found myself in difficult or at least odd situations. I don’t ‘play the game’ very well still but I’m getting there. If this sounds like generalised waffle, I apologise. I will try to make an orderly composition of my thoughts at some point.
Out of one of the most difficult times I’ve had in Thailand I found myself keen to focus some energy into something personally (and somewhat selfishly) fulfilling. In what little downtime I had when I was pushing myself too hard preparing lessons for my grade 5 English class I would throw my iTunes playlist on shuffle and found myself quite enthralled at the collection of digital music I collected.
The randomness reminded me of those late school nights furtively listening to John Peel’s radio show under the covers, falling asleep as I lay hoping to hear the latest and greatest punk tunes in amongst all the other genres being pioneered. This exposure to many different styles of music laid the groundwork for events many years in the future when I was organising shows for bands in Sydney and subconsciously decided on mix billed being the best way for people to hear new music. Never a way to a successful financial business model, it kept my brain satisfied and able to calmly appreciate music I didn’t particularly enjoy, anticipating music that I would.
So it was that iTunes on shuffle kept popping up a classic tune (classic to me), a dodgy old punk demo, an experimental noise soundscape and a 60s garage rocker, with many things in between. Nothing really modern mainstream though. It’s amazing some of the music from my youth was considered mainstream back then. It shits all over what is mainstream now.
Anyway, digging this vibe I even ended up downloading a bunch of reggae and African music that Peel always used to play – just to try and get that reminiscence in full force. Things I may not listen to as a full recording of suddenly make a lot of sense squished in between things I was more familiar with. I ended up down many paths of discovery of experimental music from around the world – as opposed to ‘world music.’
With need of some distraction, I decided to put together a ‘radio’ show and upload the result to the Mixcloud platform. I mostly take the tracks as they were shuffled through iTunes and do a bit of back announcing. I also decided to play around a little with some of the songs and introduce some moments where I could read a paragraph or two from books from my shelves.
To give this odd mix a little focus I decided to target my audience to the university students at the local uni which is less than a kilometre away from where I am. I roped in a few of my student friends from there and also from my favourite local coffee shop, to do a bit of speaking and to have their pictures taken. So was born The Chiang Rai Alternative Hour and the push for musical world domination.
Gus, Mink, Nu and Aing – in the music library.
Understanding that my tastes are almost niche beyond niche I would not expect a huge audience for what I’m doing but really that is not the purpose. I do it for myself. I really enjoy putting it together and messing around with things, trying to come up with some new ideas for presentation. I’m contemplating how to do this mix in a live setting and finding a place to do it but I don’t have much time to practice that part as well as not having a completely reliable equipment setup. A new laptop is a little out of reach at the moment.
So, if you’ve read this far you may be curious to hear what these shows sound like? Or scared to find out. Either way, it seems like this is a good vehicle to post links to each show and also force me to write at least once a week as new episodes appear.
“Remember life on earth is but a flash of dawn And we’re all part of it as the day rolls on”
Music from Ween, Magic Mushroom Band, No Babies, The Ebonettes, goat, Andy Partridge, Acanthus, Banned, Hebosagil, The Yellow Payges, Bad Brains, Daniel Striped Tiger, Martin Archer, Teenage Depression, Mudhoney and Donovan.
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful that I could do so many things yesterday and keep going even though I was so tired by the end of the evening. I kept a good attitude and wasn’t so anxious about things that I wanted to do compared with some things that I had to do.
Did it list
Encouraged Fern to learn to make my coffee at Utopia.
Got my haircut.
Uploaded TCRAH podcast.
Recorded new TCRAH podcast.
Prepared and executed a quick fun game for my two students today.
Got through a little of the never-ending sorting of music, on computer and CDs.
Wrote another blog post and enjoyed the process of writing.
Got passport photocopies done.
Rosie offered to do quick drawings and send them out as postcards. What an awesome idea so I asked her to do Jochen, Lachlan and Kyaw Kyaw.
Music from DMBQ, Sebadoh, Belly Button, Units, Amateur Drunks, Round Eye, Blame Game, Minutemen, Ilaiyaraaja, Ween, Motorhead, Széki Kurva, The St Thomas Pepper Smelter, Hebosagil, Tall Dwarfs, DNA, The Milkshakes, Samla Mammas Manna and Pryapisme.
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful to be working in schools and with a not so serious expectation of my teaching skills. Of course, I always try to improve but the fact it is a little more relaxed has meant that I can enjoy interacting with the kids more. I don’t see many of they other teachers getting involved in the same way so much especially not the Thai teachers. All the kids want to talk to me all the time. I feel like I am a great asset to the school. I hope the school feels the same.*
Music from The Misunderstood, Angelic Upstarts, Passage, Surveillance, 13th Floor Elevators, Lozenge, Vaz, Hard-Ons, The Damned, Queen, Captain Beefheart, Melt Banana, Crass, Hitler SS, Meat Puppets, I Am Above and on the Left, Thee Headcoats, Party Diktator, Supertramp.
Gratitude Journal
I am so happy and grateful to be living in this part of the world. There are many times in a week when I marvel at the views of the rice fields and the mountains. Their depth changes depending on the weather conditions and time of day. There are good and bad points about every place to live but I certainly feel grateful for my time living here.
Recorded in the same circumstances as debut release BABA, Moscow resident Pavel Eremeev (ex USSSY) takes holypalms on a full-length journey and tribute to the music of the snake charmers around the world.
Self-described as ‘electro-noise-raga’ Pavel combines sounds of a quarter-toned baritone guitar along with an electronic background of tones and beats. Silky and liquid hues of sound enhanced by electronic cadence beats and crescendo grooves. Asymmetrical noise collapses into a lo-fi vortex and ebbs with the silver lustre of subliminal guitar sounds.
Folky and deep-rooted high grains of Indian classical raga are embedded amidst the improvised techniques of recording. Recurrent, moxie melodies enthral and cut through like a Katar dagger opening an ineffable horizon of endless travelling into the shamanic atmosphere that is holypalms.
” “Tribute to Snake Charmers Music” is my own vision of traditional melodies of the music performed by the caste of snake charmers from India and Nepal. I have imbued these sounds and it somehow entered into my guitar improvisation, and then I developed them, inventing rhythms and background sounds.” – Pavel Eremeev 2015
First made available via fellow Moscow cohorts at Cancelled Records, tenzenmen hopes to broaden holypalms fanbase by presenting Tribute to Snake Charmers Music to you here.
Review: “holypalms step into the cloud of oriental psychedelia that might easily pass for a lost collection of desert ecstasy from the Sublime Frequencies label. I’m quite sure Pavel can actually charm snakes with his guitar. Recommended!” (Weed Temple, Transmissions from the psychedelic underground)
On the flip side, Minneapolis psych-rock vets, Flavor Crystals, offer up Mirror in My Mind, a drone smeared, carefully considered, morotik ripper that mines the depths of exploratory shoegaze with aplomb, not unlike an auditory visage of one of Frederik van Eeden’s exercises in lucid dreaming. The band’s most recent full length release, a triple LP psych monster, coincidentally titled Three [Mpls. Ltd.], may well be one of the more criminally overlooked wax platters of the past couple years – self-engineered and produced by the band following a lengthy US tour in support of like-minded sonic sojourners, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Three captures Flavor Crystals in a vulnerable, metacognitive state and the results are nothing short of staggering!
Flavor Crystals are: Josh Richardson Nat Stensland Vince Caro Jon Menke
Special guests on this recording: Ricky Maymi: drums, blender guitar Stephen Lawrie: percussion, oscillations
Produced by Ricky Maymi Recorded by Nat Stensland Nov-Dec 2013 in Minneapolis Mixed with Neil Weir at Old Blackberry Way Mastered by Bruce Templeton
Special thanks to Christian Fritz/mpls ltd, Nevin Domer/Genjing, Ricky and Stephen
——————–
Carsick Cars are: Shouwang Zhang Fan He Heting Sun
Produced by Sonic Boom (Pete Kember) & Hamish Kilgour Recorded by Matt Boynton April 2013 in Vacation Island Recording Studio, NYC Mixed by Ping Li at Busy Bee, Beijing Mastered by Joe LaPorta at Sterling Sound
After 4 full albums in two years, Alpine Decline retreated back underground throughout 2013 to write and record their fifth full-length “Go Big Shadow City”, again with friend and co-conspirator Yang Haisong. Cataloguing experiences both lived and fictional ”Go Big Shadow City” is the sound of Beijing itself, as heard from the outside. Cigarette vapours caked onto countless km’s of 2” tape, street-level, ear-burning progress filtered through carcinogenic dust.
One year after spiriting off to China, Alpine Decline return with their fourth album, “Night of the Long Knives”. Descending from the high altitude visions of their previous records, the duo walks us gassed out and head numb through chaos and time sickness, deep into the ruins of ancient alleyways and naked skyscrapers. This time under the expansive sonics of producer (and China punk godfather) Yang Haisong, “Night of the Long Knives” is Alpine Decline surfacing from the Beijing haze maze at the height of their powers, crafting songs with the ghost-memory quality of myths and guiding us deep into the cinematic and stereoscopic landscape of their world, real and apocryphal.
Somehow sounding both clearer and denser than their previous albums, “Night of the Long Knives” opens with “Day 213”, a broken transmission from the site of the band’s crash landing. Stepping away from the rubble, we again walk with the duo through a landscape that is equal parts fascination and horror (although never cynical, never sneering). This fourth album presents some of the bands most accessible, nearly pop moments, masterfully folded into experimentation and sonic exploration. From the deep hooks of “Drunk on Crystal Fire” to the zombie lurch of “Industrial/Domestic”, “Night of the Long Knives” is an album that proves, once again, Alpine Decline are making some of the most creative, exciting albums anywhere on the planet.
1994ever 