I have a pal who recently saw the Happy Flowers in a show somewhere on the East Coast.

I’m not sure if he knows about their web site. Hopefully he’ll see this and be amused. In a horrible oversight, there are no audio assets available. The music is inexplicable, so I won’t even try.

Irregular Orbit: Narthex – A Small Story From the Days of Punk [via Boing Boing – Mark’s been active lately and it’s a good thing].

“Here is our amazingly obscure story, because all of these little stories added up to a remarkable era — everyone who participated should be telling their own first-hand stories.”

Amen to that.

Here are a couple of mine: the Tussin Up archive and Modock, both posted quite a while ago. Must reactivate guestbooks!

The Modock website includes Mp3s and video. The Tussin Up site presents browsable scans of every page of every issue of the late Steve Millen‘s amazing ‘zine.

Other archival audio including a live set by the Walking Ruins may be found here. Eric White’s Walking Ruins video archive is here.

In this excellent Metafilter post, Quartermass reports that Smile!, the legendary lost Beach Boys album intended to challenge the Beatles for the world-studio-wizard championship, will finally be released, and that in support of this event, Brian Wilson performed the entire album live last Friday.

This is very, very cool.

I’m kind of excited that my turntable is working again and I can listen to a bunch of stuff I don’t have on CD and am too lazy to rip. Right now it’s one of the middlin’ size bunch of classical music records I started grabbing as the vinyl slough commenced. They were your best bargain bet in the early nineties because in the fifties the only records produced in greater quantity were by schlock merchants like 101 Strings. This had the effect of creating a vast glut of great and largely unknown music that did not appeal to the clientele in thrift shops all across America. I looked ahead and bought in (slight) bulk.

Then I started to concentrate on 78s but those quickly became expensive collectibles, so, no go.

What the hell am I listening to?

Mozart concertos 3 and 4. Arthur Grumiaux on fiddle backed by the Viennese Philharmonic, on Epic, apparently released 1956. Apparently escaped from a radio station, as it features a grand total of 4 on-turntrable events marked on the cover of the LP.

The cover is pretty cool – abstract modernist triangles in grey and black with a lower-case modern type (an all l/c Eurostile?) “mozart” large in the upper left corner. The release is clearly too early to be stereo.

Waxy.org: Daily Log: Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album MP3s.

You read about it, now go get it.

We are only just beginning…: Jason Webley announces new CD with release party, May 11 and April 30, respectively.

Does it have to do with the open-heart surgery?

Last night Spence and I went to the Tractor Tavern to see old acquaintances of Spence’s, the entirely brilliant (in the American sense of ‘genuinely original and deep’) The Handsome Family. The band is a husband-and-wife songwriting team; they perform original music that is deeply grounded in American traditions and which benefits from the rich baritone of the singer’s voice. Viv had originally planned to attend a different show at the Croc, Visqueen, but decided to stay home instead.

Scott McCaughey and a Vancouver band, ‘The Buttless Chaps,’ opened, but I was there for the headliners. A couple friends met us there. I ran into an old friend there as well. Some grumpy gus was pissed that Katie and I (and then Spencer and I) were gabbing during the set, and although I was irritated by him, I couldn’t be mad at the guy – the music demands reverence.

After the show I started talking to Brett Sparks, the lead singer, about the old-skool clamshell iBook they used to provide accompaniment for the entire performance. The iBook was running iTunes with a list of backing tracks and one-minute silent tracks between the backing tracks. I floated a possibility about a piece looking at the couple’s use of Macs in their creative and performance process, and he was quite open to the idea. He told me that the backing tracks had all been developed in ProTools. We started talking about the roots of their music (they opened the set with a song about a bottomless pit, which reminded me of the myth of Orpheus).

Brett’s wife Rennie is the lyricist; he mentioned that she is working on a novel, which sound interesting to me because I find their music so interesting and rewarding. We talked about the great age of much of the material that they work from. Their work reflective and literary in the sense that the work has a great deal of possibility for personal reflection and the discovery of tangential meanings built into it.

Then Spence and I ate at IHOP in the University District (bottomless coffee, endless pancakes) and had a long conversation about, like, you know, life and stuff, as traditionally appropriate to late-night dining.

Alas, the buses don’t run between the U and the Hill after about 3:00 am, so I walked home. It took about an hour and a half. I arrived a bit after 5, having taken a pit stop at the wonderful neighborhood bookstore Twice Sold Tales and wandered around looking for a nice hardback copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which I’m reading on my Palm
Pilot. They had one, but it was overpriced at $18. I’ve been struck by the perfection of Stevenson’s prose, which begs to be read aloud.

While I was there, they were playing old Kinks, and so at 5 am, as the sky pinked up a tiny bit, I had the pleasure of hearing ‘Waterloo Sunset’ just before I walked back in to the chilly chilly morning breeze.

I just discovered that iTunes can burn to CD from a remote volume if that volume is mounted.

My connection to the remote volume is via a 10/100 hub, and both the burning machine and the host machine have 10/100 ethernet ports, so presumably the data was running at 100 – but still, that’s pretty cool. I was burning on both machines simultaneously from the same directory.

A few years ago, my mom gave me a CD for Christmas, because the musician behind the record lives here in Seattle and his mother is my mom’s neighbor.

The record is Blues Dream and the musician is local hero Bill Frisell.

Nothing long winded here; just that it’s an amazing amalgam of languid blues-based jazz that builds more on non-jazz American popular music of the past seventy years than jazz per se. Listening to it over and over I long fantasized that Frisell would make a record with Austin transplant and banjo nutcase Danny Barnes (nutcase is here used in a technical sense, meaning genius), after a while, so it came to pass.

Tracks three and four are “Pretty Flowers Were Made for Blooming” and “Pretty Stars Were Made to Shine.” The titles are taken from the lyrics to Little Maggie, and listening to these two tracks is one of the coolest aural experiences someone who listens to music written before the steam engine was invented might have an opportunity to experience.

Frisell plays out with well-spaced, even stately regularity. Consider him.

Sunday night, walking up the hill from seeing Master and Commander (verdict: excellent if reactionary, a forgivable vice in an historical romance, featuring the best sailing-ship sea battles ever committed to bits’n’film) we ambled by Clever Dunnes, which bravely lofts the orange, green and white in my otherwise unconcerned with tradition neighborhood. I’ve mentioned Dunnes before (the food is good, generous, reasonably priced, and up to the competition hereabouts) and I’ve wondered if the place would get a seisun going.

Well, I looked in the window as we strolled by and saw two slightly bewildered-looking folks playing or singing along with a couple others, and I think I saw two acoustic guitars and a bodhran – which makes me think I saw a seisun a-borning.

After the holidays, I’ll look into this further – but if this is what’s happening, I really should drop by. It’s only blocks away.