#356

Yeah, I'll get in here. I'm hot now, I guess. They say to strike while the iron is hot, and I want to, but I'm the iron. Right? I'm the hot one. So indeed, it is my own body, my own spirit that I must strike, like a great tongueless iron bell, with a mighty iron hammer, to bring forth the deep ringing iron tones that let a motherfucker know what time it is and that time is time for

FACTUALLY MUSICAL 2023

BRINGING THE HEAT

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My preference is largely to work things out for myself. It's much more laborious and uncertain for me to play well with others, agree with them, take part in joint endeavors. I do my best, when the season for an attempt is ripe, and these have borne important fruits, but I prefer to read and think and develop on my own, perhaps reasoning aloud into a liminal yet public space. 

Factually Pointless is for public consumption, free to all though partly (fundamentally) owned by Alphabet, doubtlessly scraped by algorithms and programs in order to teach themselves how to accelerate global decay--and all are welcome to these materials in their own way, I suppose, since I think of them as a gift and a service which may be utilized or refused by the recipient with full respect to their agency. For all that, it is also a tool I use whose mechanism is, for most people, private: to grapple with my secrets and how the world impacts me emotionally. It is a messy place, especially for those trained to believe that we are the gleaming, perfect surfaces we present to the world and use to sell products and services, rather than hairy meaty bags of blood and shit that think they think.

Also, to sharpen my knives before I use them on the True Work, That Which One Paywalls.

Suppose my most concentrated point with all this is to state that my views do not represent those of my associates, friends, etc. Just me. 

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Oh, music! Well, today I'm going to actually play instruments with my friend that I wrote about maybe doing a band with. The show, very predictably, fell through. I said it probably would and it did, and good riddance. But now that I'm hot again, rather than unbearably depressed, injured, ill, or a variable combination of the three, we can at least get together and make some horrible noises. He's got a youtube channel on which I have already featured; today we shall generate more such voyages through the land of...whatever it is we call what we make. It's a complicated string of terms, the kind of thing where Len offers up exhaustive lists of equipment used and how it was modified and the way it was hooked up just so in order to create the sound of a a billion trillion shards of glass blowing in an unchanging titanic wind across the surface of a dead and blasted, totally carbonized world. Somewhere there is a throne, a great scorched twisted thing lashed together with filthy bones and ichor-splattered carapaces that defy human description, and seated on that throne, Moloch Angrenach, who has defied every death that can kill a god, whose empty, gnawing hunger is as endless and immeasurable as the depths of lightlessness before the world was thought of.

I'll put up a link to Len's channel tomorrow. It'll go better with what I'm thinking for that post. 

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What else about music? Sticking with the personal and literal situations of music, my bass, Stray Dog, is still missing his E string, and this week I realized the strings on him are older than my marriage. Ezra might get me some for Christmas, apparently. That'll be revolutionary. Maybe I'll have Len fix the E peg and have a fully-strung bass for the first time in at least seven years. Whoa! I better fuckin watch it. Gonna get too fancy and let the devil in my house.

--JL

#287

One explanation for why certain bands gain prominence well beyond what would seem fair or just in a balanced universe is that people love guitars. I personally love guitars, so this is understandable to me. Though I play the bass and think of it as my "main" instrument, I never can understand why people seem to be so fixated on pumping up the bass; what they really mean is they want to feel the pulsing of the beat within their chest cavity in an unhealthy way.

Used to play tuba, and when I wanted to quit tuba in order to better concentrate on playing many other instruments as I like to do, my band director attempted to dissuade me by expounding upon how essential the bass element is to the sound of any given musical effort overall. I was not disputing this, and still do not, but it's not something people really hear except when it's not there. "When you're listening to rock music, don't you turn up the bass, on your speakers or in the car?" he asked me, trying to reach me through the evils of modernism (this was not my problem). "No," I replied. "I concentrate more on the guitars. Or the trumpets, which is what I want to go back to playing." "You're valuable to me as a tuba," he replied flatly, abandoning the relatability angle and thereby becoming much easier to understand. "You're not valuable as a trumpet. But if you really want to go down that road, you have to at least wait till tryouts next year to make the formal switch. We can talk about it at camp."*

Ah, band camp. He gave me the runaround then, too. A good band leader can't take shit from prima donna asshole kids, and whatever his faults, the man was one of the greats. 

The instrumentality of the bass line is not widely regarded, is what I'm saying. I think of something different when I think of bass music than simply root notes and the big drum. Yes, the framework is essential, and without it, it all falls down. And guitars are probably overrated. But guitars are awesome, and one time, a band I was playing with literally forgot me and left me at a liquor store waiting for them, and I had to catch up to them; this is a perfect illustration of how the bassist is regarded. Also, I just can't play the guitar for some reason. This means it retains its mystique, and I place all my inventive guitar energies into my bass instead. Makes me a terrible bassist to play guitar with, I can tell you. 

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So, guitars. Better to say, specifically, electric guitars. How about a list of my top twenty albums in no particular order evaluated solely on the merits of the guitar work? Or maybe, top ten guitar albums, top twenty guitar tracks. That might be more information for less effort. One thing doing Album Week has taught me is that albums are much more difficult than songs.

Top Ten Albums On The Strength of Their Electric Guitars In No Particular Order Purely My By Own Unspoken Subjective Metrics Off the Top of My Head (Records with Carlos Santana here omitted for reasons of bias and proliferation; same goes for Caspian)

Dreaming of Revenge, Kaki King

Shadows Collide With People, John Frusciante

Hot Rats, Frank Zappa

Electric Mud, Muddy Waters

No Code, Pearl Jam

Stadium Arcadium, Red Hot Chili Peppers

This Is a Long Drive For Someone With Nothing to Think About, Modest Mouse

Ride the Lightning, Metallica

Sink / Swim, Cutting Room Floor

Mommy's Little Monster, Social Distortion

Honorable Mentions

Mexican Teenagers EP, Kaki King

Glow, Kaki King

Renihilation and Aesthetica, by Liturgy

Top Twenty Songs On the Strength Of Their Electric (Or, Sometimes, Combination Electric/Acoustic) Guitars In No Particular Order Purely By My Own Unspoken Subjective Metrics Off the Top of My Head (with an attempt to reach for more artists off more albums rather than, say, ten Caspian songs and ten Santana songs out of their discographies, which I could also do, and ALSO, omitting any songs/albums I have discussed before in Album Week 2019 or 2022)

"Height Down", John Frusciante & River Pheonix, Smile From the Streets You Hold

"Swans (Life After Death)", Islands, Return to the Sea

"Spitting Venom", Modest Mouse, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank

"Throw Away Your Television", Red Hot Chili Peppers, Live at Slane Castle (let us here include all extemporaneous jam intros/outros/interstitials to any given song played that evening)

"Don't Wait For the Sun", American Hi-Fi, American Hi-Fi

"Murmaider II: The Water God", Dethclock, Dethalbum II

"Tempting Time", Animals As Leaders, Animals As Leaders

"L.A. Woman", The Doors, L.A. Woman

"Barnes", Pinback, Autumn of the Seraphs

"Quadrophenia", The Who, Quadrophenia

"Worlds Apart", Bruce Springsteen, The Rising

"There's No Home For You Here", The White Stripes, Elephant

"March To the Witch's Castle", Funkadelic, Cosmic Slop

"At Least That's What You Said", Wilco, A Ghost is Born

"Arms of a Thief", Iron & Wine, Around the Well

"The Mountain", Krallice, Dimensional Bleedthrough

"Ex Cathedra", Wolves in the Throne Room, Black Cascade

"Sister", Sufjan Stevens, Seven Swans

"1969", The Stooges, The Stooges

Last, I'm buckin' the rules and posting a four-way all in the same move, check it:

"I Want It All", "Hammer to Fall", "The Show Must Go On", "One Vision", Queen, (not writing out the albums; it's Queen, the later albums mostly)

Honorable Mentions

They are LEGION, many deserving a spot in what might be the "actual" top twenty, but this is just an exercise in the vein of a speedrun. I cannot stress how non-exhaustive and unauthoritative today's post has been. For the sake of honor, I shall mention 

"Halo Theme Mjolnir Mix", Martin O'Donnel and Michael Salvatori, featuring Steve Vai, Halo 2 Original Soundtrack 

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So there's some food for thought! Or not. On that note, time to cook lunch. Or maybe order sandwiches. Probably left things too late. I am too hungry to think clearly any longer.

Album! Week! Twenty! Twenty! Two! 

--JL

*On another occasion, regarding the trumpet thing: "You got great tone, but you don't work your scales. You don't work hard enough to make high chairs. It's that simple." And it was. Now when I play my trumpet it's pretty much just scales and long tones, a little bit of extemporaneous whatever, then back in the case. Too late I have learned, but it's never too late to just enjoy playing, so it's not a waste or anything. I'd play my tuba too, if I could find one. Funnily, no one ever criticized that I didn't practice my tuba scales. 

#178

June came in with a bang around here, thundering huge and spitting lightning with a hail and a thick downpour, but also it has been sunny and bright and mild and calm through parts of the day. High-key stuff. It's been a savage year, really digging it. June is one of my favorite months, desperate and magnificent. Challenging and glorious. I am thankful to live to see another June.

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June first also happens to be the day of Saint Justin Martyr, who doesn't even sound real but is the patron saint of philosophers and was a gangster (you can kinda guess the main outline of how he died and got sainted) so I don't really care one way or the other, this dude and his dorky-ass name are on my team.

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There are few stories as metal as the stories of the Christian martyrs of the early centuries. Crazy shit, astonishing shit, even if a bunch of it is fake. I sorta thrive on made-up crazy shit, personally.

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I've been doing some warmups on my bass guitar as I've been writing this. The A string, which is the lowest string on my thrashed-ass old beater* had come unsprung, what with the advent of summer an all. I hooked it up again and he's all in tune and sounding sweet and sound as a bell like he does. My guitar is very special, a real blue dog, one of those Fenders that rolls off the line with a magic spell on it, loud and clear with power in the wood that only grows as the neck warps and the body ages and cracks and breathes all kinds of smoke and takes all kinds of dirt, it's all magic enhancement, and will stay on in the pieces if I'm lucky enough to live to play it to kindling. I call him Stray Dog and I have wailed on him with full abandon and he has sounded out a fearsome joyful noise for twelve years now.

Anyway, I'm going to get down to business, and when he and I are through I'm going to work on some other stuff. I sense a productive June in the offing.

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Next post I'm going to describe some lamps!


--JL

*only need three strings to kick much ass and whip up a fiery frenzy and I will prove it any day