The Townhouse Interviews: Michael Lueckner (Guitar, Computerjockeys)

American critics, anyway, have got Michael Lueckner all wrong.  The man behind Guitar and Computerjockeys is vastly more substantive than Pitchfork would have you believe.  Guitar isn't just about pretty sounds and happy Japanese afternoons.  Lueckner proves as much in this interview where he discusses everything from ancient African proverbs and Roman poets, to Fleetwood Mac and Nick Drake.  Lueckner is German, but speaks delightful English. Without further ado, enjoy the Townhouse interview with Michael Lueckner.


Evan Jones First off, it's nice to have you over to the Townhouse!

Michael Lueckner ja mann, du bist auch willkommen!

EJ So who is Michael Lueckner?  I haven't been able to find much information about you over here in the States.  Do you mind giving readers a short bio?

ML A short lyric version says: the storm is hairy on the outside like a caterpillar!  That's what they said when we were only a few people in Gondwana, South Africa 30,000 years ago.

The nice version is: a bio-organic food eating non-vegan musician who studied philosophy to B.A. after he made a teaching to male nurse :o)

He loves electronic music, but used to be an old school two finger blues picker: (Michael playing the blues)

Long versions of him as a releasing artist say another story that he approx plays acoustic and electric guitar since 14.  Started the electronic pop duo Computerjockeys together with Hagedorn, based in Cologne, Germany and after years of club touring in Germany as a Geheimtip and first ones who used computers in clubs for original club music,  released two albums on EMI and Universal with a Europe-wide clubhit named "Pinpong" and massive MTV Manga film score music hype.  Been on tour with Moloko, Console and others.

And I founded 'Guitar' with Ayako Akashiba from Tokyo, starting as a shoegaze band.  The success in sales and fans with first album "Sunkissed" on Morr Music Berlin, ended up in seven more Guitar albums released on german, Us, and Japanese labels.

During the first years as an electronic musician I called myself "Digital Jockey" on all releases and produced three solo albums with more or less Dub influenced backings and laid back crossover kind of music.  Straight bass drum and world music samples plus a Jamaican singer, chamber music and straight bass drum plus a female soprano singer, Dub and Techno and world music and an African-american gospel and soulsinger.

EJ What was the last bit of music you listened to?

ML Clifton Hicks and Matt Kinman singing Last Gold Dollar on youtube - I love this version, the intimacy and the American new folk wave :o)

EJ Now you're primarily a guitarist?

ML Yes, you have seen me two Q up, don't you!

EJ I assume you have some guitar heroes?

ML Only John Lightning Hopkins and the young Chuck Berry.  Everything else is a derivative.

EJ Speaking of guitars, I mainly would like to talk about Guitar for this interview.  It's remained a mystery to me since I first learned about it.  And I want to start off by talking about Sunkissed.  That was my introduction to Guitar, and I really had no context for it but I knew I liked it.  Do you mind talking about that album?  Its development, what it's all about, those kind of things?

ML Short lyric answer says: if it doesn't rain a long time you bury a chameleon alive! Again from the Gondwana/South Africa context.

In the late 80's and early 90's, as a young man, after a rich time with Prefab Sprout, Steely Dan, Sonic Youth, Tuxedo Moon and The Smiths I have been musically driven happy again with the new shoegazer or "dream pop" (stupid old Rolling Stone grandpa Greil Marcus formed that nice description to diss that movement).  Tn the pit stood MBV and put music on a new level mixing ALL instruments on one volume level including vocals.  The vocals sounded like a siren in the symphonic ocean of endless guitar tracks and you could not completely understand the lyrics, you only understood the teasing of the song as a siren.  That was postmodern music for me.  No "she loves you, yeah..." but only the emo part of music.

Then in the middle of this wonderful movement, promising all sunny news, came, unfortunately, the revenge of the major label empire: Nirvana's "Teenage Spirit" smelling golden perfume and the grunge wannabe-punkn hippie-retro square check shirt thing and blew this tender new blossom of dream pop away... gone, but not completely dead...

...untill 1999, when we had huge success in Europe with Computerjockeys, I decided to not wait any longer for a third MBV album that picks up the techno/electronic years in between and grabs out some new shoegazer, and did it by myself.  Made experiments besides Computerjockeys to get that drone sound with a different note in the oceanic sound for one year.  Made the first track called "Hot Sun Trail", saw that it worked and then made House Full of Time and sent it to German's best, coolest singer Regina Janssen of Donna Regins who is an MBV fan too.  This was the start of it.

My lyric idea, or better, concept (i am a concept artist!), of a good shoegazer album has always been the idea of Roman Empire poet Scipio: Earth is surrounded by seven planets on concentric circles on slices or plates and these plates' circles produce a big big roar touching each other, but we can not hear it cause we have been born & rised with it.  And I always thought: yes, that's the story, NASA tell lies, there is no empty room.  There is drone and roar and now we take the Sun into speech and say, the sunwinds blow their soft warm roar over earth, but we can not hear it because we are born with it, like you guys in NY don't hear that stupid roar of your city anymore.

That's why its called Sunkissed.  I gave Ayako, the singer, that idea and title and she made a song out of it.  We are kissed by the sun and if no stone from outer-earth will hit us, she sun surely will do expand into us in 2000 years.  The song she sang can be heard on "Sunkissed" - it's all there including "Melt".  Fun?  Yeah yeah yeah!

EJ I'll need to let that sink in for a bit.  At any rate, you seem to present an idealistic place to listeners.  I actually think the title Sunkissed describes your music perfectly. Is that your goal to present this idealistic place to us?  Is that place Japan in your mind?

ML Japan is best fresh food in the world and supernice friendly people in a beautiful country.  I made an album about that called Tokyo. Sunkissed has nothing to do with Japan, except a female singer who is born there and lives there.

EJ And who is the nice lady?

ML Ayako Akashiba, living in the suburb of Tokyo, working full time in her prefecture in the registration office being responsible for weddings, death cases, and birth, who knows more about Gerrman neue deutsche welle music than me and taught herself English with mc tapes as a teen to be able to sing songs of our occidental culture.

EJ Where do you get your love and fascination for Japanese culture from?

ML Japanese people are the better Germans, hahaha.  I just love Japan, but I love USA too as a cultural phenomena and the country itself.  And if you want something important about Japan: Tokyo and Japan is not the shibuya crossing!  All documentaries and Miss Coppola and all the others show that, but its much more.  Tip: just take a compass.  Climb out of the subway somewhere in Tokyo city and just walk outside in one direction for 10 hours.  You would not believe what you see: parks, British houses, San Francisco up and down streets, museums you never heard of with old Chinese sketches and paintings from rich Jap collectors, mantis religiosa in meadows, flyfishing in rivers...

EJ I'm looking up plane tickets right now.  So it seems that just about every review of your Guitar work references them.  I actually don't get as strong of a sense of MBV in your work as other people seem to.  Are you, in fact, sick of all the comparisons to MBV?

ML No.  If you compare my fat symphonic guitar layer songs with them, fine!  All my other music and albums are influenced by music all over the world.  MBV only influenced me 1/1000th!

For example, my personal most heard and beloved album is Rumours.  If you want to reduce me, you can do it with one song: "Dreams" of Stevie Nicks, and Lyndsey Buckingham's guitar and Christine's organ doing swelling layers in the backing and in the middle of the song when Buckingham makes that kind of soundsolo with some volume pedal tricks.  I always always wanted to sound and go beyond this particular part of this one backing.  "Dreams" is the apotheosis of songwriting, song-backing and song-feeling in itself and of all harmonic sounds and layers one can make.  It's all in there; all!  MBV's sound design isn't imaginable without "Dreams".  I would never ever believe Kevin Shields isn't influenced by Rumours.  He is, minimum in his subconscious, remote controlled by this album and "Dreams". I could not understand and perceive all these shoegazers without this one song's appearance. And I didn't talk about the lyrics yet.

It's postmodern, not this "she loves you, yeah" stuff.  They were not the first ones, Pink Floyd and to name it directly, Syd Barrett, did that first on early PF in the song "Brain Damage" when he sings about the madness in the grass/meadows of English art universities where students meet and grow a band.  But Nicks/Buckingham and Mcie put that on the map of unconscious life and remote control of musicians and people's brain by having a world hit that played forever in all channels.  If you listen to "Dreams" again closely with that you'd say, "what a simple dwelling layer sound", but if you check everything before and the developments after it  - at the horizon of "Dreams" you can hear the layers of MBV's first album.  Rumours has been the best selling album for a long time and probably still is in the top 20 and that makes a difference in the unconscious.  Hotel California didn't do that!

You know, it's behind the moon to talk about music, but what has to be done is to examine resp. study the progression of sound, maybe that tells another story.  Our story!?  Surely not the story of Clapton's lost guitar or Slash's hat, hahaha...

EJ Haha!  So long story short, those comparisons are as accurate as the number of them made suggest?

ML Journalists and people need something to write and to compare .  I understand that.

EJ Are there some influences that aren't music that make their way into Guitar?  You seem to have a bit of a fascination with cultures?

ML As said before: there are some old lost poets dreams that influenced me to work conceptual instead of just having a boring stupid construction like a band.  You know, that concentric circles plus planets plus friction of these plates making a big roar has been a dream by Scipio!  Just stay relaxed, sit back in your chair and let that flow into your imagination.  That was nearly 2000 years ago, a Roman poet dreamed that.  What does it mean if 2000 years later a young couple wrote and made that sound in a Burbank studio?  That's simple discourse analysis in a postmodern way and not that bloody biography history writing the stupid lonely dead Rolling Stone and Greil does!!!  It's not: "I have hung around with famous band 'xyz' and made photos of them, singer died early, let's make a film to understand how it was", hahaha.  It's all in the art itself.  It's just postcards from Scipio to young Lindsey and young Stevie to Kevin.  Everybody can read that and being an artist, but only Christine did that and swelled her pedal to talk with Scipio.

Isn't that more poetic than the circumstances of Nick Drake's death?

EJ Your song titles for Guitar reference mis-translation, particularly between Japanese and English, which are notoriously brilliant.  Is that accurate?

ML I like self-made English and add sense that oscillate between something.

EJ Technology is making its way into virtually every avenue of creative practice so this next question comes up a lot, and you're certainly no exception.  What role does technology play in your work?  Is technology at the forefront of your concerns, or just another tool?  The use of technology seems that it could be important considered Japan's contributions, and your combination of traditional techniques and modern ones.

ML Like Japanese peoples' daily easy handling of hundreds of years old tradition and newest tech I do see all tech as a tool like Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd did write that first in the 80th.  We do not need robots that act like men, we need autobots that help like a good fork in the windy cold night. That's something music history tells too when African-American did scratch Mr. Nixon's table.

EJ I'd also like to talk a little bit about your process for Guitar.  Technology certainly plays a big role in the process.  Do you mind giving a general outline of the process for a Guitar song?

ML A Guitar shoegazer kinda backing is made by just putting 15-20 guitar and classic symphonic music made by Claude Debussy over each other in different mostly slowed down tempo forward and reverse until I have a fat stable wonderful symphonic sound, cutting a eight minute loop of it and sending it to Ayako in Japan to sing to it with only the title given - melody and words made by herself.  That's it ;o)

If you are asking other Guitar albums like instrumental It's Sweet to do Nothing!, I just made a concept: chamber music crossover with world music would be nice!  So let's do it...

EJ Straight to the point.  I love it.  Anything you care to say in closing?

ML I do sell ALL my albums and some extra stuff now at Bandcamp.  I would be superkind if all those folks out there, listen my music and have been ripped it would do me a favour and buy some or all of it, because it lands in the pocket of the musician directly and helps him to make some money and stay in his home studio making music instead of interrupting and going outside and driving out biofood to pay the flat rent, so he has time to spin the Ariadne thread concentrated for you musiclovers - in time of your death you will hear music and be able to cross the labyrinth to the light!  Thank you.

...uh, I forgot to speak to you rich musiclovers: it's good for your labyrinth-kharma to drop more than $7 at Bandcamp for one album.  Consider $70-70k and consider your fave artist could have played your beloved stuff with a $3,000 Bibson custom instead of a 0.6k epiphone studio kinda wreck ;o)

Michael Lueckner would really love it if you went to his Bandcamp page and purchased $70k worth of his music.  Just do it.

One Fine Selection No. 44

This week, "John Henry" from Clifton Hicks, who is reviving old time Appalachian music.  

The Townhouse Asks Felipe Alonso: What is Art?

"Art is the space where you reveal experiences. It works out a way to the subconscious. Is the search for what you dream and for what you don't believe in."

View more of Felipe Alonso's work at his website, here.

One Fine Selection No. 43

This week's fine selection, a track by minimalist composer Harold Budd. Enjoy.

The Townhouse Gets a Scoop: Where Is Piglet Now?

I contacted Piglet, a mathrock band from back in the day, to see if I could get an interview. Unfortunately I didn't get one.  But I did get this:

"If ya wanted a little update, one member is a doctor in Detroit, another lives in Thailand, the other has been homeless in Chicago for about three years.  You can "blog" that if ya want.  A lot of people email questions everyday, I just don't answer anymore, so if you put it out there hopefully it will shut some people up." 

I hope we can help.

The Townhouse Asks Tim Youd: What Is Art?

"I would say that art is less about the search for meaning, and more about the search for meaningful experience."

Tim Youd is a painter, sculptor, and performance artist based in Los Angeles, California.  He is currently retyping 100 novels over ten years.

One Fine Selection No. 42

Mimicking Birds. Enjoy.

The Townhouse Interviews: Jeff Barsky of Insect Factory

Guitarist Jeff Barsky's project, Insect Factory, is part of a group of artists who are redefining ambient music.  A group that don't even consider their music ambient.  Instead, they call them meditations, continuations of folk traditions, and examinations of our world through a lens that only music can provide.  Specifically, that only ambient music can provide.  Jeff Barsky was kind enough to give his two cents on the matter.  Enjoy.

Evan Jones First thing's first: what's behind the name Insect Factory?

Jeff Barsky Words just sort of reveal themselves in different ways - imagery that works, a shape of the words themselves, rhythm with syllables - that sort of thing.  I've never spent much time thinking about it, but one review of my first LP said that the name was "simply an abbreviation of the sound", and I like that.

EJ So I don't know very much about you other than that I like your work.  How about a brief history of Jeff Barsky.  Go:

JB I picked up a guitar in the 80's and played along to a lot of Def Leppard and AC/DC on the radio. I played in a lot of short lived bands that generally played covers (Hendrix, Neil Young), and wanting to do little more than play music, I went to college in New England to study guitar performance.  This certainly helped me learn some rules, but it certainly didn't make me want to make music on my own.

I digress for a moment: having grown up in the DC area, I saw many DIY shows in basements and art spaces, and I connected hard with the ostensibly inclusive elements and DIY nature of shows in the punk community, but I wasn't always totally excited musically or challenged by what I was hearing. In college I found a great community of friends who listened to music together, played in bands together, organized basement shows in the arts complex, and so on. This was what I was looking for, but perhaps didn't know it. My guitar playing, I think, was maybe a reaction to what I interpreted as a purely physical sort of nature of punk bands - I wanted to fill space in a way that wasn't just loud chords.  So I still play an electric guitar and use somewhat traditional tools, but I focus more on capturing a meditation or more atmospheric angle of a song instead of a sequence of parts to a song.

But if you listen closely, there are still parts of songs in my music.

EJ What was the last bit of music you listened to?

JB I've really been loving the first record from Urban Verbs, a DC band from 1980 who made 2 beautifully crafted records.  It's kind of similar to what people call "new wave", but I've never been entirely sure about what that means. I'd recommend looking them up if you're not familiar - it's kind of astounding that people don't talk about this band more!

EJ I shall check them out. Who are some artists you like to listen to in general?

JB It runs the gamut but lately I listen to The Rolling Stones, The Gun Club, Al Green, The Ex, Keith Jarrett, and The Psychedelic Furs. I tend to go wide rather than deep.  I like to listen to everything and don't really obsess over any one category.  Hothead is one of my favorite things in DC right now - her songs are really genuine and natural feeling.

EJ Is Insect Factory your only project, or just your primary one?

JB I freelance around. I play in Plums, which is an improvised band that, to give you a ballpark, I would maybe suggest imagining Flipper trying to play surf rock.  I have a duo with guitarist Chris Brokaw called Sunset to the Sea, and we're releasing a tape on Tape Drift next month which was recorded during a few shows that we did together.

Last summer I toured with an improv trio called Paper Balls, and we hope to go again this summer - it was such a challenging experience to improvise music that could be so deathly serious one minute, sad the next, and then absurd.  I also collaborate with Kohoutek, a formerly DC-based psych rock collective, whenever I can.  They're now based in Philly. Scott Verrastro, the amazing percussionist from that band is a close friend and a frequent collaborator.  He's on the latest cassette of mine released by Already Dead, which is the set we played at the latest Terrastock in Louisville.  We've shared more beautiful musical moments than I could count.

EJ How do you typically compose an Insect Factory piece?  Speaking technically.

JB I play into my tape machine at home and hit record.  It's less about intentional composition that's been planned ahead of time and more about what comes out at the time that I'm playing.  I try to focus on developing a sound, a mood, or a moment, and meditate and focus intensely and actively on making something better that's happening right now.  That may or may not be a metaphor.

EJ Now speaking philosophically.  What drives Insect Factory?  What kind of things are behind the music?  Inspirations, ideas, or otherwise.

JB Social justice - racial equality, gender equality, economic equality, books, nature, experiencing the world, bike rides...I am an elementary school teacher and my relationships with my students inspire my art constantly, and my art inspires my teaching and my relationships with my students. My love of coffee and beer are huge inspirations. My music couldn't and wouldn't exist if the inspirations for my music and for my life were different. Both are one.

The philosophy is what dictates the technical needs. The technical side is kind of boring. I use delay boxes and distortion boxes and that kind of thing, but I try to focus more on playing with fewer notes and using the stereo field, volume, and tone.  I don't really relate at all to "ambient", but rather, I think of my music as slowing down a pop song by about 800% and staring into it with a microscope.  I think of it as the opposite of ambient; it's almost as if the microscopic elements of pop are magnified so heavily that the hairs growing on pop songs are the size of tree trunks, and you're examining everything from the middle, and you're seeing everything from a new vanishing point.

EJ Woah.  Slowing down pop songs.  That's a brilliant idea.  How did you arrive at that understanding?

JB I actually think that this is an understanding that comes from intention more than reflection.  As far as being microscopic, it's always been in my nature to look super closely and ask questions and examine.  I used to break toys to see how they were put together.  As I learned, sometimes you end up with a deeper physical and conceptual understanding, but sometimes you end up with a lot of G.I. Joes separated at the torso! Haha.

EJ It happens...

JB ...but given the many routes one can take creatively, it always made more sense to approach this project with a wide open and inclusive lens rather than a genre oriented and exclusive one.  My intention is to explore, examine, break, test, fail, progress.  Maybe not always in that order, though!

I actually think it's not actively about any one thing, but more an intentional and meditative channeling of many different ideas and thoughts - both musical and non-musical. The intention was to be wide open and challenge myself constantly to be more wide open and allow emotion and understanding of privilege and books and pets and death to slowly sort of reveal itself to me through this process.  This is really why I don't mess with my setup and equipment.  To put any concerted effort towards technology would allow equipment to take too much of the forefront and require too much cerebral processing from me.  It does put certain limitations on the music, but we all work within walls of some sort.

EJ I guess along those lines, I get the same kind of feeling from your work as I do Luciernaga, where ambient or whatever you'd like to call it, is more a means of rooting yourself down here on Earth, and not so much a way to look beyond.  You, like Joao (Luciernaga), don't seem to draw as much inspiration from, say, "space exploration" as ambient music maybe has in the past, but instead you seem to be rooted in humanity.  The titles of your music seem to always suggest something earthly.

JB I think that's fair. I'm not really that interested at all in outer space.

EJ And it seems that your music tends to be a slow burn, rather than just a typically ambient drone. There is actually an arch to the music you make, even though it might be a very slow one.  It tends to sneak up on us, rather than immediately presenting itself. That's accurate?

JB Yes - I think it's accurate.  I think it's hard to get my Western brain away from the idea of resolution in art, and the arch is part of that.  There are melodies happening and there is intention, but there's also chance and there are also accidents.

EJ The mother of all slow burns: Glacial.  A 45-minute slow burn, in fact.  It's rad...and also very foreboding (it has a happy ending though).  What was that all about?

JB Haha - I had recorded that at home and I lost myself as I was recording it, and I'm not really sure how or what happened.  Truly I don't remember it very well.  I tend to record hours of music and then either rediscover it or forget about it and move on.  I shared it with some friends and got encouragement to release it as a limited disc.  It's available online now.  Recording and putting my records together is really just about going back and looking at what's already happened.

EJ There's not really a structure as we might typically think of it in the type of music you make, because it's really just about sounds.  Even with your process, the "music" is so slow, so stretched, that it doesn't exactly read as musical off the bat.  That said, there does seem to be an interest more in making "listenable" ambient, rather than just done-y atmospherics for the sake of drone-y atmospherics.  Do you think people are trying to re-interpret ambient music now that we're a few decades from its inception?

JB I don't know - I think that everything is an interpretation of who we are, what we do and what we know. I don't really know what other people are trying to do.

EJ You're a guitarist, but that doesn't seem to be totally important to Insect Factory, at least on the surface.  Do you get all of your sounds from the guitar and related elements?

JB I am a guitar player, but I've never really had the concerns that other guitar players have. I don't really like equipment and pedals and amps. I try to use the bare minimum of what I need to make the music I want to make.  This makes it more portable and easier to adapt to my brain so that my equipment is like another limb.  I haven't bought a new pedal in over 10 years.

Most of my sounds don't come from equipment other than my guitar.  I scratch the strings, de-tune, mess around with the input jack - the delay boxes just help me hold on to those sounds for longer. On a purely sonic level, it's almost all my guitar playing. Occasionally I've augmented my recordings with tape samples or drum machine loops or percussion or something.  The record I just finished is all guitar recorded live.

EJ And there's a lot of what I, as a visual artist, might call "glitch art" in your music. Bits of sounds, digital noise, etc. that contrast with the foundation atmosphere of the song.  Does technology play a conceptual role in your music?

JB Nope!  The technology serves the larger conceptual need rather than vice versa.  As far as the technology, though, sometimes making music isn't a clean process and for various reasons, like recording fidelity, new sounds work their way in.  I welcome this.  Accidents are fine and mistakes are part of a growing process and an artistic process as a human.

EJ So the contrast between the atmosphere and the "glitch" isn't really a conscious one?

JB I haven't thought much about contrast within music. I think, at least with this project, that I try to think less about contrast and more about unification.  Like many people, my thoughts run all over the place, and I want to reconcile everything as best as I can into a meaningful whole.  So while there may be atmospheric elements, percussive elements, or "glitch-y" elements, I try to approach first from the whole, as a concept, and then work backwards, rather than start from the parts and then go forward to the whole.

This is similar to planning lessons that I'm teaching!  I find it more useful to think about what I want to help my students learn and then work backwards, rather than to focus on micromanaging the millions of possibilities.  If you know what your goal is, at least conceptually, it's easier to create parts that are suitable.

EJ Instead of using the word "glitch", would you maybe describe that textural elements in your music the microscopic "hairs" that you referred to earlier?

JB I think that's an appropriate connection that makes a lot of sense.

EJ So what does post-production look like for Insect Fields?

JB There isn't much - I record to tape, mix it onto my computer, and that's it. I like to be self sufficient.

EJ And how do you perceive the state of music these days?  Are you optimistic about it?

JB I don't really perceive it much. There's a lot being made. I'm never really ahead of the curve - I'm always catching up and going backwards at the same time. If there's something cool happening now, I'm sure I'll catch on in a few years. I read something in the past month or so about how music from the past finally caught up with and outsold music being made now. But I find it weird that this was ever not the case.

How many decades has recorded music been around?  Have the last 12 months ever been more important than the rest of recorded music's existence?  Have books written in the last 12 months ever been more valuable than the entire of the history of writing?  Maybe in some cases with non-fiction and research, sure, but doesn't that grow from what came before it? In one sense, a practical one, the "now" is always infinitely more important than the past or the future.  But we're talking about recorded music, and this serves more of an archival purpose than a current one.  Once something's been recorded, it's history.

EJ I notice you return to the history theme a lot.  It seems like you either make work that becomes history by forgetting about it, or you rediscover history and it becomes part of what's been cataloged. Just like anything humans do.  That seems to be an important idea and an important way of working for you, no?

JB It's not something I consciously think about too much.  I think that your work becomes history the moment it's finished, and the quest is for something new to explore.  But yeah - sometimes I'm aware of it as something worth putting in a newer, more "current" context, which is kind of a human sort of endeavor, right?  History is given its value by putting it up against the "now" - that way we get to measure it against what's happening in the present and judge with what we know now.

EJ On that note, anything you care to promote, say, or leave us with in closing?

JB  Check out Already Dead Tapes & Records and Tape Drift.  Both labels release lots of new and exciting music.  I just listened to the mastered version of my new studio record, and I'm hoping to get it out this spring.  Thanks!  This was fun.

EJ Look forward to that.  Thanks for stopping by!

Support Insect Factory by visiting the Bandcamp page, and keep up with the Insect Factory latest at insectfields.org, or Facebook. 

Slow Oxygen Loss. Insect Factory

Some more ambient beauty: Slow Oxygen Loss by Insect Factory.  Enjoy.

Able Bodies. From Indian Lakes

One Fine Selection No. 41

This week another noise track from pioneers of the genre, My Bloody Valentine.  "Soon" is the closer of their 1991 LP, Loveless.  Enjoy.

Weekend Listening

It's Saturday.

The holidays are over, and so is the week. So kick it. 

Legendary producer Madlib was given access to Blue Note Records's original masters catalogue back in 2003 for a remix project. What was born was a mix of jazz, hip-hop and electronic style that has been hugely influential on younger contemporary musicians/producers like Flying Lotus and Thundercat since its release.

He would dub this reinterpretation of Blue Note classics Shades of Blue: Madlib Invades Blue Note.

If you've ever wondered what would happen if you gave one of the most talented hip-hop producers of his generation unrestricted access to the catalogue of the record company that churned out albums from a veritable Pantheon of jazz giants (Art Blakely, Coltrane, Chet Baker, Herbie Hancock, Dexter Gordon, Charles Mingus, and too many more to name here), here's your chance. 

One Fine Selection No. 40

Twenty One Pilots is a duo band straight out of Columbus, Ohio. Their music encompasses a little bit of every genre. It is rock, rap, hip hop, indie, and alternative.  These two musicians are very talented when it comes to creating and preforming music. Their music has arrangements of drums, piano, ukulele, and other fun surprises throughout. These surprises are what make listening to their music fun. The other great thing about this band is the interesting and intriguing lyrics.

“Lane Boy”, a song off of their new album Blurryface, explores the issues with the music industry today. The band tells us that we, as an audience, should no longer trust songs that are ‘flawless,' because those songs turn us away from depth and feeling. Instead, the song encourages us to listen to music that makes us feel something.  They express that so many of the songs we hear today are “heartless”. This song has a rap, electric, and alternative flare that will make you want to dance while also absorbing all the lyrics have to offer.  Tyler (the lead singer) kills it with his rapping skills and makes you want to look up the lyrics so you can sing every word just as fast and accurate. It has several changes in tempo and beat that will keep you entertained and on your toes.

 So take a listen to this song and if you like it, take a look at the whole album (especially Stressed Out, which explores the idea of how we are slowly losing our individuality and creativity).

Click below and have fun listening to the song and remember “Don’t trust a song that’s flawless”.

The Essential Books

Iconic audio-collage supergroup The Books were truly unique.  I dare say they paved a new path for what music could sound like, and be.  Here's a taste of what The Books had to offer.  Enjoy your worries, you may never have them again.

One Fine Selection No. 39

This one is from Smokestack Relics, who offer up what they aptly describe as "dirty swamp rock from Colorado." With a driving hybrid of the crunch of the Delta Blues, the attitude and noise of the guitar-driven punk rock scene that once gave rise to bands like Dinosaur Jr., and strong (sometimes bordering on overwhelming) hints of their bluegrass and classic country roots, these guys have found their formula. And it's working. 
"61 & 49" is the kind of song that someone might want to underscore their next car chase. It's a rolling blues anthem that seems to have taken the "Safe as Milk" era Beefheart legacy and run with it.

Feast your ears: