Haunted Magic From The Underbelly Of Hog Heaven
Now, lookie here: there's no such thing as a review written sans personal bias. That shit is a myth. One could choose to try to swath the inherent bias of a review in "journalistic integrity" (a dubious prospect for the form, to say the least), or one can just come right on out and say "I feel this way about _______ because this is me, these are my personal experiences, and this is my opinion".Ahem.Haunted forest melancholia. I just came up with that! Who wants to give me money? Tiny Mixtapes, perhaps (do they even pay)? Anyway, that's the most evocative phrase I cou

Hail To The Woz/NO HEAVY TRUCKING
Shit. Busy times, ups and downs, and everything moves me. I've heard some beautiful, borderline-sappy old r&b songs in the last month or so that have moved me to tears and/or made me sit there mumbling "good goddamn, what the hell?". I've dug up some buckwild noise bleeders that would drive a sensible person to distraction even as they give me the damn chills. I got that Joseph Spence reissue on Mississippi (order that from Exiled, my favorite PDX record store, or come by my work sometime... we shoul

FM DUST IS A RECORD LABEL!
COMING THIS TUESDAY, AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW:DUST001ACTUAL BIRDS- Funny Hatz And Other Dubious ExperimentsC-90 cassette (edition of 25)$6 ppd US/$9 intlUS:INTERNATIONAL:Why do I keep putting this out in such tiny editions if it's the best full-length I've done to date? That's my business, buster. Anyway, this is my "Portland record" (meaning that 15/18

Maybe I'm Just A Guy Who HATES Heels
Alright, so I was slaving over an entry for the past week about something else, and I do intend to get back to that. However, I need to steer the discussion away from records for just a minute. Instead, let us consider VHS tapes, and the death of the rental shop.The one cool video rental place in Ann Arbor, Liberty Street Video, will be closing its doors soon. I admit that, since I started working at used record/media store where I'm allowed to borrow whatever DVD might come in, I've done nothing personally to prevent this. I'm still pretty bummed about it, though.When I first moved to Ann Arbor in 2000, Liberty Street Video was one of those local institutions that m

Dork Side Of The Goon
Okay, there are a couple of things I need to establish right off the bat:a) As soon as I came up with the title above, I knew what I was going to write about for this entry, andb) I fucking hate Roger Waters.I mean, I've never met him, so who knows? Maybe he's an alright dude. One can never really know unless you spend time with a person; one must always remember that there is a human lurking inside every unsavory public personality who is as real and fragile as any of us. That, of course, means that maybe George W. Bush is an alright dude, too... I've never met him.Both, however, certainly come on like the Lords of Douche Village on film/in p