so i guess this show thing is on...details

so being the clever slueth that i am, i located the myspace page for this event coordination company or whatever, Ishta Music Company, and apparently even though they hadn't properly confirmed with me the details, they're already doing some meager promotion for this event thing. anyway, here's the shit:

june 18th - 9pm or 10pm or something
@ G3 Lounge (formerly club lamia)
3910 geary st @ 3rd ave (san francisco)

all sources online of which i could divine describe this venue as kind of an overpriced dive, guess a lot of asian kids go there too. i think i walked past it before on the way to a party or something during one of the few times i've ventured into the richmond for a night time activity, cuz really, what the fuck is over there besides houses and fog? anyway, let's look the ad soliciting bands:

ishta Music Company and G3 (located at geary and third avenue) starting a new weekly on Sunday nights for talented, hip, sexy, fresh, know how to rock bands. Will showcase up to five bands in one evening...the audience and ishta music company will then pick one band to recieve cash compensation and a live mastered recording of thier set with the oppurtunity for future booking. Battle of the hip bands, so make sure to come with something fresh...those who play it safe need not apply.

Please send audio files/myspace urls, etc to above email address...
Looking to set up first event for June 4th and every sunday there after. PLEASE REPLY WITH BANDS AVAILABILITY FOR SUNDAYS IN JUNE...

Compensation: $200-300 for winning bands, live recording and future bookings

well, are we hip, sexy, fresh? can we bring the rock? only one band receives cash compensation?? wtf? i do say, performance, charisma, it's not my fault if nobody likes it... but seriously, let's drop the pretenses, i have no interest in competing. we'll be performing on our own terms, and hopefully we won't suck, or at least have enough friends present to heckle us onwards towards our doom.

anyways, if you're our friends or you like us or something and you have nothing better to do, please come, i'll post more details as soon as i acquire them. hopefully it won't cost an outrageous amount of money to attend. i did see something in their myspace ad about $2 becks beer.

a show maybe

so we might be playing a show on june 18th. i have no other details than that, other than some chick named krs10 from Ishta Music Company posted an ad on tribe.net and like our stuff via our myspace page. i have no idea if she is legit or even has her shit together. i don't really care either. if we get an opportunity to play, then that'll be hella cool, i don't really care about money or any of that shit, that's just like a surprise bonus or something. at this point i make enough money doing my dumb jobs. anyway, the event is supposed to be a weekly sunday night thing of indie discopunk electro bands competing or some shit for prize or some shit like money or recording or something. whatever. we won't win. and that's fine.

anyway, we're trying to get our shit together i guess. i dunno. been playing around with my nord synth thing, figured out how to make it drone, so we'll do some songs with a synth drone in the background. the other day i went out and bought an octave pedal for my guitar so that i could get some bass tones, and it works rather well, at least better than i expected it to. it does in fact have a killer distored bass setting, all meaty and thick and nasty, and i can take the bass line and run it to a separate amp away from the guitar, so that's pretty cool. basically we're gonna change our approach away from ultra stripped down and instead use all the techonology we can to have a more panoramic sonic sound, at least as much as you can have with just two people. looking at getting a sample trigger pad for tommi, but they're damn expensive, and there isn't much out there as far as products. probably will end up getting one off of ebay or some shit at some point. anyway, the prospect of playing a show again is rather exciting, hopefully this chick isn't a flake or representing some bogus corporate bullshit.

on x-men 3 and tom yum goong

i thought it was pretty good, i enjoyed it, though it could have been SO MUCH BETTER. shoulda been longer. needed more with the supporting characters of angel, colossus, kitty pryde, rogue. more mystique would have been good too. the overall story was kinda dumb. but i was relatively captivated and sucked in throughout, even through some crummy cartoony effects. not what i wanted after three years, but it was serviceable. would rather have gotten bryan singer's version, cuz i have no interest in his superman movie. he should have stuck to x-men. superman was already been done well, like 26 years ago. halle berry was less annoying than usual, almost not sucky, but she should be re-cast from here on out, cuz she really is a terrible actress. the spikey faced morlock was hot. all the morlocks were pretty cool, it was weak to kill them off in the final scene where jean grey goes apeshit.

saw tom yum goong finally today after downloading it like a million years ago. i think we can all agree, tony jaa is fucking hot. and elephants are cute. tony jaa, elephants, lots of ass kicking, cuz right when the flick gave a load up of ass kicking, it gave ya a whole 'nother scene of ass kicking. capoera guy was hella hot too, even though capoera still looks retarded and is posers (i.e. hippie wanks from santa cruz). all the broken english, especially by dirty balls from ong bak was great, and the tranny head mistress, awesomely retarded camp. and when tony jaa hollers out for his elephant: KORN!! that was sweet, i laughed like hell. all this ass kicking with an important environmental message - don't fuck with thai boys and their brother elephants. quality, the only thing that could have made it better would have been for tony jaa to be more naked and there to be more blood in the fights. he was fucking cute in the red scarf though.

horny, depressed, and lonely

but mostly hungover. that mainly sums up my weekend, haha. actually not really too much of any of those things, but a general malaise, i guess. drunken attempts to manufacture attention, sabotaged by eyeliner. this drunk fool last night at the cafe, he says to his friend right in front of me, is that a girl? i'm wearing a tight gray wife-beater, i say straight up back to him, do you see any tits on me? he apologizes in his drunken way, i say whatever, just giving him a hard time for thinking out loud instead of even thinking at all. efforts to get into trouble were completely unfruitful, time spent trolling around on internet chat rooms, ever as retarded as they have always been. whatever. attention, validation, don't you think i'm ever so pretty? i'm listening to supergrass right now, so everything will be alright, very much so. i just bought their greatest hits cd for like $6 or something, i like them a lot, i just always forget to listen to them. i definitely gonna put this in my car though, it'll make driving to work perhaps less painful. my day job fills me with some additional dread now that i have learned that i will soon be moving my work station out of the conference room into a cubicle of which i will share with one of my least favorite co-workers. it's not that i don't like her, though in all honesty, i used to not, mainly because of the way she sorta carries herself, y'know snotty white girl entitlement, but i've grown to like certain aspects about her, i mean, she's brought her dog to the office a couple times, and that's one super cool dog, and her little offspring daughter is hella cute, so i can't knock her that, let's just say that she isn't my first choice as to who i would share a cubicle with. this is like my favorite supergrass song playing now, late in the day, such a wonderful melody, i remember the video, they're all bouncing around on pogo-sticks in time with the bounce of the song, great stuff. so wystful nostalgic psychedlic bridge, another time, another place, late afternoon sunset, the kinds when you're away from home, somewhere unfamiliar, places i rarely see. i need to travel away from here, get my passport together, save up some money or something, go to another country, that's what tommi wants. i'm getting bored with the politics, all my daily blogs i read, blah blah blah, same shit everyday. daily kos has really lost a bit of levity, the front pagers there are pretty listless, even darksyde, who used to publish great science blogs is all boring as hell now. there's an air of unfocused pretentiousness, i mean kos has always caried himself in a kind of arrogant snottiness that probably doesn't come across as much in person but is like totally amplified by the keyboard, though he's no bitter railing queen like john avarosis at americablog, who though often always right and fighting the good fight for queer community and rights and stuff, well he seriously needs to get laid. take the edge off, bucko. digby's still the best, and atrios is filter or choice. rawstory also. boring stuff though, motherfucker's spying and compiling info for databases that they be too incompentent to manage or make proper use of except of specific political enemies. i tried to work on music today, mix some old shit better, add some synth and shit to some shit, failed at that, i need beats. i practiced drums again today, been practicing on my days off, going through this book of exercises on stick control. my left hand is still hella weaker than my right, but i've gotten a lot better just by doing these exercises, it's really phenomenal the differance a bit of practice makes, i'm almost starting to get the theory that perhaps i am a natural drummer, at least more so than other instruments, although saxophone was always easy as fuck. wish i could get more piano coordination back, maybe i should be doing piano exercises, haha, oh the horror, oh the misspent youth of ten years of lessons. and i still suck at guitar. i've got this john petrucci video, the wank fag from dream theater, on building up guitar technique, and i tried it once, but it just moved so fast, i gave up after the first exercise, i should pull it out again and try again. i just hate practicing guitar, it's so boring and fingers are so uncoordinated when not playing chords, it's lame. but practicing the drums was kinda fun, cuz i actually felt like i was making some progress. like after doing some exercises, i'd take a break and just fuck around on the kit and i totally had more strenght, coordination, and confidence. so that's pretty cool.

report from the fall

so me and tommi went and saw the mighty fall play at the independent last night for their first of two shows there, featuring their new guitarist, bassist, and drummer, as their previous members had quit the band a week earlier in phoenix and flown back to england. it was pretty fucking rad, as it had all of the elements of a good show - a shitty opening band, a noise multi-media performance, a whole lotta of rock, and a hot indie mod boy all up next to me.

the opening band was birdmonster. they were cute. the bass player seemed like a real hottie, but up close, ehh, not so much. the guitarist vocalist was pretty hot for a white boy though, working the side burns, looking like springsteen sweating and playing his derivative indie rock anthems tired and true. they were spunky, they had energy, and maybe in another context they might not have totally sucked. i hollered, turn up the fucking bass, but i realized later that it was so quiet cuz the swarthy little beast couldn't barely play, at least not with any consistency that involved the dexterity of hitting less than all four strings at once. he was serviceable at the tamborine tho, i'll give him that. the lead guitarist bounced around like a giant douche, their rock moves ever so cliched. i dunno what they were singing about. they were from san francisco, furthering my hypothesis that all bands from SF suck, at least the semi-popular ones. but i don't see that many local bands, so who am i to really say. anyway, they sucked, but i woulda fucked the singer.

so then we got this multi-media noise thing, which was actually really cool. the guy played short clips of famous rock stars, like prince, elvis, barbara streisand, and michael jackson, in a back and forth loops so as to isolate the charisma and amplify the ridiculousness of their various performative aspects, essentially the sillyness in their facial movements. some asshole yelled out you suck, i yelled out this is awesome. i was laughing like hell, and while it was a bit taxing, i think a fair amount of the audience enjoyed it, as it certainly didn't take itself to seriously.

at around this point i had well noticed the hot white mod boy in my vicinity. what stood out and garnered my appreciation was that he was totally dressed up as the guy on the cover of the 50,000 fall fans can't be wrong cd, with a diamond pattern sweater and shit. plus and fine stylish haircut and a lovely smile. i wanted to immediately go up to him and declare friendship with this kindred spirit. instead we kinda smiled intermitently at each other in anticipation of the fall coming on. after about the second song he hollered out "i am curious oranj" a reference i let him know i registered and appreciated. i asked him if he had seen them play before, and he said that it was also his first time. we were at the front of the stage, eventually he moved closer to the center, while i stayed off a bit to the right so as to avoid being any closer to the mosh area. at one point he did look back, all smiles to check if i was enjoying the performance as much as he did - i very much was and knodded back. the show totally rocked. mark e smith even smiled whilst performing! the kids on the fall website who have been following the band on tour declared that it was a legendary show and that the band were in top form. the most striking aspect was how mark e smith used the stage and his band's amps as sort of a mixing board, going up to amps, twiddling knobs a cavaler assuredness, changing the sound dynamic of an instrument, and then changing it back, all within the proper time context the song. from what i've read this is totally his thing, and i can also see how it might piss off ego-centric musicians, e.g. almost all musicians. but the execution was brillant. the guitar should be louder. muffle the bass for a bit. turn down the synth, turn up the synth. that kick drum don't need no fucking mic. it was pretty rad. i couldn't hardly hear a damn thing he hollered, it was almost all distorted bass and drums with some synth from where i was at, but sounded hella good, as i drunkenly banged my hands on the stage along to the beat. pacifying joint, what about us?, and blindness were all hella rad, the whole audience singing along to the chorus of what about us and shit. bildo really should have been there!

after the show ended i had to at least still talk to the cute boy even as i had somewhat sobered up. i said hey, i really like your sweater, it's totally cool, and i meant it with all sincerity, maybe too much sincerity, i don't know if he knew how to take it, i probably looked like a jackass. i introduced myself, his name was nick, tommi did the intro thing too, and cute boy introduced himself as nicholas to tommi. what did that mean? tommi said, i really like your hair. and then all of a sudden this chick with long stringy dyed magenta hair appeared and the two of them disappeared. heartbroken, tommi and i left the club. tommi said maybe we'd see the kid around, perhaps true. i was gonna say, be in my fake fucking band, haha. how cool what that have been? going trolling for cute boys to be in yr band fall concerts, now that's epic.

acid mothers temple - may 7 @ bottom of the hill

me and tommi walked in to the first band, je suis france, playing some kind of indie rock jangle. i was like what the fuck are these guys doing opening for AMT and what's with the 9 guys on stage, especially the two who are just tossing a football back and forth? well the next two songs were much better, essentially one chord krautrock drones with lots of percussion and effects and shit, kind of like early stereolab a lil' bit.

the second band was called the antarticans, and they were from LA, and i was like, since when do dirgy doom emo experimental bands come out of Los Angeles. they were pretty cool, all instrumental, a lot of the songs were in 3/4 time. a bit repetitive, but i dug it.

acid mothers temple was totally what i expected, pretty much the same show as the last time i saw them, i think it was even the same drummer, as it was their basic quartet. they played pretty much a bunch of improv noise rock things, and a couple of their more melodic jams, like pink lady lemonade, of which they were conveniently selling on a cd that night, and oh what a shit load of merch did they have for sale! fucking unreasonable, i thought $60 would cover my AMT merch needs, but noooo! they had a 4cd box set for $40 that i had to pass up, lame! anyway, we ended up buying this month's new cd, the afrirampo collaboration, and the live cd with the two melodic jams. i also bought the newest cd by the antarticans, whose main guy was very humble and meek about pushing their music on me, as i said, well which do you recommend, which one is your newest one? at this point i figured fuck it, i might as well get something by the first band too, who had like ten different cdr eps all spread out on their section of the merch table. so i ask the dude standing there, like which should i get, i liked the last two songs. so like all these eps are like 2 for $5, so he points out two, and i'm, ok, whatever, $5, can't beat that i guess. plus they was from atlanta, so i figured why not support these weirdos, normal looking weirdos as it was, but whatever. anyways, the highlight for us was how cool the guys from AMT were, both the bass player and the synth guy were there selling stuff and they were super cool and shook our hands and such, way cool. and i must say, firms handshakes at that.

so we're gonna see the fall on sunday, which should be even more fucking awesome since the guitarist, bass player, and drummer all just quit and flew back to england. should be completely fucking rad, as he's hired some dudes from some other band on the same U.S. label. i'm excited-uh...

tv on the radio vs mellowdrone

me and tommi went and saw tv on the radio play at the independent on tuesday night. it was pretty cool. the opening band was called celebration, and while i dug their drummer and all the odd-meter shit, and the presence of a real bona-fide organ, i just couldn't get into the singer. like i felt like her voice just wasn't all that strong and she was just mainly screechy the fucking time. maybe it works better on record, but i thought she was pretty tuneless and lacking artfullness or subtlety. there were some good songs and i was pretty close to buying their cd, but in the end i was like fuck it.

as for the indie rock bellys of tv on the radio, seriously boys, yr major label deal making ya all hella fat now, ain't it? the hottest guy was the hired drummer who also played some accordion and guitar at the end. as for the band, well i thought the singer dude's voice would sound better, but really it was just all over the top emoting, again, not a lot of subtelty. i understand that their is a certain messy murkiness to their sound, but considering how polished the rhthym section rock aspect was as grafted onto their live performance, a lot of the falsetto vocals and guitar by the afro guy came off as lazy, err perhaps, stoned as fuck? white boy was just plain embarassing to watch, bobbing and sweating profusly in excitement at being in the presence of music making, shall we say, the rock. though he redeemed himself quite nicely with his damn impressive beat boxing on the last tune, ambulence. while the show was not revelatory, and the amount of buzz of these fatties surprises me, given that they aren't that terribly accessable or melodic, with the tunes that hit, they fucking hit and filled the audience with energy. guess i was just expecting a little bit more, more craft maybe.

so we went and saw mellowdrone on wednesday night, of which i am familiar with throught the rantings of Jaye of popperattic in LA, who saw them open for Johnny Marr several years ago, saying the use of guitar opened her mind up or some shit. anyway, at some point i had downloaded some of their eps off the internet, and remember that a few songs were really good, but nothing really held my attention. but for $7 and my first wednesday night off in like forever, why not check it out.

opening up was an emo-pop-punk band called lola ray. they were pretty terrible, sounded like fall out boy or any other crap on mtv that's market to adolescent girls. they'll never make it in this racist ass country/music business cuz they got an asian boy singer, but damn was he cute! all skinny with peircings and they were in shirts and ties, fucking hottie. their second song was alright in it's bouncyness, but god damn the lyrics throughout were horrible, "i need to be with you...ooooh oooooh oooooh...being inside of you, changed the way i feel" type horse shit.

mellowdrone was ok. i really don't like bands that play to pointless drum loops. just do it all live already, nobody can hear the fucking electronics anyways once the drums start pounding. fucking wankerish. the chick on keyboards didn't seem to do anything, and the main guy's guitar was barely audible. but the lead guitarist, what wonderful reverby chorused tones coming from him, good stuff. the music was hit or miss, but their were a couple songs that really stood out. "oh my" was totally a hit single (though when i put on their cd, it sounds like shit, no hit single there), and the second to last tune had a great minor major 7th type chord progression that should have gone long or reprised, cuz that melody was the heart of the song and the essense of music. no one care about the stupid verse and chorus, gives us the bridge and the vamp. what was most shocking however was the fact that it took me nearly half their set to realize who he was aping vocally, especially when it was so obviously julian casablancas from the strokes. that was annoying. even better was the song of which the verse was the exact same chord progression to "eyes without a face" by billy idol. i hollered out my eureka moment, this is billy idol, much to the evil glares of young females their to revel. whatever, fuck them. anyways, at the end of the show tommi and i came to the conclusion that the main dude was totally drunk, as he kept swigging his beer during songs, but also totally coked the fuck out, cuz he was anorexically thin and confident yet detached as fuck. plus they're from LA, the album is out on columbia records, so of course he's gonna blow all his advance on...blow! anyway, i bought his cd, cuz it was only $10 and i figured for the few good pop songs it might be fun. but i was listening to it in my car this morning on the way to work and it was making my ears hurt. too many layers of vocals and crap, not enough guitar, not really mixed very well, and the keyboards sounded hokey. oh well more later.

ladytron vs lemonade

friday night me and tommi saw ladytron at their sold out show at mezzanine. it was pretty cool, about what i expected. like i really like them a lot, especially their witching hour cd, but i still hear them for what they could be and perhaps are evolving towards.

an austrailian duo called the presets opened the show and essentially tried very hard to be sexy, but though the singer bore a resemblance to damon albarn of blur/gorillaz, how sexy can a boy be in a baggy t-shirt, one with a cartoon mouse i'll give him that, but really, after announcing yr first song is called steamworks to muffled laughter from the audience members familiar with the renowned san jose bath house, and huffing and puffing raunchily into the microphone in tandem with disco synth duran duran tones complimented by basic rock drum beats, perhaps taking off yr shirt and showing a little skin to match the retarded performance theatrics of flailing body arms and straight white boy dance moves might have gone a long ways towards captivating the audiences attention, or at least distracting this faggot from dissecting the slightness of each of yr tunes. they did have some almost good tunes, one had an awesome bass riff with killer descending fill that unfortunately looped it's awesomeness adnauseum until it was compleatly dilluted over the course of five minutes, when it should busted out into some killer disco funk. these songs were more sketches stretched out, and while they had ideas and potential, the retarded performance antics turned me off. i would buy their cd for $3 tho if i saw it in the cutout bin.

ladytron was augmented by a chick bass player and an asian dude on drums. the drummer was a powerful addition to their sound, though the drawback was that he wasn't given a whole lot to do. i give them credit though, it seemed that 90% of the music was being generated live, as i hate bands that play to tapes, sorry presets. my criticism is that they take these musical tropes, such as rock drum beats, and minor key melodies or their songs and murky synth patches and don't really do much more than build tension. while it was great that they stretched out on some of the tunes, it was essentially the same riff over an over with no instrument taking the lead to push the thick sonic morass past being simply a thick sonic morass of propulsive atmosphere. still they did have an impressive sound, though i would say bearded guitar supergenius boy's guitar could have been a little more prominent, it was almost like he lacked the confidence to be more present as he hid back on the left cornor of the stage. asian coke fiend ruben was rather impressive though, demonstraing himself to be the conjurer of a multitude of synth lusciousness and effects. but the biggest surprise to me was that the main vocalist could actually sing. whereas on record, i had assumed the heavy vocal effects had meant to disguise a weak singing voice, the chick consistently proved to have some serious vocal pipes, as many of the new tunes sounded stronger and more confident than they do on cd. finally, the bulgarian chick is pretty fucking hot. seriously hot.

saturday night tommi's friend dan beckoned us to come join him at a bar in the mission called amnesia. we got there, paid $3 cover, he was already relatively piss drunk, and fucking immediately pulled this kiss on the lips hello shit, and proceeded throughout the night to attempt to feel up my back and grope towards my ass. tommi was like, oh, he's just being european, which he is not, and just flirty in an innocent way, and i'm like no, he wants sex, and it's making me uncomfortable. anyway, whatever. turns out this band was gonna play. they were called lemonade, and they were like a noise dub avant tribal rock band, in other words, fucking awesome. they consisted of a bass player, a supergenius wordless vocalist percussionist effects guru boy, and a sexy drummer, and they had the crowd of hipsters dancing hella down to the no wave disco funk. they were really good. they had a clear boredoms influence to my ears, and were a whole lot of fun. tommi's friend dan totally hated it, just like when he tagged along to the meat beat manifesto show back in february. but i was like, fuck this shit man, i ain't leaving, i got dragged out of the house when all i wanted to do was lay around and watch movies and lo and behold here i am at a totally awesome show, yay! after the show i went up to supergenius vocalist effects boy and was like hey, y'all got a cd, and he was like, we still recording it, but i got these neat tie dye shirts i made, and i was like they cool, but i got enough shirts, so i very much look forward to yr cd and seeing you guys play again as i touched my hand to his leg, and we exchanged introductions, and he was like so sincere and nice. these guys are ones to watch.