I Was Just About To Run

Anastasia Cazabon - Tree (from Stories)

With the tan slightly stiff on your cheek muscles and warm like the day, the forever of an afternoon spent in the sun is the beauty of eternal recurrence. When whatever can run its course of all things has already rolled on every piece of grass and mastered every kite trick, whatever can happen of all things has already happened, resulted, and gone by. And there are a forever of todays and tomorrows and forevers.

Throw Me The Statue - About To Walk (mp3)

It's Work Related

Jorg M Colberg - Secretary's View

I love that the worst singer makes the best indie music. The dumbest hook makes the sickest remix. The most disjointed rhythm and random instrumentation make the best hip shake. The more insecure and self-deprecating, the more relevant. You don't get that at work. In no other business is a wish a plan, a secret a sale.

Imaginary Johnny - Work Related (mp3)

Everyone That I See, They Act Like They're Indifferent

Heidi Kuamo - Protest (2005) [from Misbehaving: Media Machines Act Out]

Today's musical offering is a very special one. It comes from some optimistic place between Brooklyn and Noodles & Company on State Street where strangers do nice things for each other. Derek, who calls his music Computerization, believes music right now is too heavily based on the performer and not enough on the audience - with bands creating music to show off how smart they are, caring more about appearing to be a good musician than making music that people enjoy.

But not Derek's music. He wants to write a song about you. And me. Just below a coy self-consciousness that calls the project both a gimmick and a philosophical statement, he will gladly customize a song to your liking for only nine dollars. You choose the topic, the speed, the instruments... Derek writes your song and sends it to you. Seriously. What will it sound like? Sincerity. Hilarity. Self-Pity. Synergy. Uncomfortable Intimacy.

This is what he has to say about www.JustSayinIsAll.com... order your own song here.

Computerization - Just Sayin Is All Is Your Answer (mp3)


Computerization - 1.14me (mp3)

Gardens of Fountains of Youth That Wither

Marrie Bot - Toos [84] and Arie [85] (2001)

Fill your dowry with candy and sweets and statistics this spring. Stimulating the appetite can make a person more with impulsive in decision making. Married adults are less likely than other adults to be in poor or fair health, and are less likely to suffer from health conditions such as headaches and serious psychological distress. Then top of the basket with Zanax and some dancing, lots of dancing. And all the drawings you made that need coloring.

Winter Flowers - Too Young To Mary (mp3)

We'll Make It, Just Leave It Alone

Amie Dickie - My Vanity (2006)

Just after the holidays, a scream comes from the other side of the wall. It's your roommate and he's been drinking in the morning again. He repeats himself like he's trying to make a passionate point with only one good argument. He has found a toy trumpet. He is singing this song, which Simon says is a good choice because even the original version sounds like a critical channel has been muted - the channel that distracts from persistence with novelty. Maybe it's just not there this time. Maybe the important part is the hunger. We'll still make it.

Ghost Is Dancing - We'll Make It (mp3)

Gas is 3.79 at Club de Wash

105.5's Jonathan and Kitty Search for Lost Awesome Places to Hear Music in Madison

Looking For Someone

Lillian Lykiardopoulou - Pregnant with the Contrary (2007)

Summer on the farm will be beautiful this year. Personally, I'm planning for the best summer ever after that winter massacre. Best as just a summer, not a trip or a temperature. Today the holes in my socks say they knew it was coming, they're not just tired. They're bursting and screaming and ready to dance with the tambourine to the quick ending like a radio hit.

Slow Club - Summer Shakedown (mp3)

JustSayin Summer Concert Series: Laura Barrett

Laura Barrett - Robot Ponies

Not to distract from the highly anticipated Old Time Relijun show coming up next week, but here's another exciting announcement from the JustSayin Summer Concert Series. You've never heard the thumb piano played with such zeal, if you've heard it played at all. Laura Barrett uses her thumbs like palms on congos, agressively plucking the kalimba's tactile percussion into graceful melodies. Pitchfork says she's your "quirky, crafty, half-hip/half-nerdy friend who miraculously managed to escape puberty with her imagination fully intact and who never ceases to charm you with her wiles and whimsy." And that she "stands to do for the indie world's perception of the thumb piano what Joanna Newsom did for the harp". No small task for two thumbs and a dream about My Little Ponies taking over the world in the clean '50s of this new decade.

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JustSayinIsAll.com PRESENTS
Laura Barrett (TORONTO)
quirky, imaginative kalimba
with
The Great White Jenkins (VIRGINIA)
psychedelic, gospel rock


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The Project Lodge
Friday, May 30th [7pm]
$5 (all ages)

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Laura Barrett - Deception Island Optimists Club (mp3)


The Great White Jenkins - Wind (mp3) [live video]

Cermonial Fight Between Brutality and Tenderness

Paul Kjelland - Noah (2008)

Paul Kjelland tells his stories with reclaimed wood and creativity from rural Brodhead, Wisconsin and industrial Riverwest. He collects scattered pieces of childhood dwellings, fences passed on the way to school, and tragedies of demolition and builds his own cityscape for permanent memory. It's a tone of resolve amidst the temporary.

Esaias - Exposure/Fade (mp3): Esaias is just a boy. His tender falsetto balances on a fence of just eighteen years in Lund, Sweden. With a fresh James Dean smirk, this eager song is a either a lonely high school achievement or the first thesis in a body of revolutionary works. To decide, Esaias is cooped up somewhere small and dark pulling antics like underwear elastic, but only recording the hungover aftermath. With friends Jonatan Frenck (guitar), Jonas Bengtsson (bass), and Johan Stubbergaard (drums), youthful trials will be recorded in shallow sighs on an EP supposedly titled "But Hey Take a Cookie Instead".

Eponymous Beneath The Name

Chris Johanson - Untitled [connected people that have souls illustrated in dynamic colors on acid free paper by fairly religious person Chris Johanson in the united states of america (a country famous for illigal wars against anyone it sees fit) oh its enough to really scare you in the way you dont have control of your life by way of association. i am worried right now and i have also been drinking. it is 1:31 a.m...] (2006)

Shearwater - Leviathan Bound (mp3): It's much easier when titles speak for themselves. Even when they confuse daily life for the devil. Especially then.

I'm thinking what you're thinking: WAVEHAMMER.

Beeple - IV.8 [Simple Extraction] (2008)

Like Coffeeshops for Alcoholics

*Koya Abe's attorney has requested that the image be removed from this post. Many visual artists view their work as proprietary and not for public display and discourse. This blog, however, exists to aggressively disagree and posit that intelligent discussion of and links to art that is already posted on the web only increases its impact and relevance.*

Koya Abe - After Napolean In His Study (2007)

Stated plainly: It's all about NOTHINGcontextNOTHING. A guy, 29, sitting in an office instead of a tower. A bricklayer in a different place in time, an account manager in this one. He still portrays himself the scraggly martyr in thick rimmed glasses by getting his light from candles (from Ikea). It took years for him to pack away the polyester and wear coarse sweaters of interconnectedness with the soil subtext of history. The places walked to, sat in, left - all with opposition to yesterday and progression to tomorrow, but without confrontation. The day you sat in today is the natural protest. Like coffee shops for alcoholics.

Frightened Rabbit - The Modern Leper (mp3)

The Skin of a Drowned and Crucified Avocado Pit

Felix R. Cid - In God We Trust (2007)

Owen marks an important musical transition for me from self-absorbed emo, through heavy medication, to self-identified folk. Not to oversimplify and place Mike Kinsella in the category of teen angst (especially since he is over thirty and married), but I identify with a certain honest immaturity in his struggles with lyrics and strange public places. So I ventured last night down to campus and into a reminder of my own aging to see him play the already awkward cafeteria at Club 770.

The set was built of pleasant acoustic arpeggios in strange minor chords overlaid with sparse words about emotion with most emotion detached. Quite typical, on a steel cafeteria chair by himself. But then he began massacring several Fugazi songs by playing only the dull second-guitar lines, playing them poorly, and not even attempting to finish a song. The charade may have appeared totally egoistic to the unprepared concert-goer, but is exactly why Owen performances are so unique and intimate. Mike's unapologetic realness mixes the informality of watching a friend pick away at a guitar in his dorm room across the hall with the voyeurism of watching him break down and cry.

Both the visual and musical pieces in this post play with daily monotone to express serious frustrations, sampling from very personal references and strange senses of humor. Much like Felix Cid, the young Spanish photographer featured above, Owen's choices are interesting because of the transparency of this emotional complexity. There is no other musician I will watch so expecting, even wishing for a just OK performance. And feel totally validated by it.

Owen - The Ghost of What Should've Been (mp3) [previous post]

JustSayin Summer Concert Series: Old Time Relijun

This next announcement from the JustSayin Summer Concert Series sounds like oil and water meeting in the street for a midnight fling and their passion boiling aggressively to become the muddled tar reduction that our cultural lives walk upon. The dirty rock experiment will include locals Sleeping the Aviary, Kitty Rhombus, and The Dark Horse Project at the Annex on May 21st. Come confront what your soul means when it urges to dance without worrying about how you look.

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JustSayinIsAll.com PRESENTS
Old Time Relijun (PORTLAND)
experimental jazz rock from the sweaty gut

with Sleeping in the Aviary (MADISON)
and Kitty Rhombus (MADISON)
and The Dark Horse Project (MADISON)


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The Annex
Wednesday, May 21st [9pm]
$7 (18+)

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Old Time Relijun - Indestructible Life (mp3)