Make Moon @ Troubadour

TSS first discovered Make Moon when they opened for Octopus Project at the Troubadour about three months back. Recently Tim Corbin “Dallas” and an acquaintance ventured to watch them perform at Silverlake’s Spaceland. Here is their collective accounts of the evening:

Upon first appearance, Spaceland’s stage seemed to be taken over by a time warped Viking/Pilgrim hybrid of a band. Were they going to raid and colonize Spaceland? Explore the North Western sea brink? Perhaps harvest some maize? Luckily for us they were there just here to play music, enter Make Moon a five man band lead by their very impressive singer/front man: Drew Morgan.
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Day 2, Saturday – “The Ghost of Patrick Swayze”

The video below was shot by Capt. AKAK and George Pants:

Dirty Dancing was first mentioned by the trip’s catalyst, Yang Wang. While spending time with him in the JFK baggage claim he had mentioned that Kutsher’s was where the movie was shot. I think my Mom and two sisters watched Dirty Dancing several hundred times, actually wearing out the VHS tape we’d used to record it off cable, but for some reason I could remember no details of the plot except for the fact that Patrick Swayze was in it. Actually, I think I remember more from the MAD Magazine spoof on it, Dorky Dancing, than I do any part of the movie – I had a bad MAD Magazine habit and spent most of my allowance on it. In the 3rd grade I copied a poem from one issue and turned it in as my own work. The teacher, Mrs. Young, was incredulous but could prove nothing.

Google Images at work

Without having anything to compare it to in the daylight Kutsher’s appears to be the exact place where they shot the film: there’s the pond, large dining rooms, the hotel, cabins, pathways, lawns and it’s all surrounded by woods. Several people in the town of Monticello told us that the movie wasn’t actually shot at Kutsher’s but at another, similar, nearby resort. Why all this discussion of a pop-culture relic? Ever since we had disembarked from the plane Carl Jung’s notion of synchronicity had been enveloping us in long chains of cause and effect. The rest of the weekend and subsequent road trip around New England would eventually look like a Mandelbrot Set after punching all the data into one of Capt. AKAK’s spreadsheets while being bored on the flight home to Long Beach. Dirty Dancing was just the beginning.

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Day 1 – “Where did we go/days when the rains came”

From JFK we drove North in a rain which had begun as we’d loaded our bags into the back of the rental car. At this point we had become crazed from lack of sleep and were having extreme difficulty in utilizing the parts of our brains that help you find places. The fact that the roads in the New England states make no sense to people raised on freeways, the grid system and adequate signage didn’t help either. Eventually, with the help of a purchased map, Internet directions, directions from 2 different smart phones and eventually a gas station attendant we made it to Monticello, New York, where our hotel was.

For the last two years All Tomorrow’s Parties has been held in the hotel and on the grounds of Kutsher’s, a once-famous resort from the “Borscht Belt” era which reached its peak during the mid-1960′s when Jewish families would come and spend summers at the various loosely connected resorts that the Catskills region was famous for. Nowadays it’s a downtrodden, practically abandoned relic echoing what was once an upscale-now-kitsch past. Attendees at All Tomorrow’s Parties had the option of staying in one of the old resort’s rooms, but they were expensive – although the performers stayed for free – or you could try to find a cheaper room in nearby Monticello.

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The Man who gave us a ride to the airport in Long Beach, CA. Capt Shabbin.

The objectivity of journalism is typically a farce. The author can never completely hide their intentions in writing what they’re writing, no matter how pedestrian the topic. At the very least perceptions and attitudes that they’re not even aware of as being the basis from which they’re writing color their work.

That being said it’s probably best just to be out with it: I’m not even going to attempt an unbiased account of the following events involving a trip in which two friends – Capt. AKAK and George Pants – traveled from Los Angeles to New York to witness and participate in 2009’s All Tomorrow’s Parties music festival. It begins, as many stories begin nowadays, on Craigslist.

After the festival we wanted to drive back across the country to Los Angeles on old US Highways: US 20, US 12, US 2, etc. Being the cheap bastards we are, or more accurately I am, I figured that we’d try to find one of those mythical situations that are assumed to exist but probably don’t: the family who needs their car driven from one side of the country to the other and is willing to pay you to do it. We never found them. Instead, we found a man identifying himself as Yang Wang.
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Megafaun make me want to move to Durham, North Carolina where I imagine my life would involve frolicking around in forests, exploring gorges and finding shady rocks to use as diving boards into hot springs.  Brothers Brad and Phil Cook, along with Joe Westerlund make music that’s best served gathered in a circle lit by the moon and campfire while you “sing to each other like friends telling stories,” as their buddies Akron/Family might say.
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Ryan McGinley, from "Sun and Health"

Los Angeles, July 23, 2009 -

The night began like most others in L.A.; we sat in traffic. My friend Krystof was trying to figure out why his iPhone didn’t sound right playing through my car speakers. I wasn’t paying too much attention – I was busy checking my work e-mail on my phone while driving and attempting to explain a lecture I’d been listening to during my morning commute on the nature of memory by some guy named John Steele (a random Pirate Bay download). Little did I know how prophetic it would turn out to be. From Wikipedia, “While his work is often closely related to the psychology of fragrance, in talks and writings Steele also explores Buddhism, Vedic culture, the great yugas, geomancy and geomantic amnesia, geobiology, time out of balance, shamanism, the effects of geological formations on human consciousness, cross state retention, and the importance of sacred sites and spaces.” That could easily be a review of the new Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros record.
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Two weeks ago, I went on a mini tour to see Dirty Projectors back-to-back nights at the Troubadour and then the Casbah in San Diego. The first night consisted on a special night out between Ebee and I where we decided it should be just the two of us as we tried to recapture the magical events that had inspired so much awe in us on New Years Eve in New York merely 7 months ago.
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It was 7 years ago when Bloodclot bought me my first Tortoise album, A Million Now Living Will Never Die. We proceed to cruise the Pacific Coast Highway at approximately 60 miles per hour along the Huntington/Newport Coast. The opening sang off this album is roughly 25 minutes long and was the only song listened to for this particular drive. My life was expanded into an entirely different universe since then. I had no idea music like this existed; electronic in a way but way more organic in nature. The music which is at the heart of the post-rock genre. Over the course of the next two years, I became obsessed with all post rock bands: Tortoise, Slint, Isotope 217, Godspeed!, Trans Am, etc. I have more than 20 albums in which John McEntire plays drums/produced. Frequently, I would play a Tortoise album in my car and end up getting lost on my way home from falling into the K hole that is their sound frequency.

About two years ago, me and about 6 of you were able to see Tortoise live for the first time at the El Rey. I am very excited to be afforded the pleasure of seeing them again for the tour of their new album, Beacons of Ancestorship, due out June 23rd.

Two Drummers plus Jeff Parker on Guitar……lots of energy and fun. And also you know Johnny Mc is the greatest drummer ever in my humble opinion.

Ten Tickets @ $29 a piece.

1. Capt AKAK
2. Capt Shabbin
3. Willum
4. mRoyed
5. Hello Kitty
6. ebee
7. Angel
8. WB Records Friend
9. MartotheLyn
10. ??

Last Friday twelve people from the TSS crew ventured to the cozy confines of the Echo for a night of psychedelia and post-modern punk rock. Amelia, Zac, Joe and Chris are experienced veterans to the LA music scene but it was their first time to come out with us which was a pleasure to witness. (more…)

Los Angeles, CA – 06/11/09

I don’t know if it’s because I’d been working for what felt like five years straight without a day off and I’d just come to the realization or if it was because I was extremely tired, maybe both, but the Handsome Furs were transcendent.

The Monolators opened for them and weren’t. They played their Queers-esque songs too fast and didn’t seem like they practiced much. They also seemed to have no dark side.

The Cinnamon Band were more interesting – they were like the Jayhawks if everyone except the drummer and guitar player had contracted swine flu and croaked and the 2 remaining members were on the “memorial tour”. The two of them drank Tecate after Tecate the entire set and sang esoteric songs about growing up in the South. The drummer seemed like a maudlin drunk. However, they had some good drawling harmonies and some of the songs weren’t too bad.

Then the Handsome Furs began setting up and it became immediately apparent that like baseball there is a stratum in music – some people are born to play and others are doing it because they just really want to. Dan Boekner was born to fucking rock.

I listened to Big Black intermittently in High School mostly because they had the angriest lyrics of all-time. That was the only other rock band that I’ve heard where a drum machine was featured as the entire percussion section. Yes, there’s been the Postal Service and others, but no one has rocked out like Big Black, until Dan Boekner bought his first Alesis.

There is a definite William Gibson vibe to Handsome Furs; the feeling that if you walked outside the club it would be drizzling a cold acid rain on a population of androids and their leather-clad human masters. It’s an interesting counterpart to the mostly anti-technology/sad-state-of-modern-culture lyrics but the drum machine, the synth and the odd movements and coked-out appearance of his wife made for a decidedly post-apocalyptic evening.

Alexei Perry is certainly playing a part on-stage but if there’s even a shred of reality in her appearance and actions then she’s definitely a drug-user and probably borderline-schizophrenic, which is probably why I find her attractive. During the show she alternated between grinding her teeth, licking her lips and rubbing her nose and making weird jaw contortions. Dan didn’t seem similarly afflicted, just like he’d been up for several days and now really needed a nap.

In between songs Alexei would run around the stage and do big butterfly thank-you’s with her arms – she’d put her hands on her chest and then throw her arms out to the audience. During songs she would stand on one leg and pirouette and then other times do Muppet-esque dancing with her arms while attending to the drum machine and synth. I wouldn’t be harping on this if it wasn’t such a compelling sight. The tableaux made you really want to go hang out with both of them after the show. You felt like Dan would be sitting in a chair in an old dingy hotel room with a bottle of whiskey and a cigarette while Alexei was in the bathroom snorting cocaine cut with comet so you could really feel the burn. He’d then make some offer like, “if you want to fuck her tonight go ahead, I can’t get it up anymore.”

That’s obviously an exaggeration but I’m not kidding, there was a palpable sense of danger and enlightened decadence that they exuded. But oh yeah, the music was good too. They only played one song off of the first album, Plague Park, the rest being songs from the relatively newly released Face Control.

Having heard the first two bands, and a lot of other mediocre bands at other shows and on records, it helps to make plain the fact that in many ways true talent is a natural phenomenon, is born. While the other bands were sincere, probably practiced more than the Handsome Furs and had some good songs, it was like a different kind of human had landed when the Handsome Furs started in on their set.

And this wasn’t even the best that I’ve heard them play. They seemed tired and a little crazed, but they still played an incredible set of modern music, music to watch the world crumble to.