Prompted by a passing mention on the always inspiring Siblingshot On The Bleachers blog, I dug out Prison by the late Steven Jesse Bernstein (1950-1991) last night. A powerful Burroughsian epitaph still. Poetry in motion, expertly set to music by Steve Fisk. "If that mountain falls on me, it's gonna fall on you too..." Steven Jesse Bernstein - No No Man (part two) MP3 Steven Jesse Bernstein - More Noise Please MP3
I don't care about your week, all I can think about is having to get up at 3.30am tomorrow morning to drive my brother to the airport. No drinks for me tonight...So take your pick from these morning themed tunes. The freaked out, psychedelic drone world of the Psychic Ills, the rockabilly country stomp of the Old 97's, the catchy, falsetto high energy electro of Sparks, the substance abuse
I'm not normally one for listening to the lame cd's you get with music mags, but Mojo seems to be pretty good at dishing out quality selections from time to time. A few months ago they did a Sub Pop cd to coincide with their 20th anniversary. All the usual suspects were on the cd, but there was one guy I'd never heard before called Steven Jesse Bernstein and I was immediately struck by the intensity and delivery of his poems which he read over jazzy / lounge / experimental music. Bernstein suffered from mental [...]
Aaron Booth will be releasing a new album this month. He's a Calgary singer-songwriter I once called "one of the most promising Canadian singer-songwriters" in a nationally distributed mag . I am prepared to stand by that statement. The new alb is called Back Stories , and you get it from his website at your choice of cost. While you're there, you can snag some more free tunes from Booth's impressive back catalogue. Y'know what else is impressive about Aaron Booth? [...]
Here's this week's installment of Song Obsessions from a great blog called I Pick My Nose . Make sure to check out his studio session with John Vanderslice . Adrian : John Vanderslice - Numbered Lithograph With him coming down do an in-studio with me this week, there was a lot of listening to Vanderslice's new album, both because it was new, good and exciting and for "preparation". I was liking the shear weirdness of the sounds on this one anyway, but he also played it [...]
Song obsessions are those songs that we listen to on repeat. I noticed that my obsessions are often a week long. I also thought that other people might have similar obsessions. I've collected a panel of a few like-minded individuals and gotten their "song obsessions of the week." Quite often it's easy to explain why the song is good; it's much hard to explain why we're obsessed. Maybe you'll become obsessed with one of these. - Adrian ( me ): (mp3) ( buy ) [...]
Steven Jesse Bernstein - More Noise Please Performance art: the words send shudders down many a spine. Hairy half-naked men sticking skewers through their biceps, women standing in inflatable paddling pools in full scuba gear, narrated interpretive dance. I'm sure you're familiar with all of these clichés. What this dismissive mindset fails to see, however, is that performance art can produce some of the most captivating theatre around. Steven Jesse Bernstein was a performance poet. Prior to posting this, I knew very little about him, [...]
Camden Market in the early 90's, I bought a bootleg video of the last ever Big Black gig. Filmed in a power station, the footage started with the support act - a weird looking tattooed fella ranting at the audience. Kind of like Derby Market Place on a Saturday night, except he wasn't asking for money. He was reciting poetry. Someone once claimed that the blond haired kid at the front of the stage was Kurt Cobain. Could be true but is probably just apocrypha. They have two things in common though...both great artists and they both committed [...]
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