Blog: Warped Reality

I’ve been reading Sophie Calle’s “M’as-Tu Vue?” (“Do You See Me?”), a book that is entirely concerned with appearances & disappearances. The way that she tries to pin down chance, re-creating moments that never happened, taking the paths not followed, reminded me of Angela Conway, better known as AC Marias. Angela’s music took a similar approach â€"oblique strategies for a head-on world. Her haunting single, “One of Our Girls (Has Gone Missing)” has remained one of my favorite pieces of music ever since it was first released, back in 1989. The album continued her long-standing collaboration with Gilbert & Lewis [...]

Lisa Crystal Carver AS220 Providence RI Lisa Crystal Carver is a fearless cultural adventurer, an endlessly optimistic raconteur who’s always followed her own idiosyncratic path â€"ever since the fateful day she first took the stage at age seventeen as leader of the infamous anarcho-performance troupe Suckdog. From there it was one adventure after another, some more harrowing than others but all grist for Carver’s incisive, easy wit and droll, conversational tone. Her new memoir Drugs Are Nice [Soft Skull, 2005] chronicles [...]

The Knitters The Modern Sounds of… the Knitters [Zoë/Rounder] Live at The Paradise Boston MA, 2005 There are a few things you should know about the Knitters : they formed in 1982 as a side-project to the members’ primary bands (X and the Blasters) with the intention of playing only benefit shows. They released their first album, Poor Little Critter in the Road , in 1985; this year they finally released the follow-up, The Modern Sounds of the Knitters . The band is [...]

The second volume of Soul Jazz’ “New York Noise� comes out this week, and if anything promises to be even better than the first. I’m intrigued by the inclusion of UT, a band that rose out of the ashes of Robin Crutchfield’s Dark Day, got picked up by the label that introduced Sonic Youth to the world, Blast First! , and then disappeared in 1989 or thereabouts. UT’s music wasn’t quite as concise and declarative as its name, but it reveled in pitting the primitive with the sensual. The constant tug-of-war became a sonic texture in and of itself, [...]

Prolapse was a wonderful, unwieldy six-piece band of C86 misfits with a marked Fall obsession who managed to make four full-length albums, a million singles, and a whole hell of a lot of racket over the course of their anarchic eight-year existence. They made some of the spikiest, strangest, and Dadaistic pop music I’ve ever heard. That’s right, I said pop music. (Granted, to call them such you might have to squint a little. Bend the rules. C’mon, do it for me.) Even at their most angular and [...]

When I’m having a good day, I often find myself humming this song. I guess I had a good day today. Minxus were an odd lot. They never quite gelled as a band â€"their lone album, Pabulum [Too Pure], had a couple of marvelous songs on it but seemed on the whole a bit thin. But then, live performance was more their arena. Given that the band was led by the impossibly monikered Mod goddess She Rocola (who looked as though she’d just stepped out of Faster Pussycat Kill Kill [...]

Once upon a time there was a lovely little band called th Faith Healers . (Don't ask about the 'e' â€"it went missing early on.) They were the first band on then-fledgling label too pure (now home to Electrelane, Laika, and Stereolab, among others), and they were cornerstones of the Camden "Lurch" scene. (Don't ask me to define Lurch. If you're lucky there's a Wikipedia entry by now.) They kicked up a righteous racket â€"a furious, expressionistic squall. I don’t know that I could tell you what they were “aboutâ€? any more than I [...]

Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. â€" from “Not Waving But Drowningâ€? by Stevie Smith I first heard Vic Chesnutt in 1988, when my friends and I drove from Tallahassee, Florida, to north Georgia for the first Athens Music Festival. Celebrating a scene already past its prime, the event was held on a beautiful Fall day, in a farm-country pasture just outside of town. Modest in size and presentation, the festival [...]

His Name Is Alive has a new album out. It's called Detrola. We'll have more about that later. To start things off, we have an interview with His Name Is Alive's songwriter, Warren Defever, circa Mouth by Mouth , from the first ever issue of Warped Reality. Delirium as a form of higher expression Interview by Andrea Feldman & Jennifer Ferraro ¶ Warped Reality #1, Spring 1993 In the middle of my freshman year at Parsons [...]

His Name Is Alive Summerbird EP [2005] There are many reasons to love His Name Is Alive’s eccentric mastermind Warren Defever. He named his band after an afternoon hallucination about Abraham Lincoln. He used to be in rockabilly hellraisers Elvis Hitler. And since 1986, he’s been happily and idiosyncratically mining his own seam of darkly humorous, poetic music, abetted by an ever-changing, fluid group of collaborators. HNIA joined the roster of acclaimed cult label 4AD in 1990. With their first album for the label, Livonia (named [...]

Remember print zines? How charmingly quaint they seem, now... Once upon a time my little zine came with a His Name Is Alive/Prolapse split flexi. By the time I got around to putting out a flexi â€"a craptacular-sounding but endearingly cute little flexible 7"â€" there was only one place to get them made, Evatone Soundsheets in Clearwater, FL. They made me sign an affadavit that the record I was pressing contained "no swear words." I crossed my fingers and signed "no," hoping they didn't listen too closely for content... (Doubly-irony? This was for the anti-censorship issue of the [...]

I once compared Warn Defever to Max Ernst. This was way back, King of Sweet -era, even, and I thought of him as this mad genius who played with repetition and texture in the most fascinating ways, creating a body of work that felt marvelously out of time. Even if it had discernable stylistic earmarks here and there, they were difficult to pinpoint amidst the dense sonic collages. Fast-forward to 2006’s Detrola. We’re not in sepia-toned Ernst-land anymore, nor have we been for quite some time. But the fascination with repetition [...]

This is another archival interview from Warped Reality’s first incarnation as a print zine. I’ve reprinted it as-is, so keep in mind that any references to the present are speaking of 1994! *** The songs of the Raincoats seem to stem from some collective unconscious: upon first hearing them, one is struck both by their familiarity and their newness â€"it’s a language you’ve longed to hear although you’ve never heard anything like it before. There surprise with their complexity, their elasticity, their playfulness that comes (perhaps) from their having [...]

It’s been freezing, freezing cold here. And as I was walking home from work the other evening a song came on the old shuffle â€"a song so soufflé-light, with birds chirping and Spanish guitar and a voice as airy as early morning sunlight filtering through the treesâ€" that I momentarily forgot about the ice cold, brutal wind whipping right through me and stinging my eyes. Spring songs are different than summer songs. Summer songs are carnal, sun-drenched and earthy. They’re a little bit crude, certainly more anthemic. By contrast, spring songs are just waking up [...]

Cass McCombs/The Decemberists Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel Providence, RI Cass McCombs’ timeless, unassuming songs and warm, humble demeanor were somewhat lost in the cavernous, imposing primness of Lupo’s. Why then did his songs play so much better than the Decemberists’ self-conscious, sometimes awkwardly formal song cycles? For one thing, Cass’ songs of love and loss were accentuated and answered by the echoing, tumbledown openness of the club space itself. It’s a little bit lost, is Lupo’s. Despite a new coat of paint and some attempts at modernizing the [...]

A little over a week ago I went to Kid Congo Powers’ record release party at Tonic in NYC. I’d tried my damnedest to talk myself out of going (NYC being a bit of a trek and all) but the lineup just kept getting better and better and I couldn’t in good conscience stay away. The show didn’t disappoint, touching on just about every facet of Kid’s long and storied career. (The video for “Hit the North� (-uh!) didn’t get an airing, but that was just about the only glaring omission.) The Sassiest Boy in America (aka Ian [...]