It’s like a map, sweetheart, and the blood is my landlocked heart and the carpet is the unkind taiga of society and oh yeah bail is way high this time.

The little free time I’ve had in the past couple of days (weeks) has been devoted to watching an ok film about the Arkansas blood scandal in the 90s (1/2 true-true crime, 1/4 Unsolved Mysteries whole-tones, 1/4 asinine conspiracy theories), screwing around in my kitchen (chicken covered in cayenne pepper and then fried in bananas: yes), and obtaining a framed picture of several hieroglyphs. My bachelor pad is creepsville USA. The Brown Bunny is 1. much more enjoyable 2. much more emotionally resonant and 3. much less concerned with Vincent Gallo’s cock than most responses led me to believe.

It is Boredoms week on Stylus. That’s one of the aforementioned Asian-related surprises. We have spent time. Long and hard. I interviewed Eye. Say that and confuse your friends. (realization: could’ve called it I Against Eye. Missed puns, though regrettable, are forgiveable.) I also got my treatise on the band. Enjoy. In other MP-not-PBW-related hustles, here’s me on the Knife. I basically stopped caring about Silent Shout just before I had to write the piece, and despite a track record that shows I play best with a hot iron, it turned out pretty well.

We will be back on regular flow soon. Recommended listening: We Shall All Be Healed by the Mountain Goats, registering in your consciousness as a new wound, every morning on your work commute as Arkansas turns cold. Miles Davis’s “He Loved Him Madly” every night for the past month since leaving New York, imagining the tone of light Pete Cosey’s guitar gives off in the dark (Miles’s organ is dull, street-lamp orange); wake up from nightmares covered in a film of sweat with it playing in the corner of your room. Think about how you used to be obsessed with catacombs and how a good eulogy can really hit the spot, like a bowl of fluffed and candied yams.

Joanna Newsom’s Ys continues to perplex, disappoint, and thrill, in that repeating cycle.

Just… the… twoooooo of us

If only all my fetishes were timed so well. Actually, I have two Asian-Related Surprises coming up in the near future, but… and that’s how I write a teaser. Here are a couple hints:

IRRESPONSIBLE AESTHETICIZATION OF SERIOUS POLITICAL SITUATIONS coupled with A CRIPPLING TENDENCY TO ONLY SEE THE FOREST AND BASICALLY FORGET ABOUT THE TREES

THUNDER

Also, the new Califone album is more or less as good as people have lead me to believe, though the “I Zimbra”-cribbed funk of “Pink & Sour” is, as far as Opening Tracks on Avant-Folk Records go, an inexcuseable tease. Somebody please get some ass in those britches amen. Right now, the grooviest folk record this year is still Ali Farka Toure’s Savane.

Also, Bob Dorough has big teeth and you should listen to his records. They screw me gigglepuss.

Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

An article about an NYU professor creating “time-lapse phonography” of Billboard chart hits. So you grew up reading Allmusic guides. So you want to learn about pop history. All of 1978 sounds like a few jet engines spliced together. While it’s a canny move from that perspective—all abridged all classic favorites pill form swallow!—it also plays on another time-obsessed project, William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. In Basinski, though, the tapes bled until they crumbled; they’re like the Malone Dies of head music. Or take Alan Licht’s Plays Well, where Donna Summer’s “Dim All the Lights” is cut up into hundreds of frames that loop over and over again, stretching two minutes out to nearly twenty, because, in the memory-wrecked rhetoric of my friend Brandon, “The guitar on that song is so fucking awesome and he wants to make sure you know how fucking awesome it is so he will let you soak in how fucking awesome it is bit by bit.”

DuBois’s music is immortal. Time gets compressed to the point of unintelligibility. I used to play this weird game with my brother where I’d make him say the second syllable of a two-syllable word and I’d say the first at the same time; neither of us could understand anything. Imagine fifty. Imagine it’s the pledge of allegiance. Splitting the verbal atom. I could dork out for pages, but in the spirit of the project: O//X! bip—

(The results of my own time-lapse phonography studies:

Joanna Newsom’s catalog: A footfall in the snow and then the sound of, I think, a fox’s tear splashing against an ebony nightstand.

Om, Conference of the Birds: A bong rip and then a mountain quietly exploding into gold dust.

Charlemagne Palestine’s “Strumming Music”: A fire alarm going off in what sounds like your brain.)