I’m pleased to report that our Dane Sturgeon documentary has been selected to premiere at the 2012 Brooklyn Film Festival. It’s an emotional jerker! More information here.
April 24, 2012, 1:56pm
I’ve been a vegetarian for 23 years, and consider myself a non-violent person. I say that because I’d like you to check out a new graphic novel about an interspecies gladiator tournament. It’s called Nature of the Beast. As our first review so aptly put it, “the carnage is so over the top that it crosses over from disgusting to slapstick… Nature of the Beast isn’t going to appeal to everyone…”
I wrote this with one of my oldest friends Adam Mansbach, who after three successful novels achieved mainstream notoriety last year with a little ditty called Go The Fuck To Sleep. Our illustrator, Owen Brozman, is a master of visual storytelling who makes a very difficult thing look easy. For what it’s worth, we’re really proud of this book. If you care about comics at all, please check it out.
March 30, 2012, 10:39am
DWARR on tour: Austin 5/12 Houston 5/13 Atlanta 5/15 Durham 5/16 more info here.
March 26, 2012, 9:26pm
We moved to Oregon six months ago. We like it here very much.
I got a camera and volunteered to make videos for a local organization called Beyond Toxics. I’ll be doing more of these and featuring music from the label when the opportunity presents itself. This video features an unreleased guitar raga by Ted Lucas, someone who would have been very sympathetic to what we’re trying to accomplish here.
This video describes an all too common situation I don’t think a lot of people outside the northwest know very much about. Like Kony 2012, we tried to make this engaging and informative. Unlike the creator of the Kony video, I don’t plan to be arrested for dancing naked in the street next week.
Please take five minutes for this and if you feel the motivation, share it with your friends.
For best results, go to vimeo, make sure HD is on, and watch it in fullscreen by clicking the four outward pointed arrows at the bottom right corner of the picture. Thank you!
March 21, 2012, 4:36pm
Whoa, there’s footage of Ted Lucas online — The Spikedrivers lipsyncing on Swingin’ Time in 1966.
March 07, 2012, 5:57pm
Best movie of 2011: The Tree Of Life
Also: Love Exposure, All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, Bridesmaids, The Future, Drive, Paranormal Activity 3, Contagion, Melancholia, Young Adult
Still want to see: Margaret, Meek’s Cutoff, Le Quatro Volte
March 04, 2012, 10:27am
The talk I gave on new age as part of the Experience Music Project pop conference at UCLA in early 2011 finally went online recently. You can sample all of the talks for free here.
To get around apple’s annoying “itunes u” concept which treats these lectures as different than podcasts or regular music tracks, I made it a simple mp3 and uploaded the talk to my own server here.
A couple notes — I’m self-conscious about how this sounds and I don’t always talk this fast; it’s due to the 20 minute time limit. Finished with four minutes to spare, go figure. Also, a slide show of album covers played on the screen behind the podium; the tape pictured above got a laugh.
And finally, there was a little glitch in the title, published as “Flogging A Dead Genre: Resuscitating New Age” rectified very simply with a question mark. It was intended as, “Flogging A Dead Genre? Resuscitating New Age” — a question and answer, and the suggestion that the genre never died, just went into a sort of coma, and has now recovered to a great extent thanks to a new generation of artists coming at it from a very different point of view.
February 24, 2012, 1:14pm
Recently transferred goofy home movies from News, c. 1970-71. Seriously though this band is amazing.
December 06, 2011, 8:50pm
![Other Music on DWARR, Starting Over, the latest record from Drag City / Yoga Records (emphasis mine):
“Drag City and Yoga continue their excavation of the works of Dwarr, a/k/a Duane Warr, a South Carolina native who in the mid-’80s put out a couple of completely unique privately pressed albums. Last year, the two labels collaborated to reissue Animals, Dwarr’s second album from ‘86, which is a mind-blowing exercise in basement psychedelia and Dungeons & Dragons-inspired doom metal. That psychedelic part was most likely accidental, or a byproduct of the man’s supposed drug intake at the time, but that’s beside the point. One of the greatest strengths of Warr’s music is that although the influences can be traced (Hendrix and Black Sabbath, I’m guessing), thanks to his limited means and vivid imagination it is 100% singular. While Starting Over, Dwarr’s 1984 debut, is less heavy than its successor, it still exists in the same fantasy wasteland where Over the Edge and Conan the Barbarian exist side by side. Here, he alternately shreds like Eddie Van Halen on a bum trip and a drunk Steve Hillage, only to mellow out and go into Pink Floyd territory, and then there’s my favorite song on the album, “I’ve Been Thinking,” where Warr does his best Jimi impression, except the treble is turned to 11 and it sounds like a horror film soundtrack. Non-rock, non-metal, non-normal human life, but always triumphant…Dwarr always wins!! (And for the full Dwarr experience, check out this video on YouTube.) [AK]”
Purchase at Other Music, Drag City, or itunes](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_luggun4Szz1qb5kflo1_1280.jpg)
Other Music on DWARR, Starting Over, the latest record from Drag City / Yoga Records (emphasis mine):
“Drag City and Yoga continue their excavation of the works of Dwarr, a/k/a Duane Warr, a South Carolina native who in the mid-’80s put out a couple of completely unique privately pressed albums. Last year, the two labels collaborated to reissue Animals, Dwarr’s second album from ‘86, which is a mind-blowing exercise in basement psychedelia and Dungeons & Dragons-inspired doom metal. That psychedelic part was most likely accidental, or a byproduct of the man’s supposed drug intake at the time, but that’s beside the point. One of the greatest strengths of Warr’s music is that although the influences can be traced (Hendrix and Black Sabbath, I’m guessing), thanks to his limited means and vivid imagination it is 100% singular. While Starting Over, Dwarr’s 1984 debut, is less heavy than its successor, it still exists in the same fantasy wasteland where Over the Edge and Conan the Barbarian exist side by side. Here, he alternately shreds like Eddie Van Halen on a bum trip and a drunk Steve Hillage, only to mellow out and go into Pink Floyd territory, and then there’s my favorite song on the album, “I’ve Been Thinking,” where Warr does his best Jimi impression, except the treble is turned to 11 and it sounds like a horror film soundtrack. Non-rock, non-metal, non-normal human life, but always triumphant…Dwarr always wins!! (And for the full Dwarr experience, check out this video on YouTube.) [AK]”
Purchase at Other Music, Drag City, or itunes
November 10, 2011, 9:35am
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Shona Laing, ‘You Are The One’ — the best revolutionary song ever recorded #ows
October 27, 2011, 7:30pm
This Dane Sturgeon documentary is shaping up to be pretty much a small masterpiece…
September 01, 2011, 9:24pm
Andy Beta did an article for the LA Times about the current vogue for new age music a couple months ago, and just published the last of the interviews for that article on his web log. Mine was over the phone and there are one or two spots where even I can’t tell where the babbling ends and the funky transcription begins… But anyway make of it what you will.
August 31, 2011, 12:42pm
Jill Cislaghi — coming soon — 500 only — what it’s all about
August 29, 2011, 2:14am
Takako Minekawa: Why Do I Play Music?
July 29, 2011, 4:04pm
Dane Sturgeon
July 29, 2011, 4:02pm
