goooooooooooooglez.

gooooooooooo.....gle.com (with 53 o's actually). try it! this is an awesome site i stumbled upon a while back. don't ask why or how i found a cool google site with 53 o's. it must have been a low point in my late night internet explorations. its some real inter-dimensional lo-fi madness.

slurf song!

on repeat!
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=396718159899295ed9d5c56d04dfa8b0e04e75f6e8ebb871
michael hurley!

i must be sleeping. CRULE!!!

wow! double thanks y'all!

Willamette Week

Best New Band 2009

Portland’s music scene insiders pick their favorite breakthrough acts of the past year.

(tie) 2. Nurses

(66 Points) ----(((***i like to pretend the points are from a city-wide-band-bowl-off and we bowled a 66!!! ***))))

Who: Aaron Chapman, John Bowers, James Mitchell
Formed: 2006
Sounds Like: A long-lost psychedelic Elephant 6 band who stole Animal Collective’s gear and tripped out on The Wizard of Oz one too many times.

Last fall, psychedelic-poppers Nurses were in the middle of a grueling, monthlong national tour in Indiana when they realized something: They had forgotten to get directions to the next show. “I don’t think we’re very organized when we tour,” multi-instrumentalist John Bowers says. “It was so bad we had to [text] ChaCha everything—‘Where is the band Nurses playing tomorrow?’ Just go south and it will tell us!”

The band’s three members—Bowers, singer and multi-instrumentalist Aaron Chapman, and drummer James Mitchell, all 25—are so close it’s easy to assume they’re related. On a warm April afternoon in Alberta Park, all three sit cross-legged, nearly finishing each other’s sentences while sharing stories from the road. It’s a togetherness that has come from constant life on the move, living in confined quarters.

Bowers and Chapman, best friends from Idaho Falls who met in junior high school, have been roommates for five years. They started the group in Idaho and went through stints in Southern California and Chicago before taking to Portland and meeting Mitchell on a whim in late 2007. Until last month, they lived together in a decaying attic in Northeast Portland—a house with nine other residents and numerous couch-surfers. That’s where they refined their sound, one mouse click at a time, and recorded much of Nurses’ forthcoming full-length debut, Apple’s Acre (set for release in late July on respected indie label Dead Oceans).

After years spent as self-described Luddites, the band members’ Portland move and embrace of technology have infused their songs with a new sense of purpose. Much of Apple’s Acre—including the buoyant, echoing standout “Manatarms”—was written over three years ago, but not laid down until Chapman started experimenting with entry-level Mac recording program GarageBand on his laptop last summer. Despite the software limitations, Apple’s Acre sounds fresh and professional, brimming with clever songwriting and tinkly melodies straight out of The Wizard of Oz.

Chapman describes the band’s writing process as serendipitous: It was discovering GarageBand and experimenting with tape loops—often forged out of long, sporadic jam sessions—that led the band in its latest direction. “Even though we have electronics, fundamentally [our songs are] not that different than a folk song or a pop song,” he says. “We got in the habit of making lots of tapes where we just hit ‘record’ and see what happens.”

Nurses’ best songs take melodic ideas written on an acoustic guitar or piano, then dress the tunes up in psychedelic garb (much like the guys themselves, who favor pink tights, sun hats and, in Chapman’s case, his blue-and-red-striped summer “onesie”), padding the songs with a bright, colorful bed of electronics, weird noises and vocal harmonies. The effect often sounds like a 21st-century take on the Beach Boys—if they’d discovered Animal Collective’s bed of electronics and lived to tweet about it. The fun part of the process is in trying to create “sounds where you couldn’t really say what it is,” Chapman says. It’s an often exhausting exercise that effectively forces keyboards and sequencers to act out roles that a guitar or bass might play in a more traditional setting.

While there’s plenty unusual about Nurses, the band members’ interactions with one another are timelessly rock ’n’ roll—it’s evident the minute the trio takes the stage and locks into one continuous, pulsing groove. “We hang out almost every day,” Chapman says, pausing slightly for dramatic effect. “I think the longest we’ve gone without seeing each other is, like, a day. But on that day we definitely called or emailed or something,” Mitchell says, laughing, before chiming in with maybe a little too much information. “I barely talk to anyone on the phone except for them and my mom. I don’t even call my girlfriend [laughs again].” MICHAEL MANNHEIMER.

SEE IT: Nurses play WW’s Best New Band show Saturday, May 9, at Berbati’s Pan. 9 pm. Free. 21+.

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ALSO- hope this doesn't seem too geeky to post about. but i can't help it. a friend tipped me off to this on stephen malkmus's blog...

Portland Show This Friday... Opener Alert FROM PORTLAND: NURSES www.myspace.com/nurses Get there early. These guys are cool. Show starts at 9. See you Friday!

that's tonight!

tomorrow is the berbati's show!

FUN!

rainy dream snackspeare

it's a wet one in portland today! a good day for snacking, if i do say so myself. the first 3 months of 2009 i was living with various friends for various times, and i survived almost solely on snacks, and when i moved into a new place recently, i still had snacks on the mind... so when my friends came over on a sunday afternoon, i made them a three-course snack feast! it turned out so well i decided to share it with whoever might also want to enjoy a (very cheap) 3 course snack. it's real cheap, and real good. here's a picture of it if you wanna eat it too. and a picture of the inside of my head.

also, aaron and i wore dreamy clothes today that our friends aidan and paul made. we turned into fantasy characters and walked around slowly with straight faces and wide eyes! aidan is a multitalented artistic powerhouse. i suggest you take a look at her stuff if you haven't already. i hope there are pictures of us wearing the fantasy costumes somewhere... i really don't know yet- i was in fantasy land. yeep!

i found a copy of shakespeare's henry IV while i was on a walk today and i'magonna read it starting tonight. i bet it's good. i betcha.

moondog/helmo sandwich!

i was listening to moondog today and stumbled on this photo.
moondog is totally the p and b to helmo's j


02 Down Is Up.m4a
( the photo is from helmo.fr not sure exactly who to credit-either thomas couderc or clement vauchez?)

obsessive drumpulsive.

i have been completely infatuated with heavily percussive and strangely melodic sounds lately - the "you're-deep-in-the-woods-and-the-night-is-going-to-steal-your-soul" kind of sound that the liars pulled off really well with "they were wrong so we drowned" and "drum's not dead". mike hilger introduced me to this heat, who were doing some really awesome, way-ahead-of-their-time stuff decades ago. they are all over the place, but the albums "deceit" and "repeat" have got me hooked lately. their recordings are also strangely timeless. without knowing when they were made, it would be hard for me to place them in any time period.

silver apples have also been on the playlist non-stop - similarly heavy on the percussion in combination with sparse pop melodies and oscillators. they must have been a huge influence on caribou / manitoba.

my gal pal showed me tall dwarfs who are pretty rad.

konono no. 1 are a group from the congo region who lay down some awesome traditional african rythms and melodies with an extremely awesome lo-fi / non-traditional approach. the "congotronics" albums are great.

the possibility of smush/fantasia

Yesterday i was giving a friend a ride in our giant van, which by the way is the least convenient/fun way to get around town.
as i was about to turn right through an intersection i saw a guy on his bike in the crosswalk. i stopped with plenty of time, but we were both a lil shaken by the possibility of smush. he looked me right in the eye and hissed "you f**king b**ch!" (censor in case my mom or sisters read this)
right afterwards i turned the radio on and this piece was playing-
the most epic 'just almost smushed a dude on his bike' piece ever written.
anyway i found this video, which pretty much sums up the feeling of the experience