Ball of Wax 57 Songs: Russell Duke – “Misophonia”

Posted on September 12, 2019 by Lattney B. Jones

From the first tympanum-tapping moments to the fadeout of the celestial rattlesnake that winds its way through Russell Duke’s “Misophonia,” I find myself struggling to identify exactly what I’m hearing. At more than twice the length of the standard pop song (or is that now a non-standard metric?) and moving along on rumbling bass tones and rapid chuffing, “Misophonia” allows plenty of time to act, react, and attempt to make sense of one’s surroundings. Before I can say, “several models of small shiny mecha gathered together in a god factory and moving with the clicks,” the bass tone has dropped away (or moved into a register lower than my ability to discern) and I can say that I’m feeling some dread . . .

. . . which is fitting: the word “misophonia” is a compound of the Greek words for “hate” and “voice.” Google it and you’ll see that it’s consider an anxiety-related disorder by WebMD but is not recognized as such in the DSM-IV, that there are no solid causes or proven treatments, and that there have been no studies to investigate its prevalence by age, ethnicity, or gender. That’s all well and good, but the more pressing questions in this context would be, “is it music? And, if so, is it good?”

Answering questions like that is what I’m here for. Short version: yes and yes. Long version: what is music? What is good? Duke’s “Misophonia,” audibly disorienting as it is at times, is evocative of mood and emotion. Though scattered in structure, it possesses a continual meter, if you will, and has tones arranged to approximate a melody or motif after its halfway point. It’s more musical than most machinery I’ve operated or worked near in my lifetime, and I would attest that the sounds and rhythms produced by said equipment have, at times, been some of my favorite music.

As to why Duke’s composition should be considered “good” by every listener who encounters it: “Misophonia” delivers on its titular mission statement. For those who prefer their music poppy, trite, and easy on the intellect, there will be much to hate with these 8.5 minutes. For those who dwell in the crushingly abrasive sound-world of nu-metal and grindcore, this work may also cause strong and terrible grievance. And for everybody in between—especially those who like their tunes challenging and well off the beaten path—“Misophonia” will bring the dread, the anxiety, maybe even the full-on panic. Looks like I’ve identified what I’m hearing. What are you hearing?

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Ball of Wax 57 Songs: blouseusa – “Sisters”

Posted on September 11, 2019 by Levi Fuller

If my records are correct (a big if), we haven’t had new music from Benjamin Thomas-Kennedy’s solo-experimental-mostly-electronic project blouseusa since volume 22 – a good nine years ago. This was when the project was called Blouse (u.s.a.), but after it was just called Blouse for an appearance on volume 16. BT-K’s project both pre-dated and seems to have outlived that other Blouse band, but hey, that’s life.

Anyway . . . my previous exposure to this project was as an outlet for relatively chill, low-key, occasionally whimsical experiments in electronica from a musician who happens to be a monster drummer. That was then. Things get real percussive real fast with “Sisters,” which is a buzzing whir of noise and rhythm, an extended full-kit drum solo (played on electronic drums, as far as I can tell) overlaid with frenetic synths and keys of every imaginable hue and timbre. Very little changes in the general sound of the piece throughout, but over the course of its 2-and-a-half-minute run time, something happens to your brain (or to my brain anyway), and what was aggressive and anxiety-inducing at first becomes almost calming, a warm, buzzing, musical blanket. Chord changes are discernible, melody even peeks its head out from time to time. “Sisters” is a highly enjoyable – if not toe-tappingly accessible – sonic experiment from a gifted and often-surprising musician.

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Ball of Wax 57 Songs: The Vardaman Ensemble – “TG’s Hug Machine (B)”

Posted on September 11, 2019 by Patrick J Gibbs

Ball of Wax over its now 57 quarterly releases has reserved a significant amount of its bandwidth and compact discs to music outside of the norm. One of these outsider tracks is the hypnotic “TG’s Hug Machine (B)” by Portland’s Vardaman Ensemble. It has no commercial potential, and yet I cannot stop listening and exploring its many depths. A lone snap on a snare drum initiates the song. It hangs in the air like a deep inhalation before a race. This is grand and fleeting. Almost too soon cymbals and synths crash, and off we go. Over the next five minutes the Vardaman Ensemble charts a course over a syncopated soundscape full of seesawing droning horns(?), vocals (perhaps), and keys, plink plonking electronics, and synthesized tides. An atmosphere is formed like what I imagine Of Montreal would sound like if I drank too much Robitussin.  It’s dreamy, and I am not going to cough.

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Ball of Wax 57 Songs: Ken Cormier – “Kitchen Sink”

Posted on September 10, 2019 by Lattney B. Jones

Everywhere I look lately, I see these comments, posts, and tweets that let me know everybody out there is “living their best life.” Some of them even encourage me to live mine. But you know what? I can’t. Ken Cormier is living my best life. From having poetry and fiction published several times over to producing gorgeous spoken word and audioblog bits to being a Creative Writing professor who is widely loved by his students (it’s true—I checked!) to delivering a doctoral dissertation on audio technology and identity expression (the abstract itself made me cry), I’m pretty sure Ken Cormier is the man I was supposed to be when I grew up.

If that weren’t enough, he’s a damn good musician with an ear for jaunty melodies and a knack for arrangements. “Kitchen Sink” is an eccentric number that opens with a drum loop and muffled dialogue that sounds like somebody’s admiring somebody else’s ride (or, considering the quirkiness of the song, somebody showing off their Cat’s Cradle skills) before bursting into a progression that plays with key and mostly uses three notes—c, d, and f—in various melodic combinations that cleverly give the whole thing its sense of movement and whimsy. Lyrically, Cormier puts his creative writing skills to use in ways that seem to serve the rhyme scheme more than logic or storyline, yet paint a picture of a narrator with a weariness for the company of other humans beyond the companion to whom he’s singing, and with just a hair of psychedelia thrown in to keep things from being too grounded in reality.

I suspect Ken Cormier may actually be aware that there’s a guy out there that envies what he’s got and what he can do, because he works two specific components into “Kitchen Sink” as if to show me personally that there are many things I’ve yet to learn that he’s already mastered. The first is throwing a meter change into the song that is maddening in its incongruence and its easy flow and handily answers the age-old question, “Will a section set to 11/8 work in a song in 4/4?” The second is the ending: as many tomes have been written about the use of cadence to signify closure as have been written about the numerous durations a final note or chord should be allowed to ring out. Cormier dismisses all of this by ending the song abruptly after the last lyric, and it’s a perfect stop. [Just wait ’til you hear the next track, which almost works as a continuation/coda to this song. One of my prouder moments in sequencing. -ed]

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Ball of Wax 57 Songs: Annastasia Workman and Colin Ernst – “Cosmic Bees”

Posted on September 9, 2019 by Levi Fuller

This sweet and groovy little number was written by Cafe Nordo music director Annastasia Workman, and produced and performed by our old friend Colin Ernst. According to Colin, Annastasia wrote it for Nordo’s adaptation of Tom Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume. It’s been ages since I read that book, but “Cosmic Bees” does seem to capture, both musically and lyrically, some of the hedonistic glee of Robbins’s work. The shaker-backed groove and bees-and-flowers imagery has me picturing a colony of bees floating from bud to bud, nodding their heads and buzzing along with the kazoo line, catching the buzz.

One question I have about the lyrics pertains to the opening, which includes the phrase “whatcha doing here, with your shady deals and your orange-faced lies?” Between this and the political nature of much of Colin’s recent work, I kind of assumed this was another tune about our Dear Leader. But then we pivot to singin’ and lovin’ and joyful abandon and our brief reminder of The Real World is forgotten. Of course the original Jitterbug Perfume was written decades before our orange-faced liar rose to power, but maybe Robbins anticipated him and included his own orange-faced liar in the book? Or maybe Annastasia’s interpretation included room for present-day reference. Further research is recommended, starting with another spin of “Cosmic Bees.”

Colin will open up our Ball of Wax 57 release show this Saturday with a set including this and other BoW favorites from over the years. Make sure to get there on time!

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Ball of Wax 57 Songs: Virgin of the Birds – “Saint Ursula”

Posted on September 6, 2019 by Levi Fuller

Our dear friend Jon Rooney is back after his longest BoW hiatus in quite some time (has it really been a year?), and he’s brought us a perfect, less-than-two-minute nugget of Virgin-of-the-Birds-iness. Eighth-note chords chugged out on acoustic and reverbed-out electric guitar? Check! Titled for an obscure historical figure (who was apparently massacred along with a slew of other virgins [were they all sainted, or just Ursula?])? Check! Highly specific name-checks? Check! An encyclopedia of references that sail over my head? Double-check! And after all that, a second-person turn to intimacy and emotion that comes out of nowhere and leaves you just a bit woozy? All that, my friends, and a sweet little synth stinger at the end. Virgin of the Birds is back, baby!

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Ball of Wax 57 Songs: KPH & The Canary Collective – “Dam Dam”

Posted on September 5, 2019 by Lattney B. Jones

Kaeley Pruitt-Hamm (KPH) is a young community organizer/social justice advocate who has spent the last several years mostly bedridden (read her story here). I bring this up not to garner sympathy for KPH’s plight—although much of her recent work has been a twin effort of creative expression and self-sustainment due to her circumstances, she is not an artist defined by her condition—but rather to give context to the stomping declaration that is “Dam Dam.”

Over steady bass, a descending funk guitar riff, a nice organ drone, ghostly backing voices playing hide-and-seek with the panning knobs, thigh-slapping (seriously, she told me herself!), kinetic high-hat, and a kick drum that sets up the chorus (and primary groove) of the song from the start, KPH infuses every lyric—from alternately frustrated and ruminative verses to a joyous metaphor-packed chorus—with real-life experience. You can’t hear “Dam Dam” and not know intuitively that it comes from a place of pain, near-resignation, and breakthrough.

Finally—and I may be stretching interpretation, but I almost fell out of my chair when this occurred to me—in a feat of tonal mastery, KPH & The Canary Collective keep the whole thing moving along on an A minor chord as extant within the confines of the key of E minor. And what’s so special about that? A minor is the subdominant in this key. Sub = below or under, dominant = powerful, influential. It never moves to the dominant and never resolves to the tonic—that’s how important the chord is to this song. “Dam Dam”’s very harmonic structure can be seen as a sequential metacommentary on the experience it relates.

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Ball of Wax 57 Songs: Drew Danburry – “1996, For Luke Graham, Ryan Hibler and Aaron Mickelson”

Posted on September 4, 2019 by Levi Fuller

Everyone’s favorite singer-songwriter/barber/fraudulent teen Drew Danburry is back after what feels like a long hiatus (or at least a long hiatus from my inbox). It’s been a couple years since Drew brought us “Mediocrity, for Denis Villeneuve (who is amazing and not mediocre),” and he’s back with another song whose title includes a highly specific dedication. (This one not involving any famous film directors, as far as I can tell.) The similarities between the two songs end there, though. Where “Mediocrity” was a slow, contemplative piano ballad, “1996” is a breezy slice of folk-pop. It starts with four chords on an acoustic guitar, then over 2-plus minutes ever-so-gradually morphs into a marvelous melange of multi-tracking, with more guitars, keys, and layers of vocals. The song just keeps growing, but never in a way that feels excessive or ornamental. Drew’s vocal style throughout most of the song is in his usual amiable, low-key mode, but there’s one intense moment at the halfway point where he breaks out and almost shrieks, and it’s spine-tinglingly effective; all the more so for the way it contrasts with the rest of the song. I still haven’t figured exactly what the song is about (never my strong suit), but there a lot of little lyrical gems in here, leading up to the closer: “I could use your help, so stop blaming your failures on somebody else.” Words we could all stand to hear from time to time.

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Ball of Wax 57 Songs: The Foghorns – “Night of the Comet”

Posted on September 4, 2019 by Jon Rooney
Mary and Lou

“Siri, show my the coolest fucking picture ever” – Mary Woronov and Lou Reed

“It’s the last arcade on the street / it’s the end of the 1980s / and somehow you’re alive” is one hell of a lyric from a band that’s had more than their fair share. As a latchkey kid from the ’80s lucky enough to have cable, the title “Night of the Comet” means something to me. Night of the Comet was a seminal ’80s b-movie mixing sci-fi, horror, and teen romance about a mass extinction event starring, among other actors, Mary Woronov of Warhol Factory (she danced with whips while Velvet Underground played gigs!) and Eating Raoul semi-fame. Night of the Comet was on heavy rotation when I was a kid, alongside the likes of The Last Starfighter, Cherry 2000, and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. I feel like the below trailer really underplays the creepy, anxious tone of the movie but I guess more of a “girls just wanna have fun” vibe helped sell tickets to kids in 1984:

Culture has certainly preserved and exalted the likes of The Terminator, Back to the Future, and Aliens – big tent blockbusters teed up by the success of Star Wars and Spielberg’s run of hits that linger in the visual and textual landmarks of today (see: Stranger Things). So those were the hits – what about the misses? What about the knock-offs, flops and left-field castoffs likely funded to be huge blockbusters but that instead ended up filling out the afternoon time slots on HBO and long-forgotten channels like PRISM. I’m not sure where lead Foghorn Bart Cameron first came across Night of the Comet (some local video store in Racine,Wisconsin? an edited-for-TV version?), but I imagine that the garish, moody red sky in the film works as much as a Proustian Madeleine for him as it does for me.

Getting back to the song, “Night of the Comet” is another entry in Cameron’s emerging song cycle about the end of the world. The Omega Man from “And Omega Man / has a drunkard’s conviction” is likely Charlton Heston from 1971’s The Omega Man, reinforcing the desperate, apocalyptic backdrop. Musically, like much of the Foghorns’ catalog, “Night of the Comet” draws from traditional folk and blues changes and form – simple, but confidently played. The lyrics and the singing contain the whole weird world of the song – forming a sort of snow globe of nostalgia, dread, and the kind of generous fatalism we’ve come to love from the Foghorns. Are you listening to it yet? Why are you still reading this?

The Foghorns will play this song and more at the Ball of Wax 57 release show on Saturday the 14th – and who knows, maybe Night of the Comet will be playing on the TV over the bar

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Ball of Wax 57 Songs: Cowboy Cold – “Roadkill”

Posted on September 3, 2019 by Lattney B. Jones

I am pleased to report that American(a) music is alive and well. I am also pleased to tell you that it won’t be found on popular radio. Not that I’m happy it isn’t getting that type of exposure, but because of the company it would be forced to keep. No, the music I’m talking about is rare. The type of stuff you could spend your life looking for but never find. What you hear on most radio stations is shiny, sure. But it’s all iron pyrite—fool’s gold, as the oldtimers called it, and the most common of the sulfide minerals. Its worth is nothing next to the rarity that is actual gold.

One such rarity is Will Felty from Lubbock, Texas. One listen to anything he has recorded as Cowboy Cold and you know immediately that this is no sulfide material. Cowboy Cold presents, in a way that uses low fidelity (arguably one of the hallmarks of independent American music) as an instrument itself (listen to Death Blues, Cowboy Cold’s 2018 release, and then try to imagine its tracks without the beautiful hiss and hum of the tape machine), stripped-down country music as a precious metal, and “Roadkill” is a perfect example.

From the wandering finger-picked intro to the subtle addition of pedal steel and, throughout, its primary subject matter, Felty delivers “the truth” in his half-whispered, unadorned drawl. It’s within this truth that a rare nugget is to be found: a sardonic understanding of human nature as influenced by technology in general and social media in particular. While the first verse is used to describe a “mown down” animal, the wording and delivery suggest an observer emotionally moved by the sight; the second verse involves the video-captured loss of a human life and offhandedly remarks that it was “like anything else on the news that night,” comparing it specifically to roadkill—a word not used in the previous verse. In both occurrences of the chorus, this detachment from our fellow humans is subtly reiterated, marking “Roadkill” as a confessional as well as deep observation.

Cowboy Cold will be traveling all the way from Lubbock to present his splendid version of country music in person at the Ball of Wax 57 release show, September 14th at the Blue Moon!

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