Leslie Knope(ish), and I say ish because she can be a bit bullheaded and I don’t think you’re that, but you have this amazingly sunny, positive attitude that reminds me of her. You’re kind and wonderful to everyone around you, smart and thoughtful, and like her, deserve all the wonderful things!
Heavy, I have you fooled! Mwuhaha [Evil laugh]. I’ve been told, on MULTIPLE occasions, that I am the most stubborn person on this- or any other- earth. I’m a Super Scorpio, after all!
But the rest is absolutely true. I am a 100%, fully formed, fully fledged Knope. Right down to my inexplicable, platonic infatuation with Ron Swanson— Who deserves all the bacon and eggs this world has.
The shooting that happened in Alexandria, VA today was awful but I keep hearing republicans say "oh this is terrible and an attack on our democracy we need to come together now more than ever and find solutions and not create problems"; and all that is fine and dandy but the answer now is clearly gun control.....like the democrats/left wingers have been proposing for a long time now....and maybe if they had compromised on this sooner this wouldn't have happened.
Alexander Garsden — Of Another (Duos 2018-2019) (Marginal Frequency)
MFCD K | Of Another (Duos 2018-2019) by Alexander Garsden
Gatefold sleeves are good for more than cleaning dope. They can also conceal communications from the artist to the listener, luring you further into the world they make with music and telling you things that decode a record’s sounds. They might just look inscrutably cool. Of Another sports an external image of branches bearing green fruit that might be more recognizable to people with an Antipodean horticultural background than they are to this writer. Open it up and you’ll find an image of one twig in closeup, with one fruit intact and another hollowed out. Since this is an album of acoustic guitar duets, one wonders which musician is whole and which has been gnawed by bugs? Does Garsden, like Derek Bailey so flippantly self-described years ago, consider himself to be so devoid of ideas that he needs to get them from another musician? Or is he suggesting that in a duo encounter, one musician must submit to being consumed in order for the cycle of musical life to continue? Think about it; you might prefer purchasing intact fruit at the grocery store, but any fruit that comes to you that way has been hijacked and misdirected from its evolutionarily designated task of seducing animals into enabling floral reproduction Unless, that is, you’re depositing those swallowed seeds where they’re likely to grow into new fruit trees. If so, your mom and the local cops might disapprove, but Mother Nature smiles upon you.
Wait, isn’t there a record to be discussed here? There is, and it’s a lovely one. Alexander Garsden is a guitarist (and composer, electronic musician and planner of experimental music events) from Melbourne, Australia. Since Australia is remote, it behooves its residents who are interested in unusual sounds to get out of town and make some connections, and this record appears to be the product of a creatively motivated walkabout. Each of its eight tracks is a duet, named for a city associated with the other guitarist, but not necessarily where they live now. The pieces bear names like “Tokyo 20,” which suggests that Garsden and his Japanese duet partner, Tetuzi Akiyama, recorded quite a few pieces that didn’t make it to the record. Stockholm is indubitably where David Stackenäs resides. But Melbourne? Maybe Julia Reidy lived there once, and maybe the tracks she plays on were recorded there, but she’s been based in Berlin for years. Anyway, if Garsden got to travel to make this record, the poor guy isn’t doing so in 2020; he’s spent chunks of the year confined to small subsections of his city. But at least he got to put out this a CD of music that’ll take you places.
Geographical discussion probably doesn’t get you to the point of why you need to hear Of Another, but its gatefold picture might. Nowhere on the sleeve will you learn if the album’s music was improvised, composed or played in a way that accesses the virtues of both methods. Garsden’s not telling. Maybe, like a good writer, he prefers to show you what he wants you to know. While each of these duets places him in the company of one of the other guitarists, you have to listen closely to catch what he does. Garsden’s playing is like a mirror, reflecting the other player’s sounds in the listener’s direction. The rippling, 12-string fingerings on “Melbourne 04” can’t come from someone other than Julia Reidy. But these duets don’t just spotlight her sound, they foreground her actual playing, which is becoming easier not to notice amidst the increasingly elaborate production of her solo albums. The intertwining, fractal shapes of “Tokyo 16” evoke images of a DNA strand bent upon expanding its slender bulk rather than reproducing some larger organism. Akiyama’s performances here take you to the reactive, non-boogying corner of his musical consciousness (Not that there’s anything wrong with boogying; here’s hoping that Akiyama someday cuts an album with David Nance). And “Stockholm 02” radiates the bright woodiness of Stackenäs’ sound, which you might already know from his work with Fred Lonberg-Holm or Tri-Dim. The tiny burst from each plucked string is as essential to his playing as the big, swelling sound is to Reidy’s and the changing constellation of sounds is to Akiyama’s. And Garsden? He’s the light that illuminates these qualities. So maybe he’s neither the whole fruit nor the chewed up one; he’s the guy pointing the camera.
JUST KIDDING, ELENA IS AN INSANE LIL PIECE OF SUNSHINE THAT I LOVE SCREAMING ABOUT NIPPLES TO, AND SOMETIMES WE HAVE OUR LITTLE "what would u do if" MOMENTS THAT MAKE ME REALLY HAPPY AND SHE CAN ALSO MAKE A REALLY SHARP WEAPON OUT OF CANDY BUT SHE ENDS UP STABBING HER TONGUE WITH IT SO--- YEAH I LOVE THIS LIL SUNSHINE A LOT UHEUIOFSDGBFSDLIHFS
