#sunwatchers

[marchelino666]

[dustedmagazine]

Ian Mathers’ I Didn’t Wanna End the Dream: Trying to focus on 2019 (but not just 2019)

Saying I didn’t find myself able to pay as much attention to new music in 2019 as I normally do is true, but lacks some context; I see from my notes that I still managed to get through 70 new releases so far this year (and I’ve got a solid 30 more downloaded that I will be giving at least one listen to between now and early 2020), which still places me somewhere towards the extreme upper percentile (really, if you sought out and listened to five new records in 2019, I bet you’re above the global or even continental average). And honestly it’s not sheer bulk that has me feeling like I slightly neglected 2019 in 2019; I’ve had years where I’ve heard less and felt passionately caught up in the moment, and I’m sure I could have listened to twice as much and still felt the same. No, it’s that 2019 was the first year maybe a decade and a half where I actually allowed myself (and it very much had to be “allowed”) to pay half as much attention to old music as I did to new.

Before I get to that, though, let me emphasize that this doesn’t mean that what I found to love in 2019 I loved any less; some years a single record announces itself as some sort of emblematic favorite strongly, some years it’s more a gestalt, but I’d put my feelings about this year’s top three against any recent years’, easily. I certainly didn’t expect Hatchie’s Keepsake to top the list when I first got it (even when I had this reaction to one of the early singles, a song that I wouldn’t even necessarily say is my favorite on the record!), but it got there the old-fashioned way; I simply couldn’t stop playing it, coming back to it between other records, getting various songs stuck in my head, etc. It’s a record I loved passionately and thoughtlessly enough that I couldn’t find the words to articulate it here at greater length than a Dust entry. If it feels a bit less tightly connected to current events than my dual 2018 favorites (Low’s Double Negative and Leverage Models’ Whites) did, that just speaks again to the multitude of ways we all connect with art. I’ll let most of my 2019 list stand on its own, except to note that the rest of my top three had at least an oblique relationship to that notion of currency, with the dark fables of Picastro’s Exit certainly being harrowing enough to soundtrack the news (particularly a song like “A Trench,” which like most Picastro songs instantly sounded like some dark old folk song I’d known since I was a kid the first time I played it) and Hot Chip’s ebulliently humane A Bath Full of Ecstasy being written in the spirit of providing a positive ideal to strive for, even while we’re (on both sides of the Atlantic) being buried under a mountain of shit.  

But even in that context, I don’t think my sudden attention to my archives was in the spirit of retreat or refuge; I can honestly say it started on a pure whim, with a friend mentioning how much they preferred the non-album version of The Wrens’ great “This Boy Is Exhausted,” a version that I can now tell you is from the Drive Thru Records 1999 compilation You’ll Never Eat Fast Food Again. This comment reminded me that I have that alternate version (and he’s right, it rips), but that I had no idea where it comes from. And something, somewhere, snapped. See, although I’ve been through multiple computers since I first had my own in the late 90s, and I’ve always been able to transfer all the music I’ve had on it (sometimes through crazily baroque methods) to my new machine, other things have changed a lot. It used to be I kept a ton of CDs but (since both the process was lengthy, hard drive space was at a premium, and internet speeds were painfully slow) I’d usually rip the four or five songs I most wanted to keep around. And any time I was keeping less than basically a full album of songs I’d erase most of the metadata (this now seems insane to me, but I think my mind at the time just wanted all those songs to display in alphabetical order and this seemed the easiest way to get, at the time, WinAmp to co-operate). Well, I got rid of 9/10ths of my CD collection at least five years ago, most of the music I get now whether promos or bought by me come as files, and I’ve got about 100 gigs of hard drive space free and a good, cheap internet connection.  

Somehow this combined with a momentary impulse to clean up and properly file my Wrens MP3s and turned into a massive sorting/deletion/reclamation project, complete with a spreadsheet in Google Docs to keep track of what I was keeping and a still to me surprising sense of satisfaction whenever I could justify spending an afternoon or evening just listening to, sorting and often deleting material, some of which hadn’t been played or looked at in 10+ years. Building a new library of stuff I still actually care about, and of course all the little fringe benefits (the little shocks of rediscovery, moments of outright nostalgia, even just the feeling of tidying up); it’s been the most edifying thing I’ve done in a while, and feels somewhere between self-indulgent and the best thing I could be doing for myself.  

Mind you, I’ve got a lot of music and I’ve been trying to prioritize this project below things like the people in my life, my day job, and writing here and elsewhere (which is rarely focused on that older material I’ve been processing, but is often informed by what I’ve been getting out of the work), so after eight months I’m… still working on the end of the Cs. Which means I’ve gone through literally everything starting with C that was already in my iTunes library, and have since moved on to the Unsorted pile I generated through that process, which holds both everything in the library I realized needed more time/listening before I made a decision (including things I downloaded as I went, because you do this and you realize it’s insane you somehow only have one Curtis Mayfield song, for example), and then all the other stuff starting with C that was sitting in a few directories that somehow didn’t make it into iTunes before. As I noted on Twitter at the time, C was a particularly rich haul in this respect not least because my love for Coil and the relatively messy state of their discography had at one point led me to say fuck it and accept another fan’s offer of their complete works (and even that wound up being not quite it… keeping a twitter thread of all the random little things that have come up during this process was a surprisingly good part, too). Those particular embarrassments of riches I’m still going through during my spare time, which led to November being a month where, except for stuff I was writing about, pretty much only Coil and Carly Rae Jepson got played in our apartment (my wife, with a saintly patience that comes naturally to neither of us, minded neither).  

It even feels a bit weird to discuss this still-ongoing project just in the context of 2019. Aside from some early goings where the thrill of just getting stuff put away properly was overwhelming, I’ve mostly been able to keep it as something I’m working on but after other things, which means it’s definitely going to be a years-long endeavor (to say nothing about how newly obtained material will get integrated in, as it comes), but maybe the major thing it’s done is abated the slowly but steadily rising background panic I only now realize I’d been feeling over the past decade or so, as all the new listening I keep doing (which I love and wouldn’t trade for anything; every year it gives me so many new things I love and that matter to me) was out of whack with the near total neglect I had for everything once it fell off the treadmill of the new. I felt stuck on that treadmill; now it feels, to torture this metaphor, like I still spend a good amount of time on the treadmill but also get off every so often and, I don’t know, lift weights or something. If anything, it’s made me more eager to hear new things when I carve out time for them. My teenage self, always worrying whether I’d still feel the same way about music once I hit my (late) 30s would be thrilled to hear the answer to possibly incipient burnout is not “stop listening” but rather “listen even more, but differently.”  

Ian Mathers

   Albums:

Hatchie - Keepsake

Picastro - Exit

Hot Chip - A Bath Full of Ecstasy

Blanck Mass - Animated Violence Mild

Sunwatchers - Illegal Moves

Clinic - Wheeltappers & Shunters

Wand - Laughing Matter

Ladytron - Ladytron

Aarktica - Mareación

Boy Harsher - Careful  

Nakhane - You Will Not Die

Lambchop - This (is what I wanted to tell you)

loscil - Equivalents

Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society - Mandatory Reality

Sigrid - Sucker Punch

Julia Kent - Temporal

Pelican - Nighttime Stories

Rafael Anton Irisarri - Solastalgia

Beth Gibbons & Krzysztof Penderecki - Symphony of Sorrowful Songs

The National - I Am Easy to Find

Singles:

Kitten - "Memphis"

James Blake ft. Rosalía - "Barefoot in the Park"

unperfect - "Gots to Give the Girl"

Rinne Yoshida - "Mu"

Georgia - "About Work the Dancefloor"

Vampire Weekend - “Harmony Hall”

Caroline Polachek - “Door”

Freddie Gibbs & Madlib - “Crime Pays”

BiSH - “DISTANCE”

Charly Bliss - “Capacity”

[sweetblahg]

sweetblahg 2019 year in review

Daniel Johnston & Tweedy(, the band) - 10.20.2017 @ The Vic

Greg Spero & Blaque Dynamite - 10.2.2018 @ The Whistler

Neil Young - 1.23.2019 @ The Riverside Theater

Tortoise - 2.17.2019 @ The Empty Bottle

Sunwatchers - 4.13.2019 @ Cafe Mustache

Elkhorn + Charles Rumback 4.14.2019 @ Elastic

Papa M - 4.22.2019 @ Rockefeller Memorial Chapel

Ryley Walker - 8.16.2019 @ Hungry Brain

Mute Duo (Quintet) - 8.22.2019 @ The Empty Bottle

One Eleven Heavy - 9.5.2019 @ The Hideout

Bitchin Bajas - 9.12.2019 @ Constellation

Stereolab - 10.4.2019 @ Turner Hall Ballroom

Bill Frisell - 11.14.2019 @ The Art Institute

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Headroom / Sunwatchers - Baby’s All Right, Brooklyn, New York, December 9, 2018

A psychstravaganza courtesy of Eric PH / NYC Taper! This was actually a triple bill -- Headroom, Sunwatchers and Heron Oblivion. The kind of night that New Yorkers are used to, but the rest of us have to envy. Headroom’s set is filled with deep-fried jams, led by the crunchy guitar mastery of Kryssi Battalene. Sunwatchers, meanwhile, preview a few new tunes from their forthcoming Illegal Moves. I’ve enjoyed all of their previous stuff, but they may just now be hitting their stride. Watch out! The Heron Oblivion set has yet to surface, but have no fear! Thanks to acidjack, you can listen to the band rattling eardrums on the previous night, when they were across the river opening up one of Yo La Tengo’s Hanukkah shows. Some fresh material from an as-yet-unannounced second album. I especially dig the long one. 

Edit! The Heron Oblivion 12/9/18 set has been uploaded over at NYC Taper ... 

(Photos: Michael Baca) 

[sweetblahg]

Sunwatchers: Cafe Mustache 2019

Sunwatchers tore through town once again en route to Milwaukee Psych Fest, and once again we Chicago heads benefitted from the MPF runoff. This time, the PunkJazzDrone masters were sandwiched in the middle of a h e a v y local bill. BBsitters Club, The World’s Best Jamband™, kicked off the night with a toight 40min of their ComicSans-tinged/LittleFeat-via-Ween spaceprog, which you can listen to HERE...and I highly recommend you do that, Angel Bat Dawid sits in and kicks it up another notch (as esteemed chef, Elzar, would say). Angel (whose incredible new tape is out now on International Anthem) then proceeded to bring the frickin house down post-Sunwatchers. More on that later (probably?). As for the Sunwatchers set...what can I blather abt this dang band that hasn’t already been more articulately blathered by more talented writers? @aquariumdrunkard called them “[a] quartet [that] continues to defy adequate description, incorporating elements of free jazz, psychedelia, punk, Ethiopian and Thai music into a dizzy, invigorating sound.” which does a pretty good job setting the scene for n00bs.  This Cafe Mustache set is everything you/I love about Sunwatchers, yet somehow even more vibrant, assertive and powerful. A ripper in the truest sense of the word.  Their new record, Illegal Moves, is out now. Buy it. 

Sunwatchers 4.13.2019 @ Cafe Mustache Chicago, IL New Dad Blues Beautiful Crystals Sunwatchers vs. Tooth Decay Everybody Play Love Paste > Brown Ice Strollin' Coma Blues > The Worm Store Peter Kerlin - bass guitar Jim McHugh - electric guitar, electric phin Jeff Tobias - alto saxophone, keyboard Jason Robira - drums lightly mastered by Doug Kaplan (thx doug!) stream download buy a cassette! 

previously on tehBlahg: Sunwatchers Motel Band: The Hideout 2018

[sweetblahg]

sweetblahg 2018 year in review

75 Dollar Bill (big band) - 9.23.2017 @ The Hideout Block Party

CAVE - 12.31.2017 @ Hungry Brain

Wolf Eyes - 3.1.2018 @ The Owl [5 sets]

ADT - 3.9.2018 @ Elastic

Nick Millevoi’s Desertion Trio - 3.14.2018 @ Elastic

2018 Festival of Large HearingOrgans - 3.22-25.2018 @ Knoxville, TN

Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society - 4.21.2018 @ The Hideout

Gunn-Trucinski Duo - 4.21.2018 @ The Hideout

Wet Tuna - 5.3.2018 @ The Hideout

Chris Forsyth & The Solar Motel Band - 5.4.2018 @ The Hideout

Sunwatchers - 5.4.2018 @ The Hideout

Universal Eyes [Wolf Eyes + Universal Indians] - 5.25.2018 @ El Club

The Art Ensemble of Chicago - 5.25.2018 @ El Club

Bitchin Bajas - 6.15.2018 @ Hungry Brain

Neil Young - 6.30.2018 @ Auditorium Theatre

Radiohead - 7.6-7.2018 @ United Center

CAVE - 7.28.2018 @ The Empty Bottle

Guerilla Toss - 9.22.2018 @ The Hideout

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Sunwatchers - II

#bandcampmonday! I gave this one a plug a little while back (in honor of the band’s radical Lagniappe Session), but it deserves many more plugs. Sunwatchers’ first LP was killer -- this one is even better, a psychedelic fire music extravaganza. Like Albert Ayler joining the Meat Puppets ... or Eric Dolphy jamming with Evol-era Sonic Youth! You understand. II is too good to miss, friends. 

Also too good to miss: this recent Solar Motel Band live EP (the SMB currently shares a rhythm section with Sunwatchers). Amazing, extended excursions, plus a very nice Neil Young cover. Get it! 

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Sunwatchers :: Lagniappe Session

The mighty Sunwatchers return next month with the exquisite/ecstatic II -- I loved their debut, but this one is next level. Also next level is this four-song Lagniappe Session, which gets the always reliable Aquarium Drunkard series off to a great start in 2018. Sharrock! Dylan! Doyle! The Brothers Kirkwood! All amazing. Don’t miss it. And if you’re on the west coast, don’t miss the band’s upcoming tour -- see below for dates. 

Sunwatchers features Solar Motel bassist Peter Kerlin, -- if you’re so inclined you can chase the Lagniappe sesh with a recent Monty Hall tape via the Free Music Archive. Solar power!