Glowdown - Shit Hits Fan

In the Glow this week: a review of "Shit Hits The Fan" by Brooklyn quartet Bad Credit No Credit, a Q&A with Saint Louis noise-monger Joe Raglani, and a review (goes up Friday) of Guitars From Agadez by Group Inerane, players of Nigerien Tishoumaren, otherwise known as "guitar music," which originated in Lybian refugee camps during the second uprising of the '90s.

"Shit Hits The Fan" by Bad Credit No Credit - John Le Carré recently wrote an article in The New Yorker about the A Scanner Darkly-esque working conditions of British intelligence agents during the Cold War. These days, Carré writes, the job is just as shrouded in blind faith and paranoia, with Islamic terrorism the only invisible threat. “Shit Hits The Fan,” full of intrigue and suspense, is an able theme song: the drums and bass work in a tight groove as rain-stick and screams accent the seductive sax and tense croon of Carrie-Ann Murphy, who affirms, “All signs point to apocalypse.” Keep reading...

Interview with Raglani - Joe Raglani, founder of the experimental label Pegasus Farms Records, is a mainstay of the cozy music scene in Saint Louis, Missouri. Though he has been playing music for nearly two decades, Raglani’s latest record, the ominous and atmospheric Of Sirens Born, is his first major step out of his post-industrial home base and towards a wider audience. Over e-mail, he talks about Of Sirens Born, sources of inspiration, Saint Louis’ decayed art scene, and continuing to live “the dream.” Continued...

The McCain strategy - Americans are stupid

First, McCain says he's got to postpone today's long-awaited debate and suspend his campaign, so he can fly over to Washington to help save America's economy with a clear and bipartisan mind. But while he sits through a fruitless White House meeting with President Bush, Congressional leaders and Obama, his campaign ads still go on the air. Now, citing "significant progress" in negotiations for the complicated $700 billion bailout proposal that went nowhere yesterday, his campaign is up and running and the debate is going to happen.

All of this for political gain!

"The difference between Barack Obama and John McCain was apparent during the White House meeting yesterday where Barack Obama's priority was political posturing in his opening monologue defending the package as it stands," a press release announcing the resumption of the McCain campaign reads. "John McCain listened to all sides so he could help focus the debate on finding a bipartisan resolution that is in the interest of taxpayers and homeowners."

Here's a strategy: Switch off the presidential race's omnipresent politicking, like a light, so you can put off an important debate and simultaneously demonstrate that you have a "bipartisan" outlook that solves problems. And then pray that voters still on the fence won't notice that you played politics by trying to erase them, and then failed to win the support of your own party to ram a complicated bill through Congress that will have massive effects on these same voters.

McCain must think that most Americans are pretty fucking stupid, huh?

Raglani - "The horror! The horror!"

After a century of twiddling with the knobs of modular synthesizers, splicing magnetic tape, collecting field recordings, borrowing from foreign musical traditions and doing what we now merely refer to as “sampling,” pioneers of the electroacoustic arts have fundamentally improved music. Now, the world is host to sonic landscapes—turbulent oceans, jagged cliffs overlooking arid savannah, blighted cities reminiscent of Blade Runner‘s Los Angeles. Joe Raglani’s Of Sirens Born, inspired by recordings of Latin American folk and the treacherous jungles depicted in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, takes the listener on what sounds like a voyage through a creek of sludge in a dark sewer of St. Louis, Raglani’s post-industrial home base. Awash in grumbling drones and dissonant harmonies, swollen with a tension that rarely finds release, Of Sirens Born is at once terrifying and sublime. Continued at the Glow...

Head To Head - Gétatchèw Mekurya & The Ex + Guests

It’s been nearly forty years since Ethiopia boiled over with the revolutionary politics that claimed thousands of innocent lives and nearly killed the proud East African nation’s sultry and horn-driven music. Thankfully, after the Dergue regime’s blood-soaked revolution came to an end in 1991, the producers of Éthiopiques took on the honorable task of distributing to a wide audience the musical epoch that began in the ’60s with auxiliary police bands in the capital, Addis Ababa. Continued at the Glow...

Limbo in the North - Will the war in Uganda ever end?

Eveline Alobo, a weary, rail-thin 50-year-old mother of five, turned in her chair to look at the man waving his arms in the air. In one hand, he clutched a cane; in the other, a bottle of home-brewed beer. Through the hot, hazy air of the dry season, the babbling man, in his torn shirt and hat, resembled a marionette.

“He is drunk,” Alobo said, frowning. An Association of Volunteers for International Service (AVSI) staff member hopped up and ran towards the man, clapping his hands in the air to scare him off.

Alobo, an ethnic Acholi, lives in the Acet Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp, about 75 miles from the border of Sudan, one of hundreds of camps that dot Uganda’s northern region. Acet looks like most of the other camps: The fertile undergrowth typical of neighboring villages has been cleared away, making room for a few simple structures that serve as schoolhouses and a clinic, plus row after row of mud-brick huts with thatched-grass roofs, many of them furnished with little more than a pot for cooking. Every few yards, a latrine shaped like a porta-potty juts out of the ground. Using the latrines makes the camp more sanitary, but children fear them, so small rivers of human waste run down the mud pathways.

“The sanitation is just shit,” said Louisa Seferis, program director for AVSI’s Northern Uganda office, which monitors and manages camps in three of Uganda’s northern districts.

Alobo moved to Acet 20 years ago. She fled her home after the Lord’s Resistance Army—a rebel outfit that’s been terrorizing the region for more than two decades in an attempt to overthrow the government—raided her village in the middle of the night. She watched as rebels pulled her husband and daughter from their hut and hacked them to death with machetes, then made off with her son.

Now, like most of the displaced, she faces the filth and widespread alcoholism of the IDP camps.

Continue reading this article, which I co-wrote with Hannah Rappleye, at San Diego CityBeat...

Post-Surge Iraq - America's "House of Cards"

Last night, NY Times reporter Dexter Filkins read from his new book, The Forever War, and led a Q&A session that proved rather inconclusive. In his white dress shirt and blue blazer, he looked nothing like the haggard man pictured in his recent NY Times Magazine article "My Long War," but he had the classic nonchalant air and beaten-up face of a war journalist, and his diction was loaded with military lingo. He smiled and chuckled a lot. "I'm totally nervous," he said, about doing the night's event. "I'd rather be shot at with a 50 caliber machine gun."

Filkins is the "death wish" type of journalist who races through battle zones unfazed and wins the good graces of Marines and media critics alike for his down 'n' dirty reporting. His book looks O.K. – it’s a collection of stark and/or action-packed personal accounts of Afghanistan in the late ’90s, the Sept. 11th attacks, and the early years of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. I've only gotten through the first couple chapters (busy with other books), but already a vehicle, several buildings and a head have exploded into oblivion; a hand has gotten chopped off during a public execution at a soccer stadium; and the tragic fate of some child soldiers who worked for the Northern Alliance has been poetically alluded to. I can tell already that this isn't going to be another Taliban, Assassins' Gate, Night Draws Near, or No True Glory. Filkins doesn't have the sharpest intellect, but he can make sense of chaos and horror with a nearly photographic sense, and that's where his book is strong. "It's just stuff that I saw," he explained. "It's representative of my experience."

He just got back from Iraq last Friday. During the Q&A, he said that Iraq is really peaceful now. "The gains are real," he said. But he referred to the country aptly as a "kaleidoscope," and said that it's a "fool's game" to predict what might happen there in the future.

He shied away from opining on the situation, but he suggested that all of this success would amount to little if we withdrew from Iraq in a year. The most elucidating point came when an Iraqi man Filkins apparently knew pressed him on the rivalry between the "Sons of Iraq" - the Sunni fighters and tribal leaders allied against Al Qaida in Iraq, who are famous for bringing down the violence - and the Shi'i-led government. If Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki continues to marginalize the Sunnis (Maliki recently said that he plans to incorporate only 20% of them into the Iraqi Army), won't Iraq eventually devolve into sectarian conflict again?

Filkins had an ominous retort. With the "Anbar Awakening," the United States built an immense "house of cards," he said. “And, you know, a house of cards is better than no house at all.”

“Is it gonna last? Who knows?” he added. “Stay tuned.”

Trax - Abe Vigoda + Experimental Dental School

Abe Vigoda is often described as “tropical” or “calypso punk.” That might be accurate if jagged rock music drowning in reverb alluded to things tropical, or if Michael Vidal and Juan Velazquez’s howling and stabbing guitars actually brought to mind the up-beat, feel-good hits of Harry Belafonte. Read more at CMG...

Experimental Dental School’s charm lies as much in their agitated ravaging as in their name. Read more...