isaiah the toothtaker.

photo by dan zev

my homie serge runs a sick blog called beer and rap... and i been buggin' him to spit some shit up in here fer awhile now... he's more than delivered...
this is an interview he did for us with one of my favorite rappers doin' it right now, isaiah the toothtaker. covers every thing from where his name comes from to what happens when you hit a man in the face with a black jack. this shit is fuck-ing real.

it's a long interview... but more than worth the read...
here's a sample (click to hear audio).
" One of them I split his face in half and like his eyeball popped out. He had to have surgery to put his eyeball back in and that’s self defense still. II used a black jack that time but it was like yo, it was versus seven dudes so what if I had a black jack. I could have stabbed each of them in the face and it would have been self defense.

 They got me for fucking assault with a deadly weapon, temporary disfigurement, and another like high up assault charge. It was like yo that’s obviously self defense. And like all those motherfuckers even corroborated to say that it was self defense. They all kind of said they tried to jump me, but yet they hemmed me up. I got indited for that shit, caught a felony for it. And the same shit, just cause the cops fuck up police reports and write what ever the fuck they want, doesn’t matter if it’s somebodies life on the line."

his stories are sick, his music is sick.

read the whole interview after the jump. (seriously it's fucking uh-mazing)

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i'm in love with chelsea wolfe...

i hope that statement doesn't creep her out. i'm kind of prone to hyperbole... but i'm not sure if that's what's at issue here. the girl is seriously fucking uh-mazing... intelligent, well spoken, and sweet as all hell... then she gets on stage and fucking destroys me. she does what any good performer should. she becomes what she presents.

i talked to her for a bit and got some footage from her performance at noise pop... if y'all missed that shit... don't worry... i'm bringing them back for 120 MINUTES this summer.




showed her this video, and this was her response.
"out of space and time; bottomless and boundless floods.. something died inside me last night, normally that might sound like a bad thing but i think actually it cleared out a fog in my head.. my memory is bringing me all sorts of sounds and colors and days that i could never remember before..."
seriously... fuck-ing love.


go buy her album, the grime and the glow, from pendu right now... fer realz.


chelsea wolfe- halfsleeper mp3

death rattle.

yesterday, my niece asked "don't you wish you weren't alive all the time, so you could lay down in heaven."

word.
there's a company out of the UK called AND VINYLY that will press your ashes into vinyl. so now you can haunt 30 of your closest friends with a mixtape of your mortality.
here's a rough draft of mine... in case it comes up before i have a chance to get something more formal together.
(click trax fer mp3's)
nick cave and the bad seeds-the mercy seat
johnny mandel-suicide is painless
daniel knox-ghostsong
rocket from the tombs-ain't it fun
coil-who'll fall
i think i might also record my own version of dust in the wind sometime in the next couple weeks.

beyond all that, last saturday was pretty ill... so much so that i just said ill. we had the first installment of 120 MINUTES (a night i'm throwing here in SF).  LIGHT ASYLUM played an amazing show,  oOoOO, Harrison, and  Josh killed it with their DJ sets... and i felt solid on my audio/video set...

shannon from light asylum

oOoOO

crowd feelin' it

me and john (from SALEM)

speaking of... check out this video for king night. honestly... no idea if it's official... been busy as fuck and out of the loop lately... but, regardless it's hot as all shit. dark and tripped out... magic.

Salem - King Night from Sean Michael Pheanis on Vimeo.

ashes to ashes.

During the rise of the state hospital system, tens of thousands of patients with schizophrenia, severe bipolar, and other (at the time) seemingly untreatable mental disorders were abandoned by their families to spend the rest of their lives in the back wards of public mental institutions.
The only physical memorial that stands to the plight of these forgotten souls are the thousands of brass urns filled with the unclaimed ashes of society's mistakes. These urns are currently stored in a building at the Oregon State Hospital.

David Maisel’s large-scale photographs display the copper canisters that hold these ashes. The Oregon State Hospital, in Salem, inaugurated as the Oregon State Insane Asylum in 1883, stored the remains of over 5000 people in canisters in an underground vault in the mid-1970s. The vault flooded repeatedly, and the canisters—some containing unclaimed remains more than a 100 years old—underwent spectacular processes of deterioration.
Maisel writes of his work: “The copper canisters have a handmade quality; they are at turns burnished or dull; corrosion blooms wildly from the leaden seams and across the surfaces of many of the cans. Numbers are stamped into each lid; the lowest number is 01, and the highest is 5,118. The vestiges of paper labels with the names of the dead, the etching of the copper, and the intensely hued colors of the blooming minerals combine to individuate the canisters. These deformations sometimes evoke the celestial — the Northern Lights, the moons of some alien planet, or constellations in the night sky.” David Maisel’s Library of Dust is the subject of a large-scaled monograph released by Chronicle Books in 2008.

david bowie- ashes to ashes (mp3)

wisconsin death trip has a flikr.

seriously amazing.




Wisconsin Death Trip is a non-fiction book by Michael Lesy, first published in 1973. It has been adapted into a film.
The book is based on a collection of late 19th century photographs by Jackson County, Wisconsin photographer Charles Van Schaick, mostly in the city of Black River Falls, and local news reports from the same period. It emphasizes the harsh aspects of Midwestern rural life under the pressures of crime, disease, mental illness, and urbanization.

the film is currently available streaming on netflix... so you might want to get on that...

and here are some reading's from Lesy's book... this was put out on CDR some years back... (link to mp3's)

"Hillbilly noir from Butchertown Allstars; i.e. - 10 musicians reincarnate Wisconsin Death Trip. 46 tracks range from 20 to 90 seconds, comprised of male and female spoken stories accompanied by sounds spliced of vast scope ranging from old-timey dust bowl blues to free jazz to alien forcep electronics (all performed by the Butchertown Allstars). The result is timeless, sounding as if it was recorded anytime over the last 100 years. Highly reccomended for suicidial introverts! Based on Michael Lesy's classic book "Wisconsin Death Trip", an intimate, shocking and sometimes hilarious account of the disasters that befell one small town in Wisconsin during the final decade of the 19th century. Lesy discovered a striking archive of black and white photographs in the town of Black River Falls dating from the 1890's and married a selection of these images to extracts from the town's newspaper from the same decade. It is from these extracts that Butchertown Allstars bring back to life the tropes of hidden lives, suicide, familial disaster, cross-dressing, acute paranoia, drug addiction, schizophrenia, 'crazy socialists' and myriad tales of ordinary madness."