once again i let this little foray into supposed community lapse. my bad. i've been getting settled into our new gallery space/apartment in lovely kreuzberg, which has taken much of my energy. most times i'm at the computer, i can't fathom engaging in activities that are unnecessary (though i must admin, facebook occupies a bit of my time). i found this album, shadrack chameleon is amazing. only 500 copies were pressed, so cop one if you can. otherwise, i think the album has been thankfully re-released by gear fab records, on vinyl even!

when i was 14 i met a girl named merry, and she introduced me to a band called 'clam famine', who apparently hail from wheaton, illinois. i still know very little about this band, and have never seen them live, but still their tape was seminal in my musical development. i wanted to play guitar like on 'i am peter pan' and was amazed by how tight a local band could sound... i would sing their songs to psych myself up before soccer games, and to 14 year old me, they were as important as any of the other sort of bad grungy music that i listened to, like the smashing pumpkins or pearl jam. yes, i once listened to (and loved) pearl jam.


before i moved back to berlin i took some time to dub the only clam famine tape i have ever heard for posterity, then realizing that they are on myspace (linked by the picture above), albeit with different versions of the same songs, though there's something about dirty tape hiss and four track recordings that i find vastly superior to local bands being recorded at the local studio, generally a reverb intensive and compressed affair. without further adieu, i bring you clam famine. think of them as my own version of pete & pete's 'polaris'.


as i settle into berlin i shall continue to bring you music, but as the road towards having all of my possessions settled into an apartment seems long and arduous, bear with me as i progress towards freedom and free time. enjoy this tasty morsel as an appetizer first...

this record was given to me by a friend, and seems to be quite rare. i have found no information online on it. i think the group featured here 'belonged' to ram dass (richard alpert) in the sixties, but there was no jacket with the record, and many of the songs don't have an artist attributed. some of the vocals are reminiscent of becky stark (of lavender diamond), some sound more like space ghost, and others are dirgey versions of hindu classics...
get it here!

the music presented here is more irreverent and intentionally local than the posts preceding, but celebratory and gripping nonetheless. the raytown hustlas hail from my hometown high school, and their cd lay dormant in some basement flip folder until i resucitated it a few years back, finding bounce & ballin'ness. trill-a-g is better than federline certainly, but imminently more self aware. if art can be post-post-modern, music can be faux-faux-gangsta, which is, perhaps, the most proper genre assessment for the hustlas.


Click on image for album, and hit them up to donate if you dig it.

electropeasant will continue with gems from further afield in its next installment. i just want to rep something that i heard about but hasn't been in the news at all.. an ohio farm share coopreative, the manna storehouse, was raided without reason by fully armed swat team members, their assets, equipment and food raided, and still no reason was given. more here.

click on the image above to download


i don't know how i first came across this delightful and immanently transcendent performance, but i would like to pass it along, as it's position within the canon of the history of america/music/art is so astounding. i can't imagine being at the funeral for the great john coltrane, nor any funeral with musical accompaniment like that displayed here, but i am thankful that it existed as a moment. don ayler, who is playing in the funeral had this to say of the performance:

At the funeral I was present, right, everyone was there, yes, I mean, not only musicians, but people from all lots of life, all colors from all nations, because people understood what John Coltrane stood for. I remember seeing Stockeley Carmichael, Rapp Brown... Yes, I remember, my brother and Ornette Coleman were supposed to play, and we played at funeral in St. Peter's Church. I think that everybody cried when they heard that he had died, you know, and I cried when I heard about it, I cried when I heard that he had died, but after a while I realized you couldn't bring him back in the world, so, you know, I just played the best I could, I think I played some of the best music of my life at old John's funeral, yeah, the music was recorded, we heard it, very spiritual music, very spiritual.

personnel on the recording are:

A. Ayler - Tenor Saxophone / Vocal
D. Ayler - Trumpet
R. Davis - Bass
M. Graves - Drums

finally, i found that this is from a box set released by reverent records of albert ayler's music. peep it!