Dusty Bible Does The Starkweather Fix!

I have spoken of the Nottingham (by way of Oshawa) Madman Dusty Bible here before, and told you of his having been in way-out bands like The Starkweather Fix or Designer Babies.

Like the wind, he is ever unpredictable, and the last few years have seen him move from a solo blues act (sometimes with fiddle accompaniment) billed simply as Dusty Bible, to psychedelic freakouts at Peter Gabriel's surreal Real World studios, to his latest musical expression -- "weird electro band" Din Din (from whose recent premier gig the photo above originates).

This post here is about a couple of choice Starkweather covers Dusty Bible recently sent my way - "Fucked Up" and "Shiveraltitude", both tracks originally appearing on The Starkweather Fix's sole CD, What The Swedish Butler Heard.


I'm pretty chuffed by both. I love the crazy noise breaks on "Fucked Up" and the insistent keyboard underneath the verses. Also how Dusty sings it in that wonderful, rich voice of his.

"Shiveraltitude", which The Starkweather Fix often opened our shows with, is here less the live powerhouse and more the slinky psycho cathouse, a great song for Dusty to lay down some tasty bluesy licks on. And some theremin at the tail of that beast for added spice.

Hope you dig 'em both!

Fucked Up
Shiveraltitude

No No Zero is playing shows again, whee!

The Poster Show IV at the Lakeshore Legion Hall this past Friday went very well, I'm happy to say. The posters were great, lots of fun people there I hadn't seen in awhile, & the venue was really something else - the main room had a wooden floor, there was a fantastic large lakeside patio, and $3 beers, ah yes.

Bands included The Ancestors, Sun Ra Ra Ra, No No Zero, Quest For Fire, and Anagram; everybody had a good set, I thought. Our first song was a nightmare (I couldn't hear myself at all), but after that it was pretty smooth sailing, and it's got me looking forward to playing Erin's do at the Atria on Sept. 18.


This time out, No No Zero was myself on the vocal mic, Mark Jarett on drums, Zak Hanna on guitar, Chris Cheeseman on guitar, and Andrew Gunn on guitar. Aside from being our first show as a band together, it was Mark's birthday too. And a full moon.

The pictures taken that night on my camera are not exactly great live band shots. Fortunately, Ivy Lovell's boombastic B&W band blog has a few of those, and she graciously let me use them here. Thanks, Ivy.

And thanks to Ryan for organizing a super night and a wonderful tribute to Mike Majewski.

Mythical Beasts at the Museum!

I visited the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau-Hull, Quebec this past weekend, and was quite impressed with their feature exhibition - Mythical Beasts: Dragons, Unicorns and Mermaids (on until September 20th).

This exhibition - organized by the American Museum of Natural History, in collaboration with The Field Museum, Chicago; The Canadian Museum of Civilization; The Australian National Maritime Museum, Sydney; and the Fernbank Museum of Natural History, Atlanta - divides the featured creatures into their respective 'realms' of water, earth, and air, along with an extra section on dragons (who can pretty much handle all three, presumably).

The exhibition does a good job of showing how unusual animals or phenomena occurring in the natural world may well have been responsible for many of these legends and myths; how the sinus cavity of a dwarf elephant skull might translate as a cyclops' eye socket, for example, or how the way that dolphins jumping in sync might well example reports of huge sea snakes.


Along with the admittedly hokey plaster models of unicorns and the like (an understandable move given that children are more likely to enjoy a life-size unicorn, rather than a drawing or other representation), there were historical curios such as the Fiji Mermaid on display, and a rotating calendar of related experts and performers.

Although the exhibition has already been presented in some of the museums aforementioned, I shouldn't wonder if the Museum of Civilization didn't add some CanCon in the form of many Canadian myths & legends - Ogopogo and Sedna, to name but two.

For anyone seeking more, I encourage exploration of the AMNH's exhibit resources, as they seem to be different (and frankly more in-depth) than the resources of the Museum of Civilization.

Below I include some crappy photos I took before one of the people working there asked me to stop.

Over 30,000 visits in the last year!

I added that free counter at the bottom of this page early in September last year. Since then, Penetrating Insights has seen over 30,000 visits, wow.

I realise I've been a tad slack with the blogging as of late, but my scanner hasn't been working, and it has been the summertime after all... I do hope to be posting more often now that summer is at an end, and, for that matter, now that No No Zero is back up and running.

I have some sleazy stuff lined up - but I've learned not to actually announce such things before they happen because inevitably something then prevents them from happening. Suffice it to say, there should be record shares, scans, interviews, and much, much more!

Please stay tuned for lots of fun and stuff to come!

***Sept.10/09 - This'll teach me to be so self-congratulatory. My counter has gone back to 10000! Oh well, no keeping track of the action here, I guess.***

Space City USA - Chromed

Space City USA were a band from London*, Ontario who - about 13 years ago now - somehow managed to get Toronto's Raw Energy Records (who normally put out punk rock and ska type stuff) to release this bizarre combination of rock, stoned samples, soundscapes and straight-up power electronics noise.

The CD's cover art includes the phrase "The Future of Rock 'n' Roll" - and, between the lo-fi, often trebly mix (perfect for iPods), the somewhat ironic sensibility (inner sleeve has pictures of vintage electronics and big sunglasses), and the exuberant use of noise and collage, one could make the argument that "Chromed" might well have struck a chord if released today (the song "Suzuki Kid" is not unlike Wolf Eyes, for example). Another band 'ahead of their time'.

At that time, I was playing in The Starkweather Fix and was looking for different-sounding bands to play gigs with - when I heard "Chromed", I was initially confused by how plain weird it was, and then intrigued. Gradually I came to love it, it really is its own little world. I approached Raw Energy about playing a show with Space City USA, and recall how thrilled they seemed that someone was taking an interest; indeed, I was left with the distinct impression that they had no clue whatsoever what to do with the band.

In August of 1997, we played together at the El Mocambo downstairs, along with Bunny Hoover and Mangloid. Space City USA were pretty strange live too, as it turned out - for the song "Posathon"(a pastiche of noise bursts as well as Joni Mitchell's famous rebuke of the Isle of Wight Festival audience that they were "acting like tourists") - the lead singer/guitar player not only played a recording of Mitchell's dialogue, but proceeded to lip-sync it as well!

They played a bunch of songs off their record and covered Yoko Ono's classic "Don't Worry, Kyoko (Mummy's Only Looking For Her Hand In The Snow)" in their own inimitable style. I also recall they gave out faux hockey cards with musical figures instead of hockey players; unfortunately, I can't find mine right now. I think it was Eddie Kramer.


"Chromed" has been available online from Western's college radio station CHRW 94.7 for a long time, but sadly only at 128kbps. There's precious little, internet-wise, on the subject of Space City USA and what became of them. It appears that the aforementioned singer guy went on to produce "maximum drum & bass" under the name Suzuki Kid, releasing at least two acclaimed records under that name ("Doom Doom Doom" and "AC/DC CD").

"Chromed" has two 'bonus tracks', and in true 1990s fashion, these appear after a minute of silence at the end of the album proper: one is an aggressively crappy cover of Judas Priest's "Livin' After Midnight", and the other is a noise barrage called "The Treatment". I should add that Track 9 ("New Transmission") has a warning in the liner notes that, "this song may damage your speakers if played too loud. Try it with a few cups JO, and relax". Perhaps the greatest warning of its kind ever?


Space City USA - Chromed (320kbps)

*hometown of the Nihilist Spasm Band of course. Is this whence comes the noise?

***Sept.12/09 - I had a very nice email from Brother Joe (the main man behind Space City USA and Suzuki Kid), who now lives in Vancouver and runs an extremely tasty hard-psych-rocking blog called Don't Feed The Ears Let Them Eat. He's also DJing a Psych Night Wednesday nights at 10pm (BC time) at the Anza Club, with a live internet stream to boot! More info here.***

Loop - Edizione Limitata di 1000

Soundheads out there will likely know that Loop has been reissuing their recorded output over the last year or so. Initially slept on, these records are now considered classics of guitar-rock brain-oozing psych, and it's a wonderful thing to finally see Robert Hampson discussing the band after some 20 years of studiously ignoring the subject and focusing on his later Main project.

Now Main is defunct too, and Hampson is actually putting out albums under his own name. The Loop reissues have generously included bonus discs of Peel Sessions, demos, and comp appearances. With the exception of recordings now too damaged to remaster, it seems almost everything that Loop ever released is seeing the light of day. Everything, that is, with one noteable exception...



The history of this Loop live bootleg is largely unknown. Released in 1992, originally in both the double-LP format and as a single CD, this Italian bootleg was famously limited to 1000 copies; the songs were late-period Loop, with many tracks off their last record "A Gilded Eternity". I bought mine not long thereafter at an HMV of all places, and yes, it was expensive even at the time.

According to the Loop discography at glassdarkly -

Appears to be the complete concert from which "Got To Get It Over (Live)" from Dual was extracted. Oddly enough, the sound on this is vastly superior to the version from DUAL (provided that they are, in fact, from the same show). As a matter of opinion, these live versions are given a much more muscular workout than the studio versions, at least as far as the tracks from A GILDED ETERNITY are concerned. "Mother Sky" is a cover of a song by Can.

A 12" Loop EP came out around 1991 consisting of three tracks and entitled "Prisma Uber Europa"; interestingly enough, these three tracks have in fact been reissued on the bonus discs for Loop's "The World In Your Eyes" collection. Now, two of those three tracks - "Afterglow" and "Got To Get It Over" - are the same live versions that appear on "Edizione Limitata di 1000".


Further, that same live version of "Got To Get It Over" also appears on "Dual", which is an official release (although not sanctioned by the band). Again, information at glassdarkly lists this recording as dating from Loop's 1990 tour of the US (opening for The Cult, I believe). So it would seem that the master for all these live recordings may well have been in the possession of the band, at least at one time.



Still, as the write-up quoted above suggests, the sound on the Italian bootleg is superior to that on the official comp album. So who knows? The whys and wherefores aside, I give you now that rarest and most-sought-after Loop prize, a nice 320 rip of the original CD bootleg, the full-length "Edizione Limitata di 1000" --

Loop - Edizione Limitata di 1000 (320)




***ADDENUDUM (Aug. 25/09): I bought the flabbergastingly awesome three-disc remastered edition of the Loop compilation "The World In Your Eyes" yesterday, and the notes for those aforementioned three live tracks list their recording location as, "God only knows" -- which pretty strongly suggests to me at least that Loop must not have recorded the songs in the first place!***