KK Null & James Plotkin - Aurora / Remixes

The mid-1990s saw a particularly rich series of collaborative records made, and this is a personal favourite of mine from that era. With K.K. Null and James Plotkin jamming on guitar (recorded on four-track, with Null sending Plotkin recordings to work with), you might well expect that this was going to be an extremely loud and noisy album.

In fact, Aurora (1993, Sentrax/Rawkus) goes the other way entirely and is a great example of what was alternately called 'dark ambient' or 'isolationist' at the time -- generally drumless space, often a bit scary or eerie in tone, perhaps best suited to headphones for a properly immersive experience. Music for those who enjoy a bad trip, as it were.


Also of its time was a follow-up remix record, Aurora Remixes (1996), featuring Scorn, Yab Yum, and DJ Spooky lending their considerable talents, as well as some remixing by James Plotkin. The first track off Aurora - Neuro (Remix) - is repeated on the Aurora Remixes, but I've left it off here as being redundant.

Aurora
Aurora Remixes

tonetta777 MP3s!

If you're following the saga of tonetta777, you'll know that Youtube closed his main account last month, leaving fans scrambling to upload their own copies of his videos and/or plead for favourites to be re-posted at his secondary account (tj1749).

Today I found a wonderful surprise in my in-box -- some kind anon has posted a link to nineteen tonetta MP3s! Lots of faves! In 320 yet! Sounding great, and what a super way to start the weekend.


I felt such riches deserved their own post, so here it is. Please feel free to make this your one-stop resource for tonetta MP3s, just add any relevant links to the comments and let's see if we can make our own box set.

tonetta MP3s!

Special thanks to the fabulous person who posted these! One million free internets to you!

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.***