Stadiums & Shrines

Irvine

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Irvine
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Cruisin’…

Irvine, California: a planned city, a snow-globe of modern pleasantry, “a community where people can live, work, and play in an environment that is safe, vibrant, and aesthetically pleasing,” they maintain. A good stretch of it is taken up by the business grid—rows of vanilla buildings pristinely landscaped, palm trees and all. While monotonous and at times disorienting, this streamlined metropolis does possess a certain magic, once you’re free of whatever agenda it is that brought you there. For me it would appear on drives back home—mountains far off behind wide open desert, hints of a coastline nearing, and a rare kind of night-silence only possible in a place so loyal to the nine-to-five routine; commute turned cruise.

Edmund Xavier must see it as well, to have chosen this particular exit off the 405 for such an expansive sequence—its first half locked in a groove, its second cooling down to dusk. The track covers about a third of Any Exit, his latest release with Moon Glyph and further proof that no name sonically suggests the art of driving quite like FWY!. Only a handful of tapes remain.

Dreams of India with Megafortress & Noah Wall

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Dreams of India

 

Two skies meet at the indigo hour. The rails of the infinite staircase edged—one sky pale blue, the other crimson—swirling upwards to the margin. Walls vanish, and bathers flock to the yawning mouth of Ganges River.

Knowing the eclipse is near, Scorpio dashes across the marble terrace. Unnoticed, as mosaic pillars flash, he swipes the sacred reliquary.

Each ascending step brings him further from the city, closer to the gods—he hopes. Glancing back, down, one last time; a hundred spires line the horizon. Scorpio laughs in a fit of victory, twisting ahead again to face his new universe, and, to his surprise, its wrath. With a single brush of the sun, his vapor paints the air in a howl.

____

Megafortress is Bill Gillim and Michael Barron. Noah Wall joins them here in a collaboration we will be hearing more from. Both projects also have releases of their own in the works.

Watch Them Pass

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Watch Them Pass
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Last Saturday Ashley Paul‘s record release show took place as part of Diamond Mouth Surprise. Among those in attendance was our dear friend Dan Goldberg aka The Spookfish, who was so struck by the set that he emailed her afterwards (below). The story came up over coffee with Dan yesterday and all this indeed went on to strike us as well…

“Hey just wanted to say your performance tonight was my favorite thing I’ve seen in a long time. I felt like La Sala turned into a different place when you were playing.

I also remembered a day I had forgotten about while you were performing: it was when I lived in Korea and took a really long, aimless walk and ended up walking under what seemed like endless highways next to a mountain. Then I decided to hike up the mountain trail. I ended up at a somewhat run-down Buddhist temple where monks were hitting drums at different rhythms as part of some meditation. I snuck around and listened to their drums for a while without them noticing me.

After this, I decided to continue up the mountain. I found myself on an exposed ridge that went on farther than I could see and the sun was going down. I walked as far as I could until the sun was almost down. Then I decided to turn back and take the steepest trail back down to the road under the highway tunnels before it got dark. It was barely a trail and after cutting through thick vegetation, I realized I had stumbled into a little clearing full of burial mounds. I quickly got back down after that though and then went to a party at my friend’s apartment and forgot about the whole thing.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy that story and it isn’t a drag to read. It is one that hardly ever crosses my mind, but I relived it in like a split second from your music and wanted to send it to you.”

She replied kindly.

Line the Clouds is out now on REL Records, and streaming over at Ad Hoc.

Party on a Floating Cake

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Party on a Floating Cake
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Crayons and clouds, just out the classroom window—that place is still there, waiting, with a cake.

Animated themselves using their own drawings and photos, the sublime “Party on a Floating Cake” is our first glimpse at Toropical Circle, a collaborative album from Takako Minekawa and Dustin Wong out May 15th via PLANCHA.