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Brent Knopf is one third of Menomena, a band I’ve unabashedly lavished praise on here and who I feverishly await a new album from, and this is his first solo album featuring a exhausting cast of Portland musician guest appearances. The album as a whole is beautiful, taking some of the more gorgeous parts of Menomena’s sound and throwing them into a nearly ridiculously pensive direction.

That’s my one misgiving about Intuit, the album is so pensive, almost claustrophobic in a way, that’s just kind of hard for me to listen to. A couple tracks into it I already start to feel emotionally exhausted. There’s no levity here, no light moments, just a fist that keeps clenching tighter and tighter the whole way through.

One of the other guys from Menomena, Danny Seim, has his own solo project Lackthereof (which I’ll post a song from tomorrow) and it’s great to listen to these two guys back to back because it’s clear where they intersect in Menomena. Knopf brings the emotion to the music and Seim brings the playfulness in drum beats and vocals. There’s a joy to hearing the artists of a great band work on their own, like McCartney and Lennon splitting apart finally, because it makes you appreciate the combination of them even more. There’s nothing wrong with Ramona Falls, it is absolutely beautiful, but without Seim balancing out Knopf’s foreboding feelings, it’s almost too much for this listener to handle.

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I’ll unabashedly admit that sometimes I like songs that would strike most people as incredibly irritating. This is one of those songs, but I encourage you to listen to the whole thing because it is quite fun and on my first full listen of it, I actually started laughing hysterically and then suddenly I was kind of head banging. I mean, how can you get that much fun into one song? I’ll tell you: it’s by rhyming digital accordion, Richard Brautigan, and deadly scorpion together. That is how you have fun.

I wish I listened to the rest of this album before I wrote about it here, so I could say something about it, but I didn’t, so I can’t. I listened to the first track, Sexual Cowboy and it suffered from the same problem this song does, that there is no bass to it, and it’s way too bright. Maybe it’s a result of the illegal copy I have (no money to buy it yet, I swear!) just being encoded in some horrible way, but I have a funny feeling the album is mixed to be so damn bright that if you turn it up really loud you feel like your ears are going to spurt blood in a Tarantino-like manner.

But all in all… I just have to ask…

Have you ever heard a digital accordion?

A digital accordion?

Have you ever heard a digital accordion?

God damn I love this song.

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I haven’t always been the best boyfriend. Hell, most of the time I’m not the best boyfriend. I’m too pragmatic to frivolously spend money on buying a girl things like flowers and shoes, and I’ve been hurt too many times to just fully give myself over to someone. When I do really fall into someone, I become insecure and I can’t help but let my mind wander around to what it’ll be like to lose the person, what it’d be like to watch them fall away from me into the arms of someone else. Even if I have no reason to distrust, I do anyway, and if a couple hours go by without contact there’s a vague feeling that wells in my chest without any thoughts attached to it, there’s no “I bet she’s fucking someone else” or “She’s having more fun without me right now than she could ever have with me” going on in my head, but some weird need that feels like it’s going to pop my ribs open from the inside out.

It’s unfortunate but this is how I know I’m in love. When I’m inclined to distrust and doubt, when I feel sick to my stomach whenever the girl is out of sight because I worry she’ll never be back in my sight again, then I know that I love someone. How did I end up this way? What circumstance caused me to only be truly aware of my love when I feel this way?

I’ve spent the last year and a half with a girl who I spent a lot of time wondering why I didn’t feel that way about her. I assumed I didn’t really love her, and that I wasn’t supposed to be with her. Even though she made me completely happy I never felt like I was worried she was going to run away from me, and that made me worried that the things I, we, felt wasn’t real at all. I spent a lot of time thinking that if I didn’t feel this certain horrible insecure feeling then I wasn’t really in love.

Is that really love? Is love just being scared that you’re going to be sad when the person is gone? Is love just not wanting anyone else to have her? There are other aspects, like, being around her makes you feel like your chest is going to burst open and flowers are going to pour out of it (kind of like The Fountain), and sometimes I look at her and I feel like Thank god I found this woman, finally, so I can finally stop hunting for a decent one and I’m relieved that no matter how hard I tried to get her to go away about eight months ago she still came back to me…

And when I listen to a song like this my eyes fill up with tears because I know how it feels to be completely at home wherever I am because she’s standing next to me, and that it doesn’t really matter where we eventually end up as long as there’s a flat spot I can lay next to her in, and I wish that love to me was purely this feeling and not the other feeling, and then I wonder if this is why people get married and move in together, because they can’t handle being apart without crumpling under waves of insecurity, because no one talks about these things, not the truth anyway, no parent sits down with their kid and goes, “Son, you’ll know you’re in love because you’ll feel like dying every time you think about her being all runn’oft with another man,” or “Son, you’ll know you’re in love ’cause when you lie in bed with her you feel like you wanna hug her so tight for so long that the sheer probabilities of the electrons in your skins merging become so tiny that she just falls into you and you can never be apart.”

No one tells you this when you’re young, and maybe they should, maybe someone should have told me years ago that this is what it’s supposed to be like, this, without the hurt and the pain, without the uncertainty that’s proven again and again. “Love is feeling like you’re at home no matter where you are just ’cause you got your girlie next to you, kid.”

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When I was 14 or 15 the internet girlfriend of Mark Sam Olynciw sent me some LSD tabs wrapped up in gum wrappers through the United States Postal Service. I didn’t think they’d ever get to me, but they did.

This guy, Mark Olynciw, was the biggest douchebag I ever knew back then, and he and I had little flame wars between our websites—mine was ElectricBiscuit.com and his was Riothero.com. I considered him hugely pretentious, constantly trying to write about shit that sounded smart while I was just all about speaking my mind and trying to piss people off by doing it. I’d discover that he’d be stealing the things people said from other websites or from books and posting them on his blog—which was always more popular than mine at the time which pissed me off quite a bit—as if they were his own, so I’d call him out.

One of the best things he ever did was steal the entire design template from an MTV webpage about Radiohead—which was back when Radiohead was releasing Kid A and the hype around it was absolutely huge—and fiddle with it so it would be the design of his blog, except he didn’t bother to give any credit to where he got it from, so I called him out, and then we got into another flame war and he’d go off about how it didn’t matter.

Him and his stupid little internet girlfriend would call my house and pose as interviewers and ask me completely innocuous questions that I would answer honestly because I didn’t give a crap, and then they’d start giggling like they were pulling a fast one on me by asking me about my TV watching habits and I would just be like, “Seriously? This is funny to you guys? Don’t you realize you’re just wasting YOUR time?” If this was happening to me these days I would say, “Come on, you’re letting the terrorists win,” but this was back before the word “terrorist” was in the forefront vernacular of every American.

It’s been 11 years since those days but it’s obvious that I forget absolutely nothing. What’s even funnier is that if you look at the source of riothero.com right now he’s still doing the same thing; he’s commented out the credit for where he got the template from. He’s not even using the website but he’s still careful to make sure people don’t know that he’s not making the shit himself. Some things never change, Mark! Glad to see you’re still a douche nozzle!

Anyway, I took two tabs of this really weak LSD that this girl sent me and it didn’t do anything after an hour. I started talking to another online friend of mine, whose name I can’t remember and whose website I can’t remember and so I have to point out how isn’t it funny that you remember your enemies better than you remember your friends, and he was like, “It’s probably some weak shit, put two more under your tongue and let me know what happens,” so I did, and an hour later nothing happened, so he told me to just put the last four or so under my tongue and let them fully dissolve and see what happens.

About half an hour later I WAS TRIPPING BALLS. My monitor started swirling around, and I could still type so I was like, “DUDE I AM TRIPPING BALLS!” so he told me to put on some music, and at the time I was listening to a lot of industrial dance music, which I realize now is an easy way to say “psuedo-wannabe-industrial shit that is completely neutered and mostly retarded”, and I loved this song Orange Moon so I put it on and it became the soundtrack for my entire trip. I didn’t want to put anything else on for fear of ruining the awesome feelings it was giving me, so I just put it on loop.

It played even when I crawled out of my bathroom window and laid in the grass outside my house staring up at the trees, which were swaying gently in the breeze, which was making the branches cast waves through the night sky, which was full of millions of stars, more stars than I had ever seen in my life, and they were all moving in and out of each other, like there were three different planes of stars and they were each undulating, moving in and out of each other. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen in my life.

Pretty much everything I saw that night was the most amazing thing I had seen in my life up til that point (I had yet to have sex or even see a naked woman in person, much less have one under me moaning with the pleasure I was inflicting upon her, so my point of reference at the time was relatively limited) and I crawled back in my window to grab my digital camera, and then started taking pictures of the amazing things I was seeing. At one point I climbed up onto a brick wall and precariously balanced on it while leaning over several feet and holding onto the roof just to snap a picture of some power lines—and now it occurs to me this is probably how people on acid seriously injure themselves.

The next day when I sobered up and looked at the pictures, I was disappointed to see that they were just pictures of grass, of tree bark really up close and entirely out of focus, and of the corner of the roof of my house. I still felt a little funny, though, like I was enlightened in some way, and I don’t mean in the spiritual sense, but my body actually felt lighter, like some weight had been lifted off my shoulders, not a metaphorical burden, but an actual weight.

I only wish I had been older, and more capable of holding onto that feeling. My memories of my one LSD experience are distant now and I can hardly remember how I really felt at the time. It’s as if the experience wasn’t mine, but one that was told to me so many times by a friend that I’ve begun to be able to tell it myself in such a way that it feels in my head as if I was experiencing it myself.

I listen to Orange Moon now and I have no recollection of the way it made me feel, just the vague memory that it made me feel like I was full of pure joy. The angst and depression I was loaded with when I was 15 temporarily melted away and for a couple of hours I cared about nothing else in the world but how absolutely beautiful it all was, and afterward it didn’t matter that it was all a hallucination, knowing that didn’t diminish the experience at all.

You know what… anyone got any LSD they want to send me through the mail?

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Australian 20 year old “Pogo” crafted an short EP of electronic tracks composed mostly solely out of samples from Alice in Wonderland. That’s all you really need to know about this. First track “Alice” is the clear standout and I discovered it thanks to this amazing thing which uses Pogo’s cool as shit YouTube video and stacks it and layers in such a way that if you are stoned, or even if you aren’t stoned, you will trip balls on how absolutely incredible it is.

I’m going to link to that a few more times because you should really check it out because it is so awesome.

If you click on the album art above you can go to Last.FM, where you can download all four songs off the EP for free. This isn’t awe-inspiring stuff, but it feels great and both Alice and this track Lost have worked their way into my regular rotation and they should be in yours too. Add a little whimsy to every day.

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Back before my freshman year of high school a little independent film came out called The Blair Witch Project. I’d say most people hear the title of this movie and they groan, usually about how terrible it was, but before most people thought it was terrible, a lot of people thought it was amazing and absolutely ground breaking. I saw it the second day of limited release, back when people still thought it might be real due to the clever marketing campaign that just blatantly lied to people and said that it was found footage. I was probably the only person in the sold out theater who knew it wasn’t real, but by the end of the movie I was scared shitless. I had just witnessed the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen in my life.

I think a lot of it was to do with the fact that my 14 year old mind had been heavily saturated with first person shooter games over the last four years, starting with Wolfenstein 3D for the SNES when I was 9, Doom for SNES when I was 10, Doom II for Windows 95 and Quake when I was 11 and so on. In short, I think my little brain was acclimated to seeing things in the first person perspective and being completely immersed in them, so when the final section of Blair Witch happened, and I was second to the front row so that the screen was the only thing I could see, and they started running through that house with the cameras as if they were their only eyes, it wasn’t them in that house, it was me and what happened to them didn’t happen to them, it happened to me.

I couldn’t talk for a few hours after seeing it. When I got home I just laid down on my floor for a while. I couldn’t even articulate in my head why I was so scared by it. It just moved me on some primal level, and I became an immediate fan.

I started up a website at BlairWoods.com and begun compiling all the information I could on the film. I hunted down interviews in magazines and newspapers, and slowly brought together all the information into one large dossier including how they found the actors, how much they paid them, what gear they used, how they used a pre-programmed GPS unit to move between checkpoints that the directors would stock with small amounts of food and secret notes for each actor on how they should behave. I still remember a lot of it: the actors were absolutely alone in the woods for days, by the end of the shoot they were living off an apple a day, seriously starving in order to make their performances more convincing, that they improvised certain things like when Mike threw the map away. A lot of this info is now on the wikipedia page for the movie.

The highlight of all this for me was that my website got mentioned in an article that was syndicated in newspapers around the country. I still have a copy of the Los Angeles Times with a reference to BlairWoods.com right on the front page of whatever section it was. Pretty cool for a 14 year old. The only downside was that I never had any sort of advertising on the website, this was back before Google got into the advertising business or was at all relevant. I remembered applying to be a part of UGO but they shot me down. Oh well.

This song was included on the faux-soundtrack for the movie called Josh’s Blair Witch Mix which mostly sucked.

For the record, The Blair Witch Project is 5,000 times better than that Paranormal Activity bullshit with it’s stupid generic horror movie The Ring-like bullshit ending.

Listen and Download @ http://thedemise.staires.org

Back in June of 2008 I was asked to throw together a muxtape of music by my long-time twitter friend @leftsider that was representative of my ‘taste’ in music. At the time I was going through a lot of ridiculous emo bullshit because this dumb whore up in San Jose was fucking around with my heart and I was being a dumb piece of shit who didn’t want to realize how awesome he was and dump the cunt, so I put together this really sorrowful 12-track playlist.

Back when muxtape was operating as a free-for-all playlist maker, they limited you to 12 tracks, which is why this is much shorter than any other mixtape I’ve put up. It’s been a few months since I’ve made a long running playlist, and I’ve been slowly working on a couple in my head and just need to sit down and do them (one will hopefully be a small history lesson, tracking the origin and progression of psychedelia over the last four decades that I’ve been wanting to do for about six months now, and the other will be a “get pumped up and fuck shit up” playlist) but in the meantime I figured I’d put this one up, ’cause I just stumbled on it.

I listened to it last night and with a few exceptions, the mood of it is quite consistent. Vampire Weekend’s Bryn doesn’t really belong at all. The Dresden Dolls’ The Gardener runs two minutes too long to be acceptable for a mixtape and could be successfully replaced with better album cut The Mouse and the Model. 16 Horsepower’s Outlaw Song is one of my favorite songs of all time but doesn’t fit the theme at all… It’s obvious I just threw this together before I had any inklings of taking playlist/mixtape construction “seriously” (it’s surprising even to me how seriously I take it now).

Either way, a lot of good stuff on here. Bottom of the Hudson’s Riot Act is the best song nobody has heard and once you hear it you should make it your life’s works to expose it to as many people as possible. I think most of these tracks have appeared on here over the years if you want to read about my individual thoughts on them, search for them on the map.

Listen and Download @ http://thedemise.staires.org