Mixtape 246 • Hide + Seek
The Jesus Lizard are back, like a delicious headache you thought was gone but is now raging.
The Jesus Lizard are back, like a delicious headache you thought was gone but is now raging.
It was a night for mazzy music, starting with a startlingly woozy track from Maya Hawke and following up with entries from many other exemplary female vocalists with a unique sense of melody and delivery. Also, it’s now light when I leave for the radio station, and midnight when I return, which adds a sense of interdimensional time travel to the broadcasting ritual, I’m going to enjoy that for a few more shows before it’s back to operating under the cover of darkness.
The story of Nell Smith & The Flaming Lips is as improbable and unexpected as their album full of Nick Cave covers. Existing in a triangular universe of mutual admiration, Where the Viaduct Looms gave us the opening track tonight, the menacing “Red Right Hand”.
Billy Martin’s drumming makes me think of oxymorons like “precisely sloppy” and “intensely casual” and “red hot chill out”. This album lives within a zone that’s hazily bounded by funk, jazz, and electronic dance music.
Double Date With Death are loud and Canadian, and they don’t care if you don’t understand their French howling. They have a double date to get to.
The cryptographer tried to once again estimate the circumference of the lighthouse, asking the question aloud and then naming best guesses. The compulsion to know these geometric factors was strong. The agronomist successfully prevented their eyes from rolling. The history of this place was more interesting, having provided a high point from which to shine a light for centuries, currently for Estonia but briefly for the Kingdom of Torgu. That last bit of trivia was relevant because they were here to meet with the self-appointed Official Court Jester, who had requested they journey to this location on a rented tandem bicycle. They had also requested ice cream, “any color except white.” It waited in a cooler strapped to the bicycle’s ample frame.
The archivist’s breath misted in the freezing vault as gloved hands lifted the metal canister off the shelf. Getting to Greenland had not been trivial, driving the snowcats to Nuuk undetected had been a challenge, and breaking into the Katuaq Cultural Centre’s secret collection room, dug out of the permafrost, could be described as difficult. Now, locating the footage was close to impossible, given the hundreds of linear meters of shelving that were visible. The producer unspooled the first few feet off the reel, peering up through the film to the overhead light. The muffled sound of Persian hip-hop could be heard from the theater above. Maybe it was not so impossible.
I have never been so uncomfortable, thought the hacker as they strained to match the wires in the fusebox, their head inches from one of the combine’s many potentially lethal harvesting blades. The lookout’s shadow was barely visible against the hangar door. Straining to clip the blue wire into the scanner, they heard a soft call and nearly lost an ear before remembering their uncomfortable position.