Mixtape 208 • I Just Died
What FIZZ does is bombastic, is unexpected, and is just a lot of fun.
What FIZZ does is bombastic, is unexpected, and is just a lot of fun.
I believe this is the first time we’ve hit four exclamation marks for a playlist’s name, courtesy of Australia’s Psychedelic Porn Crumpets and their very doge-titled track. Elsewhere tonight, a special themed segment that attests to the powers of random selection!
With a name like The Giant Robots and an origin country like Switzerland, it would be easy to make a play on their precision, but the truth is that completely misses the point of their particular type of rave-up.
I am proud to bring you KNOWER, despite the fact that I constantly stumble over how to announce the name of the band, trying to tease out the magical diphtong that distinguishes it from “nowhere” to the listener. I love them so much I will even respect their penchant to spell their name in all-caps. Led by Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi and often spiced with cameos, their take on modern jazz funk / funk jazz is always on tap to fix a day going wrong.
The screen door banged against the frame of the small building that was once Cisco, Utah’s non-bustling post office. It’s like a ghost town abandoned by the ghosts, mused the cinematographer. Whatever once haunted this place left out of boredom. Meanwhile, the blacksmith methodically tapped the foundation along the perimeter of the building. They had brought the infractometer over from the side-by-side they had arrived in, but sometimes the old ways worked best. The rhythm etched out a Namibian bossanova that had been popular in the ‘70s. The entrance to the silo complex had to be near.
The parade stretched through the downtown area, its colorful participants a completely normal distribution of small-town denizens. The statistician knew otherwise. They stood waving from the platform of the float, their flysuits carefully integrated with the diorama to give the appearance of animated mechanical humans. All they needed to do was get within twenty feet of The Mayor, and the technology built into the platform would do the rest. The imagineer adjusted the EQ on the float’s sound system, giving the Estonian techno which poured from the speakers more high-end sparkle. The crowd reacted favorably, some of them breaking out into dance.
The first mate adjusted the sails, letting out some wind to keep both skids on the sand. The sun shone down like a hole punched in a blast furnace someone painted blue, the radio broadcasting its gypsy salsa above the hiss of the sandmaran's travel. Leaning on the tiller, the captain let out a yell of warning as they crested a dune, gaining air for a brief moment. They still didn’t have a plan for replacing the statue, but they had a thousand miles of desert to work something out.
The Cadillac engine roared with naked abandon behind the driver. It was the familiar rumble of the seven-liter-plus workhorse, but its power was unleashed on a propellor instead of a bulky automatic transmission. At the airboat’s prow, the tracker kept an eye on the reeds that protruded in clumps from the murky water. Barely audible on the comm link were the strains of some forgotten psychedelic blues. A promising glint along the mangroves gave hope they had found the downed satellite. It turned out to be the stare of a brooding twelve-foot alligator, unwilling to leave the scene. The search continued.
This is the final episode of The Lacking Organization broadcast on WFIT on September 6, 2016. It features guests Ryan Blount and Patty Bleu, who perform songs from their upcoming split 7" and get dragged down the verbal path by yours truly. In between and all around, we play a selection of original music originating in the Brevard County, Florida area, ranging from the last 30 years.
I would like to thank everyone who contributed music for this episode. I received so many amazing entries, but in the end I had about three times more music than I could fit. I picked a couple of personal favorites and let the random do its business. If you sent me a track and it's not here, I apologize for the luck of the draw.
It has been a pleasure to bring this haphazard collection of random sonic excursions to the ears of listeners in Brevard County for eight years. I appreciate all the emails, tweets, messages, and phone calls, even if they have gone unanswered in the frantic cycle that is a weekly radio show. The Lacking Organization may now be off the air, but as one door closes, many others open. Stay tuned for the return of this mess of a musical aggregate in one form or ano