12.20.2013

Christmas at the Pink House 2005



Some shambling bouts of extremely drunken caroling at a DeKalb house party circa Christmas 2005. Ryan Green leading the massacre at electric organ. Caught mercilessly on handheld tape recorder by Elizabeth Hill

Enjoy?!?

11.14.2013

Handmedown Satellites - Fossil Flues: 1997-2001



Crazy-quilt compilation of tracks from the earliest-ever Handmedown Satellites tapes, recorded in various Normal, IL bedrooms on a small Tascam 4 track cassette recorder with 3 functional tracks, which was given to me by my buddy Paul Schmidt. The first HMDS releases were usually given away to friends and confused-to-horrified strangers at shows, or left anonymously in record or book store free piles in quantities of 1 to 5, and tended to change sequence and content drastically from copy to copy. Some of the songs here were supposed to have been released on a tape label out of Florida as "Peg & Awl", but I'm not sure if that ever actually happened or not.

Some old old old bullshit

11.12.2013

YSOI Undead...

Just posted new links for EVERY DAMN ONE of my old posts. Have at 'em, heshers.

4.23.2010

Willow Folk Festival 2006 - Fireside


Round 2 here of the Willow 2006 recordings. i transferred these recordings a few years back, but upon recent listens i feel like i probably have more recordings from that year somewhere. There's a lot of the Chris Bathgate/Michigan crew on this one here. These takes are all after hours campfire jams from Saturday night. Throw another log on the fire.

Willow Folk Festival 2006 - Stage Performances


I'm getting kind of hooked on this whole blogging thing over the last couple of days. This is something that I've wanted to post up here for a long time. The Willow Folk Festival is a down home cornfield music festival that takes place near Stockton, Illinois every August. I grew up in nearby Freeport and have been going every year since my senior year of high school. I hold this festival as a pretty special tradition as it is just a beautiful commencement of amazing people and amazing music. If it weren't for this festival I would never have met anyone affiliated with the Dekalb S&S crew. I saw Little Headhunter play there in '05 maybe, and I was pleasantly moved by the music. I introduced myself to Tom Cober later that night and we hit it off pretty well. He told me about shows at the attic and 7th Street Space and I decided to check it out a month or so later. The rest is history I guess. A lot of great friendships I've made with people (especially Scratch and Sniff folks) are ultimately rooted at Willow. In 2006, I started bringing my tape recorder everywhere I went at Willow due to my documentarian/preservationist leanings. I have countless tapes from the past 4 years (except from '08 when my tape recorder was rained on) that I've been slowly digitizing and planning to put out in some format to sort of showcase the array of talent and great music that happens there. Well, here's batch number one of numerous volumes to come. These recordings are solely from the "stage" performances (open to anyone that signs up) from Saturday and Sunday. This is in contrast to the campfire recordings of the evening jams that happen after the stage performances finish, soon to come. It is by no means ALL of the performers, but I feel that it's a pretty good cross section of the talent there. I don't know the names of all the performers and songs so everything is just listed as "various artists." - matt - Willow

4.21.2010

Icarus Syndrome-Live @ The Attic 5/6/06


Hey all. So Mark invited me to contribute to YSOI after a long discussion about blogging last weekend. I'm honored to have the opportunity to help out with this here nugget of internetted goodness and it seems this will be a neat segue to start posting on my own brand-spankin-new blog, titled Fabled Farm. Anyways, I thought I'd post this rip of an Icarus Syndrome show from the good ol' attic days that I recorded on a handheld cassette recorder around the time of his Pie Rhymes album. I ended up cutting out a lot of the banter and talk between songs but am kind of regretting it nowadays. Oh well. Hope this finds you well.

1. Donut Shop
2.Iceland Town
3.Soap Opera Lament
4.Eartha Kitt
5.Hear The Old Dishwasher Sing
6.Waitin' For The Sunfish



3.08.2010

New blog of occasional vinyl rips

Not that the world necessarily needed another irregularly updated music blog, but I've been having fun lately ripping some records to ye olde storage device, and you know, it was just inevitable really. It's mostly gonna be a hodgepodge of 7 inches and ep's for now(aka easy to scan) but I'll get some long players up there before long.

Sorry 'bout the name, it was just one of those juvenile whims...

Any would-be contributors/collaborators out there? Let me know!

3.05.2010

Pregnant Cheerleaders EP



I'm sure anyone who even knows about this already has a copy, thanks to Joe Robinson's ever-present free CD tray, but figured that number of people is relatively small, er, cosmically. And besides I've always been fond of this rockin' one-off. Love the good cop-bad cop guitars and slip n' slide drums.

impregnate yourself

3.02.2010

Bicycle Day & Friends - DEstructoKALB: August 10, 2002



Sorry for the wait on this one, which I've been promising to get up here for ages. I know I had some weird technical reason for stalling but don't remember what that would be as it was 99% ready to post the whole time. My apologies! Especially to Gabe.

Anyway here we have a cassette documenting frenzied communal extrapolation upon Bicycle Day's song "Destructo Ray" from the end of a show on August 10, 2002 at the Brain Basement (variously known as Seventh Heaven Sky Lounge, Seven Dead Arson, The Rodeo, Studio B, and lord knows what else throughout the epochs). Friends of the band were encouraged to set up their amps & guitars all over the place and wail away, instruments were swapped from band to audience members mid-song, and general insanity prevailed for about 30 minutes of proto-Slutwashian ear-mangling bliss.

In addition to the tape rip, as a bonus I've also posted a separate file with Bob Aspatore's original digital recording of the complete Bicycle Day set from that evening, up to and including "Destructo Ray" without the track separation of the cassette, naturally. Thanks Bob!



DEstructoKALB cassette rip

Bicycle Day Live August 10, 2002 complete live recording

3.01.2010

*e* - Zipidee!



From zee liners:

Hi Everyone!

This album is a diary of parties, loud noises, songs and samplings from 2004-2006 all stemming from many great years in DeKalb, IL & whereabouts.

Emily's fantastic organ, I must say, played a large role. Thanks to all!


Zippidee

1.18.2010

Scrambler 2004



Jeezus, sorry for the million year delay between posts, if you're actually still checking in. I've been lazy (of course) but have also had difficulties in the form of crappy sound input devices, making it hard to rip anything but cd's at the moment. Anyway i haven't forgotten about this blog and here's a bootleg of performances from the 3rd Scratch & Sniff Records Scrambler, recorded by Andy Herald on November 6, 2004. This was the first one to feature all cover bands. Please correct the erroneous/missing song titles if you know 'em, and enjoy.

9.21.2009

Handmedown Satellites - Skeletons


Brand-new HMDS thinger, recorded over the last month or so...

SKELETAL

8.21.2009

Paul's Sad Bastard Chicken Coop, Inc. - Kick It! The Kickball Album

Hell, yes. A sweet treat from my friend Paul Nixon, who kindly supplied the following information:

Two summers ago I made a kickball album called "Kick It!" which ended up being the last thing that Paul's Sad Bastard Chicken Coop, Inc. would record.

It's the truest Bad On Purpose side-project there is. It was the formula for Bad On Purpose: 1. Write a song title, 2. Press record, 3. Repeat, 4. Repeat.

At 10am I had 9 song titles (one for each inning) and by 3pm I had 9 songs written, recorded, mixed and burned to CD-R.

So, thanks to some Casio magic, some stolen Beastie Boys samples and
Tommy Lasorda samples, and special guest Pat kicking out some old school
rhymes, the resulting album was possible.

The tracklisting is as follows:
1st Inning: Kick It!
2nd Inning: Christ Punchers Are Go!
3rd Inning: Kickball Love
4th Inning: Fuck Orange
5th Inning: Shake It Off
6th Inning: Hep Cove
7th Inning: 7th Inning Shotgun
8th Inning: Livin' The Dream
9th Inning: Play Of The Day

Though one song was used in the trailer for the documentary about our league, "Left Field", the scene in the movie that used the song ended up on the cutting room floor.

It's not that good, but it is sort of funny with the right kind of ears.

I made 5-10 copies and distributed them anonymously at kickball games. Like, "here, have this cd". I was hoping it would become this legendary thing and everyone would wonder who did it and then the rumors would start. "I heard he is hung like an ox!", "I heard aliens made it", "I heard he is hung like an alien!", etc.

Then, one Sunday afternoon, a cute girl in kickball shorts would walk up to me, say "I know it was you. I want you to be my husband." and that would be the story of me.

Not the case.

Kick It!

8.14.2009

*e* - You Are A Brilliant Flower That Ever Blooms



Elizabeth Hill's second collection of solo recordings. So so good.



my copy had harsh glitchery all over "Meadow Experience" but luckily that track was thrown up here all nice & clean, so I just replaced it.

Brilliant Flower

8.12.2009

Paul Yarn Bunkbeds - Poison Socks



An absolute joy, I tell you. Forty little gems of homespun silliness & wonderment.

Poison Socks