finalsounds

[finalsounds]

Happy to have miraculously kept the faith and to have come back a mere 2-3 weeks after the last episode. FINAL SOUNDS RADIO shall henceforth be a thing.

This hour-long episode hues closely to our mission of being about underground folk, American Primitive, acoustic, experimental and outsider music. New stuff is played from MYRIAM GENDRON, WILLIAM CSORBA, ALLYSEN CALLERY & BOB KENDALL, ANDY McLEOD and others - plus a couple of massive tracks from Tompkins Square's new "Imaginational Anthem, Vol. 8 - The Private Press" compilation of never-heards.

Download it, stream it, and come learn more about what we do at finalsounds.org if you'd like.

Download or stream Final Sounds Radio #6 on Soundcloud.

Stream Final Sounds #6 on Mixcloud.

Track listing <ARTIST - Title (Album, Year)>

PERRY LEDERMAN - One Kind Favor (V/A Imaginational Anthem, Vol. 8 - The Private Press, 2016)

WILLIAM CSORBA - Diablo Canyon (V/A New Dimensions in Fingerstyle, 2016)

JOSEPHINE FOSTER - Little Life (Little Life, 2001)

ALLYSEN CALLERY & BOB KENDALL - I Gave You (V/A This is Providence, 2016)

JIM ED BROWN - Angel's Sunday (Angel’s Sunday, 1971)

JACK ROSE - Kensington Blues (Kensington Blues, 2005)

MYRIAM GENDORN - Au Coeur de ma Delire (Soundcloud, 2016)

SIMON JOYNER - Montgomery (The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll, 1994)

MATT SOWELL - Minnesota (North Winds Callin, 2016)

C JOYNES - Georgie (Congo, 2011)

SIBYLLE BAIER - Wim (The Colour Green, 2006)

ANDY McLEOD - There Is No Time For That Now (Ghosts in Virginia, 2016)

CRYSTALLINE ROSES & THE YANKEE ENTERTAINER - Got To Be Hope Somewhere (Two Man Cult, 2016)

MARIE CELESTE - Prisoner (And Then Perhaps, 1971)

JOE BETHANCOURT - Raga (V/A Imaginational Anthem, Vol. 8 - The Private Press, 2016)

[finalsounds]

Final Sounds Radio is being re-imagined and reconfigured.

This is the first podcast I've done in 2016, and I'm now prepared to pump them out with regularity from this point forward. Final Sounds is heretofore devoted to underground folk, American Primitive, 78rpm, acoustic, experimental and outsider music. The show’s patron saints are John Fahey, Sibylle Baier, Lee Hazlewood, Daniel Bachman, Robbie Basho and Vashti Bunyan.

Episode #5 is the first of many such 90-minute episodes. You can set your watch to it.

Stream or download Final Sounds Radio #5 on Soundcloud.

Stream Final Sounds Radio #5 on Mixcloud.

Coming to iTunes soon.

Track listing: ARTIST - song (album, year)

ABRAHAM CHAPMAN - Deerfield River Blues (Nothing To Leave Behind, 2016 - orig. 1978) JOANNE ROBERTSON - Rest (Wildflower, 2016) TANGELA TRICOLI - Jet Lady (Jet Lady, 1982) ANDY McLEOD - Oh The Sorrow (Ghosts in Virginia, 2016) FJ McMAHON - Sister Brother (Spirit of the Golden Juice, 1969) DRY HEART - Meeting By The Moonlight Mill (Dry Heart, 1970) NATHAN BOWLES - Gadarene Fugue (Whole & Cloven, 2016) JOHN FAHEY - The Red Pony (God, Time & Causality, 1989) LEE HAZLEWOOD - Easy and Me (Cowboy in Sweden, 1970) BIG BLOOD - No Gravity Blues (The Grove, 2008) DANIEL BACHMAN - Funny How Plans Change (Daniel Bachman, 2014) ALEX ARCHIBALD - Stray Cats of Commercial Drive (Pink Slippers For East Van, 2016) ALLYSEN CALLERY - Shoot Me (The Song The Songbird Sings, 2016) CARTER THORNTON - The Field (Mapping The Ghost Vol. 1 - The Dirt Path to the Field, 2015) PETER LANG - Bituminous Nightmare (The Thing at the Nursery Room Window, 1973) ROBBIE BASHO - Seal of the Blue Lotus (The Seal of the Blue Lotus, 1965) JACK ROSE - White Mule Pt. II (Red Horse White Mule, 2002)

[finalsounds]

This Year’s Final Sounds Update

It has been nearly a year since our last transmission here at Final Sounds. Other things took precedence, but we'll attempt to bring the gap with some serious activity here over the next few weeks and months.

I'm changing the mission and structure of this site & podcast. Rather than try and wrestle down the entirely of experimental and underground music, as I've done with very limited success here, I'll focus instead of music that I listen to frequently, but that might be an ill fit for both my rock-oriented Dynamite Hemorrhage blog/fanzine/podcast, and my 70s dub-focused Hemorrhage in Dub podcast.

I'll attempt to morph this thing into the slightly overlapping realms of spectral folk, American Primitive fingerpickers, experimental acoustic outsiders, and perhaps a little blues & country to go with some global 78rpm finds. That narrows the scope immensely, while keeping it broad enough to allow for some weirdly compelling musical serendipity.

That's the idea, anyway. We'll see what happens when we return. Until then! Thanks for reading - keep an eye on our Twitter and Facebook for updates. They're coming.

[finalsounds]

Final Sounds Radio closes out 2015 with one hour of some of the wildest experimental, dub, outsider folk, noise, world and freak-out music that's crossed our speakers the past several months.

There's a lot of 2015 to be had this time around, including new releases from MADS EMIL NEILSEN, SEEKERS INTERNATIONAL, GUTTERSNIPE, SELVHENTER, BILL ORCUTT & JACOB FELIX HUELE and more - plus recent reissues from SCIENTIST, A. KOSTIS and others.

Download or stream the show on Soundcloud.

Stream Final Sounds Radio #4 on Mixcloud.

Check out our other (underground rock-focused) podcast Dynamite Hemorrhage as well at dynamitehemorrhage.com.

Track listing:

MADS EMIL NIELSEN – Untitled A KOSTIS – Gianis Hasiklis (Yannis The Hash Smoker) BACK MAGIC – Cobra SAPAT – Arson Lieder/Our S(u)(o)n Leader II SK KAKRABA – Lubile Prai PEDER MANNERFELT – Royal Watusi Drums 1 SELVHENTER – Dogs PALM – Communication BILL ORCUTT & JACOB FELIX HUELE – Memories of a Contradiction AMOS & SARA – Syphilis Party GUTTERSNIPE – Sandworm Percolator SCIENTIST – Slave Master Dub SEEKERS INTERNATIONAL – Son of Her Majesty HAMED AL RAYAH – Shaloo Alkalam (They Removed The Words) MOUNT ELEPHANT – I-I

[finalsounds]

The return of Final Sounds Radio, first show in six months....! Our 3rd edition breaks the already broken mold by focusing solely on Americana & Americans, from the 1920s to last year.

Country, folk, blues, showboating, drinking and hot-stepping patriots from the lower 48. Download it or stream it & take a load off for an hour, why don't ya.

Download or stream Final Sounds Radio #3 on Soundcloud.

Stream the entire show on Mixcloud instead.

Track listing:

SUZI JANE HOKUM – Home (I’m Home) DICK CURLESS – Loser’s Cocktail JIM ED BROWN – Pop a Top LEE HAZLEWOOD – Hello, Saturday Morning BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAIN SINGERS – Lorena ASA MARTIN & JAMES ROBERTS – Darling Nellie Gray TOWNES VAN ZANDT – Sad Cinderella RUTH GARBUS – Certain Kind WANDA JACKSON – Back Then JULIE BYRNE – Melting Grid SKIP JAMES – Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues SMITH CASEY – East Texas Rag LIGHTNIN’ HOPKINS – Tim Moore’s Farm DEBBY SCHWARTZ – Satan, You Brought Me Down THE HAWKS – A Little More Wine My Dear BLIND ROBERT WARD – The Voyage of Apollo 8 DANIEL BACHMAN – Song For The Setting Sun I

[finalsounds]

I said we’d be back in a month. Turned out I meant almost four months. Whatever, right?

FINAL SOUNDS RADIO #2 is now live and ready to download, stream or subscribe to on iTunes. It’s an hour-long podcast of experimental, dub, spectral folk, soundscapes, 78rpm stuff, free jazz, cut-ups, global lunacy & more. Recorded on the final day of May 2015.

Track listing: PEN RAN - There’s Nothing To Be Ashamed Of AFRICAN HEAD CHARGE - In A Trap VIVIAN GOLDMAN - Private Armies Dub LEA BERTUCCI - An Unbroken Plane PEDER MANNERFELT - Bahuto Chants and Dances 1 ABY NGANA DIOP - Dieuleul-Dieleul VIRGINIA MAGIDOU - To Akis Na Mis To Nis Kareis ILUNGA PATRICE AND MISOMBA VICTOR - Mama Josephina WE WILL FAIL - 061 TSEMBLA - Love Potion QUTTINIRPAAQ - Malvert BIRCH AND MEADOW - There Is A Lightness KING AYISOBA - Wicked Leaders

Stream or download Final Sounds Radio #2 on Soundcloud.

Listen to Final Sounds #2 on Mixcloud.

Subscribe to - and download - the podcast on iTunes.

[finalsounds]

The first of what we hope will be a long and fruitful series of FINAL SOUNDS RADIO podcasts. 75 minutes of experimental, dub, spectral folk, soundscapes, 78rpm stuff, free jazz, cut-ups, global lunacy & more. Recorded in February 2015.

Stream or download Final Sounds Radio #1 on Soundcloud here.

Download it directly to your computer here.

Stream the show on Mixcloud here.

Subscribe to the show via iTunes.

Here's what you'll hear:

TSEMBLA – Animal Negatives

CURSE PURSE – Message CP

MERIDIAN BROTHERS – El Gran Pajaro de los Andes

RICHARD DAWSON – Judas Iscariot

ALEXIS ZOUMBAS – Untitled (2)

TORBJORN ZETTERBERG & SUSANA SANTOS SILVA – Feet Machine Song

PARADISE BANGKOK MOLAM INTERNATIONAL BAND – Sao Sakit Mae

MYRIAM GENDRON – Song of Perfect Propriety

LAURA CANNELL – Entrance to the Vault

PRINCE JAMMY – Nuff Corn Dub

XYLOURIS WHITE – Psarandonis Syrto

OKYYUNG LEE – Meolly Ganeun

RHODRI DAVIES – Each Annulling The Next

DELIA DERBYSHIRE – Mattachin

[finalsounds]

RHODRI DAVIES - “An Air Swept Clean of All Distance” LP

Rhodri Davies is an Welshman who bends and contorts an acoustic lap harp into aggressive, improvisational mini-pieces that tumble and turn at near-lightning speed. “An Air Swept Clean of All Distance” (available here) is one of several LPs he put forth in 2014, each using slightly different instrumentation, and it’s mostly rapid-fire collection of instrumentals that are vaguely “Eastern” in feel, stopping at times to relive tension with some spaced-out but still aggro plucking. Some numbers buzz by so rapidly that they’re nearly turned into drones, albeit drones that stutter, convulse and collapse upon themselves. 

I imagine extended, bony fingers twice the size of a normal man’s, zigging and zagging in blurred time across the “mere” 20 strings he has to work with on said lap harp. It’s a pretty berserk ride, but certainly not one that’s tough to mount. Once one locks in with Davies on a given number – well, first of all, it’ll be over before too long (most pieces are about 3 minutes each) and secondly, they can actually be sorta sweet, like the delicate if still puzzling “Each Annuling The Next”. The possibilities of this instrument have certainly been furthered as a result.

[finalsounds]

INSTANT LIGHT 4 / SOLEN – Café Mir, Oslo Norway, 2/10/15

I found myself back in Oslo for a second month in a row, and fortunate enough to have timed my work trip to coincide with Cafe Mir's every-other-Tuesday "Blow Out" series of free jazz, improvisation and general sub-underground derring-do. This time they invited a trio and a quartet of limber Scandinavian noisemakers, respectively, neither of which I was personally acquainted with before the event commenced, yet after spending a 'lil quality time together, I feel like I've got the general cut of their jibs pretty well locked down.

SOLEN (Sun), a hard-to-Google trio made up of Danes & Norwegians, came on first. I'd venture a guess that they're nobody in the band's "main gig", as their two sax-&-drum squiggles and bursts seemed to this unrefined ear to be a little lacking in heft or cohesion. The male sax fella, Mads Egetoft, would at times rest a few fingers on some electronics/keyboards to generating some dark, chilling effects, but overall it was hard to achieve any sort of liftoff with these folks, outside of a very cool sequence where drummer Oliver Laumann made these spaced, circular brushstrokes on a cymbal and nearly gave me the heebie-jeebies. They did do us the favor of keeping their improvisations well within their opening-slot time limits.

INSTANT LIGHT 4, on the other hand, were liftoff and ascension from the word go. A true, blasting power quartet of skronk, they had an absolutely phenomenal drummer in Dag Erik Knedal Andersen, whose compleat recordings I shall be hunting down with extreme zeal shortly. What a nut! He was matched tooth for nail by double sax players and a bass player every bit his equal, and these guys sweated up a storm in bringing the freedom to the people of Oslo. The only rest anyone got was when it was clear that someone needed a break, and then they'd be a slightly-less-loud trio for a few minutes while someone grabbed a drink of water. Quite inspirational and a real mind-rattler of a quartet whom I hope keep this sort of thing going for much longer.

[finalsounds]

We missed TSEMBLA (Marja Johansson) when she played in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. I mean, it is a 7 hour drive and all. That said, her new "Terror and Healing" LP that came out this month is fantastic.

I poked around on the WWW and turns out there are some videos of her doing her robotic cut-up collage jams live. This one's from early last year.

[finalsounds]

Just got this exceptionally old-school cut-n-paste experimental music fanzine from Scotland called TOTALLY NANG. At three bucks a pop, I can't recommend it highly enough. 

It's slapdash in all the best ways, using typewriters, scissors and smudgy photos to make 2015 look pretty much like 1981 - with the music covered herein being very much of our time. Experimental, noisy and way underground. The first issue featured Tsembla (if we ever do a fanzine of Final Sounds, we're likely to steal this good idea); this brand-new #2 issue features Richard Youngs and Neil Campbell talking about breakfast and music, along with Jan Anderzen, a Finn with whom I'm not familiar with yet.

The woman behind this is a bit of an intentional mystery. Her name does not pop up anywhere, but we know she thinks Oren Ambarchi's a dreamboat and that she likes to drink at live shows. It's a lot of fun; nice to see this sort of music tackled in a less-than-serious-at-all-times manner.

Order Issue #2 here.

Follow Totally Nang on Twitter here.

[finalsounds]

OKKYUNG LEE - “Ghil” LP

As part of my penance for ignoring so much improvised music over the last decade, I’ll be playing some serious catch-up with the blown-out improvised cello of OKKYUNG LEE, whose “Ghil” from 2013 is one of the wildest things I’ve heard in many a moon. The classically-trained Lee has by all accounts used her powers for much good over these last ten years, and I’ll concur, at least going by the evil and extreme transmissions on this one. “Ghil” wrings more hotwired terror out of a cello and a bow than I’d have thought possible, but there it is. She recorded this in and around Oslo, Norway with noise compatriot Lasse Marhaug, who apparently used a 70s mic and ancient tape deck to capture and then edit this frenzy of activity. While it’s improvised and very much of its moment, Ms. Lee scrapes and saws and creates exploded textures that have a real sense of whole about them, like she knew where to head and maybe even how to get there as well & just wasn’t telling.

The piece de resistance is the 9-minute+ “The Space Beneath My Grey Heart”, which really has to be heard to be believed. She thrusts and bends her way through this dense root canal of an improvisation, which includes quiet drones, and all ear-shredding aside, it’s actually lovely in its way. To me, the noise shards of “Meolly Ganueun” sounds like a village of Vietnamese fishermen arguing over a 75-pound flounder, but others may hear something else entirely in these workouts. “Over the Oak, Under The Elm” (I’m fascinated with the process of retroactively titling improvisations) is a hurried, bursting sonic attack to close things out that actually frazzles out the tape deck, seeming as if it was all too much for the thing to handle. A cello, I repeat. Should you play it for your baby’s christening? Maybe not! Should you play it right now? I think so!

[finalsounds]

OREN AMBARCHI - “QUIXOTISM”

This pulsating five-part dose of sound is beguiling, to say the least. (It’s really only one continuous piece, at least that’s how I see it, cut up into five fairly indistinct parts). Here I am thinking it’s Ambarchi on solo guitar and laptop, locking in all by his lonesome in a steady, percussive tone that modulates in and out, and I come to find there’s all manner of heavyweights showing up to cut some chops in the proceedings. You’ve got Eyvand Kang, Jim O’Rourke, Thomas Brinkmann and the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra all coming in to take a bow at various points. 

The fluttering instrumentation varies and increases in complexity after a long, quiet start. The transitions to new forms build slowly and steadily. Viola crashes in toward the end (Kang), as well something that sounds like hand drums (that’s got to be “U-zhaan” rocking the tabla, now that I’ve read this). Bleeps and washes take over for a while in that last chaotic fifth, and then it’s over. To be honest, I felt it was a pretty mundane journey the first time I heard it, so I listened again, and then a third time, and its mysteries continued to reveal themselves. Maybe I’ll actually figure ‘em out next time.

[finalsounds]

OSSIE ALL-STARS: “LEGGO DUB”

I had just finished up a piece I wrote in Dynamite Hemorrhage #2 that included my purported “Top 10” Jamaican 70s dub platters of all time when I heard “Leggo Dub”, like, the same day. If I’m not buying someone I already know & love, I’ll tend to buy 70s dub based on how ridiculously obscure or cut-rate the sleeve looks. There is no shortage of wild and wacked-out finds to be sourced that way, this CD from OSSIE ALL-STARS included. It has a cartoon high-top basketball shoe on it, the words “Leggo Dub” and little else.

Now, having done a little research beforehand, I knew that “Ossie” was Ossie Hibbert, a producer and keyboard player who mined his trade in the two great dub backing bands of the day, The Aggrovators and the Revolutionaries. The latter supply all the drop-out rhythm on this one. So do “Ossie’s All-Stars” = “The Revolutionaries” in this case? I guess! Another one of 70s dub’s great mysteries. I bring up that Top 10 list I made because a case could easily be made for this thing to be on it. It’s as foundationally great as The Revolutionaries’ “Earthquake Dub”, and that’s pretty goddamn great.

The original 10 tracks from the 1978 LP are here (an LP conceived as a “dub LP” from the get-go), along with six 45rpm b-sides also cooked up by Ossie and his teams (not always the Revolutionaries). Most are taken from backing tracks on a Gregory Isaccs LP that Hibbert had a hand in. The original instrumental ten are beautifully sparse and layered, with lots of popping and cracking and super-distorted echo at the end of most riffs. He gets a little too wacky in parts, adding in ringing telephones, babies crying, cars traveling through tunnels and that omnipresent “boooooing” sound effect that Jamaican dubsters loved so much around this time. I posit that Mikey Dread mined this sort of tomfoolery far better, but it does add a bit of bonus flair here.

There are some stunning examples of the form across this one, as in the title track that I’ve posted here. The 6 extra tracks on the CD take a different approach, letting in some vocal snippets vs. the pure croaking & droning instrumental tracks from the original LP. An excellent find that I’m gonna add to my Dub Top 11.

[finalsounds]

LAURA CANNELL - “Quick Sparrows Over The Black Earth” LP/CD

Laura Cannell is a fiddling Englishwoman with a foot firmly planted in baroque medievalism, and the other merrily stomping through modernist improvisational takes of same. Her two halves sync beautifully on 2014’s “Quick Sparrows Over The Black Earth”, which she released on her own Brawl Records this past summer. You truly don’t even need to read that it was recorded in a stately English church to know that it’s true – its fiddle, overbowed fiddle and recorders rebound and reverb off of walls in a manner that makes it clear that these are single takes, recorded someplace cavernous.

Cannell loves the long, drawn-out scrape across the strings, and she uses it to haunting effect across the album. Numbers like “Radiant Shaking Leaves” do have a hint of medieval jauntiness about them, but more often than not, she expands upon the textures and moods of traditional “early music” to make more layered and nuanced compositions that are evocative and even downright sad. The nearly 9-minute disc-closer “Black Crowned Night” is one of these; a whopper that extracts all manner of drones and melodies from a pretty simple construction. “The Drowned Sacristan” is another. There’s much to be revealed here, and if Cannell shows up at your church anytime soon, I’d suggest you grab a wafer & a glass of wine and take your seat.

[finalsounds]

BOOK REVIEW: DAVID GRUBBS' "Records Ruin The Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording"

It was an inescapable premise for me and my interests in the collision between music creation and music consumption: How has the experience of experimental music listening changed, especially to music from the 1960s, since digital technology has afforded its lengthy pieces a consumption experience not granted to it in the LP-only days? Grubbs threads a lot of thought and quite a bit of history into multiple stabs at this question, with John Cage (a famously biting critic of recorded music, as opposed to live performance, and who claimed to never own any records), AMM and Henry Flynt at the center of some of the answers.

The book looks at how the 45-minute LP was insufficient to the task of documenting the ephemeral and ever-changing feel of outré music’s leading 60s practitioners, not merely because of its two-sided limitations, but because the LP's snapshot nature was so insufficient at conveying the music’s improvisational, moment-in-time shape-shifting. There was a bit of pomposity afoot for sure – records are what rock musicians make – but I guess you can see their iconoclastic point.

What Grubbs is even more interested in, however, is how this reluctance is now flipped on its axis by the liberational smorgasbord of the internet, where archives like UbuWeb and DRAM have many thousands of taped, one-off performances by all manner of heretofore-undocumented sound practitioners from the 1960s and beyond. We’ve moved dramatically from an era of recorded scarcity, in which deeply experimental music’s canonical improvisational moments were more read about and talked about than actually heard, and where one or two LPs that did happen to squirt out (say, AMM’s AMMmusic) contained music no more or less “representative” than the performances that either preceded or followed it.

Now, Grubbs rightly maintains, it’s far easier to get a bead on just what these weird tape collectives and underground spaces were truly up to just by clicking around for a few days; he also fears drowning in a hard drive bursting with all of this this newfound knowledge, to say nothing of the many thousands of hours more to be heard (or not) via streams.

He writes cleanly and mostly unlike the Duke University academic he is, and humanizes the whole process right up front by documenting his own collector/accumulator/experiential journey into these worlds from 1980s hardcore punk/indie rock beginnings. (Readers may remember Mr. Grubbs from their own once-fandom of his rock bands Squirrel Bait and Bastro; I certainly do). I liked that he conceived this fairly off-center topic out of whole cloth and owned it so meticulously; it’s an enlightened, chin-stroking sort of read, even if, like me, you haven’t yet begun trawling the interweb archives to pinpoint the Great and True History of the Experimental Pioneers.

Order it here.

[finalsounds]

Who We Are and Why We're Here

There was once an early 1990s rock fanzine writer from New Zealand by the name of Nick Cain. When he started, I believe he was in high school. His magazines De/Create and Opprobrium started out by chronicling kiwi rocknroll and the various stripes of noisy independent-label malarkey, much like my own fanzine at the time. An issue or two in, it very quickly sputtered off into wholly incoherent (though enthusiastic) babbling about free jazz, soundscapes, formless noise drones and so on. I saw it as pseudo-intellectual wannabe twaddle of the worst sort. Who was this Nick Cain? Had he never heard The Stooges? Did he even know what punk was? How could this young pup proceed directly to impenetrable underground musics without first being dirtied, bathed and then cleansed in the crucible of garage, punk, post-punk and indie rock, to say nothing of his having forsaken the canon – my canon - in favor of, say, Borbetomagus and Anthony Braxton?

This rankled at the time. I was seeing quite a few peers leap off into the formless music void, and I was having none of it. Nick Cain, of course, was a good writer, and he’s continued that good writing to this very day in The Wire and elsewhere. (Let's say what he was doing was not "a phase"). Meanwhile, I burrowed deeper into record collecting and music slobdom – as long as that music was rock music in structure and form. It’s quite easy to ignore whole swaths of music, as I’m sure you’re aware. My excuse has always been, despite enthusiasm for other forms, that it was more satisfying to go long & go deep in underground rocknroll than it was to dabble around the edges. The whole contextual pie or no pie at all, I always said.

The experimental, non-rock underground would leap up into my consciousness at times, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, and my own musical appreciation was expanded greatly in the 1990s by introductions to John Fahey, 70s Jamaican dub, African polyrhythms & AfroFunk, pastoral English folk music, 78rpm blues, country and Rembetika, and even bands that fetchingly skirted rock forms like the Sun City Girls and their weirdo ilk. Yet rockist I mostly remained.

By the time 2015 rolled around, I had endured and enjoyed 47 years on the planet. At least forty of them have been chewed through by an overweening music obsession that’s been among my favorite raison d’etres and reasons to get up in the morning. Fanzines, radio shows, blogs, even some performing: participating in the sub-underground rock music “scene” writ large has been a life anchor like little else outside of family and friends, even if I’ve mostly done so in an introverted manner, hidden behind a keyboard, a radio mic or a laptop. I was, however, spending more allotted musical time than ever before with reissues of old 78s from around the world, with dub, with Fahey’s many imitators both past and present, with ghostly freak folk from the sisterhood, and even with some of the free jazz I’d once haughtily dismissed. Even while publishing my sub-underground rocknroll fanzine, Dynamite Hemorrhage, and while doing a twice-monthly podcast of the same name, it was feeling a bit like nearly all the treasure had been mined from these particular musical pits. It struck me that perhaps it was well past time to start digging a little deeper, or in different places. Ergo, Final Sounds.

The name doesn’t mean much. I abandoned several and settled on that one. I may change it again. Who cares. The purpose it to provide a new forum for non-rock wanderings and writings, and as a spur to wander and write some more. Anyone who’s read stuff I’ve done on the interweb knows that I’ve started & abandoned many a blog since 2003, with at least six started and buried – some after only a few months’ time. I’m gonna work on making sure this one sticks around a little longer. 

What I bring to the table here: I have heard The Stooges. I have a lineage of music study that stretches back four decades. My mind is opening, by necessity and by design. I’d like to think I can sometimes string a sentence or two together in the process of describing music that I would like you to hear. I bring a willingness to be an admitted neophyte, and take things from there.

What I don’t bring to the table here: Some of the wisdom and experiential lessons-learned from having grown up with, and into, more challenging music. A readily-available taxonomy of foundational underground artists, particularly those who make soundscapes, who are classical minimalists, or who honk and squirt. Patience for what I still believe to be pomposity or pointlessness. The ability to recognize by name certain ring modulators and woodwind instruments.

Any project I embark on I try not to half-ass, but this project’s size is deliberately small, reflecting both the virgin territory I’m covering and the likely potential size of the project's audience. Final Sounds will follows a pretty well-trod template for these sorts of things: record reviews, a smattering of live and book reviews, and soon, a podcast. Wow! My hopes are selfish; that in the process of attempting to document what I’m hearing outside of rocknroll, I’ll discover far more amazing tuneage than I already have (it’s already happening in spades). Going that selfishness even one better, I’d like to in turn write convincing enough accounts and depictions of said tuneage that this thing’ll be a resource for other seekers of musical truth. If not, well, I can always go back to The Stooges.