Foals.

“And when you’ve given all you had
And everything still turns out Bad,
and all your secrets are your own
Then you feel your heart beating
Thrum-pum-pum-pum…”

One of the all time greats, Peace to his memory.

From Magnus Robot Fighter #7 by Russ Manning.

From Black Jack, Volume 2.

April first is here, and so it’s time for me to start on the final phase of me and Jon Carpenter’s Post-Musical Industries project. I’ve been waiting to get to the final stage of this for a while, it’s been ready for a few months but my other work wanted to be finished first. This project’s taken over a year now to finish, I’m hoping it can be wrapped up by the end of the month. The ideal is to find a label interested in a vinyl only release, and we’ll see how it goes from there after I shop it around to a few of the most likely suspects.

“If you keep your eyes so fixed on heaven that you never look at the earth, you will stumble into hell”

That quotes the story of my life, yeah.

I’ve set up another of those damned myspaces for my music, much as I loathe the thing, I’m told it’s still a resource for some people finding music, and that lonely prophet howling in the wilderness bullshit is for chumps. I’m too lazy to actively hunt people down on it, so if you dig my work add me here:
http://www.myspace.com/derekwisdommusic
I’m on facebook too, send me a request if you’re so inclined:
http://www.facebook.com/derekwisdom

Dig it ya’ll, after two and a half months of blood sweat and tears I’ve got two new tracks you can take delight in upsetting your neighbors with after midnight:

Vibranium Cones
and

Rigel

If you’re new to my work, I’d describe it as colonizing the common subatomic territory between Mingus, Xenakis, Hank Shocklee, Phil Spector, Jay Dilla, Lee Perry, Conny Plank and Jack Kirby.

It’s no easy task but it sure beats shoveling shit.

(above, THOR and THE RECORDER return to Rigel after helping EGO THE LIVING PLANET open a psychedelic can of whoop-ass on GALACTUS THE DEVOURER OF WORLDS. Cosmic Architecture~! as only Jack Kirby and Vinnie Colletta could deliver from THOR #162)

Where were we?

Tracks coming along, one is mixed and ready to upload, the other hopefully will be done by tonight. In both cases while trying to mix one section I’d inevitably get annoyed with something, erase it and just make something new from scratch. Holger Czukay said something about this once that made a dramatic impression on me, how he was always quick to feed audio to his always hungry tape heads for erasing. While I’m pretty good about that, there are technical issues confounding me, my macbook is on it’s last legs, I should photograph this monstrosity for posterity, and in addition the Ableton corporation have after 10 years finallly succeeded in creating an unstable piece of software. Live 8 crashes so often you’d think it was a Native Instruments product. So I’ll often have to mix a track in isolation and get something I really like the sound of, but that gets lost in the shuffle and just takes up room in the mix. And my mixes are of the highest fucking density as it is, I’m of the Phil Spector and Kevin Shields school in this. So provided there are no further complications I’ll have the tracks done tonight, then I’ll make them available Thursday when I get back from Indonesia.

Let’s do one of those what are you listening to lately posts, here’s what I’ve been obsessing on at home or in the ipod:
Alice Coltrane - Translinear Light
Gonjasufi -A sufi and a killer (most interesting album released thus far this year)

The Abyssinians -Satta Massagana
Fela-Ransome Kuti -Fela with Ginger Baker Live! 1971 (best reissue thus far this year)
Dinosaur Jr -Bug
Wayne Shorter -Adams Apple
Slum Village -(self titled 2006 album)
Glen Branca -The Ascension
Francoise Hardy -La Question
Kool G Rap and DJ Polo -Road to the Riches
Charles Mingus -His Final Work
The Delfonics -La La Means I Love You
Michael Rother -Sterntaler
Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate -Ali and Toumani

I also picked up a set of the brand new Sony Jimi Hendrix remasters, haven’t had a chance to listen to them yet so I can’t comment. I’ve heard really good things about the new vinyl pressings, hopefully the mastering on the CD’s carries over. The Benchmark for Hendrix on CD is the 1987 West German Polydor pressing of Axis: Bold as Love. Not just because of sound quality, but it’s the only official release of Hendrix’s mix on CD that’s ever existed. I’ll give these a chance, I needed a decent CD master of Electric Ladyland anyway so if they provoke any thoughts of significance I’ll write about them when I get back.

In terms of sheer destructive force, not much compares to Jack Kirby and Vinnie Colletta showing the God of Thunder fucking up an entire planet after Adam Warlock tried to run game on one of Thor’s ladies (From the masterpiece of violence that is Thor #166). Derek Wisdom fucking around with some CSS, HTML and PHP bullshit while trying to redesign this website is an equally awesome display of destruction and catastrophe.

After discovering new dimensions of suffering in the process I think I have settled on something I like here. Got the old school BSG fonts on display, and the grey and white came from Space Ghost, so it’s like my new internet nerd Valhalla. According to the mission description, I’ve gotta have new music up for download by Monday and will then immediately bring the verbal feces to this blog again. Let me know if you’re using some antique browser or microsoft product and the site looks like total shit or something. I’ll try to get around to fixing it sometime early next year if that’s the case.

In the meantime, subscribe to my RSS feed and you’ll always be the first kid on your block to get my latest and greatest bullshit.