On the box right now: John Zorn's version of "Man With Harmonica" (aka "Once Upon A Time In the West") with Quine & Marc Ribot trading skronky-ass guitar parts.

Is that THE BIG GUNDOWN lp? Love that stuff.

On the box right now

Guster, Lost and Gone Forever, AIFG.

Fiery Furnaces!

I listened to it a few times in the car this weekend, and it's an album that makes more sense the more you listen to it. A real grower. This one is going to make a lot of critics' 10 best lists.

Hey, there's a long tradition of two-chord classics. "Sister Ray," "Roadrunner..."

Bob Quine: "[White Light/White Heat] completely changed my life. 'Sister Ray,' 'I Heard Her Call My Name.' I spent thousands of hours on headphones wearing that out. That was a big influence on me. They were starting to make a big deal about people like Larry Coryell, rock musicians playing jazz, but there was no real fusion going on. What Lou Reed did, he actually listened to Ornette Coleman, and deliberately did off-harmonic feedback and the deliberate monotony of it. This stuff is like Jimmy Reed- it's monotonous or it's hypnotic. For me, it was hypnotic."

On the box right now

Brian Lehrer and Diana Somethingorother talking about the NY state legislature's inability to pass a budget on time (20 years and counting). AIFRocks!!

Okay, it doesn't really rock. But I do like the Brian Lehrer show.

that THE BIG GUNDOWN lp? Love that stuff.

Yep, but actually it's on a mix I made for a friend who's driving from TX to ME this week. I burnt a few comedy albums, a couple of Firesign albums, a Ska/Dub mix (from the Trojan boxes, which I'm listening to now), a couple of short-fast-catchy postpunk mixes, and a mix of long, spacey songs (which has the Zorn/Quine/Ribot song, the krautrock song on the new Wilco, a Neu! track, one of the long Fiery Furnaces songs from the new album, and The Tain) with a few Coyle & Sharpe interviews in between songs.

Fiery Furnaces!

Damn straight! It's the smartest album I've heard in a long, long while. I absolutely love it.

And yeah, I agree with Quine. I've been on quite the free jazz-fusion roll lately, and the Velvets got the single chord harmonic structure down pat, which was only one of the great things in their bag of tricks.

Huh. Jon, I just discovered there's a theremin on that Guster song I was listening to, "All the Way up to Heaven."

Jeez, seems like anyone's using a theremin, these days. ;)

I was totally unaware of this lawsuit: Wilco Pays Up for Spycasts. Apparently, the label has used the settlement to put the Conet Project back in print.

The Wilco thing annoys me.

Fernandez is trumpeting his victory as a "classic David and Goliath confrontation." But copyright lawyers and intellectual property activists aren't so sure. How exactly, they're wondering, does a guy get ownership over something he taped off of the radio?

Apparantly under British law you can copyright something you recorded off the radio. But then, the guy who sued didn't even make the recordigs himself; they were given to him.

Sounds like it was easier and cheaper for Wilco to settle than to fight it out.

I agree that the copyright issues are murky at best. At the same time, it was pretty stupid of Wilco not to approach Irdial while they were making YHF to ask about using the samples. They probably would have gotten the rights for a lot less money.

True. It also sounds like they could have gotten them for nothing from the guy who gave Irdial the tapes.