William S. Burroughs Interviews

Two separate audio interviews with William S. Burroughs, conducted in 1984 and 1985, respectively.
These are either for Burroughs completists or newcomers to his work, as the interviewer (Donald Swaim of Book Beat) is frustratingly ill-informed about Burroughs’ history or personal life and asks some really obvious or flat out dumb questions.

Part one – 1984. 25 mins.
Taped on the event of Burroughs’ 70th birthday. Interviewer asks many clumsy and probing questions about his drug history, occasionally talking about his writing.

Part two – 1985. 34.4 mins.
Much about Queer and Naked Lunch. Taped in the echo-y bunker.

Indeed, in this page, Mr. Swaim seems fixated on Burroughs’ drug use and makes it a major feature of his bio blurbs to the interviews, to wit:

Burroughs also talks about his drug addiction claiming it is easier to get through life with “junk” but it’s very inhibiting to creativity.

Although he has been sober from his drug addiction since 1957, as expressed in the previous interview, Burroughs admits he will from time to time use a bit of cannabis to get some inspiration for his writing.

But that’s not entirely true. Burroughs relapsed on heroin in the early eighties and continued to use methadone nearly until his death.
But it probably sounded better to the square-sounding Swaim to chock up his stranger writing and relative obscurity before fame to the ravages of wanton drug abuse.

Shut-In Theater: Butthole Surfers

This clip with interview makes me pine for the ‘Surfers when they were at their peak. I got to see them in one memorable performance on Halloween night at the (then) Pine Street Theater.

I don’t think there was a person there that wasn’t either tripping on something illegal or simply the strobes, surround sound system or second hand smoke.

Here’s a clip shot in Portland (by Smegma’s Mike Lastra) of a show that I sadly missed, although I once owned this bootleg on VHS.

But for my money, the lineup with Gibby, Teresa, King Coffee, Paul and Jeff Pinkus on bass was the best era in terms of sheer skullfuckery. Plus they could flat out rawk when they wanted to.

Turkey Day Show

Here’s the audio to last night’s show.
We had a ball. My brother Andy and my son William were there, as well as co-host for this show – and supplier of most of the music – Devin, host of Radio Under the Influence.
Dr. Zomb stopped in extra early to lend us some of his mind-blowing Turkish rock records (we especially dug the recent vinyl edition of Love, Peace and Poetry: Turkish Psychedelic Music).
We all had pie, cake and leftover turkey from my sister’s house. We also had many happy callers, requests and helpful hint or two on our horrible pronunciation of Turkish words.

Play show:

I’m not even going to attempt a playlist, but roughly it was:
Negativland, Erkin Koray, Selda Bagcan, Mustafa Özkent, Cem Karaca, Mazhar ve Fuat, Erkin Koray again, Ozdemir Erdogan, Mogolar, Selda again, Mustafa Özkent again, Cem again, 3 Hurel, Erol Buyukburc, Cem yet again, The Weatherman, some weird electronic music that Andy and I made on Thanksgiving night in 1996, some Barış Manço, some more Mustafa Ozkent, Ersin Ergin a weird video sent to this blog while the show was going on. It was titled Selim B.A. Soyle Duracac and was very odd sounding and we finished off with more Barış Manço and closed with Cem Karaca and some more of that weird electronic music by Andy and I. That’s roughly a on-the-fly list. Contents may have settled in shipping and was made in a facility that processed peanuts.

Technical note: The audio for some reason isn’t too good. I think it may be due to recording it in the air room on the CD recorders in the rack. So the microphones sound really over-modulated and clipped. Hopefully that’s not how we sounded over the air.

Turkey Day Broadcast (er… make that night)

Hello, dear friends,

Thursday night from 10pm to Midnight, join us for a Turkey Night get together on the radio.

It’s Turkey day at the Kill Ugly Radio household, and you’re invited!
It’ll be a Turkish/Anatolian Rock blowout!
We’ll have Erkin Koray, DJ Manrich’s famous oyster stuffing, some Cem Karaca, a deep-fried Turkey courtesy of Selda.
With Devin DeStrange and Wilhelm II.

Plus there’ll be strange, homespun electronic sounds and other surprises.

We’ll keep the songs kickin’ though, to counteract the sleepy effects of tryptophan.
You’ll want to save room for the pie!

Thursday, Thanksgiving night, from 10pm to Midnight on KBOO, 90.7 FM in Portland and streaming on the web at http://kboo.fm/listen

Thanksgiving Podcast Rererevisited

Not much meat left on this carcass from 2004; I’ve trotted it out for nearly four years running and recycled bits of it for the radio broadcast show I did on July 18th entitled Everything is Under Control.

But here it is again in all it’s long-in-the-tooth glory, because I am a lazy bastard this year.

Plus, I have an upcoming show this Thursday evening.

Play Kill Ugly Thanksgiving 2004.

Download MP3 (60 mins. 54.6 megs @ 128kbps)

More later.

Playlist below the fold.

NEW FEATURE -Trouser Press Tuesday

Hi ‘yall,
I am going to kick off a new, regular feature.
One of the most dog-eared and well-thumbed books on my library shelf is my copy of Ira Robbins’ wonderful Trouser Press Record Guide.
I think I have owned every edition of this book, including the most recent one The Trouser Press Guide to ’90s Rock.
What’s cool about the website, though is that it every review from all editions are available online, plus new ones written by Ira and crew. It also replicates perfectly my favorite Trouser Press experience: the ability to thumb to a random entry, via the aptly named Random Entry link at the bottom of each entry page. I could spend hours random tripping through the rift of reviews.

So, on to the task at hand…

Today’s random entry:

CHESTERFIELD KINGS

Unless you check the copyright date, you’ll swear that this upstate
New York band with pudding bowl haircuts and Beatle boots existed two
decades back. The Chesterfield Kings’ faithful re-creation of ’60s
guitar rock and garage punk (the first album’s material is strictly
covers, most of it so esoteric that only a fanatic record collector
would recognize more than one or two tunes) is so spot-on that it’s
impossible to discern from the real thing. In their chosen idiom, the
group’s records are as consistent and reliable as early Ramones.(…)

Read whole entry

Buddha Machine 2.0

I want one of these in the worst way. It’s long been a dream of mine to create a program that can spontaneously create music. But alas I was no swimmer….

But the Buddha machine is close, plus so damn simple. The new model just now out includes improved sound, new samples and a pitch bend wheel. What more can you ask?

Don’t know that I’d necessarily buy the eight or so that Brian Eno supposedly had of the original version (I think he’s got deeper pockets for experimentation than I), but I would love to find one in my stocking (reading this, Honey?).

Here’s a series of cascading piano loops (all out of sync, one looping backwards and forwards) I recorded from samples I ripped from Buddha Machine creator site FM3:
Buddha Piano Trio

Download as mp3

Michel Gagné on Words & Pictures

S.W. Conser gives us a heads-up on another fascinating episode on Words and Pictures:

Tomorrow morning (Tuesday November 25th) from 9:30 to 10am (PST),  Words & Pictures travels north to Bellingham to visit Canadian comics and animation conjurer Michel Gagné, whose work runs the gamut from the abstract jazz-inspired film Sensology to concept design for Disney and Pixar.  Gagné’s bewildering take on the Dark Knight for DC comics (Batman: Spore) infuriated traditional superhero fans, and his recently unveiled project Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet breaks the mold for computer-based gaming.

        “Words & Pictures” airs on KBOO community radio, 90.7fm, Not near a radio?  You can listen to the real-time webcast at http://kboo.fm/listen  And look for the webcast version on KBOO’s home page shortly after the show airs.

        For more info and links to recent webcasts, including the recent UPA retrospective special, visit  http://kboo.fm/WordsandPictures

Please do tune in. Conch and cohost Bill Dodge have some amazing interviews in the works and their archives are definitely worth perusing.

Cut Up Sound

Supergenius Jim Larrance, of No Soap Radio and more, has been putting up many of his wonderful audio cut-up tracks up for you to download or stream online. Many of them are newly minted out of his audio forge.
Uncle Jim is king of the audio cut-up and much of his work predates the computer audio editor. He’s a cut-and-paster par excellence and is and continues to be a huge inspiration to me. He was the first person who introduced me to the art of audio collage and also the cut-ups of William S. Burroughs, whom he used to play copious amounts of on his program in the Eighties.

He sat in on this last week’s Outside World and played some of his new material and had the crowded air-room in tears of laughter with an insane cutup of local news broadcasts.

Check out his website here.

Jeff Foxworthy Beef Jerky

This may be old news to some of you, but I am reminded that there exists a product such as this:

Taste-test results show consumers prefer Jeff Foxworthy beef jerky by more than 2 to 1 when compared to Oh Boy! Oberto and Jack Link’s.

More here and probably ways you can get on the ground floor – albeit a bit late – of this amazing retail/marketing opportunity.