“My Friend Drowned in His Own Vomit” from “Life and the Afterbirth”.
NEW SHINKOYO!
We’ve launched our new site over at SHINKOYO after a good month and a half of INTERNET BRAIN web work by myself and the west coast SHINK-HEAD Severiano Martinez… The entire Shinkoyo catalog is available NOW on the Shinkoyo site…
Which of course includes the two early SKELETONS records “Life and the Afterbirth” (from 2003, which has been unavailable for a few years now) and “I’m at the Top of the World” (which before now was only available if you happened to grab one of the first 100 hand painted copies back in 2004…). I’ve remastered the stereo mixes a bit to hopefully compete in the loudness wars and the downloads on Shinkoyo are HI-FI 320kbps mp3s…
AND in other news - these records will also be available on all your favorite internet based music sellers like the iTunes and the Emusic and a bunch more…
It’s been a really long time coming for getting these records available… I’m super psyched to have people hear them again and hope that they find some new ears…
Above I will post some tracks from both records…
With love and apathy,
-Matt
Kind of the only song I can listen today. On play number 4. What’s especially great about it is that it’s basically constant build up one enormous 3 minute long chorus. He does two “verses”, two “Ya-ma-ha” hook/choruses, then turns part of the verse into another hook (oh-oh baby… never seen a girl with an…”), then comes up with another hook (could this be a bridge? no change musically… though there are rhythmic elements coming and going… “seen a lot of places…”), THEN another hook “CLUTCH, BRAKE, GET THIS MOTHERFUCKER RUNNIN” (perhaps the best of the song?)! Then back to “seen a lot of places”, and a final half-time feel of the last hook… No return to the ACTUAL chorus.
Which is really wonderful. Why pick one chorus when there are always more and maybe better ones? Why not put a bunch of em in the same song? Why not order them in a way that gathers momentum and IMPLIES dynamics so you can just let the beat rock at near full blast the whole way through?
Sorry, I hope you don’t think about it too much.
With love and apathy,
-Matt
SKELETON$ BIG BAND on ROULETTE TV.
Some DOPE photos from the SKELETON$ BIG BAND show at Death By Audio last month by Ben Rubin!
My friend CYRUS (who’s probably one of the most musical-searching-thinking-doing people I know… always trying to find NEW VIBES and figure out the place of those vibes in this world we live in now… He’s also an often collaborator with Skeletons) sent me this link last night:
http://www.thedailyswarm.com/headlines/lou-reed-laurie-anderson-and-john-zorn-spur-walkouts-boos-canada/
Last night I read the link above and thought it was pretty funny/interesting… sounded like a wild experience. But today I watched THE VIDEO! People are crazy! I agree with ZORN! What in life closes these people’s minds so tight?
With love and apathy,
-Matt
WHEW! THE internet almost won the past few weeks: army of a zillion browsers, pop-up raids, multitasking brain-tazers and my eyes and head hurt. I’ve been working on another website that’s on its way to being done and wonderful and full of promise/purpose.
THERE should be a ton of new news here, but I can’t confirm any of it yet and still (as always) have no idea what’s gonna happen or what the right decisions will be, but I offer a promise of some kind of new studio musics sometime soon.
In the meantime I uploaded some of SKELETON$ TV™ Season One, from back when the internet wasn’t just all blogs and everything was infrequently updated and it was still kind of cool to make the text on yr site really small because people had relatively low resolution smaller monitors to view it all on… SKELETONS.tv had no useful information just games of pick the embedded link and win a prize. I wish I could’ve finished my MYST-esque vision of this site that just opened more doors and videos and videos without explanation. People seem to be pleased with the ease of this version however, so maybe no worries, maybe people like explanations, context, NOSTALGIA, what have you so here’s a big chunk of it.
These three videos below are my favorite from the first round of videos we made from tour documents. TWO is the earliest, with the 808 still kicking the hard kick, a funky version of DON’T WORRY with some great dance moves from the Nightlight in Chapel Hill and some great shots of slow mo Fashe… THREE tries to contain the weird/wild-ness of a BLOWFLY set plus the weird/wild-ness of a tour we did opening for MAN MAN. This was probably the height of the period for which I have no name, where basically everyone said they didn’t understand what we were trying to do as a live band… Here’s a quote I just found just now from a lovely “Brooklyn Vegan Anonymous Commenter”:
“Skeletons (& the Girl-Faced Boys) are quite probably the single worst live band I have ever seen. Jesus they sucked.”
AND another:
“Skeletons was one of my favorite bands for 3 years. Until I saw them live. They really need to figure out a way NOT to come across like a university talent show jam band, their music is so good, such a shame.”
And here’s one that’s a little more positive:
“Skeletons was the most AWKWARD show I’ve ever been to. Quite good though, despite frat boys trying to egg me on my way to the venue.”
Really, I have no idea… I didn’t really think about it this much, in a way I probably naively thought people would be psyched to come hear music we hadn’t recorded yet or hear the music in a way that they hadn’t heard it before (different than the recording?)… I guess I remember politely laughing off harsh criticisms, maybe I had more confidence in my bones… I dunno. To ME this version of “You’d’a Been Better Off” from “git” is totally burning and crazy and awesome (sidenote: I don’t smoke weed and I’ve never tried any of the other popular recreational drugs - which I feel like I should mention so there’s no easy way out etc…) - though I will admit that it’s CONFUSING in the same way it must’ve been confusing to the audience who came to see those MAN MAN shows. This music was all about ENERGY for us, not about “playing the song right” - which is a terrible argument to have really - it goes in circles forever… What’s the point of FOOD if it TASTES BAD? Right? Though the other side is usually “THIS FOOD IS BAD FOR ME BUT I EAT IT ANYWAY” - Jason talked about this in his interview for our Big Band shows at Roulette (which is posted in this “blog”)… I mean, we shoulda been trying to convince the Man Man audience that they should like our SONGS, so that they’d buy those products!
I wanted to post these videos and thoughts along with two articles I checked out on this interweb recently. ONE says:
“Surely we would be better off pursuing more adaptive activities—eating and drinking and fornicating, establishing relationships, building shelter, and teaching our children. Instead, 2-year-olds pretend to be lions, graduate students stay up all night playing video games, young parents hide from their offspring to read novels, and many men spend more time viewing Internet pornography than interacting with real women. One psychologist gets the puzzle exactly right when she states on her Web site: ‘I am interested in when and why individuals might choose to watch the television show Friends rather than spending time with actual friends.’ “
One reason of course is that our imagination is awesome and life is sometimes not as awesome… BUT check it out, very interesting. I used to walk around with headphones on and spend the whole day at work with headphones on but lately I’ve been enjoying the mishmash of music that happens when I let all different kinds of memories of songs flood the head at once… THE point in this context was though, how disappointing is it to go SEE a band that you’ve created a IMAGINARY version of?
THEN, this ONE:
“Is the pervasive resistance to untethering ourselves from our social worlds or disconnecting ourselves from the media drip, even for an instant, at root a fear of the emptiness in our heads? What does it say about us, as a society, if we’re unable to be alone and unplugged without being bored or lonely? Is the girl in Deresiewicz’s anecdote who wonders why anyone would want to be alone an outlier or a poster child for our times? If Deresiewicz is right, should we preserve some small space in our lives for solitude—a Walden of the mind, away from the Matrix?”
So OK, these are deeper questions and ideas and I’m not really positing that the music in these videos has anything to do with THE DEEP QUESTIONS but I’m constantly curious about perception and what affects people about both music and the internet (sometimes I think I’m probably confusing various “scenes” of music or films or videos or art with some sort of metadata/link/cut and paste internet hologram?). And this beginning of 2010 is the longest we’ve been home without touring in 6 years… So I start to think, wait, does anyone care about things if they don’t care about it on the internet? If you’re out meeting people in different parts of the world it’s easy, “YEAH, this is great, this is why we’re making music because you are here and having this experience with us”…
Anyway, EPISODE FOUR is from a tour right before the Man Man tour where we headed down to SXSW and played a zillion shows in 3 days in exchange for Urban Outfitters gift certificates and shoes I didn’t like anyway. On the way we played in BATON ROUGE and took the next day to visit NEW ORLEANS and it truly was in terrible shape. I highly recommend the book “VOICES FROM THE STORM” if you haven’t read it already. We were young and disrespectful in that city probably, but did some tourist things at the French Quarter which probably part of what the city needed from us as passer-bys. A mega-version of Don’t Worry soundtracks my footage from the highway through New Orleans, from 3 very different versions of the same song. That tune (like “BOOOM”) is one that really came alive on tour in all these ways I’m talking about - REACHING FOR SOME OTHER PLACE.
IT’s good to be home for a while, and try to imagine what other places are like, even ones I been to before.
With love and apathy,
-Matt
SKELETON$ TV™ ARCHIVE: Episode FOUR
