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Newsletter No. 28: DISAPPOINTMENT. AND THEN: RELIEF. Hi there, Bottle. Oh yes, we see. You won't talk to us NOW, hunh? Now that the car is crashed, you have absolutely NOTHING to say, is that right? Well we'll just lay in the bushes puking until the coast is clear. Like Normandy. And the beaches of Normandy. You know, they saw us coming and poisoned our food. The restaurant? Lucretia's. Yeah. We should have known. But we didn't and if the truth be told it now seems like we've been poisoned since, oh, well, since we got back from Anzio. You know, Italy. One stomach ailment after another, one even driving Eugene from the stage at the Porch/Caesura show to simultaneously shit and puke the men's room at the Bottom of the Hill straight to hell. And they think they had problems with incendiaries before. Fire in the hole, baby. But what's even worse than the swirling dropsies, the creeping mimis and the heebie jeebies is the long now lingering sense that everything is wrong. Call it end-of-record-itis, call it what happens when you're down to the last bit of screwing you're going to do for a record (excepting a possible 10 day run of shows in the states, which we'd said we do but never did, but which we still may), but it's that prevailing sense of being at odds and ends with where you are, who you are and how the hell you are right about now and KNOWING THAT TOMORROW'S PAPER IS JUST AS LIKELY TO HAVE YOU IN IT FOR PULLING A KITTEN FROM A TREE AS IT IS TO HAVE YOU PULLING A COP FROM HIS CAR. It's that kind of crazy uncertainty principle that sets on our minds like a motherfucking fever. Every one is after us. Nobody believes that everyone is after us. Nobody believes US anyway. And nothing is certain. Except for the fact that everyone is after us. Not so, you say? Well why the fuck are we still being poisoned? IF YOU THOUGHT HE WAS BAD BEFORE He failed to pass muster for all but number 5, however his winning answer "does that include porn I'm in?" made him a shoe-in for the ministrations of the shadowy Israeli multi-millionaire backer that's larding him with cash, porno and new computers. We expect you all to log onto his site with great frequency and spend all of your disposable income on porno since you're sure as shit not spending it on OXBOW records. And to anyone Eugene's creeped out in the last month as a result of having his world view confirmed most aggressively by watching hours and hours upon hours of porn and then coming on to you in like a Harry Reemish kind of sorry slick, grabass MO: please accept our heartfelt apologies. He only did what he did because he wanted to fuck you a little. That's all. We mean he's a lover, not a fighter. Well he's a lover AND a fighter but you know what we mean. Just ignore him, he'll go away. Maybe. |
| YOU CAN’T SPELL
PIMP WITHOUT F-U-C-K http://www.ezb8.com/ IF THE AMAZING DR. DAN ADAMS SAYS IT IS SO, THEN IT MUST BE SO THINGS THAT WE'VE DONE IN THE LAST MONTH THAT YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE
ARE TRUE EVEN THOUGH WE'RE TELLING YOU THAT THEY REALLY HAPPENED AND WE'RE
NOT FUCKING LYING ABOUT THEM SWEAR TO GOD, SCOUT'S HONOR.
WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED? |
| MAY 25, AQUARIUS RECORDS,
San Francisco We did the all-acoustic thing at a secret, fairly unannounced locale, in this instance the great and glorious AQUARIUS RECORDS. Rare because it involved not just Niko and Eugene but Dan and Greg as well; the brief set was cool and drew almost as many people as the Bottom of the Hill show did. OXBOW starts to dream longingly about playing acoustic ALL the time so that they could dispense with loading in 2700 pounds of equipment each time they play. Well they can dream can�t they? MAY 29, The Eagle: Mission Creek Music Festival: San Francisco JUNE 1ST, ATA, 8PM: Debut of the Christian Anthony OXBOW movie MUSIC
FOR ADULTS. Well we got a chance to see the final cut of the movie and it was interesting and painful to watch. Amusing as well. We won�t unduly influence your opinion though it IS being shown again at the WEREPAD in San Francisco on June 20th, 2003 and we DO plan to have it available for sale this summer. Stay tuned. |
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SHOW ME YOURS
MUSIC FOR ADULTS: SECOND SCREENING Friday, JUNE 20, 9 PM, THE WEREPAD, SAN FRANCISCO 2430 Third Street between 20th and 22nd jucifer/oxbow dates JUNE 21, THE POUND, San Francisco HOT FUN IN THE SUMMERTIME July 04: La Guingette Pirate: Paris F July 05: Limoges Festival F July 06: Bordeaux/Lyon F July 08: Geneve Usine CH July 09: Nurnberg/Stuttgart D July 10: Amsterdam Paradiso NL July 11: Rotterdam NL July 12: Dour Festival B July 13: Brighton GB July 14: Cardiff GB July 15: Birmingham GB July 16: Belfast GB July 17: Dublin IRL July 18: Cork IRL July 19: Bristol Ashton Court GB July 20: London Underworld GB THE SCROTUM PRELUDE TO A KILLING �Hi there, Just wanted to say how much I liked An Evil Heat - i'm enjoying the first run-through immensely, and yet I bet it's still a grower! Also, I wondered if you'd be into answering a few interview questions over this here email interweb doohickey. In fact, inspired by the fictional "Robinson vs. Rollins" bout, i propose simply listing a series of celebrities, and then Mr. Robinson states whether he could "take" each one in turn, and how he would go about doing it, tactics, maneuvers etc. I think it would be an interesting, yet strangely alarming read. Better than the fucking TV Guide at any rate - there is simply nothing good on nowadays, apart from The Simpsons. And those are reruns. Also, i see you're playing at the Ashton Court festival in lovely Bristol, UK. You should perhaps know that it is an annual free event (with perhaps a couple of quid for charity), with lots of dodgy fast food and tons of locals getting toasted by the sun and the alcohol. I doubt anyone there apart from me and these three guys who work in a record shop will have heard of you, so it should be a fucking riot! By the way, i cannot believe you took Fentanyl? I read somewhere that it is something like EIGHTY times as potent as morphine. Ridiculous. I drink quite a lot of tea myself. I'm constantly going to the toilet! i get a lot of reading done. seriously, An Evil Heat is amazing - of course, it's weird and whacked but I'm not forcing myself to listen to it because some trendy rag said i had to (mind you I don't really do that anymore - i dont have time for bullshit, despite what this email may be implying). It all flows and whatnot. clearly, the live setting is a different beast, so i am looking forward to that. And on those card doodads that go over the top of the cd when you peel off the cellophane wrapping, you're described as "like stumbling into the midst of a sex crime against humanity" - who wrote THAT!?? It's good, and pretty much on the money i reckon.�KUNAL, http://go.to/superfi |
| A DOG AND HIS VOMIT "alright. How's it rock? been asked to put you lot on again in leeds? you up for another night of drunken idiocy with the devils? if it happens there'll probably be some ace drone/sludge bands too. cheers ewan www.infinitemonkey666.co.uk" Editor's Note: Ewan booked the show in Bradford where almost half the club was stabbed or indeed actually choked by Eugene. OXBOW replies: "We wouldn't miss it for the world. Unless the money was
shit and then we'd miss it quite easily." Editor's Note: "Sir, as a matter of protocol, YES, it is typical that the
dog would be set afire and the toothbrushes would be micturated upon.
HOWEVER, disregarding for a moment the historical imperative, we have
decided to indulge our fancies and invert the gyre of home invasion, creating
a new and wholly significant art form out of the more prosaic piss-fire
duality." In further note of this phrase, someone (probably one of the AVENGERS of the NUNS) carved it into a table that was backstage at Winterland during the SEX PISTOLS's performance there in 1978. There is a photo of the table top in the James Stark book PUNK '77. The WInterland show was the SEX PISTOLS last ever performance until their FILTHY LUCRE reunion tour a few years back. Have I bored the living shit out of you yet?" Editor's Note: Yes. Not to mention the fact that you saunter around immensely proud of the fact that you don't give a shit what other people think. Then a band who is becoming well known simply because of how outrageously shitty they are, OXBOW, gives you some positive feed back. Then what's the first thing you do? You post it on your board as a flag saying "Hey look, someone likes us!" And it's some big ordeal for you. Go hard retards!! Get a job in a fucking side show."�unsigned, Sacramento Editor's Note: OXBOW will be working with PEARL JAM in the near future.
i was eating steak and jello after the gym and browsing the internet. i came upon the oxbow site again. i realised that i had never emailed you. not after remembering and forgeting the name of the town in belgium that dead and gone played that i thought oxbow was playing the next night. or to tell you how much i didn't like the place that you choked out that english guy either. nothing like bad vegan mush to make one feel like they are on the brink of english hell. although it was better than the crap i ate at the weird squat in oslo where i fopund a gas mask canister fater the show. i also am at a loss as to why my brain failed to comprehend that it was you at the bbq at sam's place just because you had hair. by the way i now live at sam's place. anyway so those are the things i failed to tell you earlier. i am about out of things to say or ask other than how is the band going and are you still doing any spoken word dates?� --jerme spew Random Q's and T's and A's Q: Suicide comes up often in Oxbow�s songs --1000, The Killer--the undercurrent of the whole first Oxbow album from what I�ve read in articles posted on your site. Have you seriously considered taking your own life? A: haven't we all? I mean haven't we all just wanted the party to end a little sooner than it might ordinarily? I mean why wait for the fucking inevitable bus or cancer or man with a ballpeen hammer? So "seriously"? yes. for the same reason that we might do anything else: because we think we might find it amusing. Q: does writing such songs serve to purge these feelings? A: does a suicide note purge suicidal feelings? anyway I'll get to your question with an answer offered by my friend Gabriel when he was contemplating whether or not we'd embrace the final embrace for almost ANY reason at all..."what?!? me kill MYself?!?! I'm too handsome to kill myself! You kill YOURself!" so it goes: these days we're much more likely to be found at a homicide than at a suicide. Q: "Gal" matches some of your bleakest, most chilling lyrics with one of Niko's catchiest riffs. What inspired the tune? A: when I was 11 or 12 years old the song happened to me. For years I've thought about murdering my tormenter. He's alive and I believe living in New Jersey, however one of the inescapable, it seems to me, truisms of life that's completely missed by Hollywood time and time again is that frequently the bad just get worst. And so he has: he's a murdering criminal and so I've done the very adult thing of "getting over it." Or perhaps not. Q: All of the albums leading up to An Evil Heat touch heavily on betrayal, lost love (or lust at any rate) and the violence that follows being done wrong. This album focuses more on physical compulsion of pleasing the flesh, but here the violence seems more an aspect of sex than part of any retribution. What led to the change? A: hahaha...life. the death of love. and the primacy and sureness of the sucked cock. YOU call it physical compulsion. I call it the only sensible road to take. Abstraction is DANGEROUS. We've surrendered to certainty and the sucked cock is not nearly as dangerous...unless it trundles you headlong into abstraction. and then you're rolling around the floor of your trailer, crying, with a shotgun in your mouth. and believe me I wish I WAS playing this for laughs. but i'm not. sadly enough, I'm not. |
| WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY YELLING?
MORE WORD ON THE LARGE SAC'D AND EIGHTH WONDER OF THE FUCKING MODERN WORLD: OXBOW!!!
OXBOW review by: Roberto Martinelli, http://www.maelstrom.nu The Hemlock Tavern is a small, run-of-the-mill bar in the area of Polk Street famous for its male and transgender prostitution. It turns out I�ve walked past the Hemlock many times, but have never noticed it. More remarkable still was that a show would be held here, but up a few stairs is an area with a small stage. The whole place may be able to hold at most 50 people. I was keen on checking out Subarachnoid Space, as one of the band�s members, Mason Jones, is in the band 355, which we reviewed this issue. I don�t know if Subarachnoid Space (below) is on the Neurot Recordings label, but it would fit in well. Instrumentally, the four-piece seems like it would be a rock or metal band, with two guitarists, a bassist and a drummer with two bass pedals. But Subarachnoid Space is much more about instrumental ambient sleepiness, but one that just happens to have double bass in it sometimes. As warm displays of sun-like projections were reflected on the wall behind them, the quartet lulled the audience into a pleasant state of lethargy. I for one fell asleep in my front row chair a number of times. I couldn�t shake the cobwebs even after the set was over, and only the arrival of The Lord Weird Slough Feg�s Mike Scalzi prevented me from sleeping all the way through the intermission. Those were all the winks anyone would get this evening. What was to follow would be the most intense display I had ever seen at a musical event. Oxbow is a Bay Area band that has been around a surprisingly long time. Since 1989, the group has only had one lineup change and has released several albums, the latest of which is An Evil Heat, (review in issue#9) which was one of the best albums last year. Perhaps what has made Oxbow so loved by so few and largely disregarded by so many is the inability to classify it. We�ve called it voodoo possessed technical rock, but the official description of the music being like �stumbling into the midst of a sex crime against humanity� is an apt description. So there was a good deal of nervous anticipation leading into my first Oxbow experience. Feral tales of nude performances and on-stage choking of witless audience members by front man Eugene Robinson made me anxious and scared - and impatient. Suffice to say I was very, very awake from the moment Oxbow started its set. There are four men in this group, and they all contribute to the torrent of energy. At the forefront of this is Robinson, the erudite-cum-shoot fighter front man who�s as famous for his gradual removal of clothing on stage as he is for his trademark duct-taped ears and Bacchanal performances. (Why does he do all this stuff? Find out next issue in our interview with Oxbow.) Robinson is like an actor who loses himself in a part. It�s very clear that while on stage, something has snapped within him. Reaching deep inside some fearsome well, he displayed such looks of desperate psychosis as he humped the mic stand and howled his vicious prose. When the clothes gradually came off, displaying Robinson�s impressive physique and myriad of tattoos, it occurred to us that he was a whole lot like the black version of Robert DeNiro�s character in �Cape Fear.� Robinson would slowly seethe, only to break out in violent fits of thrashing about to the dynamic music (pictured below). Meanwhile, drummer Greg Davis was going mad behind the kit. The stocky, powerful man was smashing his equipment, which made the level of precision with which he played all the more impressive. There was an unscheduled intermission as Davis actually tore a hole into the head of his bass drum; luckily Subarachnoid Space�s drummer was good enough to lend his. Maybe a better term would be �smart enough.� Niko Wenner, the most unassuming member of Oxbow off stage, was in his own private freak out zone as well. Alternating between three gorgeous guitars, Wenner (below) became one with the flow of the musical torrent, culminating in a total loss of sanity to end the set as he turned his back to the audience and ravaged the strings of one of his prizes in a way that would even frighten Caspar Br�tzmann. In any other band, bassist Dan Adams (below) would be something to watch. But in Oxbow, it�s easy to overlook his presence on stage, which is a mistake. Adams� fine performance was as integral to the show as any other.
Oxbow will be playing again next month, to a much bigger crowd. Who knows what might happen.
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