Wednesday, January 12, 2011

The Inner Ear

Welcome to The Inner Ear.

The last thing the world needs is another music blogger.  Some people feel compelled to read a dozen different reviews of the new National or Walkmen or Kanye record, and it doesn't take more than a couple microseconds of googling to satisfy that compulsion.  Here, treacherously deep inside the Inner Ear, I'm not going to have much to say about the hot new shit - Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros will complete their eighteen month Moment in the Sun/Backlash/Toyota Commercial life cycle without me adding my two cents.

What you'll find here will be a more-or-less daily examination of one record at a time - a close, personal interaction between myself, your dear old Horned Gramma, and some of my favorite records from my vast collection of marginalia and weirdo music.  It might be something thirty years old or more.  It might be something you've never heard of and may never hear of again.  You may find yourself here because you searched for information on a strange, mysterious disc you found in a dimly-lit record store and this was the only place on Al Gore's vastly, beautifully strange internet that you could find any information about it at all.  Maybe while you're here you'll find some other odd little treasure to take home and puzzle over.

My responses to the records I will be writing about will be more emotional than critical -- it's easy to rip to shreds an album that you can't stand, but making someone understand why you, personally, love a piece of music is much more fun and rewarding. 

Hopefully, over time, this place will become something of an archive and a resource for the many, many great and lost masterpieces that exist outside of the mainstream and outside of the collective consciousness.  That isn't to say that my main objective is to impress you with all the totally obscure records I have, because most of these records are not hidden from and inaccessible to the general public.  In a lot of cases, you'd probably just never know to look for them.

This project was started under a different name in the autumn of 2010 in a dusty corner of the Sasquatch! Music Festival message board.  The Sasquatch! Festival takes place on Memorial Day Weekend at the Gorge Amphitheater in Quincy, Washington, so it's existence at that venue served the purpose of giving the couple dozen people who suffer from Sasquatch! Fever year-round something to talk about during the winter months.  Some of you may have followed me here from there.  The first couple dozen posts will be an archive of the pieces I wrote over there, and then we'll move forward with new stuff.

Pitchfork is the new MTV, just like MTV was the new American Bandstand.  Let this be MTV2, or that weird Canadian channel that would only come in on C-Band at like 2:30am.  This is where Residents videos are still in heavy rotation; this is the dark side where the Moon Man never planted his flag.  This is where The Philistines Jr. made it big instead of Green Day.  So nestle on in like a Ceti eel and permeate the membrane of The Inner Ear.

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