MP3s: Rent Romus' Lords Of Outland, You Can Sleep When You're Dead!
All hail the man of a million hats! The originator of the original San Francisco free jazz industrial rent party! The potentate who in a short 20 years has founded Edgetone Records, become Executive Director of Outsound.org under which he is the head curator of The SIMM Music Series at the Studio 6 Musicians Union Hall, and who operated UIRC (Ultra Independent Recording Coalition), as well as The Edgetone Music Summit, an annual festival held in the greater Bay Area.
A former student of tenor sax master Stan Getz, Romus once helmed Jazz On The Line, an acoustic sextet that fused jazz, blues, gospel, and hip-hop. Romus produced three albums for JOTL including the critically acclaimed Jazz On the Line with Chico Freeman. When not looking he also founded outer space free jazz organs, RKZtet, finally landing to earth with the Lords of Outland, featuring film music composer Vytas Nagisetty on bass, Andrew Borger (drums, currently with Tom Waits) and Jason Olaine, (former AR director for Verve Records Universal) on trumpet.
Safely, if not sanely put, Lords of Outland imagines Jaco Pastorius playing armor outfitted basketball with a band of crazed bassists and saxophonists. The rhythms run amok, the melodies are anything but friendly, and nausea and sickness is sure to follow.
Rent Romus
"Gasburger Sheep Slaughter House" (mp3)
from "Rent Romus' Lords of Outland, You can sleep when you're dead!"
(Edgetone Records)
More On This Album
Rent Romus "Party in Room 614A (M.Y.O.B.)" (mp3)
from "Rent Romus' Lords of Outland, You can sleep when you're dead!"
(Edgetone Records) More On This Album
Okay, Settle down: The Foreign Cinema: Summer is finally here and here it comes! Hip-hop blasting from automobiles cruising an endless circle around your block, pools resounding with children splashing and hot moms sunbathing, concerts in the park, and if you live in a big city, an endless rush of bodies, noise, and human cacophony.
A quiet retreat may be in order to comfort your addled brain after a weekend of fun, sun, and good times, and that's where the Foreign Cinema comes in. Aka Dustin Aaron, The Foreign Cinema appears at first blush as yet another faceless indie alternative act, his mostly mid tempo songs blasting gentle cobwebs afloat with urgent, 1/8th note pulsing guitars and amateurishly bashed drums = the currency of ordinary ordinariness.
But listen closely, and the Foreign Cinema reveals an introspective, even slightly sullen inner soul that makes rockin' good times turn the way of Jack Ruby gunning for Lee Harvey Oswald. Beneath buckling rhythms and whispered vocals, Aaron reveals a heart of darkness, a penchant for dark moments amid a crowd of happy faces, a private world view that finds contentment in small gestures, even while hopelessness seems the final outcome.
The Foreign Cinema's online bio speaks of Aaron's travels across America as the basis for his worldview, how "Aaron has spent most of his life traveling these roads, capturing the feelings that the last outpost of Western Civilization invoke. Spanish missions, engineering feats, the manufactured shine of Hollywood, and the ability to find oneself in the middle of nowhere between it all create both the mythology and reality of California that finds it's way into the songs of the Foreign Cinema."
"Don't Forget to Write" certainly speaks to isolationist tendencies. Singing plainly about traveling to Santa Cruz over finger-plucked guitar, Aaron recalls broken relationships with all the candor of someone losing a parent, not a first girlfriend.
Post-coital tales of detachment and disgust arise in "Magazines," Aaron's anemic vocals and adolescent subject matter recalling Hanson by way of Pavement.
Better is "Sunday Afternoon," a gentle soul's walking tale of endless blue highways and the hitch-hikes that covered them, sweet chords reflecting and refracting like sunlight on a hot July day.
The Foreign Cinema "Don't Forget to Write" (mp3)
from "Everybody Is Lonely"
(Are You Alive Records) More On This Album
The Foreign Cinema "Magazines" (mp3)
from "Bright Lights"
(Are You Alive Records) More On This Album
The Foreign Cinema "Don't Forget to Write" (mp3)
from "Everybody Is Lonely"
(Are You Alive Records) More On This Album
