what's playing at mi casa

boris - akuma no uta cd: the more i listen to the strange attractors cd, the more japanese it sounds to me. when i mentioned boris to attractors' gtrist jeremy diaz, he responded, "what, did jon teague get you into them, too?" of boris, teague (he of yeti / great tyrant fame) say, "fucking heavy rocks...with beauty." their music sounds _fundamental_ to me, like the stooges, like late coltrane. it reminds my sweetie of tectonic plates shifting or thunderstorms. real force-of-nature stuff, in other words. starts out with a crushingly heavy drone, followed by a little hardcore, a brief acoustic interval, an extended wata gtr jam, and a taste of blue cheer-inspahrd heaviosity before a return to heavy doom. i need to hear some of their earlier recs.

rory gallagher - live at montreaux double dvd: the other night at el wreck, i was telling lance allen that the guy playing slide on a standard-tuned gtr on muddy waters' 'riginal version of "you shook me" was earl hooker, a factoid i gleaned from an int rory gallagher did with guitar player back in '78. 'twas the same int that inspahrd me to check out son house and blind boy fuller, great acoustic blues players. rory could play the shit out of that style, too, which is just one reason i prefer his stuff to srv, johnny winter, any of those cats. he seems more well-rounded and down-to-earth somehow. this dvd features material from five different appearances rory made at the famous jazzfest (held in the same casino that burned down and got immortalized in d. purp's "smoke on the water") -- '75, '77, '79, '85, and '94 (a year before his death from liver failure following a transplant). the shows are of uniformly high quality, altho the early ones possess a slight edge in energy 'n' excitement, of course ("bought and sold" from '77 is one of the hottest live performances by anybody you'll ever see on vid). the '85 features rory, who generally eschewed the use of f/x, using an octave box and playing a coral electric sitar (!) in addition to his trademark beat-to-shit strat. for some reason, the producers elected to present the '94 show alone in its entahrty. by that time, rory had put on a lot of weight and looked unwell, but still delivered the goods, as was his wont. the acoustic bonus clips are some of the best 'uns included.

frank zappa - you can't do that onstage anymore, volume one double cd: it always makes me feel good when someone tells me i play gtr like fz, even tho i know it isn't true and the person is usually inebriated enough to think that we're playing "the besht muzhik i ever heard _in my life_!" it's what i've been striving for for yrs, tho -- to play like fz (or sonny sharrock), even tho i'm still an illiterate blooze clod at heart. carducci's right about frank, tho: it gets hard to separate the wheat (great, challenging music) from the chaff (silly novelty songs) on his rekkids. these days, when i wanna hear some zappa, i generally reach for uncle meat (his first great alb, imho, the social commentary on the first three mothers of invention albs not having aged particularly well) or this, a mashup of bands spanning the yrs '69-'84 and showing the impressive scope of what fz and his various lineups were up to. prolly my fave fz alb after the orchestral yellow shark and the synclaviered civilization phaze III.