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http://y5kmusic.tumblr.com/

Most music updates will be made there from now on.

New Y5k covers album

I put together a four-song EP covering two tunes by Loch Lomond and two by Ballads of Larry Drake. It was great fun to work on.
Here's the link: http://year5000.bandcamp.com/album/ll-bold
Here's the cover:

and here's the presser:

Y5k -- LL/BOLD

Year 5000 plays Portland artists Loch Lomond and Ballad of Larry Drake

We're thrilled, seriously, to be playing these songs by two of our favorite artists, Loch Lomond and Ballads of Larry Drake. Both Portland, Oregon-based bands create stunning, stirring music, and both have created classic peak-moment records in 2007. 

Loch Lomond's album Paper the Walls is a front to back masterpiece. It's definitive not only for the band but for its entire genre. Although the Y5k covers of these songs take an entirely different stance, the songwriting and strong melodies shine through.

Ballads of Larry Drake produced six home-made classics in recent years, but Cool Walk Death Hymnal finds the one-man band at its most vulnerable, truthful, and scary. The stripped down voice-and-organ is unrefined, intimate, full of little errors … simply beautiful.

LL's Ritchie Young and BOLD's Trevino L. Brings Plenty have both played and recorded with Year 5000. Young toured and recorded with Y5k in the 1990s and early 2000s; and Brings Plenty collaborated on recording projects (and a few shows) after Y5k left the NorthWest and went truly global -- relocating to the Caribbean, Hong Kong and elsewhere. 

Year 5000 creator Mat Probasco currently lives and works in New York City's Harlem neighborhood, writing and recording an astonishing amount of music each year,  much of which found at www.year5000.bandcamp.com. The project has a revolving membership that has included Portland musicians from Brothers Young, Iretsu, and Hurtbird, whose song "Nolan" Y5k remixed in 2010. Probasco and coconspirators are currently working on three new collections in his "Harlemonium" studio -- including a German, French and Farsi language record.

Media contacts can contact Probasco directly at matprobasco@gmail.com and find him on Facebook at facebook.com/year5000.

The enclosed promotional album cover photo is copyright free for media use. More are available by request.

Hot buns ...

This video was super fun to make, maybe too fun. The site I lifted the visual element from said it was in the public domain, which I hope is true otherwise their's a neat lawsuit coming my way. Oh well ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4ffhaFyeN4

Music

A friend and musical collaborator once told me, though he knew me as well as -- maybe better than -- anyone on Earth, he had no idea where my songs came from. Their origins, inspirations, remained a mystery where the work of other songwriters in our circle he could easily pull apart.

I thought about this for a few years. My initial response was that my songs were/are existential -- dealing with the very nature of existence itself. Sounds nice. But then I had to examine what he Hell I meant by that. Here's what I came up with:

These tunes, and it almost always starts with a tune, seem to leap into my head. Maybe they grow slowly there overtime, building with the tempo of each footfall, or maybe they jump down in attack like a panther from some rainforest tree. I don't really know. But when they do come, it's usually as unpremeditated as a mudslide, meteor strike, or menstrual cycle. Sorry.

The lyrics are generally short on the tune's heals. Their success and poignancy is usually inversely proportionate to the amount of time they take to write. Usually. They too usually form in some dreamworld that I don't fully understand. Sometimes it takes years for their meaning to surface. Sometimes I know what they are about, but they've been cultivating in the backwaters of the mind for years.

Either way, in both instances, these aren't well plotted efforts. It's just ... I hate to way random, because it is not, but it is simply how the brain chooses to record and regurgitate that which it experiences.

Existential. Sometimes it's religious, dealing with acceptance of the inevitable disappearance of life, such as in this song. Sometimes it's dealing with the crush of material existence or a personal relationship with the larger world. Frequently, thankfully, I'm blessed to write about utter joy, such as here, here, and here.

Life is also completely ridiculous. Here are some of my favorite strange-as-the-universe songs:
http://year5000.bandcamp.com/track/julia-conspires-the-spacedragon
http://year5000.bandcamp.com/track/capture-the-goddess
http://year5000.bandcamp.com/track/glasses
http://year5000.bandcamp.com/track/grackle-saladbar


 

New Y5k album

I'll have more on this later, but here's the sneak preview of the new Year 5000 album, The Stranger's Gate.
http://year5000.bandcamp.com/album/the-strangers-gate

Stupid/Awesome Hong Kong T-shirts

Here's a collection of T-shirt designs sure to keep you guessing, all from those amazing fashion-forward HongKongese ...

I have a few others hidden away here at home, including "Play that music and fuck my ears off" and "Teenie Weenie, Fly to Your Dreams." Just waiting for the right moment to break these babies out.

Amazing stuff.

A Brief Word on Shut the Fuck Up

There is a siren that sounds in the New York City subway system when the emergency exit door adjacent the turnstile is opened. If you have an oversized bag or a bicycle, you can push the door open and this incredibly shrill, stabbingly oscillating whistle blares out like a long steel tine jabbed right into the center of your ear. It's a horrible experience, yet, incredibly, people seem more than willing to just push the portal of sonic death open for no reason. The sound is extraordinarily disturbing, alarming; it is, in fact, an alarm, meant by definition to jolt anyone in proximity into mild panic. Are these people pushing the door so deadened to their audio-environmental impact that they might as well be deaf? Are they purposefully calling attention to themselves, like so many barking purse dogs? 

I do not know the answer.

Please don't think I'm anti sound. I like sound. I even enjoy some annoying sounds. The Master Musicians of Jajouka are a sect of horn-blaring tribesmen in the Moroccan hill country dedicated to inducing panic in their victims/audience. The same can be said of early industrial music explorers, sound-collage artists, and vocal stylists like the nasally poet Steven Jesse Bernstein (whose masterwork "More Noise Please" says it all). 

My objection is to mindless noise created out of a lack of perception, forethought, and understanding of audio ecology. I'm anti sound pollution.

Walking through a crowded train station, it can be noisy and frustrating, but you would never think to scream, "Get the Fuck Outta My Way! MOVE IT!!!" The person that does this is general ostracized from the rest of society pretty quick — and winds up scratching around the street corner sneering exotic curse words. But, sit yourself down behind the mighty wheel of an automobile and you will surely find the motorist version of yourself is more than happy to lay on the horn. And forget about the crowded, noisy train station. This new glass-n-steel-encased you will HONK HONK at 6 am on an otherwise snowy-silent Christmas morning. HONK HONK HONK!!!

Vroooom vvrrrRRROOOOOMMMMM, goes the obscenely loud motorcyclist on his way to work. Pretty cool ... Pretty fucking lame. Jesus, did you ever consider none, and I mean none, of your neighbors want to hear you start that burbling, growling, ear-seizing toy. Shut the fuck up!

Now, too much of this kinda shit will give you a condition called tinnitus, where a tiny swarm of helium-breathing mosquitos nest in your ear and hum Penderecki compositions until the end of your days. As horrible as that sounds (nothing against K. Penderecki, by the way), that same void — the natural state of near silence — is filled purposefully almost everywhere you turn. Televisions barfing out hackneyed dramas and idiotically louder commercials are everywhere. Commercial radio is filled with the sort of sounds that make you want to stuff wet sand in your ears … actually, the stuff coming out of the radio sounds a lot like an ear full of wet sand, come to think of it. Nonsense. And the ubiquitous little white earbuds have at least three generations of people on any given street bobbing their heads around like mad dogs with neural conditions. At least the earphones are semi-private devices only imposed on others when used as extreme volume — that is until the listener begins to "sing."

But louder, and especially man-made louder, is better for some reason. Maybe always has been. 

I was at the beach with a friend the other day. Lots of people lunching behind us at the restaurant, even a TV on in the open bar, but none of it was audible over the soft wind, chattering laughing gulls, and fuzzy-tipped waves stroking the seashore. It was lovely … until the iPod and portable speakers came out. Suddenly a disco club broke out with shouts of "ooh, this is MY JAM!" When she went for drinks I slyly reached for the volume knob intending to inch it down. But I kept going, kept going, kept turning until once again it was just me and the birds, my heartbeat and the waves, the air in my lungs and the wind. "I wanted to hear the birds," I said when she returned. "Hear the birds? HaHa! That's crazy. The fricken birds." Disco.

I also object to air conditioners, overly loud fans (both the sports-cap wearing and bladed types), large trucks, big talkers, amplified church services, circling helicopters, barking dogs and children in general. But, worse than this background cacophony relentlessly painting camouflage print over the virgin forests of auditory potential, is the active removal of those sounds that are truly interesting and fun!

I spent part of the afternoon in the lobby of a large multi-national bank headquarters today watching two men — an oblivious security guard and a dopey, tattooed handyman — trying to remove the chirp from an escalator. I'd stood in this spot before and listened to the lovely chit-chirp-chit of the device. At first I thought it was a bird or two flitting around the large marble room but no, a ghost in the machine had something to say and the pseudo-natural squeak was delightfully anachronistic given the surroundings. But here were these two dopes — like white rhino hunters — yanking on the black rubber hand rail and spraying some sort of industrial badness in the sliding works. I won't recount the inanity of their conversation about the proper way to kill this rare bird, but from what I heard they were failing. For how long I don't know. Never underestimate the obsessive will power of a bored human bent on domination of his surroundings. 

An escalator in the bowels of the Times Square subway station is outfitted with little metal boxes that send out safety messages, and one especially unsettling: "Have a nice day." Jeez. Give me chills just thinking of it. Whose grew idea was this? Let's have a disembodied, Stepford wife robot wish the great slough of proletariat slumping by some meaningless nicety. Nice.

There's an antique tugboat that putters and sputters around the Hamburg harbor. It's fucking loud, but it's an honest sound. It's purposeful. It means something and it's out in an industrial harbor. I can get behind a sound like that, even advocate it. At the dock nearby, some very unGermanic planning has two sections of dock overlapping. As the rolling waves passed under the floating dock, the steel plates on either end rubbed together in a sound I can only describe as sickly dragons mating. It is a hideous noise … so much so that I once stopped to record about a minute of it. Here's a sound I can respect, but certainly not advocate. 

There's an ice cream truck in Harlem with one of those big white megaphone horns mounted on the roof that blares some nameless nursery tune embedded in the minds of all children raised in Western Culture. Normally I'd be more inclined to run than stop and listen, but this truck uses some sort of warped, mangled recording of this song stretched into wobbling perversion. It's lovely. I always stop and listen, sometimes standing in front of the machine wishing the driver would kill the refrigeration unit so the tape could play without the background rumble. The driver probably thinks I'm nuts.

My point wasn't to bitch. Here's my point.

Can we do something to make more interesting sounds, and less mindless ejaculations? Can we appreciate individual sounds for what they are, and let them shine through the otherwise sun-choking invasive species of portable radios and airport terminal televisions? Can we all stop, take a deep breath, and shut the fuck up for a second?

Aug. 4, 2011

Harlem, NYC

(PS -- Can you believe I spelled Jajouka, Penderecki, and Steven Jesse Bernstein correct on the first try!)