Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Vic Chesnutt and me


Vic Chesnutt died on Christmas. Among many odd and inspiring songs, he wrote a great song off of his first album "Little" about Isadora Duncan.

 I saw him  in 2001 in Austin at SXSW.
Cerberus Shoal was booked to play the TRL label showcase for 45 minutes after a disturbing Oxbow performance. We had just finished our set. We were feeling raw and weird. (South by Southwest is comparable to a meat market for musicians.) 
I saw that Vic was playing right then at the Billiard Room a few blocks away. I cut out of the Cafe and ran like hell.  That night was chaos. People everywhere looking like Steven Tyler and Lita Ford.  Ike Turner was playing a comeback show next door. Lee Scratch Perry was on stage down the street. Wesley Willis was performing in some boardroom # 404. When I finally got to the venue, I convinced the bouncer that I was supposed to be there. He let me in.
  Climbing the stairs I was blown away by the scene in front of me. The bar couldn't be any more  different from where we had just played. Everything was gleaming gold and green. The bar was an enormous island in the middle of a vast sea of heads. About a dozen active pool tables were scattered throughout the venue. Vic wasn't on stage yet. I proudly celebrated my luck with a rare beer and pushed my way to the front of the stage.  Tina Chesnutt, Vic's wife, brought him onstage.  I could have touched him--not that I would ever touch a person while performing!
  A blonde cocktail waitress brought him a beer --per his request and got pissed when he didn't pay her. He hadn't a dime on him and neither did Tina. The Waitress left the stage yelling something about her manager! 
 It was a funny opening to what blurred into a dreamy show. Just Vic and his guitar for the first few songs, then he was joined by two other musicians who harmonized beautifully. His voice was like a powerful buzz saw cutting through the din of the bar. So much character and foul mouthed commentary emanating from such a seemingly fragile frame. My memory of the performance itself is watery and gleaming. It was like being galvanized. The complete environment surrounding me with color and sound. At it's center was this giant personality who played for months on repeat in my room, now singing songs right in front of me. I had fallen hard for "Little" and a handful of songs off "About to Choke" used as a soundtrack for many of dancer/writer/choreographer Buffy Miller's performances. 
  It was a life changing experience and a rare treat to escape from my bandmates and have such a magical experience.  It was in the cards for me that night to see Vic play and I will hold that memory for as long as I can.

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

"may your days be merry and bright" -Irving Berlin

My friend Tom explained that Irving Berlin wrote the song White Christmas while staying in Arizona during the holidays. We were sitting around our little tree singing christmas tunes and the words to that song in particular feel real. I love the idea of this man sitting in sweltering heat wishing for snow as I sit in arctic Maine also wishing for snow.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

DTTR New release! Brother Oak 10/10/09

The final days of swimming in ice cold Maine water, (while it's actually sweltering outside) are over and we have been very verrry verrry busy! Amidst work, school, bills, pumpkins, recording, birthdays, camping, apple picking, dancing and dishes we here at  Dontrustheruin Records have come out with a gorgeous new  release.  Brother Oak is our brother in life and music. He shines...
 Fall is here! 



Thursday, August 20, 2009

Last weekend we saw...

Below are photos from The Waterfall Arts Festival in Montville, Maine
12,000 Trees

What Cheer? Brigade rocked the RO HE GE  Barn and made us all shake our tail feathers
 Uke of Space County Corners crooned and bloomed--always with the most beautiful voices and sounds. They are my absolute favorite band to listen to --on record and live!
We played almost all new stuff and improvised alot

Daniel Higgs conjured and testified by the fire fumbling for light in the dark.

The shows were awesome and exhausting, the people we met and walked with and talked to ruled. 
Daniel Higgs

Thank you to our hosts Dan, Amy, Drew, Rose, Andy and Claire.

NO shows till October but planty of music coming out on Time lag, DTTR and more.


Below are photos from The Waterfall Arts Festival in Montville, Maine



Sunday, August 9, 2009

terribly exciting...three shows with Daniel Higgs

For those of you who don't know Daniel Higgs, he is the wordsmith and voice of Lungfish and The Pupils. His poetry and art have been published worldwide. Higgs is a visionary artist whose presence and performances inspire very strong reactions. I link the title of the blog..just click on it will ye!

First show August 14th...Friday Festivities ....BIG Big nite at RO HE GE  
12 Mill Ln Belfast,  Maine

Higgs & Echolepsy
Big Blood
Uke of Spacial Corners
Over a Cardboard Sea
What Cheer Brigade!
Starts at 7PM 

Sunday show at Waterfall Arts
RAIN OR SHINE!!!!
SUN AUG 16th
12-12:45pm Belfast Bay Fiddlers
1-1:45pm 12,000 Trees
2-2:45pm Perpetual E-Motion
3-3:45pm BIG BLOOD
4-4:45pm FRIGATE
5-6pm 
DANIEL HIGGS

@ WATERFALL ARTS KINGDOM FALLS
52 KINGDOM ROAD MONTVILLE MAINE 04941
time-lag records presents:
MONDAY, AUGUST 17th
  • DANIEL HIGGS
  • BILL NACE
  • BIG BLOOD
  • ASA IRONS
@ the apohadion, 107 hanover st., portland maine. 8pm. $5.00

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Tapes Rule


Holy tapes that look and sound good! 

Our friends and compadres from Athens, Greece a.k.a.Reverse Mouth totally rule!! One member, Panagiotis runs a label here. He put a lovely tape version of our album The Grove about a year ago. I just love his taste in paper and print.

 We played two shows with Reverse Mouth two weeks ago at a barn in Conway, Mass withHorse Spirit Penetrates(love love love 'em), a solo performance from Human Adult Band which stole my heart, and Michael Jackson--michael thomas jackson that is. (I have to add a side note...I truly hate the formatting, messaging and pop up freak-out-ness of myspace. However the upside of that ruinous marketing tool is that we can all go to these band sites and hear what people are doing right now... and for that i am sort of thankful.)
i drew during almost all of the sets at the barn show.
 Thanks to Kieran for his superior hospitality, HSP's killer set, and bear hugginess. We stayed up waaaay to late--not being parents just music-cans, riding the crazy frenetic moshing energy of the night and taking cracks at lame contemporary singers while defending Sade, thanks to the late night crew.
The pawtucket show was more serious and somber. we wer lucky to play with Uke of spaces and lucky they played on our set. Soo many friends came out it was overwhelming and awesome. I forgot my camera or maybe i left it at home on purpose. Here's the scrawling diary like snapshots of our two day "tour".







 

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

maybe this link will make you laugh...click on it


DTTR's been busy...


we heart WFMU and WFMU hearts Big Blood here

our friend Patrick set up our home base at the archives where you can download alot of albums here

We are actually playing two shows out of town!!! One in Western Mass and another in Pawtucket, RI

go here for details


 


Tuesday, May 12, 2009

New DTTR Releases that we loooove







Good to be home!

We are getting ready for a relaxing summer… hopefully…

Anyway… we just released 4 new albums two by us, Already Gone I & II and here's the deal on the other two...

dttr #015 Inspector 22 “The Waiting Grave”

  Inspector 22 is the brainchild of Todd Wesley Emmert.  Residing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, “The Waiting Grave” is the follow up to IRNI which we released a little over a year ago. IRNI was one of our all time favorites… but we gotta say “The Waiting Grave” is even better. It kills. To hear somebody hit "it" on every song is just mind-blowing; needless to say we are big fans. 

The song ‘Cannibal’ could be an all time classic. Really you could say that about every song on this album. We can’t recommend it enough.

dttr#016  Accident Child – “Into the Gorge”

    Before we started doing the DTTR label we were both finding ourselves only listening to music of the past. For one, there’s so much great music that has come and gone, and truthfully it was getting harder and harder to relate to music happening today. So one of the greatest things for us to do is to release music we love, by people living today… peers, friends etc. “Into the Gorge” came to us through a CD trade and man were we hooked right from the beginning, We played this one over and over on our car rides this past summer.

Matt Norris is Accident Child. If you had to describe it, loner folk would be as good a term as any. Reminds us a bit of Tuli from The Fugs or King Darves. A real intimate listen. “Into the Gorge” plays out like a life story, from birth to present. Matt’s words sneak up on you and tell their story with a delivery akin to the masters. This one is a real gem!

All 4 new dontrustheruin releases can be ordered from

here, here, and here


In other news, we, Big Blood have finished up an album for Time-Lag called “Dead Songs”, another for the label Peasant Magik called “Operators and Things”, and a tape for Cabin Floor Esoterica called “Night Terrors in the Isle of Louis Hardin” all due out…. well who knows… but that’s the word!

Recommended listening – Exuma, Our Poor Neighbors, Garm, Brother Oak, Uke of Spaces, Radikal Satan, Kletka Red, Missy Elliott.

  



Sunday, April 26, 2009

Already Gone I & II


Here's the newest news...
Updates for those of you looking forward to our new double disc ...we have finished printing the covers, inserts and extras. We've assembled and packed them all up and they look very nice if we do say so ourselves. 
WFMU wants Big Blood and our new cds on their new Free Music Archives  feature article. If you don't know about WFMU is a terrific station in New Jersey that has killer dj's and programs that you can download for free. Our new cds and the whole Big Blood catalogue will also be available for download through the Free Music Archives.  
Time Lag will be getting the hard copies by May 15th as well  as North East Indie and Tomentosa Records. 
  

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Sovereignty you...


Busy busy couple of weeks...and we still have one more show to go!

Big Blood plays Guthries on April 17th in Lewiston with Jessy Kendall and Denise Dill. We were asked to play because a friend of ours JK asked us-- and filmmaker Craig Saddlemire used our song Sovereignty You Bitch for a soundtrack to his film "Neighbor by Neighbor", a documentary about a 'visible community's fight' to be heard. Sovereignty You bitch is here thanks to Patrick. A link to hear and download Sovereignty




Tower of Song was wonderful... thank you to Alicia and Will for patiently waiting for us to get ourselves together enough to leave the house. Quinnisa had a great time too. What's not to love about playing up high in a tower among friends while your kiddo claps and even sings along to your cover of The Cult.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

relative-ity




Our Thanks to everybody who came out on Sunday night for the Meg Perry Center Benefit.  Attar Cups were absolutely  lovely...Uke of Spaces Corners were f-ing magical!  Their friend Caleb played french horn, guitar. 
We had post-show late night jams that made all the pre-show stress worth it!

We had a great time playing and singing our faces off. Our set consisted of mostly new tunes written for the show soon to be out on our very own Dontrustheruin records. Caleb covered Missy Elliot's "Pussy Don't Fail Me Now". I played two songs "New Eyes" and "Dreadful Hope" off of our upcoming Time Lag release.

Speaking of new releases...
Our newest CD-R wont be posted for another week. Caleb is responsible for this...he doesn't like the quicky home made  Cdr we put together for the night of the show. I handmade 15 covers and sold out of 'em all. So those are the only ones out there. We are getting together a double cd for the Tower of Song show this Friday.


We play Guthries  Lewiston, Me on April 17th.
(more details as they come)


All of our releases are available at our friend Paul's distro  North East Indie
He's fully stocked up as of today!

Thanks to Lee lee for taking fotos of us and showing your killer art.


Monday, March 23, 2009

countdown(to fun)

   5  days until the Meg Perry Center show with Uke and Attar Cups and our new CD-R!  
                                      2 days until we play Portsmouth radio
                                          9 days until we play tower of song!


Friday, March 13, 2009

Barbed Beauties



 The Violent Femmes  were playing on our local radio station yesterday.   . The bass player's amazing spazzy lines and Gordon Gano's strained PMS-ee vocals ripped right to the bone. The raw, surreal and the real of their music  brought up the idea/luxury of making music and art on your own terms. About aspirations to make beautiful and deadly marks on paper and sounds in the air. Deadly as in exposing a truth.
Although I am seduced by beauty everyday . I believe it comes at a sharp and terrible price and so nothing --for me, can be just beautiful. My most powerful experiences with art and music are where the dark and dirty meet the opulescent beauty. Briefly exposed to sunlight in a burst of fire but never changing the works inherent grit.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

music on this thing!


can anyone out there help us put our music up on this blog or link to downloads?
 We want to put all our stuff up since grown so ugly has been taking a break from the bloggosphere.



Friends and blog 'followers' already have alot of our stuff up on the interweb. So instead of repeating them I'll just link you to them. That way you can see their sits and download big blood and hear it all from people who actually like the music not write the music!

Here's Captain Groovy's site The Real Nitty Gritty
and Peter html whiz The Pessimist Club

Eventually we'll probbly post our stuff but for now we'll start with some tunes you may not have heard...coming soon.

We do play out...sometimes

like on March 20 at Space we assist our friend and musician Chriss Sutherland as he releases his solo CD "Worried Love".

On  March 29th at Meg Perry Center in Portland with Uke of Spaces & Attar Cups.  

On April 3rd for the Tower of Song on Congress St. 

.


Big Blood doing "Hangman" @ Danimal's in NOHO
                                                                                                                                                                 

Big Blood and Visitations doing Blondie's "Heart of Glass"at Wickermania 3   
under the tent at Shannon & Bev's. 




Thanks to Sita Magnuson for the use of the photos

wonderful and terrible sounds



speaking of, have you heard these sounds?

Uke of Spaces Corners are on tour right now! This terrific pair of human beans make exquisitely lovely human folk music that truly make us happy.

Inspector 22 has a killer release coming out on our label.  All about death and cannibals and more dark and awesome things. 


Our Poor Neighbors have our heart in his hands.

"Such wonderful and terrible sounds I is hearing!" he said. "Some of them you would never wish to be hearing yourself! But some is like glorious music!" His face was beautiful in its blaze of emotions.
                                                            
 Roald Dahl, The BFG


Monday, March 9, 2009

what the future brings...

We are working on one if not two Big Blood new releases for our upcoming show at the Meg Perry Center on March 29th in Portland, Maine.


We have an actual piece of vinyl coming out on 
Time Lag Records with new Big Blood songs.

Unitl then here's an older video of Vitamin C live 
here.


(Thanks to Peter for the html heads up!)

the fear that comes when you are not making...

[...When I don't write, there is a very strange moment when I go to sleep.  At that moment in a sort of half sleep,  all of a sudden I'm terrified by what I'm doing. I tell myself: "you are crazy to write this", and there is a kind of panic in my subconcious...How I interpret this is: when I am awake working, in a certain way I am more unconscious than in my half sleep. When I'm in that half sleep there is a kind of vigilance that tells me what I am doing is very serious. But when I am awake and working the vigilance is actually asleep. It's not the stronger of the two. And so I do what must be done.]  Jaques Derrida, interview

the link is in the blog post title 

a link to a great link to a great link




A nice guy who wrote alot of nice things about us 
detailed twang

Our favorite station in Jersey and beyond
WFMU

Music we love and put out on Dontrustheruin Records



Dontrustheruin Records is just us. We started up out of necessity wanting to self publish our own music without having to move a record through a label. We do everything ourselves with the exception of selling the discs through some friendly low key distributors.  We ask our friends and favorite living musicians if we can put out their music. Then we hand screen-print covers and Cd-R's, package them all up real nice and send the music out all over the world. Whoever writes us gets a CD-r if they are patient enough. 
Here are some of our releases: (Grown So Ugly blogspot has almost all of our releases available for down load in addition to reviews and other links. I can't figure out how to make Html tags yet so you must do the searching....if you know how to, please tell us)

 DTTR012 Big Blood & the Bleedin Hearts  
DTTR011 Uke of Spaces Corners  -  Watershed
DTTR010 Inspector 22 - IRNI
DTTR009 Big Blood - The Grove
DTTR006 &007 Big Blood -  Sew your Wild Days Vol 1 & 2 
DTRR008 Garm - Zeros 
DTTR005 Big Blood - Sahara Club & Space Gallery 1.27.07
DTTR004 Big Blood - Strange Maine 1.21.07
 DTTR003 Big Blood - Strange Maine 11.04.06
 DTTR001 Asian Mae - Collsing

write us here or contact us through our email address bigblood24@yahoo.com

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Big Blood falls for a thousand years...






begin the begin,

...and the noise of sound hitting the ground 
   and the winds we wheeze with ease
   and in every finale the bang is around me 
   we explode with the sound and the sea
   singing our family's song
   big blood rolls on