brainwaves from ZF FILMS on Vimeo.

@brainwashedcom – (as in brainwashed.com – home of the brainwaves festival) one of my all time favorite music news sources, touching upon the darker side of my listening soul, has joined the land of twitter. I attented Brainwaves in 08 and was deeply thrilled to finally see some of my old favorites: Peter Christopherson, Meat Beat Manifesto, Matmos, and Stars of the Lid. I was also introduced to some musicians such as Marissa Nadler, Glenn Jones (who I met there and learned he’d had his album worked on by one of my childhood friends and classmates, Anthony Esposito), Boduf Songs, His Name Is Alive and many others that enticed me. Brainwashed has always been at the forefront of musical discovery, finding and helping bring success to those bands that eventually grew to relative stardom (Antony, Amanda Palmer, Devendra Banhart, and on and on) but often being overlooked by the powers that they inspire.

Brainwashed deserves credit for pulling culture out of the cracks and feeding it to many who desperately need it, and while that occasionally comes with a low dosage of condescension, their reviews and headlines are usually surprisingly optimistic and pleasant, rarely crucifying their subjects. For a counter-culture online publication with a dedicated base of rabid, often darkly dressed fans, that’s quite impressive.

The bottom line is: if you want to be a step ahead of the music scene, pay attention to brainwashed. Listen to their podcasts. I too have been guilty of ignoring them from time to time, and for that I always kick myself. On their site, they are currently wondering what they’re going to do with twitter. If you’re listening, brainwashed: keep us informed. Remind us when you update, tell us when there are brainwashed bands playing shows, tell us when the DVD is coming, let us know whenever you see Gary Wilson covering himself with baby powder. Tell us pretty much anything, we’ll listen.

By the way, I must show pride, I got this shirt at Brainwavesfest2008 and I am in love. Thanks kranky.

These two nightmarish images were created for a 2 disc mix cd a few years back. There was no real reason for the mix except that I wanted to make one (usually the incentive is something like “impress a girl!” or “make my friends like this music by force!”) I tossed this together with a theme, as one might be able to tell from the artwork: Piano music. Not exclusively pianos, but every song on both discs featured a piano in some form or another. I know, that’s not hard to pull off, but I thought it was a nice effort. A lot of the music turned out to be spooky and weird, so I put together the spookiest, weirdest covers I could think of.

The cover to Nurse With Wound’s “Thunder Perfect Mind” had been stuck in my head, and the “Sharps” cover (top image) took heavy influence from that image. I compiled these elements in Photoshop and took used my wacom tablet to draw the “branches” gripping her hands, growing as her seat, and so on.

The other (bottom image) was derived, I believe, from some sort of nightmare I’d had a few nights prior. The shiny blurry bits that seem to fly toward the front of the image and fade behind the kid playing piano are actually CDs. My CD collection had been damaged in a recent beach-sand accident and one day I decided to dig through them and pull out all the ones that weren’t worth saving, systematically snapping them in half and throwing them in a trash can. Rather than throw them out, I thought, on this hot autumn day in Savannah, it might be interesting to solder them together into a collage. I took out a soldering iron and found that when I held 2 CDs next to each other and punched through them with the hot iron, they stuck together almost immediately. Awesome! I proceeded to make a canvas out of CDs, with the intent of later sticking on a bunch of different colored ones in a way that made an image. I snapped some pictures, one of which was used for this image, and then put the thing against my wall. Unfortunately, it proved too fragile when returning home from work the next day, closing the door behind me caused it to crumble apart before my eyes. Oh well. They ended up in the dumpster moments later. Such is life. At least they made it into SOME sort of artwork.