BSPH: Luther Allison - Meet Me In My Own Hometown

"Meet Me In My Own Hometown" is a song by American Blues guitar player Luther Allison. It was released in 1992 on an album titled "Hand Me Down My Moonshine". The song is an old school throwback acoustic folk blues with a strong minimalist vibe. It is an example of Luther Allison's exceptional talent of making something special out of whole bunch of nothing.

What is fascinating about this song is how little of the song there is and yet how big it feels. It makes an impression of The Song. (at least for me).

The arrangement is folk blues classic done to perfection. Luther Allison was the student of the game and he played with the greats like Howlin' Wolf. He knew how to make the song tick and not even break a sweat. He was the right stuff.

"Meet Me In My Own Hometown" is just a basic chord loop and a very simplistic even barebones set of repetitive lyrics laid on top of it always going back to the core refrain. The song starts with some cool blues guitar licks slowly setting in the tone and the mood of the proceedings - playful and somewhat tongue-in-cheek with that infinite overheated swamp dusty chill. This song does not really care about anything except for itself - it is here to have some good time and be excessively full of itself. This song just likes to be played. And it is really unusual to listen to a song with such an attitude.

The guitars swirl around the chords with fills zigzagging all over it like those flies. The groove it sets in is indelible and eerily irresistible. It is basic blues stomp, but it is done so well and with such mighty swagger you don't really need it to be anything else. The beat goes on so steady it seems like it was there forever and it can go on a couple of infinities and never get old.

"Meet Me In My Own Hometown" just circles around the core refrain going over and over again barely noticeably moving forward. In a way, it is a kind of sonic starfish. If you look at it - it seems like nothing is really happening, but if you shift your attention onto something else and then come back - it turns out a lot of stuff had changed in-between.

The song ebbs and flows back and forth starting mild and getting harder near the end of the verse with the strumming getting more intense and emotions wrapping up the vocals. Over the course of the song the tension showly grows. The whole thing culminates with breaking into mountain climbing dueling solos that go broadway in their swashbuckling fencing. It is like a pack of fireworks going off to fight the thunder and lightning Godzilla style.

The lyrics are also very interesting beast. It is structured as a sort of dreamy rambling conversation with a friend (probably an imaginary one). The protagonist asks whether his friend would meet him in his own hometown in the future so that they could have a big-big-big party there and the blues would be played all day and all night to the end of time and everything would be just fine just like this song. After a while a question morphs into a taunt but everything else stays the same.

Each sentence is capped with the phrase "...in my home home town". It is repeated to the point it looses even a semblance of meaning and turns into some kind of a wraths - a distant and obviously impossible dream. After a while, there is distinct feel of despair seems lurking deep in the background. It is very grim and bleak song wrapped into a feel-good hangout stomp like a mummy.

"Meet me in my home town" is a textbook example of classic blues "less is more" approach. There is just a little bit of the stuff and it kinda erupts upon the listener in the sweeping surge of cool.

Jack Smith Moustache Bra

This is "Jack Smith Moustache Bra" - a typographic composition. I believe it was made sometime in 2012.

This piece came together by accident. I was looking for the right font for the poster. The process was simple - i took the font, typed something with it and dropped that on a board. A couple of hours later I've noticed that the board was piled with stuff. Among else, there was a thing that resembled the image you can see.

It was a combination of ukrainian letters Ш та М in handwritten baroque font. And it stuck with me. I just couldn't get it out of my head. So after several iterations i came up with this version - it is somewhat differently organised. Instead of ukrainian Ш there is english W.

At that time it was just a neat piece. The title itself was brought up by Dmitry Volchek. For him the piece channeled that Jack Smith vibe.

The Beach Girls and The Monster - Uninspiring Beach Party

Here's one of the most unsettlingly pointless scenes ever conceived and put on film. Seriously. The scene makes so little sense in and out of its context it forces you to question the very foundations of reality cognition. Not really, but nevertheless. It is so null and void that after a while it seems like a glimpse into a parallel dimension. Your brain can't help but try to salvage wasted time and turn the thing into something at least remotely coherent and meaningful. And then it just gives up and accepts the ominous meaninglessness of the piece.

The scene originates from the 1965 film "The Beach Girls and The Monster". The film itself is a typical representative of a "beach party" film genre.

The scene goes like this: the first section is just a bunch of people dancing on the beach in the middle of the night. They are dancing away all the worries and woes. There is a kaleidoscope of little moments - random pairs of people dancing or enjoying the atmosphere, people playing music instruments, people being pranked with funny signs, slinker glasses and exploding tubes, women shaking hips, waving hands. Lots of lusty women shaking hips shots.

As the dawn approaches, the scene transitions into a more intimate setting. Two characters run away from the group and share a kiss. They find a desolate place to indulge themselves in passionate cuddling. That's when the creature starts slowly approaching them.

The creature looks like a man in the carnival suit and it would have been fine if it was like that in the film. Instead, this man in the suit is supposed to represent a mutant monster. We get another shot of the pair kissing but no monster to indicate the approaching threat.

Then the film cuts back to the party in the middle of the night right when the music stops and it seems like there is going to be an orgy. Except it is not and we get an acoustic number - a romantic ballad built on concrete cliches reinforced with saccharine rods.

Over this soundtrack we get more people kissing or preventing other people from kissing. No monster approaching though. After the song concludes, one of the character pulls out a lion mask and enacts a flirting exchange with one of the girls. It mentions a monster in a mocking fashion. It evolves into a singalong that describes what is going to happen when the monster comes around. And then everybody go surfing.

In the meantime, the pair that went away to cuddle joins them. But the girl forgot something in her bag and she asks her boyfriend to bring it back. That's when the monster attacks. The boy tries to fight the monster. It looks like the most awkward and unmenacing double arm wrestling bout.

At the same time, the man in the suit walks on the beach and sees what's happening. He cries for help but nobody reacts. Then monster continues to fight the boy until he finishes him off with a lethal blow. The monster moves on from the subtly mutilated body of a boy to continues his savage mayhem. The end.

Yes. I did this transcription.

"The Beach Girls and The Monster" came out right in the middle of the genre popularity in 1965.

It had all the right credentials. The surf footage was shot by Dale Davis of "Walk on the Wet Side" fame (who would go on to direct the ultimate surf film "The Golden Breed"). The theme song was written by Frank Sinatra Jr. The girls were pro Watusi dancers from Whiskey A Go Go.

But it also tried to broaded its appeal by implementing elements of the horror genre into a beach party film. If being 50s straightforward monster horror. So its logline would look like this: "people having a good time, looking good over a cool surf rock soundtrack. But this time there is a monster let loose and he wrecks havoc on the unsuspecting victims."

And it fails spectacularly. But it doesn't really matter.

Beach party films were not as much a narrative pieces as an ambient ones. They were all about the atmosphere, the vibe. The plot was there to reinforce the vibe, nothing else. It is about people enjoying life, overcoming the worries of the reality, experiencing a good time, looking good and being nice over a cool surf rock soundtrack.

Beach party films were throwaway disposable products designed to capitalize on the target audience segment by offering something relevant to their preferences. It was presented as an alternative to so-called "daddy's cinema". Despite its blatant cynicism and extreme vacuousness, for a while beach films were consistent money makers in the mid 60s and the genre helped to cement the status of surf rock in the popular conscioussness. "The Beach Girls and The Monster" is one of the few bizarre oddities of this era. It is a clueless cash grab so incompetent it becomes sublime in its clumsiness.

BSPH: Seek Seek Seek Seek - Trying to ask to look for juice

Sometimes it is a good thing to go though your old stuff. You can find something worthwhile. Like this piece.

The piece roughly translates as "Trying to ask to look for juice" which is actually a three different translations of the word "seek" into ukrainian and also a homophonic ukrainian word "juice". 

If you think about it - the way the sentence is composed is mindboggling and awkward - it it is very peculiar situation you can't really comprehend empirically. At the same time, it works as a statement which doubles down on the cognitive dissonance of the situation. 

It actually caused quite a stir back when it was first presented in 2014 at poetry reading in Lviv. I was even called "an abomination" and "language criminal" after that. And somebody had thrown a can of diet coke at me, and it was cool so i had a refreshing drink afterwards. It was fun.

Zur-En-Arrh Transmission: Jane Pow - State

This is a cover of an album "State" by the band Jane Pow. It was released in 1990 on Target Records. It is very listenable indie rock from early 1990s. Make yourself a favor and listen to it. This post is not about the music - it is about the cover of an album.

As it is - the cover for "State" is nothing really special. It is stylish minimalist cover with an evocative but at the same time vague and ambiguous image. The cover features a bullseye with blue, white and red colour stripes. The basic thing - you can throw darts at it if you want, or whistle Flight of the Valkyries while staring at it. The image is a little bit flattened with the aspect ration blown up to make it overstretched. Because of that it looks odd in that borderline slight manner - not really but definitely odd. That is what make it tick in a special way. 

Because the image is squished by the transformed aspect ratio - there is notion that something is wrong with it because it doesn't fit a preconception of the bullseye's appearance. That raises the caution which affects overall experience of the album.

That's why i thought it would be a good idea to mess with this image and add some intense wobbling effect to it to completely transform the thing into something of its own. 

The combination of colour and the circular shape provide a good material for distorted, contorted shapes. When you twist and turn the image in different directions at the same time - colourful circles go crazy and twirl into very different shapes. The wobbling effect is good due to its smoothness. Because of that, the results seems organic, as if it was a real paint strokes smeared on the canvas in a manic Clyfford Still episode.

It also looks somewhat calligraphic. The transformed pieces look like those drunk freestyle rave-ups of a chinese calligrapher Zhang Xu. It is less of a coherent documentation of information as an expression of the feeling's sudden onrush, ebb and flow. 

Check out for yourself.