2013 november issue

November 2013

November 2013

MUSIC Soothes THE Savage BLOWING WIND: Writing about MUSIC for

the Sake of Fulllling a D-R-E-A-M

DARK ARTIST

MISTER SAM turns industrial

ROCK STAR AL JOURGENSEN

Into a COMIC BOOK HERO

SOUL

/ index /

/staff/ Ellen Eldridge Russell Eldridge Victor Schwartzman Michelle Cruz Danielle Boise Leah Bishop

Editor in Chief Operations Poetry Editor Design Editor Music Editor Copy Editor

Cover image photo of Oteil Burbridge (The Allman Brothers) by Michael Bradley of RockHousePhoto.com

Editorial: Music Makes Me Real........ 3 Writing music blog: The Great Southern Brainfart’s Don de Leaumont is doing it right....................... 4 Interview with composer for “Dr. Who”..............................6 Poetry review: Listen to this prairie voice....................... 12 Deconstruct, reconstruct: Ministry’s Al Jourgensen talks about The Devil’s Chord.....................14

Want to contribute or advertise? email ellen@targetaudiencemagazine.com

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November 2013

By Ellen Eldridge, Editor-in-Chief When I’m sad, anxious, feeling lost or uninspired, music is the place I go to find comfort, stability, a place to call home and the motivation to create something. Instead of watching or trying to make sense of the relationships falling apart around me, wondering when my happiness would come, I turned the music up and drowned the world out.

I focused on the poly-rhythms rather than the poly-problems. I found my way through the darkest parts of adolescence into adulthood by subtracting out the overwhelming everything, resolving to stay inside that one perfect lyric. The one thing that made perfect sense at that moment.

I focused on the poly-rhythms rather than the polyproblems. I found my way through the darkest parts of adolescence into adulthood by subtracting out the overwhelming everything, resolving to stay inside that one perfect lyric. The one thing that made perfect sense at that moment.

Thinking back to what I could accomplish by digging my way through an album by Tool, Radiohead, Tori Amos or Ani DiFranco, I realize I found assurance and hope in the layered lyrics and multiple meanings. Analyzing songs was always easier than figuring out and finding friends.

I wrote personal poetry with words shrouded in metaphor, attempting to find catharsis and camaraderie without openly confiding in any one individual. I made mistakes with relationships and soothed the burn time and time again with the angry, the intense, the passionate music that meant absolutely everything when I felt I had lost everything.

Over the past few years, I’ve realized I’ve lost touch with many of the emotions in music process that wasn’t part of my particular healing. I wrote a review of Nine Inch Nails where I boiled down the parallel lives of Trent Reznor and me by accepting that we each grew up.

We used our demons as our bitches, created art from pain and moved on.

Of course, Reznor revisits those broken feelings, scraping the bottom of his soul to continue his art. Me, on the other hand—I go back into those albums with headphones on searching for respite and for peace. When I’m frustrated or unmotivated, the first albums I reach for are by Tool, Radiohead, Tori Amos or Ani DiFranco.

Music is personal and in step with the moments that build us up, strengthen our character and drive us on. In sadness we break down only so far as we need to clutch our catharsis.

This issue is dedicated to the hope that catharsis yields the inspiration music brings us as artists.

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The Great Southern Brainfart: Don de Leaumontestival

The Great Southern Brainfart founder Don de Leaumont meets Iron Maiden guitarist Janick Gers on de Leaumont’s 40th birthday, September 5, 2013. The encounter made Don’s day, but he just said thank you.

Acceptance of personal freedom, accountability and integrity are the qualities founder of The Great Southern Brainfart, Don de Leaumont, portrays. He tells it like it is and never apologizes for liking what he likes. His music reviews are pure to his sense of musical style, and this makes his followers kindred spirits because de Leaumont doesn’t pander to anyone nor does he need money to propel his dream of being a music journalist.

The photo above appears on de Leaumont’s personal Facebook profile. He describes the matter-of-fact meeting of one of his favorite icons.

“After having a couple of drinks at the hotel bar, Lizzi and I were walking to get some dinner and I saw Iron Maiden guitarist Janick Gers across the street just 4

kicking it solo,” de Leaumont said. “He saw a huge group of maiden fans walking toward him so he just ducked his head and kept walking, and nobody noticed him. He turned the corner and we followed him up this dead-end street and I just casually said,

‘Excuse me Janick, I don't wanna bug you, but I just wanna say thank you for all the music you've made with Maiden and Bruce over the years.’

According to de Leaumont, Gers just stopped and

November 2013

smiled. Lizzi then said to Gers, “It's his 40th birthday today and all he wanted to was to see you guys tonight, and, honestly, I think you just made his day.”

That’s when Gers said,"Well then let's get a photo with the birthday boy shall we?"

“So for those of you afraid of getting old or slowing down, THIS is what 40 looks like. Pretty fun huh?” was the way de Leaumont wrapped up his story.

He writes his blog in the same way, where he cares about the content more than the technical aspects of writing (see his website banner and tagline above). The Great Southern Brainfart is a personal blog, but it’s done with such sincerity and pride that the website averages hundreds of daily hits.

“I average about 300-500 hits a day at this point, but I feel that people who come to this page do so because they truly enjoy the content of it,” he said.

The Great Southern Brainfart began in 2009, after de Leaumont and his wife moved from North Carolina to Atlanta. “Mrs. Brainfart,” as Don has referred to his wife and partner, accepted a job that afforded him the opportunity to follow his dream of writing.

“I’ve wanted to be a hard rock/metal writer ever since I was a teenager reading RIP Magazine and watching Headbanger’s Ball in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s,” de Leaumont said. “Lonn Friend and Riki Rachtman both made it look so cool and I aspired to be those guys.”

Though the heavy metal interviewers inspired his blog, de Leaumont didn’t want to be just a person asking the same questions that every interviewer asks.

“I loved those those two guys,” de Leaumont said about Friend and Rachtman, because they always seemed to not so much interview bands as engage in a conversation with them.

“The bands seemed to really like those guys and even treat them as friends somewhat,” de Leaumont said.

Experience proves over and over that those who get into a business because of a pursuit of passion are the most likely to succeed, and de Leaumont’s blog The Great Southern Brainfart is no exception.

Engaging with and conversating with the musicians that most rock his face inspired de Leaumont to write. He writes and performs his own music, and has the perspective to genuinely talk to musicians about the creative process, what it takes to make an album and how to react to fans.

“I just got started doing album reviews and concert reviews,” de Leaumont said. “I would then email them to band’s labels and PR people, and, eventually, I started getting emails about covering other bands’ shows and albums. It just steadily grew into what it is now and it continues to grow slowly but surely.”

As far as monetizing his website, de Leaumont has no interest in it because he simply doesn’t need the money, and money was never the reason for doing what he does. The website comes from a point of passion for music and passion for sharing his thoughts; de Leaumont stays true to this idea and keeps his niche content without targeting a specific audience. He writes about what he wants, hoping to help local as well as national acts.

“I feel that if I started to monetize, then I have to start dealing with advertising, money, business and I would much rather put that energy into developing content and giving my loyal following good shit to read.” de Leaumont said. http://thegreatsouthernbrainfart.com/

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doctor who?

By Tillman Smoot

MURRAY

GOLD

Murray Gold is the musical composer for one of television’s longest running and most popular shows of all time, “Doctor Who.” In 2005, the BBC brought back the show after a hiatus that many spanned almost an entire generation. Since then, the cast, show runners and producers of “Doctor Who” have all changed at least once, but it has been composer Murray Gold that has been there for every episode since The Doctor returned to our screens.

“Doctor Who” has been a life changing experience for Gold.

Working on the show has required him to reinterpret the series’ iconic musical theme multiple times and he has even had his “Doctor Who” compositions performed twice at the Royal Albert Hall in London, England. On November 23rd of this year, Murray’s music can be heard during the 50th anniversary episode of “Doctor Who,” which the BBC is airing at the exact same time all around the world.

Murray Gold’s resume may be filled with episodes of “Doctor Who,” but he isn’t just limited to a show about a time traveling alien saving the universe.

Along with his lengthy career of musical composition in television and movies.

Gold has written plays, ballets and radio plays.

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In the past few years, Gold has won the Imison Award for Best Script by a New Writer for his radio play “Electricity” and the Tinniswood Radio Drama Award for Best Radio Drama Script for “Kafka: The Musical.”

To find out how Gold ended up in such a unique and coveted position, it requires a fairly rare discussion about his youth.

While he currently resides and works in New York City, he was raised and began his education in a naval town on the south coast of England.

“I went to an all boys grammar school in Portsmouth.

Most of your readers might not know what an English grammar school is, but it’s basically a school that you have to take an exam to get into. I came out of there and went to Cambridge University and studied history. While I was at university, I was in bands and wrote a lot of music for theater productions. After Cambridge I had a couple shows at the Edinburgh Festival, then I started writing music for theater.”

November 2013

Graduating from such a well known and prestigious university didn’t have the immediate payoffs for Gold that he was looking for.

Like most of us, for a few years after his time at the university, he found that making a living as an artist proved to be difficult.

“When I was in my twenties, I went back home and felt terrible about myself and I didn’t know how anything was going to happen. That was probably the most difficult time of my life. I sort of believe that your twenties should be a part of your education, but (especially in England) most people don’t do post-grad. A lot of people leave full time education at 21, and there are those that leave at 18 and don’t even go into further education.“ “I remember my dad used to say to move up to London and do some journalism and I would say ‘that’s not what I want to do. That’s not who I am.’

But, I think he had a point.

Sometimes it’s best just to get things going. I was pretty hardcore about what art was in those days.

You know how some young people are so ‘I’m not going to sell out! I don’t want to do television. I would never do television.’ It was all theater and novels and the more avant-garde it was, the better.

There was only certain kinds of theater I liked... not the commercial theater... unless it was Chekov or Strindberg. I was kind of like a miserable twenty something. A moody, miserable, little git.“

I was doing things and getting a reputation for writing music for theater. Then, one day somebody from television came and asked if I wanted to write some music for a documentary he was making. So, I did a few documentaries, and then I did drama... I was quite lucky, I suppose.”

Then, in the late nineties, a personal tragedy would would forever change his life and define who he is today. “I was still back in Portsmouth in 1996 when my brother died. My brother dying was a major jolt.

I had been really depressed up until that point and then I had a reason to be depressed. It had the galvanizing effect of sort of saying ‘to hell with all that depression nonsense.’”

The emotional struggle with his brother’s death led to Gold taking on some work that he might have previously turned away.

“I’d gotten a job writing soap opera scripts. I’d managed to convince this show-runner that I would be a perfect writer for this show. I ended up writing hundreds of episodes of this show, and then the next year I started working with this guy named Mark Munden on a documentary, who a little later came to me and told me he’d been asked to direct “Vanity Fair”, a BBC costume drama. He said that he really wanted me to do the music for it. It was really out there musically. It was my first television job, and I’d done a lot of theater, so I was a bit like ‘it’s television, who cares?’”

“So, we got this really out of tune brass band to make this really decadent sounding theatrical music.

When comparing his post-educational experiences to those that people may currently find themselves in, Gold does think that technology has changed the playing field.

“I had been putting my work out there, but of course nowadays it’s easier to do that. The question is, can you have anybody listen to it?

What I mean by easier is that there are just ways of sitting in your house and making something go public that weren’t available in the nineties when I had left university. But, I was getting out and about.

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November 2013

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When asked about where the idea for “Kafka” had come from, Gold explained.

“I’d always joked about writing a musical about Kafka. I thought it was one of those jokes that was never going to be a thing. I told Jeremy Mortimer, who was the producer of the radio play, and he told me to go write it. So, I’ve won two radio play awards and I was just absolutely amazed and thrilled because I’d been doing music for a long time, and it was lovely to get acknowledged for these plays.”

Before winding up the interview, Gold did have one serious piece of advice:

“Get up early, work, eat lunch, have an afternoon nap and then do another session of work. Don’t lose the afternoon nap! That’s the best thing in the world.”

The End

, WORK have an afternoon NAP

“Get up early, E AT L U N C H , and then

Do Another Session Of

WORK. THE afternoon NAP! T h a t ’s t h e DON’T LOSE

BEST thing

IN THE

WO R L D.” 10

November 2013

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Listen to this Prairie voice

By Victor Schwartzman, poetry editor

Atlanta is about as far from the Prairies as you can get.

If you are reading this on the Internet, you yourself are, statistically speaking, almost certainly not living on the Prairies. If you have never lived on the Prairies, the sky is a river, the clouds rushing overhead with nothing to stop them--no mountains, no tall buildings or even trees. You can see thirty miles in any direction, the earth is flatter than a pancake, and there is nothing but you unprotected and the world.

There are towns and cities, isolated from each other by canola or corn or wheat or nothing. Prairie communities developed whatever they could not carry in on their backs. While life today has all the usual comforts, the weather remains extreme. The climate of Winnipeg (where your Poetry Editor lived for 25 years) is similar to Siberia.

The weather and landscape and hard work has an impact of the people living there. The stereotype of a Prairie person is private, respectful, wary, slow to act. That sounds like a lot of people. What is the difference in the Prairie voice? A poet from Brooklyn (your Editor was born and raised there) might write about personal loss in a style best described as IN YOUR FACE. How might a Prairie poet write about loss?

GONE

pened—a death, a break up, a simple day trip—is not important. The poem is about the images: the house is rented, not permanent. The preserves are an attempt to make something seasonal permanent. Autumn in a glass jar is an image of the end of growth and stocking up for a harsh winter—or just a nice gesture.

“Gone” is included in “Yes,” the first book of poetry from Rosemary Griebel. “Yes” was published in 2011

by Frontenac House (Calgary, Alberta, www.frontenachouse.com.) and was received very favourably when published. We’re getting to it two years later, and that’s because it is worth reminding readers about.

Griebel grew up on an Alberta farm. Does that mean the poetry is about corn and dirt and bugs? Tending crops? Carving venison? Not, the Brooklyn poet is saying, that there is anything wrong with corn and dirt and bugs and killing Bambi’s mother.

Prairie people tend to relate to the environment from a stronger basis than a cartoon. The following poem is a good introduction to a young woman growing up on the Prairies: ON FIRST HEARING A RECORDING OF VIRGINIA WOOLF The winter I was seventeen I devoured all of your books one after the other, and imagined your voice like that of my mother’s, traveling down a long hallway from a room distant as childhood. You spoke of the triumph, jingle and strange, high singing of life – in its midst the feeling of being suspended above earth, alone.

Even then, I knew there were birds that flew by night, though I couldn’t see them or the land they left behind.

This is the world without you: the decanted light of winter, a rented house on the riverbank, your apple preserves in the pantry holding autumn in a glass jar.

Every life is a kind of fiction, all longing, a dream. I turn the pages and the lives of Mrs. Ramsay, Prue and Lily Briscoe follow.

Now, coming out of silence, echoey and static on an old recording – your words with their plummy, ornate British tones, certain as Bond street, girls in pink muslin, iron cooking pots and a lighthouse.

This sudden surge of tenderness: Here you are, Virginia!

Nothing loud. There is rural imagery, although more in the absence of concrete or neon. What has hap12

Of course, Prairie girls of 17 would be interested in

November 2013

Virginia Woolf for the same reasons Woolf’s writing struck a resonate chord in seventeen year old girls in Manhattan. The poem is straightforward and direct, part of being a Prairie voice. It helps if you know Woolf and what a ‘room of your own’ means, but if you don’t know that you probably would not be reading the poem to begin with (which means you really should read some Woolf.)

Prairie issues these days, at least in Alberta, include industrial pollution. In the past, most pollution probably came from the chemicals used on farms, where there were farms in Northern Alberta. The oil sands project now dominates that part of Canada, fully supported by the government. Separating the oil from the earth is a complex, dirty process. Many Canadians, including me, are concerned about how the oil is produced, the impact on the local environment, and the dangers of shipping it by pipeline or railroad.

NATURE II

for food and profit. Griebel writes of the relationship honestly, tongue partly in cheek.

THE PIGS Maybe it was the way we became animals.

The rusty smell of turning meat on the grill, the private urges of the bedroom, memory, the summer heat and the women arriving in his truck, night after night. The women arriving with pink purses, thinking they were safe from the street. And the pigs sleeping, making those little noises that pigs make when they sleep. Their velvet ears the size of a man’s hands. And what they can do.

The hands of one man.

Or maybe it was the season. Fall coming on and that heavy light dragging across the land.

The details deepened the day.

We couldn’t talk because there is no justice when you know nothing is as it seems, nothing the same.

You remember the simple smell of dirt while driving winter roads to Fort McMurray where malls are overweight with stuffed shoppers who cannot consume enough in this new Eden.

As a child you burrowed deep into leaf rot and worm tunnel, inhaled darkness of badger and bone.

Remembering how as a teenager I fed pigs, an age when the boys in big trucks talked about porking the girls, and I loved their eyes. I loved the soft light of the pigs’ eyes when they looked up from the trough. They trusted me to feed them, would eat anything: fermenting grain, bones, cabbage heads. Aren’t we all born into a trust with this world? And with what measure and certitude do we get into sorrow’s truck and ride.

Paradise: earth, breath, sky above.

It was before you understood you were Adam, cast-out into a world that had to be remade and renamed, a new world, marked with hungry ghosts of gas wells, methane skies, misshapen seasons, dirty brine feeding the exhausted snow of winter.

Yet somewhere in you lives that green memory of a time when the land lay down at night and listened to the moon, carrots were sweet and orange on the tongue, poppies bloomed the colour of summer. Everything was connected.

Ancestors wheeled among the galaxies, and earth was home.

“Yes” contains several sections, many poems and plenty o’ themes. Her Helen Keller poems haven’t even been mentioned. Throughout all of the writing there is a directness that is refined by a Prairie gust. The book starts with a quote from e.e. cummings, I imagine that yes is the only living thing.

Griebel notes in the acknowledgements at the end of the book, “What we listen for in poetry is a way of being in the world, a way of knowing.”

What used to be a relatively pristine wilderness now reeks of methane and boasts poisoned water.

Living on the Prairies does not mean only adjusting to the environment.

You live with the animals you raise

The last poem in the book is a knowing way of looking at modern Alberta and our lives. www.frontenachouse.com

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Deconstruct; reconstruct: exposing the pumpkins’ insides

By Ellen Eldridge

Sometimes, the music itself becomes weight-bearing, crushing the creator. Ministry

back to his music as if some piece of him knew our phone call had a point, but the truth was I didn’t have but three questions—and I

frontman Al Jourgensen has had his fists in any projects and tried more than once to step away from music altogether.

Haunted by the loss of his best friend, he finished the most recent Ministry release to honor Mike Scaccia, Ministry’s guitarist who passed late December 2012.

He then redirected his thinking 14

“Deconstruct, construct, he said. “Like my music.”

Without hesitation, because it made perfect sense to me too, I asked what he was using to piece the pumpkins back together. “Duct tape, glue and stitching,” he said describing what he called his “weird fascination.”

When Al Jourgensen answered the call to discuss the 13-issue series comic coming out by dark artist Mister-Sam Shearon, he sounded surprised. He claimed I caught him off-guard as he blew up pumpkins as part of a contract paid by Esquire magazine. When I asked if he had a few minutes to chat, he agreed saying he could make time.

“This is how I spend my day, blowing up pumpkins,” Jourgensen said.

“Esquire Magazine paid me to do this. I got a couple of acres out here and I just sit in a chair watching pumpkins blow up. Then I try to piece them back together.”

from blowing up pumpkins to music.

“First you blow up the pumpkin, then you put it back together.”

forgot to ask one of them.

“I’m a little bit nuts, but not too much,” he said.

Jourgensen connected his joy

November 2013

The beauty of the metaphors inside that statement emerged easily, as many Ministry fans and musician colleagues must have experienced similar experiences as Jourgensen recounted in his memoir. Similarly, Shearon’s dark-art audience could well have spent years self-destructing just so they could piece themselves back together, perhaps learning something about their own makeup or core in the

process. The dark artist has a way of depicting the mobsters many artists deal with internally, so the match makes perfect sense for the series.

“I’d listen to their stories, drink with Al until sunrise, draw sketches of him while I’d hear horror stories both funny and sad at times... of his actual REAL life,” Shearon said.

The scenario sounded so very like that of Johnny Depp understudying Hunter S. Thompson, and I told Jourgensen that he reminded me of the late journalist sitting on Owl Farm trying to tame peacocks.

“I met Hunter in ’95—he was at Tim’s house,” Jourgensen said before quickly admitting that the scenario with Thompson was too contrived to be as meaningful as the time when he randomly met Charles Bukowski in an airport and got drunk with him.

I asked why meeting Bukowski was a bigger deal to Jourgensen than Thompson and he said, “I was way more drunk” with Bukowski, but then he continued, “Hunter was more of a staged event. Bukowski was a chance meeting at an airport.”

Shearon considered him a comic book character, with super powers including an “ability to hear conversations across the world, and a flying V [guitar] that I can whip out and play the Devil’s Chord that will knock down a building,” he said.

By this point in the conversation, I got around to asking my first question, which was why did he make statements and actions (including the C-U La Tour where Ministry said goodbye to fans a few years ago) to the effect of stepping away from the music business.

When I asked Jourgensen to describe the super powers his character had, he sounded truly excited, like a kid. Not in an infantile way, but in a pure way. A way that led me to believe he had been missing with music.

“There’s other things I want to do; the music business sucks,” he said.

He made a statement about wanting to write books and put off death. Jourgensen described how his wife, Angelina, and

Convinced, he said, “I’ve had these powers for a while.” Confronted with the choice of the one super power he could take back in to real life, he flared, “This is real life! I’ve had these powers for a while and I’m gonna start using them.”

Bringing the discussion back to Hunter S. Thompson again, I asked if he knew much about the comics por15

traying Thompson. I admitted I didn’t know much, but that I believed it was a comic Thompson never approved nor appreciated. Jourgensen agreed.

“I kinda know him and he wouldn’t have liked that,” Jourgensen said about someone turning Thompson into a comic character. Jourgensen, on the other hand, had a hand in writing the stories. The time Shearon spent in El Paso connected them.

Concerning the ‘Alien’ connection with the character’s name as Alien F. Jourgensen, Shearon explained that “Al’s nickname for a long time has been ‘Alien Jourgensen’; on a number of occasions Al and I would stay awake all night talking about the paranormal and the Supernatural, the Occult and the Unexplained, things of which we both share a huge passion for.”

“We’d see the sun come up and the beers would go down,” Shearon said. “I’d make notes and sketch him some more.” Jourgensen described to Shearon childhood grey visitations, as well as recent alien encounters at his home in El Paso.

“Coupled with Angelinas’ own tales of black triangles above the house, phones being tapped, suited men at the door asking to see computers during the ‘anti-Bush’ records era... it all became a little too real,” Shearon said. “Things you just couldn’t make up... then a light-bulb in my head blew... THIS would be the material that would carry across the journey of Jourgensen. That’s when I suggested to Al we map out the series in chronological order using the actual Ministry albums themselves as a canvas and themed for each of the 13 issues.”

“There were things about Al I never knew. One real eye-opener was the very real power that he does indeed have involving electricity,” Shearon said. “He puts it down to being around so much ‘gear’ and equipment in the industrial scene for so long, being shocked here n’ there he’s somehow harnessed and developed his own ability to control electricity. He can make light bulbs blow; I myself have witnessed this.”

Listening to the descriptions of the comic by Shearon and Jourgensen elicited a true excitement that I believe Jourgensen lacked from music. Or hadn’t felt in a while. That idea of electricity coursing through Jourgensen, unleashed as creative energy paralleled that sense of fueled inspiration. And asking Jourgensen about the music business brought a frustrated tone to an otherwise enthralled individual.

“I’m over music, man; I started about 28 years ago on this book and I just got the ending,” Jourgensen said. I heard the light emanating from under his skin electrically.

As he recounted his idea of a serial killer book that focused not on the main character as a murderer who used his mind to manipulate people in dive bars to kill themselves, but on the prosecution. “The dilemma of the book is who’s responsible,” Jourgensen said.

Music, for Ministry’s frontman, may have been the pumpkin blown apart and stitched back together.

Jourgensen has stories to tell, and he’s transforming himself into the character those closest to him see.

This comic series with Shearon opens an interestShearon dug deep to find a way to draw out the dark ing door and exposes a side to Jourgensen that fans angles of Jourgensen’s life for the comic, but the real- will need as much as the man himself needs a new ity feels much like uncovering Hunter S. Thompson’s outlet. drug-rattled trip to Las Vegas as a journey to the The Devil’s Chord comic series should be available by heart of the American dream.

July according to Jourgensen and Shearon.

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November 2013

Levin Minneman Rudess Review by Russell Eldridge

While listening to the Levin Minnemann Rudess album, I find myself asking “Who’s doing what here?” Okay, that’s a bass line, so that must be Tony Levin, but what’s that? Is that a guitar line? Who’s doing that? Is that Jordan Rudess? Is that Levin on the Chapman Stick? Is that guitar line coming from Rudess or is he playing the bass line? Could all of these amazing layers be performed as just a trio? Are Tony Levin, Marco Minnemann, and Jordan Rudess mutants with multiple appendages?

In an interview with Ellen Eldridge (for Performer Magazine), Tony Levin explains a little about how he plays the Chapman Stick. Levin plays a 12-string version with six bass strings and six guitar strings, and that it’s played by tapping on the strings instead of strumming them. I can hear how that would work in the starting track “MarcoPolis.” Levin said that his Chapstick has two outputs that go to two different amps, so he can achieve different sounds from the bass or guitar part of the Chapman Stick. After hearing all this and listening a little more, I can here the separation a little more clearly.

The next track, “The Twitch,” starts off with drums and bass reminiscent of Primus’ “My Name is Mud.” The percussive attack on the bass makes me wonder if Levin used his Funk Fingers on this track. Levin said that the Funk Fingers were designed to achieve a more percussive sound. While recording the track “Big Time” for Peter Gabriel, Levin had drummer Jerry Marotta play the strings with his drumstick while Levin fretted the notes.

It was tricky for them to do the same live so Peter Gabriel suggested that Levin just attach drumsticks to his fingers. This eventually turned into Funk Fingers, which are for sale.

Levin Minneman Rudess fascinates track after track, and one could listen to the album hundreds of times and still pick up something new each time around. The only way one could get a clear picture of how these musical monsters pulled this stuff off is seeing them live. Yup, that settles it.

The Filthy Souls Review by Danielle Boise Brit indie-rockers, The Filthy Souls’ EP is a fantastic, fascinating eargasm of sexy, gritty music that leaves you salivating for more.

Get ready for these Manchester gents, they are going to rock your world.

The 7-track EP starts off in an electrifying way with the gritty, lustrous “Cold Hearts.” There is a fire bound aggressiveness to the lyrics drenched in anger “How could you lie, to my face? I’m better off on my own. ‘Cause baby this Love is dead,” that pulsates with a driving need.

“Destroy You” takes on a retro vibe with the baseline similar to Adele’s “Rumor Has It,” but notches it up a bit as it transitions into a solid rock song with pop sensibilities.

I love how Dave Green’s voice drips all over this song, making it more than just a contemporary top 40 song, making “Destroy You” the foundation of which to build its musical statement to the world. There is a hue of irony with the upbeat nature of the song, yet the lyrical content is “she’ll destroy you” echoes throughout the chorus.

“Drowning My Numbers” shows a softer, more vulnerable side to the band. Allowing a real connection to nurture and develop between The Filthy Souls and the listener.

While “Boys Will Be Out For A Fight” has this dirty1960s bayou sound circa Sam The Sham and The Pharaoh’s circa 1966’s classic “Little Red Riding Hood.” “Monsters” is one of the sexiest songs on the EP. There is something about Green singing “she sees monsters” that just grabs at the heart and pulls at your loins.

In addition to the seven tracks, there are two dance remixes of “Destroy You” (Moxie Youth Remix & Lester Burnham Remix) on the EP that translates nicely into two different dance versions of the song nicely. I’ve gone back and forth to which one I prefer, and any given moment it changes.

The Filthy Souls have been one of my favorite finds this year. I highly recommend checking them out and taking the EP for a spin – you won’t regret it.

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