Today sees the release of a new song from my solo music concern Tired of Triangles. It’s called “Not Your Devil: A Diptych” and features colorful electronic music segueing into an acoustic guitar piece, also instrumental, and possibly “breezy.” The feel at hand might be described as what it might be like if the listener began the song hanging out in one largely empty venue and then ambled into another, and both happened to feature decent music. The track will likely end up on the next Tired of Triangles album, but I’m offering it up here as a single, which you can hear via the below YouTube video, or stream/download on Bandcamp, Spotify, TIDAL, or Apple Music.
Today sees the release of New New Tele Plays by Tired of Triangles. This is a re-recording of the New Tele Plays EP from last summer, a three-song offering of solo guitar instrumentals done on a Squier Telecaster, but captured this time with a higher quality recording set-up and played through a better amp. The result is a listen with better fidelity, to the extent that the original EP has been taken out of circulation (aside from still being available to be streamed here on YouTube).
If the above sounds appealing to you, you can hear the new EP via the below YouTube video, or stream/download it on Bandcamp, Spotify, TIDAL, or Apple Music.
Out today is a moody, carefully composed cover of the Epic Soundtracks song “Stealaway,” by my solo concern Tired of Triangles. For those who don’t know, Epic Soundtracks was the name used by Kevin Paul Godfrey, drummer of the U.K. punk/post-punk band Swell Maps, who went on to have an accomplished, if lesser known solo career. You can hear the original version of the song here. It’s an affective piece that seems to harken back to Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” approach to audio production (rather anomalous for a mid-nineties outing), carried along by stellar vocals and lyrics.
The Tired of Triangles version of this song is a little more stripped down, while still retaining the basic chord structures and rhythmic pulses of the original. Putting down this track took a fair amount of work but when it came together I was pleasantly surprised by the overall vibe, which feels purposeful but also spontaneous enough in certain places, especially where the vocals are concerned.
If I can finish another Tired of Triangles CD, this will go on it, but in the meantime “Stealaway” is available as a standalone single. It can be heard via the below YouTube video, as well as streamed/downloaded on Bandcamp, Spotify, Amazon, TIDAL, and Apple Music. Here’s hoping you enjoy it.
Am pleased to report that Leila M. & Tired of Triangles, the “rock meets Middle Eastern” musical duo I’m in with fellow artist Leila Mesdaghi, has a new release, dubbed Gathered Tracks, that compiles all of our music to date in one place. It can streamed/downloaded on Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple Music. For the occasion I put together new and improved, alternate mixes of two of the three tracks, and Leila provided one of her paintings, entitled Starlings, for the cover art.
After an overly hot and muggy 2022, I’ve been enjoying the cooler weather down here as of late. Have got a project or two underway, but it might be a good while before anything big emerges. In the meantime, here’s to a relatively even-keeled 2023.
Before this August draws to a close, I’m offering up a release from my musical concern Tired of Triangles. As its title notes, “Z.F.G. (Revamped Version)” is a reworking of an earlier track, one that graced the B side of Kaji-Pup Records’ second release. This version is a marked improvement, in my view, in that it maintains what worked with the original while expanding upon it, but without things getting unwieldy or self-indulgent. A lot of work went into getting the balance just right. The scope of this song is more maximalist, not as naturalistic and downbeat as a lot of these other musical outings, but if one is in the mood for it, this is a fun one to crank up and let rip. It can be heard via the below YouTube video, as well as streamed/downloaded on Bandcamp, and Spotify.
Last Saturday night, July 23, I saw Steely Dan for the first time, at the rather nice Mahaffey Theater in downtown St. Petersburg. The show was stellar. Without the presence of the late Walter Becker, Donald Fagen and his backing band still put on a captivating set, one marked by uncommonly skilled musicianship that never felt self-indulgent or unfocused. I had a seat near the front and it was a treat to witness the full band bringing their A game. The funk was present; it rocked here and there; everyone was in the pocket, and it was the opposite of boring.
It’s worth noting that I haven’t always liked Steely Dan’s music. It can be an acquired taste, and hit differently depending on mood and context, as well as one’s age. Despite the band’s enduring popularity, their mode of soft jazzy rock (if you will) has been characterized as polarizing, owning in part to an incongruity at times between the disarming sounds at hand and lyrics (and subject matter) that might be described as acerbic. It was only about a year into the current pandemic, amid my forties, that things started to click, aided in no small part by my friend Will being a superfan. I would say that if someone attended a Steely Dan show like that of the other night and remained unconvinced, little else might sway them, as it was a flattering presentation and fun to behold–the real deal!
It was announced the other day that Janus Films has acquired the rights to the entire filmography of Jean Eustache. Which raises the question: is a Criterion boxset, something along the lines of The Complete Jean Eustache, in the works? This seems likely, though until the films get spine numbers or someone fills us non-insiders in, we won’t know for sure.
Either way, this news is extraordinary! A proper restoration and release of these films in some form has been long overdue. Painfully so, in fact. To date, I have only seen a few of them, but would rate them as among some of the best movies to have graced the latter half of the 20th Century. They’re that good.
Conveying the value of the late Eustache’s work to someone who hasn’t seen any of it yet could be difficult. The writer-director seems to have often been preoccupied with emotional states related to matters of the heart, the messiness of male-female relations, but with a more pronounced irreverent streak and less philosophical remove than someone like Eric Rohmer. There’s also the residue of political malaise in the mix. Eustache’s films are cooler than most, sometimes embodying an idling French bohemianism that contemporary directors would have trouble duplicating while maintaining the same watchability. Rather than being flashy, overall the films feel a bit subdued, more true to life in their willingness to be patient with the characters, their peculiar beats, their thoughts and affect, and so on. The screenplays alone, at least those pertaining to the ones I’ve seen, are uncommonly well devised–Bernadette Lafont was on the money when she asserted that that of The Mother and the Whore is worthy of being published in book form. But all of the preceding is just a cursory, early-morning stab at accounting for why these films are deserving of one’s time, something that would (hopefully) become more apparent upon watching them.
Unfortunately what with Eustache’s work being largely out of circulation and underrepresented for so long, its stature has been obscured somewhat, if not exactly in limbo. These films being reissued in one form or another will be a corrective cinephiles the world over can embrace. So keep your eyes peeled!
This past Friday saw the release of a new single, “Stark Geography,” from Tired of Triangles, the on-and-off solo musical concern of mine that began sometime in the mid-2010s. It can be heard via via the below YouTube video, as well as streamed/downloaded on Bandcamp, Spotify, TIDAL and Apple Music.
The first Tired of Triangles CD, Up at 4 A.M., was less a definitive statement from me than an attempt to just put together a listenable enough batch of songs that would explore sentiments ranging from “angsty” and insular, to something akin to wee-hour jubilation, however subdued. This is relevant here because “Stark Geography” covers similar territory moodwise, though in this case the shift in tone occurs within a single piece rather than from one song to the next.
Have to duck in here for a second and give a tip of the hat to famed Italian actor Monica Vitti, who passed away today age 90. In her 35-year career Vitti acted in everything from arthouse titles to zany comedies, not to mention the occasional film that combined the two like Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty. Predictably enough, it’s her most well known work with Michelangelo Antonioni that I cherish above all. Am talking here about the monochromatic “Alienation Trilogy” (L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse) that ushered in sixties European cinema like a lion (albeit an artfully understated one), as well as Red Desert, a colorful film that came out a couple of years later and directly addressed the toll one’s environment might take on her psyche.
These works have been somewhat divisive—they are complex, visually involved treatises on “adult” issues, largely within the bourgeois sphere, whose meanings can be elusive for many viewers. Ever since L’Avventura’s premier at Cannes in May of 1960, some in the film world have loved them while others have found them rankling. To someone like me who’s probably seen too many movies for his own good, I can say with confidence that I find this spate of films enduring and nothing short of essential. In conjunction with the films’ strong sense of place and eye for social observation, Vitti’s beauty, her demure and charisma, has a lot to do with why they’re exemplars of mid-century modernism, the kind of cinema that hadn’t quite existed until then. Simply put, Vitti could be a stunning presence, with facial expressions that could say more than words, often hinting at a discontent or longing under the surface.
While film culture is full of all sorts of underdogs and unsung heroes (behind and in front of the camera) who are worth exploring, in due time, there are some personalities who’ve left a huge mark on it and should be lauded as such. Monica Vitti is one such figure, the sort of actor who worked her way into many a cinephile’s DNA…and we’ve never been the same since. She will be missed.
Reading from Anthony De Mello’s bestseller Awareness, I encountered the following passage:
What I really enjoy is not you; it’s something that’s greater than both you and me. It is something that I discovered, a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, the orchestra doesn’t stop. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody, which is also very delightful. And when I’m alone, it continues to play. There’s a great repertoire and it never ceases to play.
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