I was 27 when My Bloody Valentine put out their masterpiece, Loveless, in 1991; close to the age my father was when The Byrds came out with Mr Tambourine Man, in 1965. The two are defining templates of their ages, showing me how out of touch I was with the time, as my father was with his.

When I played The Byrds’ album for my dad a few years ago in a car ride up to Maine, he liked the music; he only said he wish they’d tone down the guitars – they were too jangly… Well, for me for so long, My Bloody Valentine, on account of the guitars, sounded like My Muddy Valentine. For each of us, though, we saw a portal into a new world, one of a potential intimacy we missed.

When I hear Loveless, at the same time, I always feel as if each successive song had already played: I hear one, and I’m not sure, say, if it’s “Soon”, “Loomer”, “Touched”, or “To Here Knows When”. There’s a mysterious, sensual, pounding drama in each, like you are crossing wet stones of a river, and you don’t know which one is closest to the other shore, or whether, maybe, the last one doesn’t reach close enough to the shore, and you will fall in, splashing head wet in the waves.

As I here the record each time, each time with more depth, it brings me farther into that time of my late twenties, stretching into my early thirties, testing my emotional thresholds, splashes of cold that turn into glorious comfort. The songs build like themes and variations, the scherzos, largos, minutes, and moderatos of symphonies, the spinning wheels of kaleidoscopes.

Where Mr Tambourine Man showed the way of a procrustean post-war culture to a world of unity and love and action, Loveless takes the victim of the disaffected eighties, and plunges him or her on a theme park rotorvator, with swirling murals on the circular walls, as the bottom falls out and she defies gravity, through centrifugal force.

My father introduced me to the rotorvator at Paragon Park in Nantasket, in 1969, when I was five. It was great, more scientific revelation to me than kids’ fun, knew knowledge given to me by my father, who was less comfortable than I was, and got dizzy.

Each time Loveless ends, with “Soon”, with the slingshot drums and rhythm guitar behind the drop dead spacey up and down tones of the lead, like an alternating current, it is overwhelming, more so each time. It keeps taking you back to the spot of the crime, where my heart was ripped out, and now it’s back and pumped full with more blood, sex, sugar, magic, a beautiful toxic beat to take into the chain of nights of the future.

Ryles, August 11
hope for joy

She plays a swing song makes it new with a sexy lilt chords placed on the piano like scented napkins on mahogany she’s so good you can almost sing it Will Slater on bass is a muffled brick through a jewelry store window Yoko with a touch of Silver or a Horace ode then it’s Bud Powell after a pedicure and a facial Scott hard on drums dropping a few bombs on the country grass as Yoko floods the fields like an ivory river

Glittering intro a modern number as modern as infinity slow and long as gospel on Sunday something you almost know and it slips off the tongue like sorbet a deep black cherry grand like an orchid blooming Lester Young in pork pie on the wall behind her and she’s as beautiful as Billie Holiday quieting for a bass snatch then trills with grace notes a trace of the blues in the bittersweet wash she climbs like ivy on college bricks massaging the back of the board muscles limber again with a peppy pickup getting resplendent with a hope for joy

As a candidate concerned with education,  John Connolly takes an interest in the city’s music students, and the world they inhabit as part of Boston’s music scene. Yesterday, at record store Deep Thoughts JP in Jamaica Plain, he demonstrated his sympathy for them, and knowledge in this area.

Connolly didn’t waste a single word when he introduced himself to the sparse though attentive crowd in the store yesterday afternoon. He presented his three-pronged approach to improving the local economy cogently, with a concern for jobs, neighborhoods and education and how each relates to the other symbiotically.

He approached the house scene point blank. First off, he recognizes how crucial it is to create a friendly environment for young musicians to play, so they will stay here and help create a healthy local artistic culture. “I don’t want Boston to be New York City North”, he promised.

Proposing the idea of creating an arts council with participants drawn from the community itself, he demonstrated his sincere interest in the kind of people he would be dealing with in his careful listening, addressing questioners concerns in detail, without straying from topic.

Connolly wants to know the musicians, and to know about what they know. He understands the forces that drove the music underground. He wants to make the music more of a part of the community, creating a healthy environment and economy through an arts program that is sensitive to mutual needs.

Mark Johnson makes things happen before you can even give him credit for them. Already he’s done 11 Raw Meet festivals, at Smokey Bears Place, and I haven’t had a chance to write about this guy and reward him for giving me the idea of being my own boss and starting the blog to begin with. It’s six hours of sets that last from ten to fifteen minutes and including a warp speed spectrum of artists and bands, thrown together like particles in a collider. Now it’s become a hot nightspot, and Johnson is taking it down to Providence, for Raw Meet 12, before hitting Philly with it after that. Here are some notes.

Mark Johnson

It’s a sound puzzle trying to figure who’s playing what instrument then it’s Steve, like a morning glory on contra alto clarinet

The operation was touch and go. My first telephone interview, assigned by All About Jazz, and I had to improvise to get the job done. And yet, that is what makes me a jazz musician as a writer… I had been in email contact with Iqua, pianist Steve Colson’s wife, and I had set up the time and date with her.

And so I called, a weekday evening, and he answered. He has an African name, Adegoke, or “Ade”, and I was inclined to call him “sir”. But I asked him, “Is it all right if I call you Steve?” He said it was fine.

There is a defining moment in his life, going back to 1971. To put this in proper perspective, you will have to understand this was just one year after the Kent State massacre. There were just under a hundred black students at Northwestern University at this time, and Steve and six friends planned the occupation of the Bursar’s office for changes in racial policy. In the process, Steve and his friend Andre went into the undergoing tunnels and mapped them so when the National Guard tried to enter the doors were chained closed. Every black student participated. Colson and four classmates had the chains around them when they came out.

It resulted in the founding of a black dorm for the school, reformed admissions and curriculum, and in the long run was the impetus for the establishment of the African Studies programs across the country, for which the occupiers each became major players and department heads.

In the context of his involvement with The Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM), I introduced this. “You’re going way back!” he responded, in his grand, earthy, dark voice.

The conversation was just as grand, dark and earthy, with a foray back into his childhood and how much he enjoyed playing piano, even then, and how he switched between jazz and classical, just as open to either, though choosing jazz in the long run, when he went to school.

The balance of freedom and order in his work is like a light- and dark-blended coffee. He adapts himself with protean accuracy to context, which involves much playing with such other great veterans of the free jazz scene as Joseph Jarman and Roscoe Mitchell.

His honors now are legion Newark, New Jersey, and where he teaches in nearby Montclair and Bloomfield. The city has honored him, and has commissioned composed work, for he is also a composer. And his scholarship is distinguished as well, often involving music theory in ancient history. He lectures on the Egyptian system, and the Greek, by way of the Egyptian.

But again, this belies his earthy, jazzy nature. He has been compared to composers like Bartok, but the comparison with Charles Mingus satisfies him most.

As for a great memory as a musician, about 40 years ago, he played at a club in Chicago with some friends. The great jazz drummer and leader of The Jazz Messengers, who funneled some few generations of hard-hitting new talents into the jazz world—the drummer Art Blakey, was in the audience.

Colson tells me how he came up afterward to the stage, smiling and beaming. He shook him by the shoulders. “You guys sounded great!” Ade is a man of great strength. This was still a moment that brought him to a peak of emotion.

So I talked to Ade, with my primitive cord with suction cups connecting my recorder to the receiver. The sound was dusty and full of static. I lost much of the detail in the transcription. Yet I concentrated hard, and I got the gist of it, the essence and hypostasis that will last. I have since adopted a more stable process of recording phone interviews, but this is the interview I am proud of. This is the one that’s part of the history of human rights, and of human music.

Lucy Watson was excited when I said I’d write about her performance at The Anthony Greaney Gallery in the South End. I’d performed with her act Smarty, which is hard to explain, but suffice it to say I had some idea of what she was about.

Naked women dancing was enticing to me. That said, I still had a pubescent idea of feminine beauty. That changed tonight as I witnessed women without cookie cutter bodies arouse me more sexually than Penthouse pets.

But there was so much more to the night than that. Art writer and critic Sampson Wilcox enlightened me thus when I met him after the first performance, with his grasp and vocab of the medium about ten times as great as mine. With his spur of insight I was able to step beyond my essential base in sexuality and music, into the actual phenomenon of women’s bodies, and how they articulate their desire through art, in the notes that follow.

Madge of Honor

Reaching up for a rope on a bell a body like a cut d’Anjou pear curvaceous voluptuous chunky see the peach tan flesh sweat red the twenty minute sexual feat of wild sex  she shows her secret parts skipping falling down and rolling missing the rope trying again bending flexing breasts pushes pussy rings the bell

Creighton Baxter

Slight contortions as she slowly moves her black clad body across the white gallery wall rubbing her cheek against it  leaving a rouge smear line from lipstick gestures with her hand against it

Four lined handwritten sheets of paper on the hardwood floor she moves them around like playing cards in a game of solitaire there are more than four she stretches them up contiguously one next to another rips of tape and plastic eats the paper she’s nuts her black hair in a bun skirt and boots slowly chews silent tears shreds from clear sticky plastic backing pensive gaze closed eyes

Gobs of pablum spit upon the floor slight look of disgust or anger in eyes revolving a thought round the brain then she licks up the spit like an animal is it sexual or gross I don’t know gross is sexual

Strolls loosely and silently in semicircle round corner of the floor sweet abstracted gaze and screams like a beast

That I understood it’s me in my apartment every day

Maria Molteni

Maria  in silver dress sensual mode with her slender neck graceful as a nightingale slight plump pulp to her legs and arms from bee venom pretty little eye blinks otherwise still both hands on right hip feet apart at angles shadow grand and tall behind on wall switch of hips little lithe shrugs slight curve of lower breast beneath shine of silver

Plié like a dancer touching her toe slight swivel little head nods slips of lips

Lucy Watson & Venus Alba

Lucy in blue light onscreen in the background song about my shadow on camel caparisoned humps with friend behind plaster head big waving cardboard hand she’s not afraid of her shadow

Now she’s asleep on the floor blowing a pipe under sheet she tosses aside primps her face in a mirror Venus in blonde wig “I don’t know do you think this is good” Lucy tells her not to touch her dirty hands to the art Lucy’s at the playground again the little girl now they strip down and have a pillow fight with gauze rags covering each others’ heads with blue scarves duck tape belts holding silver skirts

Pas de deux hand dance with silver masks

Now Venus  has naked breasts she’s making her bed she has red hair

Bridging the art and music communities Lucy’s got a strange kind of techno children’s music playing and Venus is shuffling tarot cards

The pair eat candy kneeling across from each other Venus does an ink drawing on paper and on her left palm

The floor is a mess and Lucy’s got red stuff on her face she’s doing something with what looks like a fold up table she’s under it kissing a guy Venus is back looking sexy with bare breasts the two gently sweetly hug

Weirdo Records, July 22
Pleasant Buzz

Pleasant buzz to begin with clicks and the lovelorn sounds of plastic on the table an echo and things get grander Michael’s wedding ring shining grandly I feel good I just had a sip of dragonfruit juice and bought some CDs there’s a haze of clinking objects moving to the foreground but the stuff is slow and spacy now he’s holding nothing hands in his lap I think back to the piano factory and Andrew and the gang now the clinking of dripping water thinking of girls their different flavors mine has a dragonfruit taste it falls on my tongue now and the metronome flashes its beam the headlight on a locomotive but nautical things ring in a copper pipe I begin to sense the compostion the sonic spacings and the bottle of juice is empty

Girls like goofy. The question is, how to be goofy and cool, at once. Pile knows how. It helps to be spot-on musicians, which they are, with deft, baroque but clean guitar lines, and disciplined drums. On their new album, dripping, they sport a hard-hitting sound, that’s always spunky and happy, and never dark, however daring they get, which they do.

The vocals have a charming, “aw shucks” quality, but they are always in tune, and never invasive, allowing the instruments to wash over them like waves. Check out the titles: “Baby Boy”, “Grunt Like a Pig”, “Sun Poisoning”, “Bubble Gum”. It’s kind of like a string of kid’s books crossed with psychedelic comics.

The dynamics are great, too. They come and go, like the rhythms of a dripping faucet. And sometimes the spigot is turned on full throttle, peppy and people-loving. The songs often have a folk-like quality, with their light finger picking, but the stuff always rocks, sometimes with strange breaks of string free-for-alls.

Sometimes they get hardcore, but it’s always in fun, with a big, pretty sound that loves everyone. “Prom Song” may be the highlight of the album, with twinges of the Nirvana of “In Bloom” (Nevermind). The song builds with grand romantic tones like a high school couple basking in the lights of the gussied-up gym, late in the evening.

Like Nirvana, they can get wild, but they always end up on their feet. They’re the kids you envied at school, who could jump and twist on the dance floor without ever getting hurt. And this is healing music, with a good dose of happy tones that travel through your brains like the nutrients of a good salad.

Pile plays at O’Brien’s Pub in Allston, on Sunday, August 11.

Well, I guess the absence of color is black. Though my niece, Celia, says, “Yeah, it’s a color.” So yes, Endation is a color, very basic black. Anthony Ants Conley does four-string guitar; Matt Graber does drums. And they do just about everything, so you could say it is a blinding white.

The Absence of Everything has a varied twelve songs, with tinges of Roots era Sepultura. But they get darkly mellow and electro-funky, too. The sound is much bigger than the two instruments. The duo weaves a warped complexity, undoing itself and threading itself back together. Conley has a quiet desperation to his voice, on the verge of screams, and then agonized love sickness, and sometimes just a seductive plea.

Drums peak out like pythons in the jungle, while the guitar sits neatly in the trees, like a three-toed sloth. Other times, they bounce around like a cue ball in bumper pool, falling into psychedelic holes.

Rhythms are abrupt, flowing, and then stop/starting, climbing and chugging like the little engine that could. This album brings us back to the age of super groups that ended with U2’s Achtung Baby. It’s got that same German cosmopolitan feel, with some touches of Krautrock, and the ‘70s’ genre’s patchwork quality. But it’s a sleeker, modern sound in the upshot.

It’s also got the quiet suppleness of a Folk Implosion or a Sebadoh, giving it connections to indie rock as well. It’s dramatic, plangent, and plaintive, but always calm and relaxing, somehow. I don’t know how these guys do it, get noise and make you feel like you’ve had a sedative. Must be some kind of homeopathic sound medicine.