A Soundtrack Sponge

I invented a new genre a few months ago. It's called A Soundtrack Sponge. The idea came to me when I was asked to write a review for a college publication on contemporary music. I was asked to listen to and review Deerhoof's "Friend Opportunity." I was told that I had full creative license. This was evidentially not the case since my review was rejected forthwith by the editors, who had previously rejected in their first issue Frank Zappa's famous comment that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture," in favor of the possibility to supply its reader with apt and useful reviews. In other words these youngpersons of the Mancha found themselves ready to joust the windmills.

Naturally I saw this as a challenge. I decided to take up my own lance and barber-bowl, find myself a Sancho and a donkey and ride. The project was simple: listen and write. Listen how? Anyway everyway. Write what? Everything anything. An overload of objects, subjects, discourses, languages, forms, rhythms and frequencies, texts and contexts, etc. would short-circuit itself, break down the borderlines that traditionally demarcate the limits of reality of symbolic matrices of governance; or in other words to make a metaphysical stage upon which it would be possible to dance about architecture. I called it "sui-generis" because it creates itself as much as it destroys itself, because it attempts to show the connecting strings of a sponge as well as its volume (note: the name of the magazine in which the review was to appear is "Volume"), the sponge's fullness and its emptiness; its hiding and its exposure; its being and its nothingness. A deus ex machina, an appreciation rather than a review.

The date of this Soundtrack Sponge is the same as my birthday, February 19th. It is the cusp ("a pointed end where two curves meet") or borderline in Astrology – a great code of the heavens – between Aquarius and Pisces, the final and penultimate signs in the series: both the fish and the water. It is about a soluble fish that drowns in its own immersion, that finds death in life and life in death.

This project could be aptly described as ambitious, crazy, and futile: ticks, ticks, and ticks. Here is the text (you may have read it) on the blog that it may find its proper platitude.


Soundtrack Sponge




Deerhoof’s Friend Opportunity: A Worthless Map or Dancing about architecture to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head.

Submitted for publication as an album review, February 19, 2007: rejected yet confessing
Sui-generis.
Play Music.
Feel attacked but try to concentrate.

1. Perfect Me: perfect friend no home no family no sin. Cry out! for freedom from eyes. See eyes in cover art your friend opportunity see eyes as visual homophones. Daughters? Sounds very serious simple lyrics: e.g. pasta bowl, playing.

2. +81: Choo choo choo choo beep beep. You might think we have trust issues. Deerhoof is a group that performs trust falls while playing. You don’t trust me and I might as well say it but I will not dwell on it. We will get through it and although through cacophony and glossolalia we will know that it was a serious decision. “How peoples’ brains work”: communication requires a reduction to form. The juxtaposition of nature and city is nothing new clouds are coming up, clouds go by. [Perfect me: meeting, eventual friend opportunity, wanting, calling. +81: urban alienation, generic the building, building from the side to side up down the people people. My iPod shuffle! Believe E.S.P.: belief alienation paranoia

I’m already paranoid that it’s already too much. It’s a weird thing, when all of a sudden your music leaves you and becomes a public thing. I love feedback but for me there’s always this worry.

Obsession. Thinking what the other is thinking about you 3rd person narrative squared makes communication a questionable suspicion: careful with your words. Is it still paranoia if it’s true? That’s the question. Animal mind crossing the line or anthropomorphic/anthropological tendencies see cover art to have known them all already. The war a sheltered bushcunt and the display of individual as mass experience, or the idea of the individual experience as having universal significance. Who makes art not artists? The Galaxist: the idea of universal appeal looking to the stars but threatened no life not life? Can one live without love? No: friend opportunity. The music of the spheres melody abstraction salvation. Starman Ziggy Stardust:



let the children use it
angelheaded hipsters burning for
the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery
of night,




Cave perspective hope seeking. Come along with me… seekers of a world to be. Logos. Choco Fight: relationship to the audience show me your personality. Stereotyping you like to stereotype: sailor, tyger tyger! Beautiful stereotyping! Two hearts and the calling anywhere out of the world versus The Runners Four an album “of this world” Deerhoof’s previous work calling for a “friend opportunity.” Delay singing female and male come over seas! Deerhoof love the group and need the group. Fade out during The Runners Four: “I totally lost my social life. I didn’t even know what to even talk about with my friends.” The Runners Four was trying to embody a sheltered existence. Whither the Invisible Birds: lost epiphanic it’s a trap! a conceit! a crutch! operatic narrative moment. Somewhere over the rainbow is the map. Where to stop? I have intended and you have expected a tender cartographics. I have placed all the images so carefully where should I stop where should you stop and where can we go to listen? Hither Horatio the plea. It’s a map it’s a worthless map!.




Somewhere far away or
Elsewhere, far away from here! too late! never perhaps!

Cast Off Crown: anaphora.

And when we breathe Death in our lungs
Go down invisible river with dumb pleas.

Sounds a man sings about being a queencunt a woman sings about being a boyman. The midwife’s career to a river of ideas. Fallen queen has become queen of the cast-offs. An odd character but Ziggy Stardust wasn’t a coincidence. He/She will thrice refuse: Mark 14:30 thrice does Paul deny Jesus prophecy a genius of the avant-garde no rules no guide something inside unnamable for some unknown reason but of shame and embarrassment not…but…

We have witnessed an epidemic of guilt and maybe nobody deserves to live in this kind
Of fantasy when this kind
Of evil is
Happening in the real world,
Our sins are stubborn,
Our repentances are cowardly,
We pay our admission handsomely,
And merrily we come home along the muddy path,
Believing that by vile tears we have washed all of our stains clear.




The enlightened gives into the body and music does not need a savior J.ohn C.age said it music does not need to be saved. Friend Opportunity shows dramatizes the failure of communication language the source of anguish but also the greatest moments of epiphany the anguish as well as the ephiphanic joy that went into the creation of The Runners Four run from ennui,

We tend to write really simple songs. The reason is that they can be played over and over again, and instead of it getting boring, you keep finding new possible ways to do it.

Kidz Are So Small: formally here we go round the prickly pear play time allegorical friendships childhood human animal interaction playing and the display of emotion. See cover art for animal fornication. Cuteness and sex cute! Nerd sounds. Thoughts of nerds and girls. Thoughts of faces in trees and infantile sexuality. The refusal of the appetite and the acceptance of alienation of chancre over appetite. Forgive her accent. Matchbook Seeks Maniac: drums, guitar, organ, bass, voice. Genre-playing: it is not surprising that this is an older song but it fits perfectly in an album of ambition (I will sell my soul to the devil if I could be the top of the world) versus humility (I don’t care about power), fear of madness, masturbation (I am just entertaining myself). Be a man, hope for sale, out of a fiction make a truth. It’s the same question but a different approach than in Runners Four, “reduction is constantly changing.” Is it the belief of empty men? NB: Deerhoof’s drummer has told of fits of self-flagellation a punishment for self-consciousness. Look Away: Oh God not with a bang but with a whimper you question the meaning of the word about. There is “something bigger” than classifying music art’s only chance a human feeling. The hollow man the eschatological man asked it and I have an answer: I will love you as long as you let me have my drug: Me me me me me me me memem. I can’t help myself crazy clinically coughing in the background screaming “I am Lazarus, come from the dead!”




Deerhoof’s label is Kill Rock Stars (KRS1). Deerhoof can force the moment to its crisis by creating a relationship to the concrete visual soundtrack. “Look Away” was a live soundtrack to a movie by Harry Smith, Heaven and Earth Magic. I watched it several times without sound and mapped out my interpretation of how it worked. In a collaboration like this he’s dead so we’re not really collaborating just wondering,

What’s the wonderful play I play wonderful days?
What’s the wonderful day. I play wonderful ways?
What’s the wonderful way I play wonderful days?

Necrophilia is an unthinkable act. Will I love me in the end?

The adversary said it himself: remove
Your guilt and shame and put it on me,
I beg of you.
I have known the eyes already;
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here.] ! ! !

I bear witness to what their idiotic hermeneutics are capable of of the breaking of bones and of a fastidious mind. By no means does this have anything to do with music just a specimen an animal mind and you never know how to reach that point until you’ve reached it.




S. p. onge the internet is not masturbation but pure plagiarism ; ) the body will do as it does what does : ) a tymphanuml.e.s.p.onge.





"One should construct plots, and work them out in diction, with the material as much as possible in the mind's eye. In this way, by seeing things most vividly, as if present at the actual events, one will discover what is apposite and not miss contradictions." (Aristotle, Poetics). It should be noted (and how!) that A Soundtack Sponge is at once a rewriting of Lautréamont's opus The Songs of Maldoror and Poetries and a parody of Jacques Derrida's Signéponge.