Keeping the words light today. But this is my shy way of telling you all that I have a thing for you.

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I’ve made a lot of mixtapes, burned a bunch cds, and done many digital playlists about the wonderful, terrifying, exhilarating feeling of love—but this might be the best one yet. Twenty deep soul and funk cuts about the thrills and the pains. And it starts off with a humungous question we might all quietly wonder as we face this daily wave of cruelties in the world today.

Listen to it on any day that you feel overwhelmed by, or overflowing with, love.

The layout of this cover was “inspired” by the cover of the Swiss pressing of the Black Sabbath LP “Paranoid”, which curiously re-worked the cover of their debut. That debut album was released in the UK on February 13th, 1970—the day I intended to send this out.

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Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”

I.

I did try.

I looked into alternatives. I asked myself questions. I asked friends their thoughts.

And now, I’m back in your inbox / on your desktop.

That story isn’t interesting. Technology didn’t work the way I wanted it to, the alternatives cost me money I couldn’t justify, and an ethical internet is a mythology. Once you claim a hill, there are more, bigger ones to die upon.

Since I wasn’t ready to completely disconnect myself, here we are.

A reset.

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II.

I was stunned earlier this year when Stereolab awakened from deep slumber and released an album. I think it’s a good album, one that drops right back in like they hadn’t quit for ten years. I’m not a music journalist and I don’t think I’m one to write about that. Loop did this too, when they released Array and then Sonancy after a twenty year departure. My Bloody Valentine may have led the way with this kind of necromancy, although the m b v album never landed with me. I think about three of my favourite bands essentially being eternal, music existing continually somewhere else that occasionally crosses the threshold of time space into our world.

Stereolab recently toured North America as well, and I hadn’t given much thought to seeing them. I’ve seen them enough times throughout the 90s that I’ve had to think about how many times I’ve seen them to actually give a definitive answer.

I think I’m now at number seven. Because the morning of, an old friend texted me to tell me he’d bought me a ticket for my birthday and had chosen not to surprise me for months. So we went, and I’m glad and it was so much better than I was anticipating—I had stopped seeing them around 2001 because I felt they just weren’t a live band anymore.

Something that stuck out for me in their set was the song, “Motoroller Scalatron”, from the Emperor Tomato Ketchup LP.

I hadn’t looked at the setlist prior, and although I’d been getting texts from friends in other cities telling me I’d love the set, it never dawned on me to look because I never thought I was going to go. I didn’t expect to hear that song.

III.

On the drive home after the show, I couldn’t get past my joy that they played it. The crowd had been a mix of old people like me, and young people not like me. Surprisingly I was the most visibly excited person around me during that song. After, I was thinking about there being two different fanbases, almost—kind of how there’s two different periods of Stereolab (even though it’s very much the same band). And my friend and I talked about that over cigarettes and beers. He got into them in the later, more expansive period—I had played him Dots and Loops, the album that is like their declaration of the future. I had been an early zealot upon hearing them, then seeing them, in 1993, when the were pushing their motorik-heavy Farfisa rock. My friend and I have had conversations about this schism. He has less relationship with the earlier material, and I have less with the later. I have still never listened to the albums they released after Margerine Eclipse. And I had a personal photograph of singer Laetitia Sadier in a frame on my nightstand for almost ten years.

Is this like The Reformation?

IV.

But back to that setlist.

Hearing “Motoroller Scalatron” had me thinking about Stereolab songs I have been going back to over the past few years, songs that weren’t necessarily the obvious ones. Their output is incredibly large, evidenced by the number of compilations of non-album tracks and tour singles. If I wanted to make someone a Stereolab mixtape—and I have made plenty—there is so much to choose from. I’ve never made the same mix twice.

For a few days after their show here, my friend and I sent songs back and forth, discussing their different band lineups during the 90s and how their sound shifted alongside their collaborators—like John McEntire and Sean O’Hagan, of the bands Tortoise and High Llamas. And so I had to make a mix that answered all my silly little thoughts about one of my favourite bands of all time. My goal here was to look at the period I love the most: Stereolab Phase I. I love how you can hear a sound forming and becoming a wave, before it crests1, draws back into itself and emerges anew. But I wanted to look at that exciting decade through some of their B-sides, for lack of a better way to put it. Kind of like a Stereolab mix the zealots could appreciate too. I also wanted to show how they really were like a Lab, by including “Les Yper Sound” (a song they’d play live on the Later with Jools Holland, so not exactly obscure) along with the more experimental reworking “Les Yper-Yper Sound”. It’s that willingness to explore that makes me such a fan of the band. I hope you enjoy this. It’s about two hours long.

V.

This is also an art blog now. I’m currently retooling the Sermons! catalog of playlists. For this mix cover, I wanted to do something that visually accomplished what I felt Stereolab was doing during this period, and I tried to build a letter system from three basic shapes: circle, triangle, and square. Including the various experiments was an attempt to show how the idea progressed, something I think this playlist does with their sound. Only after I was finished did I see Vasilis Marmatakis’s poster for the film Bugonia. Oh well, I stand by what I made.

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Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”

Uriel Speaks on the Landing (1988, Unarius Academy of Science video)

…I'm not saying I've been everywhere and I've done everything. But I do know it's a pretty amazing planet we live on here. A man'd have to be some kind of fool to think we're all alone in this universe.”

The Mummies—You Must Fight to Live on the Planet of the Apes, (Live, 1990s)1

“…on a dark and stormy night, when some wild-eyed eight foot tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head against a barroom wall, looks you crooked in the eye, and asks if you paid you dues; you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye and remember what ol’ Jack Burton always says at a time like that:
Have you paid your dues Jack?
Yessir, the check is in the mail”

Ships In Horrible Storms

“On a dark and stormy night when the lightnings crashing and the thunders rolllin’ and the rains coming down in sheets thick as lead…
Just remember what old Jack Burton does when the earth quakes, the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of heaven shake. Yeah, Jack Burton just looks that big old storm right square in the eye and he says: Give me your best shot pal, I can take it.”

Obituary—Turned Inside Out, (Live 1990 (footage w/ James Murphy!))

“…Like I told my last wife, I says, "Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it's all in the reflexes."

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Kathakali, The Dance Drama of Kerala, 1959

“Which Lo Pan? Little ol’ basketcase on wheels, or the ten foot tall roadblock?”

Dishrags—I Don’t Love You (Live, 1979, Vancouver, BC)

“Would you stop rubbing your body up against mine? I can’t concentrate when you do that”

Midnight Cave: The Time Experiment (1963 documentary about Michel Siffe)2

“Sit tight, hold the fort, keep the home fires burning. And if we’re not back by dawn…call the president.”

Ofra Haza—Im Nin’Alu3 (1978, TV broadcast)

Jack Burton: I don't get this at all. I thought Lo Pan—

David Lo Pan: Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to "get it!"

Castellars de Vilafranca (Le Diada de Saint Felix, 1997—if you watch only one video, make it this one)

“Look, I’m going to tell you about an accident, and I don’t want to hear act of God, okay?”

The Equals—I Can See You, But You Don’t Know ( 1970, Australian TV promo video)

“Ol’ Jack always says, what the hell…”

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Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”

I had to read a lot of shit in art school. Not art history shit. Post-structuralist shit. Foucault, Lacan, Derrida…gems like this Judith Butler riddle that makes the rounds:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

You said it. Whatever it is that you actually said.

I’m not writing this to brag of any smartness, just pointing out that I have an education— one that I’ll be paying off until I’m burned into a gazillion particles of ash in the crematory, and spread across a variety of locales by trusted friends whom I am banking on to outlive me.

Don’t get it twisted.

I love having the ability to read an artwork. But then again, so much art is created to fit within the framework of how one could read it because we have had to read so much post-structuralist shit. Post structural theory in art has given the lead to the cart, instead of the horse. It prioritizes curators™ and critics, even as it gives artists better tools for decision making—which is what art making is: a series of decisions that result in an outcome that is then defined as art.

In art school, I thought this was so enlightening, but now after years of bleeding so much of my available energy back into the veins of the artworld™ heart that keeps up this systematic pipeline of art students into art laborers, I think I’m back to just appreciating art that I simply find interesting to look at or listen to.

My relationship to art is simple, my relationship to art is complicated. One thing I carry with me, other than a firm philosophical devotion to Guy Debord’s method of the dérive, is Roland Barthes’s punctum, as written about in Camera Lucida (THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS in student loans).

But my ADHD-diagnosed brain1 really can’t be bogged down by details, so for me it’s defined as simply as: a certain point that draws my attention, as a viewer, and as a listener. I mean, that’s all it is, right? That book could’ve been a pamphlet.

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A few weeks back, my friend Al and I were DMing about the modern French Oi band Rixe. I never liked Oi when I was younger. Hated the whole street punk, bonehead three chord singalong stupidity of it. I love Caveman Death Metal, hate Caveman Street Punk.

Probably because most of the guys I knew that were into that music when I was growing up were total fucking idiots. Kitchen staff at the vegetarian restaurant I briefly worked at when I was 19 counted a few—which meant that they could at least hold jobs, but that doesn’t vindicate them enough to move them out of the total fucking idiot category. I think they also reminded me how much I bought in to the punk caricature when I was young, something that embarrasses me to this day.

Al, of the above paragraph fame, is a drummer. His actual fame should be for the band he plays in, Spell, and not for being the topic of a paragraph on a music blog on Substack. He was excited to share that Rixe with me because of the drum machine on Tir Groupé. It reminded me of Métal Urbain, who I think aren’t underrated as much not really known. Classic French punk doesn’t have the best rap, but beyond Plastic Bertrand’s Ça Plane Pour Moi, one can find some pretty good stuff, like Métal Urbain or Les Olvensteins—honestly nothing sounds as punk as slurred filthy French. We also chatted about listening to more punk music during stressful times.

Of course I told Al I’d make him a playlist because that seems to be how I justify avoiding the task of writing or making art—that ADHD again, apparently.

Which brings me back to Barthes, his punctum (that feels dirty to write) and my morgage, ahem, student loan debt.

What I made turned out to be less focused on Métal Urbain education and more directed to punk adjacent music with something that catches and holds my attention, something that sets it apart. Like the drumming on Grim’s Old Town Mall (particularly the ride cymbal in the bridge). Or the bizarre and amazing vocals of Personality Crisis’s Mitch Funk. There are a few songs thrown in just because I love them, like Really Red’s Too Political with it’s opening verse:

Middle class liberals all make me sick
The communist party is a load of shit
The KKK can kiss my ass
They're all dangerous morons tied to the past
Each one tries to dictate their own point of view
Telling everyone their way is true
Each needs a ghetto to put their opponents in
Each needs a ghetto to put their opponents in
NO MORE GHETTOS!

And then there’s the absolutely feral Toronto band S.H.I.T. (Sexual Humans In Turmoil, but also an acronym with no meaning, depending), showing how perfect hardcore is in speaking to any current moment, with the nightmarish Corporate Funded Killing Technology—a song that makes me want to smash every single piece of hardware I own into my skull.

There is a bit of a lyrical thread stringing it along, so as always: it plays best in order and not on shuffle. In the most predictable expectation, this playlist operates like an artwork, but I’d leave that for a curator™ to get into.

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Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”

Prelude:

This was scheduled to go out this morning at 7:30 am but at the last minute, I pulled back because it isn’t very good and reads like a basic blog post. I’ve been up to my eyeballs in design jobs and wasn’t able to devote the real time Halloween deserves; instead of talking about how the holiday has been twisted in the American psyche, a day we’ve decided to celebrate the masks and costumes we wear instead of hide behind them, or the collective weirdness of the haunted house—a phenomenon explored by my favourite anthropologist / artist Cameron Jamie, or how losing radio shows to streaming audio has robbed us of our connection to music and our time. Instead I just basically talked about myself, which isn’t nearly as interesting and comes off like me trying to impress readers. But alas…

I loved three things when I was thirteen: Skateboarding, horror movies and heavy music. I did lots of cheap special effects. I had a sword. I made a Metallica kite for an Earth Science project. Evidently I only drew skulls. My mom admitted to me in my thirties that they were a bit scared of me for a minute. To me, this sounds like a normal thirteen year old.

Two things I definitely did at thirteen:

1. I made a fake head wound with liquid latex and Ben Nye stage blood (mint flavour, great deep red colour), then took my bike, threw it on the side of the road and waited next to it until a car would come—then I’d fake that I’d had a terrible accident by crawling in the street. It was fun until one lady screeched to a halt, ran over to me and insisted on calling an ambulance.

2. Staged exploding blood fights on a busy intersection during rush hour traffic (for maximum visibility). Here’s a cheap (and stupid) way to make a squib: Take a condom and fill it with stage blood. Tape a Black Cat firecracker to one side, with the fuse exposed. Tape the condom to a soup can lid, with the firecracker between it and the condom (to “protect” you from the explosion). Tape the whole mess to your chest, light the fuse, say a quick prayer, then laugh like crazy as blood explodes everywhere.

One Halloween, I made a fake body and dragged it up on to the roof above the front door. I hid behind the pitch of the roof, and every time a group of children would come up the walk, I’d throw the body down on them, then stand up yelling. I was wearing an old goalie mask I’d bought for $5 at a garage sale in Alaska. I also had a machete. It was 1987. Kids were terrified. This went on for hours.

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If you lived within 50 miles of Houston in the 1980s and listened to punk music, you probably listened to Chuck Roast and his show The Funhouse on KPFT 90.5. He played a schizo mix of punk, industrial and noise music. He also owned a record store and played in the noise band Turmoil in the Toybox. His show is where I first heard psychedelic punk maniacs Butthole Surfers, crusty animal rights punks Concrete Sox, the terrifying nightmare of early Nurse With Wound, and the culture jam of Negativeland and locals Culturcide. If you were adventurous in your listening, Chuck Roast had your ear. You can read / hear more about The Funhouse at Mark Twistworthy’s now defunct Texas Punk Treasure Chest. I can’t remember how I discovered it, but I was probably rotating the dial towards 91.7, a college radio station that I also was recording stuff from all the time.

The Funhouse had a huge impact on me. It had a huge impact on a lot of people. I think my whole life I’ve been trying to carry that forward, to create my shapeshifting version of The Funhouse. The way I used to make mixtapes, splicing and pasting. The way I made turntable mixes I was too hesitant to play in public; weird, collages of sound and children’s records, occasionally punctuated with actual, listenable songs.1 Sermons!, where I try and dig through all I remember and all I discover in my endless excitement for music.

I’ll forever be indebted to Chuck Roast—he scrambled my young brain so wonderfully. So here’s a tribute. His Halloween shows were some of his best, a mash of horror novelty records, Halloween sound effect records, terrifying industrial noise, musique concrete and blistering mutant hardcore. A total assault on good taste and a listener’s patience. It’s only an hour. It’s not a party mix, unless your guests are a bunch of freaks. There isn’t a song on here that was released past 1989 (except the Fliehende Sturme song which I just really like), and I can hear Chuck playing all of these. I’ve tried to make something that feels like those shows (as far as a playlist can anyway). Most of you probably won’t like it all, or any of it. I challenge you though to listen to it like I’d have to listen to the radio show: unable to fast forward—which ended up rewarding me in so many ways now that I look back. We don’t give music the time enough these days. Let these songs work their chaotic magic.

I may pass it on to him, but more likely not; he still has a record store in Houston called Vinal Edge (yes, it’s purposefully misspelled)—it’s been in business for over thirty years.

I really do love Halloween.

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Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”

I sometimes play my little records out at bars. I also sometimes put together my little playlists. One day I may try my little radio show.

I can only write so much about the music I try to bring you. Or, I want to share more than one song with you.

Occasionally, we need to go deeper. And we need to focus on the music and not whatever silly words I’m writing. Ultimately, SERMONS! is still just about the music and nothing more.

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In the early 2000s, I came across a record called Love, Peace & Poetry: Turkish Psychedelic Music. In fact, it was one of a series dedicated to “global psychedelic music”, and there were nine editions, although I have only ever heard this one, the Japanese, and the Mexican volumes.

I’d consider it a pivotal personal discovery.

I texted a friend the other day to share my excitement that Selda Bağcan is playing in Houston in April. I was surprised (not really) that he wasn’t as delighted as I was, but it made sense when he told me he didn’t really know much of her music. While Selda may be better known in certain circles as the sample source on the Mos Def song Supermagic1, there’s so much to dig into with her, including the political climate that found her jailed and eventually living in exile. I told him I’d put together a list of songs to check out, which then instead of a Selda list for him became a playlist of twenty of my favourite Turkish songs for you.

Other than the sublime version of Nem Kaldı by the contemporary Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek, the songs in this playlist were released from around the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s. As hard as it was, I’ve made sure that no artist is represented more than once, and I tried to create a slightly broader representation than a compilation like Love, Peace & Poetry does. While all of this is a bit psychedelic, there’s less of the hard rock side of things—this isn’t really a “Turkish Psych” compilation, so nothing like 3 Hürel on this. The english translation for this playlist is supposed to be Turkish Ascent, although I’m sure that’s not right. But please ascend anyway.

Hopefully, this either:

A) Makes for a great soundtrack to an evening of eating well, drinking better and laughing and loving as hard as you ever will.

B) Makes for an introduction to a dynamic culture of music that deserves much recognition and carries through 2024 with musicians like Gaye Su Akyol and Altin Gün (who put on one of the best shows I saw in 2023).

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Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”