I FAKE IT SO REAL I AM BEYOND FAKE

Harry Allen (as in "Yo Harry, you're a writer - are we that type?") has unearthed and posted a 10-minute video of Margaret Seltzer, the woman who wrote an "autobiography" claiming to have been raised in South Central L.A. and run with the Bloods - all of which was utter bullshit. Check it out; it's awesome.

NONE MORE BLACK FOR ME, THANKS

I have tried. Really, I have. In my iPod right now there are albums by Antaeus, Blut Aus Nord, Burzum, Craft, Darkthrone, Deathspell Omega, Dimmu Borgir, Emperor, Glorior Belli, Gorgoroth, Immortal, Marduk, Nachtmystium, Spektr, Thorns and Xasthur. (I own stuff by Cradle of Filth, Leviathan, Mayhem, Watain and others, but they're not currently represented.) But I have at last come to the conclusion that I just don't like black metal anymore. There are a few groups that occasionally come up with something sort of cool - I enjoy Dimmu Borgir's most pomptastic, John Williams-esque moments, and some of Spektr reminds me of a super-creepy version of Main at times - but the big problem with black metal bands, as adventurous as they sometimes are, is that they're scotch-taping a few small innovations on a base of orthodox black metal. Which annoys the living fuck out of me at this point. The shrieking vocals. The ultra-trebley guitars - and the three riffs every band in the genre has agreed to share between them. The one fucking drumbeat (see previous sentence). Oh, and corpse paint is neither scary nor ignorable. It's fucking silly, and it makes every band wearing it look like a goddamn sad clown/pissed-off mime. I can't take it anymore. I need melody and rhythmic intricacy. I need musicians more concerned with what they're playing than their collection of spiked armbands. I need album covers in color. Sorry, black metallers. I'm sure you're very, very serious about what you're doing. But I'm all done.

THIS MONTH IN JAZZIZ

BOBBY FEW
Lights And Shadows
Boxholder
Bobby Few and his pumpin' piano have been heard on a fistful of classic or underrated free-jazz albums, from Albert Ayler's Music Is The Healing Force Of The Universe to Frank Wright's Church Number Nine and Uhura Na Umoja. His two-fisted, keyboard-sweeping style blends gospel fervor and avant-garde expressionism into an often breathtakingly beautiful tidal wave of sound that seems to draw equally from Cecil Taylor and Fats Waller. Few's new solo album is occasionally a meditative affair, as albums of (mostly) unaccompanied piano frequently are, but he's lost nary a step in the decades since recording the legendary slabs cited above. And his still-powerful impulse to pummel the instrument, and the listener, into submission comes to the fore more often than not. On the disc's opener, "Bells," Few overdubs whistle and bells, but otherwise it's 10 fingers and 88 keys, all the way. On the gentle-ish "From Different Lands," he gets into some almost classical territory, rumbling at the low end of the keyboard in a decidedly intimidating manner. This ain't no easy listening dinnertime background music. "Enomis," on the other hand, easily could be. The title is Few's wife's name spelled backward, and the piece is lush, romantic, and reminiscent of Thelonious Monk's "Crepuscule With Nellie" in feel if not melody. Ultimately, this is a beautiful and multifaceted disc showcasing a pianist who should be a god to far more jazz fans than he presently is.

NIK BÄRTSCH'S RONIN
Holon
ECM
The fourth studio recording, and fifth album overall, by Swiss keyboardist Nik Bärtsch and his spidery, minimalist funk group Ronin is possibly the band's most subtle work to date. Bärtsch hasn't changed his compositional style - he's still working with tiny melodic and rhythmic cells that vary ever so slightly over the length of a piece, but he's abandoned his Fender Rhodes for acoustic piano, which gives the music a delicacy, and a humanity, occasionally missing in the past. Albums like Randori and Rea featured compositions - Bärtsch calls them "Moduls," and they're numbered - that sounded like they were played by tiny, wind-up stainless steel spiders. But Holon, in a manner befitting its title, seems to glow with an inner light. In the liner notes, he compares the band to a school of fish, making collective decisions and moving in one direction or another, as one, in a fraction of a second. That's a fascinating analogy, but perhaps a better one would be to the ocean itself, as the band's improvisations and the members' reactions to one another are frequently invisible. This music has a calm and an utter absence of hesitation that makes it feel like the product of a single mind rather than a group. And that's an astonishing achievement. Holon is a quiet and infinitely patient album, one that seeks to lure you in rather than bludgeoning you with excessive rhythmic force. The more you listen to it, the stronger its grip on you becomes.

RUN TO THE HILLS, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES

Got Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem from Netflix; watched it last night. I'm not kidding when I say this is one of the most nihilistic movies I've ever seen. The human characters, even the leads (played by the dumbest fireman from Rescue Me and the semi-exotic-looking CTU chick from 24), are just piles of meat that happen to stagger out of the way while the Aliens and Predators are fighting. In the meantime, pregnant women and babies and dogs die, the government intercedes in pretty much the worst possible way (Robert Joy in an expensive suit = run for your life), and overall the movie's "message" boils down to "one day something really big is gonna fuck you over, and there's no way to predict it or save yourself." The filmmaking is rudimentary, but philosophically it was almost Schopenhauer-esque. Recommended with the usual caveats (if you don't like genre movies, don't waste your time watching and my time bitching to me afterward).

CURRENTLY IN THE WIRE

LISLE ELLIS
Sucker Punch Requiem: An Homage To Jean-Michel Basquiat
Henceforth
If somebody dies young enough, they can become whatever you want them to be. Lisle Ellis, a musician and occasional painter, regards the late artist and occasional musician Jean-Michel Basquiat as a kindred spirit, and has assembled a disconnected, atmospheric shrine on this CD. The overtly 'jazz' tracks making up the bulk of the album are very pretty indeed; saxophonist Oliver Lake and trombonist George Lewis dance gracefully together, and drummer Susie Ibarra is a good match for Ellis's subtle basslines. Pianist Mike Wofford picks at the melodies like a fussy eater, and Ellis's wife, flautist Holly Hofmann, adds delicacy to a stately post-bop group sound.
But more than that, she gives the ensemble what uniqueness it possesses. Ellis's melodies are similar enough to those heard on discs by Greg Osby, Jason Moran, Steve Lehman, Vijay Iyer and other New York performer-composers of the moment that without the presence of Hofmann's flute, blindfold testing would be difficult indeed. The nearly nine-minute "Las Pulgas (Repelling Ghosts)" could be a track from any one of a dozen recent albums. It's all well played, but ultimately inessential. Five brief, glitchy electronic interstitial pieces appear, with no obvious relationship to the main music. Only on the final track do vocalist Pamela Z's gnomic utterances, reminiscent of AGF's experiments in fractured language, add more than ballast for the album's titular conceit - making the record in some small way memorable. Pretty isn't enough.