Yeah, we’re doomed.

This little tune is hot fire, and the beat — courtesy of a 22-year-old Chaka Khan on drums — is dope. Notice where she screws up at the beginning and tries to stop the band, but it’s live TV, so they just keep going and she has to jump back in.

I ran across this clip a couple years ago on YouTube, and it was removed for copyright violation soon after, but not before I was able to audio-hijack the music (which I’ve since sampled into a janky little beat that still isn’t completed to my satisfaction). The other day, I noticed the clip was back up, as well as an extended version that contains the interview portion before the performance; the video quality is better on that one, but the audio isn’t as good. Here’s a stream of just the audio (which you can download from MediaFire):

This pretty much speaks for itself. Here’s a little more from the film’s web site…

November 2009.

Manuel Liebeskind, longtime European sound engineer for the  band OXBOW, joins their tour of Europe.

He points his iPhone towards the scenery and shoots a personal tour diary, as close as one can come to the exhaustion of everyday tour life.

STILL BEFORE draws the most intimate tour portrait  of this exceptional band.

I wonder if they’re headed back to Europe soon…and if I can tag along as the roadie / merch guy.

The energy in their music is immeasurably huge and undeniably infectious. They make an insane racket, but move in unison as one fast-paced, detuned punk rock ‘n’ roll machine. They are, for my money, one of the best live acts on the road these days.

Most of their recent show, February 2, at the Hemlock Tavern in SF — which, of course, I was front and center at — was captured on video and posted, in three parts, by Colin:

Photos by yours truly, which you can see at full size over on Flickr…

Holy shit this is awesome — Harvey Milk live at the Bottle Tree in Birmingham, AL. I love this band but I’ve never seen them play live, and this clip just makes me feel like a supersized shithead for not making that happen already. This performance is top notch, and is best viewed in HD on a full screen.

I grabbed this clip from the We Have Signal channel over on Vimeo, which has a ton of stuff on it, including a crazy dope performance from Coliseum as well.

The guys over at NoTreble threw up one of these clips — “For Whom The Bell Tolls” — a few weeks ago, I bookmarked it, and just recently went back to discover that the YouTube user who initially posted it also put up several other isolated Cliff Burton bass track recordings from classic Metallica songs.

I’ve been playing a lot of bass lately, and trying to write music for a heavy bass-and-drums duo, so it’s no surprise that I could listen to this stuff all day. It reminds me of how much I liked Metallica when Cliff was in the band, and how I really haven’t cared about any album they’ve released since he was killed. He was such a beast, attacking the instrument with three fingers on his picking hand (instead of the more standard two-fingered approach, or a pick), playing with a unique mix of finesse and fury, infusing a fast and heavy style with an undeniable musicality. I’ve never seen another player quite like him.

There are even more of these on YouTube, but the five I posted below are my favorites. I also added a live performance clip from Cliff ‘Em All at the end just because it’s an old favorite — Cliff (“…the major rager on the 4-string motherfucker…”) burning the house down at The Stone in SF in 1983.

This stuff is so goddamn awesome…

I broke character last Thursday 10/14 and headed to the Hemlock Tavern in SF to see friend and author Eugene S. Robinson read from his latest novel, A Long, Slow Screw. Though, given that the Hemlock is traditionally a live music venue, and Eugene is, more than an author, known as the frontman of archetypal art metal band Oxbow, the scene wasn’t all that far out of my comfort zone. Anyway…

Joined on stage by spur-of-the-moment ambient noise duo guitarist Chris Corona  (Floating Goat, Orb of Confusion) and bass player Monte Vallier (Jet Black Crayon, Swell), Eugene sipped briefly from a glass of red wine, removed his beanie and launched into a passage from the book, not reading it, but impressively reciting it from memory. Eugene is a showman — an actor and performer (if you’ve ever seen Oxbow, you know) — so there was a bit of drama in his recitation; nothing over the top but just enough to make it engaging and appropriately intense for a scene from a book about theft, graft and the general gritty ugliness of the NYC criminal underworld of the early 1970s.

The performance was brief, only about 30 minutes, but it was worth it. Here are some photos (see ‘em at full size over on Flickr)…

Bonus: Someone shot this video of Oxbow performing an acoustic version of “The Geometry of Business” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Looks like a cool space, definitely a cool song (you should get the album, The Narcotic Story)…

I’m actually working on a handful of other things, and a couple of them are actually pretty close to being done, but given my current schedule there’s just no guarantee they’ll hit in the calendar month. So, just in case, in the interest of avoiding another post-less month, I give you Sasha Grey, hilariously not fucking some guy…

The piece hasn’t run yet (it’ll be in a future issue of Bass Player magazine, I don’t know which one), but in anticipation of the upcoming US Sleep reunion tour, and because I’ve recently started playing slow and heavy music with plenty of low frequency modulation, and listening to a lot of Om as inspiration, here’s a little teaser quote from the interview, and an awesome video of Om live at Amoeba Music in San Francisco from a few years ago:

“For me the bass is essentially part of the drums, it’s a melodic percussion instrument. You have to be able in some degree to play drums if you are going to play bass, otherwise its role is reduced to a downtuned guitar. Breathing and spacing in flowing time are totally essential in the bass approach. You’re not just playing a riff, you’re bridging the meter of the drums to the riff. For this you have to find the intervals in space between beats and melodies, and then know how to push them or hold them back depending on what the song is saying.”

Case in point…