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Fall Tour: An Obscene Amount of Garlic

Sep 29, 2014
12 min

Fall Tour: An Obscene Amount of Garlic

The crowd at the Big Red Barn at Cornell is better than the usual college crowd. The room is nice and full, and people are dancing and generally into what is happening. My favorites are a guy and a girl in the front row. The girl is doing this sort of manic warp-speed shimmy no matter what rhythm the music accompanying it seems to suggest. It is particularly amusing to watch during Celestial Shore’s set, which has quintuplets and things. The guy is doing more of a thrashy nu-

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Fall Tour: Carlos hears Son of Salami in Burlington and Bursts Into Tears

Sep 26, 2014
10 min

Fall Tour: Carlos hears Son of Salami in Burlington and Bursts Into Tears

Our show in Boston is at a house. House shows in Boston must be handled carefully because the cops put considerable and occasionally hilarious effort into shutting them down. The address can’t be disclosed until the last minute, and anyone asking about the show that someone doesn’t know personally stands a nontrivial chance of being a cop. I am not sure where their fervor comes from. These shows don’t sell alcohol, and are actually among the way more benign activities a large

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Fall Tour: Lodging with the Elks

Sep 23, 2014
14 min

Fall Tour: Lodging with the Elks

Our show in Pittsburgh is at the Smiling Moose. The streets are wide enough for roughly one and a half cars, so loading is a dodgy affair. I do not intend to pass judgment on the fine city of Pittsburgh based on one of its residents, but one of the first people I see after parking is a fully decked-out neo-Nazi. He is burly and tattooed and has a big black swastika with a red background on the back of his denim jacket. You can’t miss it. The fuck is this? I’m sure everywhere

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Fall Tour: In which I discover a previously-unknown talent for shadow puppets

Sep 18, 2014
8 min

Fall Tour: In which I discover a previously-unknown talent for shadow puppets

Our Kalamazoo show is at Satellite Records, a thoroughly awesome record store on what appears to be the main drag. I take the opportunity to get some tapes for the car: Harry Nilsson, Paul Simon, and best of all, Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell. I have a morbid fascination with Meat Loaf. He is definitely one of the weirder things to be that popular. Meat Loaf mastermind Jim Steinman’s website is one of my favorite places on the internet. I love the grandiosity

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Fall Tour: Bill and Ted are kind of chumps if you really think about it

Sep 14, 2014
12 min

Fall Tour: Bill and Ted are kind of chumps if you really think about it

In Atlanta, we stay in a large house consisting of many apartments connected by a tarpaper roof. Our hosts have a large collection of bells, with which we improvise some droney faux-gamelan for a while. There is also a crystal of selenite, which can be used to bow a guitar. The guitar is covered with selenite dust, but the timbre is awesome, high and sharp and airy. Exactly what you’d imagine applying a crystal to a metal string would sound like. When we tire of playing odd i

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Tour Diary: Hootie & The Blowfish Boulevard is a place that exists and I went there

Sep 8, 2014
4 min

Tour Diary: Hootie & The Blowfish Boulevard is a place that exists and I went there

Our trip from Raleigh to Columbia is mercifully rainy, bringing the temperature down to a very nearly tolerable level. Our show is at a cozy house venue called Shredquarterz. We arrive quite early, and take a walk into town for coffee. At the main intersection, we encounter this: Turns out Hootie & the Blowfish are from Columbia, and are figures of sufficient repute to warrant their own street name. There is also a monument, which I couldn’t get a picture of but which can be

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Fall Tour: Meat Edition

Sep 7, 2014
12 min

Fall Tour: Meat Edition

Leaving for tour requires a series of carefully-choreographed preparations. Preparing to leave home for nearly a month is already pretty involved, but there are a few more variables this time around. We recently purchased a new van, a white Dodge Ram which we sincerely hope is less fucked up than the old blue Chevy we’ve taken around the country several times. It has to have some repairs done, and duplicate keys made, and in a particularly impressive move, beat-up tires swapp

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Vignette, Berlin

May 5, 2014
6 min

Vignette, Berlin

Our show in Berlin is the best yet, and even though we’re tired we agree that the night must go on. We have a hot tip from local opener Vadoinmessico: a basement party, not too far from where we’re staying. The DJ is their friend, and will be spinning J-Pop. I could care less about J-Pop on the merits, but this seems like exactly the sort of night one is supposed to have when one is young and out in Europe on a Friday night. We loved their set, so we trust their judgment, and

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European Tour: Brixton, Continued

May 4, 2014
1 min

European Tour: Brixton, Continued

Our morning coffee stop in Brixton Market introduces me to the “flat white”, which to me is the ideal ratio of coffee to milk. It is sort of like a macchiato composed of more coffee by volume. Fortified, our party agrees on an objective: everyone wants a full English breakfast. A full English breakfast is a sight to behold. #tour

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European Tour: This Pot Has Been On The Stove For 400 Years

Apr 28, 2014
11 min

European Tour: This Pot Has Been On The Stove For 400 Years

The show is not actually in Lille. It is in Wicres, a tiny town of 380 or so on the outskirts of Lille. The promoter has a concert series in which each concert is held in a different location. The series is supported by government grants at every level, and the idea seems to be to bring the arts into some of the more far-flung provinces. I had not previously realized the great extent to which all the shows we play rely on the largesse of the French government, but it makes se

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European Tour: Overeating Paris

Apr 26, 2014
14 min

European Tour: Overeating Paris

I can’t really tell you what Bourges is like because we’re at a festival, and festivals are an altered state of reality. As with most festivals, we are greeted by a surly guard who prevents us from driving in the direction that obviously makes the most sense. European cars are really comically small to the American eye, and our giant van navigates the tiny closed-off streets with some difficulty. After a series of wrong turns that ends with us being waved through by the very

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European Tour: “Cheese With Rice!”

Apr 24, 2014
16 min

European Tour: “Cheese With Rice!”

Shortly after boarding Turkish Airlines Flight 1821, departing from JFK at 12:50 PM, I am offered a drink. How classy, I think to myself; like brunch. Don’t mind if I do. I have deliberately stayed up much too late the night before so I would be able to sleep. If I’m really being honest, I stayed up late because I was in a spectacularly good mood, but I have retroactively justified this decision by telling myself it will help me sleep on the plane. I should be able to sleep.

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Mar 28, 2014
6 min

Electric Balloon Tour: The problem of a spaceman

I’m so far behind on contemporaneous coverage of tour, I’m just going to say fuck it. The immediacy is gone, and anything I’d write now in an attempt to fully document the experience would fall short. I did get to eat two meals of barbecue in one day again, on the day we drove from Charlotte to Durham. Although as I’ve mentioned my number one favorite barbecue place ever was in Georgia, I am always happy to eat Carolina-style. North Carolina barbecue sauce is not sweet and gl

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Electric Balloon Tour: The Big Easy and Hotlanta and whatever nicknames they have for Sarasota and T

Mar 24, 2014
10 min

Electric Balloon Tour: The Big Easy and Hotlanta and whatever nicknames they have for Sarasota and T

Considering I only got two hours of sleep, I wake up surprisingly refreshed. Our first stop for the day is Tulane University, where we’ll be playing an afternoon show. The show turns out to be on the quad, on a slightly elevated platform of grass. The college has secured a truly excellent-looking PA as well as professional folks to set it up. As long as it doesn’t rain and electrocute all assembled, this is going to be a good one. It looks a bit like rain. After we unload, ou

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Electric Balloon Tour: I’m All Austin The Supermarket

Mar 17, 2014
19 min

Electric Balloon Tour: I’m All Austin The Supermarket

We roll into Austin pretty late, and go to our friends’ house to crash. Our friends are Zorch, an amazing psychedelic mathy/proggy band we play with whenever we come through Austin. They have a big art studio/show space which is being used as a venue for the festival, but since most people aren’t in town yet there’s room for sleeping. This cat holds court on an old car seat. We sit around the kitchen table and shoot the shit for a while. Our host tells us that some friends fr

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Electric Balloon Tour: A Monument To Man’s Arrogance

Mar 10, 2014
10 min

Electric Balloon Tour: A Monument To Man’s Arrogance

The first thing you should know about our show in Phoenix is that it takes place at the Hard Rock Café. Last time I set foot in a Hard Rock Café I was eleven years old. My family and I had won a contest. We got a tour of MTV Studios, and dinner at the Hard Rock Café in Times Square. We had a blast, but even at eleven I was aware that the whole thing was a bit cheesy. Maybe it has one of the hundreds of guitars that, like, Kip Winger bought in the heady days of musicians makin

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Electric Balloon Tour: Things To Eat Besides The Lotus

Mar 8, 2014
11 min

Electric Balloon Tour: Things To Eat Besides The Lotus

We roll into San Francisco around midnight, and pull up to Different Fur Studios. Different Fur put the show together, and the powers that be have graciously allowed us to stay the night. This is the biggest and nicest studio I have ever set foot in, and recording there is definitely a long-term goal. For now, we are very excited to crash and play a show. They have plenty of couches and even a sauna. A sauna! For real. Before the end of our stay I will have my first shvitz, w

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Electric Balloon Tour, the re-electrifying

Mar 5, 2014
6 min

Electric Balloon Tour, the re-electrifying

The best thing that happens in Olympia besides making a friend at the thrift store is eating this banh mi. We have to get the oil changed, and I notice that across the street is a pho restaurant. We have seen a lot of Vietnamese things around Washington, so I figure it is probably legit. I am not in the mood for pho, as it is a terrible travel food, but I figure they would have a banh mi, and they do. It is small, but just filling enough, and every ingredient is perfectly bal

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Electric Balloon Tour, Day whatever*

Mar 4, 2014
5 min

Electric Balloon Tour, Day whatever*

*a few days behind here, I should catch up to the present this week We arrive in Seattle with time to spare, and everyone goes off in different directions to explore. There is really no show prep to do because the venue is small and we are unable to load in until immediately before our set. This unorthodox arrangement sounds like a logistical nightmare, but we all put it out of our minds and try to enjoy Seattle. We are joined by acclaimed artist/Julian’s girlfriend Marie, wh

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Mar 3, 2014
4 min

Vignette, Portland

Before the show in Portland, two of us and a local friend head out to a strip club. We had heard about one particular place, and it piqued our curiosity. I have always had a thing for women who rock the punk aesthetic, and that is the specialty of this club. I have never been to a strip club, nor particularly seen the point, but for some reason I am suddenly into the idea. A combination of the sense of adventure that comes with being on tour, and the fact that someone is will

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