Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship Is Finally Available

The Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship long player is finally available today for download at Romantic Air Records' web site. This album is a phenomenal work of art. The group is largely the work of Detroit-area composer/artist Trevor Naud, done in collaboration with PAS/CAL drummer TLD. Like the name of the project, the music is mysterious, rare and elevated. Download it now and you might just survive the winter.

I'll repost my original blog about HGBS from this past fall.

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(L-R, Trevor Naud and LTD)

Back in June I leaked some early mixes of Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship, a new project of my good friend Trevor Naud in collaboration with Pas/Cal drummer LTD. (I hesitate to mention that Trevor is kin because I don't want to imply that my fascination with his music is in some way pro-rated by my affection for him as a person. The majesty of Trevor's gift is wide and timeless and I just happen to know him.) And now, I have the final album in my hands and I need to talk about it.

Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship is like some rare exotic flower that flourishes in the secret dark and contains double helices of hallucinogenic gunpowder entwined deep in its stems if you know how to unleash it. Trevor told me he made it in a period of extreme personal blockage. No doubt, part of that frustration was with his own band, Zoos of Berlin, who, with over four years of stunning gigs and avant-garde alchemy under their belts have yet to produce a full-length album (there is every indication that dawning of the Zoos long player is finally nigh). So Trevor set up some mics and a computer in his kitchen and made this in a season. His impatience emerges in the ADD'ness of it all, the quick-acting brevity and the conjuring of swift, but complete, worlds of sound. They are less songs than glints of melodic hooks strung together like Christmas lights to form a shimmering path. The best way to listen is to avoid grasping - just let the vignettes fly by fully formed in their warbled and buttery baroque shapes.

HGBS came out more gentle than early mixes suggested. The first mp3 Trevor slipped me last summer was "A Head For Gabriel Dove," two and a half minutes of compression-crushed jazz drumming and reverb-soaked baritone that was as carnivorous as it was surging. But a listen to the finished record shows something much more haunted than hunting. It is a quiet anxiety slowed into sadness, more in keeping with the winter around me and things falling into sleep and death. It's a pop requiem for emotional shut-ins and the spiritually claustrophobic.

Fans of Scott Walker, David Bowie, Arthur Russell and Eric Matthews - in other words, artists trying to repossess dead rock forms with the jagged spirits of 20th century classical and avant garde - will come pre-primed for going deep with these tracks. But it doesn't require some kind of exclusive, arty membership to respond to something this gorgeous and immediate. It's very tuneful, very lucid stuff.

As far as I know he's currently figuring out the terms of the record's release. Go bug him about it.

NOTE: For some reason my audio player is being weird about these files. You might have to hit play, then pause, then play.

Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Glass Case"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Jonaccce"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Nineteenth Usher"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "A Head for Gabriel Dove"



Hidden Ghost Balloon Ship - "Once Outside"

Mayer Hawthorne Continues the Motown Revival

I know nothing about Hawthorne. Just some white kid from the burbs who moved to LA and ended up sounding black. Aside from the Marvin Gaye-on-grass intro and roomy backbeat, I'm hearing way more of a Jamaican influence than Detroit on the way he's singing those notes: dipping down, rather than up "out."

Mayer Hawthorne and the County - "Just Aint Gonna Work Out"

Mr. Hudson - Picture of You

There is so much cool music. But most of that cool music has nothing to do with me and my life, and I often suspect that it has nothing to do with anybody's life, including the people making it. And so what good is detachment?

Once in a while, I'll see something by somebody who's cool but not afraid of sentiment. It takes skill to walk that fine line. I think that this song by Mr. Hudson walks it gracefully. I especially appreciate the joyful, simple moment where he says, "Imagine that, getting paid to sing."

A Tiny Tear in the Fabric of the Universe

So I'm standing in the living room of my friend A.J. making small talk when it happened. I had come by to borrow a midi controller and it was my first time setting foot in his home. We had digressed about cats, Christian rock and a pretty mindblowing concept for a screenplay based on A.J.'s recent breakup when I looked across the room and saw it. And my speech slurred to a stop. "Wha–? Is that... I don't, under...."

A.J. stared at me, perplexed, his big, sweet Ewok eyes growing wider. He said nothing.

"Why do you have that...? I mean, what is that? I just don't understand."

I was staring at this painting, on the cover of an LP, which he had framed and set on his table.


And the tiny tear in the fabric of the universe happened in my brain, which short-circuited because I couldn't understand what multiple levels of perverse indie irony had caused someone to create a retro-tinged oil painting of spoof-epic Tropic Thunder's Kirk Lazurus (actually the white actor Robert Downey Jr. in blackface), and dress him in WWII-era pilot garb.

I heard A.J., as if from a great distance, mumbling something about Jazz composer Thelonious Monk and great deals on frames from Urban Outfitters, but I had already fallen down the rabbit hole.

Circuit Bending With Satan

Daniel Demaggio is a visual artist working out of the Detroit area. He's been drinking the next-level gravy for sure and I'm a little infatuated with his perverse and beautiful style. A friend hipped me to "Circuit Bending with Satan" yesterday and I can't stop watching it. In this bizarre short, Satan patiently explains to his child viewers how to hack into their music toys and rearrange the circuits to produce hip, experimental sounds - the better to make (the devil's) tracks with.

It's funny on many levels and visually ebullient, with crude lo-fi giving way to gorgeous bursts of dayglo animation. The way it tweaks the "learning" genre of the Saturday morning kids' TV programs from my youth is cute, and could lend itself to only working on one level of ironic nostalgia. But it's too strange for that and doesn't come off as ironic on any level. Like all great comedy, it works because it takes itself completely seriously and abides by an internal logic: of course the devil is wearing dishwashing gloves; of course he speaks in a dated hard-rap cadence; of course he's trying to capture children's immortal souls, and yet takes a moment to caution them about socket safety.

The thing I like most about this is that it was clearly done for the love. It justifies itself and sells nothing. There's no product tie-in, no band being plugged. It's just a brief, distorted thought bubble popping from one artists' brain that needed to be captured.

Why Isn't Everybody Freaking Out About Black Milk?

The record is called Tronic. A made-up word that combines "The Chronic" + "Tron" = the second territory of rap. Black Milk is a disciple's disciple - a producer who's clearly separated the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the landfills of mostly-stupid urban music that have preceded him. But he sifts through it to pave his own way, like half-trained Jedi with the right amount of reverence for the good and powerful things that have come before, and the right amount of "fuckit" to say, let's move on. He's the manifestation of the J Dilla spirit. Keeping everything in his tracks at cross purposes to serve a higher groove. His sounds raw and not-stock. His beats always sick with the flu.

It's not a competition, but this is the only hip hop album I've heard all year* to get under my skin.

Black Milk "Overdose"


Black Milk "Bond 4 Life (Feat. Melanie Rutherford)"




Black Milk "The Matrix (Feat. Pharoahe Monch, Sean Price, & DJ Premier)"


Black Milk "Try"


*Unless you count Kardinal Offishall's amazing Not 4 Sale.