The Troubles & Travails of a Travelling Accordion Player, Here Recorded For Your Amusement & Edification.

Set-pieces & Scene Reports.

2/4/10

Complicated Gardening Techniques, the first in a series of story collections I'll be releasing over the course of the year, is now available for pre-order: www.vol1brooklyn.com/shop

Also, Insound is now offering St. Sebastian of the Short Stage, with a 10% discount for the next month if you enter coupon code "franz10."

1/30/10

"Some times you miss your friends/but are perfectly OK with never seeing them again."

So, have we talked about Vox Inferne yet?

In 2005, I ran into a guy I knew from a semi-prominent nu-metal label, who'd had some luck with with a sideline in "Brechtian cabaret" and were sniffing about for more low-hanging fruit of the same breed. After a few stiff drinks, he mentioned that they'd had an idea about finding a sort of punk cabaret vocal ensemble.

"Like the Comedian Harmonists?" I said. (Who, by the way, were an a capella-and-piano vocal group in Weimar Germany, whose love of jazz eventually got them in hot water with the Nazis.)
"Yeah, exactly."
"Huh," I said, "That's funny, Hess, Terricloth, and I have always joked about starting a barbershop quartet."
"If you're serious, I'll get you $1500 to make a demo."
"Hot diggity!"

Three months and several wine-drenched pitch pipes later, we (the three of us plus Yula and ringers extraordinaire George Wright and Ray Bailey) didn't get to make a full record, but we got to keep the money and the recordings. So from our lips to god's ears, a Valentine's Day treat from us to you. "World/Inferno Presents: Vox Inferne" is a limited-edition (500) colored-vinyl 7" featuring an a capella arrangement of the Inferno classic "Paul Robeson" as well as two never-before-heard songs: "The Devil Boys' Last Hurrah," a nostalgic but firm-hearted remembrance of a gang of doomed New Jersey ne'er-do-wells, and "Istanbul, Drowned Blue Shoes," a true-life tale of domestic revenge. Out on or around February 14 on Team Science Records. There, don't say we never did anything for you.

RIYL: Sacred Harp singing, the Ink Spots, the Comedian Harmonists, Chumbawamba's "English Rebel Songs 1381-1984."

1/26/10

A friend of mine, cellist and singer Emily Hope Price (also of Pearl & the Beard) is doing a project where she writes and records a song every day for a year. We collaborated on one yesterday, a love song from a plague to its victim: "Z for Zacharia"

1/20/10

You should know: I've left The Hold Steady. I told the band I'd be leaving in early September, played my last show with them in Minneapolis around Thanksgiving, and dotted the t's and crossed the i's this week. Five years seemed like a nice round number. Thanks to everyone who was a part of the experience, especially the Unified Scene, who are nice folks. I'll see you all soon in any case.

In the meantime: My story collection Complicated Gardening Techniques is out next month, "Guignol & Mischief Brew Fighty Dirty" is out now, as is my EP "St. Sebastian of the Short Stage; and I'm producing a record from Brooklyn's The Debutante Hour. EDIT: And a Valentine's Day 7" release of the Comedian Harmonists-inspired acapella project "World/Inferno Presents: Vox Inferne." See below for more.

1/19/10

With the help of tubaist Joe Exley and drummer Vin Scialla, I did a soundtrack for a short documentary about the NYC burlesque performer Jo Boobs: "Jo Boobs Teaches The Va-Va-Voom"

Also did a mixtape for Fishbowl Mixtape Blog: American Wheeze: 30+1 Accordion Classics

1/12/10

"Guignol & Mischief Brew Fight Dirty" is finally available...on cassette (!) and digital download (the cassette comes with a download coupon, so you don't have to get both), here: The Cottage Records

I've never had a record out on cassette before. Feels kinda funny.

1/7/10

Before we dispense with 2009, let me point out that several - even many - people though "Major General" was one of the best albums of 2009, and even "one of the best side-project albums ever made," "#76 Album of the Decade," and "'Quiet Where I Lie' [one of] 200 Greatest Songs of the New Millenium (So Far)." Who? Find out here..

12/31/09

The last few years, I've really enjoyed making an end-of-the-year mix, a kind of audio yearbook of 50 songs that were the soundtrack to my year. It's not all music that came out this year (though it includes some of my favorite 2009 releases, like Pearl & The Beard, Mariachi El Bronx, Good Luck, Bomb The Music Industry!, and Demander), but also discoveries, re-discoveries, epiphanies, and just plain good music. OK, enjoy:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/k8lamz

12/13/09

I have a six-word memoir included in the new collection, "It All Changed In An Instant: Six-Word Memoris By Writers Famous & Obscure" (the follow-up to the NYT bestseller "Not Quite What I Was Planning"), alongside Frank McCourt, Gloria Steinem, Tony Kushner, and more. More info at sixwordmemoirs.com, and the new book is out Jan. 5 and available at Amazon.

Also, I'm pleased to be producing the debut (ha!) record from The Debutante Hour, fine purveyors of "new-fangled, old-fashioned music." Aren't we all. Three foxy ladies slinging Andrews Sisters harmonies and high-lonesome accordionic cabaret. That's in January.

11/16/09

Guignol has two songs in the soundtrack for "Con Artist,", a "docu-comedy" about 80s art star Mark Kostabi. Showing all fall at film festivals in Bologna, SLC, Denver, Glasgow, and more...

9/19/09

THREE BIG PROJECTS: The CD, the EP, and the Book

I have three big projects in the works the next six months - the Guignol/Mischief Brew collaboration Fight Dirty; a solo 10" EP St. Sebastian of the Short Stage; and my debut as a "published author," a collection of stories called Complicated Gardening Techniques. Thus, the respective scoops, lowdowns, and some previews.

*** 1) THE CD: Guignol & Mischief Brew Fight Dirty ***

Guignol & Mischief Brew first collaborated on "A Liquor Never Brewed", a track from Mischief Brew's 2005 release Smash The Windows. Erik's Fistolo label released Guignol's sophomore EP Drink The Best Wine First the same year. Now, three years later, a long-planned full-length collaboration is coming to fruition: Guignol & Mischief Brew Fight Dirty is seven Mischief Brew songs with Guignol as backing band; six Guignol songs with Erik on guitar; a Django Reinhardt cover, and a barn-burning take on Iron Maiden's "Hallowed Be They Name" (with Slavic Soul Party's Ben Holmes on trumpet). THIS IS NOT A SPLIT! It's Guignol & Mischief Brew playing together as a five-piece band. It's apotheosis anthems for the carnies, the travellers, the gypsies, jazzmen, and lowlifes; singing Turkish-flavored reveries, odes to tax evasion, dirty tricks, and mob revolution; cumbia carols, sludge-metal reels, and a funeral march at a flooded bar.


(Photo by Konstantin Sergeyev)

Banged out at Vibromonk Studios with Danny Shatzky (Firewater, Balkan Beat Box, Gogol Bordello), Fight Dirty will appear on CD and clear vinyl soon, but why not have a listen now...

     ROUND ONE:
     1. The Tardy Barker
     2. Off The Books
     3. Gonzalez, The Explosive Chilean
     4. Ahmet
     5. Fight Dirty
     6. Pete Merak
     7. Appel Direct
     8. Sugar Park Tavern Death Song

     ROUND TWO:
     9. Hallowed Be Thy Name
     10. Create Destroy
     11. Branks
     12. Dirty Penny's Pogo
     13. Mr. Crumb
     14. The Elusive Higgs
     15. When It Rains
     16. The Barking Drunkards

See photos from the rehearsals and sessions for Fight Dirty here...

TOUR DATES!
Guignol & Mischief Brew will be playing songs from the new album as a 5-piece:

Dec. 16 - AS220, Providence RI
Dec. 17 - Shea Stadium, Bushwick, Brooklyn
Dec. 18 - Ottobar, Baltimore MD
Dec. 19 - Strange Matter, Richmond VA
Dec. 20 - The Barbary, Philadelphia, PA

*** 2) THE EP: Franz Nicolay St. Sebastian of the Short Stage ***

      1. New England (w/ The Dresden Dolls) <--NOW STREAMING AT MYSPACE.COM/FRANZNICOLAY
     2. The Ballad of Hollis Wadsworth Mason, Jr.
     3. When The War Came
     4. I Just Want To Love

This is a new 4-song 10" vinyl (w/ digital download coupon), on Team Science Records (Matt & Kim, Teenage Kicks, Papermoons). Pressed on clear vinyl, it will be released November 10, however PRE-ORDER NOW AVAILABLE. Includes:

     - Another collaboration with the Dresden Dolls, a classic Jonathan Richman cover of regional pride.
     - The best mariachi-disco tribute to a retired superhero yet recorded. Listen!: Franz Nicolay: "The Ballad of Hollis Wadsworth Mason, Jr."
     - Artwork by VICE Magazine's Nicholas Gazin, a former accordion student of mine, includes a pullout poster-size insert:

     - And an exclusive new short story, entitled "Paraska Mikhailivna Is A Witch," about dead livestock and bluegrass music in rural Ukraine.

(I might also point out that Team Science is offering a Franz Nicolay pin-and-corkscrew set, so you'll probably want one of those...)

Anyway, speaking of stories...

*** 3) THE BOOK: Franz Nicolay Complicated Gardening Techniques ***

My first collection of stories, Complicated Gardening Techniques (with apologies to Fred Armisen) will be published around January by Julius Singer Press, an independent imprint run by Jason Diamond, who also commands the excellent Vol. 1 and Friends With Benefits reading series (among many other projects). CGT will be the first in a series on three chapbooks we'll release this year, then anthologize in hardcover.

What kind of stories, you ask? Real things that happened to me and people I know, fake things that might have happened to people you know; loosely fictionalized and highly stylized with handy tips and pithy epigrams. Here's the title track for a taster:

COMPLICATED GARDENING TECHNIQUES

I want to tell you how to get the slugs off your salad. I mean, lettuce; lettuce, not salad. Well, it's salad later; it's proto-salad, the becoming-salad. I have slugs on mine. I started the lettuce early in the season; I built long, coffin-like wooden grow-boxes, with hinged plank covers, so as the weather warmed I could slowly tilt them and prop them open and give the unclenched green shoots their first gulp of chilly sun. Sometime in May you can fold up the boxes and lean them in the basement corner with the walking sticks and the croquet set, the pitchfork and your grandfather's iron hedge-clippers. But then the loam-rows are exposed, thrusting and proud-chested and sprouting adolescently, and they take their rightful place in the food chain.

It's not just my salad. I have a Bavarian ceramacist living in the basement and he grows such a flower garden: begonias, fuschia, phlox; with wild queen-anne's-lace and black-eyed susans permitted to overrun his colonials; and expansive, ambitious mint. He wears shorts in all weather, grey wool socks, hiking boots dried in cocoons of at least four kinds of mud. When I say "living in the basement," he sounds like a minotaur, or at least a house troll. If you saw him silhouetted against the flames of his backyard kiln, sleeping in shifts to keep the fire fed, you might take him for a streamlined demon. He makes speckled, salted hanging pots for the plants, he cuts leather shoestrings for his boots, and he fires terrifying sculptures of cantilevered clay: pristine tea-bowls emerging from craggy, unfinished cliffs dripping with the remains of their melted iron skeletons and seared by the smoke of starved flames sucking the clay for oxygen. He is the master of the domestic, and then the elemental.

I awoke last night to a light flickering through the bay window and across the ceiling; shrugged on a robe and shuffled through the flecked glass doors, onto the balcony. The monster had grown a floodlit third eye that flashed with great fierceness across the great and humble green sea of his flowers and my salad. The shaggy cyclops, hairy knees damp with dew and freckled black with soil, swung his headlamp back and forth, scanning the rows like a lighthouse scans the waves, or a prison watch-light the yard; protectively, maternally, and then violently - he raised his hand, and I saw that this midnight patroller had come armed with a sleek steel kitchen knife and a mission, to defend his floral charges against their mucoid maulers, individually, personally, and with a spirit of righteous vengeance. Bedding the underside of the outer leaf of a cabbage in the flat palm of his left hand; gently, and with great restraint, he touched the blade to the damp and veiny leaf-top, then drew it back. Two shrinking clumps of naked muscle slipped and fell the hand's-length to the ground.

I must have gasped a little, because the spotlight swung up and over the roof before settling just above my nose. "Go inside," he snapped. "Don't watch if you don't want to see." I stepped back and in, nested the doors, and wrapped a blanket around myself.

When I was six, I went on an overnight camping trip sponsored by the local nature conservancy. We canoed to a small island in the middle of the lake, sprouted tents, and gathered twigs for a campfire. It quickly became clear that the island had an infestation, a kind of curse: it was overrun by the fragile, suspended spider known as Daddy Longlegs. There were Daddy Longlegs in our sleeping bags, Daddy Longlegs in our oatmeal bowls, the cantilevered, gargantuan shadows of Daddy Longlegs flickering across our tent walls. Unlike many children, I didn't have an experimental, impersonal sadism toward animals, but for years afterwards I trapped Daddy Longlegs and methodically cut off each of their legs with a pair of scissors, watching the lentil body quiver and tremble on its stumps.

The most popular folk remedy for slugs in the vegetables is drowning pools of beer. A slug is a drunk, and loves yeast and malt and rum extract. You take red plastic cups, bury them to the hilt in the loam, and pour in a few inches of beer; make a kind of beer moat around the lettuce plants. The slug smells the beer, then falls in and drowns, or gets too drunk to get out, or one then the other. They did a study, if you believe such things, about what beers slugs like best: Like the undergraduates who did the research, slugs drink cheap malt liquor first, followed by Michelob, Bud, and Bud Light. The only thing they liked less than chablis was tap water. The slug is a creature of proletarian tastes. "Talk to the slugs," my father said. "Make them a deal: If you don't eat my lettuce, I won't drink your beer." But they were uncooperative or unwilling communicators, union negotiations broke down, and I was left with cups and cups of bloated, waterlogged flesh exuding halos of slime in warm lager. I emptied the hundreds of carcasses into dented tin buckets, hillocks of soggy almonds. When I hunted live slugs, I resisted the urge to release them into my neighbor's yard and ferried them in the passenger seat of the blue Mazda, five miles down the road to a pine forest. But a dead slug-mass makes fine compost; having fed on the lettuce, so too shall the lettuce feed.

There are Russians in the neighborhood, German Russians with complicated histories who fan out through the woods with long scissors and decapitate mushrooms at the base of the stalk. I tried hunting mushrooms myself for a while but all I ever found were the clean-sliced buds where the Russians had already been. Slugs and snails hate moss, they said. Soak 40 grams of moss in a liter of water, then empty the water into a bottle and spray it over your lettuce. The smell keeps them off, at least until it rains. Wormwood and artemisia work as well, but who has those handy? Plant watercress around the salad bed, it is sour and sharp and sweetens the soil but disgusts the slug and cuts its belly. It grows quickly, make a moat of watercress.

I have a son, Karl, a dedicated endurance hiker - 2000 miles of the Appalachian trail one summer, 1500 miles of the Pyrenees the next, with the sunken eyes of the dedicated renunciatory ascetic, a Tim Treadwell or Chris McCandless of the future, with lines and lines of Gothic German Biblical text etched across his shoulders like a man who's decided to dispense with the In The Penal Colony middleman and cut his crimes, judgment, and redemption into his own flesh. The slime is a matter all its own, it coats your hands and you can't wash it off. White vinegar cuts the slime, and next time, pluck them from the leaves with chopsticks, like a gourmand preparing a sushi plate.

It's a three-course meal, the strange hospitality extended to your mindlessly malicious guests: serve them beer and wine, feed them moss and cress; cleanse your palate with vinegar and offer them a bed: Like the Arab sheiks or Homeric monsters, then, you sate them, please them, welcome them, and kill them their sleep, blinded and cleaved. Let us go, then, and prepare a place for them: Make rough plank benches, just inches off the ground. Use the greyed wood from a dismantled shed or the rotted remains of a swingset left by now-grown children. We will allow the slugs one more night of plenty, then when the sun rises they will look for a shade in which to spend the day. Come morning, turn over the benches and expose the damp side, where the slugs have come like raw bats to roost. You may harvest.

**********************************************

8/12/09

I took over the airwaves at WNRN in Charlottesville, VA earlier this week - an hour-long mp3 of the results are here...

7/24/09

I wrote a long analysis of "late-style" Bob Dylan: "LOVE, DEATH & KNOCK-KNOCK JOKES: Adorno, Said, & Late Style in Dylan". If Christgau's the Dean of American Rock Critics, I'm the semiotics professor.

7/13/09

I wrote a career-retrospective feature on the Subhumans for Impose, on the occasion of the re-master and re-release of their six classic records. It's here.

7/2/09

Another new video! Our old friend and multimedia artist Scrapworm did a great film for "This World Is An Open Door". It also features Demander's Karen Correa, In Cadeo's Jared Scott, and me in a funny hat:

"Major General" comes out July 15 in Europe and the UK on Decor Records, with two bonus tracks - "The Black Rose Paladins" and "There Will Be Violins" (from the demos) - and I'll be supporting Chuck Prophet and Mark Eitzel on European tours this fall.

It is UNCUT's 4-star "Debut Album of the Month" in this month's issue ("exudes a suitably exuberant self-confidence...Few side projects have as much character as the witty and full-hearted 'Major General'); and gets three stars in Q ("Recasting the windswept folk artist as someone with piratical swagger, he comes over like Nick Cave leading an American Pogues, and every see-saw rhythm is shot through with a potent, whisky-drenched drama. In other words, the man's a ham, but a terrific one").

6/19/09

Another (probably premature) decade wrap-up piece at Spectrum Culture, about my favorite recent one-album wonders, Dogs Die In Hot Cars.

6/12/09

I wrote a piece about the best show I've seen this decade, about ex-Adverts singer TV Smith, here. Also one about the saddest song I know, "Ruth Marie" by Mark Kozelek, here.

OLDER NEWS, TOUR DIARIES, AND MORE...