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April 19 2007 8pm Hampshire College Tavern $5

That’s right, The White Mice are coming to the Hampshire College Tavern in Amherst on April 19th! Hailing from Providence R.I. Sounding like a cross between something like Melvins, Metalux and Gwar these guys dress in butchered lab mice costumes for their psychotic freak show noisefest performance. If you like your dark metal with a healthy dose of sine wave, distortion and demonic wails then this is the show for you. They have several self published & small press LP/CDs and have recently have been picked up by Load Records. Be sure to check out their Youtube videos, Christmas Album and their art & photo gallery.

Click here to listen to the track White Mice from the album ASSPhIXXXEATATESHUN:

After speaking to my friend Dana (recently employed by Ecstatic Peace) and John Moloney from the band I was able to get my pal Eric access to the board to record the 3/3/2007 Sunburned Hand of the Man show to DAT. It sounds great… much different than I remember the show as the guitars were not mixed into the PA so on the recording they are way in the background with sax and vocals being much more in the front. I’d like to post the whole show as an MP3 or something but I am not sure if this is possible as the band asked for a copy and it may be pressed into an LP/CD. Click play below to hear an excerpt from the show where the soundman announces last call… “No, this is not a hallucination… it is last Call at the Eagles Club” then the band’s response. It is pretty funny stuff. Click here to listen:

Click here to see some of my other bootlegs I recorded and traded. Not really ‘bootlegs’ per se as most are bands that allow taping.

My river runs to thee:
Blue sea, wilt welcome me?

Say, sea,
Take me!

- Emily Dickinson

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There was this thing. For lack of a better word I will call it an “experiment”. At one point it was a contest, a wager and a test of wills of sorts, but the appeal of those concepts did not last much past the initial discussion that brought to life what I am to describe…

A group of friends and I quit drinking alcohol in the effort to support someone who had a drinking problem both in the past and manifesting currently. We all agreed that we’d take the month of February off from imbibing and extend that time longer if the person that was our motivation continued to refrain from nursing the bottle in March. There was talk of a contribution to a pool of prize money for the last man standing and some stipulations to that being that if we all agreed to end our collective temperance together then we’d spend the pool money on a kick-ass keg party. These ideas all fell short and regardless of this and the fact that the person responsible for our pact could not last the month (going 26.5 days) all participants held out through until the last day of February.

So, there we were - Midnight, March 1st. A bottle of beer and I. Let me tell you about it… It is the one in the picture above. I took that photo with my Pentax Optio which was set to shoot low-res for the web. It is unfortunate because at this resolution the photo totally fails to capture the amber glow of the seemingly back-lit bottle, the beads of sweat that were flowing down it or the light refracted between those beads and the leaded glass crystals of my chandelier above. It was a beautiful sight, I wish you could have seen it. That mysterious looking bottle ‘44′ is from a home-brew contest that a friend of mine participated in as a judge. There were some leftovers from that and she handed them out at a party I went to. I took mine home and stored it for a week because I had to wait until at least March 1st. It was at 00:01 that I uncapped it… ‘44′ was an interesting one - a bitter porter with hints of dark chocolate and orange peel. Very nice. I then had one of the standard fare PBRs after ‘44′ was finished. Also yummy.

Anyhow, this whole ordeal was a incredibly stupid waste of time. But if there is one thing that I can say I learned, it is that there is truth to that old claim: absence makes the heart grow fonder.

…government teat this is what I think of:

My favorite act to come out of Western Massachusetts Sunburned Hand of the Man is returning to the area on March 3rd for a show at the Eagle’s Nest in Northampton. If you are into folk, psychedelia, neo-hippie drug music, “jam bands”, acts like Can, Jackie-O Motherfucker, Mountain Goats, No Neck Blues Band or The Books you might find these guys to be your cup of tea. Granted, I am not a fan of jam bands or dirty hippies for that matter, but these cats are no doubt the bee’s knees. Hands down the best live act in a club that I have seen. They certainly are a live band more so than one that records in the studio. Of the near fifty albums to date in the Sunburned Hand of the Man discography only one is a studio album. For more info on Sunburned Hand of the Man clicky here and here. To listen to the Arthur Magazine release No Magic Man in its entirety click here.

That’s Saturday March 3rd at the Eagle’s Nest on Pleasant St. in Northampton, 8:30pm, $5.

I got this blog thing up and running in 2005. My original mission was to play around with Wordpress and themes / styles for the purpose of designing some content for use on other sites that I was working on for friends. I figured that since it was up and running I might as well use it. I made a total of seven posts to the blog and then deleted them all. Here we are again. I don’t particularly want to be a regular blogger, I just thought I’d use this part of pronoblem.com for random nonsense and to comment on things that I would otherwise bookmark and forget about. Stay tuned for some amazing shit! If I post something that offends you and you’d like to throw down you can find me in Holyoke, MA. Feel free to post your comments. I may shut off comments entirely if the spam-bots become problematic… if that is the case you can email me:

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