Hello everyone — for those who’ve been keeping up, I won’t be posting anything to snailcrow.com for quite some time. Some writing and music projects will be keeping me too busy for even the sporadic attention I was giving it in months past. For those of you who have asked about the site and have been involved in the past, thank you so much for your attention and kind words.

Yours,
SC

Brush pen on water color paper. Altered re: grayscale fill-ins, contrast & scale:

   

More art here, including another in the ‘Sister’ series.

Any thoughts?

   
All art C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009

! ! ! ! ! NEEDLE OUT Album Release ! ! ! ! !

HAI TEAM!

      My new album’s out and I’m happy to share it. I know cds are passe and all but it’s the only way I’ve gotten around to distributing the thing, so bear with me. I’m proud of these 11 songs (about 35 minutes) and I hope you eat ‘em up like fritos.
      As a bonus, you’ll get free cd-sleeve-sized ink & brush art with each order for a limited time (i.e. until I get too busy to do it).
      Free mp3 and order page here. Just $6 including shipping [US only], that is cheeeepieeeee!

      Enjoy the Springin.

-C.Way

Various photographs, paintings, collages & drawings of mine for sale via PayPal here.

“Untitled 10″:

Thanks for looking and let me know what you think if you have a chance.

-CW

    (Photo credit to red nails, wrongcity)
   
     

      “Hungry Saw” was not a favorite Tindersticks record of mine when it was released. Aside from abut three or four cuts, it struck me as a very respectable effort which suffered from mediocre performances & material in its first half and which was lopsidedly rich in emotion and re-playability in its second. No Curtains, but what the hell is?
      But last night, live, the record — which they played in its entirety aside from a middle suite of older material and an encore — ripened and grew into itself, lent strength by the urgency of the band’s delivery. Terry Edwards and the brass/woodwinds accompaniments in general helped the songs reach intense emotional swells of force only hinted at in studio. And Stuart with his slight bodily stutter, his seductive and slightly-medicated sway, his maracas-shaking rhythm-keeping, helped fulfill each “Hungry Saw” song to what was promised on record.
      I recognized many of the songs as if for the first time, like people who I’d seen through rainy windows. “Yesterdays Tomorrows” is a good example, lent drama onstage which never hit me on LP. “E-type” too was so amped with swagger & sheer drive. “Boobar”, a favorite of mine on record, emerged stronger live as well — the band storming out of the hushed bridges, jovial and grinning at one another, mastering the song’s swells in and out of hush and gentleness.
      Total truism, but this is why seeing music live matters. To see loved songs not so much transformed as fulfilled, like sketches blooming with color before your eyes — to have your later listenings enriched with memory, as if memory was another instrument, another section in the orchestra — there aren’t words for that magic.
      My only disappointment is the continued absence of Dickon Hinchcliffe [I think it was your standard creative-differences split between he and Staples, but not sure] — or some other live violin player capable of rounding out the Tindersticks’ sound with some of Hinchcliffe’s gorgeous arrangements. Hinchcliffe’s contributions to the band’s sound were enormous, defining — and I miss his touch on “Hungry Saw”, I miss his baroque and anguished lines, his dissonances, his sweep and pathos, and his soulful vocal lines on “Waiting for the Moon” and “Can our Love…”. Still, they did a hell of a job live trying to patch over the hole left by his leaving.

      Other things I remember –

      “My Oblivion”, that swoony crescendoing opiate, a little edgier than on record, absolute fucking lotus.
     
      “My Sister” — I song I never expected to hear live — played with a palpable sense of discovery and spell-casting by the ensemble, especially the delicate otherwordly percussion in the beginning, and that pindrop-hush interlude — the “orange and mustard planets” passage — executed as it needs to be: with wonder, tragedy, enchantment.
     
      Stuart’s gentle, endearing, half-lidded way with the audience and with his band; his searing, brief solos and tremolo-bar chords at the end of “Her”.
     
      What a band. By turns morose, noirish, soul crooning & fanfaring; day of the dead, lullaby gondola-sway, flamenco explosive, carny wobble; raking up love’s gutters and tambourining amid the refuse.
     
      What does everyone else think? Who went?

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009

I saw Azita open up for Stephen Malkmus at Irving Plaza in New York several years ago. Malkmus was terrific — all drawl and solos, and I can’t get that floppy bowl cut he wore out of my mind — but it was Azita who stayed with me until long after the show was over. I was struck by her singing, edgy and free and swooping in and around vowels, scooping out vowels with an unpolished spoon. Sharp and flat in the right ways, like Astrud Gilberto; moving in and around her head voice, from nasal to back of throat to everywhere else, lending her voice this totally distinctive elasticity. And those melodies — they completely insinuated themselves in me by show’s end, winding and complex, knotted, beguiling. I bought the LP “Enantriodromia” soon after.

I haven’t listened to the album in probably 8 months. So when I put it in this evening — it’s still playing now — I had this thrill, this shock of glad recognition. Don’t you love that? When you realize a forgotten record has burrowed deeply into you, into strata you had no idea it had possessed the power to penetrate. Maybe its her melodies — I believe that part of the power of a well-constructed, complex melody is its capacity to imprint the brain more deeply, sink down into its trenches, its Marianas, like a kind of tremendous galleon, sink down and stay there for centuries, attracting kelp and wolf eels and endless glittering shoal. Like Van Dyke Parks’ melodies, like Brian Wilson melodies, like certain melodies of Debussy or that of Chopin’s ‘Barcarolle’… the density of the melody helps it anchor down in the peat of the brain, slowly effervescing up through the soil, leaking good rust for months and years, blooming, ripening, gaining emotional power.

I love this record. I love her honest voice, honest and open like Oldham’s, Guthrie’s. Simple despite its restlessness and leaps and changes in timbre. I particulary dig “Birds”, its buoyant scatted passage, its arresting chord change right at “Birds have grown up singing in the trees”. I love her piano playing, instinctive and serving well those endlessly-surprising slanted harmonies of hers. Tons of extended chords, diminished chords, so much tension and suspension that so richly satisfies and never feels confrontational or difficult for the sake of it: a kind of dancing slowly and to one side, with unusual but necessary bodily contortions, like a kind of aural Butoh.

This record is a spell: long and hypnotic incantations, multiple languages, strange symbols woven into the air, complex results that reveal themselves in time. Letting this record into you is like waking up one day in a house of gordian-knotted ribbon and vine; such rare pleasure in stretching your limbs, admiring the whorling braids, pulling it all in and over you like blankets.
   

AZITA’s Offical Website

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009