the of mirror eye

* Neutral Milk Hotel: Holland, 1945 (4.5 mb) | Neutral_Milk_Hotel_MP3 (63.5 mb) | Neutral_Milk_Hotel_Flac (241.5 mb)
From Live At Terrastock II : April 18th, 1998 : San Francisco, CA

Speaking of all time favorite bands. This one, Neutral Milk Hotel (look here) more than definitely falls in that category. I’ve loved them ever since I first heard their debut album, over a decade ago. What’s amazing to me is that even after all this time, their albums don’t bore me. Each listen always brings new surprises. An instrument I hadn’t heard before or a vocal inflection that blows my mind.

What we’ve got here is a wonderful performance of Neutral Milk Hotel, augmented by members of The Olivia Tremor Control and Elf Power, at the second of the ever wonderful Terrastock festivals. Broadcast over the FM airwaves and captured by some awesome person, those of us who missed seeing them live get to experience their power and majesty vicariously.

If you want to know more about Neutral Milk Hotel, there’s tons of stuff about them on the web, but I’d highly, highly recommend getting the 33 1/3 book on In The Aeropland Over The Sea.

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Well, I just stumbled upon this super cool website, Tomatoes & Radiowire, that takes In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, by Neutral Milk Hotel as inspiration for various video pieces. As tends to be the case, the quality is up and down, but overall it’s a site very worth visiting.

* The Kadane Brothers: Crushing (4.0 mb) | The_Kadane_Brothers_MP3 (43.0 mb) | The_Kadane_Brothers_Flac (170.0 mb)
From Live In Stratsbourg : Nov 10th, 2004 2001

Keeping on with the Bedhead theme, we’ve got a fantastic performance by the two main fellows in that band, Bubba and Matt Kadane. It’s interesting to hear their songs, which are pretty minimal to begin with, stripped down even further to just twin guitars and voices.

I’m not sure the reason for this duo performance. In 2001, they released their debut album with their new band, The New Year, so maybe they were doing a mini tour to promote the album. At any rate, I’m glad they did, and I’m glad that someone was there to capture their performance. So, hope you enjoy this as much as I do.

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* Bedhead: More Than Ever (5.0 mb) | Bedhead_MP3 ( 87.5 mb) | Bedhead_Flac (361.0 mb)
From Live At Bennington College : April 20th, 1998 : Bennington, VT

For the longest time, Bedhead have been one of my favorite bands, ever. From the first time I heard their debut album, WhatFunLifeWas almost 13 years ago, I’ve been enchanted by their slow motioned approach to music. Bedhead have an incredible sound that really gets me goin’ (look here).

Give me the gracefulness of Bedhead, a band who slow everything right down, who linger over their chords, who make their sound so intimate you feel you shouldn’t even be listening. A band so gentle, so strung out, they make The Aphex Twin or Codeine sound jittery in comparison, a band so melancholy and pure, they make Leonard Cohen sound like Elton John. The three guitars seem to (be) creating layers of silence, rather than noise. Or rather, just something very quiet, but very beautiful. They cover The Stranglers’ Golden Brown and make it sound like silver teardrops falling. Clearly unsuited to be the headlining band at local indie label Trance Syndicate’s fifth anniversary party, they’re mesmerizing, nonetheless. (Melody Maker)

Actually, it’s kind of interesting because, as much as I love this band (and rest assured I LOVE this band), it’s really hard for me to write about them. I had the chance to see them twice before they broke up in 1998 and both of those shows rank way up there as some of the best show I’ve ever seen. This is a really wonderful recording that I’ve listened to countless times. So, just listen to the way that five people connect, leave their egos aside and play for the sake of the song.

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* Peter Brotzmann Quartet: Brotzmann_Quartet_Video (513.5 mb)
From Live At The Jazz Jamboree : Warsaw, Poland : Oct, 1974

Well, we hear at the of mirror eye headquarters have a super special treat for you!! For the first time ever, we’ve got an amazing video for y’all to download. What we have here is an incredible concert by some of the finest free jazz players around, with Peter Brotzmann (reeds), Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano), Peter Kowald (bass) and Paul Lovens (drums).

Captured on stage in Poland, these guys play their heads off and blast their way into our skulls. Fans of these guys will definitely want to download this. The video is in superb, black and white quality (the picture above is a screen capture) and the performance is extreme. Enjoy!!!

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You should be able to use any dvd player program to watch this video. I believe that one can also burn this to a dvd to watch on the ole big screen.

* Fushitsusha: I (excerpt) (2.5 mb) | Fushitsusha_MP3 (144.0 mb) | Fushitsusha_Flac (523.0 mb)
From Live At 20,000 Volts : Oct 25th, 1997 : Tokyo, Japan

A little over a month ago, psychedelic music lost an incredibly important and underrated musician. Bassist Yasushi Ozawa (look here) passed away of lung cancer. As a bassist for one of my favorite incarnations of the mystic/psychedelic rock band, Fushitsusha, I’ve listened to his low notes countless times and marveled at the communications going on between the musicians in the group.

As well as playing with bass in Fushitusha, he also played with the East Bionic Symphonia and was a sound engineer. For those who know his music, this concert, played at 20,000 Volts, is an explosive one. For those who want more info, check out this fantastic interview that originally appeared in G-Modern (look here).

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p.s. For those that care, I’m going to start including an MD5 checksum with the MP3 files. md5summer (look here) is a good program for windows machines. For Apple users, you might try MD5.app (look here). As I don’t have an Apple machine, I don’t know if this works well.

Also, it’s not absolutely vital that you use the MD5, but sometimes it’s nice to have the peace of mind that what you downloaded is what I uploaded.

So, here’s the checksum (look here) for the MP3’s of this concert, as I forgot to include them.

* Moe Tucker: Afterhours (3.5 mb) | Mo_Tucker_MP3 (73.0 mb) | Mo_Tucker_Flac (287.5 mb)
From Live At Maxwell’s : March 28th, 1987 : Hoboken, NJ

As the emcee says at the beginning of this concert, “there’s only been two female drummers in the history of the world that I’ve respected, and Karen Carpenter is dead”. That about says it all, as Moe Tucker has the distinction of being the Velvet Underground drummer for about 5 or 6 years. She quit the group in the early ’70’s to raise a family and resumed the music biz in the ’80’s. As a solo artist, she’s plugged in her electric guitar and taken the role as frontwoman to great effects. She has some wonderfully quirky pop stylings and seems to have a genuine love for the music.

This is a totally great concert at Maxwell’s featuring the ever wonderful Jad Fair. Hope you enjoy this as much as I do.

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Hopefully everyone is adapting to the new format of this blog. Is anyone having issues with the size of the downloads, the RAR archives or the flacs/mp3s?

Also, seriously, Breaking Bad is a badassed show. Love it.