The Best Twin Peaks Cover Band in New York Slinks Into Bushwick

Of all the extreme niche cover bands in the world, one of the best are Fuck You Tammy. The bandname is a reference to the most recent iteration of Twin Peaks. The group – a spinoff of the similarly cinematic but more techy Scam Avenue – dedicate themselves to playing music from every incarnation of David Lynch’s iconic film noir franchise: the first two network tv seasons, the brief cable comeback series and the Twin Peaks movie.

They released their lone single so far, a lush but hauntingly intimate and psychedelic version of True Love’s Flame, in February 2020, barely a month before the lockdown. The good news is that they’re back, and have a relatively rare hometown show coming up on March 15 at 8 PM at Alphaville. The venue is one of many in (increasingly less) trendy Brooklyn neighborhoods who’ve fallen for the goofy dollars-and-cents online ticketing fad (which may be a condition of taking Trump plandemic loans). What that means for customers, assuming that whoever’s working the door isn’t making change, is that it will probably set you back an even $14 cash.

This blog was at Long Island City Bar in February of 2018, where the band drifted through a lustrous, lusciously lurid set. Unfortunately, that show didn’t make it to the web, but a shorter show from the Bell House from a couple of weeks later did and is up at youtube. And it’s every bit as good: the Queens gig was more instrumentals, while this one focuses more on vocal numbers.

What’s best about this band is that they add subtle original touches, when they’re not doing a stunning job recreating these cult classics note for note. They open the show with a vigorous punk jazz-tinged take of The Pink Room, the creepy Black Lodge stripper theme from the movie, propelled with a stalking pulse by bassist Julie Rozansky and drummer Nate Smith as saxophonist Anthony Cekay fires off jagged, smoky accents. Then frontwoman Devery Doleman – who has much more powerful pipes than Julee Cruise – takes over in front of the band and turns in a similarly pouncing cover of Floating

Keyboardist Bill Ferullo and guitarist David Andreana open Falling with the Twin Peaks title theme: just as at the Queens gig, the effect is a lot more stark and sinister than the plush, saturnine studio sound of the original score. Then Doleman shimmies in her red dress and goes way up into Cruise-ing highs for Rocking Back Inside My Heart, the wistful pop ballad from the comeback season.

Rozansky, who has a softer voice, takes over the mic and keeps the sad 50s vibe going in Just You, Andreana firing off spot-on reverbtoned jangle and whipcrack behind her. Then the band bring the menace back with a brisk take of Into the Night, eerie echoey electric piano against spare guitar jangle and an unscripted, smoky Cekay sax solo. It’s the high point of the show.

Little Jimmy Scott’s version of Sycamore Trees is impossible to beat, so the band reinvent it with more of a cliffhanger guitar noir edge. They go back to slow, distantly pensive 6/8 retro ballad territory with The World Spins as Rozansky punches in with her treble up behind Doleman’s angst-fueled vocals, and then max out the mystery as they wind it out with a dead calm. The two frontwoman sing disconsolate harmonies in the closer, a meticulous recreation of The Nightingale. Where Tom Csatari’s Twin Peaks covers focus more on the menace that a band can find outside the lines, Fuck You Tammy max out the red neon inner core.

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Darkly Ambient Americana Instrumentalists Suss Headline an Enveloping, Inviting Brooklyn Triplebill Tomorrow Night

In 2018 this blog called cinematic instrumental group Suss “the missing link between Brian Eno and Ennio Morricone – or the Lost Patrol without the drums.” They were a quintet then. Tragically, they’ve been whittled down to a trio after the sudden 2021 loss of keyboardist Gary Lieb, but they keep putting out frequently mesmerizing, sometimes Lynchian deep-sky themes. Their latest album is a double-cd release comprising both their Heat Haze southwestern travelogue suite and their even more nocturnal Night Suite along with new material.

They’re headlining a great lineup tomorrow night, Feb 8 at around 10 PM at Public Records, that shi-shi monstrosity in the former Retrofret space north of Gowanus. As a bonus, deadpan and often hilariously lyrical new wave pop spoofers Office Culture open the night at 8ish, followed by the trippy electroacoustic trio of saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi, bassist Paul Bryan and drummer Jeremy Cunningham. Cover is pretty steep for a show like this, presumably $24 since the venue is one of many in Brooklyn who seem to be oblivious to the rising popularity of #cashalways and are still trying to make it with the goofy pennies-and-nickels online ticketing fad.

Both Suss’ Night Suite and Heat Haze got the thumbs-up here. The new tracks – the first several of which you can hear at Bandcamp – are just as drifty and evocative. Beyond Jonathan Gregg’s resonant pedal steel and spare dobro, it’s impossible to tell whether that’s Pat Irwin or Bob Holmes on the many other guitar and keyboard tracks. The first is a miniature, Winter Is Hard, rising from a delicate little piano figure to a flaring slide guitar peak and then out.

The band blend keening ebow textures, slow doppler effects, stalagmite piano drips and icepick reverb guitar incisions in North Wind. The most lingering thing in Linger is the gentle, precise acoustic guitar and the reverbtoned steel over the puffing, echoey loops in the background. Everything Is So Beautiful is steady and sad and Lynchian, and over too soon.

By now, the band are working variations on that initial crystalline three-note theme, notably in the rising and falling icy/hot textures of The First Thaw. Then they reprise Winter Was Hard with some unexpected timbres like autoharp and some gritty mechanical whirs.

At this point, you will have to switch to yucky Spotify to hear the rest of the record. Across the Horizon is aptly vast but peppered with warmly anticipatory fragments of blues and C&W riffs. The band warp the sustain a little in Ranger as a solitary acoustic guitar surveys the great plains, then in Shimmer (Reflection) they bring back the delicate quasar pulse: a distant Blue Velvet galaxy.

Holmes breaks out his mandolin and slowly works his way up in the mix in That Good Night. They waft their way out with the gentle phrases in The Open Door, shifting slowly through a characteristically twilit tableau.

Pensively Drifting Soundscapes and a Falafel Hill Show by Eclectic Film Composer Qasim Naqvi

Qasim Naqvi‘s raison d’etre seems to be getting the max out of the min. As a drummer, he propels the world’s most compellingly hypnotic live dancefloor instrumentalists, Dawn of Midi. Prior to the 2020 lockdown, he was a member of another even more adrenalizing trance-dance band, Innov Gnawa, who were the only oldschool Moroccan gnawa group in this hemisphere. And Naqvi has yet another identity, as a busy film composer. He’s on the bill at Roulette tomorrow night, Feb 5 at 8 PM, playing live soundtracks to Peter Burr video installations along with MIROVAYA LINIYA (Julia Pello & Heinrich Mueller’s dystopically cinematic Heisenberg Principle-influenced duo). You can get in for $25 in advance.

Naqvi’s 2017 album Film, streaming at Bandcamp, may hold the key to what you can expect. It’s a collection of hypnotic, calm and sometimes suspensefully minimalist miniatures from Naqvi’s two soundtracks to Naeem Mohaiemen films on industrial-wasteland themes. It’s best appreciated as a cohesive whole: tune in, bliss out. It’s testament to the fun you can have with oldtime equipment…and get paid for it.

As the set pieces unwind, subtly varied textures drift through the mix, wafting drones punctuated by icy accents. Climbs, echoes and calm/animated contrasts give way to steady doppler waves, which grow further and further apart, a pensive meditation on slow postindustrial decay. Naqvi spices his soundscapes with the occasional wry rhythmic trope or burst of cumulus clouds over the horizon. On the surface, this is very soothing music, but listen closely and you’ll find a persistent unease.

The World’s Most Cinematic Guitarist Continues His Dark Dynasty

It was the spring of 2016, and cinematic instrumental trio Big Lazy had just finished slinking their way through a slowly simmering, increasingly macabre, chromatically slashing crime theme. The Brooklyn bar was packed, and people were dancing, notwithstanding the band’s somber, noir-drenched sonics.

Then guitarist Steve Ulrich took the mic and led the band through a brisk if somewhat wistful new wave song. Half the audience did a doubletake: a Big Lazy song with lyrics, in a major key, no less!

But fans of Ulrich’s signature blend of nocturnal bristle, deep-sky twang and white-knuckle improvisational scramble know that he has a completely different body of work. In addition to Big Lazy – the first band to top the best-albums-of-the-year lists here twice, in 2014 and 2019 – Ulrich does a lot of work in film and other media. His soundtrack to the artworld forgery documentary Art and Craft ranges from his signature, shadowy style to more lighthearted terrain. And now, he’s finally released a compilation of some of his most vivid and surprisingly eclectic soundtrack work from the NPR series This American Life, due to hit his Bandcamp page. Ulrich is celebrating the release of the album with a characteristically epic night on Feb 4 at 7 PM at the Sultan Room, playing a set with a string quartet, then bringing Big Lazy in to close the evening. The venue is easy to get to from the Jefferson St. stop on the L; like a lot of the trendier Brooklyn joints, they’ve become enamored of weird online dollars-and-cents cover charges, meaning that $26 cash should get you in.

On one hand, this is the great lost Big Lazy album. On the other, it’s more texturally diverse and slightly more lighthearted: the increased use of keyboards is a newer development for Ulrich. Typically, he’ll lay down a simple, muted riff and then judiciously add layers.

The first track, Earthly begins as a klezmer-tinged, lithely pulsing, delicately disquieted cha-cha, drummer Dean Sharenow spacing out his playfully counterintuitive hits, keyboardist Thomas Bartlett channeling a deep-space cabana with his lightly processed piano. Ulrich orchestrates bass and lapsteel into the mix as well.

The group slowly straighten out into a dark, wry strut in Handheld as Ulrich’s layers of skeletal guitar and resonant lapsteel mingle with Bartlett’s occasional roller-rink organ. In track three, The Swell, they trace a similar light-footed path, following a familiar Ulrich pattern, shifting almost imperceptibly out of the shadows into a sunny pastoral theme and then back.

Fellow Traveler is not a Chinese army song but a syncopated waltz with hints of dub and classic country, courtesy of Ulrich’s baritone guitar work. Surprise, Arizona is a Big Lazy concert favorite that first took shape in the wake of a 2019 tour, a stern Appalachian theme that diverges into mysterious sagebrush.

Ulrich’s sense of humor tends to be on the cynical side, but Rinse Cycle – the loopiest number here – is irresistibly funny and a good example of how far afield he can go from Big Lazy noir when he feels like it. He begins Housebroken as a forlorn bolero over Sharenow’s shuffling snowstorm beats: it’s the closest thing to Big Lazy here and the album’s creepiest song.

The most jazz-inflected tune here is If and When, a classic example of how Ulrich can take a whimsical theme and turn it inside out in a split-second, Bartlett shadowing the unfolding menace with his airy fills. The most brisk tune here is Unpretty, which is actually very attractive, in a delicate, melancholy vein

Bookworm turns out to be an apt coda, a bouncy swing tune where Ulrich flips the script on his usual trajectory. It’s still January, but Ulrich just might have given us the answered to the question of what the best album of 2023 is.

Revisiting a Macabre Little 21st Century Masterpiece by NOW Ensemble

For the second day in a row, here’s something this blog missed over several years worth of October-long Halloween celebrations of dark music: NOW Ensemble‘s 2019 recording of Yevgeniy Sharlat’s potently picturesque triptych Spare the Rod!, which is still streaming at Bandcamp. The theme is the pervasive child abuse lurking beneath the surface of classic European fables. This particular piece isn’t listed on the bill, but the unorthodox 21st century chamber ensemble are playing what could be equally provocative works by Sarah Kirkland Snider, Judd Greenstein, Sean Friar, Patrick Burke, and their own members tomorrow night, Dec 8 at 7 PM at the Brooklyn Public Library Grand Army Plaza branch. The concert is free and there are no restrictions.

The suite’s first part is Rise, which is as classic as horror film scores get and even has a great video. At first there’s a gleefully macabre, disquietingly syncopated intertwine from two custom-made Yuliya Lanina music boxes (ensemble guitarist Mark Dancigers gets credit for cranking them). Then there are brief gusts from the group, anxiously flitting little accents from Michael Mizrahi’s piano and more gremlin-like accents from Alex Sopp’s flute and the recorders played by bassist Logan Coale and clarinetist Alicia Lee.

A flash of dramatic art-rock is over in barely a few bars, then with characteristic wit from Sopp the group segue into part two, Play. The kazoo choir would be funny if it wasn’t so creepy; a brief detour into shrieking recorder glissandos borders on unlistenable. Again, Mizrahi and Dancigers hint at a majestic rock anthem.

The way Sharlat reintroduces the music box theme via Lee’s clarinet is an artful little touch. While the music boxes eventually cede to a zany little polka, it isn’t long before a morose, Messiaenic tidal pool seeps in.

The final sequence, aptly titled Dream, begins as a briskly pulsing canon of sorts, Dancigers’ lingering resonance in contrast with the bubbly interweave of the woodwinds Does the child at the center of this surreal fable – pictured screaming and possibly in tears on the album cover – escape unscathed? No spoilers! This testifies equally to the group’s sense of fun as well as their dead-serious side and makes an appropriate soundtrack for a day when deadly so-called “bivalent boosters” are rubberstamped by the FDA as being appropriate for six-month-olds.

The Incendiary Second Part of The Real Anthony Fauci Documentary Goes Live

“People don’t want to compare the Holocaust to anything else. Why?” asks Holocaust survivor and medical rights crusader Vera Sharav in the second part of Jeff Hays‘ stunning documentary The Real Anthony Fauci, which just went live about a day ago, hot on the heels of the first half. This latest installment is ostensibly going to VOD in two days, but you can watch it for free now – and you should, even if you’ve read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bestseller. The conclusion is only about an hour long, and if Hays is involved, there’s a good chance it’ll be up for viewing for longer…or will make a mysterious return to the web in a few days.

If you don’t have the time to watch this relatively brief movie, Sage Hana is cutting up part two into easily digestible excerpts just as she did with the first segment. If you see just one of her clips, your best bet is her second segment from part two. This is where the really juicy history kicks in.

Kennedy provides a shocking insider account of Operation Northwoods, the false flag CIA operation targeting American civilians, which served as the prototype for 9/11, and, arguably, the plandemic.

If there’s any doubt that Bill Gates has power over Presidents, the newly released footage here puts that to rest. The funniest of many blackly amusing moments is an artfully sequenced series of Anderson Cooper CNN clips, where a little Pfizer money seems to go a long way.

Dr. Sherri Tenpenny – one of the first physicians to speak out about the lethality of the Covid shot campaign – gets considerably more time in the spotlight in part two, succinctly tracing how deep state and big pharma laid the groundwork for a slow walk to fascism in 2020: “SARS, MERS, H1N1: same playbook, different virus.” In between, she touches on how the childhood vaccines were weaponized as a cash cow for big pharma: “When they vaccinate those kids, they basically become customers for life with their allergies, asthma, eczema. ADHD. diabetes.”

Kennedy, who also gets more screen time here than in part one, unpacks how the Pentagon turned to Fauci as a conduit for shady gain-of-function viral research. As he did in the first part of the film, Hays unflinchingly connects the dots between the 2001 anthrax attacks, 9/11, the military germ warfare establishment and the fateful rollout of the PREP act, which set up the Emergency Use Authorization for the lethal Covid injection scheme.

Dr. Robert Malone, the controversial mRNA researcher who is widely seen as controlled opposition, makes some chillingly revealing comments here that are too central to his role in the operation to spoil. You have to make up your own mind.

Fauci the individual is subject to considerably more scrutiny than he was in part one, which is more of a history of how the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s was a soft launch for the plandemic. He comes off as part arrogant twit and part coldblooded sociopath. Without giving anything away, you could call this Kennedy and Hays’ Godfather 2. Commentary from investigative journalist Celia Farber  and  Dr. Pierre Kory, the ivermectin pioneer and hero of the early treatment movement, is witheringly funny and spot-on. Fauci’s whiteboard game with the other NAIAD functionaries is just plain creepy.

Whitney Webb adds important context on anthrax, as does UK doctor Tess Lawrie on how Fauci took remdesevir, a failed and terrifyingly lethal ebola drug, and repurposed it as a Covid “cure.” At the end of the film, we get a parade of familiar faces in the freedom movement, and a searing coda from Kennedy and  Mark Crispin Miller, the world’s leading expert on propaganda. If you have to choose between seeing part one and part two, see part two (Sage’s clips will help). But you should really see them both while you can.

Musically, the first film has a better and more sparse score than the second, although it’s good to hear that uneasy string quartet theme again as the credits roll for the final time.

The Ragas Live Festival 2022, Part 2: Hits and Misses

This year’s return of the 24-hour-plus Ragas Live festival of Indian music and related sounds was so epic that it requires two parts to reasonably digest. The frequently rapturous first half was reviewed here yesterday. The second part was also often transcendent, with some issues.

Let’s tackle those and then get to the good stuff. You’re never going to see fusion jazz on this page: with rare exceptions, good jazz is basically acoustic music. So if you enjoyed the tropical midnight act and the interminable Moroccan fusion interlude yesterday afternoon, glad you had a good time.

It would have been fun to catch sitarist Abhik Mukherjee‘s set to begin the second half of the marathon. Who knew that a trip for coffee a little earlier in the morning would also have turned into a marathon, a much less enjoyable one.

Back at Pioneer Works, bansuri flutist Jay Gandhi took an absolutely harrowing detour, running variations on a haunting, wary chromatic theme with Ehren Hanson on tabla for what seemed the better part of an hour. Beyond Gandhi’s breathtakingly liquid, perfectly modulated sine-wave attack, the somber mood was impossible to turn away from. These are troubled times: nobody has channeled that with such subtle power in recent months as these two. Which made their clever and allusive permutations on a bouncy nursery-rhyme-like riff afterward such a stark contrast. And yet, the darkness lingered, if at a distance.

Trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, whose most recent specialty has become oceanic Middle Eastern big band jazz, followed with about an hour of brooding electroacoustic sounds. Starting off on a labyrinthine rack of analog synthesizers, he rose from enveloping ambience to an achingly gorgeous, regal solo trumpet fanfare in a moody Iraqi maqam. Next, he looped an austere, baroquely churchy organ processional, then employed it as a backdrop for a constellation of santoor riffs which echoed Gandhi’s pervasive angst. He wound up the set on vocals with a similarly cautionary clarion call, more or less.

Another santoorist, Vinay Desai kept the angst at redline with a saturnine tribute to the late, great Shivkumar Sharma, who left us this past spring. We don’t know for certain if the lethal Covid injection took him out. With Vivek Pandya on tabla, the two musicians developed an absolutely gorgeous, elegaic, allusively chromatic theme and variations. Remaining mostly in the midrange, Desai rose for the great beyond with a somber glimmer before bringing it down to a dirge and the tabla entered. As the hour went on, Desai’s ripples off the walls of the space echoed into a galactic drift. Eventually, the duo took the theme skipping into the stars, a sober but energetic farewell to a pioneer.

ElSaffar returned for a second turn on santoor, joining percussionist Zafer Tawil and violinist Sami Abu Shumays behind impassioned veteran Iraqi crooner Hamid Al Saadi. After the sober, stately initial march, the maqam singer would begin the rest of the set’s expansive numbers with darkly dynamic, rubato intros, one leading to a surprisingly subtle call-and-response with ElSaffar. A little later, the group made their way into a swaying, ebullient major-key tune with a starkly contrasting santoor-and- violin break. They closed with undulating, biting chromatic theme with even more lusciously intertwined santoor and violin and a machinegunning coda.

Violinist Arun Ramamurthy gets credit for the festival’s most pyrotechnic performance, a role he’s become accustomed to. This time out he had his Indian jazz trio with bassist Damon Banks and Sameer Gupta on drums. This was the symphonic Ramamurthy: in the boomy space, with the natural reverb bouncing off the walls, he was a violin army. Banks would typically shadow him, Gupta inventively doing a nimble churning groove with tabla voicings on his kit, as the bandleader made his way through a rising and falling epic in tribute to his ancestors, to moments of icy ambience as well as frequent excursions through the bluesy raga riffs that he likes to mine in this context. Nobody knows how to draw an audience in with foreshadowing and judiciously spectacular slides and stabs better than Ramamurthy.

After that it was dance time. All-female Moroccan trance-dance ensemble group Bnat el Houariyat, featuring New York’s Esraa Warda took over the stage and then stomped and twirled and spoke power to male hegemony.

In her New York debut, singer/dancer and mystic Parvathy Baul brought ancient archetypes to life in a fervent but utterly unselfconsciously spiritual set of Bengali ritual songs. Showing off a soulfully soaring, meticulously melismatic, carnatically-infused voice which took on a grittier edge as her set went on, she sang innumerable mythical metaphors and cheerily translated them for the English-only crowd. Moving from ecstasy to tenderness and then an acerbic insistence, she cut loose and reminded that crowd that the truth is like a lion. All you have to do is set it free. Or words to that effect. Let’s hope there’s a Ragas Live festival in 2023.

The Ragas Live Festival 2022, Part 1: The Magic Is Back

It was great to see the Ragas Live festival of diverse Indian and Indian-adjacent sounds return after a two-year absence. The Brooklyn massive at Pioneer Works last night wasn’t overwhelming, but by the time the concert was over this past evening, a raucous crowd had packed the house. That so many people would come out to the fringes of Red Hook on a raw, unwelcoming afternoon to see what by any standard would be considered niche speaks volumes about what audiences in this city have been missing since March of 2020. Whether that need will be filled in 2023 is a loaded question.

Since the all-night concert was such a feast, this first part concerns the past evening, with part two here. It’s been ten years since the all-night marathon first began in a radio station studio and quickly spread to a series of venues around town. Previous incarnations have been more jazz-oriented: this was a mix of frequently rapturous traditional sounds juxtaposed with more modern ones. Some of the segues were jarring, and the location was suboptimal: if you thought trying to score a cup of coffee at five in the morning in Manhattan was tough these days, try Red Hook, never mind Carroll Gardens. But the performances made the trip worthwhile.

Veena player Saraswathi Ranganathan, backed by Sriram Raman on mridangam and Shiva Ghoshal on tabla, was a fantastic choice of opener (she got a rave review here awhile back for her show at a venue which has since been weaponized in the ongoing mass murder campaign). She dedicated her bouncy, cheery first raga to the men in the house, alluding to how it’s time for the dudes to speak up, stand up and be counted. After the trio built to an immutable, imperturbable drive, there was a wry high/low exchange: the girls schooling the guys on what time it is, maybe?

She followed with raga Mohanam, which she described as an antidepressant: as she put it, releasing the gunk all the way up as the notes rise to the heart chakra. And her attempt at a singalong with the crowd actually worked! Parsing the theme from shivery, steady melismas to a fleeting, thorny complexity and a distant, starry sense of longing, the trio channeled a bustling, determined cheer into an equally imperturbable stroll: it was impossible not to get swept up in Ranganathan’s momentum. There was a wry sotto-voce duel with the mridangam; her interpolation of a call-and-response into the final charge out was masterfully subtle within the volleys of notes and bracing, hold-onto-your-seat ornamentation.

Kora player Kane Mathis and tabla player Roshni Samlal followed with an often celestial set. Samlal grew up in Queens listening to the Ragas Live broadcasts as a kid, and was psyched to be playing now as an adult (actually, she shows up pretty much every year). Mathis delivered feathery, harpsichord-ish waves with an effortless, weightless precision while Samlal drove the occasional unexpected crescendo up to the rafters.

A liltingly dreamy, syncopated number built around a circular kora riff featured the occasional striking polyrhythm by Samlal, who incorporates grooves from her Trinidadian heritage into the mix. Then they picked up the pace with the Mathis tune Rue du Jardin, set to a scampering. cumbia-esque beat.

A little after one in the morning, sarod player Manik Khan and tabla player Sudhakar Vaidyanathan played a tribute to the former’s father, the iconic Ali Akbar Khan to celebrate the centenary of his birth. Their first tune was a serioso evening raga which began with a searching alap built from the simplest ingredients. Khan dipped to a pensive interlude where he parsed the low strings, then subtly rose to an allusive stroll. This was raw magic.

From there he hung allusively as the pace picked up, landing on a chugging, moody theme. Hints of a heroic ballad punctuated by a few downward slashes and then a somber, low tremolo-picking interlude followed in turn He ended it it cold and sudden.

Next was Raga Kirwani, another evening piece, this one a theme imported from the south of the Hindustani subcontinent. Khan let this biting pavane of sorts resolve a lot more than the first number. Again, he hung in the lows for the most part, saving his upward stabs and a fleeting bluegrass flatpicking motif for dramatic effect. The two finally picked up – those slashes were real foreshadowing, but ultimately this was more about brooding intensity than pyrotechnics, even when Khan went pirouetting through an understatedly undulating groove. It made for a great segue.

Dawn of Midi’s Qasim Naqvi was up next with about an hour of Eno-esque electronic ambience. It didn’t have the slightest thing to do with Indian music, but it was pleasant and cocoony.

Sarangi player Suhail Yusuf Khan and tabla player Pranav Ghatraju went back to the fifteenth century for a couple of timeless pieces, the first beginning with an acerbically resonant, swoopingly ornamented alap. While it underscored the eternal appeal of the endlessly otherworldly microtones in Indian fretless string music, the set was also very riff-driven. The two made their way up to a rather stern, stark stroll, methodically building to a triumphant, heroic coda. They launched into a rather solemn processional with the second number, which they could have continued for twice as long, and nobody would have complained.

It was five in the morning when sax-and-synth loopmusic act Kroba built echoey, dystopically warbling soundscapes that went on for almost two hours. A little after expressive singer Samarth Nagarkar took the stage with Khan and tabla player Shank Lahiri, it became clear that despite the quality of his set, it would be impossible to get through the rest of the marathon without more coffee. More on that and the rest of the show in part two here.

See The Real Anthony Fauci – The Movie – For Free

The most stunning moment in Jeff Hays’ film version of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci – streaming on demand for free for the next few days – is not where Fauci confesses on camera to crimes against humanity. That sequence epitomizes the banality of evil. To give away the film’s most horrific images would be a spoiler. A spoiler which deserves a reveal here is that this film has a sequel: if this is any indication, part two will be even more of an indictment.

Fauci’s biggest confession (so far) is a dry if damning one. Maybe out of sheer cluelessness, maybe out of sheer hubris, he equates remdesivir to the deadly cancer chemotherapy drug AZT. Fauci spearheaded the repurposing and deployment of both drugs. As he explains, in 2020, he was behind the drive to incentivize hospitals to employ remdesivir, a failed ebola treatment, as a lethal inpatient protocol for Covid. AZT killed over three hundred thousand gay men diagnosed with AIDS in the 80s and 90s after Fauci fought doctors and scientists to promote it as a standard of care.

Thirty years later, it’s still being used to kill people in the global south.

Even if you’ve read the book – a million-seller which has also been circulating as a PDF since last summer – you should see the movie. It’s a lot different, and has a lot of new information. If you’re feeling pressed for time (the movie runs at about an hour and fifty minutes), Sage Hana has cut it up into easily digestible excerpts which will probably lure you into watching the whole thing (her episode 7, which includes the entire televised Tiffany Dover collapse, is particularly searing).

One by one, a formidable and ferociously articulate lineup of visionary scientists, writers and doctors speak truth to power in a narrative which begins with the final, fall 2019 rehearsal for the 2020 plandemic, Event 201. From that instant, it underscores how Kennedy – whose infrequent appearances serve as a Greek chorus – has researched the film as rigorously as the book.

Fauci is less a central character than he is connective tissue in a sinister and deadly global pharmaceutical cabal, dating back to his appointment at NIAID four decades ago (Kennedy and most of the contributors here only touch lightly on deep state’s part in the plandemic). As with the book, Fauci’s role shaping the AIDS narrative, from the suppression of off-patent drugs, to the creation of the AIDS-industrial complex, is succinctly and piquantly documented.

Hays switches between individual testimonies with the mastery of a great guitarist blending textures with his effects pedals throughout a sizzling solo. Pairing Mark Crispin Miller – the world’s foremost expert on propaganda – at his most concisely professorial, with Holocaust survivor and medical rights activist Vera Sharav, pays off mightily.

Likewise, Celia Farber – arguably the most important journalist to cover the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s and its aftermath – is regal, and radiant, and simmering with rage as she connects the trail of the dead that Fauci has left in his wake, highlighting his role as plandemic point man. “Fauci’s reign begins in 1984, everything changes in 1984…Fauci is essentially a social engineer. He reeingineers how people think about human interaction: touch, human intimacy…not only sex, but all forms of human contact.”

Other crucial resistance figures who contribute here include investigative journalist Whitney Webb, cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, ivermectin maven Dr. Pierre Kory, Daily Clout’s Naomi Wolf, emergency room physician Dr. Paul Marik and Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, one of the earliest fighters to emerge in the summer of 2020. We also learn from RFK Jr. about how the CIA outsources its spying on Americans to foreign intelligence agencies, and how, on the night of September 12, 2019, the Chinese military went into the Wuhan lab, took 21,000 samples of coronavirus that have never been seen again and then changed the locks.

Many of the creepiest Bill Gates moments which have achieved memetic infamy since March of 2020 are included here. There’s also the infamous photo of EcoHealth Alliance head and CIA spook Peter Daszak with his arm around Fauci, along with plenty of other equally juicy pieces of evidence. Over and over, we get to see political and corporate figures contradicting themselves and engaging in hypocrisy with reverberations on both a symbolic and real-world level.

The music direction, credited to The Griffiths, is spare and unobtrusive but packs a wallop when utilized for effect. A cartoonish vibraphone theme behind images of Fauci flip-flopping on the use of surgical masks in the spring of 2020 is reprised as an even more uneasy string quartet  as the closing credits roll. Although there are important issues here that Kennedy does not spend much time on – notably, central bank digital coupons and prison planet surveillance – this is as important a film as anyone has released since the fateful days of March, 2020.

Apparitions Waft In With Gritty, Dystopic, Drifting Sonics

One of the best album titles of the year is Eyes Like Predatory Wealth, by Apparitions. Is the record – streaming at Bandcamp – an expose of BlackRock, or Vanguard, or central bank digital coupons? That’s open to interpretation. The trio of guitarist Andrew Dugas, keyboardist Igor Imbu and drummer Grant Martin play the kind of genre-resistant instrumentals this blog loves so much. Is this postrock? Horizontal music? Industrial soundscapes? A dystopic film score? Maybe a little of all that, available on limited edition cassette!

The album consists of three long tracks. Martin takes centerstage with his judiciously tumbling drums over slowly shifting, gritty, droning tectonic sheets of sound as the band make their way through the first soundscape, Ecstasy Through Self-Destruction. Differentiating where the individual guitar and keyboard voices are doesn’t seem to be the point of this music. At high volume, the rattling distortion is abrasive; at low volume, it’s actually quite soothing, until the very end when somebody seems to blow a fuse.

The second track, River of Fundament, is twice as long, with roaring, crunchy low-register guitar textures emerging to contrast with wafting keyboard ambience. Guitar drops out, drums take over, then the calm/agitated dynamic returns.

The closing cut is a full half-hour that starts so imperceptibly you have to turn up. It’s the most calmly lingering, ambient interlude here, at least until the band turn it into a more animated synopsis of everything that’s come before. Stick with it for the payoff.