TLASILA Menu Archive #1 (22 May 05)
Majordomography!
Kendall Nordin and Chris Grier, forced by Oz customs agents into a photomat booth, gamely smile on their arrival at Melbourne International, February 2005.
BEN WOLCOTT LIVE!
This grainy gallery snap was taken during BW's March 4th set at Rosemary’s Billygoat Odditorium in Los Angeles. Wish we'd been there!
Ben's report can be found below.
"My 'Oscillator' show had an audience (not my doing). Great robotic art. Can't quite say I had em eating out of my hands, but I am measuring my success in just getting out and risking it. Had to design some new electronics that convert light into a midi input signal, rig the electrics, build an orb of light, complete the installation , etc. The prop-heavy setup was an accomplishment in itself. Now I just need to work on my musicianship..."
Somehow we doubt that latter bit. Call us biased (we're definitely skewed), and so be it.
Crazy Canadian TLASILA Freaks! With glowing hearts we see thee, er, umm, rise!
added 27 Mar 05
A public fucking service.
Nandor Nevai and Tom Smith began work on the original Flemish Masters label site while barricaded at the Nevai family's Central Park West compound in April, 1999. Abundant narcotics exacerbated a frightfully demonic vibe. (There was an accidental death, a divorce, and desperation on all fronts.) Things, of course, could only get worse. (That is to say, better.) Weasel Walter joined the enterprise later in 2000. His influence was immediate, a jolt of manic juvenile ur-energy.
Nandor moved to Los Angeles. Bad idea. The three operated the site from respective LA, Miami, and Chicago cribs through 2001. In the wake of the TLASILA schism, a wee bit o' rancor. TS was out, and WW and NN took the reigns. Nandor's drug problems escalated. WW dipped, and the site got weird. Money vanished, property was stolen. The label crashed and burned (with white-hot phosphorescence/maximum bathos) after only three releases.
Mr. Nevai's original idea was to continuously efface content; pages were coded, defamed, robbed of context, or suffused with contextual heft through sheer capriciousness.
Awesome while it lasted.
This is the site as it stood at the moment of meltdown. Suffer.
Nevai and Smith not smeared with cocaine at the launch binge for Flemish Masters (NYC, April 1999).
Nandor is in California and TLASILA wish him the best. Friends report that his health has improved. We trust that he will again be 1000%. (Normal for NN.)
Sightings/Tom Smith @ No Fun Fest, The Hook, Brooklyn (20 Mar 05)
TS @ Western Blot (13 Mar 05)
Caption contest begins April 7, 2009!
TS and MM during TLASILA's set at No Fun 2004.
(Photo courtesy of Curt Wargo.)
HAPPINESS
This is here for no particular reason; it doesn't really relate to the forthcoming album, which eschews the corporeal for more ethereal concerns.
It's just kinda nice, that's all. Guess we could use the image to spark conversation...
So, Shavelings, have you busted it out in each of the positions illustrated below? TS reckons he's managed to avoid two of them, though not for lack of trying.
(TLASILA HQ policy analysts are willing to wager on the bottom left configuration as the first of the pair, but we're stumped as to the second...)
More as police reports filter in from the field.
Echo Canyon, Manhattan, 13 December 2004. AWK and Don making rough mixes of newest TLASILA recordings.
Don, Chris, and Ben, transfixed by...
(NAF, Black Cat, DC, 20 Jan 04)
Catherine Lewis captures a spotlight (and, oh yeah, Smith and Fleming) in moribund repose.
From NAF, January 20, 2005.
(Click on the photo to visit Ms. Lewis's site.)
Photography © 2005 Catherine P. Lewis
Audience? Black Cat, January 20. Pink spasm? Tom Smith. Shoes? Rat Bastard. Torquemada? Roger (Monotract).
TLASILA are pleased to announce that they survived.
Ben, AWK, Don, Chris, Rat, and Tom cavort, sans shame, for Aida Ruilova... Thurston slipped on some indie group's leftover anomie and fell to the Murray Street pavement.
TM sustained no injuries, but the sidewalk never fully recovered. (The dude is, like, heavy.)
Noise Against Fascism page added 9 Jan 05
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
We wish everyone - and we do mean everyone - an absolutely killer 2005!
TLASILA and Super-Friends, snapped December 2004 on Murray Street, NYC:
Andrew Wilkes-Krier, Ben Wolcott (with artist Elisabeth Arkhipoff in the background), Chris Grier, Don Fleming, Mark Morgan (from the September 2004 WFMU session), Rat Bastard, Thurston Moore, Tom Smith, video artist (and former Alva goddess) Aida Ruilova, and Marc Weitz (Menlo Park Supremo).
NOVEMBER 2004
HELLO!
Tom has been a very bad webmaster, but at least he has a decent excuse - he was on tour with OHNE in Finland and Russia!
(Well, just a tiny micro-tour, really, but preparations were extensive, travel time lengthy, and jet-lag still clouds a certain, perpetually fragile mind.)
Gargoyles support traffic signs at one of Helsinki airport's taxi ranks, November 16, 2004.
(Not that you can see them from this lousy angle...)
Here OHNE (minus laptop guru Reto Mader, who spent the entire eight-day trip in a Helsinki hospital!) pose for (semi-daft) photos following their blow-out performance at St. Petersburg, Russia's Gallery of Experimental Sound (near the intersection of Moskovsky Vauxhall and Nevsky Prospekt).
It was freakin' cold, dear friends. (Minus nine Celsius, most days...) The chill failed to diminish the festival's rarified vibe, however. It was a fantastic week!
Reto triggers his I.V. unit with a joystick connected via wireless to a laptop monitored by a Finnish nursing staff inured to the rigors of avant-garde composition. EKG beeps and respirator clicks were thus regarded as more honest, less obviously referential...
(In truth, Reto was genuinely ill; he was only released from hospital on the day we departed Finland!)
SEPTEMBER 2004
Day One...
(L-R: AWK, Rat, Don, Chris Grier)
Day Zero...