Our dear friends at The Wire report that keyboardist/FOF (Friend of Frank) Don Preston is set to be honored with a collection of electronic compositions. Preston, an original member of Zappa’s psychedelic, traveling road show that was the Mothers of Invention was a confidant of Zappa’s and a core member of The Mothers until his departure in 1974. Preston played on nearly every “essential” Zappa LP and was best known for his ridiculously sublime Moog solo on 1972’s “Waka/Jawaka” off the LP of the same name, which even knocked Bob Moog himself flat on his ...

The new issue of Clash Magazine, our Outsiders issue, is out now featuring Death Grips' MC Ride on the cover. Uncompromising and unpredictable, Sacramento’s ferocious Noise-rap trio Death Grips take no prisoners when it comes to getting their message across. Lining up for battle, they reveal to Clash exactly what their mission is. A truly great album doesn’t stop you in your tracks - it quickens the step, speeds the blood through the veins, and has a man feeling invincible while it dominates his senses. Such is the effect Death Grips’ second album ‘The Money Store’ has on this ...

kowtow \KOU-TOU\, verb: 1. To act in an obsequious manner; show servile deference. 2. To touch the forehead to the ground while kneeling, as an act of worship, reverence, apology, etc., especially in former Chinese custom. noun: 1. The act of kowtowing. Kowtow comes from the Chinese practice of touching the ground with your forehead to show respect, called k'o t'ou. It literally means "to knock the head." yeash To be annoyed with something will you cool it. yeash! Trivia What year is this in Roman numerals? MMXII. History Martin Luther: the 23-year-old German theologian and future Protestant ...

“Before I sat down to write this, I put on a record. (Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention One Size Fits All, if you were wondering.)” “There is something soothing about “putting on a record.” You get to find it in your crate, pile, bag, or pull it off your wall, slide it out, [...]

In which our hero becomes the first person in history to listen to Frank Zappa in an effort to enhance his sexual attractiveness Looking through my CD collection one afternoon in the mid-90s, it occurred to me that my music tastes were in need of a shake-up. As a 16-year-old with delusions of musical connoisseurship, my shelf of NME-approved indie suddenly looked a bit embarrassing. "I'm off to university next year," I thought. "Do I really want to arrive there with such a limited listening pool? No one will want to have sex with me if my entire musical ...

by Keith Kawaii • April 2012 Robert Beatty is Lexington, Kentucky’s resident visual/audio/multimedia artist, a longtime member of noise innovators Hair Police, the man behind Three Legged Race, and one of the most sought after figures in underground album art. He recently released a chilling 12-inch slab of proto-techno titled Wrong Element on the Acoustic Division label and has a lot more planned for 2012, including a new Spectrum Spools LP and more endless streams of psychedelic, airbrush via Photoshop artwork, soon to grace your favorite new records. What are your thoughts on the current state of album ...

Frank Zappa : Dinah Moe Humm [ purchase ]   There are bits that are naughty on Over-nite Sensation, my favorite Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention studio album (from 1973). In tune with our theme of naughty bits this week, in addition to my choice here, the list of songs on the album includes such memorable titles as Dirty Love, Camarillo Brillo and an album cover that is ...er... messy. Maybe not even naughty, and closer to nasty - but peoples' perception of these sorts of things (personal taste) is always relative. (Click the image above to view a larger version where you ...

I originally caught wind of Nolan Porter’s “If I Could Only Be Sure” via the cover that kicks off Paul Weller’s 2004 album, Studio 150. This, the single version, was released as a 7″ on ABC Records in 1972. Cut in Los Angeles, the track boasts some tall session players: former members of Zappa’s Mothers Of Invention [...]

Los Angeles, CA - Much to the elation of music fans on the US East Coast, for the first time in America, three legendary former members of the Mothers of Invention are playing a series of selected concerts as The Grandmothers of Invention starting in April 2012. The Grandmothers of Invention ...

Pre-release emails from Small Stone are always something to get excited about so I usually download them right away. I snagged this advance for Greenleaf without checking the hype sheet and just started listening right away. First thing, I thought was "damn, this sounds a lot like Dozer!" I really loved their last album Beyond Colossal and played the hell out of it. After a few minutes, it was obvious that Greenleaf was somehow connected to Dozer. After referring to the bio, I was not surprised to learn that several members of Dozer, Truckfighters and the guy that has engineered ...

Filed under: News , Holy Hell Texas Department of Criminal Justice Roy Ralph Estrada, a former member of Frank Zappa 's group the Mothers of Invention and original member of Little Feat, will serve 25 years in prison on child molestation charges. According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram , Estrada, 68, abused a female family member in Tarrant County after being released from a California prison for another child abuse case. "The victim's family was unaware that he was a convicted sex offender," Tarrant County district attorney office spokesperson Melody McDonald said. "Estrada was sentenced to 25 years in a plea ...

From Straight to Bizarre: Zappa, Beefheart, Alice Cooper and LA’s Lunatic Fringe Dir. n/a [Sexy Intellectual; 2012] by Andrew Eastwick Rating: In From Straight to Bizarre , a chronicle of the two record labels Frank Zappa operated from 1968 to 1973, music critics describe albums by some of Zappa’s more outlandish signings as works not of art but of social anthropology. The same can be said of the film: while it fails as a documentary, it succeeds as a document. It is clumsy, discursive, repetitive, and, despite a running time of 161 minutes, less than comprehensive. Yet as ...

From now on, at the end of each month we'll be sharing with you some cover art from albums and EPs that have recently been released, and making a good old fuss over them. For now, as an introduction, we're showing you some albums from any period of time, just for the fun of it. Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention - We're Only In It For The Money – Will Slater Some might say that Frank Zappa's best early sign of peculiarity was when he appeared on television playing the bicycle, which he took very seriously. For me, it's this album sleeve, simply because the sight of him in a dress reminds me very fondly of his famous response to a journalist's question, "You have long hair. Does that make you a girl?" The response was of course, "You have a wooden leg. Does that make you a table?" David Bowie – Lodger – Tim Boddy It's taken a while for Lodger to dismiss the cheap ideology that it was the runt of the so called 'Berlin trilogy', the final release (1979) in this iconic series, though iconoclastic types will dispute it ever really existed as such a series. The most Brian Eno fingerprinted of them all (he barely got to touch Low in all honesty), this post-Thin White Duke/post-cocaine Bowie album is one of the most experimental he procured and was alarmingly successful and focussed with it, bridging the gap between Neu!, reggae and Talking Heads (acting somewhat of precursor to them in fact). But ah yes the album cover; it's taken on a Polaroid SX-70 type camera with stale lighting, and then crudely blown-up out to create an amateurish low resolution effect. The image itself features Bowie on his back with limbs sodden and uncomfortably spread on the bathroom ...

I love getting weird stuff in the mail. And these 2 CD's that Racer sent me from Alone Records are pretty damn weird. I'd never heard of the label before but they've been around for 10 years and are based out of Spain. Their catalog ranges from experimental/psychedelic to more traditional rock and metal. Definitely a discography I need to explore a bit more. Getting back to the weirdness. Former Can vocalist Damo Suzuki is an acquired taste. His performances on classic Can albums like Future Days and Tago Mago (recently re-issued with a bonus live ...

Acid Garage Knoxville, Tennessee’s COOLRUNNINGS just popped onto my radar with their new single ‘Spirits of the High’, a fuzzy psych-rock blow-out that channels all things from the Mothers of Invention to Wooden Shjips. The band began in 2009 when Brandon Biongo and Forrest Ferguson combined their solo-projects to perform live – they’re now a [...]