Carlos Detres

Deastro
Mind Altar EP
Ghostly International

When Moondagger was released in 2009, we saw a benchmark Randolph Chabot (aka Deastro) album in his progressive rise as indie pop phenom. Chabot’s live shows were electric and pulsed with the exuberance of a musician whose brain brimmed with so much musical energy that he had to release a new single or EP every few months just to be able to walk straight. And after his tours ended, after people lulled, playing their new favorite Deastro album while quietly walking solo on some industrial street, the musician produced this EP, Mind Altar. Although that’s not a complete statement because he also released Orange Summer Red Swimmer EP for free on his blog but don’t worry — those songs were remastered and are featured on this disc, too.

The first song and the EP’s title track is  a tight composition of child-like bells, noise, and a whipping beat that can be a bit disorienting on the first listen. Typical of Deasto fashion, the EP is remiss of predictable structure but unlike Moondagger or Keeper’s, Mind Altar comes across as a musical sketchpad, with more surreal elements than previous works, and less attention paid to audience-friendly songs, which is why people may like it. Chabot seemingly orcestrated this album via automatism, a method surrealists implemented to channel subconscious thoughts or feelings, unrestricted by prohibition or judgement. He uses samples, loops, stabbing drums, and noise to materialize the space orchestra that’s in his head, which makes it a fun collection of songs to listen to in the dark.

This isn’t an ambitious group of songs. There are no killer singles (although “Mowgli The Linx” comes closest). This EP is part of his lesson book. Mind Altar may be more of a thrill to listen to in the future than it is today and one could argue that it was meant to be heard that way. A clue about the origin and meaning of his latest work is mentioned by Chabot in an interview by ClashMusic: “It was summer. I was making a ton of new friends, going to my friend Klair’s house on Mondays for this vegan brunch. Me and Adam, my good friend, would just drink 40′s in a kiddie pool in front of her house. We did weird shit all summer. My mind was a puddle of neon green ooze.”

Remember that Orange Summer Red Swimmer EP that was previously mentioned? The songs are included on this EP as bonus tracks and couldn’t sound any more different than if you had put an elephant next to a donkey and heard them bray at each other. These three tracks are the highlight of Mind Altar and definitely deserve an ear’s listen. Even if you downloaded these from Chabot’s blog, pick them up again because they aren’t quite the same.

Mind Altar a slight departure from his more pop work found on Moondagger, such as “Vermillion Plaza.” One could possibly presume the artist relinquished caution and uninhibitedly created new music to explore himself in. His lyrics, conveying a musician curious of his constantly changing surroundings, are still there but sonically, compositionaly, the music has changed. He reintroduces his voice on the album on a spread of ethereal reverb, mimicking last year’s critically favorite album by Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavillion. Once a listener’s head cocks in that direction, it’s clear that this is a good move for Deastro. As his sound continues to mature, lessons like these will bring about that truly great record he’s capable of writing.

Release Date June 22,

Track Listing

1. Mind Altar
2. Genesis Weapon
3. Pastor Kid Redux Edition
4. Mowgli The Lynx
5. The Concept Of Land Ownership
6. Divali
7. Get Frostied
8. World Of Shadow
9. Shield Whip (Bonus Track)
10. Seven Fell From The Firmament (Bonus Track)
11. Orange Swimmer (Bonus Track)

Last night, I edged away from entertaining people with pretty words about pretty things at some open mic

night that was caught between a hot sunny day and the torrential evening pour of rain. I had an old copy of a Whiskey Dregs collection of writing and in between the pages was a little freak story, called “The Fly” that ended with a fly’s face appearing on the endowed ass of a woman while fornicating (I’m being polite, see?).

There’s more to the story than that but I was reading for people whose opinion I could have cared less about and what prevailed was exactly what I intended to spin – a horrific balance of pornography and violence.

As someone who is heavily influenced by photgrapher, Joel Peter Witkin, I don’t always profess beauty in the superficial sense – at least not philosophically. Beauty is complex and art should sometimes represent the savagery of our innate nature (as it already does). Ugliness is essential to recognize beauty, even to embellish it (paradox, anyone?). Ugliness is what makes beauty sophisticated because the knowledge and expression of these undesired characteristics of humanity is what distinguishes us from every other species.

The story I read, in spite of its repulsive content, portrayed the act of consumption, comparing human sexuality with the voracious hunger of maggots and how, after a while, this act eventually ends with death or, as the closing moments of an orgasm is called in French, le petite mort. Accepting life or giving life is to accept death or give death and our insatiable desire for sex is the silent voice of our genes echoing our past, present, and then passing our history on to subsequent generations.

What I wanted to do with this story was strip down the characters to what they really were – savage animals, with one goal, just like the maggots – to survive. It just so happens that the act of sex feels pretty good too. It’s supposed to.

Tears of Eros

If you’re interested in reading more on this topic, check out Tears of Eros by the French author and outlaw philosopher, George Bataille. He had a good deal to say about these things. Although the book includes a lot of nonsense, it is also rich with ideas that will cause uncomfortable questions about who and what we really are as a species, .

Massive protest in Tehran

On Friday, June 12, an astonishing 85% of the Iranian electorate went to the polls to vote for President. Iran’s ruling body of clerics, the Guardian Council, had allowed four candidates to run for President, the two main contenders being incumbent and Western agitator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and  reform candidate and former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi. After an enthusiastic and contentious campaign, voter turn out was so overwhelming polls remained open hours later than planned. Although in the weeks leading up to the election opinion polls indicated the opposition candidate Mousavi pulling away from incumbent Ahmadinejad, most expected the vote to go to a run-off. In Iran, the government typically announces election results the morning after the election, but within two hours of polls closing the state-run news declared Ahmadinejad the winner by a shocking 2 to 1 margin.

By late Friday evening, both Ahmadinejad and Mousavi declared victory, with Mousavi quickly sending out a letter voicing his intent to oppose the official results. The landslide result for Ahmadinejad appeared anomalous: in Mousavi’s hometown province of Tabriz in north-west Iran, the government claimed Ahmadinejad received more than 60% of the vote. In a surprise move perhaps designed to quell any nascent unrest, the Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Khamenei confirmed the election results almost immediately, stating “The chosen and respected president is the president of all the Iranian nation and everyone, including yesterday’s competitors, must unanimously support and help him.” Soon Mehdi Karroubi’s campaign had taken to Twitter to decry the results. Bloggers such as Andrew Sullivan and the mainstream British media took note of the growing conflict almost immediately, while American news outlets like CNN took little notice. As Saturday dawned in Iran, outraged voters took to the streets to protest the suspicious electoral outcome, and consensus formed among bloggers across the political spectrum from Huffington Post, Juan Cole, and Matt Yglesias on the left to Hugh Hewitt, Rich Lowry, and Hot Air’s Allahpundit on the right, that the election had been rigged, clumsily and audaciously, in favor of  Ahmadinejad.

As the day unfolded, Iranian authorities moved to shut down all avenues of opposition communication in an attempt to stifle the organizational efforts of Mousavi supporters. Lacking the ability to communicate through text messages or via telephone, the opposition turned to social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to organize protests echoing slogans from the 1979 Revolution. With state-run television in Iran, and major news organizations in the US ignoring the spontaneous riots in the streets, hundreds of Iranians became citizen-journalists, snapping cellphone photos and video, uploading the documentation of events to sites such as YouTube and Flickr. Rumors ran rampant that Mousavi, along with other influential reformist leaders had been placed under house arrest.

Over the course of the weekend, the Internet’s disappointment with the lack of mainstream news coverage developed into outrage. Twitter users expressed their frustration by tagging their status updates with the #cnnfail label, even as the network finally began to dedicate significant amounts of airtime to the story. The slow reaction of the cable news channels contrasted starkly with the near-constant real-time updates of raw news from blogs and social networking sites.

On Monday, Mousavi supporters marched en masse through the streets of Tehran, in defiance of a government ban on protest. Mousavi himself made an appearance, his first since election night, speaking to supporters from the roof of a car. The number of protesters was staggering, with Iran’s own state-sponsored news channel reporting the number in the hundreds of thousands. The march was peaceful, but violence erupted later in the day, with the Basij, a hard line volunteer militia, opening fire on the crowd. As the situation grew more perilous, Mousavi called on Iran’s Guardian Coucil to invalidate the election results, and blogs noted the possibility of a behind-the-scenes power struggle developing among Iran’s religious elite. Grand Ayatollah Khamenei  reversed his position on the elections after Iran’s citizens made their voices heard, backing off from his earlier statements ratifying the election results and instead calling for an examination of the vote. At the same time in the US, Twitter rescheduled planned maintenance of its site that would have taken it offline for part of the morning in Iran, in recognition of the key role the site plays for the Iranian protesters (and at the behest of the State Department).

The violence increased on Tuesday, after reformist clerics and foreign governments openly questioning the election results and citizens of Iran once again taking to the streets to protest. In an attempt to regain control, Guardian Council stated it would review some of the votes cast on Friday, while the government banned international journalists from reporting on the streets. Even with most journalists unable to report freely, information continued to flow out of the country. Iranians filmed and uploaded images of the brutal attacks and peaceful marches, bypassing traditional media. Additionally, opposition forces began to fight back electronically, initiating Denial of Service attacks against government websites. DDOS attacks essentially overload a website with external communications requests, slowing it down or shutting it down completely. The value of this tactic has been hotly debated in the last 48 hours. Another form of aid rendered by internet-savvy Americans involves setting up proxy servers for their Iranian counterparts to utilize, granting them bandwidth and allowing the circumvention of government filters.

Yesterday saw yet another mass protest, with huge crowds walking silently through the streets of Tehran. Once again in the evening, protesters commenced to shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great) from rooftops, a form of protest reminiscent of the 1979 Revolution. Tomorrow Mousavi supporters plan another huge rally, with supporters dressed in black, mourning those who have died during the election protests.

Justin, Evelyn and I have joined together for something really amazing. I know this sounds like bs but seriously, I feel pretty honored to come in and do whatever I can with this baby they have created. I am also really glad and excited that they’re allowing me to MC this thing. I’m writing notes on what to say, do, considering which friends I can embarrass and what info I will divulge. It is July 21st with only a few days left and the fan in my living room is blowing the hot air around.

I won’t write much in this post but I do want to say that there is a feeling – Justin, Eveylyn and Chris have this too – that something is going on in this community of ours. The Whiskey Dregs have only been publicly active for a few months and so much has happened – so much more to come.

I want to thank all of you for being a part of this experience. Even if you just click on one of our links, it shows that there’s an interest. Our blog/on line litzine has really exploded this month and is set to double our previous record for most amount of hits. I hope to take these good vibrations with me on Saturday and give my best to this collective of individuals who I am very happy to have met.

The line up is set. The drums are warm. The paint is wet. My water gun is at the store waiting for me. My notes are collecting more notes, bands are rehearsing right now, people are building something together. We are no Haight-Ashbury but this is a pretty unique moment that I’m going to treasure for a long time.

Peace and love,

Carlos Detres

we lost touch with the world. One, two, three lovers in a room and I wasn’t counting sheep. I counted flies. Wasn’t looking for sleep. Light leaked through the drawn curtains – closed it real tight but some of the sun still shone through.

Tara and Ambrosia – the squirming flesh on the bed – they were consuming each other. It looked so fierce what they were doing. It didn’t resemble love. It looked like hurt. It looked like violence. Tara was beating the insides of Ambrosia with her fist while lapping the most intimate region of her mouth.

I pulled a seat close to the bed, sat down, opened another bottle of beer, drank it, wiped my mouth and exhaled but I could barely hear my breathing from all the racket they made.

Tara, the blonde, moistened Ambrosia’s stomach where the ridge of the muscles began and then she went up to her sternum.

Three times one is always three. Three divided by one is always three.

When I looked at Ambrosia to see her tremble beneathTara, she turned her face and pulled the blanket over her chest until a ghost materialized underneath – Tara’s head. The ghost seemed to glide down her torso leaving streaks of blonde hair where ectoplasm should be.

Then I imagined maggots. I saw them but they weren’t there. They chewed through the rot while squirming into each other – naked, segmented bodies, tiny black eyes, white runny skin, struggling to get all of their food. Consuming each other, growing longer and bigger and drowning in the vat of decay. This is why doctors use maggots to treat necrotic wounds. The little machines don’t know how to stop.

Ambrosia raised and then parted her thighs to give the ghost access as it glided in between and disappeared in the place that made Ambrosia’s head tilt back. It sounded like agony the way she grunted. I once heard that women become animals when they give birth. Something clicks and the woman you impregnated is no longer your wife. She becomes a beast. Tara seemed to call out to Ambrosia’s womb where no child would answer. I waited.

And the maggots, they grow wings, change shapes and become something different. They mean to fly but what they do is eat and lay eggs in the guts of rot where the smell beckons nausea. The long tube extends from their head and into meals. It’s called a proboscis and they use it to masticate and then eat. Flies, hundreds of them rapidly lap the food, eat, suck, digest for a month and then perish into the unknown. Sometimes they pass into oblivion while eating – ironic, I thought.

The room smelled of sweat and intimacy – a heavy sexual aroma permeated. It became warm and humid. Ambrosia removed the blanket from her chest as Tara peaked up, wiped her mouth and looked at me. I undressed and joined them.

Ambrosia kissed me on the cheek and said, “Don’t break her. She’s my number one.” I laid down and Tara kissed me. I could taste Ambrosia still on her lips and feel strands of runny orgasm twisting in her mouth. Ambrosia moved to the other side of the bed, her legs parallel to my arms, and her feet up to my waist.

“I want all of you,” Tara said. Electricity vibrated from her skin and I knew she felt authority. She climbed on top of me, rotated to face Ambrosia and then began to ride. The muscles of her back strained as she jerked up and down. She whimpered and then bent forward toward my feet and into Ambrosia. The fly’s face appeared to me as her ass lifted and dropped – two large eyes staring at me, lifting and dropping. The fly’s face ate and sucked while using my member as its proboscis.

I could feel us, like machines, like animals – an instinct to consume each other – amalgamating, unifying, breaking the silence of an early morning. All control relinquished and the power was in primacy and submission at once. Then our proboscis spat, spat, spat inside of her until there was nothing but the heaving of our lungs.

• Can’t smoke anywhere near Queensborough Plaza but you can yell and threaten a police officer while he’s giving a ticket. Miguel and I were finishing a cigarette and a cop walked over and asked for our IDs. While writing our tickets, a man became unruly at the ticket counter and yelled and threatened the cop. The cop responded by being louder than him and waving his baton. What happened next? Nothing except that Miguel and I now have to pay 50 bucks for some bs.
• Can’t park anywhere at night. Marcus parked in the Lower East Side in a section that was accompanied by a very confusing no parking sign. Apparently, “no standing” means no parking and now that sounds obvious to anyone, however the times that were designated were not. There was a difference on the sign between “no parking” and “no standing” depending on what time you “stood” or “parked” the car. What happened? Marcus got a friendly $150.00 ticket. Nice!
• Can’t stand directly outside of a bar. What happened? Miguel, Marcus and I left the gallery bar and while deciding our next destination, a bouncer informed us that we couldn’t stand “there”. We were at least 15 feet from the door but no matter – we had to move.
• Can’t dance in New York. Why? While it is not strictly enforced, people are not legally allowed to dance in a bar unless the establishment has a cabaret license. We can thank Giuliani for being the town asshole and enforcing an antiquated law. Side note: Giuliani is a fascist and don’t let anyone tell you different. Rememeber that we live in America and not Mussolini’s Italy.
• Can’t smoke anywhere. Now I understand this, believe me I do but… C’mon now… Seriously? Nowhere??? Shouldn’t there be some kind of 70/30 law like the one enforced in Orlando? Orlando isn’t a haven either. Everything closes at 2AM.
• The city that never sleeps? What a lie! Everything is done for by 4AM… That means EVERYTHING. And because a liquor license isn’t granted for anything open after 4AM that means that you can’t go anywhere but home. City that never sleeps??? Give me a break. Lie, lie, lie.
• Too many guys and you won’t get into Lit. Lit is seriously one of my favorite bars – period. Drinks are reasonable. The music is great and after a certain time, one may partake in an unmentionable favorite activity downstairs in their basement. I really love this place but if you try to go in with too many guys (more than one) then good luck. You ain’t gettin’ in. So here’s what happened: Last weekend, my buddy and I after a good night of partying decided to go to Lit at 3 in the morning. The both of us are standing in line trying to seem as if we don’t know each other but when it’s time to go in, the bouncer looks at us and says, “Sorry, too many guys. Can’t let you in.” Lit is a place that I spend good money in all of the time and because of this bouncer, I couldn’t go in and enjoy the rest of my evening with cool drinks and good tunes. I love that place so much that I’ll still throw my support but I have to mention it here because it’s not just Lit – it’s everywhere. Have a cock? Good luck.

I love New York just like every one else but if you want to go to a city that revels in freedom, go to New Orleans. Somehow these people have been successful in maintaining a healthy night life without all of these damn rules. Not one of these rules applies there. If you leave a bar at 5AM the same bar will be open when you wake up at 10AM.

Honorable mention – If you’re interested in doing your own party - good luck. New York has a law against that too. Ask the hundreds of hard working promoters who have had to fight this city to do one freakin’ venue.