If it’s Christmas at You Ain’t No Picasso, that means it’s Mixmas! These twelve days give me a chance to turn You Ain’t No Picasso over to the musicians I cover and allow them to showcase some of their favorite songs through a themed mix.

MP3: Pas/Cal – Summer is Almost Here

The only thing I love more than when bands turn me on to new music through their Mixmas mixes is when the songs they pick sound nothing like the band they lead/contribute to/etc. Well, Casimer from Pas/Cal wins both categories, as well as third and fourth ones — writing a lot and writing personally. Casimer is here to tell us all what it was like to be a Detroit Spacerocker.

“I WAS A TEENAGE SPACEROCKER” by Casimer Pascal

From about 1994 to 1996 I experienced what I refer to as my extended Summer of ’67, aka my Summer of Love. There was this makeshift community of former misfits who spontaneously found themselves all together in an ailing old Victorian near Detroit’s downtown. Every night and at almost any hour you could walk in to hear the most subversive sounds our city had to offer. It seemed as if everyone I ran into was (re)discovering things like Amon Duul II, Can, Faust, Neu, Cluster, and other obscuro music collectives, as well as figuring out the tools needed to make this special brand of noise like the Roland Space Echo, Moog synths, ancient fuzz pedals, Theremins and rack-mounted reverb units. While one of our ears were facing the Krauty past we kept the other pricked up to what was currently coming out of the United Kingdom via groups like Spacemen 3/Spiritualized/Spectrum, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab and the like. This clique of kids that I happily found myself a part of liked listening & making lysergic blurry sounds, all droning and ebb & flowing. Many of us would claim that Syd Barrett’s Interstellar Overdrive was the true Lord’s Prayer. To us, Motown was fast becoming what a local college DJ dubbed, “Detroit Spacerock City”.

With the recent reformation of Kevin Shield’s ridiculously important group and newbie kometen melodie makers like Deerhunter getting a hefty amount of attention it is good to hear people talking up J. Spaceman again and going on about the airy blissed out stuff Neil Halsted made before he became a plaintive Nick Drake obsessive. That said, some of the bands I held in such high regard back in those spacey days rarely get any mention now. Thus & therefore, in the interest to reverse this wrong and to give these mini-mavericks some much deserved love I proudly present five tracks I dearly admired when I was a teenage spacerocker.

MP3: Jessamine – Ordinary Sleep
Rex Ritter & his merry band of Jessamine were kindred spirits on the opposite side of the country. Apparently they were midwesterners—originally from Ohio—who wanted to drop the “mid” in a big way and found a home in Portland, Oregon. Rex was a deep lover of music & musical electronics and helped turn a lot of mitten-staters on to the very unheard of, American 60s psyche duo the Silver Apples, much in the same way Broadcast made people dig up old The United States of America records. Beyond sharing a common love of the uncommon with him, I found that both Ritter and myself were struggling with typical pop/rock arrangements. I had an aversion to anything verse-chorus-verse-chorus and Rex was embarrassed by his guitar because it was such the obvious rock & roll tool. At a time when the Farfisafied Stereolab was just cutting their first 7 inch and synths were still associated with groups like the overly hairsprayed Heaven 17, Rex was quoted in a fanzine firmly asserting that his next record would be made completely sans axe. So, although there is a lot of guitar on many of their songs it is often obliterated from normalcy via a daisy chain of boutique guitar pedals. This attitude of being uncomfortable with the mores of rock left a huge impression on me… and so did the guitary gurgles, filtering phasers, distorted delays, primitive drum pounding and unintentional hard rocking of “Ordinary Sleep”.

MP3: Rollerskate Skinny – Miss Leader
Thank God for coin tosses. It was crazy hard to pick just one Rollerskate Skinny track to proffer to—what I must assume is—the largely uninitiated blogopolis. Rollerskate Skinny was so much more than an adjective snagged from the pages of A Catcher In The Rye or the title of some track I never heard of by the group Old 97′s (YANP note: good song!) . Rollerskate Skinny, the band that had amongst it’s ranks the little brother of MBV’s Kevin Shields, happened to be the group I envied most in my Summer of Love. With their first and best LP, Shoulder Voices, they managed to smash krautrock, spacerock, noiserock, psycherock, artrock and rockrock together with surreal Bejarian wordsmithery and belting Bewlay brotherly vocals. Basically they one upped Mercury Rev (another love of mine at the time) by being way more ambitious and way the fuck less silly.

Majesty Crush – “No. 1 Fan”

Detroit spacerock scenesters didn’t necessarily embrace this local limey-loving quartet, but their girlfriends sure did. Whilst many of us were out scouring musty record shops for a Pram 10-inch or getting high watching a bootlegged VHS tape of Flying Saucer Attack, the Crushies were rocking it shirtless, reading about themselves in Spin magazine, and generally preparing for imminent stardom after scoring a deal with an Elektra subsidiary. Success eluded them however, their label shut it’s doors on them, yet the group managed to eek out a few noteworthy nuggets including my personal fave, “No. 1 Fan”. This track boasts many shoegaze/spacerock prerequisites: breathy vocals, distorted drones, and tidal-wave washes of reverberated guitar. However, unlike the bulk of occupants of this woozy world where vocals were moodily mixed a tad under everything else, Majesty Crush had a frontman who could kick out a totally in your face & literate lyric. David Stroughter, MC’s so-close-to-genius-he’s-a-nutjob vocalist, takes on the persona of wannabe president assassin John Hinckley, Jr. to sing a most endearing, definitely sexy, and utterly freaky ballad to the object of his obsession, Jodie Foster. Listening to it again I couldn’t help to sing along with the outro refrain, “I’ll kill the president for your love.” Now that’s what I call romance!

You Ain’t No Picasso Mixmas 2008
Ivana XL | Henry Clay People | These United States | Cotton Jones | The Bicycles