at home i have two small speakers that sit on a mantle next to a wooden mallard (drunkenly thieved from here), and a red-orange vase with a dead stalk of something. sometimes, headphones.

i started going to see the band stars like fleas because co-founder william fields was a sometime-contributor to stylus and an intelligent, right decent man.

the intent of most live shows, as far as i can tell, is to perform the music that the band has written together with a requisite amount of “flair.” did you see the drummer’s hair and so forth. was that not a scorching guitar solo. it’s not even like that on the record. i feel like the producer hemmed them in. no less than god could commit their music to tape and even then they would have to insert the tape in an angel’s mouth. they are indeed a force of nature.

i don’t love the music of stars like fleas. what i love, and why i tried to go to nearly all of their shows while in new york, is the feeling that their music is designed for place. sure, they write songs, but more often than not, what sticks is situational: slf with a shape-note choir at tonic; slf in a small forest clearing; slf completely unplugged at the glasshouse gallery. sound and place as inextricable as panflutes at the times square stop. i’m not saying it’s not compelling to hear music performed well, as i have been known to love a good scorching guitar solo with accompanying grimaces. but there’s something nervy, something priceless about a band who seem thoroughly concerned with music as a spatial thing, with live shows as a real-time negotiation of venue rather than an algorithm.

milking the sonic present is a feeling i’ve become unaccustomed to again, which is probably why i’ve returned to robert ashley’s private parts, an album that sorta serves as a–ha–placeholder for, treatise on, and reassurance of the entire sound/environment experience. i don’t really feel like i’m listening that much anymore, an absence that hadn’t really hit me until the other night, when, at a meeting for irrepressibly brilliant mix-cd swappers THE COUGARS, rod bryan said: “you know how you can tell? just put the speaker far away and see how the sound carries. some of this stuff…it just carries.” then rod, a man with things on his mind, put on an olive space suit and rode a bicycle. i lay flayed by his assertion.

watching these slf videos is a tease. time, preggers and showing, i pledge to show you new meanings of the word “waste.”