Invasive Exotics: down with indie, Up with India

Hail the Worthwhile Flux. This allusion (just to prove that we are all derivative), is the title of a book/gift I got for Christmas, a day that proved to be a blip in the trajectory of contemporary weather conditions otherwise indicative of global warming. Just last night I marched the concrete 'breakwater', where the most treacherous turn left my foot pushing to cross the other in mid-air. Thom Yorke, let's clink glasses to the apocolypse. I give us fifty years.

So to withstand my eagerness until Judgement Day (enter the T-1000), I have been daydreaming (in distortion) about travelling. My most prevalent vision consists of wandering the streets of Mumbai during the blaze before the monsoon, caught in the hallucinatory phase of heat stroke, listening to an amalgamation of sounds pouring from microphones hidden in saris, rickshaws and chai stands. The 'tempo' is roughly equivalent to the sound waves emanating from the first play of My Bloody Valentine:

Indian Jewelry - Come Closer: this is the heat from a jet plane slithering through the air laced in liquid lead, perfume wafting through a small mesh grate, diamonds and rubies shattering on pavement and/or a caravan travelling Rajasthan with Morrison's pathos in their back pocket. [MySpace]

Excepter - Knock Knock: This is daffy in Vietnam: pseudo-indigenous tribal jargon amidst headphone electronics. This is the self-discovery of cultural enamorment, the back page of the travel guide, the exotic finale of transcendence. This is a foriegner recording a city's idiosyncracies, purging toxins as an ode to Jamie Stewart. [MySpace]

And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead - Wasted State of Mind: this is being in the Agra cantonment train station with hoards of neurotic bird-ventriolquists telepathically conveying every sound simaltaneously existent in India. Trail of the Dead, I will shield the lettuce thrown at both of us. Anything that starts tabla-esque and pulls out in gypsyland has me convinced. [MySpace]

Psychic Ills - Witchkraft Breaker: this disc's artwork is an embossment of the same Thai elephant that is stitched to every 'indigenous' souvenir suffocating the kingdom. However, this is the sound that pulls you away from bartering over mangosteen in Madras (through the alley, past Ganesh and the relentless taxi wallahs) to the room emanating with a small cult of lingering travelers playing sitar and thumb piano because it's the new pink. [MySpace]

Down with indie and up with India.

-Tara