Catchy, beautiful, and very unusual music for Xmas Eve

It's everywhere this time of year – Christmas music that is. As I write this, only 24 hours remain until the holiday is here and then it's GONE, so I will get straight to the point – if you are looking for non-brain-damaged, unfamiliar Yuletide- (and Solstice-)themed music, songs with a brain, a heart, and in many cases, a “demented” soul, look no further than the following four recommendations.

First of all, there is the sublimely strange melange of music served up by the DJ known as KBC on his “Bitslap” podcast. His themed episodes are all wonderful, but one of his specialties is uncovering VERY rare and often uniquely oddball Xmas music. So feast on the offerings available on his podcast, found here. As of today he has four current Xmas shows and a number of items from years past.

Now we move on to the music-videos of three tunes I really do love, for different reasons. The first is a non-mawkish but beautifully sentimental item composed and performed by the Australian musical comedian Tim Minchin. Tim is an atheist whose Xmas tune celebrates the holiday from a secular perspective, arguing that the real crux of the season is being with family and friends. It's a smart and sweet tune.

On to the seasonal cheer. I've written a few times before on this blog about Sherwin Sleeves, the brainchild of writer-performer Sean Hurley. Sherwin is a man of many talents and a sublimely gravely voice. That voice has been featured in two very wonderful Xmas stories, the first being “The Christmas Skater,” a beautifully written piece of radio that can be heard here.

The second seasonal adventure is one that I have just listened to today for the first time. It is the innovative, award-winning play Whisper, Pray, Make Room, which finds Sean as a modern-day Scrooge who happens to work as a talk-radio host. The "ghosts" reach him in the voice of his callers. As I've noted before on these pages, Hurley is a really top-notch writer whose works are true Internet treasures. Check out his terrific "radio theater" stories with Sleeves at his Atoms, Motion and the Void site.

Oh, and here is Sleeves' extremely catchy Xmas tune, which appears at the end of Whisper... (but was written before the play was created). It's short and is worthy of repeat plays.

And finally a song that belongs not to Xmas, but to the original holiday that occurred around this time of year, the Solstice. Singer-songwriter Andy Ditzler's tune is a wonderful earworm with a chorus that's catchy as hell. The reason I recommend it heartily is not only that the song is upbeat and joyous, but because Ditzler was lucky enough to have an underground legend, Funhouse favorite George Kuchar, shoot his music-video.

Funhouse viewers and readers of this blog will know that I LOVE George's work (and that of his brother Mike), and this music-vid (shot while George was teaching at the San Franciso Art Institute) has some imagery that only he could've come up with. Santa, dinosaurs, and Halloween decorations – the nine-year-old in me cheers.

Speaking of those of other faiths, if you'd like to hear three novelty Xmas items recorded by Jewish comics (Jerry Lewis, Marty Feldman, and Albert Brooks), then check out my Xmas-music entry from last year.

In Pod We Trust: five podcasts to which I am addicted (entries 4 & 5)

4. As It Occurs to Me: Richard Herring remains one of Britain’s busiest standups and also one of its most prolific podcasters. In my profile post on Herring, I discussed his other endeavors, but in this “short list” of recommended podcasts I had to include his sketch comedy show As It Occurs to Me, since it is, by turns, the most ambitious, the silliest, and, yes, the most imaginatively vulgar program I’ve heard in the decades since one could actually hear “the seven dirty words” on listener-sponsored Pacifica radio in NYC.

The show grew out of Herring’s twisted-history BBC program That Was Then, This Is Now, but it is a vast improvement on that show, in that AIOTM (as its title indicates) has no hard-and-fast concept behind it and is subject to no censorship whatsoever. It’s an exploration of the ideas and events that have occurred to Herring (and his cast) in the week prior to the program.

One warning: it might be quite puzzling to listen to the later episodes in any given series of the show before the earlier ones, so it might be best to start with the earliest shows. Herring is a master at crafting utterly absurd in-jokes and taglines that range from the sublime (I still salute him for referring to people’s children as their “sexcrement”) to the ridiculous (one season later, AIOTM still contains gag references to a skit that fell very flat a year ago, a goofy motorcycle-clothing store sketch).

Herring is ably abetted by his small cast of two actors (Emma Kennedy, Dan Tetsell) and a musician (Christian Reilly), but the show does seem to rise and fall on the twists and turns of his own fertile and warped imagination, and his ability to toss off lines and concepts that are better than some lesser standups’ entire acts. He also does this on the much more informal and quite often directionless podcast he does with TV/film critic Andrew Collins called Collings and Herrin.

As for the “dirty” side of the show: I have a pretty low tolerance for comedy that is obscene for the sheer sake of being obscene, but I do revere “dirty” humor that is surreal (as with Frank Zappa) or fucking brilliant (as with Cook and Moore’s inspired “Derek and Clive” LPs). Herring regularly plays with the notion of being puerile in his humor, but somehow keeps AIOTM and his standup from ever descending to the Howard Stern/Opie & Anthony level of unimaginative scatological humor.

Herring’s stage persona in his standup is often that of a chubby schlemiel, but in his podcasts and in certain of his themed standup shows, he is an agent provocateur who takes things just one step too far — and then muses about why he’s never on “the telly” anymore….

UPDATE: The only trouble with trying to chronicle any part of Richard Herring’s career is that the guy moves so damned fast. In the time that it took me to write and upload this blog entry, I found that he had recorded what he claims is definitely the very last AIOTM episode. He said that twice before, so perhaps we will see a return of the show, but he already has another short-term podcast he’s developing for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and he continues the sometimes hysterical, sometimes not-so-much, Collings and Herrin ’cast.

Available: Here
Price: free

Frequency of podcast: a “season” of six episodes annually

5.) Atoms, Motion and the Void: The preceding five podcasts in this survey are all rather easy to discuss, but the last one is such a special case that I’ll first refer you to a piece I wrote on it back in 2008, then I’ll describe it again briefly and talk about its latest “cycle” of programs.

AMV offers superlative storytelling in a literary vein — wait, stop, don’t mentally tune out! By “literary,” I mean entertaining and exceptionally well-constructed, not dry and over-intellectualized. The podcast is the creation of writer-performer Sean Hurley, who plays the lead character, one Sherwin Sleeves. Sleeves is an unflappable old gent living in the woods of New Hampshire who inhabits a universe that is by turns extremely realistic and magical.

The show is in fact a unique fusion of disparate elements, the main one being modern lit and old-time radio. The clever plot twists and self-awareness of the former mingle with cliffhangers and subtle “reveals” of the latter in the best AMV episodes. The stories are so well-written that I frequently scratch my head and wonder why Hurley hasn’t had a short-story collection or novel published yet. Besides the fact that the publishing world is bleeding to death on a gurney in the corner of the emergency ward, I think it is because Sean has unwittingly staked out his own terrain, and his work needs to be performed more than it needs to be read.

Making AMV even more a “one-man band” effort is the fact that Sean scores the show himself. In the earliest episodes, he played songs by other artists that perfectly fit the mood of the piece — in this capacity he actually got me to enjoy Rammstein and perfectly accomplished a Funhouse-like leap of culture with an episode that featured songs by both the Velvet Underground and Eddie Cantor. In recent years the songs in the shows have all been Sean’s own, thus fully integrating Sleeves as the sole “voice” of the universe he inhabits.

After a layoff of several months, Hurley has returned with a new series of episodes that he is offering by subscription — the original 35 shows are all still available for free. So far the new tale is engrossing and properly trippy, as Sherwin moves through a landscape of woods and water that is the mirror image of the one he normally lives in. Again, AMV functions with the homespun charm of A Prairie Home Companion, but as if written by a writing staff composed of Borges, Hesse, and Vonnegut (and perhaps, for good measure, my all-time fave Richard Brautigan).

No one is going to subscribe to something they’re not familiar with, so I hereby reproduce from my last blog post the list of episodes that supply the best introduction to the show.

The fact that there are well over two dozen episodes [now there are 35 – ED] may seem daunting to newcomers, but I suggest these shows: episode 2 as an amusing intro to the character and his ramblings, episodes 4 or 6 as door-openers to the larger tapestry that Sleeves winds up telling; 5 or 7 for uniquely touching tales (and I am not into the sloppy sentiment that ordinarily surrounds the telling of stories involving kids), and episode 18 if you just want to jump the gun, and experience Hurley’s mindwarpingly good writing.

AMV was the first podcast I got hooked on, and it remains a personal object of addiction.

Available: Here
Price: The older episodes are all free online. The new cycle of shows is available in the form of a subscription, with the episodes coming in the mail as limited-edition CDs, plus membership to the “Stalwarts” site, which celebrates all things AMV and features related downloads. Subscriptions are $12.96 a month, three months for $38.88, or six months for $77.76. I chose the download-only option (with Stalwarts membership), which is $45.00 for the series of six eps as MP3s.
Frequency of podcast: the show appears at intervals and has always been well worth the wait between eps.

I’m glad to share my recommendations for the preceding quintet; please feel free to add your own nominations in the comments field below. The five shows I included in this post are all very different, but they all share two things: they relate to audio genres that were formerly a staple of commercial radio (no more!), and it’s evident that their host-producers all put in a helluva lot of hard work to create them. I close out with two instructions: download and listen!

My current favorite Xmas song

I stand by what I wrote last year about the oppressivesness of Christmas music, and the coldly corporate notion that the finest (mostly long-dead) American singers can only be dredged up out of the collective unconscious once a year, and ONLY as purveyors of that dreaded canon of the same four or five dozen songs.

However, every so often a Christmas song comes along that is not offensive to the ears, and is in fact chronically catchy, and becomes something I actually enjoy humming obsessively. That tune is innocently titled “The Christmas La La song,” and can be found here. It comes to us courtesy of Sherwin Sleeves, the storytelling alter-ego of New Hampshire writer-performer Sean Hurley. I rhapsodized about Sean’s work months ago on the blog. Sean’s audio podcast Atoms, Motion and the Void remains my favorite original Web creation, a brilliant mixture of fine storytelling, old-time radio, carefully chosen (and created) music, genuine emotion (without sticky, Spielbergian sentiment), and an indelible lead characterization. Catch up with his work at the Atoms, Motion site and his blog.

Though you should hear “The Christmas La La Song” as an audio file first (and should buy it at iTunes — Sean is a truly independent artist), there is a modest computer-animated video for this very modest and catchy Yuletide tune:

The best storyteller you've never heard of

It’s not every day that a new obsession comes along in the Funhouse, but when one does my first order of business is to share it with yez all. In this case, I direct your attention to an absolutely brilliant Podcast — or, as I’d rather call it, an Internet radio show — called Atoms, Motion and the Void.

The show presents the collected adventures and memories of one Sherwin Sleeves, an aged New England man with a distinctly Anglo accent who initially hauls us in with charming tales of his younger years, and then slowly travels into different realms of imagination and emotion. This is a pure radio experience — even though Sleeves’ exploits are highly literate, extremely well written, and at points blissfully cinematic, it’s Sleeves’ smoky, craggy voice that will drag you in. The man himself has described his tones as audio Ambien, but he’s wrong (although there is a weird relaxation that accompanies the listening experience): this is the kind of “theater of the mind” that was embodied by all the best programs in the Golden Age of radio, except that Sleeves’ stories offer a curious mixture of Jean Shepherd’s small-town American roguishness (and longing for the simplicities of the past) crossed with the trippiness of the best fiction of the 1960s.

There is indeed a literary side to what’s going on with Atoms, Motion…. Sleeves’ delivery may make the strangest things seem perfectly natural, but for me the show synchs up beautifully with a lot of the finest way-out storytelling of the second half of the 20th century. There’s surely some of Borges’ labyrinthine weirdness (how that’s overlaid over the Stephen Leacock-like homespun old-wordliness is the neatest trick of all), Pynchon’s secret societies with odd agendas, the identity slip-and-slides common in Philip K. Dick’s work, and most importantly for me, a connection to the extremely psychedelic and mind-expanding work of genius comics writer Alan Moore.

Sleeves’ stories are cut from the same cloth as Moore’s wild journey through religion, the occult, and the imagination in Promethea. The 18th episode of Atoms, wherein our hero truly transcends it all, is an amazing adventure that is akin to the final issue of Moore's comic. (The 32nd issue which folded out so that the character’s final odyssey formed a whole that looked like a psychedelic wall poster).

Sounds too way out for ya, is that what’s troublin’ you bunky? Well, the show isn’t some oddball artistic construct, it’s damned entertaining, and in a few episodes it’s also profoundly touching (and I’m one who immediately clicks off at any inkling of Spielberg hearttugs). I guess the most laudable thing about the whole enterprise is that the show is the product of a gent in New Hampshire named Sean Hurley who has had no fiction published to date, has appeared only on local radio in very short snatches (and that since Atoms, Motion has attracted attention), and is giving the show away as a Podcast to get his stories out to the greater public. Given that I’m now in the 15th year of giving my own labor of love away to the public (and trying to spread the material further through this blog), I have to salute brother traveler “Sleeves” for his talent and dedication.

My own encounter with Sean’s highly addictive creation came through the Ron and Fez show, a radio show (not heard in NYC anymore on free radio, satellite only) that gets lumped in with the “shock jock” phenomenon, but has had some great moments where one of our fave commodities, nostalgia, has reared its misshapen head (when host Ron Bennington did a Ted Lewis “Is everybody happy?" one day, I knew the show had a lot more going for it than was immediately apparent). Sean first appeared on that program submitting novelty tunes as Sleeves, the most memorable of which is a pulse-poundingly weird ditty about graffiti, "Mighty Horse,” that did have me wondering, who the hell is this fucking guy?

Sean’s Sleeves voice is fascinating — in pictures he resembles a dandified Mick Fleetwood, but he sounds like a cross between Long John Baldry and the aforementioned Mr. Moore. (when he ain’t writin’ comics, Alan does occasional spoken-word performances that incorporate music, are quite poetic, and completely tripped out). When doing his own, more serious tunes, Sean has the sound of the great barfly/absurdist heartbreaker, Tom Waits.

I do hope that Sherwin/Sean reaches a larger audience very soon, as his work deserves it. In the meantime, folks on the Ron and Fez msg board that discusses his work have suggested that he try to get the Sleeves narratives published (he offers what looks to be an independently published version of the play on the AMV site; also sampler CDs). I’m sure the stories would indeed work on paper, but the true way to experience them is to hear them “told” to you by the 79-year-old inhabitant of some place called “Marked Mountain” (pronounced “mar-ked”).

Sean intersperses a wide range of music in the episodes from the Ink Spots to Rammstein, Danny Kaye to Harold Budd and Brian Eno, and Beethoven to Sigur Ros (one of my fave what-the-fuck juxtapositions being a show that includes tunes by both the Velvet Underground and Eddie Cantor). The latest development in the Atoms, Motion… saga was a one-man play that Sean performed in N.H. over the Xmas/New Year’s holidays. I couldn’t get around to doing a road trip up there, but the reviews made it sound like the most appropriate visualization of his imminently imaginative flights of fancy: just “Sleeves” there at a keyboard, telling his curious tales straight to his audience.

The fact that there are well over two dozen episodes may seem daunting to newcomers, but I suggest these shows: episode 2 as an amusing intro to the character and his ramblings, episodes 4 or 6 as door-openers to the larger tapestry that Sleeves winds up telling; 5 or 7 for uniquely touching tales (and I am not into the sloppy sentiment that ordinarily surrounds the telling of stories involving kids), and episode 18 if you just want to jump the gun, and experience Hurley’s mindwarpingly good writing.


Go ahead. Listen to Atoms, Motion and the Void