Day 1 - 3: Greenville, NC - Winchester, VA (Part One)

Hi folks,

My apologies for the lack of blogging lately. I’ve been getting ready for the tour I find myself currently enmeshed in, traveling the East Coast and Midwest for three weeks with my friend Sebastian, aka Proud Father, from the ruins of New Orleans.

As tours go, three days in everything is kosher and still fresh and fun, though I know exhaustion looms on the horizon like the scaffolding of some ominous pirate ship cruising hazardous waters. Our first day was spent in Greenville, NC at Rat & Slug, one of my favorite houses to play (and partially run by a friend from back home).

Rat & Slug is your typical punk house, a bit dirty (as the name implies), a bit precarious and crumbling, but warm and inviting nonetheless, a collapsing old house near campus surrounded by waves of wandering cats. My good friend Charles Wright offered blistering waves of harsh noise and destruction in a performance that left a lot of us jaw-dropped. Charles always seems to ‘trance in’ to his music, sipping tea and lighting incense while building stunning walls of pure sound fury. This was by far the most intense set of his I’ve seen, culminating in the demolition of a guitar neck violently hitting a metal canister. Our own sets went as well as first nights of a tour tend to do, a few minor equipment issues aside, and the night descended into DJ’ing and revelry. Rat & Slug is the perfect sort of low-key, friendly environment in which to begin a tour.

After a night on a floor we rolled back west for a stop at Scrap Exchange in Durham, my favorite junk store. Having gathered some amazing VHS/cassettes for sampling, and even a few gorgeous 35mm slides of a forested cemetery somewhere, we moved on to Richmond, Virginia, one of the most flat-out beautiful cities on the planet and one of my favorite places to play. The corner coffee shop we always begin our East Coast tours at is Globehopper, and it’s one of those half-discovered miracles of city life with delicious food and drink tucked away in an intriguing part of town. Another easy pair of sets and a little vegetarian Chinese food later, we drove north into the vast night to spend it on sleeping bags beneath giant oaks at a KOA Kampground near Fredericksburg.

Now we’re in the lovely, apple-obsessed mountain town of Winchester, Virginia, awaiting a show at Winchester Book Gallery (seriously, one of the most incredibly stocked book/record/video stores of all time) tonight with old friends Christopher Feltner and Guillermo Pizarro, two noise folks we’ve hosted in Burlington before. We’ve got a lot of time to kill in these pretty little town, so I’ll catch you folks later. Till then, ZC

PS - Photos pending. Already hit a sweet semi-abandoned stockyard and an abandoned house.

Pines

Hello folks,

I have a new instrumental folk side project called Pines. You can listen to the first song over at our new blog, www.pinesofnc.blogspot.com, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/pinesnc

More soon, thanks!

As Safe As Houses

This house warps and melts like a 

wedding cake in fragrant summer,

each molded corner bleeding into 

the door-frames.

All the furniture is hemmhorraging

its stuffing, regretful and dolorous.

We could peel strips of the faded hardwood

away with our fingertips,

grasping furtively some sense

of decayed mystery beneath the boards,

where the earth meets the hearth.

The fireplace is still choked with coal dust,

and there's pale squares

where paintings once hung

in lost days of antiquity. 

Even the windows,

with their burden of busy insects and

swiftly-rusting screens,

are a reference point in glass.

Cut-Out Ghosts On A Wall

Halloween weather lingered over the city 

like an incantation,

heavy gray brushstrokes cresting against

the dead fields swept beneath the overpasses,

with leaves and scraps of paper pressed against

rusted fences at the airport's wind-blown boundaries.

Over the sullen scrim of ice that was the river,

radio lights burned feverishly 

through spires of black pine woods.

They left afterimages burned into our vision

as we staggered past the edge of the yard towards the house.

Our bulkhead is wired shut, our boots wet from slush,

and there's a sense of anticipation that's balanced like some

dark photographic negative over the 

paint-less boards of the porch,

where we sat head in hands, 

shivering and remembering.