the fields

My original plans for last night featured the Bonfire Madigan show at Cafe Du Nord, but earlier this week when I was hanging out with Sasha at the Part Time Punks Homosexuals show at Bottom of the Hill we ran into George from Club Sandwich and he reminded us of yesterday's Blank Dogs show at 21 Grand.  So after a couple hours spent in mid-'60s Paris courtesy of Godard's glorious 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle we headed back to Oakland to immerse ourselves in the noise and I left the cello music for another night.  Aquarius has been writing voluminously about Blank Dogs for a while now and with good reason, as Mike Sniper's particular brand of fuzzed-out gloom pop is eminently addictive.  For this show he brought along a small arsenal of distortion pedals as well as four other musicians to fill out the sound, rendering my earplugs absolutely necessary.  In a happy coincidence it was also Club Sandwich's 100th show, and looking at the poster of their previous 99 events elicited firm vows to attend more of their shindigs.  There's a Grouper show coming up at the end of April, for example...