Photographed by doug88888

Taken through a UV filter at Chiswick, England.

– License

On the 26th of November at Scala Toutpartout Celebrate their birthday with a special show featuring Scout Niblett, Monotonix and Phosphorescent. 

From Scoutt Niblett’s blog:

Please join us at the Toutpartout 15 Years Birthday Night at The Scala in London on November 26 for only £9. All you have to do is email your full name to 15years@toutpartout.be. At the night of the party upon entrance  simply mention the guest list and all you have to pay is £9, no extra booking fee or anything. Just so you know, standard ticket prices are £15+booking costs. The deadline to get a reduced ticket is the 17th of november. 

Worth doing if you fancy going.

You want a non-sensical lineup? Voila! To celebrate Toutpartout’s 15th anniversary they’ve laid on a truly bizarre lineup at the Scala on November 26th. For more information go here. Seeing Monotonix once was enough (they were good n’all, just I saw way too much of the singer’s bottom for my liking) but Phosphorescent and Scout Niblett seem well worth having my mind scarred with more hairy butt flashes. You can buy tickets here.

Go here to watch Kiss, a lovely duet by Scout Niblett with Will Oldham. It’s beautiful. The video is odd.

Here is the short, sweet, beautiful, wonderful At Death, A Proclamation by Phosphorescent. I’ve been meaning to see Phosphorescent live for ages and it would be a treat to hear him play. I don’t remember if I ever gave him Beard Of The Day (back when I was running that weird beard-centric feature) but he obviously deserves it. I really recommend checking out Pride, it’s a beautiful album full of solid tracks, including the epic nine minute spectacular My Dove, My Lamb. It’s definately night time music. Matthew Houck has a soft, warm voice. I haven’t listened in a while and am remembering how much I like it, perhaps it’s time to revisit it…

EDIT: He did get Beard of the Day!

Some more rain in the night & a little this morning. Some sunny periods, & not cold. Finished the flower garden. Planted two rows cabbage (36 plants). Cleared the place where the gooseberries are to go (it is too early to move them yet). Made experimentally a few briquettes of coal dust & clay. If successful will make a mould & a sieve for making them on a larger scale. Evidently it is important to use only fine dust, also one must have a large metal receptacle for mixing in.

Tonight found a kind of phosphorescent worm or millipede, a thing I have never seen or heard of before. Going out on the lawn I noticed some phosphorescence, & noticed that this made a streak which constantly grew larger. I thought it must be a glowworm, except that I had never seen a glowworm which left its phosphorescence behind. After searching with an electric torch found it was a long very slender wormlike creature with many thin legs down each side & two sort of antennae on the head. The whole length about 1¹/₄”. Managed to catch him in a test-tube & bring him in, but his phosphorescence soon faded.

5 eggs.

Pale yellow, very wriggly. (legs relatively thinner than this.)

Fosforescens är ett begrepp som beskriver ljusutsöndring från föremål som gjorts självlysande. Och vilken skiva passar väl bättre än Phosphorescents To Willie när mörkret nu sänker sig denna regniga, blåsiga, höstlördag. Mathew Houcks versioner av Willie Nelsons sånger sprider ljus och värme. Med andra ord, en perfekt repeatskiva just nu.

Spotify-länk till Phosphorescent – To Willie

I’m back with another little track to get your afternoon going.  A lot of folks are getting off of work right now, and that sucks, so for all you people on the grind out there, I have this little lament.  This is a great sad song that I picked up from…somewhere.  Today’s Jam: Phosphorescent – Joe Tex, these taming blues.  Enjoy….

Hello from New York! I have been hanging here for about a week now… and the last few days have especially renewed my sense of admiration for this city. So many amazing things going on all the time. Last week I played a solo show with some international friends and got to meet some really rad people. Shout outs to the Brooklyn Tea Party and everyone who housed us. On Friday night I went and saw Emily Wells play (she is awesome check her out) and on Saturday night slid on over to the Williamsburg Music Hall to catch the Tune Yards (fronted by, to my surprise, Merril from Sister Suvi) and Phosphorescent.

Today I am going to go check out the new PS1 Contemporary Art Centre (in conjunction with the MoMa) in Queens, there is a Jonathan Horowitz exhibition on… you should go see!

Here are a couple photos from the show last week – check out Josh Solar’s blog for more of his photography (came all the way from Kansas!)

By Jason Diamond

A few months ago, my friend described via text message, the scene at the Obits show at The Bell House in Gowanus.  She was annoyed with the crowd for being (I’m totally paraphrasing here) a sea of late 20 to early 30 year old Park Slopers with black glasses, hats, beards, and bags that probably contained laptops used for their freelancing careers.  I looked at my phone thinking this was some sort of joke, considering that not only was she dissing my neighborhood, but she was ripping a bunch of guys with the same characteristics that many folks would use to describe me.  I quickly texted her back “uhh, dude?”, waited a few minutes, and then got a reply of “oh, haha. Oops.”

Right.  “Haha.” Indeed.

A few days later, I sat talking to another friend who had made the move from Park Slope to the mellow pastures of the Upper East Side*.  He was someone I considered somewhat of a mentor at one point, and why he put his days as a die hard Brooklynite behind him perked my interest.  I told him that of all the neighborhoods I had lived in, Park Slope was by far my favorite.  Save for the cult of the co-op and the mommy army that seems to run this place, it’s a wonderful nabe.

“I guess I just felt tired of being part of the Brooklyn retirement program.”  He told me as we had drinks at The Commonwealth, the bar just at the corner of my apartment.

This was a bit silly to me, as the only time I had ever heard mention of a “retirement program” for people in my age group was when a friend told me that “rockabilly is the retirement program for skinheads”, but that was 1998, and I was eighteen, and that was about subcultures; this was my life we were talking about.

“My advice, move back to Greenpoint before you are the guy who can’t find a babysitter, so you take your two kids with you to have a beer at The Gate.”

Dang.

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Later in the summer, another friend of mine and I made our way to catch the Phosphorescent/Dr. Dog show at Prospect Park.  We met up with yet another friend (so many nameless friends in this series of anecdotes), and his group of friends; one of which who also fit said description mentioned above.  Not wanting to know the awful truth, I danced around our chit-chat, until finally I ran out of small talk and asked “so, what do you do?”  I remember his answer distinctly, because his delivery was so awkward, and seemed like something he was dreading that one of us would inevitably have to ask.

“I’m uhhhh, a photographer.”

That seemed easy.  For whom did he shoot for I inquired?

“Uhhhh, I freelance.”

The poor guy said it with such a hint of embarrassment that I wanted to pat him on the shoulder and say “of course you do”, and then tell him “we all do.” Then I would have pointed at the legions of other bearded, bespectacled gentleman also taking up space on the grassy hill overlooking the Celebrate Brooklyn stage – a good percentage of the audience, all dudes just like us.  For a second I felt at ease being among my own, but it really made me wonder if Park Slope really is the freelance capital of the world, the place where your youth goes to die, or a weird combination of both?

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I recently took up a new regimen of waking up extra early on Sunday mornings and wandering around for a few hours.  My walks take me to the edge of the Gowanus Canal, into Crown Heights, Carrol Gardens, Cobble Hill, and all around my own neighborhood.  I walk the streets with no destination in mind.  I sing The Misfits “Where Eagles Dare” in my head, because I like to believe Glen Danzig was talking about Park Slope when he wrote that song, even though I have no evidence to back that up. Inevitably, I end up back home to cook myself breakfast totally refreshed, and sometimes, if I’m lucky, I walk in the door with a new book.

Now I could be wrong here, but I have learned that if you walk around Park Slope early enough on a Sunday morning for about forty-five minutes, it seems like there is a pretty good chance that you will come across a box on a random corner or placed a few feet from the trash, and in that box there will be some books.  Many of these books are indeed crap, but in most of these instances, most of these crappy books are copies sent by a publisher for review.  To me, that box once used to ship Utz potato chips that now contains review copies of a disgraced senators memoir that is titled something funny like “Me: A Story about my life”, or a collection of recipes for cooking with yaks milk, says: “oh, somebody who reviews books lives here.  Possibly a freelancer?”  This has in fact happened so many times, in so many different spots that I am inclined to believe that this idea that I am living in some weird, nation state inside of a borough, inside a city, inside a country, comprised of parents and freelancers, might be in fact true.

So now not only will I be kept up at night wondering the freelancing question, but now I must ponder if Park Slope is the best place in Brooklyn to get free books tossed away by my jobless comrades, and if by reconizing all of this, I am admitting that I have now become another brick in the wall, or at the very least, another name in some editors Blackberry?  (I could be so lucky)

Or, do I simply have a complex because one friend easily pigeonholed me, and another told me that I have “retired” from the “more exciting” world of northern Brooklyn to the land of expensive baby carriages and my mass of doppelgangers in the south?

You be the judge.

*I’m totally being facetious here.  The UES scares the hell out of me.

Suede- We Are The Pigs

Caz Mechanic- If I See A Bear

Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood- Lady Bird

Phosphorescent- Wolves

3rd Bass- Pop Goes The Weasel

Brian Eno- Needle In The Camel’s Eye

Pulled Apart By Horses- I Punched A Lion In The Throat

Mickey Gang- Horses Can’t Dance

Lullaby Baxter- Rattled Little Clam

Sublime- Bad Fish

I really like it when glow in the dark ink is used on things.  It isn’t used very often and no that doesn’t disappoint me, it just makes the cases that do use it slightly more special.  Not every situation calls for phosphorescent ink however, but this t-shirt does it delightfully well.  I really want it, but it’s sadly sold out on Threadless at the moment.

Found via Full Beard and Monster Munch.

Beautiful song. Almost like a continuation of Bon Iver’s “The Wolves (Act I & II)”… not the official video, but cool nonetheless.

Dessinée par le berlinois Feride Uslu pour Reebok et prévue pour mars 2010, la Courtnee Mid – Glow in the Dark est tout simplement dingue, et va faire transpirer tous ceux qui poseront leurs yeux sur vos pieds cosmiques pendant que vous danserez en club. Prends en de la graine Kanye, chez Reebok on rigole pas avec le phosphorescent.

The Moleskine notebook.

Hemingway used. One of. These.

So did Van Gogh; and here’s Van Gogh’s very own Moleskine, tantalisingly ajar:

Some people still draw and paint some very reasonable stuff in their Moleskines, amply demonstrated at the website ’skine.art (www.skineart.com) — well worth a look.

Some other people, however, do not.

After seeing a live performance by Matthew Houck (a.k.a. Phosphorescent), and evidently being particularly impressed by his tune ‘Wolves’, a fan was moved to sketch her hero then share the drawings with a breathless world: “He was godly in concert/person so I decided to draw his beautiful self”. And thank you, ma’am, for not keeping them to your beautiful self.

Although not hilariously bad enough for the pages of Homemade Hilarity, wilfully posting such pictures with such flagrant misuse of a Moleskine’s creamy pages, and indeed of the English language and perfectly good graphite and ink, deserves at least an arched eyebrow:

Yes, “Ther’s Wolves”. In them thar hills, one would perhaps presume, although Mr. Houck’s plangent song complains that they are in his house. I feel he’s being metaphorical, but anyway I bet your bottom dollar that what there is NOT ‘in his house’ is a wolf-bear-boar-beast trophy head nailed to the wall:

He’s a lover, not a hunter.

“Wolves” by phosphorescent

This was a bit of an adventure. I love Phosphorescent, serious amounts. Recently I’ve been listening ridiculously to Pride and Aw Come Aw Wry and bits to the others too. When I saw he/they’d announced European dates I was so excited until I realised the London one was on the same day as Final Fantasy… Luckily he was playing in Brighton the day before and it didn’t clash with anything and I optimistically thought I could get to brighton leisurely then sit by the sea for a bit and then wander over and listen to a nice bit of phosphorescent then pop home. When I actually got to Brighton it was raining and really cold and I couldn’t find the venue for a while. Luckily when I did find it it was nice and warm and pretty small.

The support was Danny George Wilson who is also in other bands like Danny and the Champions of the World (I guess he’s the main person?) who played at Wood but we only heard them from a distance and didn’t like the voice. The same thing happened here, it started with lovely guitary stuff, very promising, but as soon as he started singing it was a bit old fashioned in a bad way and not that great. He covered My Girl and Born Free which quite a lot of the audience rather enjoyed, not me though.

After a not too long wait Phosphorescent came on. The nice man putting on the gig presented them and it was very sweet and enthusiastic. Although Phosphorescent is basically a one man band, live they are a five piece. The drummer had had an acccident with a bottle opener and had split up his arm and had to spend hours in hospital in Paris but he played with one arm and you wouldn’t have been able to tell. Occasionally Matthew Houck joined in on a cymbal when he wasn’t singing. They played a lot of the songs I like but I wasn’t really too bothered which ones they played because I tend just to listen to the whole albums not individual songs. They did a little section of the Willie Nelson covers which were lovely and they played a really good version of I’m a full grown man (i will lay in the grass all day) and they played Wolves and Cocaine Lights aftew which I went so I could catch a train that would get me back at a reasonably sensible time. Wolves was beautiful as I expected and I’m so glad I got to hear it live. It was definitely worth going to Brighton for this and I will definitely see them again any chance I get.

Phosphorescent

To Willie LP

I Gotta Get Drunk

“Tell me where you’ve been, I’ll tell you where I’ve been, It will be ok”…opens Matthew Houck (a.k.a Mr Phosphorescent) in a sleepy and delicate voice which resonates over the silent, expecting audience. This song: ‘A Picture Of Our Torn Up Praise’- the perfect beginning. Who would have known that the drummer was playing with only one hand due to a beer-related injury…

Houck captivates you instantly, creating calm anticipation with his almost majestic presence. He sings with a voice that I have found utterly mesmerising since the day I discovered ‘Pride’ in amongst my brothers CD collection – drawing you in, making you feel like you’re the only one there, telling stories of broken dreams and drunkenness.

His own material stands out so much that they really could have left out the Willie Nelson covers from Phosphorescent’s latest album ‘To Willie’, a tribute to the great man. ‘Wolves’ in particular is a highlight of the Phosphorescent evening – beautiful melodies and perfect harmonies falling over the smiling crowd – woozy, almost haunting.

There’s still time before Phosphorescent float off back to America – see MySpace for remaining British dates – it’ll be worth it.

Tilly Kneale

For Fans Of: Bonnie Prince Billy, Horse Feathers, Willie Nelson.

mp3: Phosphorescent – Wolves

Watch:

Footage from Phosphorescent’s, KEXP session:

Phosphorescent on KEXP, April 2009

www.myspace.com/phosphorescent

Listen to:

Brand new tracks from Oneida’s forthcoming album, Rated O.

I Will Haunt You

Saturday

What’s Up Jackal?

Rated O is the follow-up to the Brooklyn band’s 2008 album, Preteen Weaponry and the second installment of their “Thank Your Parents” series. This mammoth  triple album will be released by Jagjaguwar on 7 July 2009.

www.myspace.com/oneidarocks

Revisit:

The Bowerbirds, Hymns for a Dark Horse (2007)

Have a listen to the tracks which made John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats declare The Bowerbirds were his “new favorite band in forever.”

In our Talons

Hooves

My Oldest Memory

The Bowerbirds release their second album Upper Air on 7 July 2009 through Dead Oceans.

www.myspace.com/bowerbirds

Les meubles italiens Stardust proposent une gamme de canapés et de coussins translucides et phosphorescents, au design proche des formes de Tetris. Cette illumination est rendue possible grâce à l’utilisation du matériau Via Lattea (la voie lactée), tissu renforcé avec des fibres de carbone le rendant indestructible, et de diodes placées à l’intérieur du meuble. Le nom des modèles reste dans cette atmosphère spaciale, avec le Galassia, Bucco Bianco et Mappamondo. De quoi tenter de justifier un prix stratosphérique.

Via

What? Phosphorescent / Beth Jeans Houghton

Phosphorescent will be playing his acclaimed new album ‘To Willie’ which, as the title may give away a little, is a tribute album to country legend Willie Nelson. It’s a great record full of Willie covers and originals which fit in neatly by their side.

Support comes form 18 year old prodigy Beth Jeans Houghton from Newcastle. This girl has a mesmerising voice. Discovered at last years Green man festival in Wales where she was asked by Devendra Banhart to join him on stage to perform a song.

For Fans Of: Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Devendra Banhart, Vashti Bunyan, Bat For Lashes.

When? Thursday, May 28th.

Where? Jazz Cafe, Camden.

How Much? £10

Tickets? tickettext /  seetickets *MM   *SOS

mp3: Phosphorescent – Reasons To Quit

mp3: Beth Jeans Houghton – Sweet Tooth Bird