Take a break from our regularly scheduled societal collapse and swing through the doors of the Starlite Lounge on the WFMU Drummerstream. 9 PM - midnight (NYC time), where the horn of plenty spilleth over with great new sounds for our troubled times. Starting off with a few tracks from Flipper in memory of the late Bruce Loose.
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Sad waking up to the news of (Flipper vocalist) Bruce Loose's passing. Flipper was utterly monumental to me as a teenage weirdo discovering his personal soundtrack on 1980s college radio. Unlike the blitzkrieg-paced jams of their left coast punk contemporaries, Flipper's songs were slow and often deeply unsettling. Even as a teenage outcast, I had trouble figuring out who songs like "Get Away", "Sacrifice", or "Way of the World" were really being written for, since most people in the hardcore scene into which Flipper were erroneously lumped hated them even more than Reagan. On stage, the band willingly put themselves up there as a target, and seemed to take creative nourishment from having bottles thrown at them.
Flipper bassist Will Shatter died in '87 and was the poetic soul of the band, whose lyrics shone a hopeful light through their impossible wall of feedback and distortion. Bruce, by contrast, was the menacing id stalking the front of the stage -- in later years wired up to some kind of medical contraption of unknown (to me) purpose -- who made his points with all the subtlety of a cigarette extinguished on exposed flesh.
So RIP Bruce Loose, and thanks for all the amazing sounds. I'll definitely be spinning a set of Flipper favorites on tomorrow night's radio show.
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Circuits
Letters From A Tapehead