Phish Week – Day 4: Sex with Phish. Wait, lemme rephrase…

TO CELEBRATE THE UPCOMING RELEASE OF OUR 109TH 33/13 ON  A LIVE ONE, WE’RE PLEASED TO BRING YOU THE FOURTH INSTALLMENT OF PHISH WEEK BY AUTHOR WALLY HOLLAND !   ‘Sexy’ and ‘erotic’ seem to me to be almost unrelated, though certainly not disjoint, categories of experience – eroticism is a quality of imagination, sexiness a character of perception. Doing the dishes while drinking a glass of wine, anticipating a lover’s return from a weeklong business trip, can be an unbearably intense erotic experience, but you’d hardly expect someone to call it ‘sexy’ (whatever…

Phish Week – Day 3: On ‘Phans’ and Other Distasteful Topics

TO CELEBRATE THE UPCOMING RELEASE OF OUR 109TH 33/13 ON  A LIVE ONE, WE’RE PLEASED TO BRING YOU THE THIRD INSTALLMENT OF PHISH WEEK BY AUTHOR WALLY HOLLAND ! My book deals more with the private experience of Phish listening than with the fascinating subculture that surrounds it. There were several reasons for that choice. First off, I’m not a tour kid; when I’m at the shows lost in bliss I can easily imagine myself vanishing from civilization to travel the country and see 20 shows in a month, but over two decades of…

Phish Week – Day 2: On the Phish/Dead connection

TO CELEBRATE THE UPCOMING RELEASE OF OUR 109TH 33/13 ON  A LIVE ONE, WE’RE PLEASED TO BRING YOU THE SECOND INSTALLMENT OF PHISH WEEK BY AUTHOR WALLY HOLLAND ! (Please forgive the verb-tense confusion in this one. Writing about one active and one defunct rock band creates difficulties which I’ve addressed, here, by basically throwing my hands up in the air and switching tenses haphazardly like a big jerk. –wgh.) For reasons of both concision and personal pique, not to mention a certain polemical agenda, the 33-1/3 book deals only glancingly with the great…

Phish Week – Day 1: Where to start with studio Phish

TO CELEBRATE THE UPCOMING RELEASE OF OUR 109TH 33/13 ON  A LIVE ONE, WE’RE PLEASED TO BRING YOU THE VERY FIRST INSTALLMENT OF PHISH WEEK BY AUTHOR WALLY HOLLAND ! There’s no perfect place to start with Phish. Their studio albums are a mixed bag, and cover an impressively (distractingly, absurdly) wide range of styles and genres – quality, too. Their live shows, meanwhile, all feature rich ensemble improvisation, which is all about the moment of creative spontaneity rather than definitive performance, and in any case you could sample shows from 1986, 1994,…

Shepard Fairey on Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables

Turns out Shepard Fairey loves our 33 1/3 on the Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (the 105th volume in the series out just this past May) just as much as we do! Check out this FANTASTIC little review/blurb of Michael Stewart Foley‘s book on OBEY. Be sure to also read Mike’s guest posts on our blog during Dead Kennedys week, where he discusses the archival research involved in writing about the San Francisco punk scene. And of course, pick up your copy today!

Better Know a Bookseller: Librairie Drawn and Quarterly, Montréal

Better Know a Bookseller is a new feature on this blog where we’ll introduce one of our wonderful stockists. Previously we have covered Harvard Book Store, Papercuts J.P., Skylight Books, and Subterranean Books. Publishing this series is only half the battle, and the booksellers in these stores all over the world really help keep us alive. If you are a bookseller or know of a store near you that stocks 33 1/3 please get in touch!  Librairie Drawn and Quarterly 211 Rue Bernard O, Montréal, QC H2T 2K5, Canada      …

33 Things September Edition

Every month, we will compile the best, weirdest, most interesting music and sound news from the past 30 days and serve it up to you in one handy, easy to digest list. May we present 33 Things that happened in September. This list is brought to you by our 33 1/3 intern, Greta Moran. Pope Francis is dropping a rock album. Just to forewarn you: the remaining 32 things to follow are not quite as momentous. Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series is also dropping a few things, namely Metallica and Beat Happening! The release of these…