-Seattle hip-hoppers Mad Rad are sick, as is their 2008 debut White Gold. Sick beats, sick flows -- they're even sick at house-guesting (they crashed on my roommate's and my couch and floor when they were in town and were very gracious). The Mad Rad crew manage to fuse old-school Dre, Gnarls Barkley, and skinny jeans into an unironic and original sound that never slips into "white people rapping".
-Canadian psych-rockers Caribou. Both their most recent album 2007's Andorra and 2006's Up in Flames are full of driving, luscious, beautiful, beautiful music.
-online lit journal, elimae. Clean, gorgeous writing and prose. And they actually respond to your submissions within a reasonable amount of time ("within 72 hours"). The name comes from "electronic literary magazine".
-Sebadoh III. Lo-fi, seminal indie rock. And authors of these lines of genius:
No more homosexual hassles Life among the grown-ups is in full swing
-If you haven't heard it yet, the new Deerhunter album Microcastle is absolutely fantastic, as is the free bonus LP that comes with it, called Weird Era. In fact I think Microcastle is probably the best album I've heard this year (even the cover art, which is pasted above, kicks ass). I think they have an aesthetic that could be considered noisy, beautiful, fuzzy, and young. I like this aesthetic. I am seeing them next week in Williamsburg.
Here's a link to the Pitchfork review of the album. I didn't read it but I feel like their ratings are, with the exception of Vampire Weekend, usually pretty "accurate", which is to say, "agreeable". They gave the album a 9.2.
And if you like Deerhunter but haven't been to their blog, you could do worse with your time. Dude's prolific -- and generous. The blog is loaded with freebies and demos (look for the song "Requiem for All the Lonely Teenagers with Passed Out Moms"). His "micromixes" are also great (and free).
-I'm really excited about the reissue of Pavement's 1998 album Brighten the Corners, which comes out December 9. I just pre-ordered a copy in order to receive some free shit.
Unfortunately, the song "For Sale: The Preston School of Industry", one of my favorites, isn't among this shit. Apparently, it "cost too much" for Pavement to purchase it from the Dutch TV place where they recorded it.
As consolation, here's the video, of them recording it:
-On the personal front, work continues on The Great Asian-American Novel in Stories. Earlier tonight I did a reading of two very short stories from the book. I read a story called "McDonald's with Mother in Country of Her Birth, Not Mine" and another one called "You". I think the first one got a better response, although I don't think the second one got a bad response. "It was funny," said someone afterward.
If you're interested, I'd be happy to send you an excerpt. I'm looking to have a completed first draft by mid-December.
My friend (and former bandmate in Hybrid Kid) Danny Lloyd's new group, The Alembics. The Myspace description: "Melodramatic Popular Song / Shoegaze / Alternative".
"[James Yeh is] probably one of the four or five best writers in the United States who hasn’t yet published a book."
--Kyle Minor, HTMLGIANT
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Nice words about my chapbook "9/16/10," cited as a notable story in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011:
"Spit out in tense, hypnotic prose, James Yeh's Taiwanese-American kaddish can be read in the time it takes you to brush your teeth, but I'm going to bet you don't forget its sadness or its post-Brooklyn dread for a long, long time."
--Ed Park, author of Personal Days/a founding editor of the Believer "Yeh’s quiet meditation on death will sneak in and throw up a window in your soul with its intensity."
--Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolutionand Minor Robberies
--Julia Jackson, Electric Literature's The Outlet blog
"An eight-page auto-bio zine that tells the story about James Yen [sic] being nervous about playing a show at a bar. A lot of it is about loneliness. There are only ten copies so I don’t know why I’m reviewing it."
James Yeh (born in 1982 in Anderson, South Carolina) is a writer, editor, and occasional DJ. His fiction appears in NOON, Fence, BOMB Magazine, Tin House,and PEN America, as well as several anthologies, and his nonfiction appears in VICE magazine, the Organist, 'SUP Magazine, the Rumpus, and the Faster Times. His chapbook, "9/16/10," published by Swill Children in 2010, was selected as a notable story in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. A recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Columbia University, he was a 2011 Center for Fiction New York City Emerging Writers Fellow. He lives in Brooklyn, where he coedits Gigantic, and is at work on a novel. Freelance copy editor and proofreader by day. For queries, questions, or concerns, he may be reached at jamesyeh82 [at] gmail.com.
