Dave Segal on Truckasauras' "serious" alter-ego, Foscil:

All this booze talk may lead you to believe that Foscil's new album, Residential (due out in December as a triple 7-inch as well as digitally via Byron Kalet's Journal of Popular Noise zine), is a boisterous party record or a tear-soaked Pogues-athon. Not so. Much of the 12-track all-instrumental release evokes the bravura melancholy of Miles Davis and Gil Evans's Sketches of Spain, Tortoise's more languorous post-rock reveries (marimba figures prominently), and Ennio Morricone's sorrowful yet dulcet spaghetti-western scores. Other diversions occur in "Latona," which features a triumphant, Don Cherry—esque trumpet fanfare, and "Roy the Barber," whose mesmerizing, ascending chord progression sounds like a gorgeous paraphrase of a 17th-century classical-music piece, but which Adam composed with crucial accompaniment from Moore. The all-analog studio setup, along with editing and effects techniques influenced by Miles's studio wiz Teo Macero and Lee "Scratch" Perry, lends Residential that trademark warmth that even today's finest computers can't replicate.

Read and comment on the whole story HERE.

Other humans who amazed: Ross Lambert channelingbeing Mick Jagger; Sean Nelson's Another Pleasant Valley Sunday, Amy O'Neal and Sara Edwards transforming Total Eclipse of the Heart into something utterly butch, and many more. The lecture, yes, was smart and good. But I'm sure you don't want to hear about that. I'll just give you a snippet of Anne.

They told Fences to go to rehab; he said yes, yes, yes.

If Fences' Chris Mansfield doesn't have a record deal by the time you recycle this newspaper—or refresh this page or whatever—then something is seriously wrong with the music business (I know, news flash). The 26-year-old singer-songwriter has pretty much everything going for him: classical training, crucial industry connections, and most importantly, a finished first album just begging for the right label to release it. He has just enough going against him, as well: a slightly troubled but more or less taken-care-of past, wall-to-wall tattoos, a brooding demeanor—he could be the kind of damaged, bad-for-you heartthrob that the Northwest hasn't convincingly produced since Elliott Smith (or at the very least Art Alexakis).

[...] "When I first moved here, I just felt so creative," he says. "I was banging songs out. I have probably 50 to 100 songs that no one's heard yet. I'll play some of them live, but I probably have a couple more records already lined up and ready to go. I just still feel so fucking full of music right now."

But it was also a period of depressive drinking, which Mansfield talks about with an evasiveness that suggests he either wants to forget those benders or else really has trouble remembering them. "I guess I was doing whatever you could think of, just normal drunk bullshit, the shit that we all do when we're wasted," he says. "I haven't fallen off a stage or punched Eddie Vedder in the face or done anything wild like that."

Read and comment on the whole thing HERE.

So many questions.

What we know for sure:

At the Moore Theater. Five bucks for a phenomenal party with the city's best and brightest and smartest and sexiest. I can't wait. You can't wait. Nobody can wait!

Read all about the winners—Zia Mohajerjasbi, Jeffry Mitchell, Stacey Levine, the Cody Rivers Show, and Pacific Northwest Ballet—here.

This week in the music section, the Stranger profiles young duo USF (formerly Universal Studios Florida) and ponders the prospects of Seattle's rising "chillwave" scene:

Seattle hasn't really been at the vanguard of a musical moment since grunge—the very geographic and cultural isolation that allowed that scene to gestate in peace has more often than not kept the city a year or two late to trends taking hold in denser, more connected places (cf. our late arrivals to electroclash, freak folk, disco punk, etc., etc.). But as the internet has alarmingly accelerated the hype cycle, it's also decentralized the way trends spread—or even removed geography from the equation entirely. If grunge were to happen today, it wouldn't need a bunch of bands living in the same city to reach critical mass; it would only require enough acts linked up online. (Or, to defer once again to Hipster Runoff: "Chillwave was a genre created by the internet, 4 the internet?")

Chillwave may prove to have the life cycle of a mayfly, but at least this time Seattle is buzzing along right on time, thanks to a nascent local scene that includes acts like U.S.F. (formerly Universal Studios Florida), Big Spider's Back, and Secret Colors. But let's back up a minute—hypnagogi-huh? Just what exactly are we blogging about here?

Read and comment on the whole thing here.

USF play the Stranger Genius Awards Party tonight at the Moore Theatre, along with Throw Me the Statue, They Live!, and the Emerald City Soul Club. 9pm, $5, 21+. More info here.

The Mountain Goats play tonight at the Showbox at the Market . This week in the Stranger's music section, I dig into their new album, The Life of the World to Come:

The Mountain Goats' latest, The Life of the World to Come, appears at first to be more pious. Each of its 12 tracks is named after a Bible verse, and Darnielle has framed it as "12 hard lessons the Bible taught me"—for instance, "Genesis 3:23" ("So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden...") is a song about him visiting his old place in Portland and about how you can't go home again. But Darnielle's spiritual path has been convoluted—he was raised Catholic (and remembers it fondly), became a strident atheist in high school, then returned to the church, and now attends Hare Krishna services as enthusiastically as he does Mass—and his current stance is ambiguous. In a recent Pitchfork interview, he said, "The story of my religiousness is a long thing... I mean, I go to church, but I don't have the faith of the people there." His previous album was called Heretic Pride; one of his early breakthrough songs, "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" ends with a rousing refrain of "hail Satan!" On the new record, his interest in the Bible comes across as more literary and theological than devotional. He recasts its archetypal narratives to modern troubles and even incorporates more poetic bits of scripture directly into his own lyrics.

Read and comment on the whole thing here.

Most of her photos seem haphazard at first, but their mesmerizing quality may have something to do with Strauss's sad, weary, wry honesty. She is a Weegee—not of 20th-century American news, but of the 21st-century American soul. Or maybe she is a Weegee in the Ezra Pound sense of art being "news that stays news." (Weegee got that nickname, by the way, after "ouija," for his seeming prescience for being at the scene of an accident, crime, or disaster almost immediately after it happened.)

The photo shares a spiritual harmonic with this song (and its video) from Neko Case: "Thrice All American (Tacoma)."

And with the mood behind this story, also about Tacoma, and building luxury condos on a toxic-waste site.

For more Strauss, see here.

I want to kill their hair.

A massive collaboration from Degenerate Art Ensemble that is part dance spectacle and part concert, a little bit punk-rock and a little bit Butoh. Featuring musicians Joshua Kohl and Jeffrey Huston, dancers Haruko Nishimura, Trinidad Martinez (Pat Graney Company), and Marissa Niederhauser (Maureen Whiting Company), set designer (and Stranger Genius) Jennifer Zeyl, video by Leo Mayberry, and many, many more. Sonic Tales should float by like a dreamy, postmodern fairy tale.

For the late end: Rumor has it Orkestar Zirkonium will assemble at Cal Anderson Park around 11 to march around and inflict their delightful Balkan brass-band havoc on the Halloween drunks.

Honduran soldiers have blasted recordings of pig grunts and other sound effects at the embassy in which the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, is holed up.

The acoustic bombardment, which included recordings of church bells, rock music and military tunes, appeared designed to intimidate Zelaya and around 30 supporters who have sheltered since last month in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. The deposed leader said the noise amounted to "torture" and was another violation of human rights by coup leaders who seized power in June. "It can be heard from 20 blocks away. We can't fall asleep," he told a news conference.

Yesterday the US state department suspended visas for several coup leaders. The US has condemned the coup but irritated Latin American governments by not using its full leverage to reinstate the elected president.

Drug smuggling in and through Honduras has risen since the coup.

From the Washington Post:

"Sound at a certain level creates sensory overload and breaks down subjectivity and can [bring about] a regression to infantile behavior," said Suzanne G. Cusick, a music professor at New York University who has studied, lectured about and written extensively on the use of music as torture in the current wars. "Its effectiveness depends on the constancy of the sound, not the qualities of the music."

Played at a certain volume, she said, "it simply prevents people from thinking."

Cusick, the NYU music professor, has interviewed a number of former detainees about their experiences and says the music they most often described hearing was heavy metal, rap and country. Specific songs mentioned include Queen's "We Are the Champions" and "March of the Pigs" by industrial rockers Nine Inch Nails.

Another former prisoner, Binyam Mohamed, told Human Rights Watch that he had been forced to listen to the rapper Eminem's song "The Real Slim Shady" for 20 days.

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Friday night was the band's first hometown show with their original line-up in 15 years, and it was awesome. Read all about it here.

And the Seattle City of Music Awards rolled out the red carpet at the Showbox.

And I caught British glam-goths the Horrors:

This Friday and Saturday, Mark Siano and the Freedom Dancers return to the Triple Door with another dose of soft-rockin', jazz-handed mayhem. In advance of the shows, I asked the mastermind behind the Soft Rock Explosion some questions. Answers—including discussion of Jazzercise, dance belts, and "sparkletards"—after the jump.