Salon de la Guerre now has 32 albums available on iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, Bandcamp and other sites where can buy and stream music. My latest is Stereoisomer. You can check out the catalogue here and here.
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre | Tagged Alternative rock, college rock, rock, Salon De La Guerre, Stereoisomer | Leave a Comment »
Salon de la Guerre’s 32nd album is going to come out in the next week. It’s my hardest, fastest, most rockin’ album yet, full of up-tempo alt rock guitar numbers.
To whet your appetite, I’m uploading another cut from SoundCloud. The album will soon appear on iTunes, Amazon, Pandora and YouTube, as well as other music distribution sites, including one big one I won’t mention that’s been in the news for hosting rich asshole anti-vaxxers.
As always, I recorded the album at my home studio in New York City on Logic Pro. I wrote the album, sang on 10 tracks and played guitar on eight of them.
The Banality of Eva
No one ever starts out as a bottom feeder
You’re a pristine block of wood and you carve your own features
Next thing that you know you’re in the tabloid reaches
Got flashlights for eyes just like the dumpster creatures
Made in the trash but
Seeking the light
Morning caller
You’re still made of night
Doing devil’s work
To learn what’s right
Who would ever guess at the banality of Eva
Only those who knew when she was young and peevish
You only had to see she was a little bit tasteless
You only had to know she was a lot impatient
Breaking the mold, wanting to fit in
Never quite knowing what suit she’s in
Wanting to be a celebrity
Wanting to crush all her enemies
Stylish stylish stylishly late
For your for your destiny with fate
Come to be come everything you hate
Your average-ness, what you hope is great
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre | Tagged Alternative rock, Eric Randolph Rasmussen, punk rock, Salon De La Guerre, Stereoisomer | Leave a Comment »
My plumbing is all
Messed up after two years
Riding a bike during this Covid
Business
The straws and tubes
With which god made a crotch
Are all bent and skewed
Nothing comes out right
I spatter and dribble piss like
A broken radiator
But I can hiss and sob
A man made old before his time
Graceful in my imperfection
Plato said there are no objects just ideals
So you can think about that as you sadly
Consider my ruined junk
Posted in Poetry | Tagged bicycling, Covid, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
Salon de la Guerre is releasing its 32nd album in a few weeks. It’s titled Stereoisomer, and I’m sharing the title track and a few others on Soundcloud today.
Most of the album is unabashedly loud, raunchy, guitar-driven hard rock. After releasing my previous album in November, I set about trying to get a brighter guitar sound than I’d previously achieved with my home recording equipment, and I finally found the magic formula. After that, I knocked out most of the basic tracks in a couple of weekends in December. But then I had to figure out how my voice was going to get around all these bigger electric thrashing sounds (a problem I’ve heard discussed by rockers as diverse as Sting and Iggy Pop). There’s a practical reason heavy metal singers use loud, overblown voices, and I’ve gradually figured out what it is: Big Guitar doesn’t leave much room in the sound picture, and the best singers have to float above it. Then there are people like me who have to fake it.
I also had to figure out which lyrics best suited this particular instrumental attack I’d come up with. That took me a few months. As it happens, there are plenty of things in the world to be angry about (I’m looking at you, Russia) and turning your despair into angry expression is an emancipating act that sometimes only art affords you.
“Stereoisomer”
I shed the costume and now I’m chased by snow drops
Had to shed my parachute gear
Had to let go of the octopus gravity
A Dutch girl crying wish you were here
Blown out face of a Jugendstil building
Looks like we landed in the zone
I’m a nationless man finding the pins in keyholes
A traitor with a rubber for a soul
Wore a pig costume
Hair done page
Now I enter the metafiction stage
Don’t know love from rage
The human cell is acting its age
Behold the age of aromatic polymers
Benzene rings and nylon legs
Sometimes it’s scary the way things crystallize
Show you the girl, the life you left behind
Did you hear the propellant stop burning
That’s when the V-2 started to fall
See it etch the tomato sky of morning
Hope we live to be amazed by it all
Wore a pig costume
You’re on my cape
Never left the re-entry stage
But the eukaryotic cell plays
Plastic man in a plastic age
And when I broke, broke through the wall
I found a chemical lab and scored it all
Please send word to Truman
I’m sorry that I’m AWOL
Copyright 2022 Eric Randolph Rasmussen
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre | Tagged Alternative rock, Gravity's Rainbow, Music, rock, Salon De La Guerre, Stereoisomer | Leave a Comment »
This corn must know it’s growing
Near a chocolate factory
Must smell the smokestacks
And know its own good murder
And we walk a chocolate town
Known by its chocolate river
And its invasive bugs, red on its
Underwings, stretched across
The calligrapher’s book to write its
Invasive thoughts upon,
Looking up with its orange eyes
In hopes of devouring the corn
And leaving its prolific eggs
The kids and the corn and now bugs know again
They are growing near a chocolate factory
And who slaved for what is sweet
D.H. Lawrence wrote of a sensual need for justice
And likewise
The beautiful red-brown lanternfly is smashed under thought
Blue Converse and mandate of state law
Just as the bug serves his own mandate
To devour the Pennsylvania picture at night
Posted in Poetry | Tagged Lanternfly, mandates, Pennsylvania, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
Salon de la Guerre has released its first music video. It’s for the song “Lanternfly,” which appears on the album Wings Made of Cash. The video was directed by yours truly.
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre | Tagged Lanternfly, Music, pop, Salon De La Guerre, Wings Made of Cash | 2 Comments »
I’ve hit a couple of milestones recently in my musical career. One is that I copyrighted my 400th song. I’m also starting to put together what will be my first music video–a mix of animation and photography.
And last but not least is the fact that Salon de la Guerre’s 31st album is available as of this week! It’s a 20-song cycle of pop, rock and electronic silliness about money and obsession and money obsession, as well as the various ways people flail about trying to make themselves happy and follow their own existential bliss.
The album is called Wings Made of Cash, and it’s out on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube and other places where music is still sold.
I spent the summer recording this album (along with two classical albums and an ambient album) after getting my hands on Apple’s Logic Pro X software. As I’ve mentioned previously, this was my first time working with a musical score editor, and now that I’m writing in musical notation, I’m finding myself more prolific than ever. Part of my philosophy of music, after all, is to keep things new by changing the approach every so often. I once put Sonic Youth sounds to marching band rhythms. Later, I tried mixing Maybelle Carter’s guitar strumming with Thurston Moore’s alternative tuning. I once tried to mix country music with avant-garde microtonal experiments. I have an album called Yipano in which I improvise a bunch of songs on my son’s keyboard and let the audience in on the intimate and embarrassing fact that I’m very much learning to play the piano in real time.
Sorry to sound like I’m shilling for the late Steve Jobs, but the Apple software has opened a new and magical window in my brain that’s let me conceive many different new musical ideas that I’ll likely be investigating well into the future. For my next act, I’ll likely start plugging real musical instruments into the program (I used only MIDI instruments for this and the three other albums I made over the summer) to see what different sounds emerge.
Wings Made of Cash was composed, arranged, performed and produced by yours truly at my home studio in New York City during the summer of 2021. I also designed the cover. The male model photo is by an artist named “FatSprat” that I came by on a photo service.
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre | Tagged electronics, Lanternfly, Musical notation, Salon De La Guerre, video, Wings Made of Cash | Leave a Comment »
I know that I promised you a pop music album, and damn it, I’m trying to live up to that promise. But in the meantime, I’ve managed to string together another classical piece.
The Dog Opus is my 30th album, and it just hit the virtual shelves. It was conceived as a string quartet but synthesized on my computer. I was inspired by Sergei Prokofiev’s “String Quartet No. 1” (Opus 50) and “String Quartet No. 2” (Opus 92, “Kabardinian.”) I used the two violin synthesizers on Apple’s Logic Pro X, as well as the electronic viola and cello. I am not sure how well these would transpose to actual instruments, but I do have the score, and maybe someday in the future if I found amenable musicians … who knows? I’ll leave smarter people than I to decide what key I’m playing in.
Why a dog quartet? Well, I was running out of the family members I normally put on my classical works.
The Dog Opus, released under the name of my musical act Salon de la Guerre, is now available on Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube and other places where music is streamed and (still) sold.
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre | Tagged classical, Kabardinian, Prokofiev, string quartet | Leave a Comment »
–*College kid surprises girlfriend by showing up at her high school homecoming. She surprises him by having a new boyfriend.
–*This kid found out the hard way that wingsuits will not allow you to float through brick walls.
–*These precious young Velvet Underground fans made a cute video for one of the band’s songs that will reinforce your belief that nobody understands the Velvet Underground but you.
–*This extremely slow docking procedure on the International Space Station is a great reminder that if you viewers at home were doing the math, people would die.
–*Space litter!
–*A lion gives an antelope a hug because that would really happen in the wild.
–*This video on Bayes’ theorem overestimates the number of people who would use Bayes’ theorem if they understood Bayes’ theorem.
–*A montage of people accidentally pointing AR-15s at their family members.
–*This woman used a needle, thread and fabric to make clothing.
–*This pilot’s face did not melt off at Mach 2 like the thumbnail promised.
–*Jordan Peterson destroys trans cashier trying to give him change for a half gallon of milk.
–*Joe Rogan refuses to take a stand on putting your penis in a blender. “I’m not going to tell people not to do that.”
–*This 230 foot mega yacht will fairly quickly get your Marxist class consciousness and general covetousness confused.
–*A cartoon of Slavoj Žižek eating an apple, even though cartoons, apples and Slavoj Žižek only exist as constructs masking the reality of the non-self.
–*Ducklings getting eaten by herons.
–*A man made his own flamethrower even though a flamethrower masks the reality of the non-self.
–*A man who proves that Western music practically didn’t exist until Céline Dion changed keys in this version of “All By Myself.”
–*Demonic possession hack: You’ll invoke Satan if you play a chord with a flattened fifth.
–*Dude Imperfect can’t quite get past the “throwing eggs at people’s houses and videotaping it” concept stage.
–*Neville Gamer TV begs you to subscribe to his videos playing handheld Mattel football electronic games.
–*NASA tries to up the sex appeal by having an astronaut’s clothes come off spontaneously under 3 G’s of force at rocket launch.
–*Clips from The Sopranos.
–*Clips from Game of Thrones.
–*A video you made yourself of your baby puking.
Posted in The Internet | Tagged Dude Perfect, International Space Station, videos, YouTube | Leave a Comment »
In a few days, I’ll be releasing another album on the major music platforms. This one’s an ambient album and it’s called Cold For Mars. I’ve avoided making ambient albums in the past because I felt they were too easy to create, and if I were to pursue that line indefinitely, I could be making 20 albums a year and producing even more noise pollution than I do now. That’s not to say I don’t greatly admire acts like Four Tet and Bonobo and Oneohtrix Point Never. And I love Brian Eno’s ambient albums, of course. Furthermore, I understand the great need people have for albums with a hallucinatory effect and their need to chill out to them.
I suppose I could have called my album Golem Vs. Duende ambient, but it was closer to industrial and I’m not sure it’s something anybody chilled to.
In any case, I’ve released the latest album early on Bandcamp, and you can find it there if you’d like to sample it and decide if it’s your thing.
As usual, I composed and recorded the album myself at my home studio in New York City. I conceived of, recorded it and mastered it over the course of eight days. (My other albums this year took quite a bit longer, that includes my next album, Wings Made of Cash–a pop work that is taking a bit more time to fuss over.)
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre | Tagged ambient, Cold for Mars, Salon De La Guerre | Leave a Comment »
Beauty is Imperfection 