The Snipe Hunt Pt. 3 – Bad loans and the wrong blood23.12.11


Read part one here
Read part two here

The next day, calmer and heavily sedated by some of the finer narcotics Hong Kong has on offer, I started to get curious. Whose box did I have? Why was it given to me? Where the fuck did the old man go? And was it just a coincidence Pawn Shop wanted me in Thailand? The label hadn’t heard from Pawn Shop in almost six months, and no one besides me knew I’d bought a ticket for Thailand a week earlier. Despite myself, I was intrigued, and I went back to the actual pawn shop. It was closed, and it never opened, not while I was there.

I spent the rest of Hong Kong in a jittery daze, shaken by the encounter at 126 Tung Choi. I’ve invested a lot of time trying to forget it, but I’m pretty sure I did actually hear the story I’m about to tell you.

My last night there, filled to the gills with the cheapest overpriced wine a foreigner can buy, I stumbled back to the pawn shop, very drunk, and very sure I was going to get my money back. I don’t know how long I stood there, hammering my bloody knuckles into the door, before a girl came out of the back of the 7-11 screaming at me to stop, and brandishing a steaming mug of god-knew-what at me. When I told her I was looking for the old man, that he owed me $250, and that if she knew those sadistic fucks from Pawnshop, she’d better tell them I was coming for them, she laughed and her face got a little sad and patient, like I had become her slightly brain-damaged nephew. She passed me the mug, and in between sips of scalding briny coffee, told me the pawn shop had been closed since before the new year, the old man dead as long.

She showed me an obit on her Ipad, same man, same pawn shop, backrooms emptied and storage shelves gutted, but I didn’t believe her until she told me how he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer, but instead of getting treatment, he kept working and smoking, coming into the 7-11 three or four times a day, buying the same pack of Marleys, as though nothing had changed. That sounded like the right kind of stubborn bastard to me.

Apparently, right before he died, the authorities came and tried to force him to the hospital, but he refused. He kept saying something about having one more thing to do, one more thing he had to do, no leaving. The cop who’d told her the story swore he also heard the old man muttering on about demons with drums, and bad loans, something about the wrong blood.

Leave it Pawn Shop to lure me into a haunted pawn shop. And leave it me to get played by a ghost.


The next morning, I got on my flight to Thailand, now rerouted to Bangkok. I hated myself for doing it, but I had no choice; Pawnshop had sent the label a message- we have new music, come get it. I was the lucky guy who was gonna come get it.

The scrap of paper was a Bangkok phone number, out of service of course, but the guy who drove me to the airport had a cousin who worked for TT&T, he tracked it down for me. It was for a pawn shop in Bangkok that had burnt down a month before.

Yay Bangkok, here I come.

Fuck me.

Midnight Run – A guest mix by Hugo Kant19.12.11


I discovered Hugo Kant’s music about six months ago when I first heard his independently released EP “Searching London”. The EP contained three moody instrumental tracks consisting of subtly layered samples intertwining with flute melodies and ominous grooves. Needless to say, I was immediately hooked and I started poking around the net looking for more information about this artist. What I found out was that Hugo Kant is a musician/producer from Marseille, France and that the EP was only a prelude to his upcoming album titled “I don’t want to be an emperor”. (The album is out now, and its definitely worth a purchase. You can get it from Hugo’s Soundcloud or Bandcamp.) Read on…

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The Snipe Hunt Pt 2. – The Long Thin Cigarette01.12.11

The place was a narrow turn out of the noise, set deep into a stone wall, fronted by a large metal green door with some characters, Chinese and English, slopped across it.

The door swung open under my fist and a long thin cigarette poked out and then withdrew. I followed it in.

Surprisingly, pawn shops in Hong Kong are not like they are here*. There’s no retail. Instead of the usual pile of CD players, VHS tapes, Chainsaws and Weed Whackers, pawn shops in HK simply contain a tall counter, behind which sits a short man on a tall chair. I’m actually sure of this, that there is a small wrinkled baleful little man sitting smoking in his tall chair in every pawnshop in Hong Kong.

The man in the chair stared at me blankly while I shat out what I hoped was a story about a hapless tourist looking for an assuredly legendary band of skilled but eccentric musicians who despite their fame and wealth, frequented pawn shops like his, because they preferred their instruments to have been used by others. he never even blinked. I’m pretty sure they all do this, whether or not you speak gibberish Chinese and believe stories that are clearly too stupid to be told to strangers. Negotiation tactics.

He stayed that way, frozen in smoke, until he heard me say my name. Suddenly he flinched, shuddered, and coughed and spat in my direction. I shut up and watched him pull a large, creaky leatherbound from under the counter. He lit another cigarette off his last and started slowly fumbling through its crumbling yellow pages.

So for a while, he flipped pages, I wondered what was keeping me rooted to my spot, and nothing much else happened. Then, with a satisfied grunt, he spun around, hopped off his chair and disappeared into the back, floating through the dark on a cloud of smoke. When he came out, he had a small wooden box and a much smaller piece of paper. The paper he slid onto the counter. It was a pawn ticket. 1718HK$. $250 Canadian.

I reached for the box, but the old man was already back up on his chair, cigarette in hand, box underarm, mute as a dodo.

So. I needed to find Pawnshop. Pawnshop wanted me here. Here was ten years worth of low-grade tobacco smoke and a small wooden box.

What was in the box?


I stood there a long time, convincing myself the box held something important, something that wouldn’t fly out the moment I opened it, something that wouldn’t immediately infect me, possess me, or otherwise tamper with my eternal soul. Something Pawnshop needed. Something I needed.

With great reluctance, my budget crumbling before my eyes, I cracked open my wallet, regretfully counted out seventeen hundreds and a twenty and put them on the counter. The old man popped down, disappeared the money somewhere into his torso and pushed forward the box, indicating with a nod and a twist of his lips that it was now my privilege to open the box and suffer its contents.

The box weighed almost nothing. It was tiny, the size of a tissue pack, made out of balsa wood, dark brown, with strange markings, insignia, burnt into the sides.

I closed my eyes, said prayers I hadn’t had to since I stopped taking bathtub acid, and opened the box.

Pure rage surged through me, eyelids to toes.

It held paper. One little scrap of it, curled in on itself, looking like some musician dick’s idea of a fucking joke. Haha, Fuck you. The old man chortled. Fuck you too.

“See you in Bangkok. 02-1540542-45 PS”.

At that point I wanted to kill something, preferably something beautiful and cute that could be slowly strangled. $250! The Taxi! The waste of my fucking time! My Vacation! My Budget! Fucking BANGKOK!!!

I hate Bangkok.

I hate pawn shops.

I HAte PAwnshop.

I began formulating a story. Something to do with an outbreak of avian flu, criminally under-reported, rampaging through the Hong Kong night. A missing uncle and his rare parakeet, wasting away in the Alberta winter. A special record auction in Tennessee. Whatever. Anything to get me out of it with my job intact.

I turned to the old man, put on my best angry-raging-racist-slav-who-WILL-fuck-your-shit-up face and prepared to get my money back. He just smiled and kept on smoking. Right. Well. I still had my dignity?

I swallowed hard, grabbed my very expensive wooden box, turned slowly around and began the long journey back to the hotel. As I pushed through the door, I heard the old man say, ‘thank you’. In English. Plain everyday English. English we could have been speaking the WHOLE TIME!

Again Rage. Red homicidal wipe out rage. I had to kill that greasy son of a bitch.

Except there was nobody there. When I turned back to confront him, the old man was gone, vanished into thin air. I vaulted the counter, kicked over the chair, smashed random surfaces and yelled a few times, but nothing happened. There was no smoking, no English, no small man hiding anywhere.

Fucking Pawnshop.

To be continued…


*They just offer an exchange service. The shit you stole for cash. In the rare case you aren’t a fiend and you did actually need a loan to buy your baby some formula, the pawned items can be purchased back for the original exchange price. plus the interest fee. Of course. Most pawn shops in Hong Kong only accept jewelry, gold watches and valuables these days, items which don’t depreciate.

The Snipe Hunt Pt. 1 – The Setup24.11.11

If you’ve spent any time, or, in my case, way way too much time, trying to get to know Pawnshop, you’ll have learned, quickly, two things. One, They’re weird and two, they don’t like people. So when I heard rumors they’d holed up somewhere in steamy Hong Kong, torturing instruments for sound and doing weird shit, I was surprised. Hong Kong has people. Many of them. And Hong Kong was once owned by the British. A weird people, no doubt, but not that special possessed, tentacle, howler monkey Pawnshop weird. So what was Pawnshop doing in Hong Kong? Were they in Hong Kong?

Unfortunately I’d a flight to Hong Kong, innocently booked months before, and the label badly needed a word with the Pawnshop guys, and if I wanted some kopeks for my troubles, some PR would be nice too. I figured I’d make a quick detour to whatever rathole studio they’d hijacked, listen to their gypsy voodoo ramblings for a few hours, and be on my way to the nearest bar where I’d purge them from my memory with a rapid succession of White Russians. I should have known something was up when they immediately sent an Hong Kong number. Pawnshop never agree on anything with anyone for any reason. They gave me a Hong Kong phone number and then hung up. Before the line clicked dead, I heard something that sounded an awful lot like a troupe of hyenas singing Tibetan war hymns.

Fucking Pawnshop.

When I arrived in Hong Kong, I called the phone number they gave me. The woman on the other end matched my garbled jet-lag english with some hyperspeed version of Chinese, and we calmly jabbered nonsense at each other until she heard me say ‘Pawnshop’. At that point, she sped up into something horrible and screeched it uninterrupted into my ear until I finally gave in and hung up. I called back. Something cold and mechanical answered. It spat out two things, the phrase ‘Tung Choi’, and the numbers 1, 2 and 6. That’s it. After that all I got was a busy signal. Tung Choi 126. More than I expected really. I went down to the front desk and was informed that Tung Choi is a street in Mong Kok and that 126 was a common enough address.

Forty five minutes of sweaty stop-and-go traffic later, my driver turned down his Whitney Houston tape, stopped arguing with his iPhone, nudged open my door with his toe, and pointed at the 7-11 across the street. When I didn’t move he pointed again and said “126 Tung Choi” When I still didn’t move, he tapped the meter and picked up the iPhone. I got out.

No one noticed a short sweating nerd walk into the 7-11. I tried to stammer out something about Pawnshops, but my feet wouldn’t stop moving and by the time my voice had got loud enough for anyone to notice, I’d walked all the way through the store, out the back door, and, of course, standing in the dark alley, found myself stopped in front of a pawn shop. 126.

To be continued…

SUPERCREEP31.10.11

I watch a lot of horror movies, and I have always been fascinated by the Italian horror flicks of the 70’s and 80’s. You’ve got to hand it to the Italians for really grabbing hold of a genre and just running with it, and they ran to some dark and twisted places. It’s easy to stumble across one these films that is clearly a blatant knock-off of a popular Hollywood franchise, except they are usually way more boring, often have confusing holes in the plot, feature less stunning visual effects, and often have children with obnoxiously overdubbed voices.

Anyway, I am going somewhere with this. The music is usually outstanding. Italian Horror basically has it own genre of music, and it’s dope. Ennio Morricone, Alessandro Alessandroni, and Fabio Frizi are a few notable innovative composers that are responsible for creating the uniquely creepy and frequently funky scores to movies like:
Read On…

Nightmares – Music Video28.10.11

I love me some music videos.They say TV killed the radio star – I say TV saved its life. I think they are the perfect marriage of the aesthetic and the sonic. It really doesn’t matter what style,what genre of music I love it all; from Spike Jonze to Hype Williams. It makes me very excited to see artists take their art to a whole other level using the music video platform. Bjork does this well, Busta Rhymes always has amazing videos, Missy Elliot, Sigor Ros, and the list goes on.
Some of my friends think I maybe a bit too obsessed with music videos. Daily I am on WorldStar or Pitchfork checking out the latest visual drops from artists. More often than not I am surprised with the way a particular director tackles a particular song. I mean everyone has a different interpretation of a musical piece of work but it’s interesting to see a great visual artists’ interpretation of that work.
Read On…

The Haunting Hour25.10.11


I generally don’t enjoy Halloween mixes and sets due to the inevitable inclusion of tracks like Monster Mash and Thriller. Not that there is anything wrong with these songs specifically. It’s just that the repetitive nature of holiday themed mixes generally induces more cringing than excitement. So when I set out to create a Horror themed mix for the upcoming festivities I wanted it to be something a bit different than what you are used to hearing.

Once I started digging through horror movie scores and soundtracks I realized fairly quickly that there is no shortage of creepy sinister music to be had. I could have made it easy on myself and thrown together 60 minutes of solo synth and acoustic guitar horror movie themes but to be honest, it would have gotten old a bit fast, so I decided to liven things up a bit and make this mix instrumental funk and hip-hop. Once that was determined I began the somewhat arduous task of filling out 60 minutes with some older gems as well as some newer music while spattering some creepy film and old time radio quotes throughout.

Luckily, when I was well into mixing this podcast at right around the 45 minute mark I got an awesome email from Rowan Converse announcing a short EP called SUPERCREEP that he will be releasing this Halloween. He was also kind enough to send me one of his brand spanking new tracks called “Personal Demons” to include in the mix and oddly enough, it fit in perfectly.

Before I get to the meat and potatoes of this post I also wanted to remind everyone of another darker track being released via video this week from Nocturne Records. Ian Keteku’s “Nightmares” music video will also be available on Halloween from Nocturne Records. You can download and share the single here until the video is released.

Get it in iTunes or download it directly here.


Track Listing:
01 Marc 4 – Hyde Park
02 Piero Umiliani – Mondo Dove Vai
03 Skeletons – Mr. Mystery
04 John Cameron – Phychomania End Credits
05 Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra – Mondo Mondo
06 Klaus Weiss – Survivor
07 Goblin – Profondo Rosso (Intro Only)
08 Clutchy Hopkins – 3:25
09 The Teahouse – Kintabu
10 Piero Umiliani – Hard Times
11 Vampires’ Sound Incorporation – Necronomania
12 Adrian Younge – 1969 Organ
13 François De Roubaix – Les Maniaques
14 Whitefield Brothers – Prowlin’
15 Bruno Nicolai – La Dama Rossa Uccide Sette Volte
16 Teo Usuelli – Piacere Sequence
18 Rowan Converse – Personal Demons (Exclusive)
19 Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics – An Epic Story
20 Bruno Nicolai – Quarto Delitto

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Kilts and Stilts12.10.11

I recently returned from a trip to the beautiful city of Edinburgh Scotland. I was there for about a month with fellow poet and musician Brad Morden.
brad
We have a folk-hop project called Atomic Wednesday. We haven’t played Canada much but have toured over Europe a couple of times. Sweden digs us, I promise.
Anyhoo, we were there as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the largest arts festival in the world. We were invited as a spoken word act on recommendation of a show we did last year in England. The festival is literally ginormous. Thousands of people on the street daily, over 350 performers all day and night, it is super crazy. Read On…

Never Word of Mouth05.10.11




Last July Halfcut was given the opportunity to link up with video director Luke Hanson McDonald on his Fly By Shooting promo tour. Cut’ sent Luke a few songs off his second mixtape installment of Creating the Buzz and after about a dozen emails Luke came up with a video concept for the track “On Some Shit“. The video was shot at Cut’s home studio as well as a few other local spots in and around downtown Calgary.

Droooooooopppppp20.09.11


BANG! Just like that, Ian Keteku’s album Lessons From Planet Earth: Re-Evolution is now available for purchase on the Nocturne Records website. When you purchase the album you will also receive a digital booklet featuring a selection of poems, additional album art and full album credits.

L.F.P.E. juxtaposes an intense and often dynamic vocal performance regularly seen in poetry slams with ambient soundscapes, many produced by Josh Furey of Nocturne Records. The album features a great deal of Canadian musical talent including; Chelsea-Lyne Heins, The Ottawa Boys Choir and Musk Ox. L.F.P.E. was mastered by Philip Shaw Bova who has worked with many high profile musicians such as: Feist, Broken Social Scene and Jason Collet.

The reviews are coming in and they have been overwhelmingly positive so far. Here is an excerpt from a review written by Peter Simpson over at the Ottawa Citizen:

  • The pieces are set within music that is ambient, acoustic, or Afro-beat. Black Mermaid parts I and II are a dynamic pair, and the record brims with lyrical power leavened with light touches, such as aisle six at Loblaws, “where soccer moms poke at the pears.”



    • But, don’t listen to the critics…instead, go here, where you can listen to the entire album for free before downloading it.

    You can also get to the album through our new artist section on nocturne-records.org. We added vague and nonsensical biographies for each artist as well as links to their previous and current releases. Everything was designed using the latest and greatest web technology so it looks super slick like we paid a shitload of money for it, even though we just did it ourselves as usual.

    Should you decide to purchase the CD because of its awesome artwork, you still get the digital download to listen right away. In case you live in Ottawa (Ian’s home) and you wish to pick up a CD of Ian’s album at your local mom and pop book/music shop you can grab it at one of these places:

  • Sankofa Bookstore 430 Rideau St
    Fall Down Gallery 288 Bank Street
    Compact Music 785 1/2 Bank Street



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