Greetings and good tidings yon 2023! :-)

Hello all young and old! It hath been a few minutes hehehe! I am writing to update all the old friends and fans of the Bubbling Dusk that my content is slowly making it's way onto YouTube... you can check out the channel here! Anyone who finds me via the now-in-theatres Dreamin' Wild film based on the lives of Donnie (seen above with yours truly after a recent LA gig!) and Joe Emerson and their incredible family, welcome!!! I hope you enjoy this small treasure trove of self released music and art from the golden era of the private press record. I wish I had more time to dig and share but hopefully the uploads on YouTube will amuse and suffice, and maybe I can get some new mixes going as life unfurls... If interested in following my other artistic pursuits and endeavors I can be seen here and here. Much love to all, and hoping this finds all my old listeners enjoying everything, weathering the weird times and loving their life!!! Namaskar, Jack

Beautiful Blue Wind

I found this magical 45 a few years ago and have been meaning to post it ever since.  Hailing from Upstate New York, they craft a nice basement spell with these two sides of dreamy bliss.  "To Find This Place" especially floors me, with a light sci-fi undertone and odd fantasy lyrics.  It's pretty much perfect, and when the drums kick in you know you're on your way to the place!  So good!  Hopefully this marks the return of a weekly post here on the blog...  I'm not making lofty promises, but I would love to be more active on the site!  Stay tuned!


"To Find This Place"


"When I Was Young"

Chuck Senrick - Dreamin'

Here's one I just had to share.  Hipped by my good friend Mark, I was told to expect a supper club organ player that grapples with something much larger than his square acre of Fettucine Alfredo over the course of an album's worth of original songs.  And it's true, as Senrick's effortlessly simple and often repetitive chord changes stare you in the eye immediately across an empty room, a mannequin framework of drum machine pitter patter coercing his riffs and croons forward, the elegance of his voice blanketing wide eyes and a child-like heart in crushed velvet, satin-like.  A jazz man.  There's a lot of panache on display across this record, and I would argue that every song hits in one way or another.  Senrick has the ability of a great songwriter, to push you to a kind of elemental catharsis in a bridge and hold you there trapped in an amber glow over the course of the next verse.  He builds craft simply into each song, quietly, so that his subtle genius creeps up on you and it's totally fulfilling.  He has a joyful soul.  The mood is not explicitly melancholy, or wistful, but does occupy a kind of cartoon-like jazzy downs.  It's a rendering, not unlike an imagined world.  It's this latter fact that pushes the record that much further into greatness for me, as he's clearly a man at home in his imagination, and there lies the freedom that we all want to feel in music.  He comes from a familiar place, but he leaves you with the delight in something new.  The record morphs and mingles over the course of it's two sides into a wonderful micro-climate between jazz, soul, and lounge music.  Lyrically the concerns are simple, often universal, and times verge on the philosophic.  When so many people linger most exclusively in affairs of the heart it's nice to hear a grown man musing about what makes kids different from grown ups, or how he feels about his lost dog.  It's not to say that "Dreamin'" does not contain love songs, but they're often tempered and have a self-assured maturity that I'm assuming came from a married man (see "Wedding Trilogy").  Across the disc his vantage remains oddly pure and graceful in a way I don't always associate with the period, as on "Downtown" he spins with clarity how meaningless the rat race appears if you actually stop and observe things.  These concerns are never directives though, as he works like a painter, and the blended color is his own labyrinth for simple truths.  Take his ode to a friend who succumbed to drugs, "Drop a Dime," which blends metaphors rapidly creating a portrait of the addict as a part of a universal concern, "he's a little bit you, a little bit of me," yet pushing the song predominantly through a highly repetitive chorus that seems to illustratively offer that same man's base reality ("drop a dime, drop a dime").  The juxtaposition allows you to enter his world.  It's this kind of enchanting subtlety that makes the record, and is not altogether what one may have gathered from drinking in the soft blue cover with that hand drawn mug boomeranging out of a suburban abyss.  Or maybe it is that simple: music for a late afternoon, perhaps a bit wet with rain, when one might plunk down in a bean bag chair, with one light on and eat a graham cracker.  Haha.  I mean while you listen to the record obviously!  A time and place to relax, and think about the world.  So c'mon Duke, check it out!
   

Various Artists - Live at the Blood and Bones

From yesterday's barstool comes tomorrow's lamp-post cool: stumbling grog and bedfellow freedom pasted top down and mid center.  A special LP tentatively titled, "The More You Order the More You Get," or alternately "Live at the Blood and Bones" (subtitle?) - in any case, it's a variety of artists warming their bellies and rosining the bow in a stoney cafe somewhere south of never never.  I know I may be preaching to the choir, but stuff like this completely owns me even if it doesn't face off with the hyperion finish line.  It's a night carved out just for the blokes.  And maybe tonight they're south of stoked, but the fiddle, well it ain't yet broke.  On display: it's human endearment armed with soft tokes and crowd patter.  Kind of the sonic equivalent of post coital cuddling with a hairy stranger that randomly began giving you a back-rub in a crowded, auburn lit hippie night-cave.  And those little candles blinking bravely as the stone rolls away from the door...

Mix for '13: Sample Page Sexy Cut Out

Hey gang.  It took me forever to pull this one together.  Hopefully it was worth the wait.  AOR rubbish and basement treats from dusk til dawn.  Accent on the undulations of light and dark, Hollywood, Atlantis, neon, and flame.  Stay stoked, and get rad in '14!  Peace ~~~ J. D. F.

MIX

Mohs - The Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living

Mysterious, charming, and very rare.  Mohs hailed from New Mexico according to the Acid Archives, but I can find no reference on the LP other than a song title.  Back cover is blank, and no artist names are included on the labels.  But what a stunning visage, that greco-roman blueprint staring sideways, donning real mucklucks for some kind of rocky mountain climb.  Such is the rustic, slightly windblown, but at times manicured, or at least curatorial output of the Mohs, as it were - collective.  We'll defer in that sense, until further information can be elucidated.  Education is important, but so also is getting clam-baked in your camper and recording very completely sincere soft wisdom from a place that is more internally laid back than I think anyone can entirely access anymore.  I bring a tear from my eye.  But listen to the record, enjoy something for crissakes.  Slow down a little bit.  The unexamined life is NOT worth living.  But your life will certainly go on.  Even with their two goofus trax.  Period charm.  You'll have to deal.  Lots of deep stoney gaze.  Immaculate.  Mohs lets dream together.  Good night!

Everything Will Be Alright... (The Ledge - Rock Affair)

This is probably one of my favorite one-trackers of all time.  Which is to say, actually, that the rest of the LP is far from unlistenable.  But one glimpse of the title track with your third ear, and it's sort of game over on their covers of "Dancing in the Moonlight" or wherever else the AM compass was guiding the Ledge's weathered late night live sets at one haunt or another roundbout Hot Springs, Arkansas.  Stunning cover photo, and something ever so cryptic as to where that voice is coming from, even if it's just some soft focus 70s melancholied blue eyed soul.  Totally sends a chill everytime.  Big ups to Rockadelic Rich for turning me onto this!  Another crazy score...

 
Everything Will Be Alright