Greatest Hits contains both Stove Is The Meat That Fell Out (2016) and Stove Is A Toad In The Rain (2016), available as a cassette from Exploding In Sound.
Is The Meat That Fell Out by Stove
tag yourself. I’m the little pause in the midst of the somewhat miraculous guitar solo that ends “Bubblegum Lightning” tearing Stove’s sonic fabric apart, exhuming the corpse of guitar past with a single invocation of fripp at eno’s best, working the compressors at their violent pumps, the unending vibration that pulls sister rosetta’s tense yanking through hendrix wailing at the top of wild thing, through prince’s neoclassicism, through cobain’s shrug and demarco’s just-kiss-me; it comes out the other end in a basement where it sounds good but not great, when I remember it’s just a guitar sounding in a room and the spaces between, and there’s pleasure in that. I’m that pause, like a breath before it says: let me in, I’m coming back in. I’m the endless churning of wheels too cool for you. I’m the 13-year-old kids who I drive home from school twice a week, for whom panic at the disco! is still a part of the conversation. one says, “you just don’t like them because they’re weird,” and the other says, “that’s not true, I like weird things.” I’m the cacophony they indulged in once when, while working on a school project, they played “hooked on a feeling” against 21 pilots, one from each phone, the songs hardly colliding, hardly even affecting each other; they stop the videos and say, “whoa, that was weird.” I’m the one who gets spoken over any time he asks a question. I’m the 20th listen to Is The Meat That Fell Out without understanding a single word, and I’m the stupidity I feel every time I say to my coworkers “huh?” then “oh” and answer their question. I’m the guy in the back looking like he just remembered he left his clothes in the wash (they’ll smell when he gets back). I’m the moment he totally believes himself — that is, if only for a moment — when he considers the chance happening of culture at all. he thinks about the layers of contingent becoming that have led to our manipulation of sound into music, and furthermore, bands, songs, albums, at all; he thinks: when I shift my focus in that way, even that banal shit is pretty interesting to say the least; the assemblage of notes and words into events that all somehow make sense is pretty nice, even just those times when sounds come together and just kind of work and no one could ever just say why. when I’m hungover and content, I get there too; I forget about anything more than my body, and I don’t care about who’s riding what trends and who’s doing better than me and why. in that moment he — the man who forgot to take his clothes out — has to hear a band and say, “how the hell’d we get here? that’s weird. I like weird things,” but then he’s lost it, and guitars are dead again. that’s me though. just that moment. I read harman as quoted, and now it’s pasting all wrong: “When #re burns cotton,” for example, “it makes contact only with the $ammability of this material. Presumably #re does not interact at all with the cotton’s odor or color, which are relevant only to creatures equipped with organs of sense. […] The being of #re withdraws from the $ames, even if it is consumed and destroyed. Cotton-being is concealed not only from phenomenologists and textile workers but from all entities that come into contact with it. In other words, the withdrawal of objects is not some cognitive trauma that a’icts only humans and a few smart animals, but expresses the permanent inadequacy of any relation at all.” suddenly, I move like proust: I pine. I keep looking behind me. sally says, “everything means something, I guess,” then she’s the one the butcher doesn’t get. we watched texas chain saw safe from rain, and later that night, your skin acted up, which I thought was odd, but then you said “I’ve been neglecting it.” weird. now sally is writing. “America is a comet hurtling, I guess.” okay. “My America is a negligent — albeit self-conscious — tire fire,” she says. weird.
some helpful thinking Is A Toad In The Rain by Stove