John Olsen: Music Writer

"The first young shorty that ever made my preteen heart sweat at night was Brandy Salem. So fine. The stage was set for some serious 8-year-old dating action but I got snaked by this lame dude named Shawn Murphy who won Brandys eye by shuffling baseball cards faster & being a little crazier on his four-wheel green machine. It killed me ... all summer I tried to get faster on the cards & upstage everyone on the street big wheel scene, but alas, no Salem. She moved to Iowa, still think of her when that "Im in love with the sea" song comes on. Fucking Shawn.... Fast forward 21 years ... in the game of pure electronic hard-core insanity, Wolf Eyes hear rumors of this RI band of PCP chair-throwing HC yahoos who hold the crown on violence & sonic terror. Fuck that. We thought we were the end of the well in electronic napalm. This Black Dice band wanted to play in Detroit ... no one will do it. Fear of violence/death threats/general horror left them with no gig. "Why would I wanna book a band who is gonna beat up my friends?" was the local consensus. So BD get a Monday gig at Club Olson/my basement in quiet Ferndale, home to a handful of whacked out electronic misfit gigs. Neighbors of the crib being left side= young couple / right side = quiet lesbian couple with child. My cell rings nonstop days before the gig with crazed young HC fiends asking if the gig is true. I start to get nervous, then I hear they need like 30,000 watts for their gig. What the? Gig day/come home from my office job & the Dice dudes are waiting for me. These are the horrible terror junkies who stab people when they play? All I see is smiles, loafers, Bjorn playing with a kid, and starry-eyed-vacant-brain Danny. Weird. Then they load in; mounds of amplifiers, mounds. The whole basement looking like Iron Maiden was gonna play. Wolf Eyes jams, we think it is intense, whatever. Then they play ... starting with solo recorder and then / WHOA /the most violent, insane, Hiroshima tidal roar of basement sonic terror EVER. EVER. We never heard or witnessed anything so massive. We have seen the Merzbows, the Skin Crimes, the Gravitars, Youth In Asia, whatever.. This was in a totally different sound universe where the air is filled with concrete. It was louder in the street than it was in the basement black hole of sound. Imagine Black Dice playing in your fucking basement on a Monday night! Jesus. No neighbor complaints. Changed our view on sound/terror/attack. This was our challenge; meet this Dice volume unholiness on the same sonic field before Shawn Murphy & his Outlaw band does it better. Dudes were so cool two of them even slept in the basement. Awesome. So we became best friends. Nate called me at work the next morning & said "we are gonna do a record together" I laughed ... that would rule... So fast forward another two years. Here is it is. Recorded at a subterranean Chinatown studio in two days. Tons of jacked EQ, no space, cases of brew, clouds of smoke, Guinness record for most times "Dude" was said. We met on equal ground here. Total respect/the record really sounds like the shadow of each band. It was a blast. Play it on 16 rpm in a closet and jam along with the bones of an enemy. Me, it would be playing the remains of that rat fucker Shawn Murphy, dude couldnt shake shit at this horrible eerie black pond sound." - John Olson, Wolf Eyes, October 2003.

with an "on" :(((

So this is the third Olsen twin?

Ned, do you like Wolf Eyes?

He's the Olsen Twin who was stillborn but whose soul inhabits them both, functioning as their id, making them do terrible things...evil things.

Personally, I like writing with paragraph breaks BUT THAT'S JUST ME I GUESS.

when was the Smegma piece written?

gg!, didn't say!

The night of their first show in SF was the day after their first Smegma collab. in 2001. JO was still riding very high.

Awesome, man, totally gonzo.

if an admin reads this, can they correct the subject?

the author of that comic was a huge belle and sebastian fan a couple years ago.

I still like them