Legends of Grift

Endless Grift - Lost in the Open / Lady Day (Live from Prenzlauer Berg)

In Fall of 2006, I got a DAAD stipendium to go to Berlin and study Jacob Taubes. Alex and Chris came with me, for grifting's sake. We found a three-bedroom apartment near Tempelhof airport, near a little park, in an area of Kreuzberg that hadn't been bombed during the war, so it looked vaguely Parisian. Alex and I already decided we were a band. We thought about a name for a long time and landed on 'Past Lives.' We invited Chris to join and play together, as it made all the sense in the world. Our practice space was in the back basement of some squatter's building just west of Rosenthaler Platz.  It was huge and cost 9 euros an hour.

Let's not speak any more of this. It was pretty much one of the greatest times in my life. 

- - - - - - - - -

We renamed ourselves Endless Grift, because this is the only form that grift should take. I recorded all the sessions. There was one jam that was a particular epiphany, an improvised jewel, one that has remained stuck in our collective heads since then. I present it to you now, in edited form. I'm still quite proud of it. It's low-fi and the whole thing is entirely in the red. It's completely rowdy and fiery. It sounds awesomely distorted and explosive. 

Do you know when you're jamming sometime and everything goes in sync suddenly and you're like "we have lift-off...look out..." Alex is playing in a superbly rolling-thunder holy-shit barrel roll. Chris is spraying fantastic siren synths. I'm playing heavy John Cale organ. In the first part I'm singing "we could be lost in the open..and never learn our names." in the second, "why don't you come over and say goodnight? you know you look good to me." It's one of the best existent records of Endless Grift, and I want to share it with you, because duh. Get up with it.

For more please visit us at myspace.com/endlessgrift.

Chaz Jankel / Real Genius

Chaz Jankel - Glad to Know You (Todd Terje re-edit)

Resident Advisor interview with Chaz Jankel

keyboardist for UK rockers Ian Dury & the Blockheads in the 80s. Jankel had a number of 80s wonky disco hits (like "Spasticus Autisticus" with Dury) and his works are currently getting new exposure to the weirdo disco re-edit beard-wearing scene. They just reissued a 'best of' which features this re-edit by Todd Terje who is basically a trippy disco edit genius. This cut is super dubby and nicely spaced, good for standing on the dancefloor in a wobbly daze.

Chaz also had a song in the movie "Real Genius," which was a point of personal obsession for me as a young bookish misfit (nerd). While the real-life setting for RG's genius-nerd micro-realm was supposedly Caltech, it also neatly overlapped with my own boarding school experience at the Texas Academy of Math and Science.




Where two-thirds of the students were laced quite straight and the other third were the kind that dropped acid right before taking the SATs. It is also where, as a neophyte, I encountered a philosophical crisis: the suspicion that science doesn't think. That's what always annoyed me about it, slightly, and why at a tender age I forsook the lab for the library. That's to say science isn't concerned with reflecting on the conditions of its own possibility. You can't deny though how great math is, or the sheer beauty of its inhuman immortality: after all our cities lie in dust, math will still be there, like the cockroach.

Montage sequence from "Real Genius" feat. Jankel's "Number One"



The full "Number One" music video