Mission Accomplished!

 Re TLASILA's Grief That Shrieked to Multiply - we've received our share of love from muzak scribblers, but the apoplectic have gathered strength, displaying symptoms of a condition I've coined Segue Tourette's.

Some mopes really, really dislike my having not given short shrift to the idea of a deeper, more immersive sort of contemplative listening, one that seeks, among other aims, to fuse seemingly unassociated sound and text into long-form narrative. I'm loathe to explain any of this, as I've preferred to trust the critical acuity of my meager, albeit endearingly loyal audience. I'm not one to condescend, although I trust I'll eventually be forgiven my frequent shit-fits of pontification.

More than a few frock-toting nudniks have railed against Grief, bemoaning the absence of the pre-digested, the convenient, the warmed-over. Oh, the affront!

To an infirm über-nerd they've pilloried us for seeding shards of ruptured sound across three very sexy 180-gram CDs.

Of course, this is not what was done.

The 63 submissions were presented intact (with the exception of the two that were trimmed due to time constraints - they appear on the download-only fourth album in complete form), albeit with very carefully rendered crossfades, each having a duration of no more than 20 seconds. (I spent a year working on this aspect of the album alone.) That dissenters can't seem to remotely follow the program leads me to believe that they 1) cannot read (the album's interior gatefold is naught but a detailed tracklist), 2) have no familiarity with any of the artists on the album (as a stone microcephalic could suss the dissimilarities in sound from fade to fade), 3) have no knowledge whatsoever of my/our/their/your history (not for nothing was Boat Of's 1983 cassette compilation titled Mix Pentecost(e)), and 4) must hail from redoubts where there is no radio, no DJ culture, no overlapping conversation, no novel exceeding eleven pages, or no structural deviation of any kind.

The negative notices we've received describe next to nothing about the submissions of the contributors, the quality or shortcomings of same, etc. They instead detail the torture of slogging through 320 minutes of minced and julienned micro-sound. Which, as noted above, isn't what they're listening to. It's obviously what they're hearing, however, and that brings us back to the paragraph above.

I'm thick-skinned. Insults don't affect me. Reasoned critiques can enthrall. Stupidity, however, offends the fuck out of me and doubtless fatigues us all.

This latest rant, from the ineffable Record Collector, is a miracle of inanity and feels like the longest standing ovation in history. Thank you, dear fundamentalist, for revealing your tenuous grasp! Kudos on those lazy '60s-'70s comparisons! Cheers on the mis-attribution and occlusion! Oy, oy, oy... In essence, I suck, TLASILA were without worth, our fans were dupes, and you, dear contributors, are shit. Hooray!

(And kudos to Andrew Paul Holguin for his FB comment which was re-purposed as the heading of this post. Danke sehr!)