I'm very tired. It's been a very long year capped off with a very long month. Capped off further with some weird issues with Zoom where the audio didn't record right and it created a constant buzzing noise. So it goes.

Also, Jill couldn't join us this year due to personal issues. We're hopeful she'll be back next month.

But, in the meantime, Josh and I still had a good time trading our picks this year. Josh has his usual blend of sincerely touching, weird, and funny. I sorta get the whole Wendy's thing.

I used my spot this year for a new creative pursuit. I used my binaural mics to record the sound of Christmas music around Philadelphia. Until they broke. Then I used the internal mics on my Zoom H5 and my phone. They're not quite the same, and the phone is not very good at all, but I do enjoy the texture of it all and I'm fairly happy with how it turned out. You can hear the whole piece without commentary on my bandcamp.

I've gotta clean up more cat pee. We'll be back next year and Platonic Polyamory will be back in January. Merry Christmas and happy holidays. I sincerely wish the best to whoever finds this and enjoy these weird little things we do.

We're home for the holidays, joined again by the soft iconoclast, early podcast innovator, Doug Tilley of Cinema Smorgasbord. This time he's here to talk about a few Christmas movies we forced upon him and to teach us how exactly one formats a movie podcast. He in turn holds us hostage, refusing to let us end the episode for another hour as we mostly start talking about Muncie, IN.

You can see a couple of the movies we discussed, but good luck with the third one. They're discussed more or less in the following order:

It's Beginning to Look a lot Like Brain Death (2023) - a feature length failed experiment Brandon and Rob half-assed a couple years ago based on a dumb idea Brandon had. Find out just how much your friends and family love you by throwing this file on the TV while opening presents.

Next up is Psalty's Christmas Calamity, a low quality YouTube upload of a bizarre pre-Veggie Tales, children's Christmas play that a lot of home school kids have very weird feelings about.

And last up is Blue Christmas (1978), an equally bizarre, but very good gritty political thriller/alien invasion/Christmas movie from Japan's esteemed Toho Studio. You can find the DVD on Japanese Amazon, if you can navigate it, but otherwise it's only really available on the furthest flung torrent sites. Godspeed, but it's worth seeking out.

Happy Holidays and I, Rob, will be back next week for a scaled back edition of the annual Xmas Music Exchange.

At long last, Jennifer and Brandon convinced me to organize a new Edgar Allan Poecast, our third (not second). If you don't know the deal, we take submissions from whoever (mostly noise musicians and those adjacent) to do readings of Edgar Allan Poe stories however they like, with whatever music or noise they can come up with, in whatever language they like.

There's not much else to say except a huge thank you to my cohosts for encouraging this and to everyone that submitted or even considered submitting. We'll do this again, so you have an entire year to consider your submission.

The line up goes like this:

Sara Century - Annabel Lee

Jennifer C. Martin w/ VODE (Arvo Zylo & Leslie Keffer) - The Conqueror Worm

The Gray Romantics - Buried Alive

Laura Squirrel - Alone

Just Josh - The Haunted Palace & Doomed City

T. Volpone - The Sleeper

Dame Smile Highlin' with HB(MB) - The Raven

Ileana - Berenice (in Spanish)

It's a great bunch of readings. We hope you enjoy. And if you want more, check out our feed for the previous two volumes or reach out to Brandon, Jennifer, or me on social media to acquire a copy of the tenth anniversary cassette of the Edgar Allan Poecast Vol. 1. You can also order a copy from my bandcamp, https://grayromantics.bandcamp.com/album/edgar-allan-poecast

Keep an eye out for cassettes or CDs of Vol. 2 and this year's episode.

See y'all next year. Or next month. Whenever we have another episode.

We've got PART 2 of our talk with now Philly, formerly Harrisburg, noise musician and... I guess he probably doesn't want me to say horrorcore rapper, but I've never heard him rap and I don't actually know what horrorcore means, so I guess I have no reason to say it anyway.

We talk more about noise, rap, touring, and Richmond, VA. I forgot to check out their other releases, so we open with a different track from Professor A's Kill Your Colonizers Volume 1 and close with a different track from Bison Squad's Death of Desire. But you still have time to go to http://woodroomcollective.bandcamp.com and check out some more (and purchase some on Bandcamp Friday).

We don't have another guest lined up, though we've got a few people we're reaching out to. So if you or someone you know wants to talk, send them our way.

OR!!!! Contribute to our NEW Edgar Allan Poecast! Any story/poem, any way you want to do it. We just wanna hear what people do. We also just put in an order for cassettes of the first one from 2015 and we'll be sending that out to its participants and anyone else who wants a copy until we run out. Also seeing about some bootleg t-shirts for participants in the new one. Email me: [email protected]

Oh yeah, and Brandon and I made a short film about seeing Dead & Co in Vegas.

K thx bye

We're back with another noise musician that Jennifer has no idea how to listen to. As he notes in the episode, I met Professor A while he was touring with his duo Bison Squad while we were all sleeping on Bucko Crooks's floor during his Milwaukee Noise Fest. If you're not familiar, this is when we made the noise quasi-doc The Arbitrary Art.

But this isn't about me and Bucko, this is about Professor A. I wanted to talk to him about the intersections of noise and revolutionary politics, but I had COVID and couldn't really follow a train of thought. But Brandon gets a ton of interesting info out of him about noise, touring, and what the hell's going on in Harrisburg.

We open with a track from Bison Squad and close with one off of Professor A's first Kill Your Colonizer tape. All of Professor A's projects can be heard at the Wood Room Collective Bandcamp page.

Also, we are doing a new Edgar Allen Poecast! If you want to contribute, you can reach out to me, Jennifer, or Brandon personally or on social media or email me at [email protected]. We're taking any stories or poems, any way you want to perform them. Everyone had a ton of fun last time and we think it came out really well, with a lot of interesting variety. If you need help finding collaborators, let us know and we'll hook you up. If you want guidance for a story or poem, we'll pick something out for you. This is all for fun, but we hope to hear from you.

And we're back with part two of our talk with the Questlove of Deerhoof, Greg Saunier. Like a Grateful Dead show, the second set is a little looser but also more to the point. We further discuss Deerhoof's accessibility, The Roots, Justin Theroux's 2007 directorial debut, Dedication, and some of Greg's other collaborations.

Music this time starts off with Treiglo Meddal - Na'i ddim talu!, a limited edition cassette that I was able to find on Joyful Noise's youtube after I realized all of my tape decks are broken. We close with Flower from Deerhoof's live album with avant garde jazz trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, To Be Surrounded By Beautiful, Curious, Breathing, Laughing Flesh Is Enough. I'm trying to keep Spotify from taking these down with copyright requests, so gotta go slightly obscure.

Do you have someone for us to talk to? Do you want to talk to us? Are you Justin Theroux and want to talk about your weird, butchered by Weinstein, but still enjoyable 2007 romantic comedy Dedication? Or do you want to record yourself reading Edgar Allen Poe stories with weird music for our 2025 Edgar Allen Poecast? Email me at [email protected] or on instagram or bluesky.

In the meantime, for more of Jennifer’s discussions on polyamory, communism, and Christianity, check out ⁠The Dirtbag Christian⁠. For more from me, the feature from my video zine with the POTUS of Noise, Bucko Crooks, is on ⁠his YouTube⁠. And eventually Brandon’s YA graphic novel on the history of skateboarding with AJ Dungo will be out on ⁠Flying Eye Books⁠. 

We’re extremely excited to present part one of our talk with the Phil Lesh of Deerhoof, Greg Saunier. 

Deerhoof has been a favorite band of Brandon and me (Rob, the guy Greg keeps making fun of for saying dumb shit) for roughly 20 years. Although Deerhoof was an integral element of us becoming extremely cool dudes into challenging media that’s far too intellectual for most people, I think we all agree with Greg’s assessment of Deerhoof as a pop band. Seeing Deerhoof in concert is nearly as accessible as their greatest stylistic influence, the Rolling Stones.

That said, the show opens with an attempt to recreate the original edit of their first 7”, The Return of the Wood M'Lady. But we close out with one of Ty Segall's daughter's favorite songs, Panda Panda Panda.

Find more on Greg at Deerhoof’s website or follow his political rants on Instagram.

For more of Jennifer’s discussions on polyamory, communism, and Christianity, check out The Dirtbag Christian. For more from me, the feature from my video zine with the POTUS of Noise, Bucko Crooks, is on his YouTube. And eventually Brandon’s YA graphic novel on the history of skateboarding with AJ Dungo will be out on Flying Eye Books. 

Also, we're putting out a cassette for the 10th anniversary of the Edgar Allen Poecast and we're doing a new one this year. For more info on participating in that or other guest suggestions, email me at [email protected]

Part two's up next week. Although we talked for two hours, we still didn't get a chance to ask about other members of Deerhoof, their new album, Greg's other projects, or how to pronounce Saunier.

It's Laura Squirrel's birthday and we're celebrating the only way we know how--doing whatever she asks us with this podcast feed.

Today we're presenting the first ever public release of Laura's fan fiction about the obscure 80s cartoon the Get Along Gang, which was on CBS for one season and was based on a line of greeting cards featuring anthropomorphic child animals that hung around a clubhouse built inside of an abandoned train or something.

She explains the context in the intro. I'm tired. I don't feel like rewriting what she said.

Music is by Laura's harsh noise wall project, Ghosts of Dead Tables.

Short one today, punctuated by some longer music clips, including the last(???) track to be released by The Smudge. He kept it going for 25 years and, as he noted in one of our last episodes, he just wants to shut the fuck up and pump gas for a while. Though I did see he's got some other gigs coming up as Cop Corpse or something. I dunno, keep up with his goings on at his Instagram @wjmartmke, unless he's currently threatening to delete it as you read this, in which case wait a few days and he'll be back.

The majority of this episode is dedicated to his thesis art exhibit in Milwaukee, opening tomorrow, Friday 3/28/2025. If you're in the area, go check it out. It genuinely sounds like a great and thoughtful experience. More on that at the Peck School of the Arts website. He's listed as, William Justice “Bucko Crooks” Mueller II.

He also notes that he'll be playing a bunch of footage we shot in Milwaukee and Fargo last summer. More on that and our corresponding zine, The Arbitrary Art, at my gumroad, which is what this long hyperlink you're currently still reading goes to. Or you can check the trailer first here.

We love Bucko, don't we folks? Go check out thesmudge.bandcamp.com for more. Hopefully his retirement is brief and he has hundreds of more albums for us before 2026.

And, of course, thank you, New Zealand.

I meant to upload this last week but I was in Australia losing my mind crossing the outback like the narrator of What's Rangoon to You Is Grafton To Me (which no one out there seems to know, let alone have any interest in ABC radio, TISM, Wake in Fright, Ozploitation cinema, that guy that walked around talking to people on the street on TV, or even the morning show I turned on upon arrival at my airbnb that was referring to orange and ham pizza as "Christmas Pizza" before segueing into cockroach milk). So anyway, here it is now.

President Crooks continues to go Bucko wild, necessitating at least one well meaning bleep from me and making Jennifer uncomfortable. He talks a bit about the history of noise, the types of noisers, Milwaukee's wild rap scene, and some other bits (Australians and their oppressively close sun got me calling everything "bits" now).

Pulled a couple of really old Smudge tracks from Bucko's Bandcamp, at least one dating back to the Galactic Intolerance Records days on archive.org. Check out the rest of what remains of his discography over at http://thesmudge.bandcamp.com

Also, check out the zine/documentary-ish thing we made about his Milwaukee Noise Fest and our trip to Fargo, the Arbitrary Art. Be the first to download or buy a copy at my gumroad http://thearbitraryart.gumroad.com or glance at the unlisted video Bucko put up that I generally pretend does not exist. Or if you're in Philly look for an unmarked DVD in a yellow sleeve that I occasionally drop in Little Free Blockbusters.