26th
Reflections on The 2009 Voice of The Valley Fest, Sparked by Running Across Pitchfork’s Review of the New Emeralds CD.
1. Rat Bastard had a very clever lo-tech solution for keeping all the beer cool whilst driving/camping/rocking in miserable Appalachian sweat-funk weather: dry ice, and a collapsible nylon-and-foam cooler. No condensation, no soggy ice melt. The dry ice merely disappears, a slowly sublimating ghost that gives up its life, puff by chilly puff, so that one may enjoy delicious, extremely cold Bud Light all wkend long. I wasn’t even drinking beer, but I have an appreciation for this sort of ingenuity.
If you are stranded on a desert island, Rat is the man you want with you, if for no other reason that you will magically be kept in cold beer the entire time, and regaled with weird and entertaining stories until the Ghanaian Coast Guard picks you up.
2. Emeralds is really nice to drift off to sleep to when yr bone-weary and flopped out in a tent a half-mile away at 4 a.m., under a giant tree by a burbling stream. It sounds like one of those Sharper Image white-noise-n’-surf-sounds nightstand dealios from 1983, agreeably softened by a misty gouache of mountain reverb.
