Sam Prekop and Archer Prewitt at Southpaw

Photos of the two Chicago auteurs playing last night at Southpaw sans rhythm or any other backup save each other. Excellent renditions of a few Sea and Cake songs were thrown in along with pretty much the whole new Prekop album. Do Now Fairly Well, Civilise, an oldie that I didn't know the name of but that was familiar to me, Midtown were all taken from the Sea and Cake songbook. The pretty, aspirated vocals, the jazz, the freshly complicated guitar lines, the mutant bossanova made me smile and sway.

This song is sexy.

"Pop the glock" by Uffie.

She's on Myspace I guess. Read about her on Bigstereo.

Last Friday I couldn't get in the shower in the morning. My soap and shampoo were in the downstairs bathroom, and that was where Michael Rother, kraut-rock pioneer of Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Harmonia (among other things) fame was performing his ablutions, blow-drying his grey hair.

Thursday before that I came home from work characteristically (of late) late, and Michael Rother was sitting on my couch with Josh slouched and watching something about disasters on the History Channel. I then went and had a glass of wine with Josh and Rother in the wine bar downstairs.

Saturday I saw Rother perform with a couple other musicians- one of whom was Ben from Secret Machines, and it blew my mind.

Tonight I came home and small talked with Rother again.

This post is just not bizarre enough to convey how surreal this is to me.

A kraut-rock pioneer, auteur and guitarist behind some of my favorite recordings of all time, has just been hanging out in my house for a week.

"De Luxe" (Harmonia)

Last night's dream was an encounter with the uncanny. In my grandmother's house, standing in the hallway upstairs, I looked into my grandfather's bedroom. There, where I always expect there to be, stood an apparition- but this was of myself, shirtless, long-haired, staring at me exactly as I look today. Seeing this doppelganger filled me with fear, provoking a response that was merely the repeated quaking accusation of its identity. It stood expressionless and stared at me ominously. I gasped the words, "It's me! It's me!", the "it" somehow meaning more than simply that unknown thing that stood before me, but instead signifying some other, more intimately familiar unknown. I struggled to wake as, in my dream, I descended the stair. Downstairs, waiting and staring up at me from the other side of the bannister with the same unnerving look, was the apparition. I could not wake and the phantom would not dissolve until I had come within range of it with my fists. When I swung at it, it vanished, and I awoke.