Fingerpointing

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Track listing

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Fingerpointing" a)  "Freeform Freakout 0" b)  "Bad Medicine" c)  "Freeform Freakout 1" d)  "There There Betty Betty e)  "Freeform Freakout 2" f)  "Vile Vile Grass" g)  "Freeform Freakout 3" h)  "Mother" i)  "In My Baby's Ruth" j)  "Freeform Freakout 4""	34:44
Total length:		34:44

Background

• Jim O'Rourke's mix of Fingerpainting, 1999

• Released 2008

Liner notes

Freeform freakout is dead! Long live freeform freakout!

Sounds are building blocks, say The Red Krayola, again and, now, again.

60s The Red Krayola began recording because posterity asked for it. Today, they proffer their latest sensational object, FINGERPOINTING, an antic concept rendered classic, for The Parable of Arable Land is FINGERPAINTING is FINGERPOINTING; FINGERPOINTING is FINGERPAINTING is The Parable of Arable Land.

FINGERPOINTING follows The Krayola's ur-formula, first elaborated in The Parable of Arable Land (1967), designed to immerse and entertain the listener and confound the FM DJ's and anyone else's quest for the perfect segue in a narrative of counter-cultural meaningfulness. Where FINGERPAINTING reiterates the structure of The Parable, FINGERPOINTING recapitulates the same structure and the same material as FINGERPAINTING. It too is a parade of freakouts and songs alternately, and, like its progenitors, a dynamic synthesis that puts in play all that is at stake in the ? rubric of entertainment.

FINGERPOINTING could have been made for International Artists — the songs, like flies in amber, are versions of unreleased relics of the day modernity in its ruthless pursuit of its next moment signed away its carefree days of youth.

The songs are by Frederick Barthelme, Steve Cunningham and Mayo Thompson. The freakouts are not 'authored' in the usual sense. All of the music was recorded at Treehouse Studio in Pasadena, CA at the same time as the recording of FINGERPAINTING. It features the performances of David Grubbs, George Hurley, Albert Oehlen, Stephen Prina, Elisa Randazzo, Mayo Thompson, Tom Watson and Sandy Yang. The mix is by Jim O'Rourke.

We had to wait ten years for FINGERPAINTING to achieve its initial level of distributive awareness — it had taken until 1999 for The Parable of Arable Land! Thanks to compression effects, now hear The Red Krayola elaborate the third material link. Listen and see.

Retrospectives

Mayo Thompson, 2010

[Fingerpointing is Jim] O’Rourke’s mixes of that material, it’s O’Rourke listening to the material and finding another set of possibilities using the same raw material, if you like. Whereas Fingerpainting is all of the material that was recorded for these ideas and the mixes are made by Albert Oehlen [...] [O'Rourke's] ear works a certain way. When he puts together the music, in his mixes I hear his commitments to drone, for example. And [Tom] Watson has also got a commitment to drone, and so here are these two drone elements. Me, I don’t like drone. It’s not like I dislike it; it’s not part of my repertoire of sounds. I mean, it’d be something I might deploy, but it wouldn’t be a medium in terms of the way I would mix all of the sounds. I like separation of things, I like abstraction, not synthesis. I mean, I don’t mind synthesis as a summation of things, a way of describing that is a synthesis of that material, but it does not set out to be a synthesis—it’s made out to be a reconciliation, if you like, on my point of view. The way that they should be working in congress, they should reconcile things, conflicts of opinion, the war of ideas. Let’s have the war of ideas, but let’s have some reconciliation, let’s do something, that kind of thing. So people make contributions, and they trust me to respect their contributions, and I do as much as possible. I trample on some closely-held beliefs, perhaps, in the process, but I don’t think anybody’s been offended. There’s very, very few people who have ever been fired from the band.

Reviews

Exclaim

July 22, 2008

Brock Thiessen

KFJC

September 7, 2008

Pitchfork

September 23, 2008

Andrew Gaerig

Alternative Press

October 1999

Links

• Release on Drag City
• Release on Discogs
• Release on Wikipedia