—hey you guys over there at Last Plane to Jakarta have been getting real lax recently on the updates what the hell is the deal anyhow

—I told you what the deal was it’s that things are crazy busy right now

—oh we don’t want to hear any of that it’s a music blog for crying out loud you can update once a week just tell us what you’re listening to and stuff

—I know I know but there’s this other website we’re designing and it’s huge & ambitious

—you know some of us are still waiting to hear more about the T-shirts

—what is this anyway Make Last Plane Feel Bad About How We’re Not Real Businessmen Week or something

—no it’s Christmas

—oh right right OK so anyhow listen we can do this two ways: either we can skip the update entirely again or I can tell you real quicklike about a CD that came in the mail and performed the great Christmas miracle of 2002

—you are exaggerating for effect again

—right you are

—carry on then

—okey dokey: the great Christmas miracle of 2002 is a very modest miracle as miracles go but given the state of the Church this year we gotta take miracles where we find them and so the miracle is this: a jiffy bag with a CD in it came in the mail and when I got it I tossed it onto a pile of CDs that I hadn’t listened to yet and when I did so I thought to myself “oh no you’ll probably never hear that record now because there are so many CDs you haven’t listened to and you just keep buying more of them and next weekend you’re going to Holland and you just know you’ll be bringing back even more records with you when you come home”

—did you

—yes

—dummy

—but that is the Christmas miracle! like I say it’s more of a little surprise than a miracle but around here right now we are calling all little surprises miracles and to hell with it

—so that Basement Jaxx album Rooty I heard you liked it and you were sure you were going to hate it is that a miracle

—you bet!

—if you say so chief

—but it’s not the great Christmas miracle oh no sir the great Christmas miracle is that by the time I got back from Holland the situation of the to-be-played pile had gotten grave, and I had pretty much resigned myself to not hearing most of these records for months: like Tom Waits’s Blood Money, which I bought in September and just unsealed last week

—good record

—so they say! anyhow this jiffy bag is from Family Vineyard, the Indiana label whose occasional appearances in my mailbox are always, I repeat always, causes for celebration: even when they’re records I don’t particularly like, like the Rope one, they have something beautiful about them

–so they are a cool label is what you’re saying

—yes! they are one of the coolest! and the thing about cool labels is that one’s relationship to them is like nothing else in the world; while one’s relationship to a favorite band or a singer is essentially identical in nature to the relationship one might have with a well-loved author or director, great labels are a completely different beast

–like great publishers maybe

—in theory maybe but who can keep up with a single publishing house? whereas even the busiest label can’t crank ‘em out so fast that a dedicated fan won’t be able to soak up all the excess: and there are so few labels that seem dedicated to developing a real personality, I mean I know I am always going on about this but really: remember Factory?

—o yes

—you know Atavistic?

—sure

—well Family Vineyard is one of those, and their focus is experimental music leaning toward the smash-jazz end of things, and their newest release is a painfully & wonderfully short album by a band called Grand Ulena, and it’s called, get this, Gateway to Dignity

—that there is one great album title

—you know it, man! and the album! it’s like a well-orchestrated demolition derby of vocal-free jazz-informed non-noodly steam being forced through a pinhole, the kind of thing that makes you say at first “oh it’s that kind of music” but then when you sit down with it you wind up orbiting Jupiter

—seriously that good?

—listen man I adore it, every time I play it I notice some new nuance of mood: the guitars are fully adrenalized but also highly disciplined, and the drummer’s crazy, and the production seems super-Albinified at times but then sort of drops its pants in the middle of things here and there, like in the song “Gravois Means Rubble” where it’s like some guy with an echo chamber took the mixing board hostage for about thirty seconds

—are there guitar solos

—dude it is like all guitar solos

—metal style solos

—no no no no no MX-80 style super-fretboard typewriter-keyboard attack

—horns?

—no this is all standard orchestration more or less: bass drums guitar and probably a whole lot of coffee

—should I buy it

—you should buy everything on Family Vineyard, since their pursuit of a total aesthetic means that even their lesser moments give you something to mull over & wonder at

—don’t end sentences with prepositions

—nag nag nag

—that was a Cabaret Voltaire song

—and a damned good one

—are you going to write a proper paragraph-style update sometime soon

—hopefully next week

—OK well I will just listen to Grand Ulena until then

—me too

—see you next week

—promise?

—promise