In this week’s Singles Collection, we visit some of the outer reaches of the sonic spectrum, with a voyage to some of the odder corners. This week’s trio of bands, two of which were reared deep in the ruddy Midwest, while the third is a gaggle of NYC miscreants, all currently plumb the depths of strange aural cocktails and willful obfuscation in their quest for, well, whatever the hell it is they’re looking for.

Getting us started this week is the debut offering from Columbus stargazers Outer Spacist, “The Mind is as Outer Space” b/w “I Talk with Telepathy Baby” on Columbus Discount Records. True to their name, they do seem to be from another planet entirely, albeit one populated by the ghosts of ’60s psych lords like The Seeds, Roky Erickson and Strawberry Alarm Clock. The A-Side is cut at 45, the B-Side at 33, which, if your not paying attention, drastically changes your initial impression of the flipside. Anyway, the A-Side is a sizzling romp, an acid-fried guitar rave-up accentuated by fat organ stabs, wildly oscillating synths and vocal histrionics the bridge the gap between Iggy and Black Randy. The B-Side is just as stunning, beginning life with a strange interpolation of “We’ve Only Just Begun”. then blasting itself into the cosmos on a stuttering backbeat and a skuzzy wall of shimmering, reverb-laden guitars and amazing lyrics like, “i’m a motherfucking space man, baby” (or that’s what it sounds like he’s on about) before the whole thing disintegrates into a raygun-wielding outro that sounds like someone hitting Buck Rogers with a sledgehammer. These are still available direct from CDR, or from your favorite local purveyor of the phonographic arts.

Next up we’ve got sneak peek of the new side-project from Chicago’s cosmic-Kraut lords Cave, Sneakers‘ Children Into People EP on the always awesome Permanent Records imprint. This 6-song effort emanates a hissing, This Heat-type malevolence from every pore, which, is definitely a very good thing. It’s cut at 33rpm, but at 45rpm it sounds like a hyper-speed Durutti Column, or some type of fantastic racket that would have caused people (drug-riddled or otherwise) to go bonkers at the Hacienda in ‘82. Every track here is a scorcher, but the highlight of the A-Side has to be “Chick Freaked Out”, a barn-burner of a tune prone to short, violent outbursts and that arrives crammed to the gills with terse, urgent riffing and heavily FX’d vocals that sound, in the best way possible, like a cross between Howard Devoto and Wayne Coyne. On the flip, closer “Nudes” takes the cake, with its demonic grooves and delirious clap-trapping. These aren’t out just yet, but make sure to check with Permanent Records soon to get you some.

Last but not least this week, we’ve got the new offering from Silk Flowers, “In This Place and Time” b/w “Frost” on Dean Spunt’s always intriguing Post Present Medium, the follow-up to their rapturously received self-released debut 7″. For some reason, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that the A-Side should be played at 78rpm, but regardless, it’s a killer slice of slow-burning punk noir, replete with a twittering melody and menacing keyboard lines that anchor the whole show in the murk. The flipside, “Frost”, is an oozing slice of organ-drenched meta-stain, pitched somewhere between B-Movie horror soundtracks and the incessantly chanted refrain the “It’s a Small World After All” ride at Disney. This is still widely available, but who knows for how long.

That’s all we’ve got for you this week, but make sure to hit us up again soon, as we’ve got some mega-awesome, super secret squirrel surprises (and a few changes) in store in the weeks to come.

The Brighton Port Authority is the latest alias of Norman Cook (who you might know better as this guy) and his slew of uber talented friends from across the pop spectrum. The BPA’s debut album, I Think We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat is out Feb. 3 on Southern Fried Records.

The BPA this week released the video for the single “He’s Frank,” featuring Iggy Pop. (For more information on the enigmatic BPA, check this out.)

If you are a person that follows rock music history even a little bit, you more than likely know The Stooges. The wild racket they made with their instruments and the aggressive stage presence of their lead man, Iggy Pop, was completely at odds with the flower power, hippie love of the late 1960s. They spit in the face of convention, along the way spawning the rock sub-genre known now as punk.

The Stooges were ground breakers, revolutionaries in a revolutionary time and with songs like “Raw Power”, “Search and Destroy” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog”, they birthed a million punk and metal bands. So, it’s a no brainer that they should be inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, right?…

Wrong.

Apparently, the powers that be (headed up by Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner) felt that The Stooges do not merit inclusion into this year’s class, a full forty-two years after the band’s debut album (rules state that a band must wait at least twenty-five years after their debut for consideration) and only days after original guitarist Ron Asheton was found dead at his Ann Arbor, Michigan home.

There are a few in the class of 2009 that do, in my mind, belong in The Hall. Heavy Metal gods Metallica, rockabilly princess Wanda Jackson and rap giants Run DMC do fit here. I will deduct one point from Run DMC’s credibility however for inadvertently giving the world rap-rock acts like Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit and Korn.

But honestly, do we really need to see Jeff Beck inducted a second time? (His first time was as a member of The Yardbirds). Or Bobby Womack and the doo wop of Little Anthony and The Imperials over The Stooges? I know these are opinion and judgment calls, but being asked to become a member of The Hall has gone from being a great honor to being about as important as winning a Day Time Emmy for Best Bra Stuffing.

Until the old bastards on the selection committee either die off or wake up and see the error of their ways, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will be the most exclusive joke of all time. When it comes time to consider acts like Husker Du, Nirvana, The Minutemen, The Cure, The Replacements, Sonic Youth, Nick Drake and The MC5, will the committee truly consider these great acts? If they stay true to form, probably not.

But hey, at least we’ve got ABBA, Barry Manilow, Supertramp, STYX, Dokken and Rick Springfield to look forward to, right?

Iggy Pop has opened up about the death of his long-time friend and bandmate Ron Asheton in his first interview since Asheton’s body was discovered in his home last Tuesday.

Iggy talked with Detroit classic rock radio station 94.7 WCSX morning show hosts Jeff Deminski and Bill Doyle after the end of their show Friday, and they broadcast the conversation in full during Monday morning’s show.

Iggy’s comments are candid and personal; he reminisces for several minutes about the beginning of The Stooges and what was happening in the music scene at the time. He also talks a lot about Asheton’s specific style and how he influenced scores of rock guitarists who came after him.

“I don’t think everybody got it at first, but over the years other generations really caught on to it. …I think a lot of good musicians were influenced by what Ron pioneered,” he said.

Asheton and Iggy didn’t hook up musically until several years after high school, but he says their paths crossed a few times. “I knew Ron vaguely in high school because we were two of the first guys to let our hair grow over our ears, and we used to get hassled for it from time to time,” he said.

He told Deminski and Doyle that Stooges tour manager Henry McGroggan had called him Tuesday morning to give him the news. McGroggan had asked then if there was anything Iggy wanted to say in lieu of issuing a statement to the press. Rather than make some flowery speech later on, Iggy said he told McGroggan the first thing he felt.

“I said, ‘I’m shocked. He was my best friend.’ We never really sat around and held hands when he was alive, but that was my immediate reaction in the moment.”

Though he gets audibly choked up several times during the interview, he seems to enjoy talking about Asheton, and said that he “was on a high when he passed away, in his career and in his music.”

Iggy Pop Talks to Detroit’s 94.7 WCSX

Dedicated to those songs that I can’t stop playing, humming, or thinking about; the 4+ minutes you fall head-over-heels in love with. Past instances have included Weezer’s “El Scorcho,” Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time,” and New Order’s “Age of Consent.”

Christmas in Southern California is strange. Perhaps it’s my Midwestern mindset throwing everything off, but snow-based decorations placed in a non-snow environment freak me out a little. Just knowing a plastic glowing snowman will never be covered with anything resembling winter depresses me. With busy schedules, rising airline fees and a desire to stay near my own bed, this year will mark our first Christmas away from our parents and actual winter, giving my childhood another crushing blow. And while we’re expecting family visitors and many merry presents and fun by all, the actual absence of a “traditional” Christmas has me in something similar to a melancholy mood, only more antagonistic. I’m in a Stooges mood, and I need their caveman-simple riffs to support me. This is all it takes to make a song “perfect” for this moment. It only needs to fit as the appropriate score for how I’m feeling. And I’m feeling like Christmas isn’t so great, so I need something that agrees with me on some level.

No matter how much you may “love it,” “No Fun” remains a tough song. It’s a steady rock song and sounds like what you want, which means you’ll wish to share it with others. But if you do this, they might read too much into it. Are you trying to imply that your friend is no fun? Or that you’re currently upset about nothing in particular? Do you want to be left alone, or do you want people to know you’re alone and that they should want to visit you but won’t actually visit you? And then there’s the practicality of the song itself: It’s five minutes of the same perfect droning riff with minor inflections and changes thrown in. By sharing this song, will people question your ability to be bored? Will they think you should be more into techno than you are? From it’s “Hello,-I-Love-You”-esque drum opening, it seems like it should be an excellent opener for a show or movie, but the tone of its simple title contains no gray areas.

Regular readers will know I pretend I can play guitar, and some may even know that I taught myself to play by strumming a 5-string acoustic along with Ramones songs. And while this worked fine, I would have had an even more solid foundation in rock fundamentals if I had started with the Stooges — one of the bands the Ramones originally strummed along with. Only problem is I might have gotten bored with the Stooges and guitar playing if I’d done this. “No Fun” is like basketball dribbling drills for guitar. You dribble with the left, then the right, then back again, and back again and again and again. Got it? Let’s do it for the length of practice. “Droning” doesn’t begin to describe the Stooges’ style. It takes a certain kind of idiot to do the same thing endlessly in a loop, and it takes another kind of idiot to record it and call it music. And while “No Fun” may be the least fun song to play along no matter how loud my amp, it continues to be a great song to hum to myself. Perhaps “endearing droning” might be a better description.

It may be trite and cute to sum it up this way, but “No Fun” is fun because it’s intellectually no fun. “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening once said he loved animation because it was an artform that existed only in motion, that you couldn’t look at a single drawing and see “animation.” Rock ‘n’ roll has a similar quality where reading the sheet music or guitar tabs does no justice to the music being created. On paper, “No Fun” is A-E-A-A-A-E-A-A-D-A-D-A-D-A-E-A at it’s busiest. That’s just the early parts. For the last 75% of the song, it’s just the A-D riff with the flair in the middle. It’s not even a complicated strumming technique. If you’ve ever held a pick, you’ve made this strum. That’s because it’s entirely natural. Nothing about the Stooges is intellectual. Choices are more instinctual responses.

The vocals aren’t much different in their perfect stupidity. In karaoke, I’d bet the lyrics get massacred because the singers would just sing the words as is. This is entirely wrong. Iggy doesn’t sing. He grunts. And he doesn’t just grunt the words as they are, he starts every line with the tiniest half-beat “uh” transforming “No fun, my baby, no fun” into “Uhno fun, uhma’ baby, uhno fun,” and exchanging lifeless, pointless, flat ideas into dumb, fugly rock. This style of music festers and breeds with itself until it vomits itself onto some sort of microphone.

“No Fun” is primal. I could romanticize the Stooges and tell myself they couldn’t read music, and they just came up with riffs and they made noise as close to elemental neanderthal sounds as an electric guitar can get… so I will. Their image begs for it more than any other band I can imagine. Only “Louie Louie” approaches the level of heightened, sincere idiocy in which the Stooges wallow. Played in a loop, “No Fun” develops a kind of sonic gravity. It’s a black hole of music from which nothing can escape and everything gets broken down to its basic elements. After an hour or two of continual “No Fun”, time becomes insignificant. It’s just like Southern California: you could be here 5 months or 5 years, but you can’t tell because it always feels like the same season save for a few random irregularities.

Got a weird way to celebrate, avoid or disavow the holidays via music?