Merrill = tUnE-YaRdS

Ever felt like you're getting slightly stale? Your outer edges are drying out, you're a crumbly saltine, you're an unappealing handful of old popcorn. The constancy of the surrounding environment becomes like a steady hot breeze, slowly sucking the love from your cuticles and sapping the hope from the edges of your mouth. Sometimes your life seems less like a choose-your-own-adventure and more like a cracked record, doomed to repeat that same skip over and over.

Musically, I feel that way a lot. It's inevitable in my position, listening to countless hours of music a week in order to provide you with the best 30 minutes of it, always trying to find that new oasis in the middle of a vast, bland desert. For my sake as much as for yours. I need it. Precious drops of the stuff that keeps me from drying out and losing hope.

Today I found it in tUnE - YaRdS, one of the strangest, most beautiful things I've ever heard come out of Vermont. tUnE - YaRdS is Merrill Garbus, a by-all-accounts odd gentleman with obscene amounts of freshness. Merrill is going to be the ziploc bag I've been looking for.

His album is available by donation here, and was apparently recorded with only a digital voice recorder (plus some programming and arranging on Audacity).

Listen:
FIYA
When You Tell the Lions
[from BiRd-BrAiNs|buy]