Beats by Dayf

Earlier this week, I featured some cards that I got at my local card show. At that same show, Dayf from Cardboard Junkie -- who is looking svelte these days after losing about 40 pounds! -- reached out to me to see if I had more binders or sheets that I could spare. I don't have any spare binders at this point -- not while I'm trying to figure out how many binders I'll need for all the inserts and parallels from Topps, at least. But, I do have a bunch of sheets still sitting in a pile waiting for use.

So, I grabbed a big stack of the sheets and piled them into my car. Dave found me at the show parked in front of the dime boxes -- per usual -- and we chatted for awhile. Once we both finished up at the show, we went out to our cars and got the sheets into his car. Then Dave handed me a brown paper bag and said, "I hope you can use some of these."

Dave, there were a couple dozen I could use. To thank you, kind sir, I thought, "how about some Aphex Twin music, since I'm pretty sure you like them." Off we go.

Avril 14th

This video for the song "Avril 14th" is listed as the top track on Spotify for Aphex Twin. This song is just a piano solo -- a hauntingly beautiful one at that. 

As an aside and in case you don't know (because I didn't), Aphex Twin is really just one Irishman called Richard David James, who has also recorded under the names AFX, Blue Clax, Bradley Strider, The Universal Indicator, Brian Tregaskin, The, Smojphace, GAK, Karen Tregaskin, Patrick Tregaskin, Martin Tressider, PBoD (Phonic Boy on Dope), Polygon Window, Power-Pill, Q-Chastic, Dice Man, The Tuss, and Soit-P.P. Wikipedia says that James is "known for his influential and idiosyncratic work in electronic music styles such as IDM and acid techno in the 1990s.

Let's start with Bowman Heritage from the early 2000s. As the nostalgia ball got rolling and Topps was looking for new and different ways to (a) issue more cards and (b) protect its copyrights in its past card designs from interlopers like "Fleer Vintage" outright copying the 1971 Topps design, Bowman Heritage was a natural way of doing so. My only surprise these days is that Bowman Archives hasn't come out as a set as well.

Frankly, that would be a decent set for a few years. Of course, that won't happen because it wouldn't be a high-end set for which Topps could charge $750 a box.

Windowlicker

When I'm trying to find out about an artist about which I don't know much, I often turn to Wikipedia and Google. Wikipedia here for this song provides a real insight both into the song and into how obsessive Aphex Twin's fans are. 

If you watch the video above, be careful if you aren't real keen on profanity. As Wikipedia's obsessives point out, "[t]here are 127 uses of profanity in the dialogue segment of the video (which is under 4 minutes), including 44 uses of the word 'f**k'. This averages to more than one use of profanity every two seconds."

Hilarious. Seriously -- it's quite funny.

For some reason, these cards seem appropriate here. The shininess of the mid-1990s goes well with the beats and rhythms of this song. The Jaha is a 1997 New Pinnacle Base Artist's Proof which fell one per 39 packs, according to the always useful Baseball Card Pedia. New Pinnacle was, apparently, the first product ever to include the printing plates in the packages for the cards.

Wax the Nip

The odd visage of Richard James's appears regularly on many of Aphex Twin's album covers and videos. According to James, he did this because it ran counter to the way most techno artists operated -- they did not want to be recognized, so he did the exact opposite. 

This song is on ...I Care Because You Do, which is an album that Dave suggested I listen to when I was looking for something different last weekend. I picked this song because of its name. Of course.

I put the Corey Hart in with some real live 1990s cards because it really is a throwback to Upper Deck's more basic designs of its earlier era. Remember how groundbreaking it was to have top-quality photography on cards -- like Upper Deck and, when it first came out, Stadium Club? To be fair, Stadium Club isn't bad these days, so I'm not complaining there. 

It's humorous that Kelly Wunsch got a card for striking out five guys in one inning. It takes a new level of incompetence either on his part or his catcher's part or both to hit five Ks in an inning. To be fair, though, Wunsch made it to the major leagues as a lefty specialist in the early 2000s. He's now a home builder in Austin, Texas, and he married a girl from Wisconsin.

Tha

It's over 9 minutes of Aphex Twin from his first album, Selected Ambient Works 85-92. James got his start in the world of music by being a DJ isolated in Ireland and unable to find the kind of music he wanted to play. As a result, he started making his own.

Over his career, he notoriously held a great deal of antipathy toward the press. As he got older and had a family, though, he mellowed and ended up giving an extended interview to Philip Sherburne on Pitchfork.com which is intriguing to read.

These stars of the 1980s Brewers -- well, okay, 4 Paul Molitor cards and a Cecil Cooper Archives reprint from 2002 -- belong with early Aphex Twin. They are classic cards in many respects -- even the very recent Stadium Club. 

On that glossy All-Star card, though, I'm betting Molitor is checking out a girl. Just saying.

Analogue Bubblebath Vol I

One of James's very early songs is Analogue Bubblebath Vol. I. It came out in 1991 -- twenty-six years ago! -- and it's very much in a product of that era's electronic music. I don't know if it is the right nomenclature to call this trance, but it sure does put me into something of a trance. 

That last sentence took about 4 minutes to type. I just kind stared off into space for a while. No, I'm not kidding. Just listening to the music and taking it in. I've never really listened to this kind of music all that much before -- I'm a lyrics person when it comes to music, so these instrumental songs are a new world for me.

Not a new world, but all appreciated, are the mix of Upper Deck and Bowman above. Ah, I remember the days three years ago when I first got back into collecting and decided to collect Jean Segura as a player collection. That was funny. I knew that it would end poorly in Milwaukee, and it did.

In fact, the first card show I attended back in 2014, I was at this one guy's table and found about 5 or 6 Segura relics and autographs cheaply and bought them all up. The guy looked at me funny and said, "What's up with Segura? Why are you buying all those?" All I could respond was, "I'm a Brewers fan, and I have high hopes for him."

He then tried to get me to buy a bunch of 1989 Topps Brewers.

Quoth by Polygon Window

Yeah, here's the whole Quoth album. Often, reading the comments on YouTube causes a loss of IQ points, but sometimes they are quite funny. A "David Jackman" said that this album is "so hypnotic, my brain can taste it. it tastes of metal and wood chip." Something called indigopleasuredome said that this album is "the 4 o'clock last-act-rave- Before the musicfestival ends - kind of pulse."

Having never been to a rave, perhaps that is true.

Finishing off the cards from Dave, we have a Chrome Gallardo, an A&G Braun, a Power Players Gomez, and an Orange Wily.

That last card sounds much more menacing to me right now than it should. It must be the trance/dance/techno bender my brain is on right now. In a number of articles, I've seen Richard James's music called "acid house." Is that because it makes you feel like you're on a trip?

Dave, help?

Or is always like this?

Thanks for the great cards, Dave!

Binders for Brewers, Part II

Back in February, Dave the Card Junkie and I made a trade where I gave Dave binders and pages from the massive Christmas Horde in exchange for my getting cards. We did the same thing last weekend.

With Roger's one-man show in town on Dave's side of town, I convinced him to drive the twenty minutes to meet me at the hotel where Roger sets up and take more binders and pages off my hands. He then handed me a massive stack of Brewers in a paper bag. It wasn't exactly clandestine or furtive, but it was still exciting for me to get those cards!

So, to thank Dave, I scoured his Twitter feed for songs that he had posted there. After all, doesn't 44 minutes of prog rock featuring a flautist deserve as much publicity as possible?

Of course it does.

I can think of no player better suited with an introduction of a self-indulgently long prog rock song than Jeromy Burnitz. I'm not sure why that seems appropriate, but it does. Burnitz reminds me of an outfielder version of Dan Uggla -- very much a bro -- who would apparently empty out bottles of shampoo in the showers on road trips after the last game of the series and pee in them. 

Oh, you're such a funny guy, Jeromy!

Burnitz was still a very good homerun hitter in his travels around the major leagues playing with seven different teams (four in Flushing, bits of two seasons with Cleveland, a year each with Colorado, Pittsburgh, the Dodgers, and the Cubs, and six in Milwaukee). He was an All-Star once in Milwaukee and actually started the 1999 game in place of the injured Tony Gwynn. He even finished second in the Home Run Contest to Ken Griffey Jr.

A little morning Black Sabbath is a great way to wake up. Geezer Butler on bass really runs every Sabbath song. Yeah, Tony Iommi's lead guitar is really distinctive, but when you hear that underside of each song -- the thumping bass -- you know who is really in charge.

These three guys tended to be the understudies for the Brewers' stars of the time during which they played with the team. Of the three, the only one who ever led any Brewers team in WAR was, perhaps surprisingly, Corey Hart in 2007. Augustine really had only two decent seasons -- his first two in the major leagues -- while Nilsson was always behind Jeff Cirillo, or John Jaha, or Ricky Bones, or Greg Vaughn, or B.J. Surhoff, or all of the above in his years in Milwaukee.

Watching the MLB Draft's first couple of rounds on Thursday night was like watching NBA Draft coverage from about 15 years ago or so. I say that because the random assortment of "experts" that MLB Network compiled engaged in the most obvious of lazy comparisons when talking about players. The tall, African-American centerfielder from Atlanta had to be a Jason Heyward comparison. The good-hitting catcher with questions about his fielding was, of course, Kyle Schwarber's younger twin. If a player was white, he would only be compared to white players. If the player was black, then only black players would be comparable.

If MLB is going to be that way, then I will post Rickie Weeks cards with Robert Johnson's music. To be fair, posting old blues songs and then putting up cards of Ryan Braun just doesn't feel right.

Here's a new one on me. Well, okay, to be fair, I'd never listened to that Jethro Tull song before, but at least I'd heard of the band. I've never heard of the The Avalanches before. This video is just incredibly weird. Perhaps, to appreciate the song, it might be better to read something else and not pay attention to the video at all. 



Sort of like how I pay no attention any more to any of the Ryan Braun haters out there. I could get all worked up and point to the fact that Braun just took steroids rather than beating up his girlfriend or wife, or being a swimmer-rapist with a Stanford scholarship, or being a racist presidential candidate or a lying dissembling presidential candidate, or being any number of far scarier, more morally reprehensible people. 

I'm really excited for when Mets fans have to hold their nose and cheer for him when the Brewers trade Braun and Lucroy to New York for Zack Wheeler, Travis d'Arnaud, Dominic Smith, and a lottery ticket like Jhoan Urena or Andres Gimenez (who are both so far away from the majors at this point that they can be nothing more than a lottery ticket)...or, when the Yankees trade Aaron Judge, Luis Severino, Domingo Acevedo, and Gary Sanchez for the two and turn Lucroy into a first-baseman to replace Teixeira.

Hahahahahahahaha!

WARNING: 

If you have epilepsy, you shouldn't watch this next video. It consists of 3:39 of the photo above repeatedly illuminated by strobe lights.

Les Claypool is another notable bass player, having come to prominence in the 1990s with the band Primus. This song is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, as it features a lot of overdubbed vocals, a fair amount of repetition, lots of self-sampling, and it isn't exactly melodic.

Not exactly melodic describes Milwaukee Brewers baseball perfectly in the time that Ben Sheets was in his pomp. The team did well in 2008 with him -- and that was his last season of making a regular rotation turn. Indeed, that season almost certainly was the death knell of Sheets's career. He threw 198-1/3 innings and got the team to the playoffs, yet he did not get to enjoy pitching in the playoffs due to a torn elbow muscle. After that injury, he threw just 168-2/3 innings over the rest of his career in 29 starts -- 20 in Oakland in 2010 and 9 in Atlanta in 2011.

A little Radiohead to close things out here. This is from Radiohead's newest album, "A Moon Shaped Pool." In typical Radiohead-fashion, it's a bit abstract. The video looks like the old Rudolph shows with stop-motion animation going on, though this is probably done with computers, if I had to guess. 

When Dave handed me the bag of Brewers, he said, "I hope that you like Geoff Jenkins." Now having 170 Geoff Jenkins cards in my PC for him, that answer is "yes, I do indeed." I have to admit, though, that my favorite card amongst these Jenkins cards is that minor league card of Jenkins with the Tucson Toros. 

For whatever reason, I'm starting to get drawn more and more to the minor league cards. It's probably the rebuild that's ongoing in Milwaukee currently that has me scouring the minor leagues. But, even as a kid, I loved reading the old Baseball Digest prospect wrap-ups each year. I'm not a rookie-card chaser, to be fair, but I love reading about and finding out about prospects.

Thanks, Dave, for the great cards. I hope you enjoy those binders.