I live in a New York-style apartment building with hardwood floors, brick walls, and lots of yelling neighbors in Koreatown, Los Angeles. Luckily I have these 2 awesome neighbors. One of them, Sam, is a pastry chef and offers his experimentally delicious confections regularly and then we all watch the Colbert Report together. He's got a spiky mohawk and piercings, and I never thought much about it one way or another. And Rebecca's got this great laugh that rings through the whole building.

So anyway, on to the story... Sam and Rebecca invite us to dodgeball in an old tennis court. Now, I've never really been one for dodgeball. I'm terrible at throwing the ball and I get hit a lot and if I'm not mistaken, those are bad things in dodgeball. But we wanted to be good neighbors, so last Sunday we finally took them up on their offer.

We show up to this park in a fairly hispanic neighborhood (that could describe half of LA) and while I was picturing a huge anonymous neighborhood event, there were only like 10 people playing and they were all really good friends with each other... and they were all sort of gutterpunks or something. Covered in tattoos and piercings, mohawked, punk-clothed out and nearly all of them were hispanic... We walk up, these scrawny, prim white hipster types, looking a LITTLE out of place.


I get introduced to the bunch: "Hey I'm Mudguts." "Um, what was your name again? I thought you said 'Mudguts'". "Yeah, and this is Boner." "Oh, um ok."
So I take off my generic rayban lookalike sunglasses and literally want to melt into the pavement from awkwardness. It was like I had walked in to a bad 90's teen novel. I probably should have introduced us as "Scooter" and "Gidget", because compared to "Muguts" and "Boner" that's what our nicknames could have been.


(Pictured above: Mudguts' cat. I'm guessing.)

Of course, the old story... blah blah blah... they turned out to be ridiculously cool, despite the balls and tits jokes throughout the day (but who doesn't love talking shit about some dude's tits?). And I got hit by lots of soccer balls, which totally sting. I even got some people out (but only when I was aiming for someone else and it hit another person by accident). Mostly I stood on the sidelines chasing balls and trying to find somewhere to put my hands, wishing to God I had drawn a tattoo on my neck before I left home.

And now my arm hurts from throwing the ball. The sad thing is I probably only threw the ball a total of like 10 times and I still got hurt. I'm such a sissy!!!

On to the music.

The Deer Tracks make music that sounds like an elf-fairy parade... very soft and lovely and eerie, but you should know by now I don't cover music like that.
What did interest me about the Deer Tracks are their re-mixes, which take the aforementioned elf soundtrack and turn it into something I KNOW I want more of. Slowly building minimal electronic beats turn something good into something really great. "Slow Collision" is taken to a whole new level of filling my spirit. Highly reccommended, but you'll have to check it out on the remix myspace because I don't have the mp3.



Their album Aurora has just been released. Below are 2 tracks: "Slow Collision" from their album, and "Before the Storm" remix, with an electro beat to keep you company at any hour of the day.

The Deer Tracks - Slow Collision
The Deer Tracks - Before The Storm (Sizemoreisms Deer In Headlights Remix)