i’m currently going track by track through a mix i recently did for a website called
research and development - find out more
here.
9. homelife - seedpod
matt from
fortune grey put me on to homelife early last year. homelife was (is?) a recording project cum collective that orbited around manchester musical savant
paddy steer. they released a few albums through ninja tune, the best one perhaps being (in my opinion) 2002’s flying wonders. i remember when i first got a download copy of this album i had no idea of the details of its released, and immediately assumed it to be a new release. to me, it sounds fresh.
i’m currently going track by track through a mix i recently did for a website called
research and development - find out more
here.
8. charles magnante - el cumbanchero
there is a large network of sharity blogs out there, sharing full albums of hard-to-find exotica, 50s and 60s lounge music, tropicalia and brazilian stuff. i’ve never had much of an interest in trawling record stores to uncover albums - i think the few times i’ve ended up in op shops scouring through their dusty vinyl collections for hidden gems, i’m always completely underwhelmed by what i find. i’ve never had the money or the real passion for history to truly indulge in hunting for old gems, so i get my exotica fix through the sharity sites.
i think its probably pretty obvious that a lot of the sounds from the first two faux pas releases come from exotica records, most of which i either downloaded through sites like these, or at least found out about and then scoured for online. so thats that. but to be honest, i think i turned to exotica sounds mostly because they were easy to isolate in the mix, and because a lot of the sounds have a novelty value or what you might even call an inbuilt immediacy that almost makes it too easy when sampling them. i dunno. i’m not sampling much exotica any more, i think it feels a little played out.
charles magnante, it turns out, was a three-time president of the american accordion association “helped raise the accordion from its image as a hokey folk instrument to recognition as a serious instrument capable of a wide range of styles”. you can download the entire album “fiesta! south of the border” from
this location.
i’m currently going track by track through a mix i recently did for a website called
research and development - find out more
here.
7. agitation free - ala tul (faux pas edit)
a month or two ago one of my favourite mp3 blogs
undomondo posted a few 70s prog & psych tracks, and one stood out, “ala tul” by a german band called
agitation free. they were like a german prog/kraut rock band, wikipedia tells me they were active from 1967 to 1974 and that one of their number at some point jumped ship to tangerine dream. my dad had a couple of tangerine dream cds in the 80s, i remember as a kid trying to listen to them but being completely bewildered. there was no way in to tangerine dream, not for me. when it came to dad’s cd collection i was more into billy joel. i never even attempted to listen to the vangelis soundtrack dad had. though i did listen to clannad a few times. clannad is good to play d&d to.
hope you are all enjoying the track-by-track rundown. is nice? lovely. today i’m forcing an intermission (there’ll be a few of these along the way, no doubt) to bring you something awesome.
watch these. pay close attention. take notes. this will all become very important soon enough.
i am a big fan of the books. since their first album i’ve been in awe of the way they combine reappropriated snippets of everyday conversation and radio plays with beautifully recorded and manipulated home strings, guitars, found sounds and percussion. books tracks are always meaningful but never heavy-handed - they are playful but in a very serious way. when i listen to lost and safe, it feels like i am listening to the full potential of music being realised - no half-measures, no weak moments, no bad ideas, no generic conventions. i suppose this is how i might characterise the feeling i sometimes have of hearing ‘perfect music’ - immediately familiar, yet at the same time unprecedented.
one of the cutest oddities in the books relatively small catalogue is their ep “music for a french elevator and other short format oddities”, released on mini-cd and available (i think) only through the books
website:
It is a compendium on mini CD of four pieces created for the “1%” art and sound installation in the Ministry of Culture in Paris, France in 2004. The pieces were created to be played in the elevator of the Ministry, giving the release its title. Following the initial four tracks (those designed for the elevator) are “several ‘classic’ spoken word tracks” taken from The Books’ sample libraries. from
wikipedia
i ordered the ep recently from the books website, as well as a few other things including a recently released dvd containing shorts that the books themselves have put together to accompany their tracks live. sometimes when i get a dvd, or an album, its so special to me that it sits on the shelf or on my desk for a long time before i find the ‘right time’ to listen to it or watch it. i’m not sure how long this dvd will be on the shelf for, but it might be some time.
i’m currently going track by track through a mix i recently did for a website called
research and development - find out more
here.
4. emperors of blefuscu - savage customs
five months ago, local melbourne artist-run indie label
brother sister records put out a
compilation featuring local DIY artists alongside people from places diverse as japan, UK, france & the czech republic. i guess you could call it outsider music, collisions of folk, psych, world beats, home & field recording, experimental. i know that sounds wanky. it has recently been getting a lot of love from community radio stations down here in melbourne. its potentially some of the best and most forward-thinking music to come out of melbourne (or australia) for a while. though i’m not really an authority on this, but it sounds good doesn’t it.
between bmsr & skeletons seemed like the perfect place for this track by emperors of blefuscu. the compilation on which this track features - titled “a fifty gallon drum of savage customs, fresh flesh and random pop” - is available to order at the
brother sister website. there are a lot of mp3s available over there to
download in full, including full releases by emperors of blefuscu, inquiet, kharkov and others.
brothersister is also home to
drama of yamaha - i posted their great video clip “no more ease”
here a couple of weeks ago. while you’re at it, you should also check out brothersister’s companion label
pocketclock for more free downloads and great local releases.
i’m currently going track by track through a mix i recently did for a website called
research and development - find out more
here.
3. black moth super rainbow - rollerdisco
the merits of
black moth super rainbow are well articulated elsewhere on many blogs and online magazines. a great introduction to this band is mike powell’s
hi! article for
stylus magazine. i’ve never been so blown away by their material before hearing the “dandelion gum” album. you can - and should - order it
here, direct from the band, and cheap too. you can also download a healthy amount of black moth super rainbow directly from their
last.fm page. a band i’m super proud to have at the top of my current
last.fm charts, for sure.
i’m currently going track by track through a mix i recently did for a website called
research and development - find out more
here.
2. davy dmx - the dmx will rock
i was searching p2p networks for herbie hancock and stumbled across a few 80s compilations that had titles that simply couldn’t be denied - one of them being “
electro breakdance volume 2“. opening with the hands-down giant slayer “axel f” it somehow maintains that level of awesome right through newcleus, mantronix & wally badarou. then towards the end it drops this “the dmx will rock”. i don’t know much about davy dmx but there is a
wikipedia entry that went someway to rectifying that. david reeves aka davy dmx, either on his own or as a member of orange krush, worked alongside run dmc, kurtis blow & the beastie boys amongst many others.
i worked out later that “axel f” didn’t actually appear on the comp, but had for some reason been included anyway along with the rest of electro breakdance volume 2 by whomever kind soul it was that i downloaded it from… it fits. also -
harold faltermeyer was a protege of the aforementioned giorgio moroder - and the moroder track i posted yesterday “e=mc2″ totally name-checks faltermeyer in the outro! connections, dudes, connections
the mantronix track featured on “electro breakdance vol 2″ opens with a sample that is instantly recognisable to fans of j dilla’s donuts which i wrote about yesterday. where is this from originally? my ignorance is showing
i’m currently going track by track through a mix i recently did for a website called
research and development - find out more
here.
1. j dilla - e=mc2 (feat common)
j dilla’s catalogue is, for good reason, crystallising into canon. like so many others, i’ve been obsessively listening to donuts for the last 18 months or so, completely inspired and entranced by his style. the way he slices and dices pop and soul tracks is so organic and immediate, listening to donuts for me is something akin to a psychedelic experience, and thats strange for me to say because i don’t know much about ‘psychedelic experiences’. donuts is a real journey album. he experiments with form and rhythm, butchering songs into beats with the utmost respect for the source material. weirdly, when i first started listening to donuts i couldn’t help but think of the all too brief and too few musical inderludes of
cassetteboy’s “parker tapes” - brutal slice and dice beat experiments. more on cassetteboy later, suffice it to say that the comparison is kinda ridiculous - i guess that really just says more about my lack of wide-ranging hip hop knowledge than anything else.
i was recently alerted to the fact that not everyone appreciates j dilla’s slice & dice - when a blogger featured dionne warwick’s “stop” on one of his mixes last year i emailed him rather breathlessly (if such a thing is possible, i did it) to alert him to j dilla’s re-interpretation, which appears on donuts. i quickly found out that not everyone hears j dilla the same way: “that was an utter piece of shite. That sounded like someone messing around with a new sampler. Chopping up an already perfect song — what’s the point?” well whatever the point was, i think he missed it, but thats ok. i think for some people its hard to believe that for some, the act of sampling someone’s material is like the highest form of praise. there is also an art to doing what j dilla does, it sounds a lot simpler than it is. his ‘wonky beat’ style is distinctive, immediate, hypnotic… hey i’m probably preaching to the converted here.
i’ve been so taken with donuts that i’ve not yet reached the rest of j dilla’s back catalogue, post-humous or pre-humous. but i did come into contact with this track “E=MC2″ which features on his post-humous release the shining. this track is underpinned by a sample from the original giorgio moroder track “E=MC2″, which is a track that i absolutely love not just as a pure articulation of classic moroder sound, but also because the end of the track features the album’s liner notes, sung by giorgio thru vocoder - “keyboards and programming by harold, with a little help from giorgio…” check it out below, i love in particular the fact that he runs through the technical details in that distinctive vocoder monotone and saves the best for the end - “tea and coffee by lori”… if you’ve seen pics or giorgio than you already know he is possibly the cutest man to have ever brushed his moustache against a moroder - the outro liner notes from this track will do nothing to dispel that notion.