{image via threeframes.net}

i’m workin haaaaard on it!! and we start mixing it next week. pretty excited. so i might not get back to regular blogging as soon as i’d hoped – but i have become embarrassingly active on twitter. i will return to macro blogging soon enough, i promise. there’s sooo much i can’t say in 140 characters or less, but i’m not quite finding the time/headspace to get it together on the blog at the moment.

OK THATS BORING, HERE’S THE ALBUM TEASERS:

MP3: Faux Pas – Vanderbilt demo

MP3: Faux Pas – Casioing Waterfalls

MP3: Faux Pas – MY NEW ALBUM … in 3 minutes

you want more? i’m pretty sure i’ve already explained myself pretty well in this earlier blog post. something about eric the badu and the 7 wolves. whaa, that post is over a year old? holy shit. its crazy. you know, in the past 2 years i’ve scrapped literally several albums’ worth of material. i’m pretty sure this is it though. ha! we shall see, right?

in other news, i just want to say some huge & mighty thanks to fee b squared, the big o & J.P. for being hospitable, generous and very kind to me during my stint on rrr breakfasters filling in for sam pang. thanks to everyone involved at triple r for making me feel at home in the early mornings for those few weeks. breakfast radio, people! its crazy. they make you get up at like 5am. do you have any idea how much earlier than 11am that is? SIX MILLION HOURS IN MY DIMENSION, FOR SURE

more soon – yes, that is my song on the NAB ad, thanks for noticing and for all the emails (more on that later)

MP3: Inquiet – Rose Rose (Faux Pas remix – v4)

see also: version 1 | version 2 | version 3

MP3: Inquiet – Rose Rose (Faux Pas remix – v3)

see also: version 1 | version 2

interrupting the play-by-play on that inquiet remix – sunday afternoon seems like a good time to drop a few notes on what music i’m listening to at the moment. nothing too fancy, just feels a little overdue.

traffic sounds leigh (host of 2ser’s tape relay who, as far as i can tell from stalking her on mess+noise, is currently whooping it up with some kind of vincent chase lifestyle) recently put me on to eero johannes, for which i’m very grateful. he is a finnish dude signed to planet mu who is the torch-bearer for an underground movement of funky scandinavian chiptunez weirdly named “skweee.” the skweee movement moves into the spotlight, with a recent feature event on sonar and, of course, a wikipedia entry.

its scandinavian, so yeah, of course its too cool for itself and way too much fun. here’s a video sampler from skweee label harmonia (eero johannes from about 1:46 with skweee anthem ‘we could be skweeroes’ – yeah, seriously):

so fun, funky, so nerdy.

what else is around here… i went out to a bar at QV last friday night and the DJ played diamonds on the soles of her shoes, technically a tood terje edit but i didn’t figure that out until later. so i went and found that, and its dumb fun. then i went and found about 20 other todd terje edits, and couldn’t really figure out what the fuss was about. same DJ played this weird holy ghost vs the message thing that was pretty bad but reminded me what a mind-blowingly great sound “hold on” has.

i’ve been getting into a couple of tracks from a label/website called moodgadget.com – a label which, as far as i can tell, has several of their artists on extended loan to ghostly (mux mool, jdsy, reflecting skin). ghostly swim was such an amazingly strong compilation (and free too!) and one of the tracks thats really holding up for me from that comp is from moodgadget’s mux mool. not sure exactly how to track the threads on the moodgadget/ghostly connection, but anyway moodgadget put out a compilation of electronic artists earlier this year called “the synchronicity suite” which acts very much like a companion piece to ghostly swim, and has some great finds on it – the greatest being, easily, a track caleld “glad i met you” from d. gookin.

MP3: Mux Mool – Night Court

MP3: D. Gookin – Glad I Met You (from xlr8r.com)

i can’t quite get into the alexis taylor record, its hard to figure out what its trying to be, if in fact its meant to be anything other than a collection of castoffs and throwaway recordings (which i think essentially it is meant to be). covering mccartney “coming up” seems obvious but its hard to hate such a loving rendition. alexis taylor’s “coming up” and max tundra’s “coming up” are like very odd bookends that now sit on either side of that early 80s mccartney pop gem.

ahhh. the new kieran hebden vs steve reid is cool, more engaging than the earlier collaborations i think. its cool that they are just putting out whatever they do, you might not enjoy every record but you can hear their process developing which is fun. trying to get into the new skeletons record but its even harder to listen to than the last. i gave the last record a lot of latitude i think because i was so enraptured by the more accessible tunes. this one… i hope it grows on me.

These hats are awesome :3

i became completely obsessed with this song a couple of weeks ago. it holds within it the secret of all music, and indeed, life and time and space. you think i’m joking? i want to throw away whatever ideas i’ve ever had about music and just start a new movement based only on what is contained in this song. you think i’m kidding? i want to coat myself in honey and jump from a tall building onto a giant piece of sourdough. you think i’m fooling around?

also – i want to meet that dad. whats your dad like?

MP3: Inquiet – Rose Rose (Faux Pas remix – v2)

coach comes from the changes EP, released last november. buy it or don’t.

also – there are, all of a sudden, a bunch of places online where you can hear new faux pas songs, works in progress, remixes, things like that:

- 3 new songs at myspace.com/iamfauxpas
- a remix of mine now appearing at myspace.com/olloollo (which comes from their recently released remix ep)
- the rad istanbul blog undomondo recently posted an edit i made of 70s kraut stoners agitation free… alongside some footage of them rolling in egyptian dunes. big thanks, considering that its only through undomondo that i found out about the track in the first place.

i got to say, love shack is the most played-out of played-out tunes. but i couldn’t help but fall in love with it all over again when i got distracted with some pitch-shifting while putting together my bro’s playlist. simple pleasures, folks, simple pleasures. here’s what i’m talking about:

its not quite a screw, but you know. i’ve always had a sneaking suspicion love shack was meant to be sung by an all male choir, and this is a step closer. for some reason i can’t get this guy out of my head when i listen to it, brian, hank kingsley’s assistant:

wonder why that is.

MP3: B-52s – Love Shack Screw

but here’s a real screw, and a real heavy-hitter. this is bona fide, knock-it-out-of-the-park amazing type shit! god bless dutty artz for posting this earlier in the year. i’ll admit to having a serious soft spot for alicia keys, but this takes this song to a whole other planet. this is the kind of song that can keep me going when things get tough, know what i mean? this is something i can get behind. i feel better every single damned time i listen to this. i’m posting it here because you can no longer get it from dutty artz.

MP3: Alicia Keys – No One (Mike Watts screw)

screwing is about slowing songs down, but i can’t bear to hear any more of love shack than absolutely necessary so, yeah, original tempo. in fact, recently i’m all about shortening songs. like, for example, did you know that “horses” by daryl braithwaite is waaay more palatable when condensed down to 1 minute and 9 seconds?

MP3: Daryl Braithwaite – Horses (Time Poor edit)

MP3: Hall & Oates – Maneater (Time Poor edit)

this all reminds me of the time i condensed my 60 minute JJJ mix up set down to 7 minutes. imagine if itunes or winamp or whatever just had a button you could press that says “condense music” and it just compacted what you were listening to into a fraction of its running time. we’d get so much more done.

and lastly, i found this great 7 minute megamix of “i wanna dance with somebody.” in fact, on a p2p network that shall remain nameless, i found no less than TEN remixes of this track, all neatly packaged together by some dude. its 70 minutes of i wanna dance with somebody. most of it sounds way to queer eye soundtrack for my liking – this is the pick of the bunch. no trickery here, just seriously intense 80s pop remixing. the best bit is about 5 minutes in, where it just becomes this intense drum machine workout and some dude yelling at me over and over “dance, dance, d-d-d-dance”

MP3: Whitney Houston – I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Hot Tracks mix)

i’m seriously RIAA-baiting with this post. methinks i’m about to trigger a wide variety of alerts on RIAA automated blog piracy detection bot programs. note to tim’s ISP: prepare to receive correspondence! shit i’ve even said RIAA a couple of times in this paragraph so no doubt they’ll be checking me out.

simple pleasures.

MP3: Danny Taylor Trio – Theme from Shaft

MP3: Dutch Rhythm Steel & Show Band – Theme from Shaft

Lothar and the Hand People was a late 1960s psychedelic rock band known for their spacey music and pioneering use of the theremin and Moog modular synthesizer.

(^ wikipedia)

MP3: Lothar and the Hand People – Machines (via dreamchimney)

the band formed in denver in 1965 when NY-born john emelin and his university of colorado roommate richard willis were inspired to form a jug band after seeing the rolling stones play…

Willis, in classic hippie fashion, came up with the band’s appellation while he was sleeping; he had a dream in which an enslaved race called the Hand People was saved by a hero named Lothar, and when he related the scenario to his fellows, who’d been stumped in their search for a trippy handle, the moniker stuck. Only later did they decide that a theremin owned by Emelin was actually the group’s namesake. “People would always ask, ‘Who’s Lothar?’, and we wouldn’t know what to tell them,” Conly says. “But finally we realized that Lothar had been there all along.”

“Our timing was good,” Emelin says. “We were long-haired at a time when there were only one or two other long-haired bands in town; the rest were old-fashioned greaser bands. So we hit the scene with a more modern look, and that propelled us to local fame right away.”

(^ lotharandthehandpeople.com.)

the band moved to new york. they started gigging at a greenwich village club, befriending a local guitarist called jimmy james (who would later move to london and get a few gigs under the name jimi hendrix). the hand people on the other hand (ha!) recorded a debut album, enlisting a novice composer whose only credits at the time involved production music for star trek but whose future credits would involve the lion’s share of stevie wonder’s 70s catalogue, robert margouleff…

It is electronic country, a kind of good-time music played by mad dwarfs, and it is really good to listen to. There is no tension here, no jarring forces at war with each other. It may be strange that New York, the city which deifies speed and insanity, could produce this music, but it is as if Lothar and the Hand People have gone through this madness and come out on the other side, smiling.

Lothar and the Hand People have a spirit about them which pervades all they do. And after awhile, you’ll see, it doesn’t matter what they do, because the spirit is sort of happy and a lot of fun to be with. It captures a New York time when something happened that denied the concept of a city. And something which can do that, which can overcome the smoke and noise and confusion, is to me something very valuable to have.

(^ rolling stone, 1969)

less than five years later, the band would wrap things up. a couple of years ago, “presenting… lothar and the hand people” was re-issued by razor & tie records.

the full story of lothar and the hand people can be read here.

here’s a clip of a dude listening to “machines” on LP in his lounge room. the internet is an increasingly absurd place to hang out:

part 1. despair!!

MP3: Faux Pas – Live from Doom

recorded in one take, in the doom-chair, in despair, about one hour ago

part 2. relief!!!

MP3: Hand on the Bum

part 3. satanic heart!!!!

MP3: Heart – Bazzacuda (Satanic Guitar Hero mix)