When I've moaned my last moan...

The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi--Will My Jesus Be Waiting
The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi--Someone Watches Over Me

The Staple Singers--New-Born Soul
The Staple Singers--Gamblin' Man
The Staple Singers--New Home

Krautrock legends, fine--but somehow too polite for me. That was always my verdict on Harmonia, even at their best (see Musik Von Harmonia's "Watussi"), not something I was ever really going to put on. But now Water Music has uncovered a live performance from 1974. Five tracks. The first is full of minimal, wanky guitar, if that's possible. It sucks, but the last four make up one of the best live albums ever released, arguably the best example of Krautrock, period (although the original Amon Duul will probably always have the edge for me)...

There are two 15+ minute epics. The first, "Veteranissimo", is the only track taken from one of their two albums, but the title is to be taken literally, because on Musik Von... it runs for less than five minutes. Here, it's a lot like techno--there's even a percussive synth thing totally reminiscent of those drills that used to take control of my E-cstatic teenage brain at raves. The difference, of course, is that it's spilling over with electric piano, organ, guitar--most of it sounding treated by the filter section of some heavenly synth--a perfect manifestation of mid-'70s warmth and the excitement of electronic music's fresh territory. This one actually does make me the man-machine. "Holta Polta" is even more intense, the most freakishly great thing on here, and so psychedelic it simply cannot be used for casual listening. The primary stress is still on rhyhthm, but the acid is kicked up to a higher level. On first hearing it last month, I actually found myself with my ear up to the speaker of my shitty boom-box at like one in the afternoon!

In between is a really sweet five-minute meditative piece, called "Arabesque", where Michael Rother's guitar finds a nice minor place and sticks there. At the end is "Ueber Ottenstein". As soon as this one begins, it drives home the fact that the electronic percussion throughout the album has been both dead solid, and supremely varied--some of the best percussion ever, period (that makes the third "best ever" I've had to resort to in this post...) But this track is really Rother's chance to redeem himself on lead guitar. He does all the damage he meant to do on the opener, laying out wave upon wave of refried, chunky tone over a nice reverbed keyboard lead, galloping rhythm, and, eventually, what sounds like the aural translation of a malfunctioning hologram trying to reproduce the image of a manic jungle bird. During the last four minutes particularly, everyone is in the God-zone at all once, and what that gives us is some kind of proto-electronica/space-rock dream you may have once had, but never thought you'd hear in a waking state...

Harmonia--Ueber Ottenstein

Blue Monday, part 2

It's about that time...

The Beach Boys--I Went To Sleep

For nobody else...

Blues is the only genre of music that takes its name from the range of emotions it seeks to express. Blues artists are supposed to be depressed about something, and that dissatisfaction can take on a variety of shadings within the music: wounded, plaintive, grave, resigned, wistful, desperate, angry, defiant, or even threatening. But we can already hear in some of the earliest blues recordings the emergence of an attitude that draws from all these feelings to create a kind of armor to protect against feeling any of them too harshly. It was a pose of exaggerated indifference, provocative and entertaining for the way it could make a performer seem to be floating above life, rather than being mired down in it like the rest of us. The desirability of this attitude is proven by the way it has managed to infect every form of popular music that’s development can be traced back to the blues, from rock ‘n roll, to reggae and rap (soul to a lesser extent, because of its tendency toward unabashed emoting). Then, as now, performers adopting this pose of indifference were most likely to earn the respect of an audience if they could imply that it was the result of having experienced more than their fair share of life’s ups and downs simply through their vocal, instrumental, or bodily presence, without needing to spell it out.

Robert Nighthawk (sometimes credited as “Robert Night Hawk“) embodies that approach as well as anyone in his singing and lead guitar playing--though few today can testify to his stage presence, as he succumbed to congestive heart failure in 1967. His chosen name, itself, gives the impression of a restless spirit, difficult to contain, and possessing a larger-than-life confidence or swagger. Born Robert Lee McCollum in Helena, Arkansas, 1909, he would earn his more poetic, adopted name the long and hard way. McCollum picked up guitar from Houston Stackhouse (who was possibly his cousin) in Mississippi, and went on to perform and record during the 30s and early ‘40s under a variety of names, before settling on Robert Nighthawk because of the continuing popularity of his debut record, 1937‘s “Prowling Night Hawk”. He would travel to Chicago periodically to record songs--and learn his famed slide guitar technique from the great Tampa Red--but he never stayed there for very long, preferring his home-town in Arkansas and, most of all, the open road to the big city. Because of his rambling nature and the infrequency of his recording dates, he never established a recording career or any amount of notoriety outside of blues circles, although during the course of his extensive travels he played with most of the famous blues musicians in the South and Midwest, and influenced a younger generation of more commercially successful Chicago blues performers, including Muddy Waters and Earl Hooker.

Like many bluesmen, Nighthawk’s style is best showcased live, and that’s why the “Maxwell Street” recordings conducted by Mike Shea for his documentary And This Is Free are an absolute goldmine. These recordings were first released in 1980 as Live On Maxwell Street, again, under the same title, on CD in the ‘90s, and in ’99, in extended form as a CD box-set called And This Is Maxwell Street (causing a bit of a controversy among Chicago blues enthusiasts, because it revealed the recordings as originally released to be incorrectly credited, and, in parts, surreptitiously edited). Either release demonstrates Nighthawk’s singular style of jagged, but hypnotic lead guitar--often dwelling on the same string for long runs in order to emphasize rhythm over melody. Not as celebrated--but just as unique--are his serene vocals, nowhere better employed than on the jaw-dropping medley of “Annie Lee” and “Sweet Black Angel”, recounting twin tales of sexual obsession with a lightness that contrasts brilliantly with the edgy guitar work, expressing satisfaction, compulsion, and desperation without ever resolving the three states--or breaking the majestic surface of the performance. It is a buoyant, seemingly effortless creative moment that was a whole life-time in the making, and it stands as the chief legacy of a man who refused to be pinned down.

Robert Nighthawk--Annie Lee/Sweet Black Angel

Despite the title, this may be the best of the three Karen Dalton releases, through and through. Even the version of "Cotton-Eyed Joe" is devastating--you won't recognize it...

Karen Dalton--Every Time I Think Of Freedom

A dull wit will do at home...(time for the second phase to show)

I've moved out of my parents' house for the second time in my life, and--after four(!) years--it almost feels like the first. What to say, other than that my twenty-six years have seemed like a long time already, without much having been accomplished? I'm hoping the next two can outstrip those first twenty-six...

Marvin Gaye accomplished plenty, although none of it ever meant much to me, aside from "Innercity Blues". Then, on a suicidal all-night drive I heard his "problem" record, a 1978 double album called Here, My Dear. The title was literal but heavily ironic--an alimony settlement required that the proceeds from his next two records be paid to his ex-wife, but I guess the exact phrasing of the judge's document was such that he could satisfy that obligation with one two-LP release. Gaye clearly had a lot to express during this time, and more of a motivation to make a non-commercial record than a commercial one, because what sweeter revenge to take on the woman than to produce a hitless monstrosity, generating as little money for her as possible? As he says in "You Can Leave, But It's Going To Cost You": "You have won the battle/But daddy's gonna win the war".

If these circumstances sound a little reminiscent of Sister Lovers, I'm happy to report that the resulting record is almost as fucked up, if not as amazing in the end. The songs have been composed and arranged to the point of rapture--he clearly wasn't trying to turn out something bad, he just had no need to cater to anyone--and that freedom is apparent everywhere. Unfortunately, some lax sonic decisions keep this short of perfection. Sax and synth sounds are the chief offenders here, often causing a clash between the '70s and '80s that'll have your ears wanting to somehow translate various parts into what they would have sounded like just a couple years earlier. In the right mood, with enough volume, these conflicts will mostly melt away, though, and I strongly suggest that anyone who's into the tracks below check out the whole album. I've been listening to it a lot the last couple weeks. It's filled with amazing moments and near-great songs.

On offer are the two best, over-all. "I Met a Little Girl" is slow and misty, especially touching when he starts naming off the years. "You Can Leave..." is very reminiscent of "Innercity Blues", and actually makes apt use of some blatant video game synths, as opposed to the less obviously '80s sounding but not-quite-as-deep-as-they-should be mellow synths on "I Met a Little Girl". I guess the moral is: sound can't hide; and this is illustrated further by "Ego Tripping Out", a shameless electro epic from the 1980 album that's been coupled with Here, My Dear on the remastered reissue. I had to cut some weak lyrics at the start, but the resulting four minutes are a bit like Neil Young's Trans mixed with prime Michael Jackson, and maybe LCD Soundsystem's Beat Connection (rhythmic but slow build to a big, anthemic release). The lyrics, when they return, have to be the best of Gaye's career. "I've got a sweet tooth/For that chick on the floor" is awesome enough, but by the time he gets to "Spread the news!" it's impossible not to freak out..."It ain't about money..."

Marvin Gaye--Ego Tripping Out (edit)
Marvin Gaye--I Met a Little Girl
Marvin Gaye--You Can Leave, But It's Going To Cost You

Thanks, again, to Ben...

Must be the weather...

'The Old Weird America' is more interesting than 'The New Weird America', but Honey Owens/Valet is more interested in the Old Weird World, as in: "the idea of one's DNA code being accessed as eternal memory". Last week, scientists discovered a fossilized scorpion claw that was two feet long. They estimate its whole body was about eight feet long(!)--which only means it fit in with the giant dragonflies, cockroaches and spiders(!) that also flourished in prehistoric times. The cover art on Valet's forthcoming Naked Acid (front is like the rear, above, but with a giant, African tribal priestess drinking up that milky sea) suggests the most fundamental of all genetic memories: life in the ocean. But the sound has moved on from the eternal sensory-deprivation chamber of Blood Is Clean to a blown-out mutant universe where malfunctioning technology is some kind of virus, and ancient, incoherent dramas flicker on the skeleton of the future...I get all of that at least as much as "the Pacific Northwest landscape" and Honey's more obscure claims for inspiration, but neither my bullshit nor hers means much compared to her presence on vocals and guitar--in both cases stronger than anyone else's in music today. It doesn't hurt that the spirits still talk through her...the scary ones...

Naked Acid comes out next March, and it'll be very hard for anyone to best it all year. For a sample I've picked the most mysterious track, a scorched moonscape that is also a real space-rock song...

Valet--Kehaar

(more Valet)

I haven't done the things I should...

This blog has never been afraid of clichéing itself in terms of track selection (or in plenty of other ways...), as long as the music is good enough. So here's an old southern gospel song called "Waiting at the River". It's not nearly as good or as weird as "Jesus Loves Me", though, so listen to that one first...

The Original Five Blind Boys of Mississippi--Jesus Loves Me
The Original Five Blind Boys of Mississippi--Waiting at the River

Unsichtbare Welt

THE TRACKS FROM THIS POST HAVE BEEN REMOVED BECAUSE SOMEONE, I ASSUME KURT DAHLKE, COMPLAINED ABOUT COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT. WHOEVER IT WAS DIDN'T WRITE TO ME, BUT TO MY SERVER, WHO HAVE NOW THREATENED TO TERMINATE MY ACCOUNT IF ANOTHER SUCH COMPLAINT ARISES...WEIRD THAT HE ACTUALLY THINKS MY LITTLE BLOG IS DOING HIM HARM. THIS STUFF IS OVER TWENTY YEARS OLD AND OBSCURE. IT'S NOT LIKELY THAT ANYONE WHO WAS ALREADY SEEKING IT OUT WOULD HAVE BEEN SATISFIED BY THREE TRACKS, FROM TWO DIFFERENT ALBUMS, AND DISSUADED FROM BUYING THE ALBUMS THEMSELVES. I NEVER POST MORE THAN A FEW TRACKS FROM AN ALBUM, AND IT IS NEVER MY INTENTION TO CHEAT THE ARTISTS IN QUESTION. BUT ANYONE WHO DOES HAVE A PROBLEM WITH MY USE OF THEIR MUSIC, IT WOULD BE NICE IF THEY CONTACTED ME DIRECTLY INSTEAD OF GOING TO THE SERVER. WHATEVER, THOUGH, THE DUDE'S GERMAN...

Kurt Dahlke followed up the junky, DIY brilliance of his Der Plan project, with Pyrolator. As befits the new name, the tracks are more streamlined and the sounds cleaner, although he did manage to resist digital synths for the better part of two albums. "Ein Wienacht..." is a piece of catchy, semi-danceable German electro that occasionally taps into the analog drone ocean, in order to expand the boundaries of its funky little world. The other two tracks are all ocean, a few minutes each of the kind of directionless, late analog film-sound that people like me will fall for again and again. Less brooding than usual, but with a nice, raw this-was-out-there-and-I-just-tapped-into-it feel. "Der Volksmund der Beatnet" has more variation, while "Minimal Tape 1-8" simply is what it is...

Pyrolator--Ein Weihnachtsmann Kommt In Die Disco
Pyrolator--Der Volksmund Der Beatnet
Pyrolator--Minimal Tape 1-8

Grace Under Pressure

This is so beautiful, I'd trade some great songs for it. No joke, in another age the guy would have been a prophet...Thanks to Ben for this, and to WFMU...

K-Rock Pavement Show, MC

Your messed up world still thrills me...

Some bootleg-only Slowdive out-takes. "I Saw the Sun" is from the Souvlaki sessions. I prefer it to many of the songs on the album, but it probably shouldn't have made the cut because the mood is so different. The sound is very Souvlaki, but the vibe is more affirmative, even if all Halstead's affirming is "I saw the sun, ey, ey, ey..." In the ranks of shoegaze zen realizations, this is even slightly less affirmative than Ride's "Wake up, see the sun/What's done is done". I think what the song's about is an unknown amount of time lost on some very good depressants, with the dim memory of looking out a window to notice the sun in between night-time binges. And, yet, that's enough to clearly distinguish it from Souvlaki's impossible-not-to-drag-you-down undertow. But how do you not release this as a single, or at least a B-side? Alas, no perfect-quality version of this song seems to exist. This one is the best I could find...

"Like Up", on the other hand, sounds as good as you could want it to. And it doesn't really sound like Slowdive. Not only does this one fail to depress, there's hardly even any distortion on it (not at all on the "clean version"). But it's not acoustic like "Dagger" (shudder), or country/folk-tinged like Mojave 3. Probably more like one of those minor-place Primal Scream B-sides than anything...It's really hard to choose between the two versions, and if you kind of fall in love with this song as I have, then you'll want to check out both of them...

Slowdive--Like Up (clean version)
Slowdive--I Saw the Sun
Slowdive--Like Up

p.s. A little consideration for that line from "Alison" that goes: "With your talkin' and your pills/Your messed up life still thrills me". All the shoegaze bands get dumped on for having poor lyrics, but I nominate that as one of the sexiest lines ever. Not trying to be an image, and, so, sketching one more effectively than any amount of trying could..."TV-covered walls" is pretty good too...

"Morning Song to Sally" finds the Texas "outlaw" in misty Leonard Cohen mode, although the lyrics, even at their most sentimental, always remain sensible--no "touched her perfect body with your mind" bullshit. Occasional steel guitar enforces Walker's country credentials, but the acoustic melody is pure aching folk, and that shaker...

"Louise" is back to country, his singing style a thick, lazy drawl on this one, oddly complemented by Nicolette Larson's drugged vocals. If he wrote the lyrics, they're probably his best ever, making for an unusually frank, lucid elegy--Texan in the way of The Last Picture Show, rather than kris kristofferson...

Jerry Jeff Walker--Morning Song to Sally
Jerry Jeff Walker--Louise

Mr. Nobody

More lost Lee 'Scratch' Perry recordings come to light. If Perry's whole Black Ark period was his attempt at a kind of spiritual repatriation through sound, then the African Roots project gave him a chance to work with some real live, Africans, and he attached a good deal of symbolic weight to that fact. The sessions that produced Rockstone: Native's Adventures with Lee Perry at the Black Ark represented an opportunity for him to commune with another exploited indigenous culture, the North American Arawak tribe, and we know that he attached great significance to this as well. We know, because neither Wayne Jobson, nor anyone in his band, Native, had any Arawak blood in them, or any connection to the culture in at all. Jobson was of mixed English, African, Spanish, and Scottish heritage, and I guess his complexion suggested Arawak to Scratch, whose increasingly addled mind needed to run with that concept, and so he did--insisting despite all Jobson's protests, that the man was an Arawak. This fantasy fit nicely with the band's name, but of course it's more important that it was aligned with Perry's spiritual and emotional needs, because this was a very desperate time for him. His common-law marriage had broken up, and his relationships with collaborators, hangers-on, the music industry, and himself were disintegrating to the point where he would burn down his own studio in a paranoiac purge, and leave Jamaica, because, as he said "I realized I was a white man...The way black people was treating me, how could I be one of them?"...

The Pressure Sounds Rockstone release, isn't all Perry-recorded material, but about half of it is, and it's not hard to tell which half. The Perry productions seem to be quite literally disintegrating, or drowning in their own vinegar like celluloid when it starts to waste away. The wetness and woodiness, the quickened feel of his peak sound--channeling a jungle, pregnant and dripping after a healthy rain--has faded. What we're left with is the soul of a prophet losing connection with his voice, but driving it on--ironically enough--like a slave; the sound of a man not only glimpsing but diving into his own void. Both songs below bear witness to this state, as well they should, since they are likely some of the last pieces of music recorded at the Black Ark. "Meet Mr. Nobody" is probably a little better than "In the Land of Make Believe" because Jobson's lyrics never stray into "where children play" territory, and because Perry more completely subsumes the climactic guitar solo in that acid bath described above, but neither sounds like anything else on the planet.

Native--Meet Mr. Nobody
Native--In the Land of Make Believe

Manisch-Depressiv

THE TRACKS FROM THIS POST HAVE BEEN REMOVED BECAUSE OF COMPLAINT ABOUT COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT...

Poppy German synth experiments from 1980, ranging between New Wave-on-crack songs and dystopian sci-fi and whimsical horror soundtrack-type stuff. This guy Kurt Dahlke is a great producer. The sounds are alive and shabby, the opposite of cool and slick in a time when cool and slick were starting to spread like a disease. Bass and drum sounds are particularly impressive. "Adrenalin..." is quick and catchy, but so well constructed on a foundation of perfect, sequenced synth-bass and elegant drones that it never even approaches offensive levels of zaniness (the dude is German, so that's always a concern...). "Klein Grabesstile" is one of the little ambient ditties, but the vibe is neither nervy nor dark, it's pure alien luau, as visionary as one-minute interludes can be. "Generäle..." is back in song territory. About two minutes in, Dahlke works magic with what sounds like simultaneous pitch-bends in opposite directions, and just when it all seems to be headed for some crescendo or explosion, he sets a school of electrified outer space-tadpoles to devour everything and re-establish stasis. In the world of Der Plan, you learn that each extreme always anticipates the other...

Der Plan--"Adrenalin Lässt das Blut Kochen"
Der Plan--"Klein Grabesstile"
Der Plan--"Generäle Essen Gerne Erdbeereis"

The first image is an electron microscope's view of a tumor in the process of growing new blood cells. The second should be fairly obvious.

A Donovan track from 2004(!), beautiful production, a great vibe, ranking with the best of his '60s stuff, no joke (though it's not at the level of "Colours, version III"). The song opens with a good, strong trad folk melody on guitar. A minute in the vibe properly kicks in with what sounds like a Hammond B3 muted in some uniquely fundamental way. If you'll bear with me, the tone is so special, the only thing it brings to mind is a little fiber-optic stone I got at some science-gimmick store as a kid: an actually naturally occurring, translucent white piece of rock with flattened bottom and top edges, so you could put the bottom on a wood table, say, and look into the top like a magnifying glass, only instead of the image of the wood-grain being magnified, it is transferred to the top of the rock so that the wood appears to be at that level, rather than at the bottom, where it really is. Basically, the fibers that run up the rock defeat your depth perception, seeming to erase their own length--and,, hence the distance between the table and the top of the rock--so that the rock, itself, looks to be permeated by the image of the wood in just this slightly spectral way...

If anyone followed all that, you deserve the Hammond tone, and the song as a whole. There's another textural bonus that comes in a little later, and then there're Donovan's lyrics, which don't get any worse than "Like a zephyr she's blowing...into my life...my life", and his vocals, which are surprisingly good, good enough to defeat the cringe-reflex I get from looking at those lyrics written out...

Thanks to Speck Mountain, and the massively stoned satellite-radio DJ who played this song during their post-CMJ drive. Check out the awesome new Burnt Brown Sounds website for more info about them, their tour dates, their debut full-length, Summer Above, and the second BBS release, Valet's Fire 7". Also look out for a non-album related single coming up soon, and a new album, to be recorded in December, and released sometime next year...

p.s. the best compliment paid to Speck Mountain in this little SPIN.com blurb is an unwitting one. The writer misinterprets the press-release's boast that no synths were used on the record to mean no "digital" synths, because its spacy textures are so defined by echo, he just can't bring himself to believe the only source instruments were guitar, organ, and piano...

Donovan--Whirlwind

The title would turn me off too, but this is the most understated gospel song I've ever heard. Simple, sloppy acoustic guitar, the background noise of a mid-60s Chicago blues club, and Fannie Brewer's perfect, quiet grace, all add up to way more than another version of "I Shall Overcome". The way she delivers the chorus, alone, seems almost as if she doesn't want you to think that's what it is. I can't find a record of anything else she's done except two collaborative songs with her husband about the JFK assassination(?!), but based on this I think she could have run through about thirty classic gospel songs that night--picked at random--and come up with a double LP that destroys everything else in the genre this side of the Staple Singers. And as if making me think about all this isn't enough of a tease, the dicks who recorded the comp this came off of (And This Is Maxwell Street) only bother to include two minutes of the song, fading out on some particularly beautiful "ooo-oo-oo-oos", to a conversation between a righteous white guy and an "it's gotta be, it's gotta be" black guy about how the club is closing down. It would have been more poignant if you'd let us here the whole song assholes...

Fannie Brewer--I Shall Overcome

The image is the only one I can find--about fifteen years late--and she doesn't even have a microphone! I guess she gets to clap...

For fear of exploding...

Anne Sulikowski is from Hamilton, Ontario. Hamilton Wasteland, if you go by her myspace page, and whatever wasteland she has internalized, it is a real place--abstract, but almost impossibly detailed--in the mixes of "RoseDeToi(une Autre Fois)" and "Fixed". They sounded crazy and great when I first heard them through headphones on my computer, but when I burned a cd, and put the tracks on in my room, at around the three minute mark the air around me began to fill up with vivid forms (I didn't even have to close my eyes). They were tactile more than visual, but the visual was there as well. "Rose De Toi" has the ambience of a sci-fi movie too steeped in ennui to ever get made. An alien world where unseen beings always seem to be worshipping Slowdive's Pygmalion in another room (a random artifact from Earth?), there's lots of recycled black-and-gray technological uselessness under-foot, and, up above, the whole darkish sky is constantly traversed by massive streams of electrified debris, all of it lit up by enervated strobe flicks into one big, possibly holographic, swirl. I didn't adequately grasp the last couple minutes of the track on headphones, but lying there on my bed with those masses of electrified ether churning around me, I understood almost to the point of fear. I remembered something Survivorman once said about vampire bats--that their fangs are so sharp they can drain dangerous amounts of your blood without you even feeling it...

"Fixed" occupies the same wasteland, but its touch is not as light as those vampire bats. The middle portion of its twelve minutes is dominated by higher frequencies that stop short of being irritating, but I can see how they might try someone's patience in the wrong mood. Listen through though, because the last three or four minutes feel like transubstantiation by rock 'n roll. I can't tell what's generating any of the sounds, but they've been fused together with such a propulsive force that it feels like something vast is taking off and landing at the same time, and that you are caught up in both motions. It is one of the most amazing things I've heard in a long while, and I cannot stress enough that even those not partial to the middle section of the track have to hear those last few minutes at least once. It's something new. I haven't begun to wrap my head around it yet. Also, I should stress again that I don't think either track can be ideally experienced on headphones, but that you don't need a particularly good stereo (it seems to be about space, not sound quality--all of this was felt with mp3s on my cheap old boom-box!).

I don't know what or when these tracks are from. She just has them available to download for free on her website. The other track posted below is also from the website, and is---ironically--far shorter, as well as being more melodic and sweeter in tone. This link right here is to an earlier post of an Aidan Baker remix of one of her tracks that until recently I had labelled incorrectly as her remix of Aidan Baker. She has a new album coming out shortly on 9.12 Records, and lots of old albums that I think were probably self-released. A lot of the material is saner and songier, some of it with discernible guitars and even lyrics. She goes in for lots of different forms as well as moods, and I'm pretty psyched about all of it...

Building Castles Out Of Matchsticks--Roi De Toi (Une Autre Fois)
Building Castles Out Of Matchsticks--Fixed
Building Castles Out Of Matchsticks--Yes I Hate To Admit It But I Am In Love With You And Everything You Are

As "Mosquito", the first track on Sun's I'll Be the Same kicks off, I get an instant shot of '90s Thrill Jockey nostalgia. But this is the "Pop Project" of avant-drone genius, sine-wave prophet, guitar-not-guitar god oren ambarchi, and I have to admit, this stuff has a few extra layers of sonic commitment to it. I don't really remember what the Sea & Cake sounded like, I just remember what they sounded like to me then: what "Mosquito" sounds like now. I'd be willing to bet Sun bring with them some advances in production nuance. Percussive ideas especially, keep this song from feeling stiff. Whereas the metronomic slap/strum on "Help Yourself" is resolutely a backbone, a grounding force for a more abstract bit of bliss-out that summons Jim O'Rourke's Halfway to a Threeway re-made by a suddenly capable Animal Collective with Robert Wyatt's voice guesting on a sunbeam...

Now I'm getting carried away, but the same voice(s?) that just manages to work on "Mosquito" is genuinely transporting on "Help Yourself", even if the build-up in woozy harmony-land takes up more time than the real song we eventually get to. But the record as a whole is caught somewhere between unfussy, familiar pleasures and pleasures deflected or withheld. And now I'm back to those flashbacks, when post-rock felt like more of a philosophy of life than an aesthetic...

Sun--Mosquito
Sun--Help Yourself

Dilation Time In Blue

Only in music can people who promise "magical powers" and a "unique relationship to the Universe" actually be right. That's one of the things that keeps me in love with it. Take J.D. Emmanuel, self-described meditation guru, lover of jazz, minimalism, and the Rain Forest--and creator, in 1982, of the sommetimes-great electronic record, Wizards. A dolphin-happy Belgian outfit called Dreamtime Taped Sounds put together a vinyl reissue this year, and supposedly there's going to be a cd forthcoming, which would be nice because there are some problems with the vinyl copy I got. I don't know how many of the limited LPs are still available, but anyone who likes what's below should keep a look-out for that promised cd.

The general sound is like the sequenced synth theorems of Cluster's Zuckerzeit slowed down (although a couple of the longer tracks are at about Zuckerzeit-tempo) and with a warmer, less clinical feel, partially due to the heavy reliance on organ. On the three long tracks, in addition to Dark Side Of the Moon and Music Has the Right... vibes, some cheesier (always analog synth, sometimes digital delay) sounds invade the pristine world established on the shorter openers, but the patterns they are involved in are often so fundamentally gratifying, you probably won't care. "Expanding Into The Universe" is the test-case, if you can deal with that crumpled synth sound and the pitch bend orgy at the end, then you should be into most of the record. "Prayer" is the one, though--no qualifications necessary. Melodies and counter-melodies are locked tight in exactly the kind of meditative pattern this J.D. Emmanuel guy is going for. It's a tremendous compliment that I'm including this track recorded too fast, at 45 rpms, in addition to the normal 33 rpm version. Note the same magical trance powers harnessed to more manic ends but still coming off as smooth and architecturally sound as a crystal formation. Speaking of which, the effect is something like playing Legend of Zelda with the sound on, and listening to Zuckerzeit at the same time, while under the influence of a stimulant refined enough to allow the two to merge into one. Those of you who already spend your Saturday nights trying to make that happen can consider yourselves saved...

J.D. Emmanuel--Part II: Prayer
J.D. Emmanuel--Part II: Prayer (45 rpm)
J.D. Emmanuel--Part IV: Expanding Into The Universe

Water will always be, and so will I...

I once bought a comp because it claimed to contain "ambient soul". That was a lie. This time it's not. It's called "Water Water". Fittingly, the organs are liquid, and the only thing that's not ambient is the singing...cause he means it...

Joe Hicks--Water Water

The best laid plans...

Penguin Cafe Orchestra--Zopf: In a Sydney Motel

"'But what does it mean?'...

... 'What does it mean? Nothing.'" That exchange between a horny, middle-aged cocktail waitress and Tom Cruise is the key moment in the movie Cocktail. He has just showed her and her equally horny, equally middle-aged co-workers an incomprehensible coin-trick/huddle exercise thing that I defy anyone to explain. The fact that one of the waitresses actually does ask him to explain it, and the nature of his answer are examples of why I can say the movie is special in not merely an "I love stupid trash!" kind of way...

There's been a lot of movie music lately, but don't worry, I didn't uncover a forgotten gem from the Cocktail soundtrack. I've only called on Cruise's TGIFriday's wisdom to help illuminate Nancy Elizabeth's "In the Morning". There aren't many lyrics in the song, and it's possible that I've missed one or two key words, but it really doesn't seem to be about anything. That emotive--just shy of florid--piano-break in the middle seems to be what it's all about. It's the main musical draw, and seems to be concealing something that happened 'last night' (from the narrator's point of view) that was so heavy she's not even going to get into it. She'd rather end the song after two minutes, and it's probably a good move, because I doubt whatever happened would be as revelatory to us as it is to her.

Judging by her new album ("In the Morning" is a B-side), not a lot has happened to her. But Leaf didn't sign her for reasons of grit or life-experience. Her record is lonely-bower music: vague, lush, bedroom-jams for suburban Rapunzels on both sides of the Atlantic. She isn't a total 19th-century pretender--the word "bower" wouldn't quite fit in to any of her songs--and yet there is something undeniably Victorian-feeling about her instrumentation and the generic loftiness of her song-writing. If the lyrics were a little better, the album could be better, but as it is it's not without interest.

"Weakened Bow" arguably outdoes "In the Morning"--the cyclic guitar, Indian harmonium, and deep double-tracked vocals are real nice to get lost in. But it does ask you to deal with the line: "Unkind actions melt me". Another song, "How Can I Stop?" makes surprisingly good use of a manic cello-drone by blurring/dampening its impact in the mix so it sounds subdued but conveys anxiety at the same time. In general she's able to make dramatic arrangement details work far better than they should, only the harp gets to be over-bearing at times...

Advice for improvement would be to let someone rescue you from the tower or whatever--especially if they have dirty things on their mind--it might give you something to write about next time...Hope it happens soon, too, because the hourglass is nearly run down on all things folky...

Nancy Elizabeth--In the Morning
Nancy Elizabeth--Weakened Bow

Now five years old, Mapstation's A Way to Find the Day still sounds the right mix of past and future. This balance feels fundamental, like it's been encoded more than simply layered or arranged. Tension-and-release is being played with here, but--to an unusual degree--it's both at the same time rather than an alternation between the two. The result feels like warmth and abstraction fighting to get out of a rigged laboratory trap, the irony being that conditions are ideal in there--escape would only be a disappointment...

Mapstation--I Don't Know My Generation
Mapstation--When You Collide
Mapstation--Midnight Gegenlicht


The whole album is recommended, aside from two trip-hop style vocal tracks.

Sex is a proud, sad ocean. I don't know why...

A bonus track from the latest cd reissue of The Byrds' Younger than Yesterday, this is closer to solo-Crosby in tone than any other Byrds song. And I guess no one else in the band liked it, cause there's no way Crosby wouldn't have wanted this one on the original album. Another one of those "it's still the '60s but it's almost the '70s" vibes...

The Byrds--It Happens Each Day

Once upon a time Sean Penn was intense without being an embarassment, Christopher Walken had edge, and a Madonna song contained ambient perfection, if she just stopped singing and the beats got turned off. Pretty much the whole experience of being a teenager is present in this track. The sitting around, the unnatural depression, the uncertainty, the unnatural certainty that what you need is out there somewhere...It probably helps if you've seen the movie, and you should. The scene that directly follows the opening credit sequence alone would compel you to keep watching. Ideally you'd find it flipping channels at two in the morning. Expecting it to get cheesy or obvious, you'd instead become gradually mesmerized by all the empty rural space, the pervasive sense of damaged or hapless lives, and the reductive, very real monster lurking within Christopher Walken's impossible Method weirdness...

For Karl,

Patrick Leonard--At Close Range (Main Title)

P.S. The Madonna thing wasn't a joke. This is, more or less, the backing track to her song "Live To Tell".

Uses up more than it makes of me...

After seeing Magik Markers play once in 2005, it was clear they were a great live band, and that Elisa Ambrogio was one of two people in the country who really knew how to front a band (and the other, Dead Combo's Harri, was a Finnish import). Their records at that time didn't get much across to me, but suddenly, on the new one, the noise is gone--a lot of it anyway--swallowed up by the expansive drone and genuine rock tendencies that formerly had only come through live. In fact, the best stuff on here are total songs. "Taste" might please fans of The Kills, "Bad Dream/Hartford's Beat Suite" is a ballad led by acoustic guitar, and "Empty Bottles" is a mid-tempo piano ballad that sounds like something you might've thought would be on White Magic's follow-up to Through the Sun Door, before you heard their still-born second record, and then stopped thinking about them altogether...

Breaking habit, I'm gonna do things the right way round, leading with the uptempo track and saving the come-downy one for last. "Taste" is fucking cool, and fucking dirty. No other way to say it--with sawing drones harnessed as tightly as those in, say, Broadcast's "Pendulum", but cast in a milieu of sex and people instead of weed and old records. It works so well, there's no guilt involved here, just pure pleasure--and no underestimating the drums' contribution to that. "Bad Dream" (the second part of the title feels like a personal reference, cause there're no beats, and no second part to the song) gets the nod over "Empty Bottles", mostly because I like the lyrics more. The acoustic guitars are backed by a nicely distanced drone that feels like it departed from John Cale's viola and got as close as it could to the charmed feedback on Big Star's "Kanga Roo". But back to those lyrics. They tell a story. And there are consequences...that don't seem to be ending...which is what makes bad dreams...

Magik Markers--Taste
Magik Markers--Bad Dream/Hartford Beat Suite

Note, Magik Markers are touring right now. I get to see them in a couple days. Just a little superstitious that now that the recordings are better, the performances are not going to be as strong, but that's stupid--go see them! Also, Lee Ranaldo did a great job co-engineering/producing/mixing the new record with a guy named Aaron Mullan. There's enough of a sonic ethic involved that I noticed it was severely neutered by my car stereo, so, I guess, watch what you listen to it on. Sounding great on headphones right now, though...

I'm back. This time for real, as in: I'm going to post a lot of stuff in the next few weeks. First we have more vintage soundtrack vibes, this time from James Glickenhaus's Suicide Cult (aka The Astrologer), 1975. Brad Fiedel is the composer. He would go on to do the Terminator theme, which worked really well in the movies, but does nothing to prepare you for this stuff.

The excerpt takes top prize. The big synth-bass uncannily anticipates what John Carpenter would be doing a few years later, and the layers of keyboard melodies, birds (not intended as part of the music, but there on the soundtrack), and various other treats buried in the mix recall the best of nostalgic electronica a couple decades hence. Particularly the lead that kicks in at around 55 seconds, and the accompanying drone and horn-sound melody had me and Burnt Brown Karl on our knees when we first heard this. The search is on for the original tapes. For now, bliss out as best as you can to my recording from VHS. The end credits tune is almost as good. I wish both tracks were longer, but I had to fade out the first one before The Astrologer, himself--middle-aged, balding, stodgy--apologizes to his hot, young '70s wife for making her "put up with something no one could except", by refusing to make love to her because his computers told him she was to bear the second coming of Christ. But did she already?...

I might as well mention the movie is nothing special. Glickenhaus, though, would gain some serious form in the '80s, with The Exterminator, Shakedown, and McBain all well worth seeking out...

Brad Fiedel--Suicide Cult excerpt ("Time To Go Home")
Brad Fiedel--Suicide Cult (End Credits)

I am a strange loop...

Isan--Cathart

Back from out West. A few things to note:

1) Speck Mountain is on their way...
2) Oregon is more beautiful than California
3) The funniest things in the world now are things that are only kind of funny, repeated and varied obsessively until your resistance breaks down, and, suddenly, you get it (like drone music, I guess...)


On to business. Played loud, this track has, for me, nearly infinite power. It's the only thing I've ever heard that captures the tedium of serious illness, but somehow fashions something compelling out of that (see note 3 above?). "And I couldn't speak nothin'...And the doctor went home, and I still couldn't speak nothin'...And a new doctor came...When I couldn't speak nothin', I let the guitar do it..." What he lets the guitar do may be easy to scoff at (it really does sound like the instrument, itself, is doing it as much as he is), but if you've succumbed to the Reverend Charlie Jackson by this point, then it might just suspend your whole life before you--what did and didn't, will and won't go right, what it feels like when everything goes wrong, and how it's never the end of the world, even when it might be the end of yours...

Reverend Charlie Jackson--Testimony of Rev. Charlie Jackson

Felt the same today...

Missed this one on Lindsey Buckingham's first solo album, actually the best song. All you have to get over is him laughing and making stupid sounds for a couple seconds toward the end. The mood of the song is so strong, it's hard to understand why he'd want to break it, and, luckily, he can't...Supreme poet of moneyed Californian ennui, which seems to feel better than just about any other vibe (see also John Philips' album John, The Wolfking of L.A.)

Lindsey Buckingham--I'll Tell You Now

Fire keep me room...

The Burnt Brown Sounds label (of Speck Mountain fame), releases its first single this month, a limited 7" by Valet. This is more of a song and less of an incantation than anything on Blood Is Clean, and you won't be getting over it any time soon...Honestly, has there ever been a stronger single, period? "Good Vibrations"?...

Valet--Fire

Check out Valet on tour right now, most shows with White Rainbow. She'll be in Chicago in a few days, and Portland a week from tomorrow. The Portland show is with Speck Mountain, part of their West Coast tour. I'll be along for that--leaving right now in fact--but should be able to continue posting every few days. Needless to say, seeing either band is a must for any music fans within driving distance. Seeing both in one night is almost a frightening prospect...

p.s. Turntable issues prevent me from posting the mastered version of "Fire". I hope to have it up in a few weeks. But anyone with a turntable, email speckmountain@gmail.com to buy one...