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2017, in no particular order.
Visible Cloaks - Reassemblage
Jlin - Black Origami
Bing & Ruth - No Home of the Mind
Various - Mono No Aware
Ryuichi Sakamoto - async
Pauline Anna Strom - Trans-Millenia Music
Children of Alice - Children of Alice
Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource 1
Alice Coltrane - World Spirituality Classics 1
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - The Kid
Various - Outro Tempo: Electronic And Contemporary Music From Brazil 1978-1992
Circuit Des Yeux - Reaching for Indigo
Man Forever - Play What They Want
Horse Lords - Mixtape IV
Bitchin Bajas - Baja Fresh
Eric Copeland - Goofballs
Actress - AZD
Equiknoxx - Colón Man
Dustin Wong & Takako Minekawa - Are Euphoria
Lee Gamble - Mnestic Pressure
Colin Stetson - All This I Do For Glory
Yoko Ono - Fly
Various - Sensate Silk
Laurel Halo - Dust
James Holden - The Animal Spirits
The Focus Group - Stop-Motion Happening
Peaking Lights - The Fifth State of Consciousness
Neil Young - Hitchhiker
Flying Saucer Attack - New Lands
Fever Ray - Plunge
Look Blue Go Purple - Still Bewitched
Sparks - Hippopotamus
Four Tet - New Energy
LCD Soundsystem - american dream
EMA - Exile In The Outer Ring
Björk - Utopia
Oneohtrix Point Never - Good Time OST
Kendrick Lamar - DAMN
Can - The Singles
Delia Gonzalez - Horse Follows Darkness
Ben Frost - The Centre Cannot Hold
Tod Dockstader - Eight Electronic Pieces
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“I’ll come back later and pick up my stuff when the flipping place don’t stink so bad.”
Heard the radio edit version of Dinosaur Jr’s “Freak Scene” this morning (”don’t let me freak now will you”) and it got me thinking about the crazy art of over-dubbing in music and films. To make them, y’know, more family friendly. Alex Cox was even generous enough to add a few deleted scenes to the TV cut of Repo Man, including this one with the now-classic replacement of “motherfucker” with “melon farmer”:
The line “I’m going indie” caused a lot of confusion in my indie-rock addled, mostly (at the time) un-Americanized brain when I first saw it.
D12′s “Purple Hills,” their heavily altered version of “Purple Pills,” is kind of a masterpiece of this genre, if it can be called that. It’s actually pretty inventive. Favorite line: “He’s upstairs wrestling with Elton John” (changed from: “He’s upstairs naked with a weapon drawn”).
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With google translate working as an unreliable narrator of sorts, this appears to be a Japanese commercial for Jim O’Rourke branded sake. Made by the “music vibration aging process” [via McKuw]. Of course, Simple Songs makes a whole lot more sense now the air has finally turned crisp outside. I couldn’t quite get back to the right head space when I first heard it, but now it’s a lovely soundtrack when crushing leaves underfoot.
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Teaser for new Harmonia collection showing pastoral garden performance footage.
Great footage, coming off like a group of krautrock legends mistakenly turning up on the set of Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May. At one point there seems to be a mildly disgruntled bloke leaving in a huff, his beige colored afternoon perfectly ruined by this group of longhairs. And they’re playing under a fucking garden umbrella. Priceless.
(Source: youtube.com, via danselzer)
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Been working furiously recently, with barely a moment to raise my head above the parapet. Somehow I’ve ended up being consumed by the Big Music in moments when things get overwhelming. I think I need that surge of big, empty energy to get through it all.
This has probably been remarked on elsewhere–it’s hard to find much writing on the Big Music as a concept, maybe because it’s difficult to google–but to me it’s roughly akin to musical Diet Coke. A big empty buzz is still a buzz when you’re in the moment with it, you just have to deal with the creeping feelings of doubt and unfulfillment in the aftermath.
(and, y’know, I’m mostly talking about the shit end of the stick here - not Echo & the Bunnymen and the Chameleons and stuff that’s reasonably fêted. Simple Minds’ utterly vacant Sparkle in the Rain is the pinnacle of it all for me).
Tom Ewing said it best here:
“This widescreen, broad-brush rock music repels and fascinates me simultaneously. It’s repellent because I feel manipulated by it, dragged into a state of emotive groupthink I want to kick out against. And it’s fascinating because the manipulation sometimes works: Every so often the Big Music gets right under my skin.”
Choice cuts:
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High-res →
A feature I had the pleasure of putting together on the Bristol-based Flying Saucer Attack/Third Eye Foundation/Movietone/etc scene. Must admit that Instrumentals 2015 kind of drifted over me–decent enough, but it didn’t feel like there was much to hold onto. I saw FSA at one point in the 90s, at an endearingly ramshackle show. Pearce played the entire gig through the same model of (cheap, tiny) practice amp that my parents bought for me when I was a teenager. There’s something great about seeing really crappy, unreliable gear on stage, not just for the anyone-can-do-this feel, but also because there’s a certain thrill in knowing everything could go horribly wrong at any moment.
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This is the “Moog” version of Stereolab’s “Super Falling Star,” taken from a magazine/CD compilation issued at some point in the ‘90s. If the ‘lab do ever come back, and I guess that possibility is still open, I wouldn’t mind at all if it sounded something like this. Stripped down, no drums, getting closer toward the kosmische side of krautrock rather than Dinger’s metronomic precision. It’s got beauty, sadness, and a few playful tweaks of star-trailing synth, all just quietly whirling in time.
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Been on a 4AD kick lately, largely due to reading Martin Aston’s great Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD. The cover of Big Star’s “Holocaust” above is a particular favorite. I like how Howard Devoto, for it is he singing, wasn’t too reverent–definitely a wise move considering how hard it would be to get down to the blackness that was encircling Chilton at the time.
Dif Juz have been a good discovery from the book that I hadn’t heard before, although they can get a little too chilly and uninvolving for my tastes. Surprised at how many ructions there were in the 4AD family, it always seemed so unified from the outside. There’s not much love lost between Ivo and Robin Guthrie, although most or all of the acrimony seems to flow from the latter toward the former. I guess that’s the problem when you attempt to stamp a brand identity across multiple artists.
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Love this circa-1969 track from Brazilian psych-rock heads Os Brazões, who were essentially Gal Costa’s backing band indulging in a great wall of fuzz. The signature sound that runs through it, the one that sounds like a strangulated buzzard, is surely ripe for sampling. And the album it’s from, I think their only recording, is getting reissued right about now.
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Here’s something I wrote about the new Carter Tutti record.
