ILMiXor

ILM's 2005 collaborative mix project hoonja-doonja!

March 29, 2005

USA-European Connection, "Come Into My Heart (extended album version)"



Pioneering dance music producer/arranger Boris Midney was among the principal architects of the Eurodisco sound. One of the first to exploit the full potential of 48-track recording, his trademark blend of strings, horn and percussion created a sound as deep and lush as any heard during the disco era. Born in Russia, Midney was a classically-trained composer who started out writing film scores; turning to disco, however, he discovered his true calling. Working under a number of guises he produced an enormously prolific body of work from his New York City studio ERAS. He first came to American prominence with USA-European Connection. The concept was simple, take lush female vocals and arrangements (done USA style) and place them over swirling strings, and incessant synthesized beats (Euro style) and you have a hit.
--from DiscoMuseum.com's USA-European Connection page

This sort of maximalism seems like it was tailor-made for me and me alone: the string and voice arrangements that could only come from the crinkled, sweaty brow of an overzealous conservatory crank; the ambitious, proggy build, striving madly upward into a ceilingless sky; the shameful devaluation by its branding as "disco," dissociating it from less frivolous musics while it makes no secret about its gleeful acceptance of an ever-renewing subscription to pop purgatory, where repetition is a social experiment rather than an end in itself, an invitation to action rather than a series of measured tones or Danish chairs or whathaveyou. Steely Dan would disapprove (oh, they were reluctantly pro-disco and even stole a few ideas when they remembered to have their ears cocked), but towards the end of "Come Into My Heart," when the dancing has been done and we start prepping the long fadeout with jammy rock solos, there are a coupla turns by whichever out-of-work pianist and guitarist were on hand, and it's like I've stumbled into the dark and muggy Aja comedown room cuz I'd swear it was Victor Feldman and Larry Carlton bringing a little class to the class. I'd like to think of it as Midney's gift to trainspotter maximalists like me, who've stayed the course and continued to dance alone to an empty room (whether a bedroom or a club long after all comers have gone).

March 27, 2005

Fred Frith, "The Entire Works Of Henry Cow"

Eurgh, maximalism. Let's just say that this isn't an aesthetic with which I have ever formed much of a personal connection. As my partner always says, with a withering curl of the lip: too many notes. So if I must be maximalist, then please at least allow me to be minimalist with my maximalism.

In 1980, former Mott The Hoople keyboardist Morgan Fisher invited a wide range of performers to contribute pieces to an album project called Miniatures: A Sequence Of 51 Tiny Masterpieces. His only firm stipulation: that each piece should last no longer than one minute. The general idea was that contributors should aim to encapsulate a larger idea in a miniature format. In several cases, this entailed producing a miniaturised version of a larger work.

Thus it was that Roger McGough delivered a breakneck recitation of Longfellow's 22-stanza poem The Wreck Of The Hesperus, The Residents offered up a medley of the Ramones' We're A Happy Family and Bali Ha'i (from South Pacific), David Bedford compressed Wagner's Ring into one minute...

...and the experimental art/prog guitarist Fred Frith produced a one-minute sound collage comprised entirely of fragments taken from every track ever released by his former band Henry Cow, using a strict mathematical progression of his own devising.

In the album's sleeve notes, Morgan Fisher accurately identifies this as the "densest" track on the album - and you'd better believe that there was some stiff competition. It's perhaps also worth remembering that, in the absence of any available digital/sampling technology, assembling the track would have necessitated a painstakingly intricate process of manual editing and splicing. Minimal in duration; maximal in content, effort and effect; and hey, how many classic Cow tracks can you spot?

March 24, 2005

Fletcher Henderson, "Oh Baby"



What is more maximalist than the active inventing of big band jazz? This is what Don Redman was doing when he hooked up with Fletcher Henderson in 1923 and got to work arranging piles of songbooks. Borrowing from New Orleans collective improv and Jelly Roll Morton's brand of stride, Redman worked at seperating out an ever-growing coterie of instruments into something whole and multi-faceted. His mechanisms are still a part of popular music; he invented, or at least popularized, the "false start," and, due to the relative closeness in pitch and timbre of jazz-associated instruments, harmonically layered the horns and wrote in full-band pauses to make way for a single instrumental passage. These tricks equaled more sonicly interesting music, added tension and complicated the fairly basic source material. Redman blazed a trail for Duke Ellington to set up the ultimate big band blind date, where popularity rendez-vous'd with musical sophistication at an intensity unmatched before or since.

March 09, 2005

Charlie Robison, "Magnolia"

Several secrets here, most obvious one in the song itself, haha it's a guy singing a girl's song, listen all the way through and see who's laughing

Bigger secret perhaps is that I had so many country songs to choose from, turns out country songs are all full of secrets, "El Paso" and "Stays in Mexico" and "Ballad of Billie Joe" and "Delta Dawn" and "Comin' From Where I'm From" which IS a country song no kidding, wonder what it is about this music that invites such trust and then occasionally dashes it to the ground, ooh I could have also gone with Joni Harms' "The Wind" where the secret is HE'S DEAD, YOU'RE SCREWED

Anyway decided to go with "Magnolia," not the only song on Good Times like this either, and no I'm not talking about the song where he compares his Dixie Chick wife and her assets to a big huge Texican meal, biggest secret of all is that Charlie Robison and his brother Bruce -- two rough and tumblers from Bandera and San Antonio Tejas -- are two of the five best songwriters in America, now what do you think about that

March 07, 2005

Woob, "Gate"



A few months ago, the Em:t label made a phoenix-like resurrection, unexpectedly resurfacing after more than six years of dormancy. Mid-90's ambient freaks -- in between frantic searches on eBay for the label's out-of-print back catalogue -- breathed a sigh of relief and cracked a smile. "I suppose this means there's an outside chance that Paul Frankland will release something new under the Woob moniker", I thought. "But even if he did, I doubt it would sound too different from the Journeyman album he recorded a few years ago. That was a decent record, but I'm a little burned out on the whole tribal drums + field recordings thing".

I frowned. "That was the problem with Em:t" I thought, resting my chin in my hands and bowing my head. "When they were on, they were ON, meshing dark ambient and drones and field recordings and dub into epic, glacially-shifting soundscapes that made you shake your ass one minute and scared the shit out of you the next. When they weren't on, it was still good, but how many sequels to 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts' does one person need?".

Gathering my thoughts, I sat up in my chair and folded my arms. "And even moreso, that's Woob in a nutshell", I sighed to myself. "But at least I'll always have that debut Woob album".

Well, let's revise that and include the first track on the second Woob album in his canon of perfection. After that track, he jumped the shark and it was tribal drum overload from then on in (with a few gorgeous ambient flashes). The first album moved through half-hour long dub pieces, fluffy bunny ambient, screaming, about a million other things, and finally left off in some sort of dungeon with nothing but a speaker-rattling grumble for company. The second album picked up from there, with "Gate", with a low rumble that brews and thickens and builds and the tension is finally broken by the sudden appearance of drums (darkness gives way to light, etc.) ... and cuts off.

That's where the track ends. Up until that point, Frankland had done a masterful job at giving absolutely no hints as to where the song was headed. That's the secret. Of course, I already gave away this secret earlier in this post. Oh, what could have been. So now it's up to those who post after me to devise a better conclusion.

   
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