ILMiXor

ILM's 2005 collaborative mix project hoonja-doonja!

February 28, 2005

The Insect Trust, "The Eyes of a New York Woman"





People say I'm cool
Yeah, I'm a cool chick baby.
Every day I thank God
That I'm such a cool chick baby.

-Yoko Ono, "Death of Samantha"

February 27, 2005

Mr T Experience, "Deep Deep Down"



When St Peter finally calls them all in out of his book, I’m sure he’s got to have a special section of heaven roped off for pop-punk acts doing love songs. There’s something inherently great about the moments when a bunch of snot-nosed three chorders stop with the dumb pop culture references and dick gags for long enough to crack out the acoustic guitar and drop it on you on some kinda Petrarch tip. That’s why I’m mourning Blink 182’s departure at the moment: the effort our man puts into “I Miss You”, despite the fact that he can’t sing at all, is stunning. You can hear every single vein in his body straining itself just so he can do his dumb little song in anything approaching an acceptable register… it’s simultaneously heartbreaking and heart-warming. Like when you see a really ugly couple together who are obviously in love.

Anyway, yes, secrets, and having secrets. And discovering them. And revealing them, for that matter. A guy once threatened to punch me for giving him the answer to one of the clues in his Times cryptic crossword. And not in a jovial “D’oh, you crazy kids!” kind of way. In an actual “I am about to cause you severe cranial trauama” way. People hate having secrets revealed for them. They like to think that they’re intelligent just because the saw the punchline from a few seconds earlier, or that they named the murderer before Miss Marple did, or whatever. They fail to understand that the whole pretence of it was that the writer wanted you to work it before the main character did, that’s how he builds up your confidence, deux ex machina is for failures, you’re a winner. “Deep Deep Down” has a hidden meaning that I, as the 15 year old I was when I first heard the song, didn’t get. I just assumed it was a song of failed love, the sort of songs that soundtrack your being when you’re at that age. Of course, now I’m 22 years old, and can successfully hold a conversation with a member of the opposite sex without drooling, I understand that it’s just a novelty song about killing your girlfriend, but by then it doesn’t really matter. It’s your song. Enjoy.

February 26, 2005

Fischer Z, "Room Service"

i look uneasy-thanks for asking, it's all right. watch the rasta jabs, run free out to the new day. roll over onto the dotted lines. streets fold in half end to end. static three-lane ways bend into katamari traffic stops. fruit stands from river beds into avenues. breakfast for three and the world is still asleep. spoons and plates, hotel double beds. it's all right. it's morning all night.

the center of the earth is a nyc coffee shop off of broadway, a squat in philly, a warehouse in berlin--the stoney dubby savior horns mined from 1980 will save us all. smooth down the corners of the shaking masses. jump the chain link fence at the end of the night. follow the dj and the games without genres. liberators are for suckers. some say only the translator camps will survive. photo id required. the more one eyed kings the better.

if only we knew. 'it may come late'- a half second teaspoon delay pill. its all right. pull the solo synth horn hand brake back to the primitive days. what is inconceivable at this second, will be gone but not forgotten tomorrow. just keep it on with the dancing. to the turn around time. arcade classic breaks. expiration dates on the lives of the famous. its all right. what are the odds on the pope making it alive to sunday? did they get him breathing on his own again last night?check the vegas line. put me down for a hundred. reverse the curse. operation disaster. resist cease and desist.

no expiration dates. no translations. no p.i.n.'s, no text messages please. all right? walk this song down to the end of the street. hail a cab to the top of the queue. four one way avenues take me to the start, for the rest of my life. hand picked songs go to rest, pieces fallen from the board. everyone keep on dancing. the queen goes eight different ways. the fruit doesn't hang low and faded anymore. who let that guy into the building? arabs in the hall---its all right, we go back, we're tight. the dance floor keeps me wired into sunday afternoon so i check for room service and put some clothes on before it gets here. it will be all right.

(posted by BB on behalf of kephm)

-disc 2 ends here-

February 22, 2005

Eddie Harris, "Smoke Signals"


I don't understand how jazz purists work. Which is fair 'nough, since I hardly understand how jazz works in terms outside my semi-rudimentary pop-crit visceral language -- me being the type to judge Roach and Bonham or Monk and Worrell much the same way, with little regard for whatever mumbojumbic technicianistic beardstrokespeak used by those fusion-averse diehards that wrote Miles Davis out of their wills after 1970. The dabbler set I roll with is allegedly the same type that bought up Eddie Harris' albums in droves in the '60s -- his first hit (and the first million-selling jazz single) was a cover of the theme to "Exodus" in '61; the album it originated from, Exodus to Jazz, became a quick gold-seller, and he found better-than-modest chart success with subsequent crossover-friendly LPs like 1967's The Electrifying Eddie Harris and Swiss Movement, his 1969 Montreux-recorded instant-chemistry collab with Les McCann (featuring "Compared to What" of semi-recent Coke ad reappropriation infamy). A lot of jazz purists didn't take much of a shine to him, considering he was a bit of a mad scientist-slash-hot rod customizer when it came to his instruments -- at various points he played saxophones with trombone mouthpieces, clarinet joints and bassoon reeds. The tinkering peaked with his usage of the Varitone, an electric doohickey with amplification and tonal effects that distorted the familiar sax tone into subtly yet strangely-nuanced distortions. Ain't how Charlie Parker did it.

And thank God for that. "Smoke Signals" originates from Silver Cycles, recorded in September '68 and released a few months afterwards, and it holds an interesting distinction: it allegedly contains the first recorded musical utilization of the Echoplex -- a device that allows continous tape-delay effects that, per the name, facilitate the ability to overdub gigantic walls of echo on an instrument. Harris went a bit overboard with it, and it shows: at first the sax sounds simply as though it's being played in the center of an empty concrete parking garage, and then it expands and oscillates its way out towards self-dueling, inner-ear-inverting gigantic-edifice sonic ricochet Lee Perry turf (a good 2-3 years before it was Lee Perry turf). Imagine listening to a sax-heavy improv jazz piece and having difficulty knowing not only where the melody is going to go but where it is at that very moment, and you can appreciate this song on a technical level most bebop cats must've been dumbstruck by. And on a melodic level, it's immediately gratifying: aside from Harris' playing -- which, after the Great Rockcrit Cliche Purge that always gets threatened every so often, will be one of maybe five tracks that could still be referred to without fear of reprisal as "ethereal" -- are a chorus of bizarre soprano female voices who alternate between space-age wails and cocktail-lounge bop scat and sound like they originated from the Logan's Run Tabernacle Choir, a subatomic bass you hardly notice unless you focus on its elasticity, and an inspired beat that swings from subtle time-keeping to unobstructively flashy rolls and flourishes in just the right places. In essence, it sounds like how a Charles Deaton building looks.

February 18, 2005

100 Flowers "Strip Club"

There's another world that's a lot like this one, only it's much better because John Talley-Jones is on the radio singing about lust. Someone on ILM pointed out that Jimmy Webb was able to pack a lot into Wichita Lineman's 37 different words--this evokes as much with nine words to spare.

February 17, 2005

Von Lmo, "This Is Poprock"

Instead of selecting a tune that sounds like it's from another world I've chosen a song performed by a man from another world. In this case it's Von Lmo, who claims he was born in the black light dimension in 1924 (and not in Brooklyn in the 50's as others maliciously report). Several years later he built a balsa wood rocketship and crash landed on Saturn, eventually studying music there under Sun Ra. While there he befriended a music student named Juno who told Von Lmo about the planet Strazar. So they used suspended animation to travel there and found it to their liking, residing there for several centuries.

Sometime in the 60's he made his way to Earth, ending up in Coney Island. He began working with various art-rock combos, including the power-tool weilding Pumpo, Red Transistor (with Rudolph Grey), and Kongress. During this time he was banned from pretty much every club in New York (except Max's Kansas City) for his on-stage antics, including out of control pyrotechnics/smoke machines, equipment destruction and violent behavior towards other band members.

In 1981 with help from Juno of Saturn and long-time art-rock conspirator Otto Von Ruggins, Von Lmo recorded the album Future Language from which this cut is taken. Supposedly dissatified with either the result or the cover picture of him without his trademark wig, many of the copies were destroyed. The eventual CD re-issue had to be taken from an unopened LP. After playing the final Max's Kansas City show Von Lmo was called back to Strazar to help solve an ecological disaster, and he was not heard from again until 1991 when Ecstatic Peace issued the long-lost Red Transistor 7". Between 1994 and 1997 Von Lmo released several other discs of skronk/noise and made some live appearances on both coasts before disappearing again, probably to help Strazar avoid some other calamity.

While this particular cut was not a top 40 hit here on Earth, I'm sure it blew up huge on Strazar. My favorite song by him is the Cosmic Interception version of "Leave Your Body" but unfortunately at 5+ minutes I can't include it here. Please seek it out if you enjoy "This is Poprock."

February 14, 2005

Dead Man Ray, "BeeGee"

Listen to the way Dead Man Ray's Daan Stuyven sneers his lines. Try to penetrate the song and make sense of the lyrics. You can't. There's no way to connect to the song. "BeeGee" is all about texture, the meaning of the words are superfluous. There's nothing to be gained from connecting the words into a message. Dead Man Ray learned everything from The The's Dusk and then realized there needed to be some cut-up disco injected in their sound. Daan knew why I liked Matt Johnson's music: it wasn't about the lyrics, it was about the voice and the hook. Dead Man Ray inhabit a different world - one which I feel part of. They're outsiders to the Pop universe. They deliberately play with the Pop rules and the English language. It's about an outsider looking at the Pop puzzle and throwing the pieces in the air. Let it fall on the table and see how it looks. Or sounds.

February 11, 2005

Gil Scott-Heron, "Shut 'Em Down (Jaymc Edit)"

It's 1979, and the U.S. has just suffered the worst nuclear disaster in its history, the meltdown at Three Mile Island. Amidst the ensuing public panic, as thousands of nearby residents have been potentially exposed to radiation, the media gravely debates the safety of nuclear power plants and asks what steps can be taken to prevent further failures.

And then Gil Scott-Heron steps up, armed with jubilant horns and female backup singers and his own great embittered croon, and pretty much dismisses the entire terms of the debate: "If you want perfection, if that's what it takes / Then you can't use people, don't use people, you know people make mistakes." To Gil, the only logical solution -- which many pundits aren't even considering, since we're still in the heat of the Cold War -- is to just (why not?) shut all the plants down.

I'm not normally one for political or protest songs -- half the time I don't pay attention to lyrics, anyway -- but I make an exception for Gil Scott-Heron. Where I see something like Springsteen's The Rising as sadly opportunistic, or Conor Oberst's "When the President Talks to God" as an attention-seeking stab at "seriousness," I like to imagine that Gil wakes up in the morning, reads the paper, and says, shaking his head, "Motherfucker. Looks like I got more work to do." For him, it's a duty to tell it like it is (and to dress it up in a baritone that drawls over awesome funk vamps). And for that I'm thankful.

-disc 1 ends here-

February 10, 2005

Lyrics Born with E-40 and Casual, "Callin' Out (remix)"

So you're an indie/underground rapper. That means you're supposed to stay uncommercial, stay conscious, stay away from that ignorant bling shit, say 'fuck the radio and mainstream.' You're definitely not supposed to sell your song as a jingle to giant corporations like Coca Cola or Motorola.

And so Lyrics Born's original version of "Callin' Out" sells mobile phones and diet cola. And he makes a remix that includes a mc notorious for both obscure slang and gangsta talk (E-40 is the Bay Area's Raekwon, if'n you ask me) and another most famous for losing a rhyme battle live on air. And it blows up Northern California for a lot of last year (or so I'm told from reliable sources.)

One more thing being indie/underground means: defying expectations and playing by your own rules. I call that chutzpah.

February 08, 2005

Laurie Anderson, "Example #22"

My girlfriend introduced me to Big Science, an album that I am very, very pleased to have procured. If anything, it has become ridiculously apparent that Laurie Anderson has got los huevos, in large part for having an actual hit song with the strange eight-minute spoken-word (mostly) vocoder-laden "O Superman". Spoken word! The critics called it "avant garde" and the public liked it!

But this track isn't "O Superman". This is "Example #22", where she sings about the sun, the birds, and hitting her lover up for whatever it is Laurie Anderson hits her lovers up for. Throw in a wind section, a bagpipe, bang-on-whatever's-there percussion, and some wild wailing and you have yourself one genuinely weird song. Not so weird, though, that it fails to be extremely catchy - it sounds like something The Books would try (and probably fail) to do with samples and guitar. She's very obviously the best at doing what she does, and I guess that entails, well, being Laurie Anderson.

(yes, i realize there's a smartass connection between this and "German Girl" when you play one next to the other. no, it wasn't intentional. really, i swear!)

February 07, 2005

Bobby Orlando, "German Girl"

Bobby Orlando is a man. A man from Westchester, who turned down a musical scholarship at age 18 to become a boxer. Boxing wasn't for him, however--too pretty a face to waste in a ring, too much fun had hanging out with the New York Dolls--and he started writing and producing music. Dance music. 1980 is the dawn of O Records, a time when disco was dead, or so they started to say, but the HI-NRG freestyle craze hadn't yet hit its peak. A risky proposition, some said to our hero Bobby. Never one to not take the random, insane plunge, though, he beat the naysayers and O Records was a success; its most enduring act being the Flirts, a sort of female Menudo, Bobby Orlando with an ever-rotating selection of female session singers to carry the lyrics. Well, the Flirts and the Pet Shop Boys. Ah yes: Bobby and the Pet Shop Boys. Our man Bobby basically wrote "West End Girls." The original version of the song still exists on The Best of O Records Vol. 2. Situation with a complication: your producer has just written you the best song you've had in your repertoire so far, but keeps trying to set you up on dates with the Flirts and convince you you aren't really gay. What do you do? The Pet Shop Boys, they steal the song and move to another record label, leaving their producer without a penny for his song. Which made Bobby very angry, indeed. So angry, in fact, that he basically shut down shop, went to law school, passed the NYS Bar, and sued the Pet Shop Boys himself in a rather Kill Bill-level of vengeance obsession.

Bobby Orlando took the millions he won off the Pet Shop Boys and now lives back in Westchester, where he breeds show Rottweilers. But not before he released two fantastic, classic freestyle/HI-NRG albums, one of which contains "German Girl," a song that sort of sounds like what would've happened had the Sisters of Mercy been from Astoria or Brooklyn.

Bobby Orlando, you have done every single thing I've ever wanted to do, from boxing to screwing over the Pet Shop Boys. You are my hero, my idol, the greatest man who ever lived and I salute you.

February 04, 2005

Jackie McLean, "Soul"



Jackie McLean doesn't so much dismiss the blues as vivisect it, his mid-'60s recordings radiating out from the firm bop of his roots. By 1967 when 'Bout Soul was issued, Jackie had tried the Ornette stuff: the dismissal of a harmonic or melodic epicenter, the squawks and blares, always with a careful toe in the trad. Much of his risk-taking is thanks to ILM-fave Grachan Moncur III, whose compositions heavily dot the '60s McLean discog and allow the cat to open up, especially harmonically. Jackie's own compositions of the decade reflect his pal's dexterity and moxie.


"Soul" juts out on 'Bout Soul as a microcosm of the raison d'etre of jazz, i.e. soul. Barbara Simmons, poet, clearly has some experience with the subject matter, brandishing a mellifluous flow that anticipates Foxy Brown (not the rapper) and recalls Satchmo's scat. A Google search on Ms. Simmons yields little (I wonder if that’s her on the cover?) except for Amiri Baraka's incendiary lament on the disappearance of so many vital Black artists. (Amiri Baraka is the Poet Laureate of my home state, New Jersey. GMIII is a Jersey native as well, naturally.) Grachan Moncur III's nimble writing accounts for Prez and Rollins and Ornette without sounding schizo. A sultry theme swings along and the band burbles through and around the solos, an appropriate backdrop for Simmons’s enjambment and other literary maneuvers. Yeeaaaaahhhh, man. Soul is the holy rollers and all the unholy rollers, groovin’ in their own kinda way.

(In this case, the song was pulled from the Grachan Moncur III collection on Mosaic Records.)

February 03, 2005

Screamin' Rachael, "Fun With Bad Boys"

Screamin' Rachael was a former punk rocker who went on to become one of house music's first divas. She was also a classically trained vocalist, although you might not realize it from the bulk of her singing on "Fun With Bad Boys". But with this track, the genius is in the simplicity. The song consists of a bludgeoning, thudding bass line and not much else, while Rachael's lyrics are energetic but ultimately inconsequential. Remember all those James Brown tracks where you basically know all of the lyrics once you hear the title? The same principle applies here.

A word of caution -- you might want to glue the speakers to the floor for this one lest they undertake a random walk around your apartment.

Deee-Lite, "Good Beat"

January 1991. Sky is purple, it's snowing, room is lit from within the closet, where my desk is, by a flexible desk lamp, which makes the room seem purple too. My sisters, three and four, are in the living room. I'm looking at a Life magazine book of classic photographs--the proto-psychedelic delayed-flash Halloween kids-in-costume one, the Man Ray one Damon & Naomi will use on the cover of More Sad Hits. Holographic foil postcards on inside of closet walls. Bunch of cassettes, this being the newest. Spent my Christmas money on it and other things; play it first. Number six on Spin's year-end albums list, love the single, Miss Kier no. 1 lust object. I'm 15. Prince conditioning means psychedelic dance music is what I want out of life. Beat and bassline = the most powerful, cavernous-sounding thing I've heard on a record to that point. Vocal sounds playful and narcotic at the same time, mesmerized by the same aural goings-on I am and articulating it as simply as can be done. "I just wanna hear a good beat. I just wanna. I just wanna." Me too. God, me too.

February 02, 2005

Della Reese, "If It Feels Good, Do It"

The one abiding regret of my days as a club DJ in the 1988-89 "rare groove" era: that I never properly plugged this belter of a track to my mixed gay/lesbian/straight/bi crowd of MA1-wearing "Smash Clause 28" barricade-stormers.

To my continued astonishment, we then managed to get all the way through the 1990s and out the other side, without a David Morales or a Clivilles/Cole drafting in a Kym Mazelle or a Jocelyn Brown for the rattle-yer-freedom-rings circuit party remake. Good thing or bad thing? Ooh, I could swing either way.

Day-glo decals on brushed denim hotpants. Free your mind and your ass will follow!

Let-it-all-hang-out off-Broadway love-ins. Try a trio! Try a trio! To Capricorn and Pisces add a Leo!

Lurex gowns bursting through lamé disco-slash-curtains. I don't care what people say, I'm gonna do it anyway!

A lost anthem for a forgotten revolution.

LaBelle, "Moonshadow"

I wasn't around in the '60s or early '70s, but I have the feeling that most of the cover tunes recorded back then were done in the spirit of creating/cultivating a new "popular songbook," where the material was seen as a thing greater, more durable, more monolithic than the young and relatively unproven artists trying their hand at it. Funny thing is, a lot of those pop standards and their songwriters (Jimmy Webb, Laura Nyro, the very early work of Randy Newman) fell well below the cultural radar after a while, and the once-unproven interpreters are now, by and large, very very famous even today.

One songwriter young people know (young meaning "my age," which I realize isn't that young) is Cat Stevens, either because they've seen Harold and Maude or they're aware that he's a has-been hippie who's now a controversial fundamentalist Muslim. He wasn't known as a hitmaker for other musicians, but he did get covered by a group whose already accomplished frontwoman would go on to become a living freaking legend.

Sixties/seventies pop music wasn't the wonderful rainbow of inclusivity that idealists wish it was (that fantastical world where the Top 40 was colorblind, gender-neutral, and genre-oblivious). Record companies had marketing savvy and wanted to sell product. If black R&B singers wanted to be taken seriously as artists AND put food on the table, they'd have to go after the newly moneyed baby boomers, "sophisticated" college grads eager to consume high culture while remaining socially conscious and all that jazz. Nina Simone cornered this market; Roberta Flack as well. Aretha Franklin recorded one of the definitive versions of Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Less famously, a 1972 album by LaBelle kicked off with the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." The LP's title track was a funked-out, slow-burning, poetically licentious nine-and-a-half-minute treatment of Cat Stevens' three-minute folk throwaway "Moonshadow." It wasn't reverent, it didn't cautiously lift the song with chopsticks; it took naff new-age candy floss and turned it into elaborate space-gospel with hot legs and a sense of humor.

(The flipside to all this is that later in the '70s, all the old-line respectable rock dudes had to adapt to changing trends so no matter what else they were doing they all made their obligatory disco songs. Cat Stevens too. There was no use for him in the 1977 world -- you couldn't spit without hitting a better and more relevant artist that year -- but somehow, a perky proto-electro rollerskating jam named "Was Dog a Doughnut" found its way onto his Izitso album and became a minor hit.)

   
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