ILMiXor

Our journey is complete.

2005-09-12T06:27:00.000-04:00

Kode9 + Space Ape: Ghost Town

2005-09-11T08:50:00.000-04:00

'I am the ghost captain.' (Lee Perry)

Cavernous, Dark Dubstep. The Product of Glasgow (Kode9, the producer) + Jamaica (the vox) + Coventry (the source) + India (samples) = The sound of (South) London. It couldn't have come out of anywhere else.

Luka Bloom - Bad

2005-09-08T09:56:00.000-04:00

An Irish icon covering an Irish icon. Folk singer Luka Bloom released this song on his 2000 LP of cover songs called Keeper of the Flame. When selecting material to cover he was disappointed that he couldn't seem to find a song from another Irish icon, Van Morrison, that suited him but he suggests that this U2 song found him at a memorable time away from home:

"It was winter, 1988. Do the gig at the Red Lion in Greenwich Village and decide to take the night train back to D.C. I’m in Penn Station at one a.m. It’s a very sad and scary scene there -- many walking wounded, cold, huddled, mumbling casualties. By the time the train pulls in, I’m in a dark place inside. I sit on the train and take out my walkman. As the train pulls out of Penn, I stumble across a radio station, the opening notes of the Edge’s intro ease into my ears, and I instantly feel connected to something serene and beautiful. I leave the New York skyline to the sound of ‘Let it go, and so to fade away...’ Somehow, all was well in the world again. I was meant to hear this song, in this way, at this moment. And so it is one of my very favorite songs of all time. I could never have imagined that 12 years later I’d be singing it, celebrating it, passing it on."

Hearing a familiar song while alone in a foreign land can have an incredible power. It is almost like enjoying the warmth and comfort of an old friend. Hurrah for music.

Beaver Harris / Don Pullen 360 ° Experience - Gorée

2005-09-07T05:15:00.000-04:00

From Brazil we make the transatlantic journey and land on the island of Gorée, the westernmost point of Africa and former center of the slave trade. This excerpt combines two separate segments from the full 17 minute piece.

Vinicius Cantuária - "Inútil Paisagem"

2005-09-06T04:23:00.000-04:00

Vinicius Cantuária makes dream pop, 21st Century Nova Bossa Nova, fragile love songs coated in dubby sugar. He ought to be the biggest Pop Star in the world; maybe, somewhere, he is.

Murcof - "Mes"

2005-09-06T02:15:00.000-04:00

Speaking of fake authenticity, here, courtesy of producer Murcof (from Tijuana, Mexico), we have recontextualized Morton Feldman uneasily looping through rain-slicked yet impeccably focused Hitchcock streets. It is a bit of a crime to take a piece of what is such a well-conceived and well-regarded piece of musical DNA (the 2002 album Martes), but there you have it. This music excels not only on the level of dubbed-out horizontal micro-house, but as a first rate example of an inclusive reach backward to the original “classical avant-garde” whose techniques and ideas loom large over modern laptop techno sounds. That it is so engaging on a level outside such scholarly pusuits is another game altogether.

Hilary Duff - The Tiki Tiki Tiki Room

2005-09-05T09:48:00.000-04:00

There was a time in 20th century American history when the Polynesian Chinese restaurant was all the rage. In stark contrast to today's no-nonsense, decorless noodle shops, the Polynesian Chinese restaurant was high tack, all lipstick-red carpeting and brass statues of fire-breathing dragons. Some restaurants had aquariums with exotic fish; some had pebble-strewn fountains adorning the dining area. The food never strayed particularly far from your parents' American-Chinese favorites, but there might have been a pineapple ring on the plate, to satisfy the "Polynesian" requirement.

As I was growing up, these places were dying out. 1980s restaurantgoers found the caricaturishness offensive, and they wanted their experience to be guilt-free (if not completely unassimilated).

The same was happening with the Disney brand around this time. And although Disney took at least another decade to become synonymous with baptism-by-Noxema, its science project EPCOT Center was chipping away at the spirit that made the eponymous Anaheim park so iconic: its warped sense of adventure, its passion for surrealist children's-fiction, and its thirdhand knowledge of the far-flung.

Hilary Duff's Tiki room isn't one of rumbling, soundstagey Arthur Lyman- like war drums, or menacing monolith monsters with wide eyes frozen open in stone. Hers is a fake authenticity that builds on the premise of an older fake authenticity, while removing the scary edges. And since her very young demographic doesn't come equipped with reference-knowledge of Easter Island and mid-century cod-kitsch and so on, the multiple levels of removal are meaningless to them.

But in a way, their cognitive tabula rasa puts them at an advantage over me; they're free to come up with a whole new arsenal of ridiculous constructs.

Dry & Heavy - Dawn Is Breaking

2005-09-01T03:00:00.000-04:00

A new obsession of mine is dub. I stumbled headlong into the music through my best friend's band and found the love crystallized when I befriended some DJs heavily into dub, dancehall, and roots reggae. I have plenty of not-so-fond memories of the music. Growing up, my neighbors were notorious for their Saturday night parties where they would treat the block to their basement soundsystems, pissing off most of the houses around them.

My pick is in Japan, one of the major homes of reggae music. It's such a giant market that there are special dub plates made there that never make it to other sections of the world. I stumbled across Dry & Heavy trying to find some dub remixes. The drum and bass duo of Shigemoto Nanao aka Dry and Takeshi Akimoto aka Heavy make experimental roots reggae with help from friends. This song features the vocal stylings of Likkie Mai and the gentle waves that lull you to a comfortable zone. Music to think or smoke to. Music to comfort the soul.

Huun Huur-Tu - Aa Shuu De Kei-oo (live)

2005-08-30T13:55:00.000-04:00

Wiggling eastwards from Mumbai, and jiggling a little northwards, we now find ourselves nestling on the border between Mongolia and Siberia, deep in the heart of the Republic of Tuva (Тыва Республика). Maybe we're on the banks of one of the republic's 8000 rivers? Or maybe we're on horseback, thundering across the steppes? Since many Tuvan songs concern themselves directly with equestrian matters, then I guess it's probably the latter.

Think of Tuva, and naturally you'll think of Khoomei: the country's indigenous folk music, with its instantly recognisable brand of throat singing. Along with the altogether rockier Yat-Kha, Huun Huur-Tu - here recorded live, about three or four years ago - are the music's best known ambassadors. This track features Khoomei's most distinctive characteristic: that low, almost mechanical drone, with its multiple harmonics, as produced and sustained by a circular breathing technique which, notoriously, can shave several years off one's life expectancy.

Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar - "Disco '82"

2005-08-29T07:00:00.000-04:00

I'm stranded in Russia, left for dead by a cackling Dan Perry and two well-known teen lesbians. (It is unclear if he is mocking my fate, or giggling due to being in the company of well-known teen lesbians.) It's freezing cold and all I have to get out of here is a magic iPod that will transport me to the country of origin of the song that I play. But the Leningrad Cowboys are actually Finnish or something, I know nothing of the music of the Middle-East, and the battery is too weak to carry me back the home turf that is Australia, the one place that I could offer any real insight. I thumb through the artists and find a familiar Sri Lankan name, but I waver. "Imagine if this was not the fantastic adventure it clearly is, but some kind of ...collaborative musical archiving project - do you really want to be the 82,495th person to post an M.I.A. song on an MP3 blog?" But the backlight is fading - time is running out! I chance upon a mysterious playlist entitled "Bollywood soundtrack disco" and press play. The landscape warps around me, then settles. I find myself now standing outside a nightclub in Mumbai. A DFA-ish disco rhythm is echoing from the door. Have I been cast into some sort of Indian hipster enclave?? Thankfully, the distinctive strings and Hindi-English singing comes in over the top, and it turns out that I am in fact on the set of 1982 Bollywood flick Khud-Daar. I eventually negotiate an uncredited walk-on role in the movie, exchange the appearance fee for a second-hand battery charger and zap home.

* thanks to Gaz Mullygrubber for the track - apparently there is much, much more where this came from!

t.A.T.u - All About Us

2005-08-25T17:05:00.000-04:00

Ironic indie's favorite pop duo since Daphne & Celeste roar back with a vengeance with this juggernaut of a song. I didn't understand why t.A.T.u. was the pop group it was okay for everyone to like (okay, that's a lie; if they hadn't spent so much of their onstage career tonguing each other down and tweaking nipples, many people wouldn't have looked twice at them) until I heard "Show Me Love", a roaring, stomping banshee wail of malevolent desire awash in more production tricks than Britney Spears' voice. When these girls are on, they are a menacing beast; throughout the pop sheen and fragile girly-girl vocals lurks a palpable sense of rage. You can taste the fury zooming out of their best efforts, the feral snarl of a couple of girls sworn to rock the world that hates yet covets them.

Given that foundation, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that "All About Us" starts out like a serial killer stalking a half-naked coed drenched in sweat through a fun house and then proceeds to smack the listener in the face with a sock filled with awesomeness. Shame on me, I guess; I'd written them off as a flash-in-the-pan encapsulation-of-one-moment act who wouldn't be heard from again. I certainly didn't expect them to swan back onto the scene with the most stirring, emotionally-charged song of their career. Every time I play this song, I want to stomp and smash things; it amps me up in a way I haven't felt since the first time I heard Big Black. Somehow they do this by remaining completely faithful to their initial sound palette and overlaying it with the creepiest ascending vocal line ever recorded. I can't adequately explain it; it's almost like watching Alaskan fishermen club Seal.

"If. They. Hurt. You. THEY. HURT. ME. TOO."

Me hear you, ladies. Me hear you.

Leila - 'A Vital Resolution'

2005-08-24T22:03:00.000-04:00

A good old-fashioned bootleg, just like Momma used to bake in 2001. Audaciously, it mix-and-matches two of the most stunning pieces of music ever committed to disc: the spectral passion of Aaliyah's 'We Need A Resolution' vocal and Vitalic's so-clean-it-hurts nosebleed techno tour de force 'Poney Part 1'. Odd choices, given how un-malleable both originals sound, and indeed the mix starts off awkward, almost like it's a mistake. There's genius at work here though. It rapidly coheres, the two songs sliding into place alongside each other like vast tectonic plates, and propels itself with the force of an earthquake to a climax which will fuck with your head: a cacophony of Aaliyahs poltergeisting desperately over empty space, bruised and battered by the pound pound pound of all those questions - "where were you last night?" "what was in your head?" "am I supposed to change?" and the monstrous, unrelenting Vitalic force.

Originally I thought I'd have to justify this with the most tenuous of links to the theme. Vitalic was born in rural Ukraine, according to his online bio, which is kinda east of Israel if you have a really bad sense of direction. (Never mind that this all turned out to be a filthy LIE which the sly Frenchman designed to fool gullible journalists like yours truly.) And, um, the original 'We Need A Resolution' sounded kinda Eastern. But that was before I realised who the Leila responsible for this was. The treatment of the voice rang a faint bell, the way as the track builds it increasingly resembles an instrument being manipulated and distorted rather than a human singing, while at the same time having its most emotive vocal qualities magnified. And then I found Leila's website, whence this was originally jacked, and lo and behold it was that Leila, the one who used to be Björk's keyboardist, who did a couple of fantastic electronic soul albums (Like Weather and Courtesy Of Choice) a few years back which made liberal use of that vocal trick, who is originally from Iran. Quelle coincidence!

(PS this also makes me realise that further mixes of Ciara's 'Oh' and Ginuwine's 'Pony' over 'Poney' are needed post fucking haste.)

Jacob Hoffman with Kandel's Orchestra - Doina and Hora (Hebrew Dance)

2005-08-23T20:55:00.000-04:00

We've slipped a tiny bit to the West with this one, but Ned forced my hand by posting Marc Almond brooding over melancholy Russian folk music.

More Klezmer music should feature blazing xylophone solos played over blurry violin drones. In fact, the mixture of drones plus mad soloing recalls Coltrane's "India", at least in my mind. Naturally, I've always felt that jazz should feature more solos played over drones as well.

In truth, the age (1923) and fidelity of the recording smears the line between droning and lo-fi fuzz, but no matter. After a tension-filled intro, the piano finally leads the tune into the proper "dance" portion, which sounds like mild elation after what preceded it even though it's not much more than a series of drunken lurches. But soloist Hoffman is the clear superstar here with his dextrous, delicate xylophone work. It kind of makes me wonder how he would have fared as a swordfighter ...

Marc Almond -- "Always and Everywhere (I Will Follow You)"

2005-08-23T01:49:00.000-04:00

Partially suggested by Tantrum's observation of the melancholy in Prezioso's song, partially also by the (very) low-key electronics at the heart of my chosen tune, ultimately my choice here is simply due to my remembering one of the more inspired moments in Marc Almond's wide-ranging work. Almond's been huge in Russia for a number of years, and starting with a solo tour in the early nineties he has since returned many times, to the point where he maintains an apartment there, but the idea to do an album concentrating on nothing but Russian songs from throughout the twentieth century (and before) came from a fan and fellow musician, Misha Kucherenko, who felt that Almond (to use Marc's words in describing it) "would have a feel for those torch songs that express the Russian soul." Almond was surprised but eventually persuaded to participate in a wide-ranging project released as Heart On Snow, one of his best albums.

According to the liner notes, this song was one of the standards in the repetoire of Vadim Kozin, a musical superstar in WWII-era Russia who fell foul of Stalin partially due to his refusal to perform for him in 1945, partially due to his homosexuality, which though criminalized in the Soviet era he openly flaunted. Though he survived through the mid-nineties, Kozin never regained his fame, living quietly with a lover near the Arctic Circle gulag he suffered in for five years.

It's little wonder that Almond, a student not only of song but personality, would have found Kozin's story of interest, and the song as translated is notable for being a love song -- again like Prezioso's -- that specifies no gender in the object of desire. The delivery and arrangement is elegant, sad, shrouded in nighttime shadow, the melodrama in the lyric perfectly apt for Almond while suggesting the potential emotional depths of Russian poetry and music both. It is perhaps a bit formal as well -- Almond has had more gripping vocal performances over the years -- but it's an exercise that still works, an exploration into, for non-Russian musicians and listeners both, unknown waters.

Prezioso featuring Marvin - "Somebody"

2005-08-22T21:45:00.000-04:00

Four-to-the-floor detour! This is a wonderfully melancholic slice of Italo-trance-pop. At first blush, it sounds like your standard-issue bleeps-vocoders-and-rainbows-everywhere gorgonzola, but then you catch bits of the lyrics:

Hey, what about today?
Is everything ok?
The world is in my hands
But I don't care
Something in my mind
If I could realize
The colours in my eyes are black and white

Don't believe it's true
If I blame it on U
I'm only trying to hide
I'm not right
Forgive me if U can
Sometimes I'm not a man
My body's here but it's without me

Lonely among a thousand people
This is how I feel...

Somebody please help me where is my soul
Somebody please help me where is my soul
Somebody please help me where is my soul
Somebody please help me where is my soul

This is the kind of thing you'll likely find on my iShufffle when I need to spend more than two hours on a plane, and am simultaneously sleepy, overcaffeinated, and in need of a shower & a hug.

P.S. Many thanks to Ms. Candicissima for the hosting space!

Dr Alban ft Leila K - "Hello Africa"

2005-08-22T18:10:00.000-04:00

"Hello Africa, tell me how you're doing / Hello Motherland, tell me how you're doing." Born in Nigeria, living in Stockholm, qualified as a dentist, working as a pop star - this was Dr Alban's first hit and his style comes intact. The loping digital reggae rhythms, the gentle and polite flow, the slight, let's admit it, gaucheness. Alban is a long way from home, so is the music he plays: technically these beats and rhymes are a planet, not just a continent, distant from JA or NY, but that cut-off adds to the appeal. "Hello Africa" isn't unique among 90s Scandopop in its focus on the mother continent - the marvellous Stockholm Eritreans Midi, Maxi and Efti recorded a beautiful album later in the 1990s in which their heavy-handed Western teenpop styles are always in suspension with echoes of Africa, a translated, digitised, mediated Africa. I could have picked one of their songs but "Hello Africa" strikes as deep. Unlike many of the serious rock musicians who drew inspiration from Africa, Alban wants an answer to the conversation he's starting: he knows that transient pop hits are likelier to do well on the streets of Abuja and Lagos, his greetings are genuine.

T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Contonou Dahomet - "Minsato Le, Mi Dayihome"

2005-08-18T21:48:00.000-04:00

Go very slightly east, then south, then back in time. West Africa in the '70s: a musical polyglot, where the cultures of one country sashayed with another, resulting in some propitious musical strains. Fela's the prime example. The embodiment of flexible continental borders, French and English colonialism, intercontinental pollination from North America, Cuba, Jamaica, Europe; rock, funk, jazz, bossa nova, PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC, etc; places to play, people to make dance, the proliferation of cheapish recording studios and record pressing. Revolution!

The Republic of Benin's most outstanding '70s band (actually, the only band from Benin I've ever heard, but no mind), T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou Dahomey, kicks off this year's fantastic Luaka Bop comp, World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love's a Real Thing, with the track "Minsato Le, Mi Dayihome". The tune is all fading sun, mosquitoes and after school fights, buoyed by the inherently supple rhythms of coastal living (does Benin even have a coast?). Fela Kuti and James brown are criterions of this kind of merciless A-to-B funk, yet neither possesses the well-ventilated touch or polyrhthymic variations of Poly-Rythmo. Alert but never manic (authentic JB screams aside), the song builds its psych cache atop a raw "Psychotic Reactions" intro. Aside from fundamentals, a singular sound, though for reference, it seems to have developed in parallel and half a world away from Os Mutantes, and is one of my personal favorite musical unearthings of the year. More where this came from on Soundway's immaculate T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo compilation The Kings of Benin Urban Groove, 1972-1980.

Ornette Coleman and Prime Time - "Unlabeled Track 3"

2005-08-18T09:10:00.000-04:00

This is from a concert recording I um...found...on a um...network in a folder labelled "London 1987." The sound quality is not so great, theres a lot of tape hiss, but the band is pretty clear and very audible. I don't recognize the song, although it may be off "Virgin Beauty" given the date, but Prime Time is playing like crazy. Ornette doesn't hit the mic until about halfway through, when he blows through first on trumpet, then alto sax.

To you, MCD

edit - DAR! Listening to this again I don't know where I came up with that stuff about Ornette not showing up til halfway through. He's all over this track, from around 40 seconds in, switching back and forth from sax to trumpet and back.

Around the World in Eighty Minutes!

2005-08-18T08:57:00.000-04:00

Alright, here we go! The theme of the mix is "Around the World In Eighty Minutes" and so to imitate the classic tale, we're going to start and finish in London, heading east the whole way.

We'll try to keep this moving pretty fast, with everyone given a full workday to post, and going in the order they signed up, and if they can't finish in time, whoever's behind them gets 'cuts' and the one who dropped the ball goes afterwards. Since I proposed the resurrection of the mix, that means I'll be starting things off.

Coming up after me, MCD, then Tom from Freaky Trigger, then Tantrum the Cat.

2005-08-16T09:32:00.000-04:00

So, what do you say to another round, then?

Here are the individual blurb booklets for each CD.

2005-04-12T17:16:00.000-04:00

Volume One.
Volume Two.
Volume Three.
Volume Four.

Each booklet should be printed using double-sided (Duplex) printing, with the print setting set to "flip on short side".

2005-04-11T18:45:00.000-04:00

Thanks to all you spudboys and spudgirls who participated in or otherwise contributed to the ILMiXor shenanigans. Now that we've finished Disc 4: Maximalism, we're going to take a break, and possibly pick up again over the summer, if the ILMiXmasters are recharged and ready for more.

To recap, if you haven't been following along: We've been doing a series of collaborative mix CDs in the form of an mp3 blog called ILMiXor. Ostensibly, a group of ILM-ers would assemble in a queue, and each of us would take a turn posting an mp3 relating to the chosen theme (using our own hosting space or borrowing someone else's), and writing a blurb about the track. It didn't always work out so neatly -- our final disc was pretty much a first-come-first-serve free-for-all from the get-go. Somehow we filled four 80-minute CDs, almost all of them to capacity.

Many of these mp3s are still available here; if you missed a few the first time around, I'll be posting the whole works as a zip file or a torrent or something. Stay tuned while I sort it out. Artwork and liner notes for Discs 3 and 4 will be up soon as well.

Special thanks to Austin Swinburn for the idea, Elvis Telecom for the cover design, and Mike T-Diva for assembling the blurbs into CD booklet form (.doc file).

Cornelius, "Ball In - Kick Off"

2005-04-09T12:00:00.000-04:00

When it comes to maximalism, always bet on a guy who's last album made minimalism appear bombastic. The particular gift of Cornelius records in the late 90s was his refinement of the sound chaos he embraced on the final Flipper's Guitar album, Dr Head's World Tower, and his second solo disc, 69/96, so that by Fantasma the meat of the songs and the tiny details were all treated as equal. That you could hear a space transmission almost as clearly as a bludgeoning riff, spazzed-out breakcore, a verse, a hook, several backing harmonies, and half a dozen melodies without feeling like being beaten about your steadily disintegrating ears is a marvel no one else has ever truly approached, though not for lack of trying (hi, Basement Jaxx; yo, The Avalanches; lovely to see you, Plus-Tech Squeeze Box). Perhaps it's the control freak within, being a (mostly) one-man band and all, but his ability to make his music spray large funny sounds from your speakers without spreading samples in every spare place and still sound bigger than anything you've ever heard in any genre ever (again, even in his present "grandfather" stage) is what lets Keigo stand 50 feet above the heads of his peers.

'Ball In-Kick Off' is one of the loud ones, and almost certainly crazier and funkier than anything on Fantasma, save perhaps the toytown Mr Magoo theme and the arcade machine d'n'b Bach cover. Ostensibly about football, it precedes Shaolin Soccer by a few years and was probably all over Japan during the World Cup days of 2002. And it's easily as enjoyable, skipping gaily over musical forms with and without a care for any. He likes to tease, does old Keigo, but when you reach the payoff as he's putting the "multi" in "layered" and "crazy frickin' madman" in "schizophrenic", you know the ride was worth it, and anyway, your ass should have been moving too much to fritter your cares away into three big funk-metal riffs, two football commentators flipping across your speakers - one from Earth, one from the Cylon galaxy - a group of cooing Corneliuses, a tropical backbeat and a breakbeat that may have been inspired by throwing marbles on the ground and watching people lose their balance. Spector...Bomb Squad...Spector...Bomb Squad. He can scare you if he's so inclined. I've seen it happen.

He dares you, too. Dares you to deny its bounceability and its sense of adventure. Dares you to shake your pants, to rock out, to deny it's just a funny little pop song about footie. It's the beautiful game in his head, and it's an interesting trip, so won't you all step inside? Oh, and your headphones? Don't come without them.

Organum, "Shin-En"

2005-04-09T04:38:00.000-04:00

When you get right down to it, Organum has been the perfect moniker for the loose collective of merry pranksters led by David Jackman. There is just something about all of the music released under the name. It puts one in mind of open sores, internal bleeding, failing endocrine systems. Something is slightly ill, something a tad seasick about the creaky drones conjured up by Jackman and his cohorts. Even amidst Organum's more serene material -- and make no mistake, Organum's work on the whole is leagues above the garden variety shit-spew of the squatters down the block with their "denatured" pedals and household appliances -- there is an intimation of looming dread. That's the feeling one gets from this scary and beautiful music made by human beings taking up instruments in their hands and blotting out the sun. There is one hell of a robust method to this madness.

I'm actually not very big on the whole British noizenik nutball scene; your Stapletons, your Tibets. Never really been my steez. I only have two NWW records! I'm certainly no fan of the cult or whatever that attends to this stuff. My hangup, my loss, I am sure. But I guess above all, I'm just so impressed with Organum's attention to sound. BIG sound. Big sound filling up all the available space on the sonic spectrum with slowly bowed strings and shreiking metal and other grumblings that advance like a plague of locusts. Or maybe it's worms? Put it this way ... remember that scene in Temple of Doom when Indy and the kid are in that vault with all of the insects crawling and tumbling all over each other? Lucas & Co. should have totally made that scene like 5 excruciating minutes long, used Organum as the music, and then we might have had some serious-ass DREAD on our hands.

Datach'i, "Memorandum (Mogwai Remix)"

2005-04-09T03:02:00.000-04:00

Datach'i was something of an Autechre clone. His second album, "We Are Always Well, Thank You" contained multitudes of scatterbrained melodies and crunchy beats that would have been perfectly at home on Autechre's "LP5". The album was also relentlessly chaotic, featuring a crazed mishmash of soft synth sounds and rapidfire buckshot beats that would have been perfectly at home on Autechre's "Confield". Oh, except Datach'i released his album the year before "Confield". So maybe he wasn't such a clone after all.

Still, somebody thought that all of this needed to sound even more insane, so they drafted in the likes of Kid 606 and Mogwai for remix duty. All Mogwai did was deliver one of the best tracks ever associated with their name. They took a few basic elements of the original track and plastered a sensitive piano line with a migraine-inducing distorted bass line onto it. Then all hell breaks loose. A couple of tonality changes are thrown in, to heighten the drama I suppose.

Play it loud. It's good for you.

Brides of Funkenstein, "When You're Gone"

2005-04-05T16:00:00.000-04:00

To say that this song reminds me of CBS’ classic sitcom, WKRP In Cincinnati, would be a vast understatement. Something about the strings (alternately wan and viscous), and the staggering desperation in Dawn Silva’s and Lynn Mabry’s voices when they sing, “In this world/all of my dreams/one by one/they all fell through”, really captures the sort of febrile weariness I felt while watching re-runs of the show as a kid. I would be lying if I said that, in listening to this song so intently over the past few days, I haven’t imagined intricate scenarios where Loni Anderson’s character, Jennifer Marlowe (covered in the perfume of loneliness), sings this song to a penitent and less sleazy Herb (WKRP’s advertising sales manager) amid a shower of Harvest Gold paint chip confetti (“When You’re Gone”: inspiration for delirious musings).

This is taken from the Brides’ (who were, pre-Funkenstein, backup singers for Sly Stone) 1978 debut LP, Funk Or Walk, produced by George Clinton. “When You’re Gone” is a piñata of a ballad, filled with thick, glossy fragments of guitar, bass (which throbs intermittently in such a big, yearning way), and wistful harmonies.

The Beta Band, "To You Alone"

2005-04-04T16:13:00.000-04:00

Scraps of what may be memory or remembered daydreams. Well, I personally grab hold of my folk's memories and stories every chance I get. The line that runs between. You know, Eduardo Galliano, the great Latin American writer, said there is no greater truth than pursuit of truth and I think there's a lot to that. Frantic concentration required to keep enough stimuli external so's the whole messy edifice don't squash the soft brain tissue. After the first excess of my grief was subsided, I desired to retire from a world which had tempted me only with illusive visions of happiness, and to remove from those scenes which prompted recollection, and perpetuated my distress. Where one drink is a victory, four's a party and ten's a cacophony. Politicians tend to move towards the way they perceive that political power is moving. It starts so slight and precise, then layer by layer the information piles up because you just can't not hear all that extraneity. The only way to avoid regressus ad infinitum, is to accept the fundamental theses of a science dogmatically, that is, without any justification. Do not realise. We want to evangelise but we don't seem to have found the right method. Was worse was that you might not hear, or mightn't hear the same way. And I am talking to you through other people. What if the particles got rearranged in transit? Certainly don't imagine that rubber souls will protect you. The logical conclusion is a kind of moot intransigence. One virtue is more of a virtue than two. I'm a-singin' like a fool.

Public Enemy, "What Side You On?"

2005-04-03T23:29:00.000-04:00

From the 1994, critically trashed full length "Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age."
This song is the shit. P.E. have a live rhythm section throughout the album. This might be because they got their asses sued over sampling issues. Whatever the reason.. thank GOD they did. It sounds DOPE. It gave em this BIG, HUGE, POWERFUL sound. The live drums is what their first four albums were missing! Also: Oi! PUNK ROCK style shout choruses! I wonder if this is Flav on drums... that would be silly. But yah it's sad. Everyone slept on this album. P.E. were "tired" in the eyes of the consumer and the press. Fuck that. This is their best shit.

George Kranz, "Din Daa Daa"

2005-04-02T00:33:00.000-05:00

"Din Daa Daa" was a popular underground dance hit for George Kranz in the early '80s, and boy oh boy has he tried to cash in on it. If you take a look at his page at Discogs there have been 18 distinct releases of this single from 1983 to 2001. That's maximalism for ya! Of course the irony is that the best compilation to find this track, Tommy Beat's incredible series The Perfect Beats, is out of print at the moment.

What does it sound like then? Well, never mind the glaring synths and insistent motorik groove: the real thing that puts it over-the-top are the teutonic doo-wop/scat vocals! Basically, there is a bass vocal repeating "din daa daa, dan doo doo" over and over while George scats over it for five minutes with all the finesse of a sledgehammer. And I can't tell you how much I love the middle section where George mimics arena-rock drum solos with his mouth and then has the synth drums echo him in a similiarly tackless manner. Not to mention those hilarious chriping bird vocals at the end. It might all be a gimmick, but it sure is entertaining.

Elvis Presley, "Suspicious Minds"

2005-04-01T20:55:00.000-05:00

Don't let the two near-silences (at the mid-point, near the crawling bridge, and the fake fade) fool you: All those strings, horns, chorines, and most of all the Big E himself at his most dripping-with-emotion are freaking massive. How else would he have made his comeback? By not doing what he'd always done only to greater excess and with more finesse than usual? Also chosen because one of the greatest moments in ILX history occurred when several board regulars sang along with this at a Lower East Side bar after collectively ditching some drunken jerk.

Spanky & Our Gang, "Leopard Skin Phones"

2005-03-30T04:08:00.000-05:00

Wikipedia on Maximalism:

"...Maximalism as a genre in the plastic arts emphasises work-intensive practices and concentrates on the process of creation itself..."

Now neither vinyl nor aluminum are exactly plastic, but both are hard substances that are cheap enough to manufacture en masse without requiring government grants (yet), and there is no greater example of a song that describes its own creation than that of the relatively obscure maxi-group from the late 60s called Spanky & Our Gang.

"Leopard Skin Phones", from the group's third album Anything You Choose b/w Without Rhyme Or Reason from 1968, is a fast-paced groovy multi-part musical that takes you a stereophonic recording journey -- quite literally. The lyrics talk directly about the process of listening, recording, and how one can manipulate stereo, in the middle of a sudden plot involving someone that is ready to dismantle the entire experience.

Listen for yourself. The syllabus is right there in the song, so you're good to go.

[NOTE: I digitized this from a somewhat scratchy copy of the album. If anyone can provide a CD quality Mp3, by all means, let me know, and I can replace this with a better sounding file.]

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

2005-03-29T20:25:00.000-05:00

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).

Fred Frith, "The Entire Works Of Henry Cow"

2005-03-27T18:28:00.000-05:00

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?

Fletcher Henderson, "Oh Baby"

2005-03-24T15:37:00.000-05:00

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.

Shiina Ringo, "Ringo Catalog"

2005-03-23T19:29:00.000-05:00

I can’t be sure because I certainly haven’t heard everything, but Shiina Ringo seems to be one of the first successful signs of Japanese underground music beginning to cross over into the mainstream. I spend a lot of time listening to experimental music that stresses form and sound, but Shiina’s ‘Karuki Zamen Kuri No Hana’ is a pop album, 11 songs symmetrically arranged around the central 6th song and single ‘Stem’ with corresponding, mirroring song titles, and I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve listened to it in the last eight months. Unlike most Jpop which carefully refines the essence of American & European pop styles, her music is a strange fusion of cabaret pop and jazz that simultaneously connects traditional Asian instruments (kotos, shamisens, chinese opera percussion) with the best of the current Japanese underground: striking, constantly morphing, densely edited instrumental arrangements that occasionally turn corners into unbelievable fields of noise that wouldn't be out of place on an Otomo Yoshihide record: The choruses on this album get loud in a way that American rock music hasn’t figured out how to yet. I hear the distinctly Japanese zeitgeist at work in the use of noise here, which is mirrored by the use of traditional instrumentation (something that is largely just not done in J-Pop, outside of the occasional anomaly like Kihohiko Senba’s brilliant Haniwa All-Stars project) -- but here they all are somehow, seamlessly fused in a rock context, ancient modern strange.

In 2003 she decided not to follow up with another solo album, but instead formed the hyper-commercial band Tokyo Jihen. This mp3 is the last song from her ‘final’ single Ringo No Uta, a new song stitched together from samples taken from every single song of her solo career, a 4:45 long piece of self-plundering plexure pop. Even the lyrics are assembled from cut-up fragments. This might not be the most representative introduction, but it’s certainly the maximal one.

Osymyso, "Intro-Introspection"

2005-03-22T20:45:00.000-05:00

What better way to start than with some intros, eh? Over 100 of them.

Trawling the web for something interesting to say about this - something that isn't pefectly self evident on hearing it - I noticed several people, including Tom Ewing, saying that this is a great track to play in a club. It did come out on 12" after all.

So - in salute to MAXIMALIST dancing!

Ramases, "Journey to the Inside"

2005-03-21T03:53:00.000-05:00

Ramases has a secret. Or rather, he uncovered a secret, the secret to the universe. One night he got ahold of some really good shit and figured it all out. It turned out that he was the reincarnation of the Egyptian god. Not only that, he'd been brought back to set all of us puny earthlings straight about one important thing -- the structure of molecules mimics the structure of solar systems. Far out! Wait, does ontology recapitulate phylogeny or is the other way around? I can never remember. Anyway, it was 1971 when Ramases recorded his first album Space Hymns for the infamous Vertigo label. It was a song cycle which presented his wonderfully bent vision and sported a Roger Dean cover that folded out, the whole nine yards. There are a few loony people out there -- possibly even crazier than Ramases himself -- who go to great lengths to collect all 89 of the records that Vertigo released between 1969 and 1973. Not that I would know anything about that. If you google 'vertigo' and 'spiral' together, you can get some sense of the insanity. Thank god most of the music on the label is actually pretty good!

The Ramases album was recorded "with the help" of the folks who would become 10cc -- Lol Creme, Kevin Godley, Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman. Graham Gouldman is someone we all really can't thank enough. If he wouldn't have pissed off Eric Clapton so much by writing "For Your Love" for the Yardbirds, old EC probably never would have left the band. And then Jeff Beck would never have had a chance to leave and be replaced by Jimmy Page. And Pagey wouldn't have had to scrap together a makeshift band to complete those European tour obligations and we never would have had Led Zeppelin! Thank you Graham! On Space Hymns, Stewart and Creme are credited with Moog synthesizers, and boy do they ever unleash them on this, the album's final track.

This album is dedicated to the earth people who are unusual because they have begun to pause, look back, and wonder where they have come from and why, and where they are going to!

The earth is a living thing just as we are and has a soul as we do. You look at the heavens through a telescope. Reverse the telescope and you have a microscope through which (if powerful enough), you would see almost the same sight. (Electrons in orbit around their stars.) "In my father's house there are many mansions" (The Bible).

We are most probably existing on a molecule inside the material of, perhaps, a living thing in the next size up.

The rocket ship shape of churches probably dates back to Moses' visit to speak to God on the mountain and what he saw there.

Bartender, I'll have what he's having! While conventional wisdom says that by 1971 the age of aquarius was over and the dream had died, the secret history proves that there was indeed a persistent multitude of outliers and freaks gobbling substances and dreaming of a better world and god bless them all. May their flag wave forever high.

-disc 3 ends here-

KMFDM, "Naïve (edit)"

2005-03-18T19:17:00.000-05:00

KMFDM are mostly known as that "industrial rock" band that so succinctly polished and whipped their aggressive rock/disco sound into an easily digestible ground paste -- one that would be thoroughly enjoyed by their fans, many of whom bought almost all of their mostly-five-letter titled albums throughout the 90s. KMFDM are also a bit underrated in that they are nearly as influential to popular 90s hard rock bands like White Zombie, Rammstein, and a slew of yesteryear hair metal bands desperate to "update", as Alice In Chains are still influential to popular hard rock (i.e. "nu-metal") bands from the year 2000 to today.

However, KMFDM are most underrated for what should have been their break into pop music -- namely, the song "Naïve", from the 1990 album of the same name. Where most KMFDM songs would begin with big clanking percussive noises, metal guitar samples, or gutteral vocals by forming members Sascha Konietzko or En Esch, "Naïve" begins with a very commercial and catchy female sung chorus!

"That's the way of the world. What'ch you waitin' for? She has to be loved. Everybody needs somebody!"

..and then the song just loudly thumps into this brilliant disco pop song with a pumping crunchy beat, heavy guitar riffs, and the relatively buried ogre-like timbres of Konietzko and Esch. Surely the latter element would have clearly prevented this from being a certified pop hit; and, knowing the lack of compromise KMFDM were ever willing to give, there was no chance. But in a year where Trent Reznor became a household face of new pop culture, I thought the dream of a charting "Naïve" was possible in 1990. Anyway...

As for secrets, they play heavily into the theme and verse lyrics of "Naïve". In fact, given KMFDM's knack for *ahem* subtlety, secrets serve no other purpose in the song than -- you guessed it -- foreplay!

"Tell me secrets. Tell me sweet secrets. What do you know, what do you know, what do you know about me? Take me to the other side. Walk The line"

Combine that with the chorus, and you can (possibly) understand, in this context, to what "naïvity" refers.

[Note: I did a custom edit of this song, in order to barely meet the song length requirements for this mix. But also, I feel the original song wasn't edited enough anyway... you know, so it could be commercial radio "friendly"... so, here you go! "Naïve (Edit)"!]

The Free Association, "Shanghai"

2005-03-18T16:02:00.000-05:00

Every day when my roommate gets to work her co-worker asks her to tell a secret. They share childhood stories, work gossip, thoughts on time and place (2005, Seattle).

I'm waiting for the day I show up at their work and get asked. I'll probably have to admit it: "Come closer. This is a good one. Are you ready? Okay. The more a band rips off My Bloody Valentine, the more I like them. I know, I know, 99% of the time this kind of derivitiveness should not be applauded but, I don't know, I miss My Bloody Valentine so much, I miss that sound. And if a bunch of L.A. studio guys, soundtrack makers, is the closest approximation that we have in this time and this place, then I'll take it. The secret's out."

This Ascension, "August Rain"

2005-03-15T22:19:00.000-05:00

Okay, admittedly, after Kylie and Tone Loc this isn't exactly a slam dunk. But I don't listen to ecstatic dance-pop and '80s pop-rap sensations. I listen to ethereal goth-rock bands on Projekt. Bands like This Ascension. But that's no secret. The secret is in the blurred perception of the lyrics, tangentially linked quatrains that alternate between musings on a broken relationship and spectral imagery, spilling and melting into one another so that you can't tell the difference; it's in the second verse, in how the bassist wanders detachedly while the layered vocals pile on top of one another, ghostly whispers gathering until crashing into the mournful chorus.

Of course I talk about this song all the time on ILM and nobody else does, so maybe the song itself just seems like a secret to me. Whatever. It's beautiful; listen to it.

Tone Loc, "Funky Cold Medina"

2005-03-15T21:43:00.000-05:00

Between his run as a Crip and his appearances as an actor in roughly a dozen straight-to-video children's flicks, Tone Loc enjoyed a brief moment as America's favorite gravelly-voiced nymphomaniac novelty rapper. His album Loc-ed After Dark actually topped the pop charts, thanks mostly to the strength of "Wild Thing" and this track, which plays like an episode of "Taxicab Confessions" set to a late-'80s Dust Brothers beat.

The basic theme of this song is that Tone needs the sex and if it takes a roofies-like substance to get it, well, that's the price he has to pay. There's a reason why this remains a frat party anthem.

What's puzzling is that the first thing he does when he gets the Funky Cold Medina (or Love Potion No. 9 or whatever) is give it to his dog. Not being able to pick up a partner at a club is one thing, but you'd think you wouldn't need drugs to convince your own housepets to give it up. Besides, wouldn't peanut butter be cheaper? Poor Alex from Stroh's.

Then there's the incident where he "accidentally" gives a little Funky Cold Medina to a transvestite named Sheena. Loc's definitely got some secrets.

He doesn't decide using the Medina's a bad idea until it makes a straight woman want to marry him. Wasn't there a chaperone on the Love Connection dates, anyway? Was the chaperone cool with Tone Loc drugging his date?

So, according to Tone Loc, drugging your dates is cool, so long as they don't start nagging you about relationships. Or have secret penises. Also, defiling beer spokesdogs is A-OK. Cheers, Tone!

Kylie Minogue, "Rhythm Of Love"

2005-03-13T21:03:00.000-05:00

Subjugated and/or oppressed by the Stock, Aitken & Waterman popheadlock, by 1990 it was common knowledge that Kylie hankered after a co-write credit and a tiny pause after the chorus where she could draw breath; maybe also a little less legobrick and a little more cowbell, a little less Miriam Stockley and a little more Flyte Tyme. Rhythm Of Love was the fourth album (and third Kylie album) I ever owned; the fact that it diverged wildly from all that was familiar and comfortable by having eleven tracks instead of ten blew my nine-year-old mind somewhat, as did the fact that four of them weren’t SAW compositions/production jobs at all! Also: Rhythm, of love! Bloody hell!

At the time the title track seemed like the epitome of SLINK and needless to say I didn’t care about it at all: it wasn’t as primarycoloured/fun as the customary SAW numbahs ("What Do I Have To Do"! fuck yeah!), it was obviously never ever going to be a single ("What Do I Have To Do"! it sounds like a spaceship!), she says “syncopated” which seemed a bit showy and unnecessary (she says “bed” on "What Do I Have To Do"! therefore she has already used up her new-Kylie-words quota on this album, possibly), it was track eleven on an eleven track album and I wasn’t used to having to listen for this long. Whereas now it doesn’t sound boringly adult and undisciplined so much as it does clattery and frantic and looose; the chorus is barked unseductively in crisp phonetic blocks (“ta give yur luv ta mi – an ah give ma luv ta yoo”); there is a Sax (sex) Bit and a French (sex!) Bit that she stumbles over slightly (“d’amour” to rhyme with “skewer”).

And suddenly credhungry po-facery is glorious fun, and an infinitely more successful break from the customary (invariably ace) boxy SAW chunks than the vast majority of her much heralded eponymous 1994 First Actual Proper Grownup Album (singles aside, the most extraordinarily blank thing she has ever done, a big empty zero of a record, way more ‘insubstantial’/'impersonal' than the albums that came before it) if only because really it barely breaks from the boxy SAW-format at all. If "Rhythm Of Love" was Kylie tentatively toeing the waters of artistic emancipation and eventual commercial doom, it doesn’t really show; she was firmly back in the SAW straightjacket on album number four, by this point seemingly more interested in subverting from within with highly contentious album sleeves on which she Isn’t Smiling and is accompanied by some Men.

Kylie is no stranger to "Secret" tracks (she has them on albums 1, 2, 3, and also 9) but "Rhythm Of Love" is the most crucial of those early flings; lost down the back of her Stock/Aitken/Waterman years and mourned by too few.

Shape & Sizes, "Rain On My Face"

2005-03-12T15:58:00.000-05:00

I don't know anything about Shape & Sizes. That's not the secret, though I guess it could be. There must be something about them in the sleevenotes to Decca's The Girls' Scene, the compilation on which this 1966 single can be found. It's in a cardboard box somewhere under my bed. One-miss wonders, I think. All I remember the notes saying was that the singer seems to prefigure the style of Sarah Cracknell. I guess that's right.

So, the secret is her tears, anyway. While he's there, she keeps the secret and says it's just the rain making her cheeks wet.

Then he's gone for good and she can tell him in absentia that it's not just the rain, not really. We kind of knew that already, and I'm sure he did too. And I suspect she knew we knew. Open secrets: the best sort of all.

The Raunchy Young Lepers, "I Opened The Package"

2005-03-09T23:44:00.000-05:00

Secrets involving the Raunchy Young Lepers:

1) Lyrically: The location of the field is unknown, the kind of grass unclear. The woman herself is a mystery figure, as is her job. What is in the package is completely unknowable until revealed. The final line was probably unthought of by all involved until it was uttered.

2) Creatively: The Raunchy Young Lepers, who you can find quite a bit more about, should you dare, recorded most of their work either in a garage or, in the case of this song and those off its album -- if one can call an unreleased tape that, but it was 1991 and anything went -- in a bedroom, away from the prying eyes and ears of concerned parents and friends. Said parents and friends still don't know the details, which is perhaps for the best. Last year I got to visit the garage and the bedroom in question -- it was like a holy pilgrimage for me, my own personal music hajj.

3) Contextually: For a long time the bandmembers themselves tried to put this all behind them -- 'this' meaning a two year career with about fourteen albums and an insane amount of spinoffs -- and to this day prefer that discussion of their work be done with their chosen psuedonyms (that's B.S. you hear singing the song while 28086 has a brief vocal snippet at the start, to name two of the core four). But one thing led to another and demand (of a sort) rose to the point wherein part of my own secret work for the long dead band involved 'remastering' their work for the digital realm with the assistance of friend and fellow RYL fanatic Mackron. My All Music Guide entries for band and albums aren't as secret as such but you sorta need to know they're there in order to find them.

4) For Sanity and Morality's Sake: because you don't want to know about "No, No, No!" -- or do you?

Charlie Robison, "Magnolia"

2005-03-09T09:38:00.000-05:00

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

David Sylvian, "When Poets Dreamed of Angels"

2005-03-08T19:44:00.000-05:00

Secrets of the Beehive, secret narratives of history and interpersonal relationships woven into one.

Bohren und der Club of Gore, "Midnight Black Earth"

2005-03-08T00:28:00.000-05:00

In the back room at PartyLand the Hell-Metal band have just cranked it up a gear, The pulsating pink and black light, too slow to be a strobe, increases your disorientation. You need one more beer. You need to get out of here right now. A woman walks toward you, you can glimpse her in the flickering light. She grabs you by the hand and leads you to a secret door at the rear of the pink room and you pass through. Inside the smoke drenched room is completely black, lit by three or four low-watt bulbs. There’s a band in the corner in here: Black on black. They are playing doom laden dark jazz that chills as much as it soothes you... They are Bohren und Der Club of Gore.

Woob, "Gate"

2005-03-07T20:04:00.000-05:00

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.

Samsimar, "Indang Pariaman"

2005-03-07T10:57:00.000-05:00

Another instrumental track with no explicit secrets to tell. Maybe it does. Not in English. I don't know. It seems to have everything to me. Potential, mysticism, excitement, sadness, sex, heartbreak, hurt, everything. It's all in there. It's miserable, sort of. It's all wrapped up in this eminently repetitive, droning, whining folk-pop nugget from Sumatra. I guess in some way, the Sublime Frequencies releases are all steeped in secrecy, or at least purposeful imperfection and incomplete information. But I don't too much care about that. That's not why I picked this one. I hope you like it.

T99, "The Skydreamer (Dreamer's Requiem version)"

2005-03-05T14:00:00.000-05:00

Secrecy as ambiguity with regard to the track's theme, as is common with instrumentals, electronic or otherwise. But Patrick De Meyer and Olivier Abbeloos offer another revelation with this track (actually two tracks combined into one culled and spliced from 1992's 'Children Of Chaos' album), it's presence highly conspicuous on an album otherwise dominated by clunky (excellent single 'Anasthasia' and it's follow-up 'Nocturne' excepted) uptempo fillers that seem somewhat facile and uninspiring compared to the majestic sweep of this Orbital-esque interlude…

Prog-rave! White gloves and a cape. The appeal of that will vary depending on your disposition but there's a rich, intrepid dynamism to this composition that startled and intrigued me as much as any Hartnolls or FSOL production from the same era. As the glazed guitar croons like a wolf at a full moon rising the metallic bleeps twitter in and out like a legion of cybernetic termites amidst the shadows cast by a crashed vessel long since abandoned to a strict, blighted earth. Broad Mode-esque pads stretching far out like dark skies blanketing fantasy planets. Also couldn’t help but imagine a shadowy collective of hooded MCs armed spitting lyrics over something like this, retooled with a prominent beat, drifting through the dystopian back-alleys of future favelas. A potential tangent of the current minimalist trends in grime and hip-hop to contemplate...

But while this kind of evocation is par for the course with so much “intelligent’ dance music”, it's a pleasant discovery from such a relatively unexpected quarter - being aware of the authors big hits since their release but only hearing this for the first time a few months ago – the tides having relented a precious stone to the shore just waiting for the day I’d decide to go back to that particular beach (made easier by the internet naturally), aware that I’d not caught every detail available the first time.

It’s also a reminder that whether commanding your attention to the full as you walk the streets alone late at night, earphones plugged tight, or floating in the background as you sit there at the terminal in a darkened room pouring out lines of text until the darkness turns again to light, the doorway to alternate dimensions is all too easily opened by musicians with machines (and drugs, I suppose) channelling that shared science-fiction tapestry without shame or concerns over pretension (as with me here, ahem), the grandiose tone of the piece even rivalling the ceremony indulged by the KLF, only eschewing the pop angle in favour of this more sinister yet admittedly somewhat corny progressive context (my own ‘high-concept prog-love’ secret among those worst kept over the years).

Smoosh, "It's Not Your Day To Shine"

2005-03-03T00:22:00.000-05:00

The art of keeping a secret is an instinctual one. No one needs to be taught it. No one, when it comes down to it, is actually bad at concealing something they really don't want the rest of the world to know about. It's something we learn by ourselves at a very early age: I don't remember childhood as an age of innocence so much as one of secrets, both minor inconsequentialities which were thrilling to keep to oneself and larger, more significant feelings and thoughts.

Smoosh are two sisters: Asya, 12, who sings, writes songs, and plays the keyboard; and Chloe, 10, who bangs the drums and sings along sometimes. Their music is insouciant, lively, and possessed with a truly infectious joie de vivre; despite the title and sentiments of "It's Not Your Day To Shine", it's a song which can put a smile on anyone's face. Mostly because of that amazing piano riff, which is like the catchiest melody in the history of pop, and a TWELVE-YEAR-OLD wrote it! No fluke, either: each of the 14 songs on their debut album She Like Electric rivals this for hooky genius so simple that songwriters the world over must listen to these melodies and tear their hair out for not getting to these combinations of notes first.

Smoosh's music is also instinctual: throughout the album, it sounds as if everything's being improvised, nothing's been planned. And instinctively, even though Asya sounds as if she's pottering around her bedroom by herself, she knows about keeping secrets: note her untrained vocal technique of mumbling the lyrics so you can't hear exactly what she's talking about, her habit of eliding words with extended 'wo-oh-oh's, almost as if she's not quite ready to let us into her inner world just yet. It's not your day to shine: she might be wise beyond her years, but it's never a good idea to let the grown-ups know that.

(Unlikely cover stars of Plan B magazine, too, with a fabulous photo: http://www.planbmag.com/images2/planb4a.jpg)

Sinead Quinn, "What You Need Is..."

2005-03-01T15:05:00.000-05:00

Some context might help. Sinéad was the runner-up in the first series of Fame Academy, where her talent was outshone by the charisma of David Sneddon. However, as was the case with all reality TV runners up back then, she got snapped up by a major label and an album got punted out. Ready To Run found itself littered with songs about not giving up and working hard to achieve this pinnacle of fame, seemingly a kneejerk defensive action against supposed ideas that reality TV popstars are yet another example of rip-off Britain’s political correctness going mad with their manufactured pap swamping our charts and killing off home taping. Or something. The story of Sinéad’s struggle and her bleatings that you don’t know how hard she’s worked for this etc. are not the secrets we’re dealing with here, though.

‘What You Need Is’ was Sinéad’s second single and is, by a distance, the pinnacle of her career. This is her stab at being a ‘rock chick’. Your opening couplet:

You’re a junkie for your lady’s (Lead? Lean? Dunno)
You’re so addicted that you can’t get clean

The chorus has her snarling “Well c’mon over here/It’s about time your ass was mine/Don’t you dare say no/Not until you’ve tried it.” The video alternated between her Rocking Out with a Proper Band of Proper Musicians whilst her hair got blown about by a wind machine and what I vaguely remember as her ‘writhing about’ ‘sexily’ dressed in a leather jacket and so on. It was embarrassing how hard she was trying, how desperately it superglued itself to convention, practically screaming “SMELL THE HOTNESS!!!” while desperately wafting the fumes from a stack of burning tyres (the video itself didn’t feature a stack of burning tyres, as that might have got the health and safety people a bit upset). This is a shame, because the song itself is quite fantastic – the lines are all clichés but she sells them like no-one’s business; her little yelps, growls, and in particular the snarl she drops in the middle are all terribly endearing. The helter-skelter synth riff the song’s built upon is marvellous, worthy of Girls Aloud or anyone else for that matter. It rocks, very much so.

And as for the secret? Well, Sinéad was desperately trying to act like this song was it, this being her unveiling of her wild side, her hottnesss. The rest of her album certainly wasn’t it, being mainly comprised of dud-laden ballads and stuff about how hard she’s worked etc. The video was so forced that you could just imagine the director bellowing “MORE SEXY!” at her. The big thing about Fame Academy was that it was showcasing Proper Musicians who Write Their Own Songs and Play Instruments and Are Real, Not Like That Pop Idol Mob. The secret here is that, despite all this, by the end of the whole cycle we only knew Sinéad Quinn as being a nice Irish lass who wrote her own songs about writing her own songs. ‘What You Need Is’ was meant to be the unveiling of Sinéad’s dark side, a dark side that, when we looked for it, just wasn’t there. And now she’s almost completely forgotten – her two fellow FA finalists (Sneddon & Lemar) stole the limelight while this single stalled at #19, her album failed to make the top 40, and she got dropped.

Her first single nearly knocked TATU off number one, y’know. Then again, it was shite.

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

2005-02-28T09:51:00.000-05:00

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"

Mr T Experience, "Deep Deep Down"

2005-02-27T12:43:00.000-05:00

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.

Fischer Z, "Room Service"

2005-02-26T00:22:00.000-05:00

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-

Famous Monsters, "Destroy Puny Earthlings!"

2005-02-25T14:22:00.000-05:00

I'm taking a little bit of a different perspective on the theme by thinking about actual extraplanetary music, not music that's outside our traditional English-or-colonized-by-them worldview, or missed chances at the Billboard charts. Mostly because all my african funk songs I had in mind sounded really weird next to that YMO song, and I couldn't bring myself to download any Hearts Of Space crap . Anyway, I'm flipping through my shared directory and the title of this song made me laugh in this context.

But hey! What if the aliens are kinda like us? What if they have cool alien girls in garage bands? What if they have 4/4 time? Hey, what if they didn't fuck it up and start charging 'gold circle' ticket prices at their bloated reunion show? What if they didn't have to partner with megacorps? OMG WHAT IF THERE WERE NO MEGACORPS?

What if music there was just as fun and free as fucking should be? And what if the aliens are all as hot as Brijette West and Sean Yseult?

If they found us they would surely destroy us.

Yellow Magic Orchestra, "Rydeen"

2005-02-24T21:21:00.000-05:00

This song was put out by a Japanese synthpop/dance band in 1980. Shortly thereafter, the Japanese handed the Americans their ass in the automotive and home electronics industries. That's correlation, people. It is my assumption that Solid State Survivor was being played over loudspeakers every morning during the calisthenics sessions in the factory yard. This is why every time a Lee Iacocca book enters my field of vision the letters in the title do a little wavy bit and restabilize as "DAMN YOU, YMO." This song is the popmusic avatar of quality manufacturing and technological sophistication. If it had ever touched the charts in America, the UAW would have voluntarily dissolved, and we would have lots of incredibly fast trains to take us from city to city in less than a day. But let's not ponder what might have been, let's make do with what we have. Take this track to work tomorrow and start bringing home the serious bacon - revenge bacon from Asia. We can do it. Hone your skills.

Eddie Harris, "Smoke Signals"

2005-02-22T20:43:00.000-05:00

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.

Peter Hammill, "The Second Hand"

2005-02-22T15:01:00.000-05:00

It’d be a strange world in which Peter Hammill scored a Top 40 hit; he’s certainly never come close in this one. For more than 35 years he’s been digging away at his cult artist trench, influential but barely on speaking terms with popularity. It’s easy to hear why. His voice, for starters. Not many Pop Stars enunciate with quite such plummy precision. And whilst his baritone is often beautiful, it’s never far from unhinged. He sounds like a King’s Chorister turned mean and unpredictable by age and bad liquor.

Then there’s the lyrics. Whilst Hammill’s themes have ranged far and wide, he returns again and again to the question of what it means to be alive. I can’t think of another songwriter quite so preoccupied with the existential. He picks at mortality like an itchy scab, knowing he can’t answer himself but constrained to keep trying anyway. This makes for some wordy songs, and sometimes he runs away with himself and comes off overblown. Many of his love songs create the impression of a slightly overbearing obsessive. He don’t do many jokes. But when he reins in the anxiety just a little bit he’s as affecting and honest as anybody in pop.

He also has an ear for a tune, which helps. In Van der Graaf Generator, the shrieking Prog-Jazz behemoth that launched Hammill to, well, not success exactly, the melodies are usually hammered into your skull like titanium rivets. In his solo work, he displays a more restrained pop sensibility. “The Second Hand” is a Bowie-ish homebrew funk number from the late 70s. Hammill plays everything except the lovely sax provided by long-time collaborator David Jackson. It feels like the musical equivalent of outsider art. It’s about mortality, obviously.

The Ark, "It Takes A Fool To Remain Sane"

2005-02-21T02:12:00.000-05:00

Top 40 from another world? This one truly is: it was the most played song on Swedish National Radio in 2000, yet has barely been heard outside of Europe.

Huge in their native Sweden as well as in Europe, The Ark do a theatrical and opulent brand of glam-pop; the kind that aims to hit all your pop sensors at once but refuses to succumb to kitsch or pomposity. "It Takes A Fool To Remain Sane" was the group's breakthrough single from their 2000 album "We Are The Ark," and it also happens to be one of my favorite pop songs of the current decade. Even after a countless number of plays, I am still impressed by how well the lyrics and music are able to articulate the touchy notion of gay intolerance into such a classy pop anthem that is both fist-pumping and bittersweet. There's also this incredibly palpable sense of lead singer Ola Salo living vicariously through his lyrics and exuberance, as if this song was the only way he could access his most gushing emotions.

As Ned commented in his a-ha piece, there are songs that seem to defy logic when they fail to chart or aren't chosen as singles. But there are rare songs like this where you feel they deserve to flood the airwaves for as long as possible.

The Whatnauts, "I Just Can't Lose Your Love"

2005-02-20T17:38:00.000-05:00

Proof positive that not all the great 70s falsetto groups hailed from Philadelphia! Unlike their sweet soul contemporaries the Delfonics, the Stylistics, or the later Blue Magic, the Whatnauts made their home in charm city, Baltimore. And boy do they ever charm on this, the leadoff track from their 1970 debut LP. Unfortunately for Whatnauts members Billy Herndon, Garnett Jones and Chunky Pickney, another thing they did not share with the aforementioned groups was any kind of major chart success. Their strongest whiff of chartdom's more rarefied air came with the release of "I'll Erase Away Your Pain", the third single from the debut, which reached #71 Pop, #14 R&B. And that was basically it for the boys, although they did score a UK top 5 hit with 1974's "Girls", a collaboration with Stang label-mates The Moments. It's a story that is pretty much the same with any number of great soul coulda-woulda-shoulda-beens. They all deserved better, but such are the vagaries of the pop marketplace. It's crowded out there!

"I Just Can't Lose Your Love" was never in fact released as an A-side; it was the B-side to "I'll Erase Your Pain", and as great as that cut was, its flip is something stronger. Slightly weirder and just plain desperate sounding, for me it sits at the table with all-time castrati classics "La La Means I Love You", "I'm Stone in Love With You", "Sideshow" and "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore." The song is a showcase for Garnett Jones, who performs the whole thing without the aid of his fellow 'Nauts. Well, it's a showcase for Jones, but also for the awesome production and arranging of George Kerr and r&b genius Sylvia Robinson. Hey, when Sylvia's involved you know the track is gonna be tough, and this is no exception. The song announces itself with vibes and piano in dialogue over a bed of gorgeous strings and harp. The strings recede for the first verse but beautifully reassert themselves in the second with a soaring triplet figure. I don't know who the house guitarist was for Robinson's All Platinum family of labels, but if you bump into him next time you're in Englewood, please buy the man a beer. He plays some real nice rhythm fills on this thing. Jones's voice isn't always technically the smoothest -- it loses a little definition the further he pushes it, particularly on the last chorus -- but it perfectly captures the desperation of the song's oh-shit-I-fucked-up-please-give-me-another-chance lyric. A stone classic.

Plus, they had one of the goofiest names and a couple of the coolest album covers of the 70s!

a-ha, "The Swing of Things"

2005-02-18T23:59:00.000-05:00

(Warning -- this is, um, a bit long. The post, not the song.)

Of the many varieties of should-have-been hits, I ask you to consider the singles that were never chosen by the bands with success, the potential oldies standards that aren't. So, turning to a favored touchstone of mine, early a-ha. In America cursed with a one-hit-wonder status or near enough to it, but overseas things were far different, slew of hit singles all around, continuing greatness (well, at least I think so). But on their second album Scoundrel Days, I am frustrated by the fact that the two best songs were never singles. What the heck were they thinking?

Oh, I suppose, I shouldn't complain. I doubt the band was complaining, why would they? But "Scoundrel Days" the song is one hell of an opener, with that nervous twitchy introduction and a chorus that feelings like soaring over the fjords. Then there's "The Swing of Things."

Beautiful, wonderful "Swing of Things." See, it's a song that if you're not careful you can describe as yupfunk thanks to the way that the verses move, a bit of restrained swagger, careful attitude. I can imagine some dork somewhere thinking he was suave trying to pull off a ‘hey, get me babe!' approach on his local dance floor in 1987 while pounding the wine coolers (had this been a hit and it had been a couple of years later, this dork would have been me, so I mock out of love...OR DO I?)

Thing is, though, that the tres lame guitars that usually distinguished such efforts were gone (Cutting Crew was probably dorking around with them), because a-ha were geniuses and avoided such idiocy. So instead there's a quiet bit of mournful guitar near the start that could almost eventually be a quiet bit of mournful Martin Gore guitar and for all I know Martin Gore was listening because even he hadn't found out yet quite how to integrate it fully into his approach. (His approach was already great mind you. So was Alan Wilder's. But I digress.)

The FURTHER thing though is that the opening is this sparkling chime of a synth that's still beautiful today -- are IDM people using this? Why not dammit? GARG -- and it's a slightly descending melody so it's glam (possibly) except then it keeps going back up but it's still sad while there's all sorts of buried drum bits and bass, and then a quick shimmer into that guitar/keyboard bit alluded to earlier. Blue, deep deep blue. I love melancholy when it works (oh but GOD do I hate it when it sucks, the pain the pain...).

Meanwhile, when Morten Harket, who pulled a reverse Al Green by studying for the priesthood before becoming a famous singer (and he didn't even have to get burned or anything), sings on those verses and elsewhere, that supposed swagger isn't. Instead it's a discussion of how the construction of interdependent world politics and its reportage in the mainstream media results in an overwhelming conclusion that all matters everywhere must be attended to by all thinking persons on a regular basis, as well as a discussion of how engaging with the world will yet provide better results than completely withdrawing from it, but how in the face of those observations, especially and even when conveyed by someone who could well be an activist of some sort, the feelings of romantic love for that other can in fact override these considerations, leading to an admission that the personal can transcend the political, which given the nature of the potentially overwhelming pressures of modern life is perfectly understandable. So in otherwards this was socially conscious music that made a concise plea for pointing out the values of supposedly bourgeois romance. It was the most intelligent and politically aware music of the eighties! It was everything those smugfucks at Rolling Stone said was missing the entire decade, only they wouldn't pay attention because neither Jerry Garcia nor Jeff Lynne worked on it! BASTARDS! I WANT DAVID FRICKE'S WARDROBE BURNED TO THE GROUND!

Hm, anyway. So when The Chorus kicks in each time, it's Morten (via bandmate Pal Waaktarr, who wrote music and lyrics) channeling The Lexicon of Love the first time around ("But how can I speak of the world rushing by/With a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye?" -- you're saying Martin Fry couldn't sing that? I THINK NOT), then Avalon the second time around ("But how can I sleep with your voice in my head/And an ocean between us and room in my bed?" -- I've been through long distance relationships and lemme tell ya this is more accurate than you'll ever know unless you've been there). And both times the music strips down to this quick pulse beat and gentle cymbal clash and soothing keyboards, then the drums break down in a distinctly non-4/4 beat (6/8 I think? Someone correct me here) for the second part. Let us take the time to herald the inspired work of session drummer Michael Sturgis on this song, on the album, because he was the Hal Blaine of this mother and he's a GENIUS. More later but just listen to the way he skitters on the high hat before bringing it back in full on those choruses. And I haven't even mentioned the soaring double-tracked way Morten completes those choruses with a sudden almost resigned sing/stating of the title, almost an acceptance of fate.

A quick sprightly break and then everything almost turns ghostly, Morten sings "When she glows..." and the keyboards damn well GLOW, like a haunting dream somewhere, like this is the ghost in one's house, the angel floating around the room. You know, how does/did he nail that sense of poised rhyme scheme, time and tempo, breathless but never out of breath? What a dream of a singer Morten was here, this is something that might or might not survive American Idol rundowns but damn if this isn't all the training and expression one could want coming to bear, and when he takes the arrangement back into full propulsion with one of his trademark high-pitched rises on "I KNOW that I'll need THIS for the REST of my LIFE" it's pretty great, and then That Guitar sneaks back in from the start of the song, Sturgis keeps the tension and pace moving and changing just a bit, Morten repeats the line quietly, resignedly, then he lets fly -- it's not the same type of unearthly wail in "Take On Me," it's lost in the mix, a cry of a lost soul.

Then the final thirty seconds are heralded by this monstrous drum fill from Sturgis -- no, fine, it's not John Bonham level but it's all about context, LISTEN to it slam in, holy fuck -- and Morten drops the emotional bomb: "What have I done/What lies I have told/I played games with the ones that rescued my soul." Argh ARGH ARGH I might as well be wearing those words tattooed on my brain with a pickaxe (and even if I hadn't been there my god how great is it that Morten delivers it post-wail with an almost aggressive multitracked flatness, not pleading, not sorrowful, but blunt, Bowie as the alien looking coldly on himself or something). And it concludes with a massive crash and bash, the title phrase delivered quietly one more time, a dying keyboard figure and one last quick fill from Sturgis.

And it wasn't a single! This apocalyptic catchy mental explosive of a dancefloor filler meets elegant ballad meets state of the art production c. 1986 WASN'T A SINGLE! OMGWTF and I can't even LOL because it's nothing to laugh at!

But hey, at least that means I can include it here.

Fox, "Livin' Out My Fantasies"

2005-02-18T22:06:00.000-05:00

Never seen Fox on TOTP2. Never really seen them anywhere. There's nowhere on the internet to find out the name of the planet where she and her sequined prince spent some time (Narella?) But in the mid-70s, Noosha Fox and her band of hairy guys scored UK top 10 hits with 'Only You Can' and 'S-S-Single Bed'. This is from their final, 1977 album Blue Hotel. Funny times. They did things differently there and all that.

"He takes me places I've never been in his space flash limousine, and everywhere I'm seen in his arms"

Oh Noosha, Noosha, where he's taken you now?

100 Flowers "Strip Club"

2005-02-18T14:06:00.000-05:00

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.

Von Lmo, "This Is Poprock"

2005-02-17T22:34:00.000-05:00

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."

Books On Tape, "She's Dead To Me"

2005-02-17T16:27:00.000-05:00

Cassius Clay, "I Am The Greatest (Single Version)"

2005-02-16T17:38:00.000-05:00

When Columbia released I Am The Greatest! in 1963, they thought they had a comedy album by some loudmouth boxer who was about to get his ass handed to him by Sonny Liston. They couldn't have known Cassius Clay would become the heavyweight champion of the world, join the Nation of Islam and change his name, becoming not only a pop icon, but also a cultural icon within two years of the record's release.

I imagine a handful of people picking up this album, giving it a spin, chuckling and completely forgetting about it, not realizing it gave them a glimpse into the future. This album laid the foundation for two things that seem inescapable now: brag raps and athletes referring to themselves in the third person.

This track, released as a single, takes the live "recitation of his classic poem 'I Am The Greatest'" and layers it over some shuffling bass, drums, guitar and organ. Cassius Clay tells you how wonderful and pretty Cassius Clay is, all without the aid of the words "I" or "me" (outside of the title, of course).

The poem appears unaccompanied at the beginning of the album, but someone must have realized all this "I AM TOTALLY AWESOME" talk might merit more repeat listens if, you know, it had a good beat and you could dance to it.

In the past forty-plus years, became slicker, rhymes became tighter and athletes became less eloquent, but the formula hasn't changed much. Any dis track or hilarious, self-serious pre-game interview shares something with "I Am The Greatest." The only thing missing from the modern versions is the audience's laughter.

Hot 8 Brass Band, "Skeet Skeet"

2005-02-15T23:44:00.000-05:00

To me, New Orleans often seems like another world. You can go to any other city in the country and they feel like variations on a theme, but then there's the one with Sunday second-lines, $2 Heinekens sold off of grocery carts, and them brass bands holding it all together. In NOLA, brass band music is hip-hop, it's party music, it's on the radio, it's for dancing, it is pop music. I can't think of another style of music that's so unique and so addictive yet has remained so confined within its geographical borders.

Hot 8 aren't the most well-known brass band, but they're quite possibly the best, especially the drummers. They have been together for 10 years and until a few weeks ago I'd been waiting for them to put a record out every day for nearly three years. Finally getting the cd out the back of Benny's truck behind some dumpsters was really how it had to go down.

'Skeet Skeet' is the single, so it's about half has long as a normal brass band cut and has no solos. Oh, and as for top 40 criteria, the "shorty" chant near the end is the g-rated version, good clean buck-jumping fun for the whole family.

The House Crew, "The Theme"

2005-02-15T21:49:00.000-05:00

It felt like the last great ardkore anthem for a long time after the event. By the Summer of '93 I'd become aware of the deepening rift that saw 140bpm breaks with plundered diva vocals fade out - a combination of an exciting idea running it's course naturally (for me at least) whilst failing to make a full impact beyond damp, moonlit fields and Fiesta carboots in enough sectors elsewhere. Hard to see why sometimes, given how well 'The Theme' is structured and delivered - hit sensibilities akin to hits like the housier 'Playing With Knives' or 'Insanity' to an extent, just as simplistic in premise but much heavier and more intense sonically with some dazzling sounds on display (the rumbling but tight break, the two-note throbbing bass, the foreboding choir, ominous clouds fragmented by Sabrina Johnston's grafted affirmation, just the sheer immenseness of it all...), thus destined to dent the top 100 but only just, despite some unexpected support from quarters ranging from daytime Kiss FM to MTV and even Channel 4's 'Big Breakfast' during their round-up of the week's best new singles. Damn nearly choked on my Shreddies so I did...

Producers Nino and Dice would go on to prove their hitmaking abilities in fine style with Baby D's 'Let Me Be Your Fantasy' eighteen months later, vindication of some sort. But I still feel that intuitive nous is also firmly evident in 'The Theme' , the chart in the other world inside my head declaring it top of the pops for a brief spell, only to be usurped by Therapy? (probably) a few weeks later, that being the sort of thing my music taste veered further towards in the ensuing twelve months before Jungle emerged from the swamp the scene descended into that year, to lure me back towards bass and breaks-driven mentalism once again. Of course my brother playing this what felt like every single day for about four years didn't really help either. Too much ecstasy, minus the drugs. But much of the music from this period in the scene's progression endures, and I'm happy to hear it again in a projected beam far removed from the original light but forever radiant now (now that I don't live with my brother at least). And if ever a rush were worthy of amber-encased preservation for all time I'll still go with this one (along with 'Euphoria (Nino's Dream)' of course).

Once more, for Nick.

Javine, "Best Of My Love"

2005-02-15T11:55:00.000-05:00

The back story of Poor Javine, for those of you who weren’t enraptured by ITV1’s Popstars: The Rivals in the autumn of 2002: widely seen to be the most ‘talented’ contestant, she was controversially voted off the show the week before the final five girls were declared the winners. Those final five went on to become Girls Aloud, reigning queens of Popism, Poptimism and the UK charts. Javine Hylton went on to enjoy a very, very brief solo career before getting unceremoniously dropped by her record label. All together now: poor Javine!

It's probably scant consolation, but the girl who could've been aloud made the most slept-on single of last year, a monster disco anthem which sees her play the wronged woman to perfection. No, it's not that "Best Of My Love" - it's better. Replete with majestic, heady whooshes (oh, those whooshes! How good would they sound in a club? Very good, that's how good) and a pace which seems to get ever more frenetic as Javine's fury rises, it's mind-boggling that it didn't conquer the world. The city-flattening middle eight alone - 'I'm done with it! And I'm over it! And I'm through with it! And I can't believe I ever was a fool for you!' - should have been enough to cement this as Bona Fide Classic In The Vein Of "I Will Survive". Her earrings on the front cover were fabulous, too.

This single only barely cracked the UK Top 20. But in another world, this song established Javine as a star of such magnitude that there would have been no need to resort to the shoddy cover of Jade’s “Don’t Walk Away”, which was her next release – the final, desperate attempt to cling on to the mountain of pop stardom, and pretty much the final nail in her career’s coffin. Poor Javine.

Dead Man Ray, "BeeGee"

2005-02-14T22:33:00.000-05:00

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.

Go Home Productions, "Girl Wants to Say Goodbye to Rock and Roll"

2005-02-14T22:31:00.000-05:00

1. Ew writing writing writing. I haven’t slept in 30 hours, after having slept 14 hours yesterday, a nifty trick I’m likely to repeat tonite due to school, poor planning, and generally dicking the dog as they say. Patterns emerge, subsume, destroy me. Which is to say even on a good day I’d look at say Jody’s or Ally’s posts and do what I do when faced with superior efforts which is not even attempt to equal cuz no way do I equal it never mind top it even with sleep or coffee or even - just imagine - inspiration. O and the theme - um, gee it’d be crazy to hear this on the radio! O man! In a better world than this my brother, in a better world than this! Ie right click, save link target as, if you don’t have but do want, a maybe not so likely combo since this boot’s nearly a year old and hardly from an obscure source if you’re still paying attention to boots in 2004 or 5. Everything below: me showing how I can bore you - and how!, drop some personal with a tangent to the topic at hand, kick some blog, distract the guards. BLOGGGGGGGGGG. TREBUCHET ALL IN YO SHET.
2. Autumn 2001 I’m working in a record store in Athens, Wuxtry, where Pete Buck of early 80s faves REM worked, where John Fernandes of late 90s faves the Olivia Tremor Control works - Namedrops! WOO! I get the job becuz the guy who was stocking the ‘stuff besides indie rock and jazz’ has left. His name - Dangermouse! Another namedrop!, only this one’s related to the matter at hand cuz um, bootlegs, yes yes, ironic, it’s like that Grant Morrison JLA where the probabilities went whacky and Superman became the Green Lantern and Batman’s folx never croaked. I forget what happened to Martian Manhunter in that one. OK some more namedrops for no reason, as with above: when I was a kid future basketball hall-of-famer Tree Rollins lived down the street from my grandparents and I went fishing with him. O! and I sold Michael Stipe his copy of Rooty, which is pertinent cuz that lp featured the track “Romeo” which featured on a prominent bootleg at the height of the bastard pop craze. This track was called “The Magnificent Romeo” and it was magnificent and it was romeo! O!! and another time we saw some guy standing at the front door in some jean shorts and a big white Georgia Bulldogs t-shirt and like corny David Duval sunglasses, just standing at the front door and staring at the fliers and what on it for several minutes and then the guy comes in and asks me and John if we have any Groove Armada and we go ‘no’ and he leaves and me and John look at each other and go ‘whatta dork’. And it was Mike Mills. Which is pertinent (I hope I’m using that word right) cuz Groove Armada worked with Fatboy Slim who had a protobootleg o sorts with the “Satisfaction” remix of “Rockafeller Skank”, only maybe forget it cuz it kinda sucked, o and Mike Mills is in addition to being the name of a dorky bassist is also the name of a noted designer who’s an entirely different person from the bassist and has (probably) worked with Beck, who had a protobootleg o sorts with the “Highway to Hell” remix of “Mixed Bizness”, only maybe forget it cuz it kinda sucked too. THIS IS HIGHLY PERTINENT INFO AND IS LEADING SOMEWHERE VERY VERY REWARDING TO YOU THE READER.
3. Yeah, so right click, then ‘save link target as’. The rest of this, hmm, well. Don't.
4. Autumn 2001 I’m working in a very cif clientele record store, the three copies of The Blueprint I bother to stock remain unsold when I eventually leave a few months later, I never do stock Miss E…So Addictive cuz the one promo I put out used for seven bucks a week before release date is still sitting there unsold when I leave a few months later. Scene set. It’s autumn 2001 I’m working in a record store when I come in with a cd-r with some mp3s I’ve burnt, specifically, PERTINENTLY, the one mp3, yeah no shit “A Stroke of Genie-us” you guessed it, that prompted me to dl in the first place (though not the first track I dled, that’d be “Radar Love” by Golden Earring. Hh.) a practice I’d avoided previously for fears of Pandora’s box scenarios (these fears were warranted), but right now I gotta gottta play this track for someone so I’m playing it for everyone, anyone, and noone, nobody, is recognizing the vocals. I’m having to explain to some people who Christina Aguilera is. The Strokes though was recognized, pretty much immediately, pretty much every time. (Side note but extremely interesting to you the reader and I’m sure you’ll make use of it in your day-to-day life: the first person to recognize Xina, to ‘get it’, was a girl I was crazy for who ‘didn’t feel the same way about me’ ie. She didn’t want to fuck me But she did end up dating ie. Fucking a guy who looked A LOT like me! JUST LIKE IN THAT JLA WHERE BATMAN’S FOLX DON’T CROAK!!! WHAT A GIRL WANTS FOLX! NOT MY SORRY ASS!).
5. Intermission. I played this for a friend who amazingly enough was familiar with Xina and who related this little story which is better than anything I got - sorry folx! - and which I will relate to you now. My friend was babysitting her five year old niece who was coloring absentmindedly, and singing loudly passionately “What a Girl Wants”. My friend asked her niece what exactly a girl wants and my friend’s niece stared at her quizzically and thought for a minute and then finally said: “Cake.”
6. Spring 2004 after ten years I’m reunited with my youngest sister due to the worst event of my life during the worst year of my life (haha and I’ve fallen in love and attempted suicide and did neither during this year so that’s saying something!), but I’ve got my little sister again. She’s annoyingly hipper than me, only listens to hip-hop, dancehall, r&b, country and pop but definitely not any rock (ie she’s a young american - allllllllllllright), almost always has any mixtape I give her before I give it to her, intimidates the hell out of me truth be told, but I was able to burn her leaked copies of the Nellys prerelease for her so I take cool points where I can get them. She’s a big Xina fan, and though I tend to lean Britney (who’s “Oops! I Did It Again” mixed with Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady” remains the only non-”Encore” boot I’ve ever heard on commercial radio, unlike this track which I’ve only heard via ipod or cd meaning Martian Manhunter might hear it on the radio - Top 40 from another world! Dig it! - but Batman? Superman? NEVER!) I’ve come around to Xina. She sounds great here, when she cries havoc and lets slip the vox of more it meshes really really well with the VU guitar, one of those pop climaxes you’ll take in every context. And then Jimmy Somerville comes in to seal the squeal. Never can say goodbye girl. Happy endings Happy endings.

cry.on.my.console, "Tipsy (glitch mix)"

2005-02-13T17:57:00.000-05:00

It's difficult to imagine what another world's pop music would sound like when our pop music is often so strange and otherworldly. Would this other world latch on to our most banal, earthly sounds? Would Jeff Tweedy be their Timbaland? Or would their Top 40 be even stranger than ours? Becuase it suits my purposes, I'm going to assume the latter--this theoretical world would expand on the futuristic sonics and bizarre tropes that dominate our charts. And what better place to start than cry.on.my.console's J-Kwon glitch mix. Of course the huge drums are still there, no reason to fuck with the rhythm, but J-Kwon's vocals were never really that interesting, were they? This world doesn't need our bad McDonald's puns, so they get sound effects and pitch-shifts. We still require J-Kwon presence to be entirely comfortable with those beats, but, to them, he's just another instrument. We need to be willing to make these kinds of changes if we want to even begin to address our pop star trade deficit with future and other worlds.

Belvedere Kane, "Never Felt As Good"

2005-02-13T00:41:00.000-05:00

It's like: I'm pretty sure I can't actually recognise one single instrument used on this thing. I'm not really sure there actually are any - this is a record where pop becomes a physical thing, something chunky and neon you really could build nearly-four-minutes out of, sticking a hand in and pulling out plasticine studded with rubies. It's almost mathematical, ten seconds and everything before and throwing in yet another obvious stupid brilliant hook like those lasergun noises or using "kobold" as a verb or that bit where that Martian violin winds down before it kicks in or "I only took the bare essentials/ The things I'd really need/ My oldest Motown records and my Abba 'Hits' CD" or that little fluttery heartbeat before "Trees" in case you're bored or something or that electric angelchoir going "ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ahahaha, ahahahaha" or or or...

I know y'all know it already, but this is number one, y'know? That's what number ones do.

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

2005-02-11T01:44:00.000-05:00

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-

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

2005-02-10T15:16:00.000-05:00

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.

Romanthony, "Wreck"

2005-02-09T23:16:00.000-05:00

Let's get one thing straight. Ask my mother (or her mother before her) and she'd tell you, chutzpah is more than a Yiddish variation of "spunk". Chutzpah is arrogance, audacity, cheek, bravery and nerve, rolled in glitter or dirt with middle finger proudly extended. Those lucky enough to possess it invariably never hold onto it for long.

Witness Romanthony, sometime Daft Punk vocalist. Where he now? Back in 2000, he made music like "Wreck", which made hundreds of people happy and thousands of people dance. I once played this as the final song in my one and only DJ set, which followed an evening of alt-country bands in Brighton, England. The club manager came over to tell me to finish up and, like a drunken idiot, I put this song on a second time and stood there grinning as he screamed at me to stop. My grandmother would have been proud.

(This one is for Nick Kilroy)

Shuggie Otis, "XL-30"

2005-02-08T16:54:00.000-05:00

I can't say much about context before about 1983. But there we were in 1974, me in my swaddling clothes and Shuggie in the studio. Producer: "Shuggie, this is the interlude. The openening riff is great, be sure to bring it back around." Shuggie, to himself: "I'll take it where it takes me, okay?" Two minutes eight seconds isn't much time to wander off, but he manages to.

Metal Urbain, "Train (Version 2)"

2005-02-08T08:46:00.000-05:00

Fuck Tiny Bradshaw, fuck Jimmy Page & the Yardbirds, fuck Aerosmith, fuck real drums, fuck keeping time, fuck bourgeois conceits about "singing", fuck the blues, fuck rock & roll, and fuck punk rock, too. Viva La France!

Laurie Anderson, "Example #22"

2005-02-08T01:02:00.000-05:00

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!)

Bobby Orlando, "German Girl"

2005-02-07T11:34:00.000-05:00

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.

The Pointer Sisters, "Don't It Drive You Crazy"

2005-02-05T23:18:00.000-05:00

If they weren't yet the Richard Perry directed "Linda Ronstadt, in triplicate, with a beat" described by Xgau, in 1977 the Pointer Sisters were only a year away from fully embracing popdisco. "Don't It Drive You Crazy" from that years Blue Thumb album "Having a party" is almost impossibly lush funk. Shimmering strings, synth twizzles, Wah Wah Watson and a lyric that announces

I know i make it hard
but i don't care

a little later the poor guy (heh) is reminded to take his socks off.

Jackie McLean, "Soul"

2005-02-04T11:00:00.000-05:00

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.)

Screamin' Rachael, "Fun With Bad Boys"

2005-02-03T21:28:00.000-05:00

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"

2005-02-03T20:18:00.000-05:00

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.

Herbert, "Leave Me Now"

2005-02-03T19:27:00.000-05:00

Well, Herbert, in his inimitable way, may just be the very definition of chutzpah. What with P.C.C.O.M. and all. And because of lps full of Bodily Functions a la his contemporaries Matmos. Maybe you'd be tempted to write him off for conceptual pomposity alone, but then you'd miss his wonderful music and his deep and funky dj sets.

It was surprisingly hard to come up with a follow-up to the previous track, but I chose this one because the lyrics make a nice riposte to losing control, the analytical phase after the meltdown, and the music reflects the body's sensuality against you on the dancefloor in a disco-dub wasteland you go to when you're sick of thinking.

Grace Jones, "She's Lost Control"

2005-02-02T21:46:00.000-05:00

Broken down Manchester factory wasteland exchanged for broken down New York dub-disco wasteland. Grace doesn't so much sing as dictates into the track with some poor studio guy typing madly away to keep up. A news story wired in from some alternate retrofuture 1980.

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

2005-02-02T19:47:00.000-05:00

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"

2005-02-02T17:00:00.000-05:00

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.)