Stone Cold Pimpin'

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A lovely piece of animation for this Death Cab for Cutie song. I imagine it will be a bit more poignant for our Santa Barbara viewers after the Tea Fire.

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One of the benefits of buying the 20th Anniversary vinyl of Paul's Boutique is owning the 8-foot-long wraparound cover. Friend Nik and I were checking it out today and decided to see if we could find the same street corner on Google Maps. This is something I'm sure somebody else has thought of, but we didn't know. Anyway, It's only because of the super size album that I could see the cross-street is Ludlow and Rivington. Paul's Boutique is long gone, now replaced by Three Monkeys Shish Ke Bab. (That probably wouldn't be a good name for an album). We were able to match architecture and see what had changed, and what had not. If you have your old vinyl (or the new one, for $23.99! $17.99!!!) spend a few minutes playing spot the difference.

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The latest stuff, found here and there.

Various Artists - Ngoma Vol. 2 (African house music, go figure)
Ami Marie - Verrückt Nach Glück
Brian Eno - Music For Prague (more of the same hour-long droney)
Andrew Hill - Point of Departure
Serge Gainsbourg - Du jazz dans le ravin
Philip Glass - Heroes Symphony
Howie B & Hubert Noi - Music For Astronauts And Cosmonauts (from emusic.com, but with terrible audio glitches, wtf!)
A.R. Rahman - Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack
Brian Eno & Peter Sinfield - In a Land Of Clear Colours (glad I didn't pay for this "rarity")
Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass - Passages
Zu - Carboniferous (amazing!!!)
The Undertones - True Confessions: Singles = A's + B's
Bobby Hutcherson - Dialogue
Don Cherry - Eternal Rhythm
Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane - At Carnegie Hall
John Coltrane - Olé Coltrane
Robert Fripp & Brian Eno - Air Structures (yet another version of ye olde bootlegge)
Roland Bocquet - RCA - Robot Bleu
Akiko - A White Album

Not pictured: Roberto Cacciapaglia - Sei Note In Logica

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Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" from back in the day (1989!) still has the power to get a rise out of me, and has one of the most complex sample layers of any song in that period. (Or any period, as most contemporary hip-hop is the weakest of weak sauce.) Mix Magazine has a tech geek-out article from 2006 on the creation of this track:

A key to the lo-fi sounds found on “Fight the Power” and other Public Enemy records of the period were the technical limitations of their samplers, which the group enjoyed and embraced as part of their noise-based aesthetic. The S-900 and SP-1200 used 12-bit samples — more advanced than the Mirage, but lower than today's standard of 16 bits. Hank Shocklee explains that he likes the low-res sound because “you can't pick out the exact instrument and things that are going on, and it kind of meshes it all together, so the frequencies of where the guitar and the bass come in are not clearly defined.”

This was enhanced by the fact that the group often used longer sample loops than the equipment was intended for. “I think the SP-1200 had eight or 12 seconds tops for all 16 pads,” explains Hank Shocklee. “It wasn't designed to do what we were doing. It was just designed to put in kicks, snares, hi-hats, rides. To get more time, we would speed up the record, play it at 45 and we got almost double the time.” Once the sped-up sample was loaded in, it had to be pitched down, resulting in a further degradation of the sounds. Add to that the fact that the SP-1200 cut off the ends of its samples sharply. “The cut-off gave it a rough sound, a real edgy sound,” says Keith Shocklee appreciatively.

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Gotsdamn, I love the Internet sometimes! Case in point: music blog Mutant Sounds. For a month or so now, the owner of this blog has been posting rips of extremely rare electronic music from the early '80s that only saw release on obscure, home-made cassette labels like Adventures In Reality, Roding Recordings, Integrated Circuit Recordings, and plenty others. Some I have downloaded have been a bit too gnarly and amateurish for my ears, but others are just gems.

Two I recommend are Rick Crane's A Long Week in Houston from 1982 (maybe) and Robert Lawrence & Mark Phillips's The Dadacomputer (1981). "Houston" is two side-long analog synth space noodlings, one with taped voices, the other without, but both transport me back to the times when you could pick up weird music on the radio, late night. Or maybe that's just my memory. "Dadacomputer" is more rough and ready cut-up style, but bits remind me of Tuxedomoon. There's more to choose from, but I don't have the time to grab 'em all.

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Los Lobos, above, not being ripped off.
Did Paul Simon completely rip off Los Lobos for the last song on Graceland? Steve Berlin says yes and said so back in April 2006 in this interview for Jambase. The song in question is "All Around the World." According to Berlin, they were called in by a WB exec to jam with Simon and they shared a song that was going to turn up on "By the Light of the Moon."

I remember he played me the one he did by John Hart, and I know John Hart, the last song on the record. He goes, "Yeah, I did this in Louisiana with this zy decko guy." And he kept saying it over and over. And I remember having to tell him, "Paul, it's pronounced zydeco. It's not zy decko, it's zydeco." I mean that's how incredibly dilettante he was about this stuff. The guy was clueless.
It was ridiculous. I think David starts playing "The Myth of the Fingerprints," or whatever he ended up calling it. That was one of our songs. That year, that was a song we started working on By Light of The Moon. So that was like an existing Lobos sketch of an idea that we had already started doing. I don't think there were any recordings of it, but we had messed around with it. We knew we were gonna do it. It was gonna turn into a song. Paul goes, "Hey, what's that?" We start playing what we have of it, and it is exactly what you hear on the record. So we're like, "Oh, ok. We'll share this song."

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It was the hottest ticket in town, no joke, and I couldn't go. And now people like the NPR's Bob Bollen are calling the two-hour concert one of the best concerts they've ever seen.

Radiohead's show at the Santa Barbara Bowl came as close for musicianship and creativity as any show I've seen in 37 years. I've seen a lot of shows.
These guys write great songs, and sometimes you can even sing along to them, but what they do better than any band is create a sonic adventure — a soundscape which, at its best, stretches time and allows the mind to wander and rejuvenate. I think of it as resetting the synapses. Creativity breeds creativity. When the music was over, I felt unboxed and changed and pretty darn happy. Drugs are overrated; music is underrated.

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In the 70's, Rainer Wehinger created a visual listening score to accompany Gyorgy Ligeti's Artikulation. I (not me, someone) scanned the pages and synchronized them with the music.

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I was trolling the intertubes yesterday and came across the five-volume set of "Symphonies of the Planets," a 1992 release on the truck-stop and Ross Dress-for-Less label , LaserLight. Five tracks of "space music" 30 minutes long. But here's the deal: this "space music" is purportedly real space music.

In 1990, we made the Symphonies of the Planets series from raw, uncatalogued space sounds data as a promotional series... We did not go through the lengthy process to document specific planets, moons or rings. Rather we selected random information from the raw data and processed it to produce Symphonies of the Planets. However all sounds are Space Sounds. There are no engine sounds from the space probes.

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Since I posted this cover of my 1999 m:lls CD compilation on Flickr, I've had some requests, so I've posted the 2-CD set to Megaupload. Feel free to download the mix and check out some still pretty good tunes from nine years ago. (148 mins in total, 31 tracks, 160kbps.)
Track list is here:

Continue reading "m:lls 1999 - CD mix for your ears" »

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[Spit take of my morning coffee]Whaaaaaaaaa????
Yes, David Byrne and Brian Eno are making music together, and an album is set for the end of the year. Ooooooh!

Speaking at an event in New York, Byrne revealed that the duo had rekindled the relationship they formed in the late 70s/early 80s which resulted in three Talking Heads records and 1981’s classic My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
“I’m finishing up a record with Brian Eno, a musician that I worked with 30 years ago,” Byrne said following an appearance with Paul Simon at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on the 9th of April. “We did a record together of songs, and that’ll come out.”

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We're gonna continue on an Endtroducing tip with a few links.

An after-school percussion group at Minnetonka High School, Minneapolis, play two tracks from Endtroducing, over on this page, circa 2005. Word. The drummer even keeps in the weird drum edits. Big version of file here. Hot damn. Sounds like Steve Reich.

Eliot Wilder wrote a whole book about the album.

There's also this very long review of Entroducing over at PopMatters by Tim O'Neil.

Endtroducing... was a field report from the frontlines of a brave new world, a world which has now become slightly less strange but no less visceral. It would have been hard to rank it above similarly important albums by artists like Orbital, the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, New Order and Kraftwerk, but while each of those artists have produced albums which are perhaps the equal of Endtroducing..., there's not a one of them I could in good conscience put squarely above it.

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DJ Shadow's 1996 Endtroducing... is a masterpiece of sound collage and turntable skills and still sounds incredible 12 years later. The sheer number of samples place this album up there with the Beastie Boys "Paul's Boutique" and Public Enemy's "Fear of a Black Planet". And now blog Goons Dancing Under Full Moons has compiled all the samples into one large 250mb file for educational purposes.

This was a monster. When I saw the sample list I almost gave up before I started. These samples took me to the bowels of the internet and on the way I think I learned enough German and Portuguese to talk my ass out of a fight. If I tried to remember and list all of the different blogs and forums that helped me in my search my brain would bail out my ears. So here goes nothing and everything. 70 mthrfckng samples.

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Erica and I met Jon and Joan down in L.A. last night for the one-night-only appearance of Cornelius at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. For Jon and myself this was our first time seeing Cornelius since the Fantasma Tour in 1998. For the ladies, it was their first time ever. (CORRECTION: Jon reminds me he saw the band in 2002.) Keigo Oyamada and his band (which includes their smokin' ace drummer Yuko Araki) dress sharp and produce a tight post-rock that breaks rock and and electronica into small parts and reassembles them into fascinating sculptures. There's no other artist quite like it, though I would suggest The Books for the cut-up aesthetic and Yo La Tengo for the ability to play in different genres without sounding like parody. Accompanying the group was a video display which was synchronized to the music (or rather, the other way around)--and here I can use the powers of YouTube to present some of my favorites from the night. These aren't just abstract vids, but crazy animations whose domestic backgrounds mirror Cornelius' own bedroom aesthetic of music creation. "Fit Song" was incredible on the big screen, especially.
Opening for Cornelius was the two-man DJ operation called Plaid. I don't know how to categorize their sometimes pounding electronica, as it verged often into the abstract. You wouldn't be dancing to them. It's too rhythmically complex to be ambient. It's Plaid. Their video work behind them was a relief compared to watching two guys at laptops.
Finally, being my first visit to the space, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry, is a truly beautiful thing to be inside. I may have problems with a lot of Gehry's work, but inside the Hall it feels like being inside a giant wooden cup, vertiginous, and despite our balcony seats, we had a great view of the entire event and felt on top of everything. The acoustics are fabulous, especially for Plaid, as the various frequencies seem to come from different areas of the Hall. The bass was remarkable. The only trouble with Cornelius was moments were so frikkin' loud that the very high frequencies rose to the top of the hall (wood, you know) and assaulted us. But I think that was the point. Oyamada plays his trusty Theremin and one of his bandmates was sawing away at some unidentified electronic instrument with a bow, producing some otherworldly screeches. And did I mention that the drummer is amazing?
So here's some video. Fit Song:

Like a Rolling Stone (YouTube can't do this justice):

Point of View Point:

Drop (Do It Again):

Wataridori:

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Not everybody knows Laurie Anderson, even during her most popular period, 1980-1986. So I have trawled YouTube to see what I could find for all y'alls education. Her most enduring track is 1980's O Superman, her mesmerizing 8 minute opus that amazingly went to Number One in the UK in some sort of aberration of coolness. If you've never seen it, well:

Then there's her 1984 album, Mister Heartbreak, which has a number of great tracks on it. But Sharkey's Day was the only (?) video from it:

There's some great moments of early video surrealism here.
Finally, there's a great Stop Making Sense-like concert movie called Home of the Brave, which has yet to be released on DVD. In the meantime, here's the Language Is a Virus video, which is a sort of trailer for the film. This remix of the song is not in the film, but was produced by Nile Rogers to promote it.
For an idea of what the film actually looks like, though, here's one of the best songs, Smoke Rings. There's several things I love here: the gameshow intro (a parody of a SNL skit); Anderson's second microphone, which is connected to a echoey delay so she can sing a single high note into it and have it careen around the mix; the morphing of a smoke ring into a zero and then its binary opposite, a '1', then turning into '911'; Anderson's weird electronic sampler-violin at the end that make sawing, diving sounds.

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All three tracks of Sgt Pepper isolated, then played together. (the fourth track I think was used for the crowd sounds.)

It's also the only time that I've heard the track trail off into studio jamming and not segue into "With a Little Help"...

Where this comes from I don't know. (Well, the link was found on boingboing, but who "Beatlepuzzle" is, I don't know.

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My first favorite song of 2008. The lead singer looks like the lovechild of Buggles-era Trevor Horn and Elvis Costello. And is the band's maneuvering through the video a tribute to these kind of Japanese game shows?

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If we're gonna go out, let's go out like this song, joyous in the face of un-knowledge and un-certainty.

There's a city in my mind
Come along and take that ride
And it's alright, baby it's alright
And it's very far away
But it's growing day by day
And it's alright , baby it's alright
Would you like to come along
You can help me sing this song
And it's alright, baby it's alright
They can tell you what to do
But they'll make a fool of you
And it's alright, baby it's alright

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I'm back from Hawaii (didn't you know I'd gone?) and I've been sorting through blogs and mail and such. And this new video from Denki Groove is TEH COOLNIZ. It starts awesome and continues through several variations on awesome. To be more coherent, it is steady zooms on '80s style Japanese girls. It's cute and creepy at the same time, and the hair! the hair!!
Credit where credit's due to Chipple for pointing this out.
(Hawaii photos coming soon...)

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November 30, 2007 12:00 AM

The Pipettes - We Are the Pipettes
Riotbecki! Gwenno! Rosay! This retro girl-group trio from the UK has been all over YouTube, KCRW, and SXSW since last year, and now their CD has been released by a Stateside label with a different mix and two extra songs. Their lead-off single "Pull Shapes," like most of the songs, borrows its style from the Shangri-Las and other Phil Spector-produced classics, but with contemporary post-feminist concerns in the lyrics (sample song titles from later in the album "Sex", "One Night Stand" and "Dirty Mind.") The Pipettes' harmonies stay true to their British roots, although sometimes you can squint your ears and swear it's the B-52s. Sunny and bright as well as cheeky and knowing, this might not be brilliant stuff for the ages, but it can't help but bring a smile to the lips.

Radiohead - In Rainbows
OK, computer, now how much would you pay? Radiohead's long-awaited follow-up to the just-average "Hail to the Thief" is currently a pay-what-you-think Internet download with 160 kbps quality sound and no cover art. Beat heavy and funky in places, "In Rainbows" dips into Krautrock ("Bodysnatchers"), shuffling, spaced-out hip-hop ("Reckoner"), and echo-laden shoegazing (the beautiful, languid "House of Cards"), against which Thom Yorke's plaintive voice struggles with basic human relationships yet again (oh, but we wouldn't have it any other way). Light on stand-out melodies, but heavy on intricate production from Nigel Godrich, "In Rainbows" is no "Kid A," but should expand and develop over time in concert.

Continue reading "Soundbytes: Seven Recent CD Reviews for the NewsPress" »

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His marriage falling apart, something like 24 hours of no sleep, Elvis Costello sits down for this one-take video (save final shot) of a song from an album he still disowns. Watch him break down around 1:20 (and again at 2:20), I think it's real. (You can take what you think about '80s production, echo-ed vocals, and sax breaks and stick it.)
Sniff. And that's as most as I get to personal on my blog.

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Rolling Stone has an article up about Who Killed the Record Industry. Answer: the companies themselves.

So who killed the record industry as we knew it? "The record companies have created this situation themselves," says Simon Wright, CEO of Virgin Entertainment Group, which operates Virgin Megastores. While there are factors outside of the labels' control -- from the rise of the Internet to the popularity of video games and DVDs -- many in the industry see the last seven years as a series of botched opportunities. And among the biggest, they say, was the labels' failure to address online piracy at the beginning by making peace with the first file-sharing service, Napster. "They left billions and billions of dollars on the table by suing Napster -- that was the moment that the labels killed themselves," says Jeff Kwatinetz, CEO of management company the Firm. "The record business had an unbelievable opportunity there. They were all using the same service. It was as if everybody was listening to the same radio station. Then Napster shut down, and all those 30 or 40 million people went to other [file-sharing services]."

Also, why don't record companies sell CDs for cheap at concerts? That's a major audience who are ready to impulse buy. I'm sure there's some stizoopid legal reason for this, but I've always seen this as a missed opportunity.

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KJEE'S SEASIDE BEACH BALL: The Queens and I - Guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen part of ever-changing Stone Age roster
Ted Mills, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT
June 8, 2007 8:00 AM

Signs of Summer: Popsicles, beach towels, flip-flops, barbecues. Add radio-friendly rock bands arriving en masse to that list.

Large rock festivals like KJEE's Seaside Beach Ball, coming to the Ventura County Fairgrounds today, have become a way to expose a roster of popular and up-and-coming artists to the maximum amount of like-minded fans. One month ahead of the Warped Tour, the Beach Ball brings to the sunny city to the south a lineup featuring the famous (Queens of the Stone Age, former Soundgarden and Audioslave frontman, now solo artist Chris Cornell), the hip (Sum 41, Plain White T's) and the buzz-worthy (Cold War Kids, Shiny Toy Guns).

For Troy Van Leeuwen, guitarist with Queens of the Stone Age, these festivals are a good way to make new fans and to play short sets to an already-hyped crowd. "We just came off KROQ's Weenie Roast festival," he says. "They had a revolving stage, and so you come on already playing. It's crazy."

The KJEE stage might not revolve, but the Queens will be turning heads with a set that unveils many of the new songs on their fifth album, "Era Vulgaris," set to drop in a week.

Continue reading "Arts Article: Queens of the Stone Age" »

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Madness finally return with a new song and a new video. Er, it's just okay. They don't do anything particularly interesting, it looks like it was quickly shot during somebody's lunch break. The video doesn't really show off the full band--are Chrissy Boy, Lee Thompson, and Mike Barson still in the band? Not that you can tell...Still, a new album is coming soon. Let's hope it's better than this makes it out to be. Oh yeh, and this has GUEST STARS rapping during the break. Ah. Yes.

There's also an all-Madness version here.

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This is the brand new video for Togenkyo, shot in front of a series of ramen-ya of various "class" levels. A very odd song, or really, three songs slapped together.

This one came out last year? I have no idea, never heard it before. But nice Rubic's Cube theme. However, neither are as good as Tandem, what can I say?

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The Specials - Ghost Town

and a BBC documentary on the song. Educated yo'self!

Check out the 8-year-olds dancing at 4:50! Ace!!

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Adrian Belew's "Big Electric Cat" video from 1982. Loved this when this came out, check out the totally retro computer graphics. Woo!

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I'm sorry, but this may be the best thing I've seen all month. And it's in my head! And it's in German!! Hilfe!

How many music vids contain both a Godard reference and a Goatse one?

Thanks to Chris for sending this on!

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Well, I didn't think that would ever happen. Stewart Copeland, still one of the finest drummers...ever!

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A little while ago, I co-directed a video with Jonathan Crow for the Boston-based band Freezepop. Well, we at last finished post production on it and premiered it last weekend to a select group of people in the house and backyard of my producer (but not of this video) Sabrina. We had a small but appreciative turnout, but for those who couldn't make it, here it is for you to watch on your computer or download to your iPod.
Inspirations were early '80s "all-white" videos (the background, not the people) and educational film strips from the '50s-'70s. Thanks to Danny Gregory, who has a great book on those filmstrips, and who also has been an inspiration to me in his outlook on art and life. His blessing meant a lot.
WATCH: .MOV file (16.9 mb)
DOWNLOAD: MP4 iPod file (17.6 mb)
Also available on YouTube!

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Simple and clever!

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Dead at age 64, from a heart attack. One of the greats! R.I.P.

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Paul Morely writes in this Observer piece on the history of Manchester's music scene about the nights that changed music as we know it--the Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, June 4 and July 20, 1976.

Devoto, let's just say, for the hell of it because the story has to start somewhere, with a bang, or a legendary punk gig, was the man who changed Manchester because he had an idea about what needed to happen at just the right time in just the right place. He arranged for the Sex Pistols to play in Manchester before the rest of the country had caught up with the idea that there was any such thing as a Sex Pistol. In the audience for the shows were Mark E Smith, Ian Curtis, Morrissey and Devoto himself, four of the greatest rock singers of all time, directly challenged to take things on. Johnny Rotten was like a psychotic lecturer explaining to these avant-garde music fans exactly what to do with their love for music, the things they wanted to say, and their unknown need to perform.

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Photo by Brian Damage from this Flickr set.
[Warning: Geeky, obsessed fan review follows]
I've had few transcendent moments watching live music (many more on headphones and/or driving, thanks), but this weekend I had an damn near out of body experience at The Fall concert at the Knitting Factory. It helped that I haven't seen the group since 1993 and that the new album is just brilliant, and also that I was second from the front of the stage, dead center, and located right next a giant bass floor speaker that I'm sure has now rendered me sterile through low frequency vibrations. But it was worth it!

Continue reading "The Fall - Live at the Knitting Factory, LA 5/13/06" »

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I've enjoyed K-Punk's Lacanian takes on Cronenberg, Lynch, and Doctor Who, among others. This week, he starts a two part series examining The Fall, primarily the early albums. It's good stuff, as usual:

On ‘Specter versus Rector’, any vestigial rock presence subsides into hauntology. The original track is nothing of the sort – it is already a palimpsest, spooked by itself; at least two versions are playing, out of sync. The track – and it is very definitely a track, not a ‘song’ - foregrounds both its own textuality and its texturality. It begins with cassette hum and when the sleeve notes tell us that it was partly 'recorded in a damp warehouse in MC/R' we are far from surprised. Steve Hanley’s bass rumbles and thumps like some implacable earth-moving machine invented by a deranged undergound race, not so much rising from subterranea as dragging the sound down into a troglodytic goblin kingdom in which ordinary sonic values are inverted. From now on, and for all the records that really matter, Hanley’s bass will be the lead instrument, the monstrous foundations on which the Fall's upside-down sound will be built. Like Joy Division, fellow modernists from Manchester, The Fall scramble the grammar of white rock by privileging rhythm over melody.

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Us, being, the denizens of the Internet, and one particular blog called Scarstuff. They've dug up and posted the MAD Magazine
Super Spectacular Day flexisingle that I owned back in 1980. The single was particularly interesting for having eight different endings, all randomly determined from where the stylus landed. This meant that as you tried to listen to all eight endings, the song got stuck in your head. I'm almost scared to relisten to it-- I still have that obnoxious "UNTILLLL!!" knocking about my brain all these years later.

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My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is being reissued. And OMGoodniz, they are doing it up properly. Bonus tracks, new cover art, a Bruce Conner video to Mea Culpa, and, on the website only, the ability to remix two tracks by downloading the full multitracks (page not up yet). The site also features behind the scenes photos (both Eno and Byrne have perfect hair) and alternative polaroid cover art. Releases April 11.

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Back in 2000, Headless Household (under a pseudonym) scored my short film "Walk Cycle." The music (minus sound effects) has finally come out as part of Headless Household's new release Blur Joan. I just got the album in the mail and it's their funkiest yet...or ever. And funky is not a word I'd usually use to describe HH. Jeff Kaiser and Jim Connolly appear on the album too, all people who have helped out on the Mills Movie Soundtrack front. Nice.

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The Amen Break is the most famous drum sample in modern music. Just six seconds of a drum solo on an obscure B-side by gospel group The Winstons (for a song called "Amen Brother") has become the main ingredient on rap songs like NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" and pretty much all of drum and bass. Nate Harrison's Installation is really a way of making a documentary without having to clear rights, which is what the second half of the doc covers. It's also what I hoped will start happening to docs--with a need to make a visual essay, doc filmmakers will have to go underground or create installations in order to bypass restrictive copyright laws. Then maybe we'll start to see film and video versions of Greil Marcus or Lester Bangs.

Posted by Ted Mills at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Okay, so you see this chart of album sales? So where's all the money that mp3s and fille sharing have taken from the record industry? Surely, 1996, before the explosion of the Internet and file sharing, should be higher than now, correct?
Unless, of course, the record industry has just been MAKING SHIT UP.

Posted by Ted Mills at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
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For without Steinweiss, there would be no Abbey Road.

Big Town Songbook: Make 'em sing
Most people who have bought any musical recordings over the past 60 years might have assumed they always came in covers, or sleeves, or jackets, that featured a colorful graphic designed to enhance the lure of the music.
They didn't. Album covers had to be invented. This was a task that largely fell to a Brooklyn kid named Alex Steinweiss.

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Link Wray died a few days ago, but I just came across this excellent interview from 1993, where Link meets Mark E. Smith and they get along like a house on fire. Too bad there was never a Fall-Wray jam session!

MES: "The trouble with the rock business is that it's too easy to make music. That's why they use the machines. If you want to hear something that's perfect you should go away and listen to classical music, but that's not what rock'n'roll's about, is it!"

LW: "No it ain't. It's about feeling and hurting and pain. That is rock'n'roll, and that's soul music. Soul music is pain - you can hear the slaves, the beatin' and the hurtin'. Who cares if we're playing the right notes or not! Who gives a shit if it's in tune!"

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Larry Fast's gallery of behind the scene shots from the making of the first four Peter Gabriel Albums. I have a soft spot for Peter Gabriel 2. Larry Fast is PG's long time keyboard player.

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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A one of a kind object: a model of Yellow Magic Orchestra, circa 1979, and their full live rig. Apparently sold at auction in 2003.

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I'm going to be poor this year end. What with the Talking Heads reissues, Sony/BMG in the UK have at last got around to remastering the Eurythmics catalog, and including all sorts of bonus tracks and such. I'm a big fan of the entire Sweet Dreams album, most of Touch (except for Here Comes the Rain Again, which I heard too much growing up), and--despite what critics say--Savage. But hold on--where's the 1984 soundtrack and the extra dub tracks from TouchDance? Oh well. But I'm sure the remasters will sound great--the CD releases date from the late '80s and have virtually no bass.

Posted by Ted Mills at 1:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Bumrocks is an mp3 blog that posts a single mp3 every couple of days or so. The tracks are either spacerock circa 1978 or retro new stuff that sounds like 1978 in all the good ways (Moogs, Clavinets, oh my). It certainly is filling my head up with good stuff this last month. Try Metropolitain by Hydravion, as an example, light up a spliff, and don those 'phones, man. All tracks stay up for about a month.

Posted by Ted Mills at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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I get so much music these days, either buying, dowloading, or ripping, that I think I should just list it. I won't even begin to list individual tracks.

Boards of Canada - The Campfire Headphase
The Kinks - The Ultimate Collection (2 CDs - What's with all these Kinks comps and no Village Green excerpts?)
Carl Cox - Back to Mine (Cox chose the tracks on this mix CD, downtempo funky stuff, which all flows well, except for a rap song dropped in there.)

Actually, that's it for this week!

Posted by Ted Mills at 7:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Here's the most excellent music video for Elbow's "Leaders of the Free World", one of my favorite songs at the moment. The video doesn't disappoint, with Tron meeting Empire Strikes Back meets, well, I dunno, but the band all wear fake moustaches. File size is about 18mb, but oh so worth it.

Posted by Ted Mills at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Narnack
2005

At last a new Fall album! American label Narnack picked the group up and for the first time the U.S. release appears before the British. I don't know if it's the American engineers, but this album plain out rocks more than any album the group has done. (The last one, the UK "Real New Fall Album" had absolutely no bass on it). I mean, on "What About Us," when the bass kicks in, the Fall sound seriously heavy and hard, man. Woo! The album opener "Ride Away" is one of the weakest on the album, though--absolutely mystifying why they chose this to start with. (Although, as with most dull Fall songs, there's one redeeming feature. For "Ride Away" its when Mark E. Smith says "Hey hey" as if he's just realized he's in a dumb song.

Continue reading "The Fall - Fall Heads Roll" »

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Hmm, maybe I've found my Christmas present: Talking Heads Brick. The entire Talking Heads catalog remastered in CD and DVD 5.1 audio versions. The original Sire CDs were actually pretty good, so I'm hoping that these better be "revelatory" to justify the rerelease...

Posted by Ted Mills at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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naija jams | the naija music blog. Introducing selections of Nigerian music both old and new. Cool!

Posted by Ted Mills at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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This will only interest Japanese speakers or those who love Pizzicato Five, but Maki Nomiya now has a blog called "Nomiya Maki Oshare Blog". Three entries so far, with a little tidbit about P5 and the filming of one of their videos. If your Japanese is rusty, you can get a translation here.

Posted by Ted Mills at 6:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
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Gah! These chain blog posts! I don't usually answer these type of surveys, but I was interested in seeing what Phil had on his computer. So here we go:

Total volume of music on my computer
3,222 songs from 1,072 artists, taking up 16.14GB and making for nearly 8.8 days of 24-hours-a-day listening.
My work computer (the playlists rarely overlap)
1,320 songs from 512 artists, taking up 6.05GB and making for nearly 3.7 days of 24-hours-a-day listening.

The last CD I bought
Black Cab's Altamont Diary, as I'd liked the two tracks I'd found on an mp3 blog. An Australia-only release, I found it used and had to manually order it using back-n-forth email with the shop owner.

Song playing right now
Thievery Corporation playing live with a full band on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me
That changes every day, so currently it's:

Hot Chocolate - Everyone's a Winner
Junior Senior - Itch You Can't Scratch
Nerina Pallot - Everybody's Going to War
Parry Gripp - Do You Like Waffles?
Go Home Productions - Girl Wants (to say goodbye to) Rock And Roll

For those in the know, look for these on MILLS2005PTONE

Five people to whom I'm passing the baton
Mostly because I want to know how many gigs they're using: Peter Nacken, William Mellot, Danny Gregory, Patrick Benny, and Jean Snow.

Posted by Ted Mills at 2:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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I first saw James Brown in 1962 at an outdoor theatre in San Diego and it was indescribable... it was like putting a finger in a light socket. He did the whole thing with the cape. He did 'Please Please Please'. It was such a spectacle. It had all the pageantry of the Catholic Church. It was really like seeing mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Christmas and you couldn't ignore the impact of it in your life. You'd been changed, your life is changed now. And everybody wanted to step down, step forward, take communion, take sacrament, they wanted to get close to the stage and be anointed with his sweat, his cold sweat.

That and 19 others in Tom Waits on his most cherished albums of all time

Posted by Ted Mills at 2:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Thanks to William for pointing this out. This BBC Radio doc on John Peel has made me sad all over again. He's one person for which the superlatives are justified.

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Most excellent chronology of Bowie's most productive period: 1974-1980. And here's a great quote:

PM: You seem to be fascinated by cities like Berlin…

DB: Berlin, because of the friction. I've written songs in all the Western capitals, and I've always got to the stage where there isn't any friction between a city and me. That became nostalgic, vaguely decadent, and I left for another city. At the moment I'm incapable of composing in Los Angeles, New York or in London or Paris. There's something missing. Berlin has the strange ability to make you write only the important things - anything else you don't mention, you remain silent, and write nothing ... and in the end you produce Low.

Posted by Ted Mills at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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A few years ago, I discovered the most wonderful mystery of the Numbers Stations, strange coded messages of a spy agency nature that could be found only at the top reaches of the shortwave radio dial. A year later they would become "cool" (in quotes) after Wilco used some on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I bought a CD-ROM about them, but at the time the holy grail of recordings was the four-disc CONET PROJECT, a loving anthology of the greatest "hits" of number stations: sine-wave jingles, children reading out numbers in German, static, static, static. You could find some copies on the web, but it was at an exhorbinant price. What a surprise then to find that Irdial Discs, who first released the CD, has made it available via mp3 along with the very extensive liner notes.
Choice stuff, folks!

Posted by Ted Mills at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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A good defense/appreciation of the Beatles American albums. Either way, it's good to have these stereo versions out compared to the "mastered on wax paper" 1987 CDs that have still yet to be remastered.

WhatGoesOn.com- New Beatles Capitol box set misunderstood by critics:
It should be noted that in the early sixties, teen albums rarely sold in excess of a few hundred thousand copies. Capitol?s success with its reconfigured Beatles albums containing hit singles changed that. Record companies soon realized that well-crafted rock albums could be big sellers. A few years later, thanks to the Beatles and Capitol, the album replaced the single as the dominant pop and rock music format.

Posted by Ted Mills at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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The Keyboard Museum site has plenty of cool stuff, but only today did I check out their page of Flash tutorials explaining how organs like the Hammond and the Rhodes get their particular sound. Joseph Rivers animations are something that could only exist on the web.

Posted by Ted Mills at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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This so-called King of the Pirates is dedicated to collecting "a copy of every song every recorded." But why? The answer will tickle you.

I spent the day with a guy who spends every free moment collecting music. So far his music collection rivals Apple's iTunes Music Store, and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded. Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination.

What do you say to someone who has a digital music collection that exceeds 900,000 songs? This was the question I was pondering during my long drive to interview the man who claims he is on a quest to own a copy of ever song ever recorded. What do you say? I think the only way to begin such an interview would be to ask 'why'"

Posted by Ted Mills at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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I'm absolutely stunned. I woke up to the sad news this morning that John Peel died while on holiday in Peru. Just like many of his fans will say, Peel introduced me to a whole new world of music when I was in my teens in the U.K. Without John Peel, I wouldn't have known about The Fall, or The Smiths, or more obscure bands like Fats Comet, Scraping Foetus off the Wheel, Hypnotone, and (the record I'm still searching for) Colonel Kilgore's Vietnamese Formation Surf Team.
But what made Peel's show special to me was not so much the music, but his in between breaks patter. Unpolished but never at a loss for words, Peel was a friendly voice there to guide you through some of the noisy patches of alt-rock. Good at popping pretensions and self-deprecating to a fault, he didn't try to hide mistakes--like playing a record at the wrong speed, or not knowing when a song would start ("This one fades up a bit" he'd say as the music faded up).
When I had a radio show for a brief period in college, Peel was the model, and his chatty, casual style, like a best friend who couldn't wait to play you the new records he bought, was quite hard to pull off. You realised it came from years and years of work, total comfort at the DJ station, and a humility that kept his ego in check. For someone who broke nearly every major music genre of the past 30 years, he never wore it like a badge.
I remember his glee over certain records. One was "Sidewalkin'" by the Jesus and Mary Chain. He had just got the single and opened the show with it. He loved it so much, he said that he played it again almost immediately afterwards. Then two hours later he closed the show with it, just like a giddy teenager.
Though I found it hard to listen to him here in CA (even with streaming radio), he is still the yardstick I measure other radio shows by.
After Peel, what else is there?
Goodbye John, you will be sorely missed.

Posted by Ted Mills at 8:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Directed by somebody or something called SSSR, this is just lovely, lovely stuff. Subtle - F.K.O (.mov file)

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Following on from my earlier post about rare record dealers, here comes what looks like and interesting book on record collecting.

Paste Magazine :: Review :: Vinyl Junkies
Every guy with a record collection and a girlfriend should read Brett Milano?s Vinyl Junkies with her as relationship therapy. The book follows die-hard collectors from different walks of life?from R. Crumb?s country and blues 78s to several vinyl addicts in Milano?s native Boston, where he writes for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Herald. The book presents an engaging look at a diverse subculture?from the rabid nerd completists to the musicians and industry types you would expect to have a serious relationship with their records (including R.E.M.?s Peter Buck and Sonic Youth?s Thurston Moore). But Milano also writes about ?normal? people with jobs and relationships and whose fashion choices range outside jeans and obscure punk T-shirts.

Posted by Ted Mills at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Last night I went down to L.A. to see Puffy (known in the States as PuffyAmiYumi) play the House of Blues. My companion: the estimable Jonathan Crow, who says he remembers the day I first played him their debut single (the never-bettered "Ajia no Junshin") in the car while driving around Tsuchiura. So, amazingly, it has come to this, eight years later. Tamio Okuda's "idol" group kept on keeping on, and now is poised to go American pop-sub-culture mainstream with the premiere of their Cartoon Network show next month. They've scored a hit with the theme song to the Teen Titans cartoon, a level of American saturation most Japanese bands would only dream about.
It helps that they have good songwriters and producers (Tamio, Andy Sturmer, Velveteen), a crack back-up band (known as Dr. Strangelove, aka Tamio's backing band), and they can actually sing in tune (in harmony), something not often called up in the 'gambatte' culture of Jpop.
This concert ended up costing a lot of money. Sure, tickets were $20, but after Ticketbastard service charges, that went up to $32. Then because it was at the House of Blues on Sunset ("located in a cool part of town with no parking") we had to valet park, a whopping, criminal $15. Fortunately, the tour T-shirts blew and I felt no need to get one.
We waited in a line that stretched down Sunset, and got in just after Puffy had finished their second song. And we turned up on time, too!
Anyway, the band just focused on their most rockin' numbers. "Jet Police" is a good 'un, as is "Akai buranko". In between patter was written up on crib sheets and they were cute in an exchange student way. I expect most new fans assume the two are in their 20s, whereas they're crackin' on into their 30s.
They encored with "Ajia no Junshin" which just capped off the night for me. Ahh, pop satisfaction. Who woulda thought I would have ever seen this live?
Because they are promoting their Cartoon Network show, they came back on after and taped a song for a New Year's Eve concert for the network. We were asked to pretend it was now Dec. 31, 2004 and we counted down to one. A net full of balloons hanging above the crowd failed to break and instead, like a giant white sausage, floated down on to the crowd. It will be interesting to see how that gets edited...

UPDATE: If you're curious about the "service charges," here's the breakdown, for the two tickets I bought:
FULL PRICE ADULT US $20.00 x 2
Total Building Facility Charge(s) US $2.00 x 2
Total Convenience Charge(s) US $7.70 x 2

Order Processing Charge(s) US $3.75
ticketFast Delivery US $2.50

TOTAL CHARGES US $65.65

I won't even pretend to know what the difference is between the "convenience charge" and the "ticketFast" charge. You mean I should pay you money for the use of an online database and sending me a pdf file? It's not like you even had to use ink to print it out. Nobody helped me, so who had to process this? My judgement? These are bullshit charges that Ticketbastard makes up.

Posted by Ted Mills at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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In my current employment, I've got the iTunes loaded up on the office PC (take that Windows Media Player) and uploaded my series of Squid Lord comps for something like three full days of music, should I choose to stay at work that long.
And while I like iTunes' ability to crossfade tracks (gawrsh, it's like a radio station in here!) its shuffle play leaves a lot to be desired. I'm curious about the algorithm (or whatever) used to determine what track comes up next, because certain tracks pop up all the time. SoundJam MP does this too (yes, I still use it at home).
However, shuffle play is a great little thing when the collection is large and varied. If post-modernism is all about recontextualizing, then shuffle play is the great recontextualizer. It gives the listener those brief seconds at the beginning of a song to re-hear something, to compare it with the song that came before. It can elevate tracks from albums that were obscured by "the single," or connections between disparate genres can suddenly appear as if planned.

Posted by Ted Mills at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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A slightly whiny essay in the Guardian by Jonathan Harris tells us that British rock is doomed! Doomed! I tell ye. For evidence he holds up Franz Ferdinand: "well-adjusted, polite, and politically inert." They won the Mercury Prize the other day, and gave a thankful, modest acceptance speech, instead of, I guess, hurling the award at somebody. Harris' main points seem to be that life under Blair and New Labour hasn't been sufficiently horrible enough to produce the proper rage-filled conditions condusive to punk. You could ask that question of America too, as we've been far worse off under Bush, but where's the music? Perhaps music as an outlet of outrage isn't working anymore in a world of street protests, Internet, flash mobs, and MoveOn. Young musicians are more apt to blame their parents than society for their ills (hence the awful whinge-punk of Blink 182 and others).
Now, an artist like Elvis Costello always wrote about both, the external society and the internal hell of relationships, but he, like others, were able to understand that both were the same thing, essentially. "Emotional Fascism," as Costello originally titled Armed Forces in 1979. So possibly one reason this isn't happening anymore is that we can't make the connection. The machine of society runs quietly in the background...

Posted by Ted Mills at 8:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Virgin CDVX2325
1984 reissued 2001
Big Express was XTC's second album after Partridge gave up touring, decamping to become studio band. This has always been one of my "second favorite" XTC albums, in that it never finds its way to the top spot. Highlights are the underrated "Wake Up"-a Moulding song that actually found itself released as a single to complete indifference. But I love the way the duelling stereo guitar intro fools my ear everytime, sounding like four-four, but turning out to be backbeat when the drums come in. It also has a great "Walrus"-like ending. Big Express also contains a suite of songs that look at life in England: "Red Brick Dream" "Washaway" and "The Everyday Story of Smalltown" which celebrate as much as they criticize village life. The remaster is sparkling, although the album has always sounded good, even on the cassette copy I had 10 years ago. My only complaint is that sticking so close to rendering the original album art has resulted in the lyric sheet being unreadable.
Pros: Terrific production, great playing, wonderful pop melodies
Cons: "Train Running Low on Soul Coal" goes on and on.

Posted by Ted Mills at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Thirsty Ear THI66036.2
1998
Found this Roger Eno album down at Pennywise Records in Pasadena. I'd never heard of it, but any Eno is okay with me, usually. Flatlands is Eno's attempt to turn a string quartet into a sort of ambient synthesizer. Avoiding the sunny romanticism of "Between Tides" from some years back, the album is a sort of no-man's land between synth-wash background music and chamber music that threatens to become melodic. It's not a bad album, neither it is a good album. It just sort of exists and then it ends. I've put it on several times and tried to pay attention to it, but that feeling never lasts.
Pros: Pleasant, a nice melding of strings and ambient thought.
Cons: Too long without much variety.

Posted by Ted Mills at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Virgin CDVX2325
1980 reissued 2001
Ah, good old Black Sea. This, along with Big Express (remaster), turned up used and cheap at Morninglory Music. The Mummer remaster was lovely and made me re-evaluate a few songs, so I grabbed this quickly. Black Sea is the last really rockin'-out XTC album, one before the blossoming of English Settlement. On one hand that means it's consistent in tone--the Black of the title and the deep sea diver cover really suit the dark music contained within. On the other, Andy Partridge's skill at melody hasn't yet developed and is still battling it out with his desire to aggravate with yelps, shouts, and mono-tunes over rock riffs (the interminable "Living Through Another Cuba"). It's Colin Moulding's songs that hold up best, which here include "Generals and Majors," "Love at First Sight," and the bonus track "Smokeless Zone." The best Partridge songs turn out to be the singles: "Respectable Street," "Sgt. Rock," and "Towers of London." It's songs like "Respectable", "Towers," and "Paper and Iron" that look towards the dissecting of England that is to come on English Settlement.
Pros: The hardest XTC has ever sounded. "Respectable Street" rocks! As does "Travels in Nihilon"
Cons: Sonic palette not as varied as future releases.

Posted by Ted Mills at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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If you stop by this page wondering why it's not updated often, it's not that I don't buy records and CDs. In fact it's the opposite. I buy, burn, copy, and devour music non-stop, so I'm stuck as to what I should write on. I don't have the time to write on everything, so I'm thinking maybe I should just write on what I purchase. Just a thought.

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Monkmus' newish video forBadly Drawn Boy's "Year of the Rat" is very cute, especially the doggy.

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Not that you see many videos on MTV anymore, but Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" is one of the best, animated by Jonas Odell. This Quicktime version doesn't do the work justice. Maybe there'll be a DVD single (keep hoping)...

Posted by Ted Mills at 1:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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I came across this post from Woebot while searching for something on the composer Mauricio Kagel. I like the idea that this guy makes his living providing very expensive rare vinyl to arty types who can justify the expenditure. I know what seeing such records feels like. Oh Woe!

SWAG
Wonderboy makes very good money on the side as a record dealer. Bar possibly one or two people (he insists they exist) he's Europe's pre-eminent dealer. His list of clients is beyond scary. Interestingly a major part of his trade is in Modern Jazz; selling Argentinian Trios to Japanese collectors, and Tubby Hayes records to the highest bidder. Apparently he's losing interest in the dealing game, becoming buried deeper in making his own stuff. I picked up four records off him, which I could scarcely afford, however we don't hook up all that often. I'm going to keep the identity of those ones a secret, but I thought you might be interested to know what else he had in his bag; records I didn't buy. He'd already sold three apparently amazing Bruno Nicolai Italian Soundtracks before he got to me.

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Sony SRCL-5415
2002.09.19
Glad I caught up with what Mr. Okuda's been doing. I wasn't hot on "Car Songs of the Years"--half of that being older songs, and an excuse to get a few new songs out. When Okuda is in top form, he's one of the best rock musicians out there, writing pop-rock in the Beatles/Stones tradition. When he's off, he's a noisy rock band in search of a hook.
"E" came out a little while ago, but the thing's a corker. With little of his trademark Harrison-like slide guitar solos, but with a solid band behind him, he manages to put out an album of 19 songs that never feel like it's in need of an editor. (Admittedly, some of these songs are one-minute reprises of previous tracks).
Okuda manages to coax something new out of the standard rock palette, with sneaky inclusions of marimba, female backing vocals (a first!), and some grungy Hammond (or some sort) organ playing.
Highlights are the title track, a meaty, beaty, big and bouncy number with a one-note melody and twang-bar heavy fills. "The Standard" brings out the Beatles Mellotron and a one of Okuda's soaring, heartfelt choruses that immediately make me nostalgic for times I didn't even know I lived through. "Gomen Rider" is also fantastic with a wicked fuzzbox arpeggio solo.
Okuda remains Japan's best-kept secret.

A selection of songs and promo clips are here. Check out the one called "matatabi.mov" as Tamio sings a medley of his songs in under two minutes with a selection of props. Very funny.

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Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music is an indespensible guide to the hundreds of sub-genres collected under the title of electronic music. If you want to know your Gabba from your Ambient Jungle, here's where you need to go.
Great graphic flowcharts, sound samples galore, and snarky commentary make this a must!

Posted by Ted Mills at 8:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Small Room/Universal Music Thailand, UM054506
2002

A friend of mine from Thailand, who is part of the group nolens.volens sent me a huge care package of CD goodies in exchange for some mp3-age the other day. I'm slowly going through it all, seeing what I like.
Bua-Hima popped out because of their promising cover art (!) and bizarre title track. Of the groups I was sent, this seems to be the most schizophrenic. The opening tracks are an interesting blend of repetitive cello, twangy guitar, and Moog-like synths. A man speaks over the top of this while a quiet whooshing storm brews in the electronics behind him. Then some breakbeats, and it seems like it's going to turn into a Buffalo Daughter-like prog jam. It splits up into the old "go through the radio dial" tactic, then settles on a vocal sample and loops it, before returning to the jam again.
Elsewhere, Bua-Hima nick ideas from Point-era Cornelius, has a child singing about birds and balls, gets all lounge-lizard on us, go minimalist and funk-housey, and dabble in bossa-house.
With the exception of a few typical gloppy ballads (track 3 and 4) this is an adventurous outing for what I've heard of Thai rock, though still pretty enthralled to its Japanese neighbors. It does seem however, that it put all of its best ideas into the first two tracks.
One website lists this album as a "concept album"--I would like somebody tell me what that is, as I'm sure missing it...

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Tigersushi Records TSRCD003
2003
With Mu's "Afro Finger and Gel" I finally get that feeling that I'm hearing something so different, so strange, that I can't really compare it to anything.
This was passed on by a friend and on first listening, it seemed very noisy, confrontational, and intentionally ugly. But unlike a lot of music that uses this tactic, that was just the surface. There's a lot of things underneath, disturbing, murky things, along with some heavenly brilliance which may be sunlight, but may be me passing out.
In no particular order, here's what caught my ear.
They love timbales. They love 'em like early '80s hip-hoppers and producers did. Anytime is great for a timbale break. Except these breaks are coming in the middle of dark, electronic hell-rides. There's also drum breaks that remind me of the African tribal kick that made its way into pop during Malcolm McLaren's reign (remember Bow Wow Wow? Peter Gabriel? Adam and the Ants?)
The Japanese female singer here is completely nuts, in the tradition of Frank Chickens and Yoko Ono--it's threatening, smeared-lipstick fuck-you delivery, occassionally manipulated into flanging and distorted squeaks. "My Name Is Tommi" features vocalist Mutsumi taking on several roles in a recreation of a cheesy "adulterers caught on tape" tv show. She plays announcer, jilted girlfriend, and narrator, while the guy in the band plays the part of the philandering male (or is that her?). What was probably once a distancing encounter on the original TV show, is split open into bloody emotions of jealousy and hatred, and is one of the most unnerving things I've heard since Throbbing Gristles "Hamburger Lady" on their Third and Final Report LP.
Each track is about 5 or 6 minutes. Within that time Mu go in several directions at once. "Let's Get Sick" starts off with a rhythm based around a skipping CD machine, but ends in a beautiful ambient mist. Yes, [looks at CD machine] this is the same song.
I don't know too much about Mu. They are credited as Maurice Fulton & Mutsumi Kanamori, and they're married, it seems. He's from Baltimore. Baltimore rocks! They live in Sheffield. Sheffield rocks too!
For those who grew up during the turn of the '80s, there was a brief time where the art rock crowd and the freakazoid hip-hop people engaged in a musical dialogue. Afrika Bambaataa, Liquid Liquid, Talking Heads (Mu nicks "Once in a Lifetime"'s vibe for the final track), Grace Jones, some of that stuff sounded so new it was scary, another-planet material. "Afro Finger and Gel" is like that all the way through. It's one of my favorite albums of 2003.
Here's a brief article on them and Mr. Fulton in particular that explains a little more Mu. But not too much. I mean, where does Mutsumi come from?

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Don't ask me why, but I went on a Beatles bender the other day and found some great links.
The first is Alan W. Pollack's Notes On series, in which every Beatles song has been pulled apart and examined from the view of a music academic. Far from dry (well, okay, some of the stuff is pretty dry, and it helps to know music), Pollack's analysis makes some connections--mostly between the early songs and the later--that haven't been pointed out before.
For an even more in-depth analysis, Ian Hammond makes a pretty convincing argument that Revolution 9 is actually a coherent and structured piece and not just John Lennon assing about with magnetic tape. Even if you don't agree, Mr. Hammond has bloody good ears--he has uncovered several layers of sound and things to look out for (a carnival barker calling our "thirty!" not once but twice) and identified some of the sources of the classical music heard in the piece.
Then there's Joseph Brennan's page on Songs the Beatles Didn't Do including the songs they wrote for others and the ones that they never put out (such as the mythical "Carnival of Light").
Finally, because there's many different versions of each Beatles song (mono, stereo, remixes, etc.), Brennan has also maintained the excellent list of Beatles Recording Variations.
Apart from that, you could just listen to the music...

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Readymade Records HIRMC-1004
2003.05.15
The joke's on us, apparently. This CD came free with the decidedly unfree Readymade Magazine and is a series of tracks by Readymade artists and their friends, all of which are audio collages, some incorporating rare groove material, others using English and Japanese text samples. It's Attention Deficit Disorder Music, with no groove staying longer than a couple of bars to form the center of anything. It's like John Oswald without the density, or Negativland without the politics or satire.
Now, there is some discussion over on the Pizzicato Five mailing list and elsewhere whether DJ Yoshio is actually Yasuharu Konishi. On his track he plays longer samples of tracks that Konishi has used in P5 songs and elsewhere. Does this seem like another transparent admittance?
I think the idea of the CD is to provide DJ "lessons" to the listeners, either through presenting a DJs favorite samples or through showing how much can be mixed together in one sitting. Then there's also a few Japanese spoken word tracks seemingly against Bush and the war (the monkey gets sampled a few times). What is it all about? In what environment does this CD make sense?

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Capitol Records (rereleased on M&M records, MMCD-1009, 1997
1968
I have this album with no real information, just a track listing and a date: 1968. Apparently they are the offspring of the other King Singers, and here cover some Bacharach, some Beatles, some Beach Boys, and some Roger Nichols. What I want to know is who did the arrangements (for groups like this, the "auteur"). The stop-start of "Good Day Sunshine" is clever and the vocals go to and fro between solo and sweet harmony.
As usual with soft-rock groups, the Japanese are crazier about this stuff than the West. Google results in 80% pages found with Japanese domain names. The Western stuff is mostly just a mention in a "For Sale" list or a spot on some indie-radio station's playlist.
Any Pizzicato Five fan worth their salt should seek this one out--I bet Konishi wore his copy out. Just listen to "I Fell" and then P5's "Triste" and all should be apparent.

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I have a love of digging up the original sources from which hip-hop and now all modern music samples from. This has especially been true since I got into Pizzicato Five, as they cut and paste everything. But let's go back to the classics, first.

I've always wondered where that breakbeat comes from that has been used on everything from Erik B and Rakim's "Paid in Full" to Milli Vanilli's "Girl You Know It's True"--my favorite, however, is its use in Brian Eno's "Ali Click." Well, with a little searching, I found out. It's a record by the Soul Searchers from 1974 called "Ashley's Roachclip." The famous two seconds come in about 3.5 mins into the song. You can hear a low-quality RealAudio sample over at this one person's Milli Vanilli site. But for the muthaload, check out These Are the Breaks, a list of ten of the most recognizable samples in hip-hop, including my all-time favorite, the Apache break. Mmm, bongo goodness!

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Polystar PSCR6118
2003.07.23
PM is the companion remix album to Cornelius' "Point" and by far the worst of all his remix albums. Having opened up the remixing challenge to any and all who came to his web site in 2002, Cornelius then collected the best of the lot and put them out here. He has said of his delight in receiving completely crazy remixes from people worldwide, none of whom have record contracts. He doesn't mention that none of them are any good.
Maybe some of it rests in the samples he posted. Instead of full vocal lines or some serious loops, there were nothing but a few solitary drum samples, a bass note, or a single word. What could be made of it? Anything, really, but nothing that remotely resembles the album it comes from.
Worst of the remixes is "MC Cat Genius' BomBassTic Re-bomb" by Animal Family featuring MC Cat Genius, the sort of tedious self-reflexive, self-defeating undergrad stuff that dares you to like it. No, we don't need three minutes of you telling us how hard it is to finish your remix. Stop moaning.
The rest is chop-up ProTools-y stuff, with very little groove, just a lot of stop-start business.
Accompanying this, I also listened to some of the hard-to-find Nova Musicha e.p.s that Cornelius put out at HMVs and Tower Records in Tokyo (collect all 8, suckers). There's a few pleasant tracks: The very brief "Star-Spangled Gayo" which reconfigures the national anthem and reveals its musical roots (very baroque), and "Search," which is not by Cornelius I just found out but Takashi Tsuzuki, of whom I know nothing. "Search" is a collection of hiccups, bubbles, and sound bites that exists and goes away, but just by doing so has more going on than the entirety of PM.

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Polystar PSCR 5916/7
1985 (rereleased 2000)
Wow, I never expected this, it's like Penguin Cafe Orchestra or some other more acoustic Editions EG record from the early '80s. I thought, being on the Non-Standard label, the music would some burpy electronica. No, this is happy little miniatures of acoustic guitar, punchy barrelhouse piano, a few minimal effects, a gong or two, and Meredith Monk-like vocals. Completely charming, working out a few simple chord progressions. Adding to the effect is the low-fi, recorded at home feel. "Music Train" is a a cheerful number with "la laaa la" vocals and a drum that reminds me of the There's bits of Harold Budd and Saboten in here too.
Very few things date this: there's a bell sound that comes straight out of a Yamaha, but for the most part this could have been recorded anytime. There's nothing very "Japanese" about the group either.
I'm listening to this as I read a very long unpublished Lester Bangs interview with Brian Eno just posted on Perfect Sound Forever. And the Eno theories are coloring my experience of listening to it (of course, it helps that they are coming from some similar places). The minimalism of World Standard reminds me of some of Eno's Music for Films pieces.
And then there's the live track, tucked away at the end as "Ishi no hana", where the arrangement is exactly the same as the studio version, but now the whole thing is bathed in echo (real echo, too), and the audience (sounding like about 20 people--I'm thinking it's one of those ultra-cramped Tokyo basement clubs, full of smoke) gets processed along with everything else, their murmurings turning into a little black stream of sound. Majestic.
Bangs' interview (it seems to be around 1981) ends with the author's anxiety about Eno's comfort of working with machines:

There is something just a little too comforting about this insistence that this stuff takes place totally outside of the world's arena. Music stirs people, in one way or another; it can be used for evil purposes, it can make evil things happen. One thinks of the stories of Jews in World War II who reported finding themselves excited by Nazi songs even as they knew there were the anthems of their own destruction. Rock is a form of music, let it be admitted, particularly susceptible to the creation of mass states of pointless rage and destructiveness, although Eno's music, if it ultimately has any social consequences at all, points in the opposite direction: towards pacification. His stance makes you sometimes wonder if he couldn't go merrily along creating his pleasant little ambient tapes under the most totalitarian regime, which leads you to further speculate that it might have been amoral in the first place.

Of course, Eno's outspoken essays against the Iraq invasion, his criticism of more modern technology (CD-ROMs, synthesizers and software made by programmers for programmers--not artists), have put those anxieties to rest. How threatening those analog machines must have sounded back then, how warm they sound now.

Addendum: Actually, the above description above applies to "Youthful Standard," the 2-CD of bonus tracks and demos that came with the 2000 reissue of this album. Because of various factors, I wound up listening to it first about five times before I even put on the studio version. And I can say I like some of these demos better! The studio versions do indeed have lots of synths and are exceedingly clean and airy, and "Coconut Fruit" reminds me of the first Pizzicato Five ep. In fact, Konishi appears on tracks 1 and 4, singing chorus. The album is produced by YMO's Harry Hosono (as was the P5 e.p.) and is a chirpy thing and good in its own way. But I'd rather put the second disc on first!

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UUTWO records DDCU-2002
2003.04.16
Or: the problem of listening to remix albums without knowing the original.
Who has a truer listening experience? The person who picks up a remix album without knowing the originals, or the one with a deep understanding of the material to be remixed? And does it matter if the remixer winds up using little of the material (70% of all remixers)? What if the remixer uses nothing but the material and then reconfigures it into something new (Sean O'Hagan's remixes of Cornelius and Pizzicato Five, both of which are wonderful)? What is the criteria? How "danceable" something is? How much something is "rescued"? How faithful to the material? How sacriligious?
Kenji Jammer is the pseudonym of Kenji Suzuki, of whom I know nothing except he seems to have started in the '80s, done his time playing hard rock (opening for still-famous-in-Japan Deep Purple and Stevie Ray Vaughan), moved all over the world, and now in this alter ego explores acoustic and lap steel sounds with a definite mellow bent. Fortunately, the CD ends with two of his originals, or one would never know what's being remixed here. "Sail On" is a skanking jam, and takes nearly all of the track until the steel guitar comes in. Okay, so it makes me wonder what Hula Hula Dance, the original, sounds like. It also reminds me, for the third time in a row today, of the Orb.
So then, the best of the mixes are Fantastic Plastic Machine's mix of "Daddy's Delight," which seems to mix a vocoder with Kenji's slide guitar, and the "Across the Border" mix of "Universe", which toodles along very politely, even seeping into the background. It's pleasant.

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Lastrum LACD-0049
2002.08.30
Sounding a bit like Harmonia or the more electronic side of Krautrock, Blasthead appears on the same label as The Calm. It's a similar mix of jazzy instrumentation, Mo'Wax downtempo beats played live (or at least I think so), a series of groove experiments.
It reminds me most of the Orb's first album without the spoken word samples, or more likely the Orb's version of ambient. Unlike the Orb, Blasthead feel no need to keep the dancefloor in sight. Rhythm, when it comes, arrives unexpectedly, sometimes fast, like an exploding drum circle, other times slow, like the multi-layered handclaps that remind me of Eno/Schwalm's Drawn from Life. Lots of hammer dulcimer. At one point, some very discordant free jazz sax makes its way into the mix, waking up all the stoners in the chill out room.
There's liquid bass, bubbling synths, a general blue-purple sound.
"Scene 4" grooves for for five minutes before blossoming into a big-beat, organ-drenched psychedelic rock freakout. At the moment, these two albums are hard to tell apart.

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Lastrum LACD-0040
2001.11.20
Last time Jon returned from japan, he came back with some very strange CDs by groups I had never heard of, all supposedly coming out of this one record shop/label in Tokyo. I've heard them in passing and very pleasant they are in an acoustic ambient way. This time he has returned with two that I can properly listen to. The Calm make this wonderful blend of ambient synths, distant, echoey trumpets, melancholia, and slightly danceable beats.
Track 8 has something approaching a drum'n'bass riff, mixing in Reich repetition, wandering sitar, lonesome shakuhachi.
Imagine if Tortoise hadn't sprouted from reformed punks, but psychedelic rockers. Imagine if they listened to DJ Shadow, not knowing it was madefrom samples, and tried to recreate it live (though for all I know this is all done in someone's bedroom on ProTools.) That's the Calm. They like their sound samples too: the good old moonshot countdown sample, and some French lady saying I-don't-know-what.

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Victor VICL-61070
2003.02.21
I never thought I'd like another Kahimi Karie album again after the truly awful triple whammy of Once Upon a Time, Journey to the Center of Me, and Tilt, all of which together contained maybe about one decent song. The music was sonically dull, and Kahimi was way up beyond her already whisper thin range. This wasn't singing, this was asphyxiating. So what a surprise that Trapeziste is full of great grooves and a reformed chanteuse who talks and sing-songs her way through songs. Best of all, she often drops out of the song altogether and lets the rhythms do their thing—this album features some lovely arrangements. Kahimi even sings the Habanera from Carmen and doesn't sound out of her range or depth (though a native Frenchman would be able to tell me if her French has improved at all). Momus is, I think, nowhere to be seen this time, but the producing is done by Tomoki Kanda (Chocolat, etc.) and Koki Tokai from Ah! Folly Jet, a very eclectic mix of dub electronics and jazz (free, bebop, and some faux-Django). Some sounds live, but that could just be sound effects. Could it be that her fellow countrymen understand her better than her international suitors? (Which reminds me: I haven't heard the previous "My Suitor," which could either be worse or better.)

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Epic/Sony ESCL-2357
2003.01.22
Sometimes you just gotta be in the mood. I think I spun Puffy's new one (well, newish one) about three times—twice at home, once in the car, where things are different—but didn't think much of it. It was like their last album—The Hit Parade—full of the usual Puffy pep, but running in circles. Now, suddenly, when I've thrown it on while I do some work, it has jumped out at me. I keep stopping and thinking, where did this come from? Have I really owned this since May? The secret to any good Puffy album is how well Tamio Okuda and the girls' other producer songwriters are doing, and this time Andy Sturmer producers and brings along some great stuff. The opening track "Red Swing" lifts from Jeff Lynne, but that wouldn't be the first time. By the time you realize the theft, they're onto a bit of Buggles ("Tokyo Nights") and some Madness-style ska ("K2G"), and that banjo-fueled pop folk that occasionally turns up in their music kitchen ("Shiawase"). And that's not to mention their best single in ages, which came out in 2001 and jumped an album to appear here, "Atarashii Hibi," a joyous little romp, full of power chords and a twirling organ-led hook. Nice, indeed.

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Oy! Again with the Russians. Here's an interesting look by historian Mikhail Safanov of how the Beatles brought down the Soviet Union.

Guardian Unlimited: Confessions of a Soviet moptop
During a chess match between Anatoly Karpov and Gary Kasparov in the 1980s, the two grandmasters were each asked to name their favourite composer. The orthodox communist Karpov replied: 'Alexander Pakhmutov, Laureate of the Lenin Komsomol award'. The freethinking Kasparov answered: 'John Lennon.'

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I find myself more and more fascinated by those who record, manipulate, and release field recordings. This one site has much to download, links to other artists, and some good essays on doing it yourself.
quiet american
By way of Robot Action Boy

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CBS/Columbia CK 38660
1982.10
Men at Work stand as the first band I ever saw live, back when I was a wee lad in 1982. They played the Santa Barbara County Bowl with Mental As Anything opening (how's that for an '80s flashback?). It's probably where I smelled pot the first time. It was certainly my first tour T-shirt (longsleeve baseball-style, as was the fashion). And Cargo has been in my collection since it came out. But I hadn't listened to it for a long time until I got the CD (and not the remastered version, which I'm still looking for).

Far from being Police-copyists and a dated embarrassment, I think the album still holds up well. This was the early '80s, so the drums are not Gotterdamerung-volume. Apart from a few twee synth sounds here and there, the band is tight (they're like a poppy King Crimson on "I Like To,"? an otherwise throwaway song that turns into an angular jam). Best of all is Colin Hay's lyrics and general songwriting. Yes, he wrote a song about a Vegemite sandwich, but most of this album is sunshine-dappled angst. I think there's a total of one song that could be considered a love song"”"Blue For You"?"”and that ends with intimations of suicide ("I could take a big jump!"?). But mostly there's this: "Blood on the pillow on my bed / Explains the pain that's in my head."? ("High Wire"?). Or songs about nuclear war ("It's a Mistake"?), angst-fueled insomnia ("Overkill"? a great song that was always too dark to have been a single), directionlessness ("No Restrictions"?), or post-breakup depression (the also fabulous and justifiably long "No Sign of Yesterday"?). Great guitars solos on all these, and I'm not a guitar solo guy. They're minimal but refined.

The other thing I enjoyed: the air between the instruments. There's been so much muddy production recently that the sound of this album suddenly stood out as enjoyably crisp. I never followed Men at Work after the core group split (and "Two Hearts"? is just a jumble of sequenced noise), but I'd like to believe Colin Hay is still writing some good tunes. (Decide for yourself.)

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Well folks, the RIAA has let their lawyers loose and sending out cease-and-desist notices to everybody with mp3 sites. My two favorite sites (this one and this one) for rare '80s mp3s has been shut down, and they only posted maybe five per week, all completely out of print and sometimes totally unheard of. And what good will this do? The RIAA are penny-pinching big business suits trying to comprehend why their sales are down, and why they've lost customers. They've spent years in cahoots with the music industry screwing the artist; now they're screwing the consumer.

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Reprise 9 46835-2
1997.11.11
Well, there's only one reason I borrowed this from the library, and that was for Enya's first, and best, fluke hit "Orinoco Flow". Yeh, but did I listen to the rest of the CD?
After one aborted listen, having to stop after the horrific "Anywhere Is," I tried again and made it all the way through. Talk about the law of diminishing returns. It's an example of an artist totally misunderstanding what made her first hit so good. There's fifteen other tracks here that have the "Enya" sound--smooth multitracked vocals, crushed digital velvet, quasi-Celtic mysticism, slow tempos--but none of the idiosyncracies of "Orinoco Flow." There's an erratic rhythm in the verses, a grand pomposity to the use of kettle drums, and the lyrics are mostly onomatopoeia. Who cares if "From Bissau to Palau - in the shade of Avalon/ from Fiji to Tiree and the Isles of Ebony" means anything? It sounds good. And don't forget the last hanging chord, like a question mark.
The other songs make sure all the ambiguity of "Orinoco Flow" is solved. The chords are sunnier, the songs finish with major chords. The lyrics get dippy. "Sail away, sail away, sail away" conjured up some sort of wanderlust. "Anywhere Is" features a melody programmed by kazoo, and words such as "The moon upon the ocean / is swept around in motion / but without ever knowing / the reason for its flowing / in motion on the ocean" are trite, especially if you know the sing-song way it's sung.
And if anyone develops a drinking game based around the number of times Enya uses the factory setting "tolling bell" sound (as first heard at the beginning of "Do They Know It's Christmas") then the chap who puts this CD on will wind up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning.

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You are now looking at my CD collection. With a day spent restoring my crashed drive (see the main page for that story), I spent the down time doing something I've been meaning to do since 1996: sort my CD collection into a manageable alphabetical order. I was stuck in the house anyway. I always used to keep my collection in order, but the bigger it got, the lazier I became. Since coming to the Mills Compound in December, this has been on my to-do list. I knew it would take some time, and it did.
Most of my CDs have had their cases tossed and replaced with thin poly bags that hold both booklet and J-card. (You can get them at Bags Unlimited.) So what you are looking at is a fraction of what it could be.
I sorted 'em into alphabetical piles on the floor and took this picture. You can see the piles for B, C, and F are the largest, the reason being my obsession past and present for The Beatles, David Bowie, Beck, Elvis Costello, and The Fall. The P pile should be bigger as an extra three feet of Pizzicato Five CDs were already sorted and on the shelf. The "Various Artists" pilie was big enough to divide into two, and next to that there is the Soundtracks pile, the Jazz pile, the Classical pile, and below that Video Game Soundtracks, and VCD (mostly porn, apparently. Where did that come from?) And do you really care about this?
Anyway, it's all sorted now and shelved away. At last I know where everything is.

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IMME Records IMME-1001
1996.08.01
Second only to Pizzicato Five, Flags was my favorite Shibuya-kei band back in the rosy days of '96-'97. Produced by Tetsutaro Sakurai, they were his side project to Cosa Nostra, and featured five girls of different looks and personalities that he used to sing his Todd Rundgren- and Laura Nyro- inspired pop. There was Harry, the spooky, arty one; Aki, the girly one; Maria, the one who sounded like Kahimi Karie; Emiko, the earthy, fun one; and Rio, the slightly older, glamorous one. Or that's how they seemed to me.
After buying all four of their releases and all six of their singles, I had given up on even finding their rare CD-ROM mini-album combo from 1996, let alone being able to afford it (Japanese collector prices being astronomical). Imagine how I almost choked on my Raisin Bran when I saw this at Tokyo Recohan for something like $7. It was a no-brainer.
I was slightly disappointed to find out that the six songs here are not new, despite the titles I've never heard of. They are actually all remixed versions of the songs found on their second album MOR from a month before, with English lyrics instead of Japanese. Some sound like demos--all the sounds I know are in place, but they don't fit together as well. "Wonderland," the English version of their best song "Nowhereland" (a song I so loved that I ripped off the title for my movie), is awkward and blocky, one take short of being brilliant (it's interesting to compare and contrast, of course). It's like those albums you discover only in your dreams--it sounds like them, but something's quite off.


The QuickTime movies that accompany the songs are the usual bland Japanese promo variety, with usually one or two set-ups and no imagination of what to do for the entire 5 minutes. Only "Wonderland" gets any sort of treatment, with the band vogue-ing and being subjected to several digital effects. The dancing doesn't suit the music, though. Mostly the videos prove what I always thought, based on the very few publicity photos I have seen of them: Emiko (left) is the cutie (she also has the best voice). After their 1997 album Cream they vanished into the ether.

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When I was a kid, one of my most valuable possessions was a Sears mono cassette recorder, on which friends and myself made hours and hours of ridiculous skits and other shenanigans. I thought the thrill of hearing your own voice would have been lost to the camcorder generation, but apparently PC owners with MusicMatch Jukebox software have something called "Mic in Track," the ability to hook a mike up and record straight to mp3. Possibly these people don't know that their efforts are also downloadable from Kazaa if they save everything in their shared folder. Ah-ha....
Check out the audio verite at Stark Effect - mic in track.
Discovered at Boing Boing

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test

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test

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test

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Call it synchronicity or two great minds thinking alike, but I was checking out this site by Edward Tufte on the same day that Scott Rosenberg blogged it in Salon. Hmm, maybe it was because my friend Jon Crow had been there before me and then told me about it all. Ahhhh. I see.

Anyway, Edward Tufte is the "Da Vinci of data," as his press blurb says, a statistician who also thinks long and hard about the graphical representation of data. There's a lot of depth to the site, place to go explore, and I'm a sucker for graphs.

Perusing the site led me to a link to The Music Animation Machine, created by Stephen Malinowsky. There's a few videos you can download, a cross between Oskar Fischinger and the Atari 2600. The graphical representation of pitch and time creates patterns that scroll horizontally and can add to a greater understanding of music composition. They're also great to watch. Highly recommended!

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It's a way of documenting the world in sound, goes the intriguing Invisible Cities project over at F

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The Library of Congress has initiated a long-overdue program to archive classic recordings. Here's the list of the First Fifty. I'd sure like to hear those Cowell-produced discs of early electronic/avant-garde music.

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