Here's a new mix series called Treasure Maps where I basically take a look at old records and lost classics of various kinds. This first one is about white boy/girl R&B and funk, funky blues and soul, and some interlopers from other lands.
Been a while since I've put up a Friday Finds, and since I've got too much music on my hands and not enough time to write anything substantive about it (and anyway most people just want music, and a lot of it) so here you go. Lots of gems on this one.
I've put together a mix of various minimal and cold wave, synth punk, some old some new, a lot of which has been covered endlessly by 20JFG. Regardless, in keeping the current revivalist spirit this type of anemic, eastern blockist, psuedo-fascist dance music is sounding hyper fresh, at least for the next coupla months. It's a very specific sound, with an unforgiving, axiomatic stance that can get old quick. But it's also a type of wild posturing whose freedom lies in it's restrictions. Frowns welcome.
At his worst, Paris based Debruit has way too much style for his own good. Like so many other would be hip hop producers lacking an MC who's brave enough to take chances on anything other than played out R&B samples or club music, Debruit is forced to make lemomade out of pure sugar. This inevitably means his tracks play out much shorter than their actual length and seem to always end with a whimper, but more importantly they just feel too big for their britches, working a bit too hard to impress. Debruit's stuff rings in just slightly under the post-Dilla radar for instrumental hip-hop derived electronica which is odd because he quite elegantly combines many of the style traits in vogue at the moment. Dropping about as many third worldisms as the next man, laying heavy on the P-Funk and wonky off kilter stuff, but with an real ear for the sparsity and robo pop of a neptunes era track, Debruit has a knack for crisp, modish collage. This is reflected straight down to the album art; a smart, urban update on Picasso. But there's something more than style here that seems aching to get let out, Debruit wants an audience but he's gotta say something first. Part of it is just completing his tracks, when your track sounds like it's winding down at 2 minutes, don't make it last for 4 unless you've got some good ideas. But also, there's something inherently dangerous about flirting so closely with the music of Nigeria, of Persia, of Kingston, of the Congo. It's not merely a practice of exoticization that today's hip hop finds itself so interested in African and Middle Eastern party music, it's a sub-literal yen for that untraceable element of a culture momentarily unbridled, and in certain cases revolutionarily transfigured through a musical conduit. In the "West", it all seems like candy: clubs, culture mongering, fashion, dialectic - we consume these as if they were both useless and the only currency available. Debruit knows how to make a track sufficiently useless, and I mean that in the best sense, but he hasn't been convincing enough in how to make that uselessness matter.
Dan Deacon - Bromst
Bonnie Prince Billy - Beware
Raekwon - Only Built 4 Cuban Linx
Thee Oh Sees - Help
Dâm Funk - Toeachizown
DJ Sprinkles - Midtown 120 Blues
Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
The Dream - Love Vs Money
Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion
Phoenix - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
Other Favorites:
Little Dragon - Machine Dreams
Pill - 4075: The Refill (mixtape)
Best Coast - Sun Was High (So Was I)
Broadcast and the Focus Group - Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age
Blues Control - Local Flavor
Six Organs Of Admittance - Luminous Night
John Zorn - O'o
Top Ten Movies
Avatar (I haven't even seen it yet...I just know)
Public Enemies
Star Trek
District 9
The White Ribbon (also haven't seen it yet but comeon, it's Michael Haneke)
The Hurt Locker
Fantastic Mr. Fox
In The Loop
Bright Star
Anvil: The Story of Anvil
(side note if I ever did get around to seeing A Serious Man I have no doubt it would have made this list but since Michael Haneke has never done me wrong, and the Coen bros do me wrong every other movie, tie goes to the runner)
Lawrence's Until Then, Goodbye is one of the Japanese label Mule's newest offering of low key, sleek, late night house, and it's also their best since the elegiac DJ Sprinkles release Midtown 120 Blues. The record is sort of divided between the luxurious fantasy that one could expect from house these days and a comparatively raw group of interludes that paint a more realistic, earthy vision. Lawrence's moves are as fluid as the moon is blue; he's elusive but generous. In the acoustic oriented tracks (of these I've posted the title track, and "Father Umbrillo") he draws heavily from twinkling, ringing things - vibraphones, marimbas, mbiras, bells of various sizes. But in the synth driven tracks (the obscenely gorgeous "Jill", and the haunted "Don't Follow Me"), it's not an entirely falsified template, he'll sneak in timpani, bongos, trap sets and tablas that feel almost untouched. Lawrence has clearly been around long enough to know how to keep a mix dense enough to be interesting (take note minimal folks - simplicity is not simplification) but spacious enough for you to fill in the blanks. It doesn't hit you in throat the way DJ Sprinkles does, it's not a massive record really, but it is careful, well conceived gorgeous music by any standard.
Edan, the Boston indie hip hop boy wonder with an intense servitude to obscure rap oldies and a killer disappearing act, has put down the mic and focused solely on his turntablism on Echo Party a mixtape he's been developing (presumably) for years now. Apparently Traffic Entertainment Group let Edan run wild in it's archives, a veritable treasure of records from the period where hip hop was somewhere between disco, house, and the common breakbeat + MC oriented stuff we think of as the birth of the genre. Edan has always been terse in all the right ways, and I can't imagine a more well structured 29 minute mix than this one. It comes, it jamz, it goes into outer space and then it's done. But it's a dense mix, samples fly by at an alarming rate, perhaps not quite as distracted as Girl Talk, and in general much smoother and less reflexively preoccupied with juxtapositions of genre. Part of the glue of the whole thing is Edan's use of the echo taps. It's a constant reminder there's an artist's hand twisting and mashing here. What's amazing about this record is that he manages to let the samples speak for themselves and yet provides the framework to make them sound utterly new. There are certainly distortions and intrusions and moments where you wonder if something in there is purely Edan (his previous records make sure the line between sample and production stays murky). In the booklet that comes only with the CD or vinyl copy of the record, he has painstakingly delineated every sample and when its used in the booklet that comes only with the vinyl, and something tells me Edan has a pretty fierce ethic when it comes to materials so it's hard to tell what's what sometimes. Devotees of Edan's rapping (I could take it or leave it) will certainly be disappointed by this release, especially having waited so long since the last, but this current incarnation plays so well to his strengths as a producer and un-anointed rap historian that I wish he'd been making these kinds of mixtapes all along.
I've never been a huge digidub fan. I guess I've never really been a huge dub fan to begin with so that kind of precluded the possibility of getting into digidub. Dub always seems too preoccupied with a kind of stoner melancholia, and digidub sounded too piercingly cheap for me. I certainly haven't sampled enough to stamp the whole genre, but from what I've heard...well lets say maybe I haven't heard enough. The UK based Tapes' newest 12" called Hissing Theatricals has changed my attitude somewhat. Part of it is that these tracks are deliciously economic and brief. Dub gets boring for me after I hear a couple phrases of the same groove and no amount of delay tap shifting will convince me otherwise. This record isn't about hypnosis or even mesmerization, these are lean and tight structural grooves, that shift and hammer and cut. They hardly even cut loose. These are made by a robot from an unsought past. Sonically, Tapesis playing with degenerated tape surfaces, crackling bitcrushed moogs and junos oscillating a bit out of tune like a cassette that's been fried in the glove compartment. For all those 8-bit heads out there, this is how you do it right. This recorddoes two things well. It places a ton of hiss and frizz on the surface of the sound, giving it a super crisp, bristling profile, but doesn't skimp you on the depth of the mix. The kicks really thump and the reverbs really haunt. One of the things I like about this EP is that there are some mean juicy bangers, like the kingston robocop hustle of "C20 Riddim", or "Gold Love Riddim", a track that Major Lazer couldn't dream of copping to for its authenticity (is there any record more full of posturing than Major Lazer?? Ok fine, there was that horrendous N.A.S.A. record.) But there are also these gorgeous, miniature romances, that just swish along aimlessly, content with themselves. "Good Thing You Came Along" is almost cut from the same cloth as a Nite Jewel track - plaintive, shabby, and sort of lobotomized. I'm not sure how interesting any of this stuff would be to see live, it might be kind of a downer, but if you're looking for something rarefied and next level in this genre Tapes is holding it down for all you sleepy, backpack wearing motherfuckers.
I came within inches of putting a track by the New Zealand band Signer on a Friday Finds a few months back and then decided it was too sleepy or something. That was stupid of me. Their newish (Sept) record, Next We Bring You The Fire out on Carpark may drift in and out of electronic psychedelia, woozy somnolence brought on by exaggerated LFOs, walls of lydian tuned aggregates, and a voice nearly as slim as a sine wave, but the details of its makings are fully aware and its construction, though not always well conceived, on the whole, cogent. A contemporary Cocteau Twins comes to mind, though not nearly as fey, which is saying less about Signer's inherent groundedness than it does about the extreme airiness of Cocteau Twins. The real winner here is a track called "+Kicks and Kicks", which swaggers in a barbiturate induced trip across a dance floor, knees locked then buckling, faceless heads bobbing, moaning, glowing, and a mild case of claustrophobia that creeps and creeps. "Languidly Toot" is a far more exalted example, swerving perhaps a bit close to shoegaze, and needs a third section, but altogether gorgeous nonetheless (why did they withhold that blastbeat till the last 20 seconds, and then only use it once??) The album on the whole could use more bouts of this kind of thing (by that I mean adrenaline). The one place we really get it is on the too long "Don't Be A Forest Cow" which dips into the Teengirl Fantasy/Pictureplane model of muscular, astrally disturbed house, but here it drags somehow despite being the fastest song on the record, the four on the floor kick feels out of place with the listless vocals, or maybe the drums are just too clean, and when the acid bass line comes in it is suddenly the most insensitive moment on an album full of florid, otherworldly sensitivities. On "We Should Touch Teeth" the initial scape is mulled over unnecessarily, but when we get somewhere, a sufficiently massive tribalized rave sequence is deserving of interest, if a little forced. Next We Bring You The Fire is perhaps not a crucial record, but otherwise it's a finely tuned likeness of where electronic pop is, and where it's going in the late oughts.
Brian Harnetty is a British composer with a serious crush on American folk. His last record, American Winter sampled rare recordings from an Appalachian folk archive at Borea College in Kentucky. In many of those pieces, he added instrumentation on top or around these recordings. Bells, twinkling toy pianos, bowed metal, string drones, the tools of a new music composer's approach to folk. Some of it had a contemporary drone feel, some of it was like a disfigured, reoriented bluegrass, as if someone had forgotten how to play it but remembered the rhythmic pattern. His use of samples is unique. Firstly, he picks a lot of moments that are in transition from the spoken, or ambient, to the musical; a woman forgetting her lyrics and trying to remember how the rest of the song went, a radio dj introducing the next selection, people describing their understanding, or perhaps more importantly their memory of the songs they're about to or have just performed. For Harnetty, the moments before or after a performance are not only musical themselves - the ambience, the spoken word, creating a kind of a soundscore already - but also present an openness, or priming for what I suppose you could only call accompaniment. Which is to say, sometimes the sample is not what's important here, sometimes the composing takes over and really sends the sample into a back layer. This is especially true when he blatantly ignores the tempo and meter of a given sample and composes against it, creating a new temporal arrangement that feels torn between the two worlds, the imaginary archival world, and the modern one, looking back.
The trouble is, on this new record, Silent City, out on Atavistic, Harnetty teams up with indie folk's most notorious self aggrandizer (aside from Devendra who can hardly be called folk anymore), Bonnie Prince Billy (Will Oldham). Don't get me wrong, I love Bonnie Prince Billy, I mean like love love, like I think he's one of the more enigmatic, shapeshifting, brashest musicians in this country. He's just way too Bonnie Prince Billy to sit in on a very sensitive proceeding and go unnoticed. It's the exact same problem I have with David Sylvian's music altogether. He's singing outside of the music, it's all about him (and his brooding fascination with himself). Similarly, when BPB sings it pushes the rest of the piece to the background, which is what good singing is supposed to do, but what the best of Brian Harnetty's music moves obliquely in opposition to. The good thing is, BPB is only on a couple of the tracks, and the rest of the record is really a beautiful graduation forward from American Winter. It's really a more settled, more accessible record. It's also darker. Instrumentally, it leans a bit too hard on the accordion which can get tinny after listening to it sustain through every track on the record. But the addition of drums, which are performed loosely but with great specificity, is an important step for this composer, in that it pushes him past creating beautiful textures and mysterious situations, it asks him to tell us something with a sharper ear for how time is being played out. And that's always a good thing. Who wants to hear a Brian Harnetty/Grouper split?
Also here's a pretty interesting video for 'Sleeping In The Driveway' It's a poignant montage of southern farms, farmhouses, interiors, graveyards, and roads.
Just feel like it needs to be said that all these "Fences" remixes are getting play now that the new Phoenix remix album of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is out and there's like 5 different Fences remixes on there. Back when I did my remix of Fences nobody was even paying attention to Fences as a track let alone as a dope template for a dance remix (or a garage "remix" in the case of the Soft Pack's version). Not that my shit is better than anybody's, that Boombass remix is aight, although the Friendly Fires remix has a pretty serious case of multiple personality. There's about a hundred others surfacing so I'm reposting mine just to get up in this hoopla.
This is fun right? Todd Terje is definitely one of the best remixers out there, his version of Shit Robot's "Simple Things (Work It Out)" a while back is far superior than the original, which was already a pretty sticky piece of techno sleeze. Here he takes on 80's new wave one hitter M's "Pop Muzik" with sheer unabashed joy. I'm getting fairly bored these days with nu disco and house music, but this track seriously kills. It's got all the forward momentum of a techno track, with the bloopy bass and stab synths of a house anthem. Then add the faux doowop vocals, the new wave sneer, and the deeper subtext here, that pop can be a kind of manifesto, a gestalt, and that the choice to embrace it is not a choice at all, it is insuppressible, and you have yourself a fine evening.
Composer, sound designer, producer, and musician for avant-garde, film, theater, sound art, hip-hop, left-field dance, art pop, indie rock and points in between. He lives in Los Angeles.
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