sunday is for sounds

2012-01-30T19:25:00.000-08:00

Chairlift - I Belong In Your Arms

2012-01-22T12:13:00.000-08:00

The Roches - Hammond Song

One of those sundays...

2011-11-28T08:43:00.001-08:00

Royal Headache - Honey Joy

Royal Headache - Wilson Street

Royal Headache - Never Again

Prediction.

2012 = Year of Pop Punk's reemergence into the mainstream.

Royal Headache is getting a head start.

2011-11-10T17:16:00.001-08:00

Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica

Stunning new release from Daniel Lopatin, synth magician, and new, new age leading light. This has got to be the most contemporary sounding, vintage debris oriented, stoner record from the hypnagogia set. This is why people really listen to OPN and only name check Ferraro.

2011-11-09T10:58:00.000-08:00

Tom Croose - Cho Chua (Dukes Dub)

Brazilian balearic from Resista, Dan Snaith's newish re-edit/dance label. Super!

2011-10-24T12:12:00.000-07:00

Tom Waits - Hell Broke Luce

Oh, this man is back with a vengeance.

2011-10-14T20:08:00.001-07:00

ADR - Jupiter Rising

2011-09-14T10:50:00.000-07:00

Grimes - Caladan

Grimes - Zoal, Face Dancer

Grimes - Rosa

Very intriguing release from this Montrealer, like a poppier, dance informed Broadcast for the Nite Jewel crowd. Weird bits of folk, lofi post rock, dreamy scenarios, bargain basement samples. The record seems to loose some focus at about track 5; songs like 'Grisgirs' in which for the last minute of the song we hear her singing what sounds like "meow meow meow" over and over. Sorry that's just not my kind of weird. The doomier stuff also fails to resonate much, I think largely because there's no mid-low range in any of the production. Lots of compressed digi-trash which all seems to work with the indie-pixie stuff, but not with the Grouper-like chanteuse stuff. Still, it's a cool entry. Ladies of the indie midstream eyeing that space that Bjork used to occupy remain unfilled - take note.

2011-09-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

Sorry Pitchfork, this new Girls record sounds like a blander Soul Asylum sharted on a Crazy Horse record. Can we stop the mid-90's shit-rock pilfering? Same goes for you Kurt Vile. Writing a boring song that resembles boring songs from 20 years ago is still writing a boring song.

2011-09-08T10:46:00.000-07:00

The Field - Burned Out

The splicing geniuses return.

2011-09-07T16:27:00.000-07:00

Wooden Shjips - Looking Out

2011-08-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

Little Dragon - Ritual Union

Little Dragon - Little Man

2011-07-10T18:40:00.001-07:00

Dirty Beaches - Lord Knows Best

2011-06-27T11:50:00.000-07:00

Samiyam - My Buddy

2011-06-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

Bare Wires - Ready To Go

Summer stoner punk insta classic.

2011-05-23T13:05:00.000-07:00

Thurston Moore - Benediction

Thurston Moore - In Silver Rain With a Paper Key

2011-05-17T10:54:00.001-07:00

Mark E - The Day

2011-05-13T14:04:00.000-07:00

Timber Timbre - Creep On Creepin On

Timber Timbre - Lay Down In The Tall Grass

2011-05-02T15:23:00.000-07:00

Fleet Foxes - Lorelai

Fleet Foxes - Someone You'd Admire

Tracks 8 and 9 of the new one from our old faves. Start up those campfires...

2011-04-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

Owiny Sigoma Band - Wires (Theo Parrish Remix)

2011-04-28T12:29:00.000-07:00

The Fresh & Onlys - Secret Walls

The Fresh & Onlys move out of the garage, set their sights on indie rock mainstream, and fucking nail it. Fuzz be-gone.

2011-04-10T12:10:00.000-07:00

Donnie and Joe Emerson - Baby

2011-04-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

Mist - Twin Lanes

"I CAN STILL HEAR YOUR VOICE" EXCERPT from upcoming MIST "House" 2xlp by spectrumspools

REALLY excited for this release. John Elliot from Emeralds teams up with Sam Goldberg from Radio People. Synthy dreams. Preorder at mego

2011-04-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

Matthew Mullane - A Second Choir

Beautiful, folky instrumental guitar from Fabric's Matthew Mullane. Stunning.

2011-03-24T16:11:00.000-07:00

Jib Kidder - Mirage

Jib Kidder - Suspension 1

Jib Kidder - Cruisin 1

Posted stuff from this Oakland based not yr average mashup dude, way back in '08, and damn if he hasn't blossomed out. These are from his gorgeous entry into the Library Catalog series from Asthmatic Kitty. Srsly recommended.

2011-03-23T17:56:00.001-07:00

Barbara Moore - Going On Holiday

2011-03-15T18:24:00.001-07:00

2011-03-09T12:08:00.001-08:00

Penny and the Quarters - You and Me

2011-03-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

Kurt Vile - Jesus Fever

2011-03-04T11:01:00.001-08:00

Lukid - Spiller

2011-02-26T11:26:00.000-08:00

Peaking Lights - All The Sun That Shines

Peaking Lights - Amazing and Wonderful

One of the best albums so far this year. Dubby, woozey psych, touches on pastoral, touches on the same Terry Riley cuts everyone else from Sun Araw to Dolphins Into The Future seems to be listening to but the vocals aren't so evasive. Get it, zone out.

Full Album

2011-02-24T12:44:00.001-08:00

Death - Views

2011-02-23T11:39:00.000-08:00

Six Organs of Admittance - Hold But Let Go

2011-02-17T13:00:00.001-08:00

Straight Arrows - Bad Temper

2011-02-15T13:20:00.000-08:00

Blondes - Synthesist

Vulcans - Asibiso Jungle

2011-01-09T18:39:00.000-08:00

Vulcans - Asibiso Jungle

The Blackfoot - The Foot Steps

2010-06-24T14:24:00.000-07:00

More incredible Zambian rock from the 70's. This record is has some traces of traditional zambian drumming and guitar work, but it plays like an afropop Creedence. Straight forward, all heart, all fuzz.
Blackfoot - When I Needed You

Download the whole record here

2010-06-15T14:15:00.000-07:00

Stream the new Beautiful Swimmers 12" over at Rush Hour right now. I put an insta-classic Beautiful Swimmers track on a Friday Finds way back and I've been waiting patiently for them to drop anything new. I don't normally feel this way about most of the new dance music coming out, especially anything even resembling chillwave, but there's something special going on with D.C.'s Future Times; I can't find anything wrong with anything they've put out. Listen especially to "Big Coast", smart, lean, reggae dipped dance is the way of the future. Pre-orders only for now, and good luck finding this anywhere online, though if you do, please let me know.

2010-06-11T15:19:00.000-07:00

Eric Copeland - Fun Dink Death

Here We Go Magic - Hibernation

Airto - I Don't Have To Do What I Don't Want To Do

Change Leopardon - Canvas Shoes

Julian Lynch - Just Enough

Junip - Rope and Summit

The Samps - F.X.N.C.

Aeroplane - We Can't Fly

King Kong Ding Dong - Jample

DJ Nate - Ima Dog

eighties ladies - ladies of the 80's (instrumental)

Paul White - Organ Therapy

Wet Illustrated - Born Stoked

Vermillion Sands - Would You Kindly Direct Me To Hell

Download the full mix here

2010-04-30T13:38:00.000-07:00

Friday Finds 16:

The Frightening Lights - Mr. Sun

twins and Luke Perry - malibu body crew

Koes Bersaudara - Poor Clown

Chuck Berry - Blues for Hawaiians

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Menopause Man

Jeff 'Jay Dog' Scott - Snake Bite

Jason Willett - Late Night Moisturizer

Tobacco - Fresh Hex (Feat. Beck)

Oh No - Melody Mix

Dolphins Into The Future - On The High Seas

Broken Water - Heal

Rangers - Bel Air

Mount Carmel - Still Listening

Roll The Dice - Axee

Rickman - Hard 2 Be Me

Download the full mix here

2010-04-07T14:19:00.000-07:00

Hey, so Friday Finds 15 got busted up for some reason by the DMCA, so here's a couple nice ones. One's from this krauty synth band Growing which in all likelihood will get remixed by Neon Indian in the next week. Also this new cut "Shutterbug" off Big Boi's forthcoming. How does he stay so fucking relevant? Blending these Juno stabs from glofi, pitched off vocals from the cracked out crunk of Hudmo and the like, and even a guitar part that could have come straight from a surf track. Somehow he still keeps to his roots.

Growing - Camera 84

Big Boi - Shutterbug

2010-04-02T18:13:00.000-07:00

Katell Keineg - World of Sex

Hans Elder - Jag Sokte Efter Karlek

Wareika Hill Sounds - Coconut Head Special

**K - Phenomenon (Cage and Aviary Remix)

J.J. Cale - Ride Me High

Galaxy - Running

William Onyeabor - Fantastic Man

MF Doom and Clutchy Hopkins - Track 6

Shadows - My resistance is low

Beak> - I Know

Jai Paul - BTSTU

The Factory - Smile, Let Your Life Begin

Desperate Bicycles - Car

Ty Segall - Caesar

Download the full mix here

2010-03-19T02:17:00.000-07:00

Friday Finds 14:

Pill Wonder - Restless

Caribou - Sun

Art Museums - Sculpture Gardens

Nice Face - I Want Your Damage

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Round and Round

Aloe Blacc - I Need a Dollar

The Sticks - Messing Around

Autechre - known(1)

Gorillaz - Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach (w/ Snoop Dogg and Hypnotic Brass Ensemble)

Flying Lotus - Sangria Spin Cycles

Simply Saucer - Instant Pleasure

Here We Go Magic - Collector

Balaclavas -Up The Newel

Terminal Twilight - Beyond Fantasy

Faust - It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl

Download the full mix here

2010-03-10T09:49:00.000-08:00

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.

The J. Geils Band - Fancy Footwork

Soul Expedition - I'll Be Standing By

Can - I Want More

Flash and the Pan - Waiting For A Train

Dusty Springfield - Every Ounce of Strength

Cat Stevens - Bitterblue

Ted Nugent & the Amboy Dukes - Mississippi Murderer

L Hollis And The Mackadoos - Monkey Time Shine

Ray & His Court - More More More

Tony Wilson - I Can't Leave It Alone

J.J. Cale - Let Me Do It To You

Frank Williams & The Rocketeers - Good Thing Pt. 1

The Clash - Police & Thieves

Nick Lowe - No Reason

The Coasters - I Must Be Dreamin

Levon Helm & RCO - The Tie That Binds

Leo Sayer - The Show Must Go On

Download the full mix here

2010-02-19T17:43:00.000-08:00

Scott Wells - Untitled III (Root Strata)

Speculator - Peter Says (myspace)

Protect-U - Double Rainbow (Future Times)

Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate - Kala Djula (World Circuit)

Sensational Saints - How Great Thou Art (Stones Throw)

The Feeling of Love - Young Jesus (Kill Shaman)

W-H-I-T-E - Go On With The Gong (Swill Children)

Freeway & Jake One - One Thing feat. Raekwon (Rhyme Sayers)

Blockhead - Which One Of You Jerks Drank My Arnold Palmer (Ninja Tune)

Dam Mantle - Yoghourt (Feat. Julie Augere) (myspace)

Twin Sister - All Around We Go (Shark Attack Records)

Pere Ubu - Ubu Dance Party (Cooking Vinyl)

Al Usher - Silversum (John Talabot's Wilderness Remix) (Kompakt)

Raw Thrills - For Someone (myspace)

Download the full mix here

2010-02-06T16:24:00.000-08:00

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.

Caravan - Silver Strings

Sonny And The Sunsets - Too Young To Burn

Beautiful Swimmers - Swimmers Groove (final)

King Midas Sound - Outta Space (slow version)

Paul White - Highlife

Beck's Record Club - Run Run Run

The Mint Chicks - Hot On Your Heels

James Pants - I Saw You

Caribou - Odessa

Bird By Snow - If You Wait

Sam Amidon - How Come That Blood

Four Tet - Angel Echoes

Blues Control - Good Morning

Nothing People - 1-11

Larkin Grimm - Link in Your Chain

Download the full mix here

Cold Electronics

2010-02-02T15:40:00.000-08:00

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.

Câlin - Money Poney

Ruth - Polaroid/Roman/Photo

Suicide - Girl

Death Domain - Programmed Cell Death

La Maison - Igloo

Xeno and Oaklander - Toho Picture

The (Hypothetical) Prophets - Person to Person

Led Er Est - Laredo

Land of Giants - Cannibal Dolls

Allez Allez - Slump

Etienne Jaumet - Mental Vortex

Absolute Body Control - Figures

Jeunesse D'Ivoire - A Gift of Tears

Download zipped mix here

Débruit - Spatio Temporel EP

2010-01-11T12:10:00.000-08:00

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.

Débruit - K.O. Debout

Débruit - Persian Funk

2009-12-21T18:16:00.000-08:00

Christmas Time! (the mixtape)

1. The Drifters - White Christmas

2. The Sonics - Don't Believe In Christmas

3. Hasil Akdins - Blue Christmas

4. Fats Waller & His Rhythm - Swingin' Them Jingle Bells

5. The Border Brass - Tijuana Christmas

6. Tom Waits - Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis

7. Can - Silent Night

8. The Beach Boys - The Man With All The Toys

9. Afroman - Violent Night

10. Soul Saints Orchestra - Santa's Got A Bag Of Soul

11. Yogi Yorgesson - Yingle Bells

12. Klaus Nomi - Silent Night

13. The Ventures - Sleigh Ride

14. Wesley Willis - Merry Christmas

15. Johnny Guarnieri - Santa's Secret

16. Phil Ochs - No Christmas In Kentuky

17. Slaraffenland - Little Drummer Boy

All Your Favorite Christmas Songs IN ONE Collection!!

Download the full mix here

2009-12-18T12:18:00.000-08:00

Top Ten Records of 2009 (in no particular order)

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 - Until Then, Goodbye

2009-12-17T13:05:00.000-08:00

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.

Lawrence - Until Then, Goodbye

Lawrence - Jill

Lawrence - Father Umbrillo

Lawrence - Don't Follow Me

Edan - Echo Party

2009-12-05T13:32:00.000-08:00

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.

Edan - Echo Party

Tapes - Hissing Theatricals

2009-11-20T13:22:00.000-08:00

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, Tapes is 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 record does 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.

Tapes - C20 Riddim

Tapes - Good Thing You Came Along

Tapes - Gold Love Riddim

Tapes - Lowry Dub

Signer: Next We Bring You The Fire

2009-11-17T13:03:00.000-08:00

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.

Signer - +Kicks and Kicks

Signer - Languidly Toot

Signer - Don't Be a Forest Cow

Signer - We Should Touch Teeth

Brian Harnetty and Bonnie Prince Billy: Silent City

2009-11-03T13:09:00.000-08:00

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?

Brian Harnetty & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Silent City
Brian Harnetty & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Well, There Are
Brian Harnetty & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Sleeping In The Driveway
Brian Harnetty & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - As Old As The Stars

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.

2009-10-23T19:22:00.000-07:00

Friday Finds 11

C Joynes - Mob Happy

Golden Silvers with Hypnotic Brass Ensemble - Arrows of Eros

luc - backbone nuance give millions hope

Iz & Diz - Mouth (Brad Peep's Remix For Friends)

Ethan Master of the Hawaiian Ukulele - Norma Jean

Sonic Chicken 4 - Sexiest

The Paragons - Wear You To The Ball

The Nerves - Hanging On The Telephone

Devendra Banhart - Baby

David Bowie - See Emily Play

Charlotte Gainsbourg - IRM

The Alps - A Manha Na Praia

A.R.P - Potentialities

Future Trends - Moonraker

Al Usher - Lullaby For Robert (Bogdan Irkük Remix)

2009-10-22T18:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Phoenix - Fences (Jongleur Remix)

2009-10-22T13:59:00.000-07:00

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.

M - Pop Muzik (Todd Terje Remix)

Shit Robot - Simple Things (Work It Out)[Todd Terje Version]

2009-10-13T11:56:00.000-07:00

Rainy day in L.A. Not every day this kind of thing happens. Found the perfect track to accompany from a Dungen offshoot called The Amazing. These swedish dudes drop a seriously snuggly song here. Think Nick Drake, Van Morrison, 60's stuff, with a nice bit of that northern europe aloofness. The rest of the album has a couple other tracks in this vein, and some with a bit more of Dungen style psych swirl and boom.

The Amazing - Dragon

2009-10-12T12:25:00.000-07:00

Asthmatic Kitty, the label home and Michigan outpost of Sufjan Stevens, has an interesting record series called Library Catalog devoted to music basically prepped for a utilitarian role. What that is, or turns out to be seems ambiguous. They write of series: "for possible use in films and television, background sounds for home or office, or personal needs, such as relaxation, stimulation, meditation, concentration, or elevation,” or more specifically as “accompaniment to cooking, eating, sculpting, exercising, high stakes poker, soaking, panoramic landscapes, cuddling, car chases, drawing, knitting, bandaging, romance, playing chess, or planning the rest of your life, of which this is the first day." I don't think it presumptuous to assume Asthmatic Kitty considers "listening" a crucial aspect of the whole endeavor. But I do find it a recessionarily shrewd move on their part, providing indie ambient and arty instrumental rock that seems tailor made to indie films and forward thinking TV. Then again, like many of Sufjan and his crew's ideas (I'm still pissed about the 50 states project's abandonment, and for the record I think Sufjan's noisey, electronic dabbling is terribly ill-conceived, and the BQE is a snorefest), I won't hold breath for them to come to fruition. But as an excercise in 'backgroundness' these records do fine. Some more than fine. Yuuki Matthews, who plays with Seattle's underrated Crystal Skulls is releasing Music for Savage Tropical Imagery December 8, which on the strength of "Conquerors" the first track leaked by Asthmatic Kitty, promises to be a a hazy, rueful Eno-meets-chillwave affair. Fellow Crystal Skull Casey Foubert and James McAlister, who both have solo entries into the series, come together on Music For Drums, a record that does as it a describes just with a lot more interest than you would expect. The mixing is taut, the layers rich, the compositions shifting. I've posted a smattering of teasers from a few of the other records including the Sufjan collab with Lowell Brams "Alpha to Theta" on Music for Insomnia which sounds way too close to Yoga music to my ears but seriously might get some motherfuckers to sleep. Also check out Roberto Carlos Lange's (Helado Negro) "Amazonian Pacific" which is an odd mishmash of darkwave, ambient, and noisey avant kraut grooves, but definitely works. They've amped up their release schedule for these records so keep a look out as they seem to be getting better with each.

Yuuki Matthews - Conquerors

Casey Foubert/James McAlister - Big Moth

Lowell Brams - Alpha to Theta

Law of the Least Effort - Law 2

Roberto Carlos Lange - Amazonian Pacific

2009-10-02T13:42:00.000-07:00

1 Broadcast & the Focus Group - I See, So I See So

2 Su Kramer - Magic Dance

3 Gary Higgins - Down On The Farm

4 Puttin' On The Ritz - Girl From Ipanema

5 Laurel Aitken - Come Back Jeannie

6 Trans Am - Cocaine Computer

7 Atlas Sound - Shelia

8 Neu! - Crazy

9 Joakim - Travel In Vain

10 John Lennon - Isolation

11 Glenn Branca - Lesson No. 1 for Electric Guitar

12 Darkstar - Aidy's Girl Is A Computer

13 OOIOO - O O I A H

14 Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - Mother

Download the full mix here (zip)

2009-09-30T15:07:00.000-07:00

Hudson Mohawke's LP Butter comes out on Warp October 8th. The Wire's Joe Muggs writes of the record, "It superimposes the most vainglorious bombast of 21st century rap/crunk/R&B with the excruciatingly precise production, jazz funk chords and cocaine treble of 1980's soul and 'yacht rock', while deconstructing the clatter and stabs of rave and turning the synaesthetic cartoon sound of P-funk into a high-definition 3D CGI IMAX nightmare." I'm not sure it's possible to beat that description, nor is it possible not to be overwhelmed by the sound he describes as it comes to you in the flesh. The record steps way beyond, or around, all the UK Wonky, dubstep cadre who systematically insist on the same types of snares and kicks and wood blocks, who mumble and pout their way on a sadsack dancefloor with stoned out intellectuals. I don't know what drugs Hud Mo is on, and I don't really know that I could figure out HOW, let alone where, to dance to these tracks (although it turns out I missed out on his show at Low End Theory a couple weeks ago). Everything seems jacked up, either too fast, too busy, too punchy, too weird. It's totally inspired and totally next level, it's just not always totally listenable. Is that possible? I'm gonna post three of the best tracks on the album, one of which ("Star Crackout") is an ambient cut that sublimely takes apart some folk recording, a very new tactic from this particular beatcrusher. But be quick because Warp is on the prowl for this one and no doubt these links will be dead by days end.

Hudson Mohawke - No One Could Ever

Hudson Mohawke - 3.30

Hudson Mohawke - Star Crackout

FYI These tracks are probably the least flamboyant on the record (to my ears). If you're someone who wishes Andre 3000 kept making records like The Love Below until ten years from now, and then time traveled back in order to deliver some of these tracks, (and I don't think I'm exactly excluded from that group) by all means get into the rest of the record.

2009-09-29T11:31:00.000-07:00

Jam. Straight Jam.

Juelz Santana - Back To The Crib (feat. Chris Brown) (Via Rose Quartz)

2009-09-28T12:16:00.000-07:00

Roj Stevens, a former member of Broadcast, has released a collection of music on Ghost Box that will take you far far into the past, into alien addled sci-fi and haunted TV sets, into tribalized exotica, into woozy trance and third person states and musical transversalities, all as envisioned by dumpy, damp midland chaps dreaming of a future in reverse. Ghostbox makes a habit of these types of vintage 60's analog obsessed records, but this one is the bravest and weirdest. It's one of the more unique sounding records I've ever heard. Krautish, Silver Apples influenced grooves sit alongside radio transmissions, alert tones, vocal snippets, synth blips and twerps from locations unknown, potentially sinister, and altogether far fucking out. If you were ever a person who found Stockhausen's "Gesang der Junglinge" and "Kontakte" kinda funky in a really difficult way to express, you will be liberated into pure oblivion by these outer space phobia inducing miniatures. Unlike Stockhausen or any like minded early electronic pioneers, Roj keeps it stunningly brief. Which is not to say that each piece is just a etude, in fact the record has such incredible pace to it in terms of tempo and length, in terms of the simultaneous and opposing diversity and continuity of each sound world. It feels, somehow, that all these disparate pieces, with all their vexing obliquity fit to form a chaotic, spooky and beautifully psychedelic vision. Tasters choice available below but please do dive into the full experience. You can pick up the record on iTunes fr crissake.

Roj - Bongo Workout

Roj - Inhale. Exhale. Love!

Roj - Process Revealed

Roj - What I Saw

2009-09-25T11:23:00.000-07:00

Friday Finds 9

1: Renegade - Thin Lizzy (best and most underrated classic rock band ever?!)
2: 10 Bricks (feat. Capadonna & Ghostface Killah) - Raekwon (wu stalwart takes it back to the 90's, super hard!)
3: Untitled 3 (from Clear) - James Ferraro ("hypnagogic pop" from the unadorned king)
4: It's So - Famous L. Renfroe (famous, no, drunk, yes!)
5: Neon Snakes - Fontan (alert! kraut disco!)
6: Blue Genes - The Champagne Socialists (terrible name! great garage track!)
7: We Just Won't Stop - James Curd (DFA newcomer kills it with some inspirational retro disco - is DFA the only dance label worth it's weight in trendy t-shirts and sneaks?!)
8: A Million Dollars - Stanza (raps about being broke and hating your job make me feel better about myself. especially with slick as fuck production and an embarrassingly awesomea lofi video.
9: Feather - Little Dragon (if you think 'chillwave' is for poseurs but you like the production aesthetic try this band, they actually write songs!)
10: Silly Bones - Horse Meat Disco (probably the biggest track ever!)
11: What Did I Do? - The Beets (I think we all know this feeling. What did I do? Can you save me?!! Sincerely, and simply one of the best NY bands out there - this track is only the tip of the iceberg).
12: Talamak - Toro y Moi (glofi from South Carolina....at least it's not from Florida, I'm over all these blown out bands from Tampa!)
13: Traffika - The Sa-Ra Creative Partners (as weird and inventive as the Black Eyed Peas started out as, only more rugged)
14: Ohayo Mada Yaro - Yura Yura Teikoku (psych soul from Japan. What IS this? How did it get this way?)
15: Go (Offshore Remix) - Thavius Beck (Offshore is the one to watch here, tight knit neptunes inspired beats on the next level)
16: Passing Away - Emeralds (epic 60's minimal drone resurrected with serious commitment from the drone scene's brightest group. new ep downloadable from here)

Download Friday Finds 9 here

Bonus:
Thin Lizzy video of "Renegade"

2009-09-22T16:31:00.000-07:00

The Bran Flakes are the newest addition to Illegal Art, the only record label with the balls to handle the legalities of Girl Talk and other like minded sample heavy mashup artists. They are pretty irreverent, though not in the way Girl Talk might joyfully desecrate two antithetical musics with one fell swoop. The Bran Flakes find samples that while pretty distant in origin share a similar penchant for zaniness. Zaniness is a tough thing to pull off (just ask the Flaming Lips). You either look like you're trying too hard, or you think you're being zany when in fact you just look stupid. I'm not totally sure where this record falls, I think I would have to see these idiots in concert to know for sure. Some of the mashups are really awkward, or just plain annoying in their saturday morning cartoon enthusiasm. Like how Dan Deacon was before he got spiritual, or the really self satisfied dork patrol that thinks it's enough just to retool old nintendo's and other 8 bit relics in order to make "retro!" tech fantasies. As if they're the first ones to find real interest in video game music. Some of the references feel too close to home to be reified. I think Girl Talk gets away with using the most ubiquitous songs ever, because he's trying to be as obvious as possible, he's actually attempting to reinvent or at least deconstruct the most popular songs in American culture. I get the feeling the Bran Flakes' mission, while still largely hospitable to the listener (their self description on their website reads like 'Blues Clues': "The Bran Flakes are ready to turn that frown upside down, put a beat in your step, and a twinkle in your eye"), is more akin to that of Negativland, where cultural references points are worked to a frenzy in the hopes (hopes that are far more political in the case of Negativland) that they are eviscerated. I invariably end up kind of deflecting at the frenzy. It's all too, I don't know, Canadian. I end up craving something with a deeper sense of intent, of identity. But...there's 31 tracks on the record so really who cares if some of them are clunkers, the prevailing mood is pretty hysterical and it all amounts to a genuinely liberating sense of media abstraction albeit one we've been hearing for some time now. The best tracks on I Have Hands do one basic thing well, instead of trying to nail 7 different collages in a minute and a half. I've posted these songs, but for your interest Illegal Art has a 'pay what you want' policy for all their releases, so by all means, the next time you're on your seventeenth cup of coffee and wearing a hot dog costume, check it out.

The Bran Flakes - Jump Up

The Bran Flakes - Singing Dogs

The Bran Flakes - Van Pop

2009-09-10T10:28:00.000-07:00

Hidden Cameras have me feeling mighty 90's today. I don't why this track "In the NA" is so damn good, it reminds of so many useless silly songs that wear out quick but in the moment are just trancedently 'pop'. What the hell does it mean to be "in the NA"? Who gives a shit I'm bopping around my living room, shut up, that's what. I usually don't post indie rock as obvious as this, but mostly indie rock isn't this good. The cheesy synth brass hook, the totally underutilized in indie rock baritone range (Crash Test Dummies excluded). This song is gonna be stupid in like a day. But today it's fucking brilliant.
I'm posting one more track off that album, that pales in comparison to "In the NA", and apes Arcade Fire pretty hard, but all in all is a pretty decent song. Also check out the video for "In the NA" below. If you have seen a more ridiculous video since Men Without Hats' "The Safety Dance" (a video to which this one is obviously indebted) please do let me know.

Hidden Cameras - In the NA

Hidden Cameras - He Falls to Me

2009-09-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

Lightning Bolt, the rISD/Fort Thunder powerhouse art thrash duo is back with a destroyer of a record called Earthy Delights not out till October but a couple tracks have leaked this week. Fitting timing for those of us in the LA area as Lightning Bolt plays this saturday at the FYF Fest. "Funny Farm" has a bone crushing almost bluegrass hook, which is a weird and awesome change of pace for them. But almost as if the song had a dialectic, this hook gets gobbled alive by a hard as fuck section clearly designed to destruct the former. It's really odd how much this song could be off an earlier, better, and harder Deerhoof record. "Colossus" pretty much honors its namesake without apology, riding a huge dirge into a speedy oblivion. In the interest of defaulting to a theme here, I have to point out the bluesyness, albeit of the Junior Kimbrough/Buddy Guy blues as weapon school, of the primary riff. Have Lightning Bolt gone traditional? On previous records, bassist Brian Gibson had an interest in circular, minimalistic riffs, ascensions and falling patterns, arpeggios, the tools of modern minimalism done up to look like speed metal. It gave the band a kind of classical rigour. Here there's an almost rootsy vibe emerging. The third track, "Sound Guardians", references something of a tradition, though not as far back as folk and blues. This time it's classic metal, almost Black Sabbath (if Black Sabbath were lit on fire, thrown into a pit of snakes, and then blasted with explosives to eternity) in its broadness and depth. There's even flourishes of hair metal guitar theatrics. Lyrically there's not a lot of change here. Brian Chippendale, the world's fastest, hardest drummer (which would distinguish him from Zach Hill - the world's fastest, gangliest drummer) still swallows his mic (literally) and half sings/shouts indecipherable discourses like a politician/street preacher with a bullhorn who is seriously spiritually unsound. But lest anyone tell you this band is a one trick pony (and those who do aren't really listening anyway), proof of progress is here, in the dirty history of rock, wrung out and juiced up once again by the duo from Providence.

Lightning Bolt - Funny Farm

Lightning Bolt - Colossus

Lightning Bolt - Sound Guardians

2009-09-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

The german techno producer, Ada is back with a mixtape called Adaptations out on Kompakt. On it, DJ Koze's remix of the track "Eve" is transcendent. While so many brights lights of the minimal house and techno scene are acting all monkish and apocalyptic, Ada reminds us that techno is pure, beauty seeking, repetitious fun. While Vladislav Delay's new record, someone who used to understand this base level of aestheticized desire, smacks of every hack sound art installation made in a thousand converted gallery space warehouses in Berlin, and everyone and their mother is making ambient records that take a half a day to put together, Ada is doing gorgeous, pristine things with the basic structures of dance. Sounds that still retain heft and bite. Sounds with transitive charm. Sounds with swooning capabilities. Who doesn't want to fall in love on the dancefloor? Who would rather explore the inside of a sound with scientistic precision?

Ada - Eve (DJ Koze Mix)

Vladislav Delay - Musta Planeetta

2009-08-31T10:57:00.000-07:00

Jim O' Rourke has a new album, his first in 8 eight years. It's a single near 40 minute piece, like a sort of folk suite, or just a multi-movement work with many reoccurring themes (I have a problem with pop's use of the term 'symphony', which really refers to the use of the orchestra as an instrument). O' Rourke is an ex member of Sonic Youth, and an old stalwart of the experimental, free jazz and improv scene in Chicago (certainly the most vibrant place in the country for that music for the past decade). But he's also just as well known as a producer and mixer, having mixed Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and Joanna Newsom's Ys, and produced Wilco's Ghost Is Born and countless other records. This is an absolutely gorgeous record. The mixing is flawless: it's clean as a whistle, and don't expect to be able to listen at a low volume or vast portions of it will go unnoticed. One would miss not only the detail and thoughtfulness of the orchestration, which is stunning (check out the haunting horn section around 9:30 minutes, just to start), but also simply because O' Rourke hasn't compressed the shit out of everything. so like a classical record, there are sections that are very quiet and section that are quite loud. In form, The Visitor harkens back to a lot of John Fahey's folk classicism. But it dips into so many other styles and textures, and generally plays around so much, that it escapes the religious stoicism of some of Fahey's long form works. Currently my favorite section of the piece begins around 18:30, where out of nowhere a rolling, almost martial beat, a flourish of banjos, and a brass choir tear the roof off the barn, so to speak. Two minutes later, the arrangement has morphed into something so utterly nostalgic and prescient, it's hard to remember just how you got here, through all this twisting and turning, onto a plateaux of some kind, adrift. It's really a three movement work, with the first movement running through a gamut of themes and textures, trying them on for size, the second movement, which moves much more directly, beginning at 18:30 and running through a gradual wilting meltdown before eliding with the third mvt. at the the finger picking figure which picks up at about 30:00. The third mvt gains momentum, building into most exuberant portion of the whole piece before whispering off with a long piano postlude. For those of you with problems with something as overtly beautiful as this record, please drop your b.s. angsty posturing and curl up in bed, or laze in your backyard and listen to this full through, and then tell me it didn't soften you, just a little, in the hardest and most formidable of places.

Jim O'Rourke - The Visitor (link removed at the request of Drag City)

2009-08-21T15:04:00.001-07:00

Friday Finds is back. Numero 8.

Highway Memorial Shrine - Nodzzz "illegally cute lofi garage"

Black - Dam Funk "LA's inheritor of all thing funkadelic"

true enemies & false friends (yesteryears suite) - Klimek "a brass fanfare in orbit"

Laughing Owl - John Zorn "Zorn made another lounge album, woot woot!"

tryouts - Javelin "soundtrack to your trip to the aquarium"

Girls - Doe N Reezy "in what club do girls get crazy to songs like this?"

Candy Girl - Trailer Trash Tracys "biggest snare sound ever, and heart breaker of a tune"

Open Up the Watergate (Let the Sunshine In) - Bert Jansch "who knew politics could sound this warm"

Apology To Pollinateurs - Karl Blau "psych funk, from a K records all star"

Don't Need No - Pink Dollaz "the anthem from LA's 'jerkin' scene"

Feel It All Around - Washed Out "dayglo beats from newcomer outta South Carolina"

Gold Light - The Pink Noise "android Fonzie posturing"

The Laurels of Erotomania - Cold Cave "the best new dark wave. FYI Erotomania is a type of delusion in which the affected person believes that another person is in love with him or her"

Last One Awake (Friend Version) - Memory Cassette "topical tropical"

Trap Goin Ham - Pill "...like two day old shit....nope, harder than that. check out the insane video"

No Hello - Illuminations "what the world wants old Wilco to sound like"

Madagascar - Lake "Jill's jam"

Download the zip here

2009-08-12T11:31:00.000-07:00

White is the first name to emerge more broadly out of the "No Beijing" scene. The duo, Shou Weng (guitars, electronics, organs) and Shenngy (vocals, electronics, percussion) formed in Beijing and got picked up and by Einsturzende Neubauten's (one of the pioneers of industrial and experimental rock) Blixa Bargeld who produced the record in Berlin. White has plenty of kinship with Neubauten's sound; dirty electronics and metals, materiality mixed with a kind of spaced out minimalistic drive. White has gotten compared as well to many classical minimal composers, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Glenn Branca, and Alvin Curran, although I'm not so sure that the comparison should be made based on sonics as much as philosophies. White oscillates between a few different postures. There's a more industrial noise based vibe (see "Space Decay"), a minimal, synth driven tribalism that aligns them towards a more Japanese style of experimental rock like the more recent Boredoms, and OOIOO, or even more zen leaning experimenters Asa-Chang and Junray (check out the hypnotic post-dance album closer "Bai" and "47 Rockets (for Wan Hu)"), agitated drone pieces (is that an Erhu on "Spring House"?), and pieces that blend these ideas (the superbly badass "Conch Crunch"). Always with White there's a softer melodic underbelly to any of the more extreme gestures. There's a yearning, almost folk sentimentality that creeps in amidst this sort of hostile industrial sound world. It makes for an odd dynamic, something clearly distanced and analytic, the way Neubauten, or basically anything legitimately post-rock (rather than bands just tagging off its tropes) came off like a statement on culture rather than participating in a construction of it, mixed with something confidently placed in the shifting center of a burgeoning countercultural music movement in China, where seemingly the future of everything is being assembled. Check it out, or miss out on some truly new sounds.

White - Conch Crunch

White - Bai

White - 47 Rockets (For Wan Hu)

White - Spring House

2009-07-28T18:22:00.000-07:00

Here's that new Teengirl Fantasy release - two new tracks with a couple remixes of "Hollywood Hils" by Mark Brown that don't really do it for me. Both of these cuts though feel really different. Slicker production values, but also a more mellow late nite vibe. Less loony toons on crack, more codeine sippin booty jamz. Reminds me a lot of that DJ Sprinkles record especially with the way vocal snippets are integrated. Get this new one and the older Teengirl Fantasy EP here (via Pukekos)

2009-07-21T15:55:00.000-07:00

Gold Panda makes his debut with his Miyamae EP out on Various Production this month. His remixes have gotten him a lot of attention in blogs etc., especially one of Little Boots which is alright, and another of Telepathe's "Chrome's On It" which fucking rules. But when left to his own devices turns out he has a lovely, delicate sensibility for warm, glitchy techno. "Back Home" ties a neat, clipped beat to a lone violin line. Pulsing soft pads, play in reverse, marking time closely, making it the most romantic thing I've heard I could still dance to. "Long Vacation" is a stranger beast, his beat is similarly laced up, but there's a host of herky jerky synth blasts and static that make the ride less comfy. Somehow all that is so background, it still seems luxurious. Mayuri has a dub foundation but the mixing is super interesting. The bass overwhelms as it's supposed to, but not in the way it normally does; the upper lines are so pulled back that when the bass comes in it seems less about filling out the composition, or driving things forward, than it about pulling your focus to a different element. I haven't heard a mixing process this thoughtful since Aphex. This is the really the first thing this kid's done, and it does feel tentative beyond what I think he intended. Here's hoping there's a long player on the calender that steps a bit taller and prouder but keeps it all at this gorgeous micro level he's working with.

Gold Panda - Back Home

Telepathe - Chrome's On It (Gold Panda Remix)

2009-07-13T12:04:00.000-07:00

Clark, the English beat programmer/producer has a new LP called "Totems Flare" out tomorrow on Warp. In all honesty, I really haven't liked any of Clark's other material. As yet, I've found his stuff too aggressive and cold for my house and IDM tastes, which generally seek either a more limber, playful set of move sequences or approaches so minimal and scientistic they become a kind of dance lab test for the inheritors of musique concrete. This time around though he finds some really ingenious ways out of his icey dance floor restrictions without losing his sense of repose. The beats are have a lot less digital bite to them, they are warmer, in a way, without being warm necessarily, as if cut with a rusty blade. Two of my favorite tracks, "Future Daniel" and the standout "Totem Crackerjack" draw a clear lineage back to Squarepusher, one of the godfathers of Warp, in their anthemic, baroque use of arpeggiators; rounded square waves cycling through a series with a sense of internal harmonic logic, not unlike the harmonic rotation of a jazz tune.
"Totem Crackerjack" especially, after a few minutes auditioning and jumpcutting through various other modes, gears itself up into a pattern that bears striking (and for me deeply emotional) resemblance to the classic Squarepusher "A Journey to Reedham". Squarepusher's pioneering style of beat shifting, basically giving birth to the notion of IDM, in retrospect looks a little too much like pure virtuosity. Clark on the other hand isn't sacrificing his own dance motivating capabilities, and yet at the same time, as this record proves, he's seriously interested in formal adventure, not to mention dips into sound design, boom bap, and post rock. Check out "Talis" for the best (and only) time you'll here a combination of Interpol, Radiohead, Anticon, and Aphex. It's what I wish TV on the Radio would do if they only simplified their ensemble with a few more computers and synths. Anybody who has heard them live knows this to be true. It's one thing to mix a record with 10 instruments, its another to play live with 10 instruments when you have 2 different members of your group who refuse to turn down their instruments to a reasonable level. But I digress...
One last point before you listen, 'Totems Flare' has a nice sense of flow over the whole album. This is largely due to a couple really gorgeous ambient cuts that let the harder, housier numbers have a sense of breathing room. Thankfully these are not throwaways. "Primary Balloon Landing", with its delicate panning and EQing would impress even the geekiest of studio dudes, maybe even Matmos. And "Absence" is a pointed piece of melancholy that wouldn't be out of place on a Caribou record. I like that he included these vignettes, it shows that he's stretching a bit into territories other than the dirty, dark corners of clubs.

Clark - Totem Crackerjack

Clark - Future Daniel

Clark - Talis

Clark - Primary Balloon Landing

Clark - Absence

2009-06-22T15:35:00.000-07:00

DJ Sprinkles - Midtown 120 Blues

DJ Sprinkles (Terre Thaemlitz) is a seriously polemical person for someone really into deep house. I completely agree that Madonna co-opted and reified 80's latino and black gender transversality for the idiot masses, but what, exactly, does it have to do with the deep house of today? It's a considerably less vital argument these days, fighting the mainstream machine. Dance music need not even address the mainstream which can't even attempt to track trends and capitalize, and a certain cadre of new dance finds itself aping and twisting mainstream approaches from a position of obscurity. Mainstream is no longer uncool, because it is no longer a relevant distinction. In comparison to Madonna's New York of the 80's, it strikes a pale ghostly shadow. But over repeated listens, the album's intent becomes less a corrective from an old master (Thaemlitz was one of the major DJ's in the gay and transgender club scene in NY in the 80's and 90's and was a major presence in the emergence of deep house) than an elegy for a forgotten, and brutalized source. Listen on the gorgeous "house music is conrollable desire you can own", this is super personal, darkened dance music that also springs from this revisionist motive. As she/he reinterprets older music, lush pads and aimless, floating beats, vocal snippets misheard, vinyl crackle, the DNA of deep house, she retrofits it with a softer, less heterogenous approach. In "Grand Central Pt 2", house is skeletonized into crickets and panning chords, subway rattle, the distant booms of a club, a sad voice over testimonial on watching a performer in drag getting "knocked around" while everyone laughs. It's the saddest portrait of the sad underbelly of clubs and the culture of performance. So, music that is now being subjugated to a kind of retro fetishizing all of sudden has a historicized document from someone who can claim to have been there, seen the excesses and the victims, and is now reporting back with wistful remorse. It's all a bit self serious to those who might have never considered deep house a home, or care to understand the outsider origin of most dance music genres, but for those who were there, or can imagine the landscape she's coming from, it's a very elegant, touching record.

DJ Sprinkles - House Music Is Controllable Desire You Can Own

DJ Sprinkles - Midtown 120 Intro

DJ Sprinkles - Grand Central Pt 2 (72 hrs. By Rail From Missouri)

2009-06-19T18:59:00.000-07:00

Friday Finds 7

...better than a milkshake.

The Units - High Pressure Days (Rory Phillips Remix)
Nancy Sinatra - Sugar Town
Black Meteoric Star - Dawn
Blaqstarr - Naked Body Baby...
Dixie Dee and the Rhythm Rockers - Maxine
Subway - Hal
Sonny and the Sunsets - Strange Love
Ish - Don't Stop
Dirty Projectors - Two Doves
The Natural Yoghurt Band - Soft Cheese
DJ Quik & Kurupt - 9x Outta 10
Gregg Kowalsky - Tape Chants VI-VII (excerpt)
Fiery Furnaces - The End is Near
Generationals - When They Fight They Fight

Download the zip here

2009-06-15T18:52:00.000-07:00

New album out from Japan's all girl trio Nisennenmondai called 'Destination Tokyo'. Noisey, motorik, pointillistic, and plagued by an excessive interest in Germans.

Nisennenmondai - Disco

Nisennenmondai - Destination Tokyo

2009-06-14T10:15:00.000-07:00

Pictureplane is like the rated R version of Passion Pit. This is indie dance through and through, techno signposts on buzzy DIY production, moaning obliquity, faux tribalism (where necessary), anti hook simplicity, and so on. But Denver's Pictureplane (full length out on Lovepump United ) has a harsher, more carnal take on things than Passion Pit. We're not just talking about extra distortion (practically a prerequisite for Lovepump), but something more dangerous in the whole chemical makeup. Passion Pit's lead Michael Angelakos sounds like a 5 year old girl who just got given a full My Little Pony set. It's all coming up roses for Passion Pit, they're barely out of college and they're fucking signed to Frenchkiss. A year ago they were playing shitty bars and parties in Allston, and goofing off. There's something so smugly benign about bands that started at college. They're cute, and of the moment, but it's all a game to them, like turning in papers. At some point they're gonna pack up and go back to grad school, get a house in the burbs...
I don't know what Pictureplane's Travis Egedy's story is, but I know that he's got something innately empathetic about his voice that he needs to get more serious about employing. He's not a singer, you can tell that much, but he needs to sing louder and with more confidence, and get some lessons on holding that tune (I sound really dorky right now but I'm dead serious). This makes his voice a liability in a way, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It lends tension even as it makes it more approachable. Also, here's an idea, let's drop the whole off-the-cuff, lyrics as fashionable accessories, and actually write down something that has an ability to communicate an idea. Doesn't have to be a story, or a message, or even all the coherent, but let's at least string some words together to form an idea. The words "day glowwed", pretty much only lyrics from the track of the same name, are a nice image for this style of burnt out house, but really they're completely devoid of meaning. The best "song" he's got here is "Wearing a Nothing Cloak". It's the most fleshed out structurally, and has the most individual voice. But "Day Glowwed" is certainly the track that's got the biggest appeal for this scene. Hit this stuff up now, it's only this vulnerable for a short time before we watch this kid grow up and do something awesome.

Pictureplane - Day Glowwed

Pictureplane - Wearing a Nothing Cloak

Pictureplane - Future Step

Pictureplane - Flashion (You Designed My Mind)

2009-06-13T13:07:00.000-07:00

Doesn't Avey Tare from Animal Collective (seen here at Bonnaroo this weekend) totally look like Andy Samberg from SNL??

Avey Tare

Andy Samberg

2009-06-13T10:19:00.001-07:00

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. The Strange Dreams of Paul White. This guy (not this guy) is pressing things so ridunkulously forward in this burgeoning wonky/aquacrunk/thunk/j dilla world view scene. With everybody from Flylo to Bullion getting more and lavish with their beat structure, crossrhythms, 4 against 3 against 7, 20 different timbres, etc. Paul White (like the great Dilla) knows how to keep it sly and simple. Most of his beats are straight boom clap and his best play off only one other element. His crate digging taste runs in much the same territory as his peers; sci-fi and horrorscapes, misremembered soul, funk, kungfu folk, but he also taps into less trod stock; spanish folk pickers ("Surfing of the Coast of Mexico" - also probably the oddest and least realized cut on here), what sounds like a middle eastern (is it indian?) car commercial paired with the swingle singers ("Alien Nature"), sadsack britpop ("One Eye Open" which comes out sounding a lot like a Gorrilaz cut). What's nice is that unlike Onra, Bullion, Mike Slott and company, Paul White's sketches don't come out sounding all the same, which might be the first time an album of a thousand sketches (this one has 21) doesn't end up boring the shit out of me after about 5 songs regardless of whether they all last less than 2 minutes (nothing here goes over 4, and most are less than 2). I don't know whether it's laziness on the part of these other producers for having their presets so locked up, or that they're striving soo hard to establish a recognizable voice that they develop a kind of automatism where they don't even notice they're just repeating the same behavior over and over again. There are some misses for sure (how could there not be with three albums worth of ideas?). "Sea Life" substitutes excessive vinyl crackle for anything resembling a musical idea, it really just doesn't say anything at all. "Cheese Special and a Draw" is a bit too kitschy with its use of a Michael McDonald copycat (a man who is truly incomparable), and needs some reverb on that accordion sample. Sadly this is the kind of track that might get licensed, or played out in the chill room at some engorged dumdum club in hollywood. "One Eye Open" could be a toss-off instrumental from a bad dirty south rapper trying to get edgy by including electric guitar (does this ever work for anybody except UGK and Outkast??).
But some of these tracks are just fucking gorgeous. For anybody who has ever toiled through the wee hours and understands what kind of hypnosis art can be, how this type of wakeful sleep can be supremely lucid but totally useless, check out the dull anthemic wheez of "Can't Sleep Make Music". "Sugar Free Airlines" is as limber as a linebacker doing ballet. "The Magic Tunetop" is the meanest robocrunk this side of Delta City. "Waiting For Time" is probably the best single on the record. It's got a matter-of-fact oriental bass thump (kinda reminds me of the Beatnuts), a luxurious wash of sleigh bells, and the easiest, smartest use of vocals of the record. If he wanted to go pop, Paul White could easily follow this track and push Caribou straight out of the marketplace. I'm not yet tired of these records, but I could've seen it happening sometime in the near future if it wasn't for Paul White. He's set the stage for some seriously interesting ventures. Now all that needs to be done is to take just one of his ideas and go fucking nuts. Here's two of my favorites.

Paul White - Sugar Free Airlines

Paul White - Can't Sleep Make Music

2009-06-09T16:36:00.000-07:00

Found a couple new Teengirl Fantasy tracks. These guys are seriously out of their mind. "Hoop Dreams" features some remixed to shit Motown "Shimmy shimmy", replete with the blast beats and anesthetizing nintendo-isms of a psychotic, ADHD 5 year old. "Thieves" is more traditional (read; a little less interesting) gamer indie techno, the 606 blazing through clacks, clicks, crunches and ear canals alike, a wonky bass line, and an arpeggiated spy movie chordal structure.

Teengirl Fantasy - Hoop Dreams

Teengirl Fantasy - Thieves

2009-06-05T13:11:00.000-07:00

Friday Finds 6
No time for descriptions this week. You'll have to just make weird and false guesses based on their names and track titles. For example: "Es - Ennen oli huonommin", ...Norwegian funk/cooking show themesong/inuit throat singing. I will say there seems to be a lot of brass bands. Hm.

Mixed Practice - Jonestown (feat. Stiz)
Lightning Dust - I Knew
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble - Paradise
NYC Peech Boys - Come On, Come On (Don't Say Maybe) (Larry Levan Mix)
Es - Ennen oli huonommin
Mike Bones - What I Have Left
Yacht - Psychic City (Voodoo City)
Dirty Beaches - Low Rider
Ghostape - I Feeel Your Soul
Mor Thiam - Ayo Ayo Ne Ne
Silver Apples - Program
Hugh Masekela - Sipho
Phoenix - Love Like a Sunset Pt. II

Download the zip here

2009-06-04T12:14:00.000-07:00

Drake - a nice Kanye style R&B man comes out with the first true blooded summer jam "Best I Ever Had". Then R Kelly gets his hands on it, sexxxes everything up a bit and slaps it on his new mixtape (download here). Boom. Summer Jam #1.

Best I Ever Had (Remix)

2009-06-03T10:44:00.000-07:00

Them Use Them, a one man project of Ben Sadler out of Birmingham (UK), have a record I got interested in through the strength of their lead off track "Able" from the album 'Gravity You Lucky Lucky Boy', an album whose music was supposedly "conceived as tributes to animal astronauts of the 1950’s and 60’s". I managed to get a CD shipped to me from First Fold Records, which looks to be basically a couple friends and associates putting out variously downtempo, shoegazey, or post dancey electronica. In Them Use Them's case, in the spirit of his artistic statement above, he seems to be using a bunch of found sound from spaceships, satellites, and other types of mechanical detritus. He's most often running these samples through a kind of granular synthesis, whereby a sampled sound is splintered into microscopic iterations called 'grains', the layering process of various grains produces a type of sonic cloud, a wall, which results in the type of fuzzy, polluted texture you'll hear throughout 'Gravity You Lucky Lucky Boy'. At the end of this process Them Use Them usually straps on a listless breakbeat and lets the sketch kind of peter out. I have no issue with sketches, nor do I take issue with his process, but I do have a problem with the way in which a totally evocative post apocalyptic space age texture will be painfully grounded in sleezed out jazzy 90's downtempo. Here we are, listening to the end of the world through deteriorated satellite transmissions a then suddenly we're listening to Portishead circa '93 (which is a great time to get into Portishead, don't get me wrong, but this is '09). Part of the problem is the production on the drums, he gets it right by over-compressing and bitcrunching on "Able", but too many times throughout the album the beats are shoved in the back of the mix sounding like he stuck a mic right in front of the kit and put that shit straight on the track without producing it at all. There's nothing more sobering when you've got your head in outer space than the thought of some schlubby british dude in a drum tracking room. Some of my favorite tracks on the album have no drums at all. Check out the gorgeous "Laika", the claustrophic "Baker", or even the stutter stop of "Enos" which intimidates as it seduces, even though it has a faint chordal allegiance to downtempo. I'd like to hear "Enos" at twice the speed, or if not "Enos" than just something! on the record that boasts a BPM faster than 100. Space monkeys are just as spastic are real monkeys, just cause they're zero gravity doesn't mean they're comatose. Of the rest of the tracks that have beats, "Chernushka" and "Sam" are stand outs. "Chernushka" takes a while to get going, putting you through a minute of chipmunked space chatter before coalescing into an brassy, detuned anthem. But the denouement of the sketch drifts back into digijazz and I'm left with a bad taste in my mouth. "Sam" is the most effervescent of the tracks with beats. Here's a helicopter blade on top of electrical storm accompanied by just a snare hit (still underproduced). The record shows a ton of promise, but it's too unambitious even for a guy who trying to make sketches. It makes the whole enterprise of trying to make a record about space animals sound just silly when you've made a record that's only half serious. Either make it really kitschy and hilarious, or take the highest road possible. The record seems to hover in between the two, but even in space, languorous space, bodies of mass are in motion and travel with directionality.

Able

Laika

Enos

Baker

Sam

Chernushka

2009-06-01T18:25:00.000-07:00

Free Energy is a band from Philly who just got signed to DFA. It's a bit a departure for DFA largely because this is pretty far from electronic dance music and there aren't even any synths involved. But if you think about some of rockier directions of LCD Soundsystem's last record, particularly "New York I love You" I don't think it's such a huge surprise. James Murphy has a penchant for anthems, particularly those late night burners you revel in when the third keg shows up, and the party is getting revived. There's only one track available right now from Free Energy's forthcoming DFA release. "Dream City" is a sort of instant classic cruiser tune, that is, until Mitsubishi or some other co-opting force gets ahold of it, but for now; apply liberally to all moments of medium fun and nostalgia. True, the singer comes off a little bit prude for my tastes (he needs to grow a little on his chest and slam a few thousand beers), but that 70's generic guitar tone, the fender rhodes, the gorgeous sax solo towards the end of the track (straight outta Lou Reed no?) really yuck up a warm feelin don't it?

Dream City

2009-05-26T20:49:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone! It's me. I'm finally going with a new moniker for a remix of Phoenix's "Fences" off the new album. Please take a listen and let me know your thoughts on the remix and the name!

Fences (Jongleur remix)

2009-05-20T14:01:00.000-07:00

Technology is advancing! This is my first attempt at direct file hosting, so now you can just click on the track link and it will download (for all my files not just from now on). Woohoo! Also I'm embedding a player so you can listen from the site while you read or look at pretty pictures. This is a cut from London based Pariah who belongs with the Flylo, Mike Slott, (aquacrunk/wonky/what did I call it? oh yeah, "thunk"...still waitin for that to catch on...) and puts in a nice homage to Detroit soul and J Dilla both with the requisite technicolor synths (more bitcrushed and gloomy like Burial would have it), a high hat shuffle that's straight out of Timbaland's library, and some satisfyingly loose claps.

Detroit Falls Mixdown

2009-05-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

City Center. Ok this is the post where I talk about what happens when the indie taste makers get a little ahead of themselves and can't tell the difference between artsy fartsy and mostly just fartsy. City Center (aka Brooklyn's Fred Thomas and Ryan Howard) has garnered a fair amount of blog hype, scored an "Essential Purchase" title on the influential site Boomkat, toured with various hipsteratti at all the proper, off site, off beat joints, and will no doubt see themselves thrust into a larger spotlight with their first full length which comes out next week on Type records, and has been drawing many comparisons to Panda Bear's Person Pitch, High Places, and some of Deerhunter's more ambient cuts. The comparisons are made largely on the basis of listless, post world, reverb drenched vocals, flittering, shucking, clickety clack found sound percussion, and a droney harmonic stasis. I don't fault City Center for getting gobbled up and blown out too early by the blog mall/maul (after all they were just innocently posting this shambling City Center stuff as a side project on a blog for free), but I do think that, like a lot of bands right now, the interest surrounding them is a little premature. Let the band grow up and fill out naturally (this I say, of course, as I inadvertently advertise them). One the one hand, perhaps the aesthetic of indie is shifting to bands who really don't have it together, who are earnestly not hitting the mark, who are fairly unmarketable. In this way, it mirrors the anti-professionalism posturing of 90's grunge, 60's folk, or, in a way, the historical avant-garde of the 1910's, although their critique was far more piquantly pointed. But on the other hand, while some of City Center's work is really promising, particularly the frolicking "Summer School", the airy lethargy of "Bleed Blood", or the swirling "Gladest", I take issue with the flabbiness of the mixing in the record, the over wrought percussion which, even on "Summer School" weighs the whole vibe down as if it was shackled to the contents of a kitchen drawer. Also listen to the completely unnecessary beat that forces its way (way too far behind beat) like a boring anecdote into the first half of "Open/House". What's more, the second half of that song has no business being there in the first place, and has a terribly pedestrian melody that calls to mind too many bad 90's indie bands that had their one hit song played during a 'thoughtful' moment on the 'Real World'.

Usually, I'm game for found sound, but in too many cases on this record it's use is at best arbitrary, at worst intrusive and a little bit patronizing (as if to say "you know this gives us avant garde credibility, right? and you know what that means, right??"). In all honesty, I don't think these guys meant for this record to get to the level where people are critiquing it this way. If I'd heard this in a club for the first time, I'd be intrigued and probably come away with the sense that this was a young, messy band, with a lot to figure out. But signing a band like this and releasing a record with this many problems isn't just lazy, or potentially destructive to the band, it's symptomatic of a larger issue in music making praxis in this country. As it gets easier and easier to create and record music, and easier to have it heard and spread around, and with consumption levels higher than ever but the ability to make money harder and harder, a new pandemic of disaffection is slinking its way into everything we do. Who cares that City Center's music is underdeveloped, what does developed even mean? What's the point if there's ten other bands who, like lemmings, are copying this modishness and passing it off as freewheeling sophistication? Why seek a melodic character that is memorable, isn't that just like putting nail polish on the bourgeoisie? On the one hand, the music community is thriving, on the other hand, it's as egg headed and trumped up as it has ever been. These questions are smoke screens from a generation, now in its 20's and 30's and with a chance to make its mark, that has found its calling by not calling.

Summer School
Open/House
Gladest
Bleed Blood
Killer Whale

2009-05-18T13:14:00.000-07:00

The new Milky Disco compilation (#2 which is really #3 because of a 1.5 they put out) is out featuring some really nice cuts from all around the nu dance world. Many sounds that are already feeling a bit outmoded from relative old timers (!) like Black Devil Disco Club, and Glass Candy, but there's a bunch of new faces and sounds nonetheless. If there's a trend or pattern going on, it's with the use of acoustic kits instead of the same old synthdrum presets. You can hear it nicely on "You Are Amen", Pollyester's track that they did full blown reworking of. This time it's slower, less manic, and really cleans the palette with a thankfully unreverbed and annunciated vocal dead pan. But it's the clarity of the snare as it plays against a periodically blown out, dubby, version of that same sound that really gives the piece a kick in the ass. Later in the track a battery of latin percussion gradually falls to and marches it to it to its end. It's a nice departure from the glazed over, nostalgia of the Italo-sleeze obsessions that marked the past few years of disco revivalism.

You Are Amen

2009-05-15T15:07:00.000-07:00

Friday Finds 5. You know you want to.

::::CAVE - Machines and Muscles
perpetual stoner flim flam
::::Irma Thomas - It's Raining
doo wop is such perfect purgatory
::::Turtle Ambulance - Money
terrible. name. have you heard of High Places? i like this version of exoticized tribalism too
::::Cheval Sombre - Little Bit of Heaven
i hate the word "trippy"
::::Cult of Isis - Right Turn, Wrong Street (feat Boots)
early 90's oakland hip-hop gone country way before kid rock had the chance to soil everything
::::Nite Jewel - Chimera
a bit knowing, but slippery enough
::::Jacques Renault - Tuxedo Dance
makes me want to do this helicopter thing
::::Discovery - Osaka Loop Line
off shoot of Vampire Weekend...really? sometimes the arpeggio button is just a crutch...
::::Glasser - Glad (Delorean remix)
more of this please. producers need songs, songstresses need beats
::::Real Estate - Black Lake
scenester sponges
::::Lamburg Tony - Fy Coco
see below
::::Julian Lynch - Banana Jam Pt. 1
nap it out
::::Karamoko Keita - Diama
african guitar mesmerization
::::Vareid - Skumle Planer
O.C. sunset bike ride
::::Andrew Buckingham - What Your Words Have Done To Me
"Can I caress your verbs?"!!! this song makes me more than a little uncomfortable and not just from embarrassment.

Download the zip here

2009-05-12T12:24:00.000-07:00

Chain and the Gang are the brainspawn of front man Ian Svenonius of Nation of Ulysses - the legendary 90's D.C. hardcore band with free-jazz interests that helped define the sound of iconic punk label Dischord - and The Make Up - a more quirky, off color, but no less politically subversive off shoot of Nation of Ulysses. Make Up were a post-hardcore band (one of the first?) and as such they dabbled in harder psychedelia, gospel, jangley garage, 50's bubblegum pop (of the French varietal Ye Ye) and other eclectic proclivities soon to be snatched up by indie rock minions to come. But always there was Svenonius anchoring the whole thing with that unmistakably cocky, brash voice, stomping and strutting around, talking about god knows what, acting like a cultural refugee, and spitting all manners of anti-capitalist fun.
Things have toned down for Svenonius considerably since the 90's (how lame is it that by comparison, 90's music looks far more politically engaged than now?). He's got a new project called Chain and the Gang which features backup from a virtual role call for K Records (the pac northwest indie elite that isn't Sub Pop) affiliates. The record, Down With Liberty...Up With Chains! glues to the sillier, ironic aspects of the Make Up, but playing a bit less into gospel funk and into other areas including fuzzy prison blues ("Trash Talk"), Chubby Checker party rock ("Room 19"), Bayou blues ("Unpronounceable Name"), and some primal Krautrock ("Cementary Map" and "Lookin for a cave girl"). Svenonius is still magnetically disaffected even while haunting more oblique political positions. The sparsity and looseness of the record is a perfect choice in that it allows Svenonius to dominate, which he'll do no matter what, but also leaves him out to dry, open to the elements, exposing him to be as scathingly virile as he is stylishly vapid (It's post-post motherfuckers!) But there is some wonderfully laid back, joyfully desiccative stuff here and this is the best return to form that I could imagine for one of the most confounding, fascinating front men in punk, rock, or anywhere.

Chain Gang Theme (I See Progress)
Cemetery Map
Trash Talk
Room 19
Unpronounceable Name

2009-05-08T14:33:00.000-07:00

Teengirl Fantasy. Oberlin based fellows making really really blown out, astral house. Giddy and gorgeous. Very worth hearing if you're sick of snotty voiced, repressed nudance. Here's a zip of their debut EP TGIF. Portofino and Floor to Floor are my tops for now.

2009-05-06T15:01:00.001-07:00

Burial/Four Tet split 12". Hard to find! Dark and dreamy. Post dance. "Moth" is occluded, romantic, and very much Burial. But its got less textural density and melodrama than we're used to from him. It basically rides a somber, insistent motif (anyone notice the similarity with Console's remix of Subtle's "F.K.O."?) around the clock stopping in at around 4:00 for a little hint of the dancefloor before whisking itself off to fantasy land. "Wolf Cub" shows the clackety side of Four Tet side for sure. Marimbas, bone sounds, crackles, and a familiar cascade of twinkling arps swirl around an impatient two step shuffle. There's some signature Burial in the underwater bloops, a drone that looms without notice, and the exorcized vocal that makes an appearance near the end of the track. The convergence of these two very polarizing forces in electronic music is a fascinating one. Burials music acts almost to reign in Four Tet more exotic, improvisatory indulgences, and Four Tet brings a lightness, of affect, of his timbral materials, and within the mix, as well as a structural freedom and expansiveness that, despite Burial's textural interest in expansiveness, can't help but by tempered by his supremely anal retentive approach to composition. It's actually the best thing I've heard from either of them.

Wolf Cub
Moth

2009-05-05T17:05:00.000-07:00

Pretty fresh psych oriented dance EP from duo Neon Indian who are split between Austin and Brooklyn. Nothing too new here, super hipster poseur stuff, everything is a bit exaggerated, sloppy and disaffected, but altogether charming. "Deadbeat Summer" plays on a disfigured Motown bounce, with some nice childrens TV synth with the portamento set super high. An evasive, lazy vocal intones the title. Apparently no one has enough energy, or it's just too hot out, to sing with their mouths more than 10% open. Although it is nice to see some downtempo numbers out of these bands. I'm sometimes bored with the 120 standard, with the same rubber bass settings, and the gauzey synths; we get some of that here (see the MGMT/Midnight Juggernauts copping "Local Joke" or "Seriously, It's Over" with its faux lofi muffled synth). But even on these arrangements that look a bit too familiar, there's a pleasingly minimal amount of douche bag techno 'energy' and fist pumping, and in its place there's the heart of a modest little psych band with a sense of humor (check out the disarmingly simple but sweet "Should have taken acid with you").
The track that'll probably get em the most hype is "Mind, Drips" which sounds kind of like it came off the soundtrack to Mannequin, but opens up into a gorgeous Depeche Mode meets the Beach Boys chorus. It's a great record for a lazy summer barbecue. And it's weirdly nice to hear a dance record I can't really see anyone dancing too.

Deadbeat Summer
Mind, Drips
Should Have Taken Acid With You
Local Joke
Seriously, It's Over

2009-05-01T17:13:00.000-07:00

This weeks Friday Finds is better than a turkey sandwich.

1 Miquel Atwood-Ferguson & Carlos Nino - Nag Champa
J Dilla gone orchestral
2 Gregory D & DJ Mannie Fresh - Buck Jump Time

the one and only mannie fresh, is this a swing beat?
3 Kid Congo & the Pink Monkey Birds - Kris Kringle Ju Ju

dirty garage funk from Eagle Rock
4 Dishwasher - Happy Valentine's Day

"dreamy milkshake"
5 Exile - The Sound of God

radio trolling LA producer with a heart
6 Sounds of JHS 126 Brooklyn - Chill Pill (Underwater Mix)

Arthur Russell's uber hip hop phase
7 Major Lazer - Hold the Line (DJ Edit)

Diplo and Switch team up for vomit inducing hack bullshit...that i still kinda like cause i'm a little surfacey sometimes. Santigold makes an appearance.
8 Crocodiles - I Wanna Kill

90's feedback meets 50's tunefulness...beware of moderate boredom unless 14 years old or nostalgic for the Jesus and the Mary Chain
9 Betty Padgett - Love Me Forever

A forgotten legend.
10 Comet Gain - You Can Hide Your Love Forever

cutesy poopsy
11 NOMO - Invisible Cities

Is Nomo getting a little agro these days?
12 Mika Mako - Turkey Sandwich

pretty straight forward punk from the Smell scene.
13 The Boswell Sisters - The Music Goes Round and Round

oh de oooh...

Download the zipped mix here

Also just for fun I'm posting this short Canadian experimental film from the 50's that I saw at a bar near me a couple months back and was so thrilled to find online.

2009-05-01T15:19:00.000-07:00

Amazing article by George E. Lewis (trombonist and composer, heavily involved with AACM - Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, now a member of the Columbia composition dept). He proposes, or predicts, a new model, or credo, of sociomusical organization; one that at root has to do with a kind of collective social improvisation setup by new media and technological interactivity and democratization. It seems he's got a bone to pick with other future of music models that, shall we say, have been less attuned to the efforts and contributions of Africans and African Americans to modern music. What's cool is that his prose style is so perfectly linked to his message that it becomes this wandering, batty, epilogue (to the idea of music as discrete pieces with definable authorship). It's kind of wacko in a way, especially with the whole lack of punctuation thing, but bear in mind this is one of the great thinkers and practitioners of avant-garde music in this country so when he mentions the computer chip we attach to dogs in reference to the worry that technology might overtake our brain functions at some point, let that sit for a while before you go, "wha?"

*photo is from 1982

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the best future of music speculation I've seen since cage's 1937 credo was Attali's 1977 prediction about the jongleurs taking over music with anti ritual post spectacle genre ignoring globalized nonreproducible fun unlike most future of music predictions he included afrodiasporans as major actors which should seem obvious but somehow eludes many otherwise very smart people a new mode of social structuring he said now if you can do that musically that could make music making interesting again having the whole field of sound without sociosonic agency how impotent

the truth of that brief credo permeates all known present genres even the ones that pretend never to have been kissed by an electron studios simulate spontaneity and everybody wants to be amplified otherwise no one pays attention to dunn's bark beetles not to mention a rat pissing on cotton but the old man was wrong about the composing performing listening incommensurability they all network via improvisation in fact the practices merge under the new technology but don't worry fans all you need to make your bones is for one good prophecy to come true look at jeane dixon

I remember don buchla saying something about how it all went back to the theremin funny how a little rf field connected to simple oscillators and amplifiers can transduce complex emotions and intentions but don's lightning and lots of other emotional transducers we’ve been building since the original produce data streams that permit interactive collective decision making with computer interlocutors that connect different art practices to facilitate collaboration and genre/media hybridity

why fuss over werktreue organicism autonomy and other fashions when compositions can now be self modifying entities that interact in real time with physical and virtual environments simultaneously when what used to be called records move past information storage and retrieval models of aesthetic experience to become responsive and evolutionary problematizing copyright and consumerism in a more profound way via the internet and its successors

talk about ubiquitous computing private and public spaces can easily interact with the improvised rhythms of daily life using wifi gps rfid etc remember how la monte and marian suffused their apartments with oscillator drift well north americans already had 24/7 tv dreamhouses but the dreams don't belong to us this impositional intentional deafness annoys my four year old

history intentionality memories bodies and most of all improvisation are key to this new sonic sociality the brain thing is for later no killer app has convinced us to get chipped just the dog

jazz put improvisation and interactivity back on the worldwide western table but retrospectivist aesthetics and survivalist shakers will be ignored by many even as residual institutional power manages to deselect some from this future of music others will decline discursive discouragement to create new sonic socialities that will inevitably suffer and benefit from corporate commodification

people will interact and improvise and/or die

musicians will take a chance

2009-04-30T13:26:00.000-07:00

I did an edit of Black Moth Super Rainbow's "Twin of Myself" (featured here a couple weeks back). Hope you enjoy.

Twin of Myself (P Bayne Edit)

2009-04-29T12:59:00.000-07:00

Just what the hell are the Danish up to these days you ask? Well there's Lamburg Tony. Sound collage hip hop (sort of) made with pots, pans, toys and field recordings (casinos?), drums and bottles, and vintage synths. Then everything gets recorded onto old tape machines (why?) and sent of to get mastered by electronic agitator Goodiepal (?!). Just what the hell are the Danish up to these days? They're outta their minds, that's what. Who said it was ok to make music this free? Why is it that this music has zero presence in the American avant pop scene? I can't get my hands on his full record unless I fork over 22 euro and wait for the LP to show up that's partly why. Lamburg Tony is opening for Black Dice on some European dates so maybe we can expect something but I'm not holding my breath. I've got one track off Hip Hop Nation which is a gem, and makes Prefuse 73's new album sound like it was made in 1992. Screwed up vocal samples, glissing harps, a cut up ragged flute line, and a dirty ass drum beat. Try out his myspace for more or get ambitious about the LP.

Værtshussport

2009-04-28T13:25:00.001-07:00

This new Basement Jaxx single makes me want to be 15 in a European club for the first time, drinking shitty weak cocktails and watching sweaty Spaniards sweat on unassuming but generally enthusiastic American girls wearing miniskirts too short for the suburbs. When the beat drops at 1:00 everybody is gonna jump up and down like idiots and it'll all start making sense. There's about 6 too many gimmicks in this song, but you got to hand it to them for the stacked density of elements and the buzzy engine driving the whole thing. I could of used not ever hearing the lyrics "Just like a waterfall, straight through the heart of me", a seriously cringeworthy moment that nearly derails the whole track. But listen, imagine all those sweaty Spaniards shouting those lyrics in broken english and then earnestly leaning in for a sloppy slurp and a mean dancefloor hump and the picture starts to look a bit more benign.

Raindrops