So.

I have taken an extended Christmas break, but it is not without good news to report. In celebration of the birth of our lord I went out and purchased the new Earth album. I am happy to report that it is appropriately HEAVY. It is not the ambient stew of their last several albums, but for my taste it is much more listenable. It has an epic rock/country feel to it and fulfills what I hoped it would be.

Pure listening satisfaction.

Check out
Raiford (The Felon Wind)

YES

Live from Cambodia via California its Dengue Fever!

I never really liked the term"world music." It set up this weird neural pathway in my mind that led to lowered expectations of excellence. Walking into any number of coffee shops and hearing so so music that defined itself more by what it wasn't (Western) than by what it was, led me to be very dissmissive of the genere in general.

I think that these compilations are what really hardened my heart. By trying to appeal to everyone they attracted no one in particular.

In any case that is neither here or there in relation to this band. A beautiful Cambodian singer with a groovey western backing band combine to make some great music. This lonesome ballad is off their last album, Escape from the Dragon House. There are other great tunes on there that mix surf, and other 60s styles into a whole that remind me of a Bond movie fimed in Cambodia that never was.

Dengue Fever - Hummingbird

Hi!

Well a shifted schedule has pushed my hours around strangely and so I probably won't be able to post as much as I am used to. I did want to put a few more things out over the holidays though and so I thought I would share something from a new to me producer that is kind of cool.

James Holden is by all accounts a bit of a trance bod. Today's dance scene values cross fertalization more than it has in the past though, allowing for all sorts of artists to make it big. Its difficult to believe how maligned trance has been in the past. Sure it was formulaic and predictable, but no more so than a ton of the house purists followed at the time. Anyway its good to see barriers drop.

Check out this recent builder:

Nathan Fake - The sky was pink (James Holden mix)

PS Check out Border Community and Natan Fake too

I have been wanting to post this song from the moment I set up shop here at Slow Motion Radio. I first discovered Can in 1990 living in Austin trawling through record shops. I am not sure if it was cover art, as has often been the case, or a good word by a trusted record store clerk that put me on to them. In any case I bought Cannabalism I and it blew me away.

Krautrock? What the hell is that? All I knew was that these hippies rocked, grooved, and experimented in ways that put Pink Floyd to shame.

Strangely, I didn't binge on buying everything they ever made at that instant. I have been at it purchasing bits and pieces since that time and have been particularly pleased with the recent reissues. I actually didn't get around to buying Future Days until earlier this century. It was a long time coming but this album is AWESOME! Groovy, funky, dreamy, this album must be the blueprint for a host of generes. At the very least shoegazers owe it a debt for the vocals that just seem to float throughout.

This is the title track:

Can - Future Days

I had intended to continue the new dance music thread throughout the week. However, fate conspired to throw me off course. I had ordered a Nina Simone video off Netflix months ago. Just kind of letting it move up the chain naturally, not really caring when it came in. Well it came in yesterday and as usual she blew me away. It wasn't very long and didn't concentrate on my favorite period of her music but still, wow.

Her arrangements and flow are unreal. One of the tracks reminded me of Mogwai or Godspeed you black emperor. Slowly building with instruments adding, melody growing in compexity, and then with complete control she subsumes all that to the emotion of a vocal. Stunning.

Chew on these tidbits:

Nina Simone - Sinnerman

Nina Simone - Funkier than a mosquitos tweeter

Now this next track may not be, strictly speaking, ketamine house. However, I do find it woozy and intoxicating. Soulwax remains a bit of an unknown quantity for me. Every single track I have heard by them I like. In fact scratch that. Every single track I have heard them I love. NY Excuse is killer and I have a few of the E talking remixes too.

Their music has a sort of DFA feel to it but without the obvious irony. In any case straight to the tuneage. I got this off the latest Mixmag cover cd. I berated that mag for years for being lame and mainstream, but low and behold I pick it up this month and it seems every artist in there is one I have been following for a few years. I don't know if this speaks to my lame taste or their increasing coolness but i won't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Soulwax - Krack

Lame. Be at peace man. You helped shape my worldview and for that I will forever be thankful.

Today is my birthday! So to celebrate this grand holiday I purchased some absolutely sick music this weekend. The purchases were all over the place. I had been feeling a little out of touch with what has been going on in the relm of techno so I did a little research and thanks to the wonderful expertise of Mr. Philip Sherburne I picked up some tasty tracks that are prime for sharing.

If you have not had the opportunity to check out his regular column at the online magazine Pitchfork be sure to do so. It is his opinion and apparently the opinion of quite a few others, that a new genre of techno has mutated into existance recently and has faithfully been cataloged and branded with the title ketamine house. Not much out there written at the moment so you will have to take my word for it. Apparently it is defined by its wooziness and more overt psychedelic tendencies.

YUM!

Yoshimoto - Du what u Du (Trentmoller Remix)

Just a short post today. Marvin Gaye is, of course, one of the great artists of the 20th century. He may have had his share of personal problems but his music was unreal. Beautiful arrangements, forward thinking production work, and an incredible soulful voice guaranteed his position in the canon.

However not all of his work is that easy to find. This soundtrack took me years to track down in the pre-filesharing days but in the end it was worth it. Mostly instrumental, it is a great album that like a lot of his work sets a great mood for getting busy ;)

This is is:

Marvin Gaye - Don't mess with Mr. T

and

Marvin Gaye - T plays it cool

PS The movie is supposed to be quite lame.

Is there anyone out there that wasn't influenced by Mr. James's electonic noodling. I mean just look at that face, all sweetness and light. For some reason his image gives my wife nightmares, but all I see is a sweet little boy from Cornwall.

I got a chance to see Aphex once in about 92 when he opened up for the Orb at the Brixton Academy in London. I remember the whole show as awesome. That's when I felt that London had opened up for me. I viewed the soft underbelly of freaks that showed up for that show and felt that I had a place there after all. Sometimes a new city can be a hard place to adjust to and it usually takes a group moment such as that to make me feel at home.

Over the years I have been both overwhelmed and disappointed with his releases but for some reason I just keep going back. Even with the latest Analord series, I don't play vinyl anymore but I for some reason felt it my duty to get a couple. There were some good tracks, but also a few that just seemed to go on and on.

Today I wanted to post a couple of tracks that I have "found" over the last couple of years. I am not completely sure about their place in his discography and in fact there is the complete possibility that they aren't even him. However, in listening to them again and again I find that if they are not him then someone is doing a hell of a job impersonating the man. Let me know what you think.

Aphex Twin - Melodies from Mars - untitled 2

Aphex Twin - Analord 10 - Fenix Funk 5

Today, I wanted to share a bit of ambient beauty that has been making my days sparkle as I walk to and from class.

First is a track from the newly released Pop Ambient 2006 from Kompakt Records. Markus Guentner & La Grande Illusion create a lush soundscape based on a repeating guitar motif that propels me through the newly arrived chill in Los Angeles. The colors are changing on the trees, the wind picks up and this track guides me along towards my destination improving my mood and creating an air of optimism that today will be unique.

Markus Guentner & La Grande Illusion - Baghira

Max Richter, a modern classical composter, provides the next track. Previously working with FSOL his new album Blue Notebooks is wonderfully cinematic (a favorite descriptive term of mine). The pieces on this album mainly revolve around repeated piano phrases with strings and some electronics to provide accompaniment. It kind of reminds me of Romantic period classical music, which for some reason I always associate with the best kind of used book store. Getting lost in shelves of endless books, records, and other media used to consume me as a kid and teenager and this evokes that mood for me. Comforting.

Max Richter - Shadow Journal

My ftp server is giving me guff today so unfortunatly no tunes. :(

To make up for the loss in sounds let me point you to a cool website. Foxy Digitalis covers quite a bit of ground in the free folk/stoner metal/all around weirdness catagory. There are a few good articles here check out the one with Birchville Cat Motel.

In an about face from yesterday's bouncy housey posting, today will feature a couple of "metal" artists. I say "metal" cause neither one of these tunes sounds particularly like Motley Crue , say. In fact the genre of metal seems to be expanding more rapidly than most others these days. Bands as diverse as Earth and Cinderella can fall under the same general title, although how comfortable they are grouped together is a matter of dispute.

I personally like a bit of heavyness in my metal. When it can be tempered with melody that is awesome too. These two tracks can best be summed up in my head by the title of the first, Pastoral.

Jesus Lizard - Pastoral

Isis - Altered Course

PS. If anyone has tracks from the new Earth album Hex I would love to hear them. Seems like they are moving into melody as well.

Back again, the incredible rhyme animal D.....

Well Thanksgiving was interesting. Lots of time to relax and unfortunatly get sick. Ugh:(

As adult swim says "relaxing was great...but its time to get back and give you hell." I am still trying to find a common theme to post with but I have so much good new music its hard to know where to start. Aron's in LA is going out of business and I went down to cash in on the savings. I bought a ridiculous amount of "experimental" music just cause its hard to get that stuff on sale anywhere and cause their dance music section has deteriorated heavily in the last few years. However, I am not really in the mood to post that stuff. I am feeling more hard and funky this morning so lets see what I can dig up.

First up is Kaos. He used to be with Terranova, the German music collective. He then went on to do work as Ghost Caldron who I am best aquainted with through one of Superpitchers remixes. On this his debut solo full length he works with a number of of great coproducers including Daniel Wang and Khan . Here is:

Town and Countryman (Edit)

This next track is much more mysterious. In searching for something along the lines of Lindstrom's "I feel space" Jun, a dance musci buyer at Amoeba, tipped me off to a cheap compilation of Norweigen house music called Prima Norsk 2. A lot of it turned out to be disposable but this track rocks! Check it out and if you can find any other productions by this guy let me know in comments.

Suyntax Erik - Echelon

PS If you live in LA it is worth it to go check out Jun spinning at Bossa Nova sometime. He opens for Jason Bently every friday night. We just happened to choose that club cause it was close and were delighted by his set of Italo/Disco/pumping House. He even played Arthur Russel!

Well its the day after Thanksgiving and I am flummoxed as to what to present. Any semblence of a theme has left me and I just want to post a couple of tracks I like and let you figure out the significance. I think it might be enough to say that these are two bands that have been in my life for quite some time. Junior High and High School would have not been the same without these two to power my anger day after day.

Happy Holidays!

Black Flag - Nervous Breakdown

Slayer - Raining Blood

This is something I picked up this weekend totally on a whim. Usually I have some idea of what is waiting for me when I hit the record shop but this album caught me completely by suprise.

Environ has produced some of the most consistantly great music of the past few years. I still listen to Metro Area on a consistant basis several years after the release of their only album and I posted Daniel Wang on here just a few weeks ago. That is why I was caught completely by suprise when I saw this album. I hadn't heard anything at all about it.

In any case, Kelly Polar doesn't have that instant classic quality that Metro Area did. He grows on you. Its a compelling mix of 80s R&B & Freestyle sounds with a generous helping of 21st century production magic.

Black Hole

An update on the Sony case. It seems that others decided a boycott was a good idea too. Not only that but lawsuits are being drawn up. Hell YEA!

A little treat for you today. A friend of mine, Sam, has been the only person I personally know that has been advancing the cause of microhouse/tech house/electro whatever in Los Angeles. He has practically the whole perlon catalog and has consistantly turned me on to new exciting music. Recently he sent me a mix cd of what he has been working with, and it has a decidedly disco feel to it.

Tracklisting:

1. Skyline - Ilya Santana
2. Backtrack(Instramental) - Cerrone
3. Down til "7" - Silver City (Lindstrom & Prins Thomas remix)
4. Misen Gymnastics - oorutaichi (Idjut Boys Remix)

The Mix

for booking or if you want to hear different stuff from him email him at djsamv@gmail.com

Here is a little old school disco to celebrate the fact that it is FRIDAY!

Arthur Russell was quite a strange character by any standards. A classically trained cellist he lived in an ashram outside of San Francisco after leaving home and used his cello in an attempt to connect to the universe. Abandoning that pursuit after a few years he moved to New York in the early 70s to eventually become one of the few artists taking disco to another level. Oh and he was also almost a member of the Talking Heads.

This track sticks in my head relentlessly. It is a remix by the great Larry Levan.

Is it all over my face (Larry Levan Mix)

Talk Talk.

If you had asked me in the mid 90s if I liked this band I might have laughed. Indie/Dancism/Rockism disdain had led me to dismiss their music as fun but not "serious" enough for my intellectual conception of what music had to be.

After reading the boards on ILM for ages, people whose opinions I had grown to respect were unwavering in their support for what I thought was a one hit new wave wonder. Grudgingly, I picked up a used copy of Spirit of Eden not really sure of what it would sound like and happy that I only paid five bucks for it.
Expecting a synth pop record I was blown away by the depth of the music and its textural richness. They invented, in my mind, post rock. Ambient passages gave way to lovely melodies that stretched out over the length of the song. This eventually changed my views on pop and rock as well. If a band that delivered sugar sweet pop like their first song "Talk Talk" was able to evolve into this then there was more to pop than met the eye. This eventually led to a brief affair with popism before swinging to a comfortable center where I was willing to give anything a chance.

Hope it opens your mind in the same way.

Desire

This is something I just got in the mail this last weekend. I am beginning to develop a little bit of an obsession with Lindstrom due to the Feel Space track. So I sent off for this new release and here we are.

This album has a very different feel from that previous track but I am beginning to be swayed by its magic. I have a mix coming up by a friend of mine that mines more fully this disco/tech hybrid sound that I will be posting in the next few days, until then enjoy this.

P.S. If you scroll down on the above link you will find a mix by lindstrom and prins thomas and links to further mixes.


Turkish Delight

Here are some good ones and pretty damn obscure too as far as I can tell.

I can't remember how I first learned about aquarius records. It was just one of those things that just seemed to happen. One day I had never heard of them and the next it seemed I had always used them as a reliable resource for record reviews.

In trawling through their weekly best of's, I had begun to notice a lot of references to the Jeweled Antler Collective. This was in about 2001/2002, I think, and New Weird America was just a gleam in a music journalists eye. The writing that the aquarians did made these guys seem otherworldy. Field recordings, rustling twigs, and scraping stones! A harmonium played in the woods and then treated! What are those hippies in San Francisco up to?

Well after a long while I finally got it together to visit my friend Jason up in SF. I hounded him to take me to the record shops I had read so much about. Amoeba in SF and in Berkely, and to check out all the little shops all the way down Height.

Finally I made it to Aquarius where I layed down some cash for the Blithe Sons , the Skygreen Leopards and an unknown Jeweled Antler comp called Windswept Trees and Houses. There was a wealth of music on there that shifted my outlook. My heretofore undying obsession with dance and electronic music suffered a blow that day. It hasn't yet fully recovered.

Here are a couple of tracks

Skygreen Leopards - The Stars go to Sleep.

from Windswept Trees

Ohm-u-lator - Thin sheets of Beaten Gold

Here are a couple of tracks from what I consider to be Gainsbourg's finest. Historie de Melody Nelson is the story of a fictional girl that Gainsbourg woos. In reality it is Jane Birkin. She was his love at the time and she is the model on the cover and the female vocal on the album.

Air must have listened to this record nonstop for years, as you can even hear similar chords used on their first singles.


Ah Melody!

Melody

This is sick.

So everyone has heard about the sony rootkit. Well that is only the start of the problem. Apparently they have also decided that once you purchase a cd from them you have entered into a legal contract that strips most privilages of ownership from the purchaser.

Here are a few examples:

1. If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all your music from your laptop when you get home. That's because the EULA says that your rights to any copies terminate as soon as you no longer possess the original CD.
2. You can't keep your music on any computers at work. The EULA only gives you the right to put copies on a "personal home computer system owned by you."
3. If you move out of the country, you have to delete all your music. The EULA specifically forbids "export" outside the country where you reside.
4. You must install any and all updates, or else lose the music on your computer. The EULA immediately terminates if you fail to install any update. No more holding out on those hobble-ware downgrades masquerading as updates.

That is only half of what they want out of you for the privilege of purchasing one of their products. What kind crap is this?! I purchase a lot of music, not because I am scared of lawsuits but because I have a lot of friends that are musicians and I want to contribute to the light they add to my life. At some point musicians on labels that do this kind of thing need to stand up and say that this is not the kind of company we want to be associated with.

I for one am not purchasing Sony music product until this type of intrusive behavior stops. Here is where you can find out what artists are on Sony.

It appears that plenty of good artists are on Sony. Black Sabbath, The Clash, Miles Davis... well buy old used cds if you have to, but nothing good ever came easy.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the heads up

For shame Mr. Moore - Songs & Artists That Inspired Fahrenheit 9/11

What could be more french than that face on the left. Sebastian Tellier was the first artist to sign up with Air's own label. If you listen to the first track below you will understand why. Subtle arrangements and long rhodes chords are the hallmarks of his sound.
His more recent track La Ritournelle has been blowing up in the clubs of Europe all summer long and it marks a different sound for Tellier. More Expanisive and certainly more house oriented, it is also a pop gem.

Enjoy!

Universe

La Ritournelle

Mr. Gundam gets high...

and plays the blues

This is robot rock...

This will start a week of posting from behind the brie curtain. France has produced some of the most pathologically over dramatic music of the past century, Edith Piaf I am looking at you.

However, they have also produced some of the most sublime arrangements, killer house, and banging techno of recent memory. The lady of the house loves Air and I have been encouraging her to excavate their influences, as any good record buyer should. This has led to both of us discovering a wealth of great tunes.

Here is a fairly obscure track off a really obscure soundtrack. Jean-Claude Vannier wrote the string arrangements for Serge Gainsboughs "History of Melody Nelson" which in itself is awesome and will deserve its own post later on.

In L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches Vannier constructs a soundtrack for an imaginary film
that encompases a variety of musical styles. Restrained string arrangements share space with prog rock guitar before jumping further off into psych style freak outs.

Check out this arabic influenced track

Le Roi Des Mouches Et La Confiture De Rouse

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined...

A national security letter cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail. But it does permit investigators to trace revealing paths through the private affairs of a modern digital citizen. The records it yields describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.


Full Story

Here is a little something for the weekend. I, of course, was led into this man from the inimitable DJ Shadow, wish I could say I dug this up on my own but it would be a straight lie. This is one of my all time favorite tracks.

David Axelrod

Mucho Chupar

Githead

In what I would have thought a strange combination Colin Newman from Wire, his wife Malka Spigel from Minimal Compact, and Robin Rimbaud from Scanner make funky angular pop music. To my ears it owes obvious debts to several artists of the early 80s but updates the sound quite nicely. I first was made aware of their existance through the always informative Wire Tapper series.

Cheers

My LCA (Little Box of Magic)

Better than a Big Mack and twice the nutrition.

This is the story of America. A black man growing up white.???!!??

This track takes me back to the mid 90s. Warp was rising in asendacy and I spent a lot of time at a a little shop called Ambient Soho. They had a small collection for sale but the staff was way cool. Eventually Simon Pyke of Freeform and Mira Calix both emerged from stints behind the counter to release their own records.

I used to browse the bins looking for stuff to turn my chill out audience on to and one day I found Link. They weren't exactly chilled but they were cool. Here is the shorter track.

Antacid II

This track makes use of what my friend Martin refers to as the goth bassline. Strangely enough I know exactly what he means. Sisters of Mercy used to employ this all the time. I personally like the tune because it is such a dramatic rework of the original. In any case its staight to the tunes today.

Ricardo Villalobos - Dexter (Two Lone Swordsmen Remix)

I am going to wind up my drone series this week, but before we go I still have a few juicy nuggets to impart. William Basinski is something of an old fashioned romantic in my mind. He started making his loops in the 80s going direct to tape. His sounds envoke a sort of creepy pastoralism. Images of sheep crazing in a lush green pasture come to mind, but with an overcast sky of ash and flaming embers. It is an incongrous image but it suits his music well to my mind. This track is from the album Disintigration Loops. The legend is that he finished work on this album on Sept 11, 2001 while living in New York. After he finished the transfer from tape to digital medium he played the ensuing soundtrack on his roof as he watched the World Trade Centers crash down. Dark, but suitable.

William Basinski - D|P 2.1

Here is my contribution to this week's drone-a-thon. I want to do at least a couple more posts in this vein. Since I have been thinking about drone musc it has opened my ears to its possibilities and how often I purchase music that has that element in it.

Here is a recent tune of mine under the name UNA

The Long Ash

Whoa! Doing some research into Italo Disco and I came across this blog with some insane stuff on it and everyone must now know about it.

Electro, Italo, House all that.

Oh shit! Apparently the onion has been getting some flak from the White House about using the presidential seal for satire. This is their apparent response.

It feels like the 80s again. Satire of the president is back in style.

Well, I was going to give you a pretty picture of evil to go along with this post about Boris, but blogger is not cooperating. Here is a good review. This is only an excerpt from the total piece but it is a nice example of drone. I really dig this band and so there will be more boris on the way but this is a nice example to go along with the current theme.

In any case here is

Boris - Giddiness/Throne

Betty goes goth.

Continuing on with my drone theme I have the great pleasure of introducing Tim Hecker. I first came to notice him while digging through Force Inc.'s back catalog. At the time he was making leftfield techno under the name Jetone.

It was ok but didn't fit what I was after at the time. I did read an article in which he talked about his growing dissatisfation with techno and the rigidity of 4/4 time. Now that struck me as interesting. I had always thought that creating a narrative without the presence of a beat was a much more demanding field of exploration, and so I was drawn to his latest release at the time, Radio Amour.

Its crystaline structure stunned me. I fell deep into his sound world and Mirages, his latest full length only solidified my position.

His music, to me, sounds as if transistor radios had been granted the gift of sentience and then in their wisdom had come together to sing the praises of their gods, the ozone layer and auroura borealis.

Beautiful.

This track is not one of his most beautiful, but for me is still very affecting. From the remixes of Isis's Oceanic

Carry (Tim Hecker First Version)

This week I wanted to delve deep into the land of drone. Its a nebulous area, unbounded by any clear distincions. There is a whole group of music in my head which I consider droney, from modern classical to electronic noise and on to guitar based nastyness. I don't claim to be an expert on this subject so hopefully this week will inform me as well as whomever decides to read this.

First up this week is a band I havef only recently started getting into. Double Leopards are a band out of NY that dive deep into muddy psychedelic soundscapes. From their recent double album Halve Maen

This is The Secret Correspondence 2

PS I make drone music that you will probably be subjected to before too long.

I am going to conclude this little jaunt into dance music on a personal note. I lived in London from about 1992 to 1998. It was a great time to be in the city. Music of all sorts was blowing up. Warp Records was in its heyday. Techno and hard acid were going full bore and I had fallen in love with a club called Megatripolis. As I was falling down the techno/trance hole into another dimension I met this guy, Ed DMX. He was lacking a place to stay and had moved in with my good friend Sam in his legendary flat in Tufnell Park. That flat was filled with odd balls, all of us were obsessed with Trance and Ambient Techno and its derivitatives and here comes Ed bearing the banner for electro long before it became fashionable.

I had been into breakdancing in junior high and still kept a hand in listening to Drexia, B12, and other assorted Warp foreys into electro. So I used to chat to Ed about the past and wondered how he was going to translate his vision of reviving electros sounds into reality.

Fast forward to 2001/2002 and Ed had blown up! I found him looking back at me from inside of magazines as the electroclash movement swept the states and everyone it seemed was obsessed with those old school chunky beats. Time has passed and he has mercifully ridden out the flash in the pan that electoclash was and matured into a respected artist on his own.

This last weekend I bit the bullet and contributed to his success with the purchase of the Wave Function CD, and its great! Here is an old track of his that quite neatly fits in with some of the other stuff I have been posting recently.

DMX KREW - Good Ol' Daze

Tomorrow starts quite a different cycle of music. DRONE......

This is a man, who in my house, needs no introduction (cause the kids love his campy tunes) . Justus Köhncke is a German techno producer who's work covers quite a wide area of expertise. Some tracks are full on bangers while in others he delicately croons in German.

Recently he has been moving towards an increasingly disco tinged sound, even going so far as to form a band and do a cover of Good Times by Chic. Which I bet was awesome.

Kompakt Total 6 came out recently and this track is one of my favorites.

Dorau / Köhncke - Durch Die Nacht / Geiger Mix

Working in the academic sector, I seem to run into issues of copyright fairly continuously. The law is often confusing and in my opinion usually works against scholarship. That said I find keeping up with it slightly entertaining being that I am a geek. Google's recent efforts to scan as many books as possible in an attempt to index knowledge I applaud as a boon to educators and anyone that wants to do good research. There is a universe of information trapped in between the pages of books that are not indexed correctly, or at all, and this could help to expand our knowledge by leaps and bounds.

I usually keep up on copyright via EFF, but today Kevin Drum has written (as usual) a very sensible article on the merits and some of the problems with Google's new system.

So continuing down my path of posting music that everyone on ILM has heard before.
Here is a beautiful mix of two tracks from an album that simply blew my head out of the water several years ago.

Michael Mayer of the by now legendary Kompakt label first appeared on my radar on a thread of the above mentioned ILM. I had heard of Kompakt before and had been attempting to track down a cd or two for a while here in Los Angeles with no luck around late 2002. Blundering into ILM purely by accident, I made it a point to look up Kompakt. Low and behold gushing reviews for this mix abounded on the message board. After much fruitless searching and even attempting to order it from Forced Exposure I eventually was forced into file sharing to aquire my copy. I was not dissappointed. This album reawakened my interest in dance music and seeing him and Reinhardt Voight play a bit later converted me into a Kompakt zombie. That show at a small venue in Echo Park reminded me why I loved dance music and forced me out on the floor for hours. **Sigh**

Some of the more recent albums on Kompakt have left me a bit cold, but this album and that show were epochal. In fact I sadly still carry the tickets in my wallet (fanboy stuff I know).
In any case here you go.

Messian & Phantom Ghost - Perfect Lovers (Unperfect Love Mix by Tobias Thomas & Superpitcher)

oh and by the way... This track for me is the essence of microgoth

One of the more challenging aspects of posting music is to decide what to post. Itunes tells me that I have almost 80 gigs of music to choose from, which roughly works out to not having to listen to the same thing more than once a month if I so choose.

With all that choice and no immidiate audience to speak of. How do you whittle down preferences? Doing short runs of a specific genre makes sense but I have come to realize that I practically have ADD whenit comes to my listening habits. The ipod has only reinforced this so here I swim in an ocean of music trying to seperate a drop out to concentrate on.

Fortunatly, some artists just manage to make themselves heard above the din. Daniel Wang is one of these. He creates disco/house that stimulates the mind and the ass. His legendary dj sets range from old school gay disco to modern electro house all the while he is working the crowd playing cowbell along to the track. MORE COWBELL!!!

From his album Idealism - All flowers must fade

Another in a series of consumer desires. I would love to have a beautifully framed copy of this in my house. Might scare the kids, but I have always felt a bit too much afinity for Inspector Lee.


Rest in peace Mr. Burroughs. You handled your unusual life with a beautiful grace.

In what might be an odd shift from Spacemen 3, today's post focuses on an artist who I have been hearing about for ages from my friend Sammy V. Lindstrom is a purveyor of what I have heard referred to as "bongo house" What it really reminds me of is nothing so much as an updated version of Italo-Disco. Highly melodic, detail orientated dance music that owes a huge debt to disco but takes the idea forward in an even more electronic context.

Other guys to look out for in this general area are Daniel Wang, Metro Area, and pretty much anything Morgtan Geist releases on the Environ Label.

By the way Playhouse, the label that rereleased this, is a personal favorite and you are sure to see more of their stuff popping up here in the coming weeks.

From Famous when Dead IV - Lindstrom - I feel space

This album looks soooooo tasty. I can see myself being drawn into the maze of soundtrack collecting the way I was drawn into techno, house, and the various strains of electronica.

No one sets a mood like Ennio.

I am going to throw this link over on the linkbar on the side soon enough, but before that I just wanted to make a point of stressing how good this group blog is. Firedoglake has just come to my notice recently but the writing is searing and so far they are the premier source for analysis of the Plamegate scandal.

Read and enjoy.

For all the fucked up children in the world I bring you Spacemen 3.

It was in the late 80s-early 1990s that I first heard these guys. I was a poor college student at the time saving my pennies for my weekly trip to my favorite music store. It really was more about the browsing at this point because I usually couldn't afford to spend more than five bucks at a time. I haunted the place, becoming overly familiar with the staff and in fact one of the managers had lived with me for a time when she first moved up to the city.

Simultaneously I had started having small scale acid freakouts at my place just about every weekend. Friends would drive up from the surrounding area and I would kit the house up in lights and spin records on my little record player/cassette deck that I had recieved as a junior in high school.

One fateful Friday afternoon one of the salespersons at the shop, knowing my increasingly acid tinged taste, came up to me with a discount copy of A Perfect Prescription on vinyl. I was dubious of the well dressed preppy boys on the cover but I took it home introduced it to my party and it warped my perceptions forever.

Here is my favorite track. Ecstacy Symphony - Transparent Radiation

To continue on my Amon Dull II thread, this band is from Japan and they create some incredibly delicate yet powerful psych. As ever melody is in an important element of just about any music I listen to and these guys have it in spades.

Melody is such a fragile thing. Sometimes the merest hint of it is enough to carry a song onwards for what seems to be hours. I remember seeing the Dead do improvisations in their second set that seemed to drift outwards without any tether but somehow, just when you thought it was going to fall apart, some light fingerpicking would draw you back from the edge and keep the whole thing going.

Ghost - Kiseichukan Nite

Can you fucking believe this shit.
What happened to freedom of expression? Did this kid somehow become a terrorist the moment he expressed his disapproval of our president? I may have hated Reagan in the 1980s but at least I didn't have to worry about the secret service knocking on my door when I talked shit about him. To think back now 1984 almost seems like a high water mark of tolerance compared to the injustice we have become so used to hearing about right now.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the tip off.

Amon Dull II - She Came Through the Chimney

From what I know these guys were crazed German stoners from the early Seventies, who made some stunning tunes. This is from the album Yeti.

It feels good to give music to the world, kind of like running a slow motion radio station.

Bird of Paradise 

This site is the home of one of my favorite artists from the past few years, the mighty dj/rupture. This guy has turned me onto all sorts of music through his insane mix cds and this site which hosts a variety of music from around the world. He really seems to listen with his ears wide open and his writing is engaging as well.

Mudd up!

This site only post sporatically but if you like bleeding edge techno its got some great stuff. They are actually a film company doing a movie on the current micro/macro/electro/drug techno-house movement. Plenty of good free tracks, check it out y'all.

Square Productions

Most times when I listen to music I am looking for a bit of transendence. I want something that will lift me up above where I am now and to a higher place where the sky is clearer, the food tastes better and all I have to do is be with my family playing, laughing, in an endless weekend of good times and good food.

I find that the Animal Collective hits this mark sporatically. Sometimes their music is so etheral and beautiful that it almost makes me want to cry and other times its just silly. This is a beautiful example of the former from their album Feels.

Peace.

Thanks to a friend who shall remain invisible. I got some server space so that I don't have to use "you send it" anymore! Yea! Woo hoo! and all that crap.

As my inaugural post to this new world I present Ricardo Villalobos and Luciano tearing up Michael Jackson. Enjoy!

Well this is a fine howdoyoudo! You mean I have been praying to the wrong god all this time?!

Thanks as always to BoingBoing

A day in the life 

Back again for the irregular post.

Been feeling:

*Nurse with wound - Pre-Menstrual Music For Merry Maidens
*Double leopards - Halve Maen
*Sufjan Stevens - Illinoise
*Tim Hecker - Mirages (but so far he has done no wrong)
*Ethiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale, 1969-1974 (this gets better every time I hear it, which is really pretty sick) - kind of reminds me of how I felt the first few times I heard Kind of Blue
*Isolee - Wearmonster
*Can - Future Days (the track specifically)
*Jack Rose.
*Black Flag - The first four years
*MV/EE - The bummer road

In opposition to all that musical seriousness here is a fun little ditty by John Berry, who is almost but not quite as good as Ennio.

Rodeo

PS. Thanks for Blissblogger for the feeling not feeling meme.

Pure beauty 

This blogging thing starts to get good to you after a while. A little catharsis in the morning to clear the head and heart for another day in the trenches of human experience.

Last night I had the most remarkable conversation with a friend of mine who has always been consistantly conservative. He is generally a nice guy and not particularly rabid in his conservativism so I decided to ask him what he thought of the whole Katrina thing. I am not sure exactly what I expected. Perhaps a small concession that things had gone badly and someone had to be disciplined or fired over the unmitigated disaster that was the federal response to the hurricane's after effects.

Suprisingly, he simply parroted the party line that has been developing on the right in response to the Bush failure. He blamed the local government first of all, repeating the proffered lie that Louisiana had not asked for assistance soon enough. Well in response all I can think to say is that if a dirty bomb hits a major American city I hope that the federal government doesn't wait for overwhelmed state and local officials to call for help before sending in the calvary.

I almost feel sorry for those on the far right sometimes. It requires quite a bit of work to excuse the failures of your leaders so often and bend and sway to the excuses that you are given. During Clinton's impeachment proceedings I was at least able to say "Yea, he fucked up." I didnt think he should have been prosecuted for it but he did screw the pooch on that one.

I remeber those days well. Gas was at 98 cents a gallon and full employment seemed like a possibility.

On a completely unrelated note, I have really been turned on by a cd I got in the mail earlier this week. Its called Two Originals of Jack Rose.
This here is my favorite track so far.
Yaman Blues
Its has kind of a raga crossed with blues feel to it, great for a sunny Southern California day.

Whoa I just found this great link to a hoard of obscure Krautrock downloads who were name checked on the first Nurse with wound album. Thanks to Saxon.

Its a good idea for every thinking person I know to read Tom Tomorrow. His cartoons are great but its his writing voice that captivates me. He is able to convey a heartfelt positon without coming across as preachy and he manages to be relevent without being an asshole. One of my daily news sources.

Here is some inspiring metal/drone work from the east

BORIS - FEEDBACKER(Part III)

To check out similar stuff go to aquariusrecords.org
One of my favorite places in SF (says a little something about me that one of my fave places in one of the world's great cities is a tiny record store in a decaying neighborhood) Although all the great cities I have known have a similar place I love. London has Berick Street, Austin has Waterloo, Los Angeles has the mighty Amoeba Records.

What is it about record stores that inspires some of us to haunt them with such regularity. I bet there is a condition in the DSM that describes me to a T.

Oh and Bush sucks, for many of the usual reasons but New Orleans is the icing on the cake.

sweet nature 

Egil 

summer 2005 

Here is to attempting to do things more than once.

One of the tracks that I am interminably working on.

Una - satim

I am sure these things will grow longer as I practice.