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.