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)