A critical primer if ever there was one: One song apiece from the February and Jet Ear Party LPs, as well as a live track recorded for one of WFMU's Free Music Series concerts. By my reckoning, that song ("Pops") was the first ever licensed for inclusion in the Free Music Archive.
Kane and friends will be performing during the Table of the ElementsCopernicium Festival, which goes down at the Issue Project Room from May 12th-14th. Also appearing: Zeena Parkins, Stephen O'Malley, plus Rhys Chatham and the Lords of Tinnitus. [More info and MP3s here.]
WFMU's Kurt Gottschalk recently forwarded a link to some amazing footage of The Ex performing live on a Paris streetcorner. Watching it quickly set me longing for the years in which I routinely saw The Ex perform knockout sets at the old Knitting Factory on Leonard Street. Let praise be freely distributed to whomever uploaded this 80 minute knockout video of one such concert, during which The Ex ably demonstrate why they are the single greatest and most inspiring band of current history. Any chance to see them perform live should be seized upon as though your life depended on it. No foolin', they are that good!
I'm sure I was at the Knitting Factory on this night—probably in my customary stance near the other side of the stage, knocking back a Maker's Mark and getting my head torn up in the most joyous manner possible: entirely at the hands of The Ex. The author of the original Blogotheque piece sent by Kurt summates this band pretty effectively when s/he writes:
"[The Ex] started their career in Amsterdam squats at the beginning of the DIY movement, played ten times in every single European and international venue, mixed their rock with the freest jazz, and then rooted it in the heart of Ethiopia. The Ex is a symbol for musical freedom in its most rigorous form."
Bravo, I say! For more written eloquence, check out these words from WFMU's Brian Turner, regarding the band's visit to his radio program in January of 2007.
The Ex frequently rotates the selection of free MP3s available on their website, so definitely grab these favorites while they're still in the mix.
Late note regarding the Knitting Factory video: DO NOT MISS the psycho guitar improv that punctuates the song "Lump Sum Insomnia" (pay close attention beginning at the 58 minute mark). The song is from their Starters-Alternators album (1998) and remains a much-anticipated element of their live show. No wondering as to why!
Check out this drop-dead amazing track from the new Magic Carpathians album, appropriately titled Enjoy Trees! It's cool to hear them occasionally veer from their psychedelic, soundscapey ways (which I happen to be a big fan of) and point themselves in the direction of hypnotic pop like this. You can download the whole album from the Free Music Archive over here. Load your personal bleep box accordingly and go commune with nature, maaaan.
"My Anchor", as performed by Gina V. D'Orio (she of EC8OR and Cobra Killer). From her album Sailor Songs, which there is another great track available from in the Free Music Archive.
Excellent photo of actual sailor by DMahendra [CC BY 3.0]
Direct from WFMU's Digital Dump dynasty comes this utterly blazin' new Wiley track. As has been the case for many other stateside enthusiasts of the UK grime/dubstep phenomenon, copycat artists and samey releases fizzled my attentions pretty quickly. (I'll never forget the first time I saw that first Dizzee Rascal video -- It was in a hotel room in France, and when the track started I was so immediately captivated that I literally told my bunk mate: "Shut up, I'm watching this.")
Under normal circumstances, I am never that rude unless it is absolutely necessary.
Anyway, it's great to see Wiley still at it and continuing to drop epic tracks like this. "Numb3rs in Action" is from the 100% Publishing album, coming this summer on the Big Dada label. More info via Ninjatune here.
I would strongly urge you to watch this ASAP, before it gets yanked from YouTube. It's busting at the seams with excellent archival footage, as well as great interviews with scene kingpins and converts like Don Letts, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jerry Dammers, Viv Albertine, Dennis Bovell, and Stewart Copeland.
And can I just quickly add how jarring it is for me to imagine life in a place where quality art and culture are routinely celebrated the way they are in Britain? Can you imagine American network television producing a documentary of this caliber on any similar subject matter? The British youth culture fixations of my teens and twenties clearly paved the way for my more recent considerations of media, economics, and the complex paradigms that shape them. Considering the way we live, vote, and spend, is it any wonder that we so rarely feel any kind of kinship with the stories told on television?
It seems like every other new release these days is a re-issue of some kind. At WFMU, re-issues compete at a rate that seems almost neck-and-neck with new releases by current bands, making the prospects of actually staying on top of things an essentially impossible task—a game left only to the truly lionhearted. And Brian Turner. There is both an upside and a downside to this, and like a lot of my radio pals at WFMU and elsewhere, I try not to wade too deeply into the waters of musical archaeology, at least when trying to assemble an engaging three hour freeform program. There's no denying that the glut of re-ups from quality labels like Soul Jazz, Norton, and Munster have opened a lot of people's ears to sounds they might never have heard otherwise, but reveling strictly in the legacies of bygone art scenes is a fast ticket to musical burnout, if not straight up Wavy-Gravy land.
"Hey man, is that late 2002 minimal techno?"
"Yeah, man!"
"Well then turn it up!"
Regardless of which direction your musical compass points, there are probably enough genre-specific re-issues out there to fill your hard drive several times over. As with new releases, some of them are great, others utterly forgettable, and still others (the majority, one might argue) have fleeting moments of brilliance but are more or less disposable. Nowhere is this phenomenon more immediately apparent that in the case of of 60s garage and psychedelic comps, where exalting utterly pedestrian Rolling Stones or 13th Floor Elevators-wannabes has been transformed into something of an art form. This wasn't always the case, however.
When I first started doing radio at WPRB in 1992, the station's record library was carved up via a ridiculously genre-fied filing system that grouped almost all left-of-center music made after 1980 together, with exceptions for select kingpins from past eras like Faust, Iggy, Wire, Velvet Underground, etc. Compilations were filed similarly, and I quickly discovered an auxiliary section of them that interested me just as much as titles like They Pelted Us with Rocks and Garbage (80s Cleveland noise), Wanna Buy a Bridge? (UK Post-Punk), or Dry Lungs (proto headache music) did. These were the 60s psych and garage comps, spearheaded by the wholly brilliant Back from the Grave series on Crypt Records.
The original eight volumes of Grave looked uniformly amazing to me, and were scrawled with exaggerated praises from DJs who'd long since fled the station's regular programming rotation. Feeling like I was on the cusp of something important, I decided to start at the very beginning and cued up the first song on Volume 1—a track called "We All Love Peanut Butter" by some apparent hoodlums calling themselves The One Way Street.
It wasn't the savage filth hinted at by the Grave series' attention-grabbing album artwork, but it was amateurish, funny, and sounded like it had been recorded in a bunker on a malfunctioning reel-to-reel deck—just like everything else I liked in 1992. Not surprisingly, I was hooked immediately.
That song was more than enough to fuel my jones for all eight volumes of Back from the Grave, most of which I eventually tracked down in the cutout bin at the local Record Hut. Back on the radio, my interest further blossomed at the behest of two other re-issues of older sounds, not on Crypt, but which seemed equally menacing in some way. The What a Way to Die collection from 1983, and the more acid-drenched Beyond the Calico Wall from 1990. Just as "We All Love Peanut Butter" became the flagbearer of the entire Grave series in my mind, these comps also vaulted certain songs to a kind of iconic status, and no selections from the countless 60s comps which have come and gone in the 20 years since have ever threatened their security at the top of the trash heap.
From What a Way to Die, it's "Leave Me Alone" by The Knaves—a song that deploys a musical middle finger with impressive deliberacy and panache. And from Beyond the Calico Wall, it's "Up in My Mind" by Spontaneous Generation, which I like to think of as a musical version of pork cracklings. (That is, it tosses your brain into a deep-fryer for a few hours, and then re-fries whatever particulate matter remains.) One can never be too certain, after all.
Here are all three songs, for your critical consideration. God bless these electric freaks.
Having recently decided that I am now too old to continue wearing ratty, camouflage-pattered shorts all summer, I can' t help wondering how much longer my taste for utterly fried sounds--the type pedaled by Scott Soriano, for example--have on my docket. Observe here, courtesy of his recently-hatched page on Soundcloud, the battered, shrunken-head glory of Charles Albright. (Originally from the invitingly-titled I'm On Drugs single.)
Tempted? Well, the record's probably already out of print and maybe even fetching stupid money on eBay. Better to save your dough and travel west next month for the S.S. label's 10th anniversary blowout weekend in San Francisco. Scheduled performers include Albright, The Hank IV, A-Frames, and freakin' NAR, for cryin' out loud! (Hey You Kids fans, can I get an amen for Nar? Definitely an iconic band from my WPRB era that slipped through the cracks. So glad to see them being rightly exalted on their home turf!)
More info on the weekend-long S.S. anniversary-fest can be found here>|< You can also keep tabs on the related details via Twitter>|< And on second thought, maybe these shorts don't look so bad after all.
Moon Duo are to 2011 what Parliament cigarettes and 3 AM coffees at Trenton's Crystal Diner were in 1989. I simply can't get enough of 'em.
They've got the hypnotic tendencies of Neu, but match them with a sledgehammer-like insistence that's uncharacteristic of most bands that angle themselves in that manner. These songs penetrate deep down into the listener's bones and cast a gloomy shadow across the soul. They're not necessarily the jams you'll be reaching for on a sunny afternoon as you make for the beach with your sweetie riding shotgun, but under more disquieting circumstances, their records are relatively peerless. Here's "Motorcycle, I Love You" -- a live version recorded at KEXP, but originally from an EP that came out last year.
On the visual front, here's an excellent and totally pro-looking video for the song "Killing Time".
Moon Duo's website, with info on all their releases, can be found here.
