Read:My:Back

Sleep || Dopesmoker

Yep, I finally got around to buying it. Heavy duty vinyl gatefold re-up on Southern Lord Records. It wasn't cheap, but it was well worth the investment—kinda surprised it wasn't delivered by a private art handling service. Saturday morning skull battery sessions are now upon us! [Click here to listen]

WATCH: BBC4's "Synth Britannia" Documentary

I've been waiting for this one to turn up on YouTube for a while, and it was well worth the wait. BBC4's semi-recent (2010?) documentary chronicling the rise of Britain's electronic music scene/culture. Great insights from Daniel Miller (The Normal, Mute Records), Bernard Sumner (Joy Division), and Kraftwerk's Wolfgang Flür, who brilliantly summates:

"We saw [ourselves as] engineer musicians, instead of dancing boys on stage to arouse the girls."

Scientists: "We Had Love" 45

During a brief period in my life, almost everything I found deeply important was encapsulated by this picture sleeve and the record housed within it.

"Saint of the Pit" by Diamanda Galás

It's reassuring to know that in 2012, I'm still able to freak people out and ruin their lives with the sound (and in this case, sight) of Diamanda Galás. Twenty years ago, this was a ritualistic component of my weekly radio show on WPRB—these days, I just wait for my wife to walk into the room and then fire up this video clip.

"Saint of the Pit" was released in 1986 and is the second piece from her AIDS-themed "Masque of the Red Death" triptych. Further nightmare fuel here and here. Stunning and utterly distrurbing.

"We All Love Peanut Butter" and Other Back from the Grave-inspired Tales of Love and Devotion

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.

The One Way Street - "We All Love Peanut Butter"


The Knaves - "Leave me Alone"


Spontaneous Generation - "Up In My Mind"

The Iron Maiden scene from "Persepolis"

In further deference to my new life of being woefully behind the cultural curve, I finally watched "Persepolis", the uber-acclaimed animated French film from 2007, based on the graphic novel of the same name. The story considers the 1979 Iranian Revolution, as seen through the troubled gaze of a young innocent named Marjane. Like many other middle class Iranians of the era, Marjane's parents rally against the US-backed Shah, but end up remorseful over the rise of the Khomeini-led fundamentalist government that eventually assumes control.

The perhaps questionable role of graphic novels and political animation serving as historical documents notwithstanding, Persepolis recounts an exceptionally complicated series of events with admirable skill. The characters, especially Marjane and her grandmother (voiced by legendary French actress Dannielle Darrieux), are profoundly engaging and often wickedly funny in spite of the film's grave subtext. To the top of your Netflix cue, stat!

Creative Commons Broadcast Tattoo

Via Flickr

[CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0]

I especially like how the CC elements appear to have been added later on (they seem dark and fresh, whereas the tower ink looks considerably more settled.) Either way: bravo!

In the spirit of radio and free culture, here are a pair of great radio-related songs from the Free Music Archive.

Min-Y-Llan - "Radio America"

Olneyville Sound System - "Immigrant Radio"

One is an instrumental and the other consists primarily of people screaming. Playing both at the same time yields pretty decent remix possibilities. Game on!

Mesmerizing Pencil Animations by Ben Warren

I hope this guy's got a great job now. Music by Lullatone. More after the jump.

New Big Blood album, plus jaw-dropping video for "She Sells Sanctuary" [Cult cover! Yes!!]

Great news for fans of Big Blood, one of the most prolific bands of present history, but one which still feels like the best-kept secret in the universe: Brand new album up for free download in the FMA! There's been plenty of prattling on about them before (from myself and others), so no need to rehash it all over again—But whatever you do, don't miss the drop-dead gorgeous video for their cover of The Cult's "She Sells Sanctuary". (Below.) Ahhh, if only everything could be this good...

Here's the MP3 of "She Sells Sanctuary". Ian Astbury, consider yourself officially on notice.

Continued thanks to Big Blood for their willingness to freely sharing so much great music—naming a more refreshing and forward-thinking attitude towards art and commerce would be no easy task—and to Jason Sigal and WFMU's Free Music Archive for providing such an amazing repository of sounds.

Great PBS Music Docs Now Online

I was thrilled to see Dangerous Minds recently post about the Punk chapter of the 1995 PBS documentary series, Rock & Roll, finally showing up on YouTube. (It hasn't been re-run in years, nor is it available on DVD. My homemade VHS copy bit the dust eons ago.) As DM pointed out, it's one of the few docs that really makes a point of completing the critical circuits between 70s punk and the reggae sounds of that same era.

However, the hour-long chapters dealing with proto-punk (The Wild Side) as well as early hip-hop/electro (The Perfect Beat) are also excellent, and now also online. The proto-punk edition focuses on the Velvet Underground (great interviews with Lou, Cale, and Moe Tucker), Iggy, the Doors, and Bowie, and the hip-hop chapter takes on Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaattaa, Grandmaster Flash, and follows the narrative up through Run DMC, Beastie Boys, New Order, and The Orb.

Of course, it's easy to nitpick and complain about what the filmmakers foolishly left out or willfully ignored (ESG? The MC5?), but I still give this series very high marks for their overall presentation of the subject matter. In recent years, only that suberb Rough Trade documentary has surpassed this, I'd say.

Begin watching The Wild Side here. Begin watching The Perfect Beat here.

Photo by schmilblick. [cc a 2.0]