Smooth Science 2: Midterm

[Handwritten Caption:] "There is so much evil coming off this page I had to send it away. Please don't try anything funny."

Norvorg is the name for the legendary Swedish evil spirit that preys on unsuspecting vacationers near bodies of water. This is nothing exceptional: pagan Swedish mythology is rife with malevolent forces that embody aquatic anxiety. In Norvorg's case, however, the method developed to hold the spirit at bay was unique: over generations, rural Swedes passed down brief, inanely cheerful songs, called abbania, intended to subdue the demonic entity with their breezy effervescence. Such is the direct origin of Swedish pop music as a genre, as well as Abba, the name of its most successful export.

Thus in Sweden, smooth music, at least in the bubblegum variety, was created as a mythological means of reckoning with nature, being functionally a mixture of art, technology, and religious ritual. It wasn't merely a means of accentuating a chilled-out maritime soiree, but of securing the chill-out by staying in tune with a potentially hostile universe.

Should you in the coming days find yourself in a leisurely state by the waterside, let us recommend these six sonic talismans:

- Lenny Kravitz - I Belong to You

Yep. Listen to this track and tell me it's not sick. Back when Lenny also produced "Justify My Love" for Madonna. Could you put this on while you made out with somebody, or would you laugh?

- Gabor Szabo - Azure Blue



From the Hungarian jazz guitarist's album High Contrast, which also contains the original version of Breezin', the instrumental later made famous by George Benson. Like Christopher Cross' "Sailing," "Breezin" is so programmatically smooth, it's a blueprint for the revolution. "Azure Blue" is included in the playlist instead, however, because this is the midterm: Breezin', Sailing and other such master classics are pre-reqs for the course.

George Benson - Breezin' (Live on the Old Grey Whistle Test)

- American Analog Set: The Magnificent Seventies

In high school my friends and I wore out this track and the accompanying album, From our Living Room to Yours. Wistful and lightly propulsive, like staring out of your suburban bedroom window while listening to Ege Bamyasi, the track is a jewel of airy melancholia and poppy-tinged daydreams, and is great company when navigating late at night those endless asphalt tracks that comprise the Texas highway system, and which arch in the dark like the backs of prehistoric beasts feeding on the dead.

- Lee Ritenour: Morning Glory



In crate-digging, the actual pilfering through milk crates, or Google reader or whatever it is you use, is only the first step. The second is scouring a whole album looking for that one song, the one that strikes a nerve. Smooth noodley jazz is certainly rough waters for the impassioned digger, because there is a very low diamond to shit ratio. But as Lee knows, such excursions are all part of the captain's journey. "Morning Glory" is well Steely, with a bit of CSN and some elevator thrown in for good measure.



- Azymuth: Montreal City



Azymuth [album]

Alan H. sent this in, and I've probably listened to it every day since then, Azymuth's '74/'75 Brazilian jazz debut. Alan quite correctly anticipated that I would be well down with this, as it matches nimble tropical rhythms with tinny martian synthesizers like something from the second half of either Bowie's "Low" or Closer by Joy Division. It's a fantastic record, one that rewards repeated listening. It might be a case of creeper beats: they might not hit you in the face at once, they may wait until you think you're safe and sound to deploy their weapons of sunbaked smooth....highly recommended. Alan and I had an extended follow-up conversation in which he made the observation that alot of American yacht rock ends up following a curious class trajectory, being the product of ennui-ridden rich California rockers living in the lap of luxury, sulking amidst their cuervo gold, white lady and nineteen-year olds, and making its way via muzak-systems to the quotidian world of the midwest supermarket.

- Quiet Village: Singing Sand



Another track from QV's new "Silent Movie" LP, a distant smooth cousin to DJ Shadow's Entroducing. Or as one bulletin boarder put it, beardo disco = the new trip-hop.

After three or four days in a row of epic band practices interspersed with late night brooklyn loft parties I was totally worn down and brain-dead, so while, framed by my old white window, the evening light settled softly behind the williamsburg bridge, I lay with headphones on and passed out to this new record. It is an afternoon springtime nap masterpiece. It is also shit-smooth gentle tide disco made by two bald DJs. I want to share it with you, Like a lot of very good music, it is highly practical to listen to, being a kind of sonic frozen margarita, or light Mexican beer. This track makes me think of coconut-infused suntan lotion and the gentle movements of brown skin in the dark. It's what doin' it on the beach sounds like.

High Schoolers Play DJ Shadow

The Shadow Percussion Project



Music instructor Brian Udelhofen conducts the Minnetonka High School Percussion Ensemble in a performance of several tracks from DJ Shadow's sample-heavy abstract hip-hop classic Endtroducing. Making a kind of weird musical spiral - Shadow takes loads of bits from David Axelrod and others for his record, then this ensemble does cover versions.

My mother taught me to play piano. Ok this isn't entirely true, I had a number of teachers. I'll say she gave the piano to me, to me and my brother, and that it was a daily part of our lives since we could read. As a child in Australia, she often performed with her family in church, they were called the 'musical Judds'. And while organized religion got left behind in her life like the seventh continent, an inviable connection between music and the life of the spirit persisted in her - that was were we always went when we traveled, to London, for example, we spent our time in cathedrals, for evensong, for organ recital, especially for choral performances. That's why when she passed away there no doubt in our minds that her beloved choir group should be called to sing at her memorial.

The unstable force of art is that it can work as solace, as ideal and as escape. Musical groups, especially those that deploy the human voice in unison, aren't just playing pretty songs, they're marking a kind of utopian moment, where everyone gets along, everyone's working together in harmony. But the general problem of depicting a world better than this one is that it act as an ideal that you work towards somehow, or its depiction can stand in like a narcotic substitute for all the bullshit of this earth.

My mother inaugurated my engagement with music, and my high school piano teacher Jim Ogilvy allowed it to take the step into open weirdness that it has never recovered from, because he taught me how to improvise. A zen'd-up bohemian who looked something like Eugene Levy's hepcat cousin, fitting considering his love of SCTV, Jim taught me jazz chords via Plato and Aristotle and only once did he ever show me his studio, a private Valhalla behind his normal house which housed, among other holy treasures, a Buchla and the third Moog ever built. Once after my first girlfriend ever broke up with me, I had to go to my piano lesson and Jim took one look at my unbearable despondence and we spent the hour and a half in thoughtful consultation.

I got my first synth from him, an Emulator II+ sampler. It is the same sampler that Ferris Bueller uses to produce the simulated cough sounds which, when played over the phone, serve as evidence to his school interlocutors that he is sick. I still have it, because it is rare and ridiculous. That's to say, these are the reasons why I can't easily get rid of it. All of its sounds are on big floppy disks, and it takes like ten minutes to load, and it is huge. But just look at it:



Epilogue:
Yesterday following practice I took my Moog Liberator keytar and threw it in the trash gathered on the curb. Its time had come. Don't make me defend myself, you don't understand how long in coming such a parting has been. I got it ten years ago from a girl named Katherine Bentley. Working at Waterloo Records in Austin, my best friend John saw a hip, elegant-looking girl post a For Sale sign for the keyboard at the store, a sign complete with the DEVO 'Duty Now for the Future' atomic man image.





Both John and I were seventeen or eighteen or something, and we had to drive outside of Austin to where K lived with her wealthy family. It felt like a weird Fitzgerald echo, going to this upscale scene to buy a moog keytar from the intimidatingly cool art school daughter. Plus her last name was "Bentley". We were both smitten in that absurd near-mythic intensity which is the inescapable territory of youth. On the car ride home we listened to "Disorder" by Joy Division really loud, and I thought about going to summer orientation at NYU.

Guide to AC Radio: March Edition

The inaugural March edition of AC radio is curated by me.

1. Thief at your Window - Endless Grift
Recorded last April at Explosion Robinson, a basement studio on Grand Street in Brooklyn whose name was adopted by the urban clothing store which had previously occupied the space. Engineering and guitars: Darian Zahedi.

2. You May Be Blue (Neighbors Remix) - Vetiver
Topanga folkie Vetiver refits his own track from the album 'To Find Me Gone', turning the dark folk-rock number into a very Superpitcher/Kompakt-like brooding minimal-techno stomper.

3. Space Disco - Universal Robot Band
Eleven minute epic track that is a very strong blueprint for the now-resurgent 'space disco' style: short on chic/village people/bee gees disco decorations, long on hairy tribal weirdness. Sounds a bit like that 'Cloud One' record if it achieved lysergic velocity.

4. Train (Ewan Pearson Remix) - Goldfrapp
5. Once Upon a Time - The Heliocentrics
Belongs in consideration with the DJ-Shadow playing high school band and the Hypnotic Music Ensemble. It seems that live bands have figured out how to play like Entroducing and are ready to start killing shit.

6. Idle Hands - Harlem River Drive
Jonathan sent us this, a burning latin funk album lead by Eddie Palmieri. This is the deepest, most muscular track. The kind of intense music that will temporarily erase your memory and make you forget you have other songs you could be listening to.

7. Track 5 - Ulaan Khol
Stephen R. Smith's new solo record, very recommended if you are pleasantly susceptible to soaring guitar squalls and other types of mesmerizing sonic excess.

8. National Anthem to the Moon - Bruce Haack
From 'Electric Lucifer'. Deeply eccentric outsider-art moogness from the same camp as White Noise, American Metaphysical Circus, etc.

9. Snakedriver - Jesus and Mary Chain
From the Crow soundtrack! You know what, as a matter of fact, I want you to go listen to that whole record right now.

10. Anambra - Ozo
Renowned for being one of the close-out tracks at NY disco impresario David Mancuso's legendary loft parties. Not even really a disco track at all, just deep spiritual beats from no country.

11. Effective Placebo Effect - In Flagranti
12. Hung from the Moon - Earth
13. Super Inuit - Holy Fuck

Four Points On One Thing

Allow us here to make four points.

1. There is a video downloadable online of a high school after-school band performing songs from DJ Shadow's landmark Entroducing album. This is a really good idea for a number of reasons, the deduction of which will be left to the reader.



Entroducing

2. You should really read the Music Thing blog, which is where I found out about this, and which has numerous interesting/unusual/far-out posts on electronic music gadgets in general, presented in a way that you don't have to be a massive synth nerd to glean pleasure from it.

3. If you go to Music Thing, you can download the clip mentioned in (1).

4. Seriously go here and download it and watch it.