Lady Gaga - Bad Romance (Hercules and Love Affair Remix)

If AC ran the world, all remixes would be by Hercules and Love Affair. See their insanely syncopated afro-futurisms on their remix of Goldfrapp's "A&E", their slick shiny Chicago bonk on their version of "Whispers" by Aeroplane, the list goes on and on. Above all, it's H&LA's ability to thread any song through perfectly tailored first-wave house that's equally mellow and infectious, never overbearing, always addictive, that renders them peerless. Here "Bad Romance" gets toned down, from a cannonball blast of pop to a light Chicago jack, neatly balancing mainstream hooks and underground bump & grind. SO FUCKING GOOD.

Omni Ciani

Omni magazine was a science/futurism publication founded by Bob Guccione Jr. that ran from the late seventies to the mid-nineties. It ushered in a new era of popular science journalism, being something like the Wired magazine of its time, but with more of a speculative bent. Omni regularly featured pieces from science-fiction luminaries including Arthur C. Clarke and William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace in Omni's pages. The speculative side also meant a predilection for new age-y and UFO-related pseudo-science. In the mid-nineties Omni was the first print publication to go entirely online. You can read an article in Slate magazine here about the history of Omni, and as well visit the online tribute site.

Here is a clip from Omni's short-lived TV incarnation, featuring the analog synth wizardress / nerd pin-up Suzanne Ciani as she composes music for a pinball game. Not only is it remarkably hypnotic to watch her program computers and synthesizers, I also love the smug goofball TV show host at the beginning, lounging by a space lamp and saying "isn't it amazing that electricity of this kind will one day be used to regrow human limbs?" in a ridiculously smug voice, summing up the sort of self-oblivious giddiness of 70s futurism.

Ciani, a student of synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla, has enjoyed a successful career as a musician and commercial composer for several decades, having composed the sound effects for the MECO disco Stars Wars record, releasing her classic Seven Waves album, and scoring numerous commercials. These included a coke commercial in which she used synthesizers to generate the satisfying PSSSHT sound of a soda can being opened.

WAV files of Ciani's designs for the Xenon pinball game shown in the Omni clip are posted on her website.

Here is Suzanne in another clip, this time from the children's tv show 3-2-1 Contact, explaining the properties of electronic sound.

klimek

klimek - true enemies and false friends (yesteryears suite)

The opening track to Kompakt's Pop Ambient 2009 compilation, available here, appears in abridged form on Klimek's masterful new record, "Movies Is Magic." The album cut lacks the gorgeous, elegaic horns that intone here as if from across a great expanse, like the sound of distant vikings blowing into hollow tusks. As you might gather, "Movies is Magic" is suffused with all manner of soundtracky scraps, which Klimek has with great agility and sophistication allowed to breathe, ebb and flow like cosmic Morricone.

"Movies is Magic" has been awarded the Pleasant Cubicle award for Best New Work Music by A/C/K/C/L

mathias aguayo - walter neff

mathias aguayo - walter neff (from Kompakt Total 10)

another brilliant avant-pop dance track from aguayo, who as one-half of Closer Musik gave Kompakt some of its most original, creative releases. Aguayo has his hands and head in electronic dance music but his heart and spirit are fuelled by a savant sense for unknown pop pleasures, goofy and totally spot on at the same time, he's like a South American Arthur Russell. One of his more recent songs, "Minimal," skewered the stripped-down serious pretense of the subgenre, but it's clear that aguayo is no armchair critic, content to tear down something that he himself cannot improve on. One way out of minimal techno was into the luxuriant but essentially nostalgic grooves of deep house, another way is what aguayo along with villalobos, jamie jones and others are tuned into, a kind of mind-bending future pop radio music that doesn't exist yet. exciting stuff.

grooveshark / goodbye horses

Roth showed me this. neither of us understand how it works. Grooveshark is like a web-based itunes. Somehow it has every song, and you can access them all instantly, with a nice little menu set-up, no frills. It's like imeem except way easier to use. I have no idea if it's just finding the songs online and playing them, or if they're stored somewhere or what. You should use it, it's nuts. Then you can make a widget and bother people with it.

As an example here are several synth-pop gems that have enjoyed deep repeat status with me lately, the choice cut being here "goodbye horses" by q. lazzarus, a one-off jewel recorded for the silence of the lambs movie but inexplicably not on the soundtrack. Super-catchy and haunting, it bears that characteristic lovelorn passion that inflects the best of mopey 80s dance jams, the sort that seem to surface in early April, when the 'cruellest month' first casts traces of its melancholic spirit like pollen in the air. While the vocal may sound like a male, Q. Lazzarus is actually a husky-voiced woman, giving the track an interesting gender-bender quality that parallels its role in the movie, when it serves as the signature tune for trannie killer Buffalo Bill's mangina dance. Included on the playlist are other songs you probably know already but it'd be nice to hear them once more, wouldn't it? Especially "West End Girls." On that note, here's the Lambs clip, as well as one of my favorite Flight of the Conchords clip, their brilliant homage to "West End Girls" entitled "Inner City Pressure."

Liquor Store Event: Michael Schmelling

A gentlemanly reading, featuring sophisticated beverages, at the Liquor Store, corner of White and West Broadway in Tribeca. Afterparty: Ridin' High @ Savalas in Brooklyn (duh)

New Column

Behold, weekly contributions from William Rauscher now on Refinery 29's blog. Because those with style to burn deserve one another.

"Sound-tracking"

Podcasts: Sweet Relief From Human Freedom

or, Sound Advice for Digital Living




http://www.fabriclondon.com/podcast/

http://www.residentadvisor.net/podcast.aspx



http://www.samurai.fm/home/


One of the unexpected outcomes of the historical rise of democracy in industrial society is the way in which it is possible for freedom of choice to dialectically invert into an oppressive force. This largely stems from the twin motors of capitalism and technology, which operating in sync are quite capable today of overloading and distracting you with an abundance of irrelevant things to be decided upon.




"In ancient Rome there was a poem
About a dog who found two bones
He picked at one
He licked the other
He went in circles
He dropped dead

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom of choice!"

It's sound advice for digital living to know when and how to engage decision, when to sideswipe it and when to outsource it. Information overload means the need for people you know to occasionally serve as human data filters. Maybe you do this unconsciously, sorting acquaintances and social contacts into "friend who knows where to buy shoes" and "guy at the office who is a college basketball obsessive" and "friend's boyfriend who brings rare, illegally-cured ham to your superbowl party."

Listening to mixes online is thus a great away to avoid the painful abyss of human freedom (although confronting this freedom has its benefits as well, for example it's a great way to procrastinate, to spend an hour or so curating a playlist).

Here are three excellent sources of such mixes:
1. The Fabric podcast. Fabric is a techno club in London, a venerable temple to electronic music. It is a very thoughtfully-branded entity, combining nightclub, record label and other ventures, all of which lay their primary emphasis on the pleasures of musical experience. Seriously the club rules and if I lived practically next door to it, as my good friends Leonard and Caireen do, I would be there every weekend. The DJ lineups are out of hand.

Their latest podcast is from British(?)person Howie B, the world-class electronic producer, who slings together a bunch of great funk (Fela Kuti, George McCrae) and often describes a song as being an "absolute stonker". These podcasts are of general interest and not only enjoyable for techno nerds.

2. The Resident Advisor podcast. RA is a first-class electronic music news website. Sort of like Pitchfork, but for grown-ups who don't pee on themselves about bands with names like Mystic Wolf Palace. Its podcasts center more on straight A-list techno DJs, such as Richie Hawtin aka Plastikman, who recently did the 100th installment. Definitely more techno-nerd but you're just putting it on in the background while you do spreadsheets at work anyway, so don't worry about it.

And, in actuality, minimal techno is pretty much the best at-work shit you can listen to. It doesn't ever interfere with your consciousness but it burbles steadily along so it keeps you going, like fizzy water.

3. Samurai FM. Just discovered by me because the Earplug newsletter linked to it. Has also a host of good DJ mixes available for streaming, including most recent by Norwegian space-disco prince Lindstrom. Also has a good selection of archival mixes including Italian legend Daniele Baldelli, the George Washington of beardo disco.



Now get back to work.