What's the opening sample on Jay-Z's "Blueprint 3," you ask? Why it's 'spirit' by Frederic Mercier, of course, from his 'Pacific' LP, a late 70s french cosmic-disco steam-roller with a head-nodding beat and glistening huge synths and, needless to say, a daniele baldelli secret weapon. Enjoy.
this saturday night at the MoMA, Gavin Russom, DFA's analog-synth wizard, performs as Black Meteoric Star with visuals by assume vivid astro focus. looks...ravey. Russom's last outing, Days of Mars together with Delia Gonzalez, is one of DFA's greatest and weirdest releases, so hope rides on the BMS, which has a debut release on june 9th.
forthcoming single from the swedish italo-disco chanteuse. sally sings the decay of the angel, the melancholic paling of what had seemed the true lightning-strike of romantic destiny.
one of the more artistically singular and intense releases that DFA ever put out - miles from their trademark edgy dance-rock. Gonzalez & Russom put together four long-form expansive futuristic epics, heralding pagan rituals of tomorrow. Aleister Crowley soundtracked by Tangerine Dream. Lucifer with a synthesizer, symphony for the Harmonic Convergence, performed by robot demons of the New Age.
white noise: late sixties rogue psychedelic-electronic mind-melter, holy grail for avant-weirdo obsessives. the first side keeps to a restrained pop framework, I guess if you consider sound-effect orgy recordings to be pop, while the second grows a beard and gets highly nasty, depicting the inner world of the spectral undead ("Visitations") and then go into a no-holds-barred abyssal freakout called "The Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell." There's later white noise records but they're basically solo Vorhaus albums. "An Electric Storm" is an unparalleled cannonball of whiplash studio effects and lysergic lasers.
delia derbyshire: hicks sent this link, to a post about a batch of unreleased tapes recorded by derbyshire. Today if you are a male guitar player you can impossibly fantasize about nico, if you are a laptop dork you prefer delia. She worked at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and was a groundbreaker in electronic sound experimentation, her claim to fame being the recording of the Dr. Who theme. The tapes at this BBC link are nuts. Orbital's Hartnoll rightly observes that one of them could be coming out on Warp records next week. Delia did a bunch of sound manipulation on "an electric storm" as well, which explains alot. It makes playing with ableton live seem like monkeyshines by comparison.
legendary lazer-rock face-melter from Richard Pinhas' 70s experimental trio Heldon. Trippy electronics, barrelling, careening drums and siren-squall feedback guitar, it sounds like Sonic Youth jamming with Suicide. no, really, that's what it sounds like, like the sky has cracked and light from the future is shooting down, blinding people.
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sometimes it pays to judge a record by its cover. I was at Kim's, digging around in the psych rock section, and pulled this martian jedi pilot out from among the dusty sleeves, and bought the thing on sight. You see, I have an excessive faith in the unpredictable. I take alot of hard left-turns. sometimes this means I wind up in the hidden cave of Aladdin, surrounded by spectral, bosomy virgins and occult scrolls, other times I find myself on the wrong end of the rabbit-hole, cast onto a frozen desert, wandering shelterless in the dark. in this case my faith was rewarded - interface is a real mind-blower, one whose first listen can pack enough wallop to shake any nerdic genealogical tree of twentieth-century music.
the deal with a limitless resource like youtube is that there are long spells where it is a infinite wasteland of boredom, but then there are moments when you strike a deep well of links and related videos and you're down the media-archive rabbithole. My report on some latest findings of the synth-pop variety:
1. Jo Lemaire - Je Suis Venue Te Dire Que Je M'en Vais
Awesome haunting cover of a Serge Gainsbourg tune. You'll notice that the track is entirely synthesizers but the backing band is...some dudes on bass and drums. The tune has a wispy electronic sheen similar to "Take My Breath Away" by Berlin, which is the best song ever made. It's also surprising that you've never heard this before, considering how much you like 80's music. I hadn't either, and I thank the angels for letting rare gems like this come to light.
2. The Passions - I'm in love with a German film star
Icy melancholy fantasy of a 'glamorous world.' You know, I would argue that if Severin, the protagonist of Sacher von Masoch's Venus in Furs and the literary source for the psychoanalytic concept of masochism, were alive today, he would be an 80's synth-pop fan, and he would ride for this song. You can just see Dietrich in furs, and Severin espousing her aloof, icy allure.
and guess what? Sam Taylor-Wood, one of the Young British Artists of the Sensation era, recently recorded a cover version. It's produced by the Pet Shop Boys and released on the German label Kompakt - in a sort of heavenly alignment of conceptual art, British pop and Teutonic electronics.
3. The Droids - The Force
Inexplicably, I didn't post this video when I posted the Droids record. This tv clip for their song The Force is a minor theatrical triumph. As a friend remarked, it could be described as "Space Egyptians in the Chamber of Cabinets." Everything in this clip is perfect, including extremely hammy keyboard 'playing,' weird aluminum costumes, and a ballet dancer. A mesmerizing artefact that represents one of those weird off-roads on the highway of culture that no one ever really followed up on.
just in time for christmas, it's the darkest ridin' high podcast yet, the soundtrack to fiercely frozen streets during the longest night of the year. featuring a new solo track by the singer from the knife, a special kanye remix, and for closers, a balearic cover of metallica. dark and shadowy, yes, but running the gamut from steel-edged midnight horror to smoothed-out twilight grooves.
woolfy vs. projections - return of starlight (invisible conga people remix)
night plane - walls of stone
lawrence - miles
anthony rother - welcome to my laboratory
ssion - clown (glass candy remix)
kanye west - welcome to heartbreak (night plane remix)
nine inch nails - down in it
motor city drum ensemble - stripped down
killing joke - almost red
honey bane - guilty (jd twitch edit)
leda - endless race
tiedye - nothing else matters
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if i had a heart: a new solo track by the singer from the knife, singing the tin man's solitary 3am lament.
the belldog: one of my favorite eno vocals tracks, a collab with cluster. a haunting interlude about technology and transformation. because you see, there are two kinds of art, the kind that tells humanity about itself, and the kind that reminds humanity that it is actually at its core something other than itself, that the essence of the human is inhuman.
walls of stone: inspired by a late night trek through the financial district, with ghostly facades of financial institutions staring back at me.
clown (glass candy remix): cool remix by johnny jewel, nicely italo with good vocal line.
welcome to the heartbreak (night plane remix): my detroit version. every piece of art has two parts, it has itself, and it has that penumbra of possibilities around it that were never realized, but that glow like a halo. it's the dj's job to capture and engage with this halo, like those old photographs that claimed to capture a person's aura around them. in a good mix, the halos from two songs, when placed together, appear to be of matching colors. that's how I feel about placing kanye next to nin. In other words, if you think about it, 808's and Heartbreak = Pretty Hate Machine. enough said. the move from kanye's crying robot to trent's screech is really satisfying.
guilty (jd twitch edit): another of optimo's awesome punk edits. This is some more echoe-y postpunk with sexy girl gasps.
endless race: much sought-after cosmic disco track by one of the dudes from tangerine dream. far-out twisting outer-space acid synth with ghostly girls riding high. the guys from bumrocks put this on their new el bum comp.
nothing else matters: lars, james and crew set off towards the sun as it disappears over the ocean.
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.
