From the forthcoming album "Catholic," recorded by Cowley & Socarras in the early eighties but never released until now. Eschewing Cowley's trademark psychedelic disco, pioneered on landmark mixes like Donna Summer's "I Feel Love," "Catholic" pursues an edgy robot-rock sound closer to Gary Numan or Brian Eno.
a serious burner, an infectious, brazen, retro-style house anthem on Cosmo Vitelli's lauded I'm a Cliche label, a classic Chicago track that never was but should have been. Canadians azari & III present you a track that is quite literally, to follow Deleuze, a desiring machine: it churns and grinds and piston-pumps towards an unreachable target of lust: "I'm crazy for your love...but your love is not enough...I'm hungry for the power!"
in this way it's a dance song about dance songs, which are always about making you hungry for the power, inducing desire in you for something inherently sexual but not reducible to purely sexual terms, that obscure object of desire. Get on and ride.
A brief sub-genre of dance music, New Beat supposedly started in Ghent in 1988 when someone played A Split Second's 'Flesh' at 33 rpm instead of 45. The Boccaccio was the famous ground zero for New Beat, "the Panorama Bar of its day." Playing Wax Trax records slowed down does sound like cosmic industrial music, or metal-machine Baldelli. Or some skynet terminators marching through Houston, lubed up on syrup. Dark, druggy, sweaty and robotic. sun papa 3000's latest mix tells you all you need to know - as a certain mr. lench is fond of remarking, keep it slow.
for further research here's a repost of a fantastic new beat comp, one of my favorites:
ridiculously cool late seventies proggy space funk with a soaring riff that sounds like the soundtrack to some lost French rip-off of Star Trek, ie with more skin and cooler boots. one of my favorite jams, recommended if you like floyd, alan parsons, air, bo hansson, wilhelm shatner.
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ordinarily I have a policy against posting the actual cover art to whatever the jam de jour is, because it's boring. It fails to produce any kind of surrealist epiphany or revel in synaesthetic possibility. In this case however, it'd be a shame to not share mandre in his full proto-daft punk glory, that is, emerging like a demigod out of a glowing space vag.
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this song was rather hard to find because it's an instrumental. I heard it several hours ago at Rai Rai Ken, an experience which combined two of my favorite material pleasures: hearing something weird, and eating ramen noodles. It was an "oh shit I know that song..." moment and I had to geek out and ask the waiter what it was. new york city: a bustling shrine to the glories of a chance encounter.
a black 80's-style icey robo-funk tune that could be a Grace Jones jam or something off "Let's Dance." Nona gives a laundry list of possible transformations in the modern age, including sex changes, bionic adaptations.
Fitting for 2009, an era of upheaval and transition. The Obama administration is partly spinning crisis as opportunity: the chance to grasp the turning of history at its axis. The politics of crisis was documented by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine, where she put forth the theory that conservatives in the Bush White House were taking advantage of widespread crises like post 9/11 terror threats and Hurricane Katrina to ram through radical programs in line with Straussin-derived right-wing ideology that they couldn't get the support for otherwise, such as massive privatizations of schools in post-Katrina New Orleans. Needless to say, Klein's theory is cause for alarm. But guess what? the Obama team is branding the economic crisis in similar rhetoric. It's distinctly in line with Klein's shock doctrine. Except rather than the being piloted straight into the jaws of hell by a crack team of Darth Cheney and his death squad of moral sociopaths, the White House is in the hands of the good guys for once. If they can spin the brink of economic ruin into a Newer-Deal era of hybrid cars, socialized health care and fiscal responsibility, so be it, sounds like a shock to the system worth taking.
The topic of each month's player at AC is a carefully guarded secret. It is so carefully guarded, that I myself don't know what it is until about two weeks into the month itself. Those who are truly in tune with the monthly theme's unconscious vibrations, however, are able to jack in to its conceits and respond to them ahead of time. Such is the case with Bret P.'s uncannily prescient post of a video in which fax machines perform a cover of a Radiohead song.
What's effective about this video is not that it's inhuman, but that it's still somehow human. If it was just inhuman, who would care? It's about the persistent trace of the human, how it be displaced, occupy weird territories, be transformed.
On that note, the theme this month, as foreshadowed by Neil Young's Trans, is electronic affairs. We're talking about electronic/non-electronic cross-breeding jungle fever in general - could be, as in the case of Neil Young, Paul McCartney, Carly Simon, and so on, a random dip into electronic waters by a pop artist, could be a weird mash-up, or dub or remix, or a song that serves to indicate how a whole genre took a momentary weird techno detour.
In honor of father's day, it should be noted that the father of techno music is Thomas Edison. And that, as every schoolchild knows, the original matchmaker of music and technology is Pythagoras. Edison invented the phonograph, the most important and modern intersection of music and technology. All recorded music is techno. Sorry. You may think you don't like techno, but you do. Nick Drake's albums are techno, and so are Dolly Parton's and John Fahey's.
A bazillion years ago Pythagoras invented the practice of measuring things scientifically. How so? By measuring the length needed to divide a string into fifths - Pythagora's famous ratio for doing so is 3:2.
Post-Moroder Italian synth-disco genius' third record title track. A concept album about Frankensteinian abuse of experimental science: the lyrics could also allegorically be about the pairing of technology and music:
Once upon a time / Science opened up the door / We would feed the hungry fields / Tilll they could'nt eat no more / But the potion that we made / Touched the creatures down below / And they grow up in a way / That we'd never seen before / Supernature, supernature, supernature, supernature
Here's the awesome/weird video for the song, featuring man-pigs and a rainbow drum kit in the desert, very midnight-movie
3. Ricardo Villalobos - Minimoonstar New track out on Perlon now. Villalobos continues to slay with further post-Fabric mix forays into live drums. really great little accents and riffs, sounds like minimal Bitches Brew.
4. Nico - The Sphinx Not really electronic, but Nico's only venture into anything vaguely danceable, a malevolent, ice-y funk number very much in line with Yoko's Walking on Thin Ice, Sister Midnight by Iggy Pop, etc. Never, ever heard of this until AB showed me Howie B's Fabric podcast and Howie referred to it as "absolute stonkers." BTW Howie B is Scottish.
5. Girls on Top - I Wanna Dance With Numbers If we're talking about cross-breedings and genre flings, mash-ups are kind of cheating, but come on. Whitney mashed on top of Kraftwerk is literally mind-blowing. And Richard X edited it in such a way that the little Kraftian bling bells perfectly match the vocal flow. I can no longer listen to the original versions of either of these tracks. SO EPIC. Really, you need this. Bitte please.
This also might be the greatest look ever.
6. Hercules & Love Affair - Roar From a non-album 12". Way-deep Chicago-housey track featuring highly sexualized moans from Antony, you know, from the Johnsons. Really effective to hear his voice in a techno context.
7. Neil Young - We R In Control - more paranoid synth rockin from Trans. 8. Killing Joke - A Floating Leaf Always Reaches the Sea. An epic dub mix of "Requiem" from their debut album by Alex Paterson from the Orb, who was originally KJ's drum tech. Available on this compilation, which I will post as some point because it is fire.
9. Hi-Fidelity Three - Never Satisfied Twisted, trippy rap-tech interpolation of the Stones classic, taken from the now-lost Beat Classic comp that I so awesomely posted a while ago. Both BC and the ambient comp do stellar jobs of capturing a nascent genre at the period of its wild & woolly inception, before it became a packaged and streamlined framework. In the case of Beat Classic, it was all about the noisy tech-ed up backroom experiments in early hip-hop like Rammellzee's "Beat Bop," evidence of a far-out genre swerve into near-throbbing gristle territory before everything settled down.
10. Boris - Message Japanese noise rockers have a one-night stand with Konono NO. 1 Afro-tronics on this import-only track from their new album.
11. Soft Machine - Soft Space The inspiration for this playlist. Soft Machine is a 70s UK group known for its prog-jazz-rock nerd fusion excursions, so I was pleasantly unsettled to find out that there's this track that had been tacked onto some random live album ("Alive and Well: Recorded in Paris) no jazz or prog trimmings at all, just an anthemic arp-synth voyage, very Moroder.
12. Spacemen 3 - Big City A random synth-pop jam from Spacemen 3, my heroes of drone-psych. Super Krafty work. I was gonna post the video but it's mostly just them jumping around in front of multi-layered projections.
13. Black Mountain - No Hits I like this song. It's from their first record and has nothing to do with the woolly mammoth Sabbath rock sound they're famous for, instead it's a dark almost goth synth jam. Is it coldwave? Does anyone know what coldwave is?
