the music that took my attention in march of 2014 – listen, won’t you?
1. glitch – vitalija glovackyte
2. daddy needs a throne – camberwell now
3. big big blood – la luz
4. the puppet motel – laurie anderson
5. work – lv
6. telephone – bembeya jazz national
7. life i live – ini
8. i – perfect pussy
9. the moving finger – dorothy ashby
10. space invaders are smoking grass – i-f
11. outro – caetano veloso
12. the conversion of j.p. – sun ra
13. ces gens la – jacques brel
14. complicity (lyrical mix) – arto lindsay (spit)
15. the ooli moves – black earth ensemble
16. ikkkyokume – nisennenmondai
17. alice – sunn o)))
18. rainbow – boris with merzbow
19. summer day reflection song – donovan
20. wild winter – adele bertei and anubian lights
unhelpful notes
vitalija glovackyte composed this piece, glitch. it’s awesome. it’s heavy. she is a lithuanian composer based in manchester and you can hear more of her music here.
camberwell now is the group that charles hayward put together after this heat finished. i always thought this heat and charles hayward were experimentalist post punk types with prog tendencies. then i found out that he was the drummer in quiet sun. a full on prog band featuring phil manzanera before roxy music. he also was in gong for a bit, apparently. so i guess i had it backwards a bit and hayward was more of an experimentalist prog type with post punk tendencies.
i don’t have much knowledge of laurie anderson. but after hearing this song, i want to learn more. this one is so good.
when i first heard work by lv i had that reaction of just having to stop everything and listen to it a few times. it’s a perfect track. if you’ve been listening to radio loways for a bit, you’ll prolly realize that i am a huge fan of the chord progression in a lot of drum and bass tracks. and this is a perfect example of that. also the minimal arrangement. kind of a deconstructed version of the genre. kind of. and that floating sliding synth melody. nice.
telephone. the drums and guitar are everything!
i by perfect pussy. this is one of my favorite songs of all time right now. i could listen to this one for ever. this is what should be on top 40 radio. this is what should be on “modern rock” radio. that is some hook ass shit for real.
true story. for a long time i thought space invaders are smoking grass was by anti-pop consortium. despite the fact that it doesn’t sound like anti-pop at all. i thought it was some sort of weird one-off electro side project sort of thing. this was all because the mp3 files i had of this were all attributed to anti-pop consortium. then i took a minute to actually look it up and discovered it was by i-f. so apologies to i-f for never giving him proper attribution in my mind when i thought of this song.
i was introduced to caetano veloso by my college spanish professor who was something of a music nerd. he gave me a tape of livros and it gently blew my mind. then i got into his older stuff as i could find it. my favorite will always be araçá azul, but most of his output is solid – except for his soft jazz lite shit. that’s awful. but this is track is off a newer album that features his son on it. can you imagine if you opened up your mouth and caetano’s voice came out of it? how amazing! there are a few people like that for me.
jacques brel is like 60 percent cheeseball, but 100 percent amazing. there are more than a few clunkers in his catalog – have you heard his man of la mancha? it is fucking awful! red ships of spain awful. awful awful. his catalog is so vast though that he has a ton of awesome songs too. but this one is hands down my favorite. the bass and piano two note/chord descending action. minimal subdued perfection. and then the brel swell. and then receding.
i picked up this album hyper civilizado at either crow’s nest or tower records when i was doing undergrad at columbia college. one of the tracks off of it was on a jungle sky compilation and i thought it was good and once i got the full remix album and it went into heavy rotation immediately. i thought this version of complicity was creepy and beautiful. it’s definitely the best of the remixes and they are pretty much all good. i then went out and got arto lindsay’s original album mundo civilizado and was kind of disappointed. it was good, but not what i was hoping for. it kind of grew on me for a bit. but ultimately i feel like some of arto’s later/current stuff is too adult contemporary and npr boring. which is weird. cuz he is an interesting musician and will still put out jarring noise album skree.
my partner and i went to see nicole mitchell’s black earth ensemble perform this piece at the mca a few years ago and ever since then have been waiting for the release of the piece. and we have been waiting for ever. i assumed it would be a studio recording like the first album in this series – the xenogenesis suite. but it turns out that the album is a recording of that performance at the mca! which rules, cuz this show was amazingly good! the xenogenesis suite takes it’s inspiration from the xenogenesis books by octavia butler. which i read because of the suite. so well done nicole mitchell for turning me on to octavia butler!
nisennenmondai is straight up amazing. unbelievable musicians. i prefer this earlier kosmische inspired raw stuff to the newer stuff but only slightly. the newer material is the three of them making their own version of electronic acid-ish trance music with bass drums and guitar (and some pedals). and they kill it, stupendous!
i was supremely late to the sunn o))) party, but i’m glad i got there. once i realized their version of doom was essentially drone massive, i was hooked. i believe this one is dedicated to alice coltrane. that also helps me get into them.
i only knew adele bertei as the keyboard player in the contortions. i had no idea she was a singer as well and had some hits in the 80s with some decidedly more poppy singles. dig her organ solo halfway through this one cuz she is a fabulous keyboard player. i love her note clusters. a lot.
