Been another little while. Suppose I've been too busy scouring other blogs n such to even tend to mine, not that I ever thought I would. Sure, in a way, this is really just a bulletin board for me to put things up for friends n family, but in me there is a desire to put something up that would benefit the greater internet community. Hence, my refraining from doing the already did.
Anyway, coinciding with my ever-growing addiction to eBay and affiliated auction sites, I came across a cheap copy of Bobby Brown's 3rd LP "Prayers Of A One Man Band" from 1978. The title of the record sums it up nicely though, seeing as this guy was a real deal one man band street performer from the west coast. A mystic and all around new age'r, his first album was a highly conceptual and very meditative record whereas his 2nd was just a live album. This one is more quirky, dance-y, and sort of lovable. One standout track is "Hawaii Nei I'll Miss you", which I came across in Tim Koh's Flying & Falling mix. A great mix which you can find yet again at lovefingers.org.
Making a mix, I swear. If you've been within ten feet of me over the past few months, you've probably heard me talking about one of my favorite groups, Further.
Comprising of mainly two rad bros, Darren and Brent Rademaker, and one Josh Schwartz, these guys are so fun to listen to. I initially found out about them through Beachwood Sparks, whose Brent is the radster that I mentioned just a second ago. I was in my high school library, scrounging YouTube for any Beachwood material that I could find and came across this video for Further's California Bummer and nearly flipped a shit. The energy, the twang, and the shots of double Rickenbackers clearly jangling out on the beach. Who the fuck takes their Rickenbackers to the beach? These guys clearly do, or at least did back then before they gave up stripes for stirrups. Speaking of which, if you haven't heard Beachwood Sparks or the Tyde, you should check them out. Both of them provided some really good vibes towards the end of high school and still do now; the former having just played a great set at Bowery Ballroom last month (which I caught with Sezbo) and the latter borrowing heavily from awesome indie group Felt, who are a whooole different story.
Anyhow, th' Tube offered cuts from three separate albums of theirs, so I was lucky enough to have a taste of three crucial releases from their catalog, Griptape LP, Sometimes Chimes LP, and the Grimes Golden EP. The first two I got my hands on in Brussels and have yet to wrap my head around completely. Don't get me wrong, quite a few of the tracks on these albums are some of my favorite songs ever, but if they weren't entirely copping the sounds of Dino Jr, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Guided By Voices, and literally covering an Unrest tune, they were making a shitload of noise. Too much maybe. But the fact that I dropped all of those names is an essential element in this band's story. They took all of these groups' sounds and added their very personable touch to them. My most current statement on the matter is that in a parallel world, none of those bands would exist, and Further would be the lone substitute. Ha!
Sure, it's hard to imagine a world where there's no Kracked, Summer Babe, or Richard Edson on drums, but sometimes I feel like I am one of the few people in this world who even knows of Further. I hope for that to change. Over the course of these next few days I'll be uploading what I do have of theirs, but right now I offer you the Grimes Golden EP.
This EP sees (hears) the group getting it just right. Unlike the 26-track Sometimes Chimes LP that preceded it, this album originally had 9 wonderfully noisy pop tunes to its name. The slice at Wilfully Obscure offered this EP as well, but not with the 4 I-talian bonus trax that I've got. If I'm not mistaken, I think I downloaded this off of Oink before it got busted (I was a member for one glorious month), or my friend Chris hooked it up. Altogether, this is one of the most expressive, noisy pop records I have ever had the privilege to hear and it is forever a part of my lexicon. I kinda feel like a chump, what with offering this superior record first, but I feel like if you receive this immediate treatment from the group, you'll be more inclined to explore the other records.
01. california bummer 02. inert pieces 03. quiet riot grrrl 04. summer shorts 05. artificial freedom 06. 20 pages 07. this time around 08. teenage soul 09. ...v.s. (livingston seagull) 10. badgers 1 (extra track on italian release) 11. don't know how long (extra track on italian release) 12. 6 gun territory (extra track on italian release) 13. j.o. eleven (extra track on italian release)
Friends, the time has finally come for me to offer you something really special. The story goes like this...
Back in February, within the first couple of weeks my wonderful (and continuing) work experience, the boss put on a great record that I knew I had to have. Not only would its sound have a nice little influence on my taste and my own music for the months to come, but I envisioned listening to these tunes in my favorite environment, Brussels in the summertime. Between not being able to find this shit ANYWHERE, not in record shops or the on the internet, I had the chance to put this album off and not wear it out up until now. That's because I finally got my act together and forced a new friend to help me manage my first vinyl rip.
BUT, as this is fucking lame shit, of course the vinyl rip was a semi-tone below normal pitch, thwarting my efforts to provide you with an exclusive musical offering. Well, FUCK IT. I just found a CD copy of the same goddamn record here with additional tracks! I strongly suggest checking out the rest of the great New Zealand albums that this person has to offer, but for now, I am gladly hosting this incredible record on my on dime right here.
The cover of the record that I would've presented before you had I ripped her right
In my opinion, every track on this album sounds like a small victory. Simply triumphant.
It's my birthday today and everything is alright. Nothing spectacular, but just chill. The NYC heat laid off a bit today, which was a treat.
I really have been listening to tons of great music and would love to share it all. Blog ethics, strange internet connections, indecision, and awkward planetary alignments are keeping me from unloading a shitload of this material, including older mixes, new mixes, new original material, and crazy good albums that I've come across. However, a new little widget is giving me the opportunity to keep things interesting in the interim, and thankfully so.
So yeah, today I offer you a tune from the fabulous Poets. Pete wised me up to these guys after hearing them on one of the many Pebbles compilations; further exploration led me to The Rising Storm's entry on the group, which piqued my interest.
The Poets were an incredible Scottish 60's band who, under the management of Andrew Loog Oldham, were amongst greats like the Beatles and the Stones. And not just by way of their manager's caliber/clients, but in songwriting as well, IMHO. Definitely more beat-oriented and unconventional, The Poets' tunes were definitely little explorations of instrumentation and the studio as well, but built upon some pretty solid vocals and melodies. I suppose it sounds more dated than the Beatles' shit, but arguably way more exciting considering the context and comparisons!
The following tune isn't one of their more adventurous or exotic numbers, but just seems super sweet and kind of describes my pending return back home. I just wanted to introduce this fine group to you so that when we're hanging around, sparking and drinking, you can say "Hey, put on some of that Poets shit you were blogging about, you twitty twat". "Ok, mom".
Been a while. Not too cool, but this is Fucking Lame Shit. I've kind of been sitting on this mix for a while and it finally started getting uncomfortable. First things first - I love mixes. Ever since I heard the last 40 mins of DJ Shadow's BBC Radio 1 essential mix, which comprised of near untraceable, practically nameless incredible psych with it's eery, religious overtones not to mention the flawless transitions therein, I was in it for good.
The notions of band names, personas, and time periods just seem to vanish in a mix, which was a new and refreshing concept to me when I first got turned onto the whole idea - the songs that once had a context within all of the above mentioned traits of a musical group were place on their own in an entirely new context, where the song had to speak for itself. When it's placed in between the right tunes, a song can take on a new appeal, and if it's done right, the listening experience can be spine-tingling. Another one of the merits of a good mix is that you might not just discover a new favorite band, but dozens of them. Ok, perhaps the song that made it onto the mix was the best that a certain group had to offer, but it always got me doing a fair amount of google detective work.
The people at online stations like Dublab, Viva Radio, and at blogs like Lovefingers all value and offer great mixes, the kind that have kept me looking and listening for more. Some of your favorite musicians in this day and age might take it upon themselves to put mixes out there, and recently sites like muxtape.com have allowed pretty much anyone with an internet connection to host their mixes freely on the 'net. If you dig electro parties or electronic music in general, it is very likely that you appreciate a good mix; great DJs can keep a party going for hours based on their mixing strengths, and it always gets the crowd off to hear one of their favorite jams creeping up on them at the end of a groovy beat, only to lead into the song that they've been waiting to hear all night.
Enough obvious ramble though, I'd hate to place too much emphasis on the mixer, although I tend to idolize them myself - I suppose it just makes me happy to hear that some folks have a startlingly unique ear for music. Yet tons of people, musicians or not, make mixes, for friends or lovers, to capture some moment in time. What I'm putting out here for you is a sort of a collection of songs that could capture this moment in time for me, but I am really trying to make something that both you and I can listen to and associate with good days to come. I call this series No Ego because I'm just trying to cut the bullshit. I believe that these are good songs, not exactly obscure, but rather a little less commonplace. Of course I hope that these songs sound new and interesting to you, but also easy to tune into and eventually, get lost in.
This mix focuses on love. I could've gathered tons of love songs, or just picked a bunch of songs that concern love and lovers. Wait, no I couldn't have, because there are a million fucking songs about love, it's practically never ending. Alright then, instead I just chose some tunes that sounded like love, hence the title. Whether in the lyrics or the music itself, these songs just sound like love to me, simply put. Either totally free, uppity, or miserable, these things all come with love in the sense that they are that much more expressive than your average rocky, droney, or dancey song. Don't get me wrong though, background music is something I can appreciate too.
Well, I already have a couple more stewing around in my head, but I'm not about to haphazardly rush them along their respective thematic guidelines, so be patient. The time has come for myself and all of you to be legit and rad, so I'll stop myself here because I'm not about to demystify anything more than I already have.
I guess you should know by now that a lot of the albums that might make their way onto this blog are in fact lifted from other blogs, specifically ones that deal with obscure or out of print records. While I wish I was rad enough to be the first and only person to ever bring these albums to your attention, I can only say that I owe a lot of my own listening pleasure to the great folks who go out of their way to post about these things before I ever knew about them and therefore educating me. This helps me help you, no? Well, something else I wanted to express was how no matter how badly I want to catch all of you up to all of the things I've heard and indulged in since I left Brussels, I am just too lazy for that and probably lost track. Nevertheless, the music that means a lot to me will end up here regardless, but for now you'll just have to dig on what I'm digging on in the present.
So, this next entry concerns itself with an album that relates to the above paragraph in that yesterday, some guy on some blog was hyping this album that I had only heard about a few times and how it's incredible and way underrated - within minutes I found it on another blog and there you have it, well, actually we'll all have it. The album I'm talking about is Skip Spence's "Oar" from nynteensixtyeyght.
Skip Spence was a groovy California slice by way of Canadia and was the original drummer for Jefferson Airplane. When he got tired of hanging out with hippies that couldn't get over how trippy psychoactive substances were, he turned to the guitar and started another group with some other cats called Moby Grape. Apparently their first album is the quintessential document of the true San Francisco psych scene of the late 60's. Can't wait to get my hands on that shit...
Anyhow, the Grapes all did way too many drugs and it hit Skip the hardest - he flipped out and came after a couple of his bandmates with an axe. He got busted for that, and when presented with the choice of going to prison or to a mental institute, he chose the latter. During his 6 month-long hospitalization period, he conceived what was to become Oar, which is his one and only solo album. As soon as he got out of the hospital, he asked Columbia records for an advance and a motorcycle so he could make his way out to Tennessee. They met his demands and so he set out to Nashville to record this incredible album in less than two weeks.
Sorry for the long-winded backstory, it's just that this guy deserves just as much as recognition as someone like Syd Barrett for being an acid casualty who practically sacrificed his sanity for such great art (like tons many other great artists did). Plus, he was only 23 when he recorded this; that may not make much a difference to some folks but to me it's kind of fascinating to associate such a relatively young age to something that sounds so ageless. Aged by now, yes, but ageless even more so. Some of the greatest music, in my opinion, falls under this description. Ageless, and timeless at that...
Moreover, it's cool that he used a shitty 3-track recorder to lay these tracks down and therefore was also somewhat of a lo-fi pioneer in a time when other, more notable musicians were dicking around and experimenting in the studio with technology that only got more and more advanced...
You should know that this is the original format in which it was released and not the reissue, which has some bonus tracks. If I ever get my hands on it, I might repost.
I'm glad that I can finally kick this off; although I've seen some of you more recently than others, I can't deny the fact that I've become slightly distanced from some of you and not intentionally so! It's hard to find excuses as to why I've not kept in touch so I'm not gonna try and fall back on any.
Either way, if you're reading this blog, you're all still a part of my life and I can assure you that I'm still me, just slutting it up in a different locale. To those who don't know me personally, just pretend that these posts are void of emotion and ignore the references I make to people and places that are of little to no importance to you. Regardless, I'd like to share a pretty important part of my ridiculous life with all of you - music.
From time to time, I will be updating this blog with another entry and another album, song, or mix that I feel like sharing. The first musical love package I will be presenting to you today consists of a great album from 1966 by five chaps who played together as The Monks. They were some crazy Americans living abroad in Germany as ex-military men who started out playing surf rock and eventually evolved into the totally rad band that laid this fuckincredible album down.
I don't know if this album has been re-mastered to sound the way it does, but I'm more inclined to say that the way these guys approached playing rock 'n roll allowed for a sound that hits so much harder than anything from this period of time, which means a lot to me since I've spent too much time wading through old-school obscurities only to hear limp and muddled byproducts of one music's most fascinating eras - clearly the period before psych knew it was psych and was just bizarre and gritty, duh. N'DURR.
Check out this video to see how real these guys kept it and how they gave these otherwise lifeless Germans a taste of passionate and lively groov. And dig the haircuts!
It has been pretty fun just walkin around NYC for the past few months with these guys providing a kooky and groovy soundtrack to my day-to-day life, so I hope you all enjoy it.
