Hypothetical mixtape 2.07

To these ears, 2018 is off to a relatively quiet start. Okay, the Khruangbin and Nils Frahm albums are definitely keepers, the new Yo La Tengo is just what I didn't know I was waiting for (although it's probably not the best entry point for neophytes), and I am intrigued by the just-released album by Minami Deutch. (Also: "Selectors 5", by Lena Willikens. Yes, that.)

So for the time being we might just plod along with these random roundups of stuff pulled off the internet.

"Could Heaven Ever Be Like This", by Idris Muhammad. As sampled on the Jamie xx album. Except that this in its original form could hardly be improved on. It's got everything you need.



"You", by Chayns. Spelling aside (at least they got the "You"), Chayns got enough right to ensure that "You" sounds as minty fresh as it did on release, fifty years ago. Originally released on (presumably) their own Chayn-Reaction Productions label. Excavated last year, not entirely surprisingly, by a Numero Group sublabel. You can't keep quality buried forever.



"Susan", by The Mauroks. Three seconds in and I'm already hooked. Further details of the interesting story of The Mauroks can be found here.



Bonus: record cover of the month. The guy in the middle front of the picture might be Dave Graney before the fact. Shirt included.


"Paradise", by AMOR. They seem to like the capital letters. They also like to hit a groove and run it out for 14 minutes. I can dig. What may not be self-evident is the involvement of the usually relatively non-linear Richard Youngs.



"Vanishing Twin Syndrome", by Vanishing Twin. First song on the first and (so far) only album by Vanishing Twin. I never find it a problem to hear new music that harks back to the ghostly beauty of Broadcast. (In this case, right down to the cover art.) Of course, Broadcast (and Stereolab, for that matter, who might as well get a mention here) themselves leant heavily on the sounds of the past, so any similarity might be purely coincidental. (But I doubt it, given that the band's bio credits "Phil MFU (Man From Uranus, Broadcast)" -- although I can find no such person connected with Broadcast, unless Phil MFU equals Phil Jenkins, listed on Wiki as drummer in 2003. Who knows? If 2018 has told us anything, it is that facts are slippery critters.)



"Rum Pum Pum Pum", by f(x).  K-pop, innit.



"Aeroplane City", by Sensorama. I would have put money on this being from Japan. I can't really say why. Maybe I was thinking of Cornelius. I was wrong. Germany. Late nineties. No matter. Some of the tastiest electric piano here.



"Coast Ghost", by The Kramford Look. Two guys who have worked for quite a lot of other people forge their own path. Could be a risky move. Seems to work. Conveys something of an aura of Air circa "Moon Safari", which can't be bad.



"Melo De Melo", by Ricardo Villalobos. Twenty minutes of unyielding minimalism from a guy who clearly has an unhealthy obsession with the minutiae of sound. What could possibly go wrong?



"I Will Make Room For You (Four Tet Remix)", by Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Four Tet remixes Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith in such a way that it doesn't really sound a whole lot like either. Well, okay, it does sound a bit like Four Tet. But how he could conjure this out of the source material is beyond me (nb not a diss of the original song).

History lesson

The United States of America, as well as coming up with what must be, in retrospect, one of the least Google-able band names ever, are probably best known today for their self-titled debut album, which was clearly a building block for the Broadcast sound.

Of some marginal interest, then, both to Broadcast fans and to historians of the late sixties (and in particular the narrow, sometimes one-raised-eyebrow quizzical and sometimes (not always intentionally) comedic intersection between the New Yorker magazine and the long-hairs) is this extract from the issue dated 30 March 1968, where one of the mainstays of the magazine, Lillian Ross, writes about going to see The United States of America, an "Electronic Rock Band", perform at Judson Hall.

You're welcome.

Hypothetical mixtape 2.06

Let's just.

"Lord It Over", by Dylan Golden Aycock. You are thinking you could be listening to a Ryley Walker track here. You would be wrong, but not that wrong.



Bonus: here it is, unaccompanied. And at greater length. Whatever works, I suppose.



"High Tide", by Mythic Sunship. More sun-drenched psych-tinged guitar playing here, although on this occasion it might be argued they have drenched themselves in more than just the sun. Oh look, they are from Copenhagen. Perhaps slightly less of the sun, then.



"Working Nights", by The Camberwell Now. From the mid-eighties. Formed by This Heat's drummer. Who knew?



"Born Into The Sunset (Lindstrom & Prins Thomas Remix)", by Temples. I had no idea that L&PT were still working together. Here is the proof. Do they still have that Lindstrom & Prins Thomas magic? They do.



"Hey Benji (Prins Thomas Remix)", by Hatchets. I don't know what Prins Thomas was taking in 2017, but we could all benefit from a work rate like his. Two albums; a "version" of a Dungen album; a bunch of singles; a bunch of remixes. Hey, slow down; you're making us all look bad. There are actually enough really cool ideas on this one remix for anyone else to sit back and think to themselves, not bad, I think I'll take the next decade off. But Prins Thomas is not anyone else.



"Maskindans", by Todd Terje feat Det Gylne Triangel. A kinda sorta cover of an early-eighties semi-industrial electronic pop song a la, I suppose, Depeche Mode. The plot twist here is that Todd Terje has enlisted the original artist to do a new vocal track. This was released in the middle of last year; it was supposed to be from a "forthcoming" LP. We're still waiting.



"Inkjet", by Beatrice Dillon and Call Super. I know nothing whatsoever about this. I was attracted to the seemingly infinite depths of sound. Curiously, though, Beatrice Dillon appeared on a 2013 album with, inter alia, Charles Hayward, from The Camberwell Now (see above). Spooky.



"The Beekeeper (Atella's Sand In Shoe Mix)", by Horixon feat Birsen. Everything sounds better with arpeggiated bass synth.



"Love (Is Gonna Be On Your Side)", by Firefly. If, in 1981, you had hit me up with some contemporary funk action, I would have said get outta here punk. (Actually that's not entirely true: Kid Creole And The Coconuts. Also "The Lexicon Of Love", which this track sounds not unlike at some points.) But 37 years later, this, I would be the first to admit, is precisely as fresh as.



"Come Back Clean (Kaskade's Radio Edit)", by The Crystal Method feat Emily Haines. Everything sounds better when it's sung by Emily Haines. FACT!

Song of the day

"My Trade In Sun Tears", by James Elkington.

It has been weighing on me that I was unable to find a place in my 2017 year-end list for James Elkington's "Wintres Woma". If only a top-10 list could go up to 11, like Nigel Tufnel's guitar amp in "Spinal Tap".

Oh well. Life tends not to be like the movies.

Anyway, just because "Wintres Woma" didn't make the list doesn't mean I can't give it a boost. (To the extent, tending towards the non-existent, that this blog is capable of giving anything a boost.) Admittedly it's a record that looks more backward than forward; but the things to which it looks back are things that are all worth hanging onto. Admittedly, too, there is a particular kind of 3/4-time song that I don't have a lot of time for, of which there are a couple of examples on the album. But the rest of it more than makes up for any slight deficiencies on that score, and anyway I seem to be in the minority here (maybe I was damaged as a small child): Aimee Mann, whom I generally admire, but who I suspect will never again hit quite as hard as she did on "Bachelor No 2", just made an entire album of such songs to fairly universal acclaim.

Maybe, too, his guitar playing at this stage is a couple of steps ahead of his songwriting. But these are early days; and anyway, his guitar playing is at least a couple of steps ahead of many, many things.

The penultimate track on the album, "My Trade In Sun Tears", is a good demonstration of his talents. Which are considerable.

Hypothetical mixtape 2.05

"I'm back in the saddle again ... I'm baaaaaaack ..." -- from a song by Aerosmith.

"Gonzo", by James Booker. Back in the very dim and very distant past, I did a one-hour radio show of a Wednesday night on a country community FM station. It was copious amounts of fun, subjecting the farmers and other unsuspecting locals to sixty minutes of largely post-punk and other anti-social musics. But as an introduction to the show each week, I tried to find something of an instrumental nature, which caused me to range a bit wider than my usual suspects. (You could, of course, cheat, because you were the one setting the rules: "L.A.", by The Fall, for example, is perhaps not strictly instrumental.) The point being, if I were to, by some miracle, find myself in charge of the airwaves again, this would be a no-brainer candidate for starting off my first show.



"It's A Better Than Good Time (Walter Gibbons Mix)", by Gladys Knight & The Pips. Of course, on radio, if you ever needed a toilet break, you would have to find something of a suitable length to cover for you. I wasn't aware of Walter Gibbons back then, but he is, clearly, the right man for the job. Extended disco tracks (and Arthur Russell was perhaps the master of this; as, in a different context, nowadays, is Ricardo Villalobos) play this trick where, around the time a normal song would start fading out, you start to lose your focus, until you no longer even notice that the song is actually still going, until, however many minutes later, the song snaps back into your consciousness just in time for it to end. You can try it with this 12-minute gem.



"Do On My Feet (What I Did On The Street)", by Dewey Terry. From 1972. From an album called "Chief". That's all you need to know. Which is handy, because it's all I can tell you.



"Woman", by Jeff Liberman. At first glance, this sounds like standard mid-seventies blues-rock guitar wankery, but there is something profoundly weird -- if not downright disturbing -- going on that you can't quite put your finger on. (And possibly wouldn't want to.) Bonus: album cover of the month.



"Cajovna", by M. Efekt. A bunch of likely Czech lads hitting a groove circa 1987. We have the collapse of the Iron Curtain to thank for being able to listen to this. Yes, you should be grateful. And if I was still on the radio I would totally be opening the show with this one week. Bonus: seven-inch single cover of the month. Is that too many covers of the month? It is not.



"Mechanical Fair (Todd Terje Remix)", by Ola Kvernberg & The Trondheim Soloists. In which there is absolutely no hammer dancing to be seen. Or heard. (Monty Python humour. Ask your grandparents.)



"Stone In Focus", by Aphex Twin. Having been a disciple of Aphex's "Selected Ambient Works Volume 2" for some years now but not being of a particularly curious disposition, I was (to say the least) surprised to discover this extra track, available only on a couple of random iterations of the album but not (of course, I may be wrong about this) otherwise. That it is entirely gorgeous, albeit in a somewhat cold and harsh electronic way, only makes its absence from my CD that much harder to bear.



"33A1", by John Bender. On the subject of cold and harsh electronics, there is also this. (Relax. It gets warmer after a couple of minutes.) I understand the criticism of "minimal" techno; but I don't accept it. And, while this astounding piece of music predates minimal by, what, 15 or so years, it certainly bears many of its hallmarks, and it hits me in a similar way. Maybe it's just my grounding in seventies dub reggae, but with tracks like this, as with the best dub, it really does feel like less is more. (Hands up, too, if it reminds you of Penguin Cafe Orchestra.)



"Pressing Matters (Robag's Pinvoldex Sull NB)", by The Cyclist. More of those good ol' cold and harsh electronics on display here, but with a lightness of step that you might not have thought possible. This serves as the regular reminder that I seem to require that I need more Robag Wruhme in my life.



"Doctorin' The House", by Coldcut. Because why not. If you were a recording artist, film producer or television showrunner whose work was not sampled in this song, you must have wondered what you had done wrong. (I maintain, somewhat selfishly, and certainly not without reservations, that lawyers have taken a lot of the fun out of modern music. The days that you could pilfer the catalogue freely in order to create new and fresh art were good days.)



"Starry Eyes", by The Records. When oldies radio has songs like this on high rotation, I will be proud to call myself an oldie.

Song of the day

“Turn Around”, by Dungen & Woods.

Dungen are a band that, over time, have perhaps so perfected their own sound as to have become almost invisible. It seems that they may have recognised this, as their most recent releases have been drawn from some incidental music they did for a 1926 animated film, together with an album’s worth of remixes of same from Prins Thomas (admittedly this turns out to be much more Prins Thomas than Dungen).

Woods, on the other hand, are a band that have perhaps so perfected their own sound as to have become, not invisible, but predictable. Their songs tend to inhabit a clearly defined song structure that by now is so embedded in my brain that whenever a new Woods record comes out, it takes me a while to decide whether I like it (so far, so good) because each new song is, in its own way, the same as some other Woods song.

Neither of these things is intended as criticism. Both bands have much still to offer, and I will be more than happy to keep listening. However, possibly the best news so far to have come out of 2018 is that, in March, an EP is coming out that will showcase the results of a 2017 collaboration between members of Woods and Dungen which took place during Marfa Myths. We now have this taster. From the vocals alone, as well as the overall structure, it is easily identifiable as a Woods song, albeit a Woods song that happens to be backed by a particular Scandinavian melancholic psychedelia that, well, I can't really say “you could only get from Dungen”, but that is definitely the Dungen sound. (What is that sound? Imagine if someone spent a career trying to recreate The Zombies' "Odessey And Oracle", only with their own songs.)

I am, I have to say, pretty excited about this.

Song of the day

"Smile", by The Fall.

Even though Mark E Smith went through so many Fall members that if they all turn up to his funeral they will need a bigger church.

And even though Fall albums have appeared on more record labels than you even knew existed.

And even though (not unrelated to the previous point) there is a ridiculous number of rarities collections and live recordings out there, most of which are of dubious provenance and even more dubious quality.

And even though there were more eras of The Fall than there have been of human evolution.

And even though no two Fall fans would ever be able to agree on what were the best of those eras.

And even though the sound quality of the band's John Peel sessions frequently trumped that of the actual records.

And even though, in recent years, Smith has sounded more like a drunk uncle crashing a 21st birthday party than the singer in a rock n roll band.

And even though, looking at recent photos of him, you find yourself wondering how he even made it to sixty.

And even though to be a fan of The Fall meant having the patience to sit through fallow periods, sometimes (depending, perhaps, on where you came in) lasting for a decade or more.

Despite all of these things, for those of us captured by their inexplicable brilliance there remained, to the very last, and, as often as not, contrary to all common sense, a genuine sense of excitement, a thrill, every time a new Fall album landed. Sometimes the thrill might have lasted only until the first three or four songs had been endured; but we never lost that feeling.

Like the singer who pulls the plug on the lead guitarist half way through a song, it feels as if the arc of The Fall has been suspended, suddenly but permanently, while it still had a long way to travel. All we can do now is look backwards; which is not a thing The Fall ever did.

So, "Smile". It beats crying.

(They say that John Peel was The Fall's number one fan and booster. Here is film of him being just that.)

Song of the day

“Holiday House”, by Peter Lillie And The Leisuremasters.

 

I first became aware of what might be called the “Carlton scene” when as a young boy I bought a copy of “Horror Movie”, a seven-inch single by a band called Skyhooks, who had captured the attention of some of the more adventurous boys at Fish Creek Primary School (a pretty small number), largely on account of their smutty lyrics, but, in my case, on account of the sound of the guitars. “Horror Movie” to this day gets my pulse racing, but it was the b-side, entitled “Carlton (Lygon Street Limbo)” that really captured the imagination of a farmboy dreaming of a life of adventure.

A few years later, when I had started to listen to Melbourne’s 3RRR-FM, I found myself drawn to unknown (to me) entities with names like Eric Gradman’s Man And Machine, Whirlywirld, and Tch Tch Tch (easy to pronounce, typographically fiendish to denote: see the embedded graphic below), 

 

under the direction of one Philip Brophy, who would, even later, be an important part of my weekend routine as co-presenter, with Au Go Go Records impresario Bruce Milne, of a wonderfully free-form afternoon radio show on 3RRR called “Eeek!”.

By the time I moved to Carlton, in 1982, direct from Fish Creek, the Carlton scene, if there ever really was one, had already fragmented into several of the many tiny shards that made up the Melbourne post-punk contingent (if Pete Frame was still around to do his Rock Family Trees, this would give him an enormous challenge), and in turn started joining hands with the above-ground.

(For example, at that time there was still a piece of graffiti on a wall in Carlton proclaiming the greatness of The Jetsonnes, who had by then reinvented themselves as Hunters & Collectors; and Ian Cox, who was our Nicholson Street neighbour a couple of years later, had moved away from bands like Essendon Airport (along with Robert Goodge) and Equal Local in order to provide saxophone support for Kate Ceberano in I’m Talking.) (Further research reveals how chock full of Venn diagrams the Melbourne music scene of these times was: Cox also appeared on one song on an album called "Skippy Knows", by Whadya Want?, which also featured, on another track, Michael Sheridan on guitar, thus demonstrating that there was one degree of separation between the pop music of Kate Ceberano and the noiseniks who were released by Dr Jim’s Records (the titular proprietor of which label once appeared on an episode of Rockwiz with, you guessed it, Kate Ceberano). (With one further degree of separation, we can even trace Ceberano to Sydney trio The Necks, as Sheridan also played with Necks drummer Tony Buck in multinational “underground industrial” (it says here) group Peril, another of Dr Jim’s stable of stars.) (Whadya Want? also included David Chesworth, part of the "Clifton Hill scene" and (yet) another member of Essendon Airport, and Philip Jackson, who was in Whirlywirld and Equal Local. I think I'm getting dizzy.) (It goes on: Adam Learner, of International Exiles, who shared a seven-inch single with The Jetsonnes, went on to play with Blue Ruin, one of my gig-going staples of the later 1980s.))

But before I disappear up my own bum entirely -- What? It's too late? Hey, you should see what I edited out -- I should probably get to the point.

Somehow, Peter Lillie And The Leisuremasters make up a disproportionate share of my seven-inch-single collection. (Admittedly, it’s not that much of a collection; it fills a shoe box.) But the two records of theirs that I own continue to get a regular spin at home. It gave me more of a thrill than I expected when I convinced Number One Son to play “Holiday House”, the b-side of one of them, on his own radio show on 2XX a couple of weeks ago. (It was like stumbling upon a photo on the Internet of the Henry Maas-era Black Cat Cafe. I have also done that.)

A little fossicking around reminded me that Peter Lillie, sans Leisuremasters, had already taken up space in the inner recesses of my brain with a song called “Samurai Star”, which, I recently discovered, featured everybody from The Birthday Party who wasn’t Nick Cave or The Paunchy Cowboy. It’s a curious song, sounding, unexpectedly, more like The Sports than like “Hanging Round The House” and “Holiday House” (or, for that matter, “Homicide/Division 4”, the other of their singles that I own). Looking a little further back, it turns out (surprise!) that Lillie was a part of the Carlton scene in his own right, being a member of The Autodrifters with Johnny Topper (another 3RRR lunimary), and, not only that, but being the author of a song that might also lay claim to being the quintessential 1970s Australian song: “The Birth Of The Ute”. And before that, he and Topper were in the Pelaco Brothers, one of the few groups I can think of named after a neon advertising sign, and which also included, amongst its members, one Joe Camilleri, and one Stephen Cummings. (And, while we are here, we should also mention the High Rise Bombers, a group that fragmented into, on the one hand, Paul Kelly and the Dots and, on the other, The Sports (with the aforementioned Cummings).) (A handy musical compendium of the Carlton scene was released a couple of years back under the title “(When The Sun Sets Over) Carlton”, which, over the space of two discs, manages to take you all the way from Daddy Cool to Eric Gradman.)

It wasn’t actually all that hard to convince the lad to play “Holiday House”. I mostly just needed to point out to him its use of the 1970s slang expression “it’s grouse”, meaning really good; and to note that this is the only song I can think of that uses the word, and that I can’t recall “grouse” ever having made a come-back. (It's long overdue.) That, I think, helped make it the type of marginal historical time capsule he seems to find fascinating. The cover design is also of its time; Melbourne’s arty types then were seemingly obsessed with a rose-tinted idea of pre-Whitlam Australian culture, all beach houses, EH Holdens, seashell ash trays and Laminex furniture: essentially, nostalgia for a time that may never have actually existed. (See also the paintings of Howard Arkley.) Musically, too, it harks back to a kind of pre-Beatles Eylsian Field of simpler and better times. But that, too, was the tenor of those times: a post-punk fairyland where former hippies were moving to Belgrave to make experimental music; rockabilly rebels and bluegrass throwbacks crawled out of the least expected corners; and a lanky and intimidating fellow from Caulfield Grammar sat on the steps of the Missing Link record store in Flinders Lane, scaring away potential customers.

Sorry. I’m drifting off again. 

You could have saved yourself a lot of time by just reading this Facebook tribute.

But you should listen to this song. It’s grouse.

Hypothetical Mixtape 2.04

To start this one off, we are jumping back in time to the second half of the 1990s, when Grumpy Warren's Record Paradise was the shopping destination of choice, a place where you might just, if Bruce Milne didn't get there before you, pick up some lovely vinyl specimens from the lounge and library music era. (You also learned that not every Martin Denny record was what you were expecting. So be it.) Those were good times.

"Alcoholic", by The Black Fire. "Cream" was one of a number of Italian library music albums released on, I believe, Flirt Records. The covers of these records (see below) contained some of the best font design this side of a Stereolab record. (It was also released by another Italian label at around the same time with a different cover, striking in its own way but with much more dodgy lettering. See the embedded Bandcamp player.) Whichever cover you prefer, I can't see anybody not fully embracing the sounds within. "Alcoholic", apparently, was used as the opening music for the kung fu film "Operation Cobra". Sounds about right.



"Time", by Ju-Par Universal Orchestra. "Time", as in, "Now is the time for love". How seventies is that? If you were wanting to soundtrack your next fondue party, you need go no further. No extra charge for the tastiest electric piano.



"Melting Pot", by Booker T And The MGs. Not as obscure as the previous two songs, and not exactly coming from the same place, but (a) it's not "Green Onions" and (b) you can surely dig it. "Melting Pot" also existed as a single, but I can't see why anyone wouldn't take the full eight minutes, seeing as how it's on offer. It has quality oozing out of every orifice. Sorry.



"Fly Away", by Hashish. And, to prove that the whole lounge/library flame is still burning to this day -- at least in Sweden -- we have this. 



"Play With Fire", by Takkhalha. What else we like is cover versions of Rolling Stones songs from unlikely locations. Such as Iran. Taken, in this case, from a 2010 Spanish compilation. We are very grateful for their efforts, although you should be aware, as Discogs points out, that "All releases are unofficial".



"Blind Man Can See It (Extended Version)", by James Brown. This is taken from the 2003 reissue of "In The Jungle Groove", itself a compilation of earlier James Brown tracks, put together in 1986 to capitalise, it says here, on JB's status amongst the students of the hip-hop groove. The original "Blind Man" appeared on the "Black Caesar" soundtrack, in 1973. However, at 2 minutes and a bit, it was never going to be enough. Now it is. Also note: the cover of "In The Jungle Groove" was, uh, borrowed for a compilation called "In The Christmas Groove". And with beats this thick it might be Christmas all year round.



"They Came For Us", by Zig Zags. Being a repetitive groove of a very different kind. If you have never found yourself thinking, I wish it was still 1974, then you can probably move to the next track. As for the rest of you: sweet dreams!



"I Only Bought It For The Bottle", by The Orielles. Hey, kids! Punk rock! It looks like a seven-inch single but it is actually a digital file. That's progress, I guess. But wouldn't you want to hold it in your hand, and watch it spinning around on your turntable? A word of warning, though: the chorus is so big it could actually kill you. And don't even get me started on the sound of the guitar. Song of the year? Whoops, too late.



"Desert Raven", by Jonathan Wilson. I guess it must have been around this point that the drugs kicked in. It won't surprise you to learn that Wilson is based in Laurel Canyon. I feel like we've been here before.



"アイレ可愛や", by Mari Hamada. From 1997. With musical accompaniment by Autechre. Yes, I'm as surprised as you are.



"Relax Your Body (Ricardo Villalobos Remix)", by DFX. To my ears, the original of "Relax Your Body", from 1989, sounds largely like something that The KLF did much better. Twenty-seven years later, it fell into the hands of Ricardo Villalobos, who worked his usual dark magic on it, so that, voice-over aside, it bears little or no resemblance to the original track (or to anything else, for that matter). What maintains one's (or, at least, my) interest across its 19 and a half minutes is the recurring, deathly slow sequence of piano notes, which threaten, but never quite manage, to coalesce into an actual melody. If the kind of creepy interior scenes done so well by Urasawa had a soundtrack, it could be that piano.

Song of the day

"California Dreaming", by Denial.

Enough time as passed since the "minimal/synth wave" revival that Veronica Vasicka can now make a dignified re-entry into the world of archival compilation. This she does, early in the new year, with "The Bedroom Tapes". "California Dreaming", by Denial, is the first offering from this new record to be released into the wild.

One thing I can never have enough of is cover versions of "California Dreaming". Still, I have never heard one quite like this. It's like an aural approximation of "The Day The Earth Stood Still", from someone who had never seen the movie but liked the title. Notably, it was originally released in 1982 on Sydney's M Squared label. But I can't say I was ever even aware of its existence. Until now.

Hypothetical Mixtape 2.03

And a one and a two and a one two three four. Yes, it's another random collection of songs found on the internet at one time or another.

"Mamshanyana", by Batsumi. This is labelled as South African jazz. The music was made in Soweto in the dark days of 1974, but (or should that be "because of which"?) it could hardly be more joyous. It also bears a striking similarity to "Astral Weeks", although that must surely be coincidental. And they have a very funky drummer. That often helps.



Bonus: album cover of the month.

"If I Could Tell You", by Nev Cottee. I don't know why this reminds me of "Dark Side of the Moon". But it does. From Nev Cottee's first album, from 2015. He put out another one this year. I really know nothing about him, beyond this song. If this was my day job, I would deserve to be fired.



"Hey Boy", by She-Devils. It's on Secretly Canadian. But they are actually Canadian. Why keep it a secret? This song reminds me of many things. All of them good.



"Shooting Star", by Harper Simon. It is unfathomable to me that this was made in 2009 and not smack in the middle of the 1970s. It is also unfathomable that this is the first song Harper Simon released. In the annals of great debut recordings, this at least deserves an honourable mention. Also: everything sounds better with pedal steel. (Oh, and a trigger warning: Harper is the son of Paul.)



"Spanish Sun", by Sunbirds. In which a German jazz drummer possibly invents (another trigger warning here) "fusion". I highly recommend that you allow yourself to be swallowed up by the wah-wah pedalling, and, of course, the obligatory electric piano. And whatever the heck else is going on here.



"Nite And Day", by Al B. Sure!. I know it's wrong, but I just can't help it. "Nite And Day": it's a little bit Barry White, a little bit Scritti Politti, and a whole lotta eighties. (And yet another trigger warning: the World Trade Centre appears in the video.)



"Psychic Driving", by Soft Metals. So it only took me six years to find this song, even though it presses every one of my buttons. C'mon guys, a little help here.



"Catallena", by Orange Caramel. Well, this is weird. Oh, it's K-Pop.



"Animaloid MV II: Tragic Comedie", by Apogee & Perigee. This, too, may be accurately classified as "weird". It's from Japan circa 1984. Apogee & Perigee would appear to have been Jun Togawa, a musician and performer who, along with the better-known (to me) Phew, provided vocals for an Otomo Yoshihide album, "Dreams", for John Zorn's Tzadik label in 2002. (There's not a lot of John Zorn in this track.) The proto-J-Pop vocals are provided by Miharu Koshi, which allows us, as we like to do, to provide a connection to the seemingly ubiquitous YMO, as she has worked with Haruomi Hosono, whose name also appears in the credits of this LP (which, it would appear, is a concept album about two robots who travel through space with their dog).



"Straight For The Sun", by Yorishiro. Yorishiro sounds like a Japanese name, but these days who can tell? Bandcamp says that he/she/they are from Madrid, Spain. You know what? It doesn't matter. Chill. Which is what these sounds would ask you to do.



"9 Elms Over River Eno (The Field Remix)", by The Orb. And speaking of chill. The Orb, latterly of Kompakt, continue to operate in their own, uh, sphere, seemingly untainted by the outside world. Here, an external influence sneaks in to mess with them, in the guise of The Field, who has been relatively quiet of late. The gorgeous little melody line, which is hinted at in the original but drawn to necessary prominence in this remix, might as well have, as the name suggests, been collected as it floated down the river Eno (albeit at a faster clip than Eno would have sent it off at).



"In The Air", by Michele Mercure. A 2017 reissue of an obscure 1986 album reveals much that possibly sounds better today than it did then. Has anyone ever considered why the rise of crystalline synth sounds, MIDI, and digital recording techniques, coincided with the drop-off in Brian Eno's solo work? Maybe, as with the more or less contemporaneous introduction of digital methodologies to dub reggae, he thought it had all become too easy, thus taking all the fun out of it and giving rise to dangerous "what's the point" kinds of thoughts. (Of course, Brian Eno has latterly been very much back in the game, with, in particular, "Lux" and "Reflection" (and, maybe his crowning achievement, the iPad edition of the latter, which allows Eno's unmistakable ambient sounds to continue literally forever, as one senses they were always designed to do).)



And we finish this mixed bag of goodies, as we sometimes like to do, with a trio of fine Jamaican dub reggae tracks from the latter half of the seventies. There's not much that can be said here; it's all good.

"Plantation Heights", by Dillinger.



"Don't Cut Off Your Dub", by King Tubby And The Aggrovators.



"No, No, No", by Augustus "Gussie" Clarke.

Song of the day

 "Maria Tambien", by Khruangbin.
 
If you are one of the (increasingly fewer) people who could afford to overindulge during the Christmas season, this song is presented to you as something of a palate cleanser. Enjoy. In moderation.

Of the year 2017

So I have been putting off doing this post, in part because I can't quite justify including "A Deeper Understanding", by The War On Drugs, and I keep thinking that if I listen to it one more time its mysteries will surely become clear to me.

It still hasn't happened yet. Maybe just one more listen ...

It's weird. I fell head over heels for "Lost In The Dream" the first time I heard it. What's the difference? I don't know. Somehow this one feels more like the sum of its parts than the massive achievement that those parts seem to imply.

So "A Deeper Understanding" gets its own category. I don't know: Asterisk of the year?

Meanwhile it has been one of those years where the quantity (and quality) of essential new music is overwhelming. Certainly it is impossible to reduce it all down to ten albums. And yet that is what we are here to do.

Ten Albums Up On Top

"american dream", by LCD Soundsystem. But I already told you that.
"Unfold", by The Necks.
"Hot Thoughts", by Spoon.
"Reassemblage", by Visible Cloaks.
"50", by Michael Chapman.
"Kelly Lee Owens", by Kelly Lee Owens.
"Modern Kosmology", by Jane Weaver.
"Crack-Up", by Fleet Foxes.
"Compassion", by Forest Swords.
"Haxan (Versions By Prins Thomas)", by Dungen.

And then we also have ...

Revenge Of The Beloved Legacy Acts

"In Between", by The Feelies.
"Slowdive", by Slowdive.
"How Did I Find Myself Here?", by The Dream Syndicate.
"Silver / Lead", by Wire.
"Reflection", by Brian Eno.

Seven Songs

"Only Once Away My Son", by Brian Eno and Kevin Shields.
"Legend Of The Wild Horse", by Emily Haines And The Soft Skeleton.
"French Press", by Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever.
"Party", by Aldous Harding.
"Thirty", by The Weather Station.
"Hazefield", by Ikonika (with Jessy Lanza).
"Happiness (24 Inch Version)", by Crooked Man.

New Old Music

That would be "Hitchhiker", by Neil Young.

(Although I am also very much enjoying the greasy-hair-and-body-odour 1971 vibes emanating from the latest "Warfaring Strangers" compilation, "Acid Nightmares"; and I have put aside for Christmas, unheard as yet, the Light In The Attic compilation of late sixties / early seventies Japanese folk and rock music, "Even A Tree Can Shed Tears", which I have sufficiently high expectations for that I am confident they can never be met. (Why do I keep doing that?))

Films

"Paterson".
"Thor: Ragnarok".
"Logan Lucky".

Books

Because I have found myself once more making slow (but enjoyable) progress through Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Trilogy" (the end is in sight!), I haven't read very much other than High Court judgments and page after page of the New Yorker this year. Nevertheless, two graphic novels stand out:

"Hostage", by Guy DeLisle.
 
"My Favourite Thing Is Monsters", by Emil Ferris.
 
Even (or maybe "especially") if you have been reluctant to pick up a "comic book for adults", I urge you to read both of these books. I don't think either of them could exist in any other form, and the stories they tell deserve to be read.

And with that, I bid you adieu.

For now.

Songs of the day

“Memphis, Lancashire”, by Jack Cooper.

”Cremated (Blown Away)”, by The Proper Ornaments.

Hands up if you like your pop jangly. So, that’s all of you. As I thought.

A bit of history. In the shape of a fairy tale. Which is appropriate, given that every time I hear something new by these guys I have to pinch myself to check if it is real.

Once upon a time there was Veronica Falls. (“Beachy Head” I have written about here.) They released two albums. They also released, I was recently surprised to discover, two sets of cover versions, tracing many parts of the rock’n’roll map, from The Rolling Stones to The Verlaines, and putting their own distinctive stamp on all of them.

While touring, James Hoare from Veronica Falls met Jack Cooper from Mazes. The reverb fairy waved her magic wand, and they formed Ultimate Painting, a band whose sonic palette conveys more than a passing nod in the direction of The Velvet Underground, but given the way these two gents have with a melody, every song of theirs has thus far been both a surprise and a delight.

And so we arrive at the tumultuous year of 2017. We could probably all have done with a new Ultimate Painting album, but it was not to be. Instead, Jack and James cleaved themselves apart so that between them they could give us the healing balm of not one but two albums — “Sandgrown”, a Jack Cooper solo album, and “Foxhole”, by another of James Hoare’s many bands, The Proper Ornaments.

Neither of these albums is likely to appear on anybody’s 2017 best-of lists, but I defy you not to feel better about pretty much everything after listening to them. Maybe they should be available by prescription.

Bonus beats: Veronica Falls’ take on The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s “Eighteen Is Over The Hill”.

Song of the day

"Fallin' Rain", by Link Wray.

This would have been a fair pick for song of the day anyway, given the recent high levels of precipitation across the south east of the country. But it also, lyrically and perhaps also sonically, captures the mood of these strange times in which we find ourselves.

Song of the day

“It’s A Long Way There”, by Little River Band.

 

There is an Apple Music playlist called “I Miss The Seventies”. The more I listen to it, the more I am inclined to think that this might be true.

It has also caused me to wonder whether I should have taken Little River Band more seriously.

Maybe they were two bands in one: the purveyor of lowest-common-denominator singles (if I never hear “Help Is On Its Way” or “Happy Anniversary” again I won’t be disappointed); and the classy "AOR" unit exemplified by “It’s A Long Way There”. (Actually that doesn’t work: “It’s A Long Way There” was also released as a single. But the single is only half as long as the version that opens their debut album. The extra length, I think, takes the song from good to great, while also serving as an advertisement for what they thought they could achieve.) The question being: what had I been missing?

It was with some disappointment, therefore, that I listened to the rest of their first album, and discovered that it is, by my own calculations, eight parts dross to one part diamonds.

I will say this, though: guitar solos were better in the seventies.

Song of the day

"Get It Up For Love", by David Cassidy.

So often, the frustrated "teen idol" changes tack in the interests of demonstrating some new-found maturity. So often, such attempts are, in their own way, no more listenable than the stuff they made their name with. "Teen idol" is maybe the toughest pigeon-hole to fly out of, and it was perhaps inevitable that David, like so many others before and since, never really did.

This, however, is a David Cassidy song I can get behind.

Song of the day

"Compared To What", by Della Reese.

I only know one Della Reese song. (Shame on me.) But what a song.

Della Reese. Makin' it real from 1931 to 2017.

Song of the day

“Graveyard”, by Dead Moon.

 

I have a Dead Moon memory. It has to be false, because the dates don’t add up. Or it might be two memories rolled into one. Or my head might be all messed up. Too much Dead Moon will do that to you.

So anyway, it goes like this.

Back in the summer of 1987-88, when I was living in a miner’s cottage in Korumburra, a house with ceilings so low I had to duck whenever I walked through a doorway, a house that I managed to cover every surface of with my records and comic books, a parcel landed on my doorstep. It was a parcel from the United States, stuffed full of records that Doctor Jim, medical-man-about-town, purveyor of records of quality and distinction, and my good friend, had bought on what I think was his inaugural record-buying jaunt to the US. I wasn’t immediately sure why he would have sent them to me (maybe he didn’t want them falling into the dubious hands of the shoeless man-in-black known only as Moose, who if I remember rightly -- which, again, I might not -- was his housemate at that time), but after pondering the question for a couple of days I decided somebody might as well be listening to whatever was inside, so I opened it and was on my way.

My memory tells me that the first two Dead Moon albums were in the parcel. That can’t be right, because one of them only came out in 1989. And I can’t verify when in 1988 the first one came out, but for it to have been included it must have been released somewhere around 1 January.

Whatever. Somehow or other I was introduced to Dead Moon. And somehow or other Doctor Jim was involved. In the context of the late 1980s, it was, to say the least, an eye-opening experience. The cover and the labels were all in black and white. The recording was in mono. (Mono! At the height of the digital/CD era.) The music seemed to have taken a long running jump from 1968 and flown non-stop to 1988. “In The Graveyard” is a fine album. Dead Moon were a fine band. “Graveyard”, the first song on that album, might as well have been The 13th Floor Elevators. (That is intended as a compliment.) They started as they meant to go on.

Rest in peace, Fred Cole. Your work here is done.

Chicks with machines

Chicks with machines are where it's at.

Viz.

"Black Origami", by Jlin.

Here is a record that demands of even the seasoned music listener a mind that's open to new ways of doing things. It is born out of "dance music" but seems (to me) to have more in common with some of the newer composers and other folks mucking about with the pristineness of digital sound. It doesn't have the immediate human warmth of, say, a Fennesz, coming from more of a maths-and-science tip, and working exclusively in a sound-world that would be unrecognisable to someone teleported from the pre-Robert Moog era, but a bit of digging beneath the surface suggests that there is a person in there somewhere, pulling on the levers. Try "1%".

"Distractions", by Ikonika.

This is Ikonika's third album. Like Jlin, she seems to appeal (or at least has in the past) to the kind of person who writes for The Wire magazine, but unlike Jlin, she is also comprehensible to your older blogger. Like, hey, you can tap your feet. Well, sometimes. Note, in particular, the last track on the album, "Hazelfield", which features on vocals the unmistakable Jessy Lanza. There. That got you interested.

"Dust", by Laurel Halo.

Laurel Halo, like Ikonika—and Jessy Lanza—is a Hyperdub recording artist. Like The Go-Betweens (now there's a comparison I bet you weren't expecting), each of her records to date seems to have been an inverse/negative reaction to the one that came before it—bouncing between lyrical pop music, hard-edged beats and obtuse abstract expressionism. On this new album, though, the experimental and the human take roughly equal prominence, sometimes within the one song. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "Jelly".

"Halo", by Juana Molina.

And then there is the new album by Juana Molina, the (it says here) former television comedian who converted to the more treacherous path of experimental electronic musician at some point in the 1990s and, perhaps because she liked what she heard or perhaps just to piss people off, stuck with it. I'm not entirely sure I can hear incremental development in what she has done across her several albums to date—she seems to have been one of those lucky people who find their sound straight away—but it's so appealing, and open ended, that her career, if that's what it is, would appear to have some way yet to run. Strictly speaking she may not entirely fit here, as her palette is not limited to machines (for that matter nor is Laurel Halo, if you check the credits, but you could have fooled me), but everything, even her voice, is so heavily treated that you would be hard pressed to tell which is which. One could more or less pick any song off the album at random. Here is "In The Lassa".

"Ariadna", by Kedr Livanskiy.

Not every Russian is up to no good. I seem to recall that Kedr Livanskiy appeared on one of my hypothetical mixtapes a while back. The new album of hers, which I am still in the process of absorbing, is at the very least notable for including "ACDC", a song that features British national living treasure Martin Newell. No, I can hardly believe it either.

"Kelly Lee Owens", by Kelly Lee Owens.

But the pick of the bunch, and one of my favourite albums of the year, is this one. Yes, it is "electronic music", but it is electronic music with a beating human heart. Think all the way back to Kraftwerk. Think back not quite so far to Telefon Tel Aviv, say, or Junior Boys, or Darkstar, or Andy Stott, or Forest Swords. There is nothing abstract or intractably "difficult" going on here, only good old-fashioned music. Not your grandparents' music, maybe not even your parents', but yours. "Arthur" might be the song that everybody has been talking about (and you can't help thinking that Arthur himself would be looking down approvingly), and "Anxi" might burn with the power of one thousand suns, but I am taking you right to the end of the record, and the ten minutes that make up "8". It's like being submerged in a warm bath of zeros and ones.