EcieShow Music

Showing posts with label mashup/sound collage. Show all posts

"Another Goddam DEATH Dedication"

R.I.P. Don Joyce of Negativland.

The legendary sound collagist/radio mastermind/culture-jammer has joined Snuggles.

If you didn't download the "Helter Stupid" show that I posted last year, a bootleg with excellent right-off-the-mixing-board sound quality, now would be the time to check it out:

Negativland Live - "Helter Stupid Tour" 1989

Christianity is Stupid! This video is GOOD:

TRIBUTE TO PINK FLAMINGOS

Donald Featherstone, the appropriately-named creator of those plastic reproductions of our pink feathered friends, has just passed away at the age of 79. As if being the father of the world's most notorious lawn ornament wasn't eccentric enough, Featherstone and his wife were also known for always wearing matching outfits! Now that is just the sort of weird, goofy, good ol' American trash culture that John Waters immortalized in his 1972 film.

If you haven't seen "Pink Flamings," perhaps the ultimate cult movie, I sure as hell ain't gonna tell you about it. Let's just say that even tho I only saw it once - and this was back in the '80s, when the earths' crust was still cooling and dinosaurs walked the earth - a mere glance at the song titles of the soundtrack recall images that are permanently seared into my brain. So let's pay tribute to Mr. Featherstone with the suitably trashy soundtrack of '50s/60s rock, r'n'b, and easy-listening oldies that Waters used to underscore his characters foul (not to mention fowl) behavior. Some of these songs are as insane as any crazed early rock (e.g.: "Chicken Grabber," "Surfin Bird") while others, like the perfectly presentable "Happy Happy Birthday Baby," are used as ironically innocent counterpoints to the on-screen depravity.

Plus! At no extra cost to you! Other "Pink Flamingos"-related audio oddities thrown into the file:

- Edith Massesy's single, which featured her "singing" a cover of the Four Seasons' "Big Girls Don't Cry," and a lovely original, "Punks (Get Off The Grass)." Massey had moved to the Venice Beach neighborhood of Los Angeles, and her thrift store was a popular hangout for local punks and weirdos, who recorded this with her in 1982.

- Divine "You Think You're A Man" (7'' version); S/He recorded a surprising amount but I just have this one catchy bit of '80s disco.

- The Illuminoids "Satan Said Walrus Eggs," a mashup from 2007 that mixes Massey's "Pink Flamingo" dialogue with the Beatles, over a stomping beat from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. The Egg Lady meets the Egg Man, with special guest: Satan. One of the members of the Illuminoids was Howie Pyro, who took the name for his super-swell internet show "Intoxica" from one of the songs on this here soundtrack:

"Pink Flamingos" + Bonus Filth

1. The Swag - Link Wray & His Ray Men

2. Intoxica - The Centurions

3. Jim Dandy - LaVern Baker

4. I'm Not A Juvenile Delinquent - Frankie Lymon And The Teenagers

5. The Girl Can't Help It - Little Richard

6. Ooh! Look-A There, Ain't She Pretty - Bill Haley & His Comets

7. Chicken Grabber - Nite Hawks

8. Happy, Happy Birthday Baby - The Tune Weavers

9. Pink Champagne - The Tyrones

10. Surfin' Bird - The Trashmen

11. Riot In Cell Block #9 - The Robins

12. (How Much Is) That Doggie In The Window - Patti Page

Happy Tax Day, America!

Was just gonna re-up both sides of the outsider oddity that is Ah-Ah Allen's "Kick The IRS" single, but why stop there? Behold!

A wee Taxday Mix

Ah-Ah Allen - Kick The IRS
Ah-Ah Allen -Montana I'm So Proud of You
F.U.2 - Tax Exile (late '70s fake-punk)
Lenlow - To the Taxmobile! (classic mashup from 2004: Beatles vs Surfaris vs "Batman" theme)
rx - Taxman Obama (The Prez "sings" the Beatles)

My fellow Americans! Remember, April 15 is the day to show Uncle Sam your love.

We'll Be Right Back After These Brief Messages...

Let's get commercial...

Back in 2008 we posted a hilarious radio spot from the conservative religious group Focus on the Family responding to a law passed in Colorado that allowed trans-gendered people to use public bathrooms. Recently we received this fairly genius bit of animation that illustrates the ad, making it even funnier. It comes to us courtesy of Mutant Lab, who are clearly doing the Lord's work. Work it, girl!

A clever, amusing new music video by Los Angeles rocker Taylor Locke finds the artist tooling around town in a motorized easy chair, the comfy kind one might find in a living room. The video makes it look like a cheesy tv commercial for what I thought couldn't possibly be a real product, but upon further investigation, the website appears to be real. Ok...What could one possible do with one of these things? I doubt that they're street-legal. It certainly does make music videos more interesting (along with the nekkid lady!) The catchy power-pop music is quite good, too.

Sound collagist I Cut People have a mordantly funny new on-line album that slices and dices innumerable American media sound bites, revealing the existential angst, neuroses, and anxieties contained in bland public service announcements, cheerful commercials for medications, news broadcasts, and chat shows. The tracks are brief and the whole thing flies by fairly quickly, but it's not background music. Attention must be paid to catch the rapid-fire edits in such wickedly surreal cut-ups as "Ebola Vacation" and the lewd, rude "Watch Me, Innocence." Listen for free, buy for cheap:

I Cut People: "Miserable Day"
Bandcamp page

We now return you to our usual programming...

The Psample-delic Psounds of Carl Stone's "Four Pieces"

If you think sampling in music means MC Hammer looping "Super Freak," you gotta another think coming: Los Angeles legend Carl Stone has been using custom software to spin complex, beautiful webs out of found sounds since before most people even owned a computer. The closest comparison to another composer one might make would be to John Oswald and his Plunderphonics, but Oswald often hits with an ADD-addled aggressiveness. Stone takes a more trance-inducing path that sometimes approaches Minimalism, but the results are still too thorny to ever function as yoga music.

Track #1 "Wall Me Do" is not, as the title suggests, a Pink Floyd/Beatles mash-up. The title, like most of Stones' titles, comes from an LA area Asian restaurant. It's glitchy electronica, not unlike Aphex Twin, but years before the fact. #2 is pretty funny, slicing and dicing that classical classic "Pictures at an Exhibition" into an increasingly unrecognizable delirium. #3 ("Shing Kee") from 1986 hypnotically loops unidentified sounds (inc female vocals) into dreamy gorgeousness; tho reminiscent of Frippertronics and Steve Reich's early tape-loop works, the gradually unfolding patterns bear the stamp of Stone's original style. Play this with the lights out, glass of red wine in hand. Aaahhh... And #4 is Stone sampling himself, in this case remixing #1. I actually prefer it to #1 - it's all Minimalistic grooviness, but with no predictable looping and phasing.

Carl Stone - Four Pieces (1986-1989)

I was happy to see that Stone is performing live this March 22 with LA Free Music Society vets Tom Recchion and Joseph Hammer. Those two have been using extreme turntablism and tape-loop tomfoolery to great effect for as long as Stones' been tweaking his Macs. Don't think Stone was ever actually a member of the LAFMS, but note that Recchion designed the insert to this album. And the two used to rule the KPFK airwaves in the 1980s with back-to-back (Tuesday night?) shows, Stone with "Imaginary Landscapes" and Recchion's "Soundings II, aka the Tom and Tony Show." Between Stone's alt classical-to-Yma Sumac approach and Tom 'n' Tony's avant-tarde mix of free noise, kitschy thrift-store records, and live antics (e.g. playing the entirety of "Sgt Pepper" on fast-forward when the CD was first released), Young Master Fab's mind was suitably re-aligned. Tom Waits said he wept when he first heard Gavin Bryars' "Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet" (which Waits would later sing) on LA radio in the '80s. 'Twas on "Imaginary Landscapes" - I was listening that night, too.

100 Copies of The Beatles' White Album Playing At The Same Time

Artist Rutherford Chang says: "I collect first-pressings of The White Album and currently own 1,034 copies." As part of his 'White Album' project (which also includes a record store only stocked with copies of you-know-what arranged according to serial number) he somehow got 100 of them to play at once. I wonder how? Sounds quite good tho, like 100 needles were dropped onto 100 turntables at pretty much the same time. Then they slowly go out of phase, like an old Steve Reich tape-loop piece. Surprisingly wonderful, e.g.: "Julia" (end of side 2) whips up a really nice drone. And I hadn't actually sat down to listen to the White Album since I was a kid, so it's also an interesting way to revisit the album.

Four 20+ minute tracks, one for each side of the White Album, plus lots of pics of White Albums in various states of decay:

Rutherford Chang - ~~We Buy White Albums~~ (file removed by corporate Blue Meanies)

Reminds me of another Beatles-related oddity, a very skillfully executed mashup album based on the absurd (or is it?!) premise that someone visiting another dimension where the Beatles never broke up brought back a cassette of one of their later albums. It's actually made up of tracks from various Beatles solo releases. The whole crazy story, and the album download, is available here:

The Beatles Never Broke Up

Thanks to Amadeus, And Count Otto!

Ambient-Abstract-Noise

For those moments when you need to get away from the idea of music as, y'know, tunes, what with all those distracting rhythms, melodies, lyrics and other fancy accouterments, and you just want to, as Cage said, let music be itself: tracks from recommended new(ish)* releases that soothe body and soul in a colorful sonic bath. And by "soothe" of course I mean that this ain't no New Age audio wallpaper, but can get rather dark and weird at times.

27 minutes of: ambientabstractnoise

1. Philip Jeck "1986 Frank Was 70 Years Old" (from "Surf") - Turntableism as ambient sound collage; guest vox from Woody Woodpecker.

2. Back Magic "Future Graves" (from "Chorus Line To Hell") - Duo's guitar/drum lo-fi racket sometimes resembles actual rock music, and quite nice rock music at that; then we get to this chilling instro, based on a keyboard and air-raid siren sound effects; the apocalypse has never sounded so appealing.

3. Carolina Eyck & Christopher Tarnow "10,000 Bells" (from the as yet unreleased "Improvisations for Theremin and Piano, Vol 1") - Another duo, but they're German, and have had music lessons. Eyck in fact, studied under Lydia Kavina, Leon Theremin's grand-niece and former member of Messer Chups.

4. Allen Ravenstine & Robert Wheeler "Nocturne" (from "City Desk") - YES!! The once and future synth wizards of the mighty Pere Ubu have teamed up for two albums ("City Desk" and "Farm Report") of pure unadulterated analogue electro improv sci-fi soundscape loveliness. "At points one or the other musician would leave the room, letting the antique synthesizer fill in his parts until he returned."

5. Chris Campbell / Grant Cutler "Song 2" (from "Schooldays Over") - The all-too-brief album is a meditation on Ewan MacColl's 1961 Irish folk ballad about kids moving straight from school to backbreaking labor; the song is teased apart and beautifully reconstructed on such self-descriptive tracks as "Pump Organ, Gongs, Balloon Bassoons." Marimbas, glockenspiels and kotos also join the keyboards in beautiful melancholy.

6. Chris Campbell "Water Mirror" (from "Things You Already Know") - Campbell's really been hittin' it lately, what with his work for the crucial Innova label, and not one but two excellent recent albums. On this one, a fairly large cast perform both on standard stuff and on invented instruments and oddities like propane tanks, psaltrys, and singing bowls for something in between ambient, minimalism, and freak rock. So nice.

I also quite liked THIS.

* Except for the Philip Jeck which came out in 1998 but I only just discovered it.

Christian Marclay ‎– "More Encores"

I don't recall hearing the word "turntablism" back in 1989 when this album was released, but that's what this is. Needless to say, this ain't no "wiki-wiki-scratch" type stuff. I saw Marclay in performance with Tom Recchion and Toshio Kajiwara in 2003 and it was quite a sight to see records being so creatively abused, e.g.: 8 'tables all playing copies of the same record, with stickers placed on the vinyl so the records would skip at certain points. I wanna do that!

The performance was part of an exhibit of his visual art, which is quite spectacular as well. Witness his giant, useless accordion, or his album cover collages (but what's the middle album in this one, the one in between Michael Jackson and Roxy Music?).

From the liners:

Each piece is composed entirely of records by the artist after whom it is titled.
"John Cage" is a recording of a collage made by cutting slices from several records and gluing them back into a single disc.
In all other pieces the records were mixed and manipulated on multiple turntables and recorded analog with the use of overdubbing.
A hand-crank gramophone was used in "Louis Armstrong".

Christian Marclay ‎– "More Encores"

Negativland Live - "Helter Stupid Tour" 1989

At the time this excellent board tape was made, multi-media collage/ performance art/ prankster legends Negativland had been around since the early '80s, releasing several albums that served as warm-ups for their glory years of the late '80s/early '90s, when they ruled college radio, signed to the indie label everyone wanted to be on (SST Records), and generally moved from being mere (if brilliant) performers/recording artists to becoming a genuine cultural force, merry pranksters manipulating the gullible mass media, and daring to pull down the pants (so to speak) of some of the biggest figures in the music industry. They paid for their hijinks big-time, but ultimately came out the other end bloodied but unbowed. Lo these many years later, as seen in today's post-internet media-overload environment of mashups, youtube, etc., they seem positively visionary. And this performance finds them at the top of their game. Even if you're very familiar with Negativland's "Escape From Noise"/"Helter Stupid"/"U2" era (as I would imagine many, if not most, Maniacs are) this is still a fresh experience, as they take elements from their album tracks and rework them into lovely new mutations.

Negativland Live - Hampshire College 1989

Side 1:

1 - Christianity Is Stupid
2 - Helter Stupid
3 - Escape From Noise
4 - Time
5 - Another Perfect Cut
6 - Free TV Or Pay TV
7 - The Playboy Channel

Side 2:

1 - Playboy Channel 2
2 - Why Don't They Blow Us Up?
3 - I'd Like A Piece Of Meat / Michael Jackson
4 - U2
5 - Car Bomb

This comes to us from maniac Bob Berger. Can't thank him enough. He writes: "Recorded off the sound board onto Maxell XLIIS cassette with whatever tape deck was present, this tape has been legendary among all of my friends for many years. The sound quality is amazing... I've never heard Negativland recorded quite so well... Given our state(s) of mind at that show, I have no idea how we managed to capture this as well as we did... but here it is. At home, I've chopped these bits up into each track as best I could, but I figured that it would be best to preserve the whole show's continuity as two sides of the, now infamous, cassette.

Enjoy.

colunco23"

And - hey! - let's not forget to salute "guest vocalists" like the recently departed Casey Kasem, and L.A newscaster Hal Eisner. When on those rare occasions I stumble across Eisner's TV appearances, I chuckle, almost expecting him to say, "This is Hal Eisner. This is stupid."

RIP Snuggles.

The Big Beat A-Go-Go Sound of DYMAXION

This intensely obscure band recorded these songs between 1995-1998 using methods I cannot quite figure. Clearly, there's a mixture here of sampled sounds, low-tech electro beats, and live instruments...but the samples are all instrumental, and of things I can't identify. And I'm not even totally sure that there are live instruments. I'm just assuming, as the same twangy-surfy guitars do seem to pop up quite a bit. One song covers The Fall's "U.S. 80's - 90's," and indeed there's a bit of off-kilter post-punk influence here, too. Bloops, bleeps, peppy beats, and the afore-mentioned guitars give the whole thing a retro '60s discotheque feel, but the somewhat lo-fi sound removes any Space Age optimism from these tracks. Rather, there's a gritty, black-and-white feel that negates any Technicolor beach party atmosphere. Bummer in the summer.

This, their only album, collects everything they did. They thank Stereolab in the liner notes, which isn't too surprising, but otherwise, there's no info, tho according to Internet sources, two New Yorkers named Jeremy Novak and Claudia Newell are the responsible parties, and Newell dropped out half-way thru, and has not returned to music.

Pick Hit: "I-Man Transport", the one song with (sampled) vox, apparently from a dance instructional record, mixed with a synth reminiscent of Pere Ubu's "Blow Daddy-O."

Dymaxion x 4 + 3 = 38:33

STOLEN SOUNDS pt 2

More music made out of other peoples' music:

Was very happy to see that Martinibomb's oldies from 1998-2004 are now collected onto one big name-your-price album. All kinds of lovely snippets of groovy '60s bossa/lounge/surf-a go-go sounds get sampled, with modern beatz tying it all together. Faves include the Bollywood-meets-bubblegum "Dizzy Ke Peeche" (a staple at my mashup DJ sets), and the self-explanatory "Munster Beat." And anyone who samples Don Knotts (as in "The Love God") automatically gets on my good side.

Martinibomb "A Girls Bike"

But wait! There's more! A new-ish 3 song release shows them back at their game, e.g.: the zesty Latin title track:

Martinibomb "Mambossa Fever"
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Michael Intergalaxon's "The Art of Bird Mutation" crams 27 tracks in just over 30 minutes. It's a highly caffeinated rush of guitar metal, electro beatz, and corny pop crap, married at gunpoint and spinning at 100 rpm, until it flies apart and audio shrapnel goes whizzing past your ear. Some samples are only seconds long, if not shorter, reminiscent of John Oswald's "Plexure" - that is, if Oswald was a teen-age headbanger abusing his medications.

Michael Intergalaxon "The Art of Bird Mutation"
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Also from the Mutantswing posse is a split release featuring 20 minutes of entertaining insanity from Mythoklash (the second half of the album, by Unimates, is unremarkable techno disco). Mutantswing has many other releases that I haven't had a chance to check out yet. Maniacs! Investigate and report.

"Classic Sounds Of The New Post-Avant-Garde" Pressed for time? Try out the 1:20 track "The Measurement Problem"
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And finally, this oddity from BOK Darkord (the BOK in question is Buttress O'Kneel) crafting an entire album out of Metallica and Lou Reed samples, but nothing from the actual Reed/Metallica collaboration "Lulu."

BOK Darkord "Lulu"

Don't know much about Metallica, but I recognized Lou's "Dirty Blvd" in "The View," "Heroin" in "Iced Honey", and "Sweet Jane" in "Frustration." "Little Dog" seems to feature not Reed music, but an interview with him, dropping bon mots like 'I hate journalists.' Have no idea what the sources are for "Dragon" but it's excellent lo-key creepiness.

Stolen Sounds pt1

New on-line releases that make music out of other peoples' music:

- People Like Us' newest album "Don't Think Right, It's All Twice" continues the prolific audio-collage queen's string of super-swell sample-sourced sounds. This time out, she actually uses lots of "classic rock" and familiar soul oldies, instead of her usual obscure charity-shop polka records, ethnic obscurities, and radio chatter. It has a nice, low-key feel to it. Restraint - uh oh, this isn't a sign of maturity, is it!? I'm not complaining - this is state-of-the-art sonic thievery. Get it. Listen to:

Music Sounds Better With Me [Velvet Underground-Otis-Doors/David Lee Roth vs "Disco Inferno" + a bit of Beatles]

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But if it is audio whoopee- cushions you want, check out:

- Roger Species "Never Tickle A Sleeping Strawberry"

for krude komedy kut-ups a la Wayne Butane or Cassetteboy. Only not nearly as good. Still, there are so few people making these kinds of stupid-joke collages that I feel I should give the guy a mention. Even if taking a media figure saying the word "country" and cutting off the last syllable gets old after the 100th time, there's still some good stuff here. Try tracks #4, 7, and 11. And 23 for some nice gabber/yodeling.
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Back to the really good stuff:

- ZootBoot vol.2 is described as "16 new mashups and remixes with pre-1950 sources." Mashup-masters like Pilchard, pomDeter, G3rst, oki and DJ Useo do a great job of mixing old jazz, big-band, etc with more modern sounds. It's the bee's knees, kiddo.

Barnyard Beat: Livestock Rock And Jungle Jams

Musique concrete for pre-schoolers: this 1995 release on the Kid Rhino label takes played-out wedding-dj oldies, and thru the Space-Age miracle of sampling, replaces the lead vocals with animal sounds. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what is meant by "avant-'tard." Despite using the same techniques as the likes of Pierre Henry and John Cage, it will never be listed in the history books along with them, no matter how well it's done. File under "Childrens/novelty" and dump in the bargain bin (where I picked it up for a couple bucks). Ah, but we know the score, don't we, dear maniacs?

It's all more clever than it needs to be. Sonic puns abound, as when owls sing The Who's "We're Not Gonna Take It" - get it: The Whoooo?; and sheep "sing" the Beach Boy's "Barbara Ann" as "Baaahrbara Ann." The sampled birds (not lions) on the version of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is a really impressive work of cut-n-paste. Great job, guys - both me and my 4-year-old appreciate it.

Barnyard Beat: Livestock Rock And Jungle Jams

1. Born To Be Wild - Chicken Wolf

2. Beat It - Mew Kids On The Block

3. Honky Tonk Women - The Old Geesers

4. The Lion Sleeps Tonight - Lion L. Richie

5. Barbara Ann - Ewe 2

6. I Got You (I Feel Good) - Sealy Dan

7. Conga - Simian Sound Machine

8. Wipe Out - Duck Dale And The Pig Tunes

9. Wild Thing - The Red Hot Chili Dogs

10. We're Not Gonna Take It - The Hoooes

11. The Lonely Bull - Cuds N Roses

12. Barnyard Medley - The Animals

Bandcamp Is The New Cassette Culture...

...tho compared to the '80s/'90s tape underground:
- the sound quality of indie music sites like Bandcamp is usually a lot better than those hissy tapes
- even if you don't buy you can listen for free
- you don't have to go to the bother of sending away for items via the mail: they're right here! Go get 'em!
So consider this post the equivalent of when magazines like 'Option' used to have tape reviews.

- Convivial Cannibal "Buy The People Afford The People": An album as good as the band name; Absolutely fascinating unclassifiable L.A.-area weirdness that conjures up an air of dark esoterica by mixing live instruments with what sound like old ethnic music samples, children's music boxes played backwards, and unidentified sounds; the audio equivalent of a Joseph Cornell shadow box. Sometimes it resembles traditional music when it's just singing and guitar, but they're both buried under effects to the point of illegibility. "Avant garble" they call it. Numerous other-worldy videos and the new "Iniquitous Ubiquitous" album (check the hypnotically droning "There Are Greys Outside Your Window") are likewise recommended. Price: name your price.

- Dr. D.R. Barclay "One Note Mixtape": I don't believe this. Some mad genius has taken every one-note guitar solo he could find from the rock era and mixed them together into two 7-minute mixes. Some I recognized (Neil Young, The Ramones) and plenty I didn't. Hilarious and utterly mental. Price: $3.

- "Roncheras" v/a: Traditional Mexican styles like the polka-esque ranchera and the melodramatic mariachi get cooked into a delicious burrito of electro, rock, experimental, even 8-bit post-modernism for a furious fiesta. Highlites include Dr. Almeja's rockin' 'Ek Chuac,' and Dada Ket's cartoonishly crazy 'LA Costenida.' Muy fun. Price: free.

-The Hathaway Family Plot "Worry": a horrible year of illness and family deaths inspired this brief but powerful electro/noise suite. Individual tracks like "I Should Be" work well on their own, but the album is best experienced as a start-to-finish whole.

- Jaw Harp Potential "My Boyfriend, Your Cat": Need a little light relief after "Worry"? Try this: three wholesome girls from Iowa who sing five simple, catchy songs on accordion, ukulele, toy piano, glockenspiel, and harp (not a 'blues harp,' an actual harp) that are cute without being overly cutesy. Better then most Beat Happening albums. Really quite wonderful. Price: free.

Oh man, I've got at least 6 more albums I was gonna review...err...think I'll wait until another "issue" of our little 'zine here, this post is getting too long. (Press 'eject.')

MERRY CHRISMASH (AND A SOUND COLLAGE-Y NEW YEAR)

Word has it that some of you Maniacs have been looking for Wayne Butane's hilariously profane kooky kristmas kut-up in the handy popular mp3 format in all it's 12-minute glory. I figgured, well, if I'm going to post it, might as well post a whole mess of other holiday themed sound collages. These are some of the must-haves, the classics, mostly from the Golden Age of Mashups, the 2000s. Not included: anything featured on djBC's series of "Santastic" comps (number 8 just came out) since they are all still available. "A Mutated Christmas", likewise is also still in print, thru illegalart. And don't forget People Like Us' "Sounds of Christmas." But that still leaves plenty. Many of the "biggest" names in the field are featured here, but the ultimate just might be "All Your Christmases" which is nothing more than 7-and-a-half minutes of the word "christmas" taken from inumerable old xmas records artfully strung together, courtesy of Australia's Alias Frequencies. It's so great, and so annoyingly evil, bwa ha ha!

MERRY CHRISMASH

01 cassetteboy - xxxxmas
02 Voicedude - Here Comes Santa Claus In Black (Elvis Presley Vs. AC/DC )
03 The Kleptones - Bling Crosby

04 The Bran Flakes - Lovely Sleigh Ride
05 Satan's Little Helper - All your Xmases
06 Evolution Control Committee - The Christmas Wrong
07 My Favorite Things (PISs covering Negativland)
08 A Very Special Wayne Butane Christmas
09 V/Vm (Michael Jackson vs Paul McCartney) - Simply
10 The Bran Flakes - Here Comes Santa
11 cuechamp - 942003 (Nutcracker vs Daft Punk)
12 BigBadBaz - Christmas in Compton
13 Jima vs George W. Bush - The Night Before Christmas
14 JoolsMF (BuenaVista vs Beatles vs DrDre) - Havana Good Christmas
15 Gordyboy - bam bam the Cavalry (Toots and the Maytalls vs Jonie Lewis)
16 BuG - 12 boots of xmasx
17 Culturcide - Depressed Christmas
18 BRAT Productions - Chemical Christmas
19 fukjamum - Hankys Park Minimix
20 rx - Happy RxMas & a Whole Lotta Love
21 John Oswald - White
(plus: hideous bonus track!)

The Strangest Album Ever Made?!

"Trout Mask Replica"..."Eskimo"...The Shaggs...any such list is now incomplete without a mention of Five Starcle Men's "Gomba Reject Ward Japan." Coherent biographical info on this band is hard to come by, but apparently Five Starcle Men were two nuts in the '90s making low-fi (presumably) home recordings out in the desert town of Lancaster, CA. Or maybe they were from Austin, Texas. Or maybe they heard the works of those two town's most famous loonies, Capt Beefheart, and The Butthole Surfers, and said: "That's nuthin; get a load of this," and proceeded to lay down 28 tracks over the course of a few years that in comparison makes Ween sound like Journey.

At first, it may come off as a couple of stoners' self-indulgent mucking about on a Teac four-track, and there may be some truth to that, but keep listening, and one starts to wonder if there may be some genuine insanity at work here (apparently, one of the members killed himself, thus ending this band's "career.") Every sound is warped beyond recognition, lyrics range from unintelligible jabbering to surreal nonsense, samples and tapes loop themselves into delirium, unnatural rhythms pound away, all adding up to a mind-melting experience. Some "songs" sound like they were made up on the spot, many are less than 30 seconds long, and a surprisingly high amount of the tracks are really quite good. Play this for over 99% of the population (even those who consider themselves "alternative"), and they will probably will scrunch up their face and say, "What are you listening to?!"

Free listening/download here:

Five Starcle Men "Gomba Reject Ward Japan"

courtesy of 'net-label Lost Frog, who have also blessed us with releases by R. Stevie Moore, The Happy Flowers, Animals Within Animals, Big City Orchestra, and some people who make noise music out of bicycles.

STRANGE/OUTSIDER/NOVELTY JFK SONGS

John F. Kennedy inspired a lot of music. This is some of the weirdest. Song-poems! A Frank Zappa composed/produced surf record! A singing psychic! Mexican music! And all 6 tracks from the great "Sing Along With JFK" album that featured pre-sampling tape manipulations of Jack's voice "remixed" with original music and a vocal chorus. You've heard of musique concrete? This is musique ridicule.

http://www36.zippyshare.com/v/23219444/file.html

Sing Along With JFK

1. George Atkins and Hank Levine: Begin Anew For Two (from "Sing Along With JFK")
2. George Atkins and Hank Levine: Let Us Begin Beguine
3. George Atkins and Hank Levine: Alliance For Progress Bossa Nova
4. George Atkins and Hank Levine: Ask Not Waltz
5. George Atkins and Hank Levine: The Trumpet
6. George Atkins and Hank Levine: Let The Word Go Forth
7. Los Conquistadores: Homenaje a John F. Kennedy
8. Brian Lord & The Midnighters: The Big Surfer (written/produced by Frank Zappa, recorded in his Cucamunga studio, 1963)
9. Frances Baskerfield, "The Singing Psychic" - The Grassy Knoll
10. Johnny Tucker - Mr. Kennedy
11. Mike Macharyas - Lee Harvey Oswald (from the 2005 album "Ashlee Simpson" in which all Macharyas does is repeat famous peoples names over and over; he has 17 albums of this insanity)
12. Lee Roy Abernathy: John F. Kennedy The Greatest Of All (like the Johnny Tucker song, this is an indie country/folk record, but this guy seems really worried about Texas' reputation as much as anything else)
13. Norm Burns and the Five Stars: John F. Kennedy Was Called Away
14. Norm Burns and the Five Stars: John F. Kennedy's Election Race (Song-poems! This one's the more inept/funnier of the two)

Thanks for some of these to WFMU's Beware of the Blog, and master blogger Bob Purse.

FREE LUNCH DINER

("Halloween Stomp" is back on-line)

They say there's no such thing as a free lunch. Yeah, well, "they" say all kinds of crap, don't they? What do you call all of these free/name-your-price audio feasts? Damn tasty, that's what you call 'em. And so I fling open the doors of the M4M diner and its' all-you-can-listen-to buffet:

Hanetration "Timelapse" EP - I quite liked this ambient oddball's previous releases, but at first I wasn't so sure about this one: the opener "Moon" has a nice head-nodding riddim that is at odds with a somewhat annoying amateur violin. But the next track is a minute-and-a-half of niceness, and then we get to this EP's centerpiece: "Opal" starts off with a compellingly off-kilter rhythm made by no known drums, and slowly, subtly increases in complexity and texture. Excellent. The closing track "Sleep" is a 7 minute long dystopian industrial ambient nightmare - very well done, but if you value peaceful sleep I don't know if you'd want to listen to it much.

Buttress O'Kneel's "Applied Metapop" is another action-packed thrill-ride from this mad sample-smasher's series of plunderphonic parties. I marvel at how B'o'K can take the lowest form of Top 40 manure and use it as mulch to grow great, big, loud mutant killer plants. This latest album even makes me listen to that "Gangland Style" song or whatever it's called, and like it. Bowie gets a sex change, Eno's "Baby's On Fire" might finally be the dance-club smash it always deserved to be, the "Breaking Bad" theme gets mashed, and is that the rantings of Francis E. Dec mixed in with Fela and "Yackety Sax"?

And dig these individual tracks:

The fate of "Flakes The Bunny", the stand-out track on Philip Stranger's new EP "Miscolab," makes me laff only the way an accordion-and-steel-drum bit of retarded nonsense like this can. If Mr. Stranger & Co. could concoct a whole album of this kinda thing, we might have a Bonzo Dog Band for our times. Or at least a They Might Be Giants.

Peopling "Live Session - Dandelion Radio": This EP by a New York noise-meister boasts the super-swell song "Which is Width," which features distorted vox & crunching rhythms topped w/bloopy Space Age electronics. (And "De Pelicula" is a fine instro drone, as well.)

More freebies to come, ya cheap bastards...

SUPERSHRINK!

Alen Robin, a comic with a droll, very nasal voice, took the Buchanan & Goodman "Flying Saucer" concept - intercutting found recordings with original comedy - and applied it to political speeches. His "Welcome To The LBJ Ranch" hit the top of the pops in the mid '60s, and can be found in approximately 84% of American thrift-stores.

This album continues the concept, with American politicos Humphrey, Thurmond, Rockefeller, Lindsay, Nixon, LBJ, Agnew, Buckley, Reagan, and Daley finding their voices ripped out of their original context, now making various bizarre and neurotic statements to Robin, playing their psychiatrist. It's still quite funny and clever, even if you don't know much about the speakers. Even more impressive: it's recorded live. Not sure how he did it in the days before laptop samplers. Maybe he had all the voices, and pauses allowing for him to speak, pre-recorded on a long tape. If so, his timing's amazing.

The above review was taken from my review of another Alen Robin album I posted few years back, with the names of of the sampled parties changed. There is one difference with this album, tho - the groovy psych rock of Billy Mure that abruptly cuts in and out of the funny faux-interviews.

Both sides of this album are pretty short (side two's only ten minutes long) so you just get two tracks here, one for each side:

Alen Robin: "SUPERSHRINK!"

PLEASE ACCEPT THIS FREE GIFT

Aren't ALL gifts 'free'? Isn't that what makes it a gift? Hey, if the advertisers and marketers of the world say it, then it must be true. So here's a goodie-bag of free inter-webular downloads that have grabbed my ears lately:

- A C Slate no r makes interesting sound collages by looping instrumental tracks as beds for spoken-word samples that are strung together in ways to suggest a kind of narrative. My faves are the apocalyptic "Angels Watching Over Me," and "$ money piano $," an examination of materialism. Check the tracks called 'tape stories.' Negativland fans will want to peep this.
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- Buttress K. O'Kneel has a new release that layers multiple versions of that most ultimate of classical music cliches, Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons." Any new music from this Australian outlaw is worth a notice, but this one represents a completely new direction, forgoing the usual breakcore mashup madness for a dizzying mix of wedding music, Steve Reich-like phase-shifting, and mind-fucking psychedelia:

B'O'K "The Four Four Seasons"

Which reminds me of this similar mix:

Beethoven Dada - unfortunately only a minute-long clip. We want the whole thing!
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- mw ensemble, a New York-based avant-classical crew, have a 40-second track for piano and vacuum cleaner that is, in fact, called "I, for piano and vacuum cleaner ~A." It is really quite cool. Available on this collection:

mw ensemble "6 Green Songs"
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- Music For The Muted is a German ambient/noise/drone combo with a new EP whose tracks all have numbers for names. I particularly like "7," seven minutes of slowly-growing dark clouds of electronic sound dramatically rolling across the sky; somewhat reminiscent of the "Forbidden Planet" soundtrack.

Soundcloud
Mediafire
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OH/EX/OH are seriously bringing the ambient/noise/drone thang. Str8 outta Manchester, this prolific artist traffics in some pretty dark 'n' spooky stuff at times. This name-your-price EP is suitably atmospheric:

OH/EX/OH "Entropic"

Some really nice stuff - I love the slowly-shifting chords of "The Holy Fallout." But this collection of audio vérité, however, isn't that scary at all:

OH/EX/OH "Tokyo Field Recordings"

I was alerted to this artist when they sent me an actual postcard in the mail. Which I promptly lost for a few months. Glad I found it again.

Cathegory