Saturday, December 31, 2016

WEEKEND PLAYLIST
(click on song title for tune, for the most part... & have a Happy New Year)

1st Set
MARSELLUS PITTMAN & THEO PARRISH "Night of the Sagitarius" (SOUND SIGNATURE)
GIL MELLE "Mars" (BLUE NOTE)
THE IMPACS "Kool It"
TAPPA ZUKIE "Cool This Dub" (^total coincidence)
LONE RANGER & WELTON IRIE "Chase Them Crazy" (STUDIO 1) (horn riff is my theme music 2010-present)
PROSTITUTES "A Number Between Their Eyes" (SPECTRUM SPOOLS)
APHEX TWIN "Archponf" (HTTPS://SOUNDCLOUD.COM/USER48736353001)
JOE GIBBS "Rainy Night In Georgia Version" (GREENSLEEVES)
LEE PERRY "Chicken Scratch"
ABDUL HUSSEIN KHAN SHAHNAZI "Mofhalef Segah" (HONEST JON'S)
MARTIAL DROUBLY & L'IVOIRO STAR "You Dji N'indje" (ANTILLES)
U ROY & PETER TOSH "(Earth's) Rightful Ruler" (TROJAN)
MADLIB "Solitude" (STONES THROW)
BLACK SHEEP "Black With N.V. (No Vision)" (MERCURY)
OBSERVER ALL STARS & KING TUBBYS "Dubbing With The Observer" (TROJAN)
NAS "Memory Lane" (COLUMBIA)
NORMA WRIGHT "Go On Home" (COXSONE)
DOREEN SCHAFFER "Still In Love" (COXSONE)
NEIL YOUNG "Pocahontas" (REPRISE)
GRATEFUL DEAD "Rhythm Devils" (ARISTA) & ROGER DAVY "Corail Dans La Mer De Tranquillité" (DISQUES MAGELLAN) played at the same time... try it, it's awesome
LE FORTE FOUR "Meanwhile Back at the Tulip Boat, Stinky and Gus Make Warplanes" (HARBINGER SOUND)
WIPERS "Up Front" (WEIRD SYSTEM)




















2nd Set
HUSKER DU "Dreams Reoccurring" (SST)
WILLIAM ONYEABOR "Better Change Your Mind" (STONES THROW)
JACKIE MITTOO "In Cold Blood"
FRANK SCHRODER "Ohne Titel (1983-18) (CACHE CACHE)
CINCINNATI JUG BAND "Newport Blues" (SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS)
MARIAH "Shisen" (PALTO FLATS)
GREGORY ISAACS "Handcuff" (VISTA SOUNDS)
MIKEY DREAD "Industrial Spy" (CRUISE RECORDS)
PRINCE JAMMY "Swords of Vengeance" (GREENSLEEVES)
APHEX TWIN "Actium" (PIAS AMERICA)
TOMMY McCOOK & THE UPSETTERS "Iron Claw" (BLACK ART)
MANCHESTERS "Natty Gone"
BULBOUS CREATION "Satan"
FIRE, WATER, AIR "Movin' On"
C.O.B. "When He Came Home"














(^and now we bid you goodnight)

(#heavymusicinallstylesandvolumes)


GIMMER NICHOLSON Christopher Idylls LP (LIGHT IN THE ATTIC) #BLASTITUDERECORDOFTHEDAY #HEAVYMUSICINALLSTYLESANDVOLUMES #MEMPHISCONTINUED

I was talking about Alex Chilton and the Box Tops a few posts almost a year ago, and how I've gotten re-obsessed with Memphis music, so this is a great time for Light in the Attic to put out the Christopher Idylls record by Gimmer Nicholson. I hadn't heard of him before either, but he was a guitarist who quietly played around the Memphis scene throughout the 1960s (he's not mentioned in the text of Robert Gordon's essential It Came From Memphis, but he is in a photo), and recorded this album of solo instrumentals in 1968 at Ardent Studios, where Big Star would record their masterpieces a couple years later. You might hear "late 1960s solo guitar instrumental" and think "John Fahey," as that is our blessing and curse in this day and age, but Christopher Idylls is a subtly different animal. For one, the guitars are layered, with what sounds like two or three takes going on at all times, one of them using a delay pedal, which album producer/engineer Terry Manning calls "one of the first uses of the electronic repeat as part of the music." Also, these Idylls are more influenced by British music (ancient British folk and classical music as filtered through then-recent British Invasion ballads) than by Fahey's Americana (despite Nicholson being from Memphis). The liner notes do describe Nicholson being in attendance when Fahey played a gig in Memphis, "doing his Blind Joe Death routine," complete with sunglasses and other affectations, which seemed to inspire Nicholson to go in a different direction.   The result was this unique and beautiful album, but it was not to be released at the time. The Ardent label had only released 45s up to this point, and studio/label head John Fry had cold feet about their first long-playing release being an album of calm, spiritual, and potentially unmarketable folk guitar instrumentals. Nicholson himself also balked, saying he didn't like the mix, and didn't like the album cover. It seems that he was the private type, inherently uncomfortable with the idea of putting his music out into the public sphere. Nonetheless, even without being released, it still made a significant subliminal ripple throughout the world of rock music. The youthful Ardent hangers-on in Big Star were clearly influenced by it, learning ways to make their already spiritual power pop chord changes even more church-of-guitar cathedralic; Idylls showed them spaces within their songs where the chords could truly ring out. It also seems to have had quite an impact on none other than Jimmy Page. Terry Manning tells a story recently shared by the Dangerous Minds website: "In April 1970, Jimmy Page was in Memphis for a Led Zeppelin gig, and after the show, Page and his girlfriend spent the evening hanging out at Manning's apartment. Joined by Chris Bell, the four drank wine and listened to the Gimmer Nicholson album over and over again." Sounds like a good hang. Although the writing sessions for the already increasingly acoustic Led Zeppelin III were finished at the time, its recording sessions started just one month later, and when they were finished Page brought the tapes back to Memphis and Ardent in August so that Manning could mix and master. So, even without being released, the album was still a smooth jewelled pebble that sent out long slow ripples that continue to lap onto the shore of musical consciousness every decade or so. (P.S. Talk about ripples, Terry Manning was also the engineer, and Ardent the studio, for ZZ Top's entire run of great albums, starting with mixing and overdubs on Tres Hombres all the way through Eliminator. In fact, Billy Gibbons and Terry Manning are really the only two musicians you hear on Eliminator; if I'm not mistaken, Frank Beard doesn't play on the album at all. Manning, who doesn't have a beard either, did all the drum programming and overdubs, and even played a lot of the bass. This info and more can be gleaned from this great proto-Reddit Terry Manning AMA thread that went down on the Pro Sound Web Forum in 2005: http://repforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/topic,5689.0.html.)

Friday, December 30, 2016

MARIELLE V JAKOBSONS Star Core LP (THRILL JOCKEY) #BLASTITUDERECORDOFTHEDAY #HEAVYMUSICINALLSTYLESANDVOLUMES

MARIELLE V JAKOBSONS was (is?) in the band Date Palms who I'm wondering if I ever actually heard. I remember people talking about them, and I see they released a record on Thrill Jockey in 2013. Ms. Jakobsons has just released this 2016 solo record Star Core on the same label. At first glance I might call it a synth record, as that seems to be the basis of the sound, and the sci-fi atmosphere is thick, but it's thankfully not that simple. Much more is going on; no drums or anything, but gentle heavy bass guitar on each track, Far East strings and/or melodies sprinkled throughout, occasional ethereal vocals that threaten to pull the whole thing into a dream pop category, all hovering at a near-precise midpoint between light and dark, earth and space, etc. Another winner from Thrill Jockey, who've been at it for almost 25 years now, still releasing more and more diverse and interesting stuff at such a high rate that I simply can't keep up. Take just this Jakobson record and add one more like the Circuit des Yeux record from last year; I can barely process that much heaviness in so short of time; I need years for these two records, let alone all the other stuff Thrill Jockey has put out like Rhyton, Jackie Lynn, Oozing Wound, Thalia Zedek Band, Mary Lattimore & Jeff Ziegler, Kid Millions, Lightning Bolt, and that's just in the last 2 years... (P.S. I just used the popular streaming service Spotify to listen to the Date Palms release on Thrill Jockey. It's called The Dusted Sessions, and to me it sounds a lot like the Marielle Jakobsons solo record... all the elements described above are already in place. I'm not sure how many others are involved, and what they might be doing, but it would seem to be Jakobsons's vision.)



POSTSCRIPT: I'm always picking up the Chicago Reader when it comes out on Thursdays and finding out about something amazing showing or playing in town that very weekend, in just 24 to 48 hours... how am I gonna get the momentum, not to mention childcare, to go to something like that in some far corner of the city? That happened last weekend when I read about this year's iteration of the EYEWORKS FESTIVAL OF EXPERIMENTAL ANIMATION. Their feature presentation was a 74-minute 1979 animated film called Habfurdo by Kovasznay Gyory. You can watch it without subtitles on YouTube (see below), and it's a dazzling, crowded, always evolving vision of a rather simple Hungarian big-city love triangle, so simple that it's confusing and Fellini-esque as your eye keeps following the dazzling animated psychedelic design tangents instead of what the characters are saying or doing. The Eyeworks Festival also showed a couple of really nice-looking shorts programs, but alas it only ran for two days and I missed it all. They do have a really cool tumblr though, and maybe I can plan better next year.




And while we're still in the 'eyeball kicks' section, I don't think we've officially recommended the new ROBERT BEATTY book Floodgate Companion, as beautifully published by Floating World Comics. "Otherworldly" doesn't even come close as you turn the pages and go through portal after portal, many of them playful and beautiful, harshness brief and intermittent, but weirdness constant. Although, I could swear Belial from Basket Case (d. Frank Henenlotter, 1982) is lurking on every tenth or fifteenth page, which is kinda creepy.






Thursday, December 29, 2016

DAN MELCHIOR Melpomene LP (IDEA RECORDS); DAN MELCHIOR Born Under A Grey Sign LP (MONOFONUS PRESS) #BLASTITUDERECORDSOFTHEDAY




















A while back someone posted a then-brand-new DAN MELCHIOR record on that overpopulated Now Playing facebook group, and someone else responded "Is this French prog Dan or rock'n'roll Dan?," to which I responded, "Haven't heard it, but I think it's either Country Blues Dan or Sound Poetry Dan." Point being, the guy (Dan Melchior) can cover a lot of ground and although you may not be sure what approach(es) he might take, you can be quite sure he's gonna do it/them well. Here's a couple real brand new LPs that are markedly different from each other. The Melpomene LP is straight up experimental music. No vocals at all, not really even songs, more like field recordings, slowed down, screwed & chopped, carefully sequenced, joined by sci-fi electronics, ambient chord changes, and occasional elegiac acoustic guitar or keyboards. Takes a while to get going, or may never get going, which may be the absolute intention, a record of true stasis, which is a rare form of minimalism, near as I can tell. Would definitely watch the theoretical film this would make an excellent score for.



Born Under A Grey Sign, on the other hand, is clearly a 'song' album, but that doesn't mean it can be pinned down as any one genre. Rock'n'roll is a fine start, because the music here does both of those things, but it's also industrial, experimental, blues, dub, continental progressive, British pub rock, white aggro-funk, you get the drift. It takes a couple listens to begin to decipher the components, like how "Black Beauty" is made up of heavily echoed chant vocals, a driving kick-and-clap drum machine rhythm, a funk bassline, too-loud overdriven acoustic skiffle guitar, and too-quiet ambient noise guitar, combining for a playful demolition of Ram Jam's ham-handed "Black Betty" (itself an irreverent version of a 20th Century African-American work song derived from an 18th Century marching cadence about a flintlock musket). And on the very next track, Dan sounds like he overshot Spotlight Kid and ended up on the first Latin Playboys album instead! The whole record keeps shifting like this, over twelve equally dense and weird tracks (although the anomalous track 5 "Old Bone's Mansion Greys" is just Dan singing over what sounds like his own knee-slaps). The last track may be the best of all, a slow echoed-out grinder with the title "(They Call Him) The Soiled Prince," and it's so crazy weird good that I just listened to it three times min a row, and the verbal and sonic imagery made me think of this political cartoon I just saw a few hours ago, which sums up this American catastrophe we're in the middle of as well as any commentary I've seen (it helps that it's not verbal, now that Trump's superpower has been revealed, the ability to destroy all meaning every time he speaks or is even spoken about):

 














Wednesday, December 28, 2016

MAZOZMA'S FATUFAIRFE 4-song 45RPM 12" EP (SOPHOMORE LOUNGE) #BLASTITUDERECORDOFTHEDAY #HEAVYMUSICINALLSTYLESANDVOLUMES




















Unwieldiest band name of the week here, with a self-titled 45rpm 12" EP on the Sophomore Lounge label. Expert decoders might note that Mazozma is a nom de plume for Michael "Ma" Turner, who has been playing weird underground rock music in Lexington, Kentucky for a good 10 years now, starting with his certainly-legendary-to-me-anyway band Warmer Milks. That was a markedly different punkier noisier kind of band (cf. Radish on Light, it's cheap) but this Fatufairfe joint is just as heavy, sometimes even as scary. and might just be his most assured combination of classic-rock, post-rock, and sludge-rock yet. Only four songs, and it ends a little too soon, but they're all pretty long, big, and yearning, each going past the 5-minute mark. Don't know who the people in the power trio rhythm section are, but their playing is heavy and accomplished, which allows Mikey to do all kinds of stuff on guitar and really dig deep into some lost and dark Dead/Allmans nexus. Weird riffs and asides, drawling melodic leads, luxurious big classic rock chords slowly arpeggiating, all in service of some of his most interesting slow/weird ballad songwriting since "Penetration Initials" itself. Apparently this band only played a couple gigs, one of them being the 2014 Cropped Out festival in Louisville, so it's a good thing they got these recordings down. Edition of 100, apparently!

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