random stuff rushomancy is listening to

because you lot, aside from maybe three of my friends, are probably the only people who will feign interest in the utterly arbitrary stuff i like. last time i was between jobs i tried for a while posting little write-ups on the music i was digging on to facebook. it was a great way of finding new music, strangely enough, because trying to describe what i was listening to kept bringing me to other things i didn't expect to find. but it was time consuming so once i started working again i quit. expect updates to be sporadic.

this is an early side from blue note records that was on a comp with some james p. johnson sides in the '80s. it's interesting because the celeste isn't an instrument one associates with jazz, except maybe for sun ra. on top of that it's also got charlie christian on guitar, though he's not to the fore here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsVhwQsh86c

The Mills Brothers were crazy good. The dude with the vocal bass line and the guitar is funky and amazing at downhill train speed.

https://youtu.be/MtqpyMvI3D4

That Celeste sounds cool its like vibes with more sustain and a bit of a bell like overtone.

that mills brothers song is great, thanks!

a couple weeks ago i decided to listen to every band i could find named "collage". my favorite was this estonian folk/jazz combo. estonian vocal harmonies and soul jazz, what a combo!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0zVKS6vJes

I really heard the Mills Brothers listening to Blues Before Sunrise radio show out of Chicago. It's on over night Saturday night/early Sunday. It's rare for me to know that many songs on any show, occasionally a track here or there or unless he is doing a set of Chicago blues from the 50s-70s. Even then, the guy plays a pretty deep well of stuff.

There is some other accapella groups out there from same era as Mills Brothers old stuff that is mind boggling. I've heard him do sets of that stuff a couple times over the years. Some of that is like music from another dimension.

god knows, so much great old stuff and the only way it surfaces is if it's just plain weird like the dezurik sisters.

ucla is putting this huge fucking collection of mexican and mexican-american music on youtube. there was this jazz violinist named emilio caceres on vol. 1 of the savory collection, and he's got this amazing performance of "dark eyes". god only knows what the hell else amazing is in this collection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgcscxD2Ccw

a couple months ago i ran across a bandcamp recording by a doctor of something or other, where he asked the clerks at all the record stores in new york city what their favorite scream on record was and put them together. and that had me thinking about what my favorite scream on record was.

i eventually decided it would have to be by slauter xstroyes. i'm a little disappointed, as a zep stan from the age of 14, that the "belching" school of metal is more credible than the "screeching" school of metal these days. slauter xstroyes are firmly in the latter camp and it's exhilarating. singer here has a scream that turns into a laugh that goes about thirty seconds, and knowing full well what the people want, repeats it three times over the course of the song. ladies and gentlemen, i give you... METAL'S NO SIN.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh5h35dYgD8

so my goal is to at some point like all music everywhere. it's a stupid goal, but human existence is stupid and absurd so i feel comfortable with it. to the point where i seek out music in genres i particularly hate to find something redeeming in it.

the music i hate more than anything else in the world is zydeco. i don't know why. i love the accordion and the bandoneon, but zydeco just drives me up a fucking wall. so i had to find a zydeco song i loved.

wasn't all that hard. "they call me good rockin'" by herbert "good rockin'" sam. fucking amazing tune.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zwLYaEKXPQ

oh, cool, here's a slauter xstroyes live video uploaded next than a day ago. it's not the best slauter xstroyes video on youtube but it's FRESH

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR6TyENsTOE

here's a free download of a bunch of field recordings of snow and ice. it's a little uneven but i love the sounds of ice and snow, particularly when it's as fucking hot as it has been out here. good stuff to cool down with.

http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=107

sometimes i feel like too much of a gringo to listen to afro-cuban jazz. machito is great of course and i have a couple records of descargas but listening to this modern stuff i'm out of my element. "contrapuntistico" by yosvany terry though clicked with me immediately. maybe my avant-prog background; even if i don't have the technical understanding to explain exactly what terry is doing compositionally, i've listened to enough henry cow that it seems intuitive to me somehow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp8x1F1AFIo

Rush all time poster

awww thank you ross

ok, i know it's a novelty cover, but damn this soul jazz organ trio cover of "enter sandman" is some hot shit. i've always liked the song myself, i don't care if it's a "sell-out" record or whatever.

https://cookinon3burners.bandcamp.com/album/real-life-baby-single

That is a cool arrangement on "enter sandman".

a song i wind up listening to a lot, because the artist is alphabetically near the beginning of my collection, is "badonse memela" by abafana bomjovo. i don't know what any of those words mean. but i found my way to an old blog called "electric jive", which points out that the single version of it for some reason starts with an argument between two men where they yell "fuck you, man" at each other. and it's also a good song, i think it's some sort of kwela which is as far as i can tell one of those styles of music better suited to singles than to albums. of course it got played on "give the drummer some" right after it came out but that was six years ago and i figure it's ok to mention it again on the grounds that everyone involved has since forgotten it existed except me. the album version without the cursing is on youtube but to get the single version you have to go to the blog.

http://electricjive.blogspot.com/2012/04/mine-jive-special-1975.html

I first heard South African jazz through Robert Wyatt and his work with folks from that scene, particularly Mongezi Feza. One of my favorite of the recordings I've heard is a BBC session by the Brotherhood of Breath that was uploaded to a Usenet binary group probably decades ago now. Whoever uploaded it had no more information on it than I do - the tape trading scene did not always have superbly high documentation standards - and I'm not aware of any subsequent documentation of the session either. All I can tell you is that it's almost certainly from sometime between 1970 and 1975. Looking around I did find some really nice versions of "You Ain't Gonna Know Me" by Viva la Black and Louis Moholo with Shabaka Hutchings, but I couldn't find this version - I'm not actually sure there are any officially released versions featuring the composer. The announcer, not heard here, notes that the solos were by Mike Osborne, Lol Coxhill, and Mongezi Feza. I like it enough that I feel like a couple more people should hear it before it vanishes forever into the ether, so I went ahead and uploaded it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3idg2nFyuTU

^nice, thanks! have been on a b.o.b (& alumni) kick all this morning.

i'm not a completionist but i've found covers i like well enough of all the beatles' songs except for like three - i think it's "what goes on", "yellow submarine" and one other from that era. (sufjan stevens has a good cover of "what goes on", but i don't like it.) anyway i did manage to find a number of pretty good covers while i was embarked on that project.

i absolutely love this live version of "old brown shoe" by the laughing dogs from around the time of their first album. the laughing dogs apparently appeared on a cbgb comp featuring all the bands nobody in their right mind would want to listen to, but as a power pop band they were pretty alright.

there's actually a u-matic video from this era out on youtube, but it doesn't sound as good, and watching washed-out u-matic video footage isn't necessarily my idea of a good time. your mileage may vary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8CU2Oc7a3c

occasionally youtube will recommend me videos that aren't of SJWs getting OWNED, though i still wish i could turn off its shitty "recommendations" altogether. still, as long as i have them, might as well get what i can from them. so it suggested me this piano sonata by carl vine, who is it turns out an acclaimed australian composer, and i like it, though i the phrasing on benjamin boren's recording is more to my liking. anyway i do think it's a good composition and i like the sense of drama it has.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F89fz09pbHs

i was trying to explain "the white visitation" from one of the parts of "gravity's rainbow" i've read to one of my co-workers and she did a google on it and this guy's bandcamp popped up. apparently he's big in the mexico city electronic music scene, which is something i don't know shit about - i'm arguably really bad with electronic music because i don't dance but i think this sounds really good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01QUdvBCvR4

Fucking hell this is a good one! Apparently a side project of the Diaphanoids? Who maybe I should also listen to? I didn't follow XLR8R or RA in 2010, even now I barely know what the hell is going on over there. It's got an absurd and ridiculously convoluted backstory based around the 1970s, which is also a plus for me, and it just sounds, well, cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41qVUa8n5io

Man I was a big fan of Brainiac in the '90s and have been off-and-on following John Schmersal ever since. I actually had a co-worker point out the Vertical Scratchers record to me after he heard it on NPR in 2014. Now for many people (including me) something being on NPR would be a pretty compelling reason to not listen to something, but nah man Schmersal is fucking good, he's got that sort of GBV thing going on, and he doesn't overstay his welcome. I love the Vertical Scratchers' sole LP and listen to it a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6Ob8Io8i88

courtesy of my youtube subscriptions. i didn't realize rimarimba was putting out new material, but it sure sounds good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zufDLGMY4-w

I was reading about the Peterloo Massacre and Wikipedia mentioned in passing that this band did a prog-rock epic about it. This is the first track on the archival release with that epic. Apparently these folks were championed by John Peel, to little effect, which is unfortunate because he did have some fairly decent taste in music. It's a strange archival record because the band stuck around even after Peel's attempt to promote them flopped and did a fair number of tracks in a more commercial hard rock style, which are also stuck on the record with no indication as to their recording dates - absolute curate's egg. Anyway this reminds me of the better parts of, say, Fresh Maggots, and is ripe for rediscovery. I'll have to check out the record of theirs Peel did get released.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbj3xJWlbEQ

ok, i'm digging deep into jimmie blanton's recordings. i recognize that i might be a slight bit late to the party on this one. good god, though, this version of "bakiff" is spectacular.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMPl1oDA5uk

today i've been hitting the '60s and '70s funk and soul pretty hard. ran across a '72 record by a group called "madhouse" dedicated to telling richard nixon to go fuck himself. frankly a lot of political stuff ages poorly - i listened to a fair bit this morning, including a record by a group called "boscoe" that's _correct_ about everything they say (also, for instance, have been listening to the works of a guy named darrell banks, great soul musician who was shot to death by an off duty detroit cop in 1970, quelle fucking surprise) but not all sermons are created equal. spending ten minutes repeatedly telling the listener "god damn you" for having hope for the future isn't necessarily a good one.

this, on the other hand, this is some good shit (once you get past the parody opening). the message is as relevant today as it was in 1972. i expect it to be about as effective too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOpOVRb2VsA

Somehow found my way to one of Yuzo Koshiro's DJ sets today. I think Magfest is some kind of gamer festival so he starts out with "Actraiser", which you can't even remotely dance to, but shit gets pretty hot pretty quick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z2ujbw1OBA

matchess has a new one! so naturally, i'm listening to this russian space rock band called "vespero". they have a comp with multiple faust covers, but they sound better when they're doing their own thing.

https://raig.bandcamp.com/album/vespero-fitful-slumber-until-5-a-m

i'd never heard of this game before. nice music.

https://soundcloud.com/nitrome-music-nicklen10/lee-nicklen-skywire-main-song?in=nitrome-music-nicklen10/sets/skywire

I did this online radio show. Do. I guess. It's on hiatus. It's just for fun, nobody listens to it, playlists based on certain themes. Title words are easy enough because they're searchable and I have enough to work from that I can get an hour out of just about anything. I did an hour of songs based around kitchen objects once. It wasn't the best hour of music ever but it was fun.

Anyway they're not real "dj mixes" because I could never be bothered with beat matching, continuous play has just never been that important to me, but here's a couple playlists I put together today. The "summer" one turned out way darker than I thought it would. Darker than any mix with "Hot Pants in the Summertime" on it has any right to be.

America

Walt Whitman - America (excerpt)
Bekon - America
Lonnie Holley - I Woke Up In A Fucked-Up America
Stevie Wonder - Jesus Children of America
Simon & Garfunkel - America
Byrne & Eno - America is Waiting
Bruce Haack - The American Eagle
Bill Parsons - The All American Boy
Caetano Veloso - Soy Loco Por Ti, America
La Femme - Welcome America
La Santa Cecilia - Mexico Americano
Haram - American Police
Ideal Free Distribution - The American Myth
The Butthole Surfers - American Woman (alt version)
V3 - American Face
Wilco - Ashes of American Flags
Lucio Battisti - La Nuova America
Vyto B - New America

Summer

Mike Taylor - Summer Sounds, Summer Sights
The Cosmic Rays - Summertime
Les Paul & Mary Ford - In The Good Old Summertime
Kool & The Gang - Summer Madness
Shelleyan Orphan - Midsummer Pearls & Plumes
Michael Giles - Midsummer Day
Joni Mitchell - The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Nariaki Obukuro - Summer Reminds Me
The Dramatics - Hot Pants in the Summertime
Bertrand Burgalat - This Summer Night
that dog. - One Summer Night
The Doors - Indian Summer (8-19-66)
Mark Eric - Where Do The Girls Of Summer Go?
Margaret Berger - I'm Gonna Stay After Summer
Smile Down Upon Us - Two Weeks Last Summer
Waves - Summer Sunday
Peter Hammill - Summer Song (In the Autumn)
Peter Laughner - Summertime Blues

plate of goddamned shrimp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_-HqcGo5SI

would've hit my "america" mix if i'd heard it twelve hours earlier

That's lovely.

Today I've been feeling shred music of the late renaissance and early baroque. So there was this guy Rognoni who came up with this style of music called "viola bastarda", which was a more shred-oriented variation on the viola da gamba music of the day. Interesting thing about this piece is that he actually wrote it with three different difficulty levels. It feels kind of like a late 16th century equivalent of "Rock Band"!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkqCu1P9Qew

here's a band playing a soul jazz arrangement of a "streets of rage" tune in a new york city bar. great atmosphere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxJc4lc6TT4

was digging around in the "freak folk" rym charts and this popped up. it's an '80s proggy avant garde brazilian record but it's not really vanguarda paulista. it's mostly just strange. a smidge tribal, but tribal in a way that doesn't stop them from doing songs in tribute to stravinsky. maybe reminds me a little of el polen? i don't know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No6gtee2tOo

i am not a musician but lately i find myself drawn to videos with titles like "Cadential Diminished Chords are So Dope!", not because i understand it but because i don't. so from there i found my way over to this super-hipster new york big band jazz using irrational time signatures. their album just came out, it's produced by darcy james argue. i'm a total sucker for this kind of shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esppn8m6f0Y

oh, and krock is right, that synth solo is fucking amazing

today i realized that the 5:4 website has recordings of pretty much all the prom premieres from the last nine years out there so i've been delving into it bigtime

which explains why i am listening to a mixtape of enoch light deep cuts

http://5against4.com/2018/08/01/mixtape-48-enoch-light/

i've been meaning to get more into enoch light for some time now, just what i needed.

but that just-premiered daphne oram piece is fucking great too, don't get me wrong

oh, cool, i somehow got youtube to recommend me this random pow-wow record after i spent a couple minutes looking up kyrgyz folk music. intense shit. more of this please and fewer videos attempting to explain to me the TRUE PURPOSE of the pyramids (i mean, we all know it's ufo grain storage, don't we?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZUuyLEzYWs

this album makes me wish i understood portuguese

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFq3xqHAfNQ

here's a cash-in anonymous cover record of alice cooper circa "billion dollar babies", released on 8-track only, in case you wanted to hear these classic cuts at the wrong speed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdBHFYy06sk

oh hey here's a spanish-language knockoff cover of "i'm not in love"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-17C_RvPc8

:/

fwiw I never really liked that song anyway. Also "Herve" is a name I always find a little funny.

i'm in full agreement with you re: i'm not in love, man alive

i like some stuff by godley and creme, though. not their triple record bloat-fest. well, bits of their triple-record bloat fest. i'm more taken with their music for that benson & hedges ad. (have i posted that here?) it's more _concise_.

"lol" is a funnier name than "herve".

I decided I needed to listen to more Rumba Flamenca. Didn't like most of it. Thin, underproduced. Loved Los Chicos, though. Crazy ultra-'70s late-Franco shit. Up-front, punchy, thoroughly gauche - this is my jam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E1q0uU0sKs

I like that the song's all about she's going to leave him and the background dancers are all "yes, and we shall leave BY BIKE"

yeah it's super-stylin'. the preview screenshot really says it all.

here are 80 minutes or so of my favorite songs with the word "puppet" or "marionette" in the title, in celebration of my finding out that there was a super-expanded reissue of dendo marionette's ep last year

abba - i'm a marionette
raccomandata ricevuta ritorno - un palco di marionette
horacee arnold - puppett of the seasons
charlie looker - puppet
alport astazio and the kwana-moto band - odoli (puppets)
amy x neuberg and men - naked puppets
metallica - master of puppets
sleepytime gorilla museum - puppet show
dendo marionette - dendo marionette
bernard estardy - marionettes club
akina nakamori - marionette
eternal void - pirates puppet
bob drake - funeral march of the marionette
harmonic 33 - marionette

you should check out the metallica track if you haven't heard it, it's one of their better songs, kind of long though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Z2VG-XCoE

here's a song by Herbert Joos from his 1974 album THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FLUEGELHORN. great title, great cover, great music!

That's the one!

thanks for your answer rusho. i think i didn't express myself very well concerning electronic music and repetition. what you say is absolutely true most music relies on repetition of patterns and structures, that is normal and something i do not criticize. what i mean is the nature of electronic sound which to me is like a two dimensional area compared to the three dimensional space acoustic music and natural, untreated voices represent. most electronic sounds, especially the beat patterns are always identical, for me listening to them is a torture almost as if my head was subject to a small hammer hitting the skull at exactly the same position for hundreds of times. a human drummer will never be as "perfect", there will be minimal variations in his drumming, on a micro-tone level every hit on the drum kit will sound slightly different. that is what makes music made by humans so lively and attractive for me. whereas most electronic music to my ears sounds cold and dead and boring. that's probably why i never got house and techno. there are exceptions though, for example boards of canada. the reason might br their use of analog synthesizers and that their tunes are often not very beat orientated.

honestly i think i can relate to what you're saying, i did used to view electronic music that way, and over time i've just found different ways of listening. like when you listen to "peter and the wolf" david bowie introduces all the different instruments to you with their different motifs and sometimes i can sort of shift to hearing the individual performances but sometimes i get overtaken by the gestalt, the interactions, i _stop hearing_ the separate instruments, getting into that, you know, flow state.

that's the point of any repetition to me, it's learning what to ignore, what not to think about or process consciously, it's listening to "time has come today" without being driven crazy by the motherfucking cowbell (i don't think it's "humans" vs. "machines" per se). humans are surprisingly capable of acclimating to all kinds of things. i have personally found serious benefits to acclimating to electronic beats.

Fuck it I'm just gonna go way too deep on this one, or try at least (this all made a lot more sense at 5 AM before I got out of bed).

I used to say that my goal was to like all music, which made people look at me like I was stupid or something, and in truth it was a lazy overgeneralization. It's more that if I care about or respect someone, I want to love what they love. (Back when I said I wanted to like all music I also wanted to care about and respect everyone, which I've kind of given up on.)

When I was really young I used to judge people based on what music they listened to, like I wasn't sure I could date someone who liked Phil Collins or whatever. Now it's the reverse - I judge music based on who loves it.

I know for a lot of people it's not necessarily like that, it's more a "you like what you like (shrug)" thing. For me, ah, I feel like it goes back to Captain Beefheart.

The first time I heard "Trout Mask Replica" I heard about what most people without a thorough grounding in bottleneck blues and free jazz hear in it - some dude yelling over a bunch of noise. I put in a lot of work to hear something else. In retrospect I don't think my motivations for that were good. It was sort of classic troll logic, some clever dudes saying "Oh you probably aren't smart enough to get it", to which the rational and appropriate response is "Oh, fuck you", but at that time I very much wanted to be a Clever Dude and felt the need to prove that I was smart enough to "get it". Also I had paid full price for that CD, fifteen dollars, and I wasn't going to let that money go to waste, and also I had like three other CDs, so it was that, or Dark Side of the Moon, or listen to the radio which played nothing but The Sign and One Of Us on a constant loop - I like The Sign but I don't need to hear it every fifteen minutes.

Eventually after listening to about it 50 times (because my time was cheap back then) I slowly pieced it together that there was, in fact, more to it than some dude yelling over a bunch of noise, and that experience - I guess that trauma, because seriously you have to be kind of a fucked up person to willingly listen to Trout Mask Replica 50 times even though you don't really like it - has colored the way I experience music ever since.

I guess that never means I'll be a true poptimist, because I listen to any pop music as if it was fucking "Trout Mask Replica", as if it's some sort of mysterious puzzle I need to solve, but I'll also, you know, listen to it, because I've moved on from trying to be a Clever Dude. Learning to enjoy Trout Mask Replica was, in large part, a process of unlearning a lot of the unwritten assumptions and beliefs I had about how music was supposed to work. To get what the band was doing I basically had to teach myself Beginner's Mind, and having stumbled my way into some approximation of that skill I do find it a useful one to practice, and I've found it applies to pretty much any kind of music.

I'm limited in a lot of ways in what I can do, in what I can feel, but after decades of work I find that I can, with effort, learn to love pretty much any damn music if I put enough work into it. Other sorts of empathy come a lot harder, but if I can love the music someone else loves, well, it's a start.

And I feel like it works the other way around, as well. That's why I have one album I really recommend from 2019 and not ten, because I feel, rightly or wrongly, that if someone can hear what I hear in "Resonant Body" that they will understand me, understand my experience as a trans woman, in a way that's impossible to communicate any other way.

OK, that's probably enough digging for now.

OK, back to actual music. I don't know how I got here exactly but this Czech song is one of the most aggressively unfunky takes on "You Should Be Dancing" I could possibly imagine. It is at least fairly psychedelic, especially with the way OTT vocal echo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awkjjlVd1R0

The side bar (I am browsing in porn mode, which I do more and more these days just because Google will take anything I say and take it way out of context or completely get its keywords confused and start giving me news about transalpine Gaul or some shit) went on to recommend me something by "100 Monkeys", who I thought I recognized but it turned out I was mixing them up with 100 Flowers.

ok happy new year everybody tell me your favorite songs about WIZARDS

like "good wizard meets naughty wizard"

or "northlands old and toothless wizard" by eno (not that eno)

it's a new year and i need some fucking WIZARD JAMS

fuck it i can't wait any longer, here is my roughly hour-long mix of wizard jams

inside - wizzard king
sorcery - wizard's council
scanner - wizard force
albert ayler - the wizard
lone taxidermist - dribble wizard
shuttah - the wizard
the aquarian age - good wizard meets naughty wizard
the sun also rises - wizard shep
rondellus - magus (the wizard)
jessika kenney & eyvind kang - witch and the wizard
magma - maahnt (wizard's fight vs. the devil)
jake kaufman - the science wizard (explodatorium)
eno - northlands old and toothless wizard

the power metal -> free jazz segue is slightly, uh, daring, but that's one of the hazards of being me

no place for Emperor "i am the black wizards" nor for "We're off to see the wizard"?

"i am the black wizards" is classic for sure but i never got much into first wave black metal, go fig. for "we're off to see the wizard" i was tempted by aunto molly urso's disco version of "over the rainbow" which goes into "we're off to see the wizard" a bit, but i decided against it

i also am enjoying j.d. emmanuel's "wizards" from '82, which is peak new age/berlin school shovelware (the berlin school as a whole is a good argument for the proposition that music should be difficult to make)

OK here's what I've been up to.

1970s TV news themes. I'm a fiend for them. I know it's weird, it's detritus and the kind of people who are into this sort of stuff... like if you think I'm not right in the head, I get that.

Like, here's the thing I am backed up on this by a blog post on CityLab, which is as far as I can tell a reputable site, calling this "The World's Greatest Local TV News Theme". Right here.

https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/08/long-live-the-worlds-greatest-local-tv-news-song/568813/

It's "Move Closer To Your World", and it was written by a guy by the name of Al Ham, who is like a legend in TV news themes, like the TV news equivalent of somebody like Mike Post. Now that's not what I'm posting here today, because bear with me, his wife - his wife was a lady by the name of Mary Mayo, who is famous in certain _other_ circles for working with Dick Hyman on his "Moon Gas" LP. I'll be honest with you it took me a long time to come around to Dick Hyman beyond "boy that's an embarrassing name to have", and even when I did it was just "Moog - The Eclectic Electrics of Dick Hyman", which is the one that's sampled on Beck's "Odelay" and has that avant-garde moog cover of James Brown's "Give It Up Or Turn It Loose".

Anyway God knows this is the sort of music I need way more of in my life.

So here's the stereo version of "Moon Gas" by Dick Hyman and Mary Mayo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvg_NSPsyVk

Enjoy.

Yesterday I did a list of some of my favorite jazz LPs from 1944-1970 and it was fun to write but I don't know there's enough interest for me to post another long list of random names.

OK wait. So in 1976 somebody decided to get Lesley Gore back together with Quincy Jones for a comeback record, which of course means a disco record. Like, you can tell that's probably not going to turn out well, sure. But did the leadoff single have to be so, well, stalkery? "Sometimes I watch you sleep?" And then there's the cover, for which some brilliant art director took a perfectly ordinary picture of Ms. Gore and decided to go all Diamond Dogs with it. That was not a good idea! That was really not a good idea!

Here is a random record by someone named Iya Khan called "Spaceman". It has never been sold on Discogs, but Discogs says it was released in 1985 and that Iya Khan has not released any other records. The B-side is called "Fat Girls". I have not heard the B-side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exLX08o9Njo

Here's a quick one. Can't remember why I threw it together.

Pylon - Working Is No Problem
Captain Beefheart - Hard Workin' Man
Rush O))) - Working Man Slow Edit
Charming Hostess - Won't You Keep Us Working?
DEVO - Working in a Coalmine (Hardcore)
Fonzi Thornton - I Work For A Living (Nile Rodgers Long Version)
Mr. Airplane Man - I Work Hard
Otoboke Beaver - 6 Day Working Week Is A Pain
Rex Griffin - You Gotta Go To Work
Jesse Gould - Out of Work
The Fall - Fit and Working Again
UJ3rk5 - Uj3rk5 Work For Police
Wild Man Fischer - I'm Working For The Federal Bureau of Narcotics
The Clash - Julie's Been Working For The Drug Squad
Martin King - Working for the KGB (Extended)
Blue Orchids - Work

threw together an hour of cowboy songs a couple days ago but don't feel like posting the playlist, it was reasonably interesting but mostly it was just "oh yeah those are the musicians kate listens to all right".

so here's a musician i don't listen to

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPHQiZ5Zzwk

"dreidel" the lead single and leadoff track from don mclean's 1972 (or '73, sources differ) s/t lp, his follow-up to his hit record "american pie". it hit #21 and then dropped like somebody quit paying payola for it. i was surprised at how much i liked this song, considering that i kind of hate "american pie". it's not the best song ever - slightly overproduced, slightly overwritten (particularly the bridge), but genuine effort was put into it and it's under four minutes long.

Trans Playlist #2: "I've Grown So Ugly", Robert Pete Williams

("Trans Playlist #1" was "September the Ninth" by Robert Wyatt and Alfreda Benge, not identified as such at the time)

"I've Grown So Ugly", a 1961 Robert Pete Williams song I first heard as performed by Captain Beefheart on his 1967 album "Safe as Milk", cuts to the heart of my experience with dysphoria. A combination of two things, really. One the one hand, the lyric "Grown so ugly I don't even know myself" perfectly encapsulates my experience of dissociation. On the other, the howling refrain "Baby, this ain't me" carries with it the emotional weight of dysphoria, the acute feeling of wrongness that can strike at any time.

Since I go obscure on these things, here's a live video from 1970 of Robert Pete Williams that turned up when I was looking for a stream of the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFJNzJsYlxo

I just decided to randomly google "Action by Havoc" to see what turned up and came across this free jazz group. I'm really enjoying it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg9N1IIPKGc

Today I got a forward of one of those industry update emails. The top story was some undoubtedly splendid fellow from some undoubtedly splendid company talking about how the "silver lining" of the coronavirus was that it had great potential for expanding their customer base. At the bottom of the email was a quote by Wassily Kandinsky:

"An empty canvas is a living wonder... far lovelier than certain pictures."

He also is quoted as saying:

"The more frightening the world becomes ... the more art becomes abstract."

Which I would paraphrase as "When shit gets real, the real gets abstract." But maybe Kandinsky said it better, in whatever language he said it in.

It had me thinking about Kandinsky and my first encounter with the name, the final long track on a compilation of New York downtown jazz from the early '90s called "Live at the Knitting Factory". I bought the CD for the Doctor Nerve and Negativland tracks but the Brandon Ross track, though I seldom listened to it, helped me understand this artist whose pictures I had never seen.

Here is a more recent track by Ross with Stomu Takeishi. It evokes the same sort of mood as I remember that song evoking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETTrLDKPskE

So I think I will just say here that my friend Sedric and I have started a blog... my hope is that by having a co-blogger it's not going to go the way of every other blog I've ever started, which is at some point I'm looking at a wall of nothing but my own words, panic, and run away. It's vaguely centered on the things we have in common - weird music, technological imperfections and "mistakes" in old media, breakdown of ludic narrative, and old Doctor Who which is sort of a nexus of all of those things.

https://weirdthingsonbetamax.blogspot.com/

Added to my rss feed!

cool, i went on a bit of a tear yesterday and made three long posts, of which maybe 1 1/2 were music related. i'll try to keep this thread updated as well!

Will check; I always look fwd to your posts on ilx! Speaking of Brandon Ross, do you know his trio Harriet Tubman? Good stuff on youtube, bandcamp, and CDs. This was my gateway:
https://harriettubman.bandcamp.com/album/araminta He's also worked w Henry Threadgill, think this trio may have started as a subset of one of HT's ensembles.

wadada leo smith guests on this? very nice!

i have barely touched ross's work, but i did find an album from '77 by "zenzile featuring marion brown". ross is on guitar, and stephen mccraven (makaya mccraven's dad) is on drums. i like this one a lot.

So the '50s classical thread introduced me to the work of Maurice Ohana... his guitar work was mentioned, specifically his 10-string pieces, which this isn't, but the performance is so captivating I felt like I needed to share.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXd1zqNznIs

ohana was a new discovery for me too, thanks for that video (also: killer outfit on the guitarist)

did you know that the sonny rollins tune “st. thomas” is based on a caribbean nursery song his mom used to sing him as a kid ? either i never knew or forgot, found out cuz i was listening to v/a “junkaboo band key west” (folkways 1964):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ykc5_DcNNE

wow, that is really cool! i think i definitely never knew that. and yeah, i think white tie is just an amazing look and it's too bad that nobody ever wears it in practice (black tie rare enough these days!)

more posts - the first part of a possibly-to-be-completed-much-later ramble about live grateful dead recordings, and a write-up on a video mixtape i did that i thought was super fucking long but it turns out is only 4000 words, so that's not too bad then!

i’ve really been enjoying the blog, thanks for sharing here

glad you've enjoyed it!

i was working on a streaming playlist of old advertisements and in the process i dug up this advertisement for amoco's "nice clean petrol", which i'd lost somewhere in the archive and been trying to find for, i don't know, maybe a year - both a fascinating piece of corporate disinformation and a damn fine song. a double threat!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MbYgpX2svI

Been a while since I've posted here. Mostly it's a sign that I'm listening to less music. Going off on lengthy and quixotic music discovery jaunts is not on my long list of things I try to do daily to keep myself sane.

So it's been weeks and all I have for you is a Stealer's Wheel deep cut. I can't remember why I have been listening to Stealer's Wheel deep cuts. Probably some thread elsewhere on this board because that's really the only place I'm even talking about music. Hell, I didn't even know Gerry Rafferty was in Stealer's Wheel. This isn't one of his songs, though, this is one of Egan's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyaswsbk_OA

I was overall surprised by how much I liked the record this was on - it's not great, but there are a lot of second-tier early '70s rock bands that somehow stumble into having some really nice deep cuts. Nice chords on this, nice instrumentation - the bells bridging from the previous song which didn't grab me so much, the harp glissandos, the fairground organ.

That is quite lovely, that.

Persistence pays off! Found a version of "What Goes On" I dig. Flabbergasted me that I couldn't find a good take on it; the original is a decent enough Buck Owens tribute but all the cover versions I heard were just flabby and weak aside from the Sufjan Stevens one, which I just plain didn't like. Knew if I kept looking around long enough I'd dig something up. This is a roughly contemporary version from the "Beatle Country" album by the Charles River Valley Boys, a progressive bluegrass group. These folks are just legit _good_ - I wouldn't be surprised if the Dillards got their "I've Just Seen A Face" arrangement from them.

Anyway, that wraps things up. I guess there are a couple songs I sort of cheated on that I could upgrade, but as it is I'm going to declare the Beatles Covers Project "good enough".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhhFC3Fnw4o

rush maybe i'm projecting but the lyrics to that stealer's wheel song feel extremely pro-trans! :)

i never really know how much to read into lyrics! i've been wrongfooted before. there was this game last year, 16-bit-style rpg, i was really enjoying, and my feeling was that, like, every single character in the game was trans. just the vibe i got from the characters. and then the person who made the game said some really ugly transphobic shit and i had to remove the game from my library, because anybody who says shit like that it's not safe for me to make any room in my life for any of their ideas. that sort of thing is a shame when it happens. part of me hopes that they come out as trans and apologize for saying that stuff, at which point i'd happily buy the game again, but, you know... that's just wishful thinking on my part. person is probably just a super big jerk.

i was listening to the last pink fairies album, from 1973, which i guess has kind of a cult reputation on rym. and the second track is this ten minute heavy rock jam called "i wish i were a girl". and that's what it's about. i don't know what to make of stuff like that. i looked up the guy who wrote it, and he died fairly recently. and i believe in self-determination so i guess he wasn't trans. hell of a song, though.

made a new blog post, kept digging around and looking afterwards and found this iron curtain polish hawaiian-exploitation exotica record

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epR1K184NFc

so there's a new streets of rage game out! koshiro and kawashima worked on it. much respect for the originators, but '94 was a long time ago and on first listen it doesn't quite match up to the heights of the insane soundtrack to bare nuckle iii.

here's some guy doing a cover of "happy paradise" from that soundtrack. mixing is a little wonky - the drums get in the way a little bit - but it's got good spirit and energy, and is definitely the best tribute version of it i found doing a quick search; some of the koshiro tributes out there just are not good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay0tDJYP4Ic

plus, this guy also has a cover of the "highway to heaven" theme song on his channel! a weirdo after my own heart.

for whatever reason i'm digging through old zep boots. the people who grade or rate zep boots have different priorities than i do. they talk about what a shame it is about this tape, a recording that sounds like it was made from inside jimmy page's guitar amp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a14EXLG1GiM

and i'm like holy fuck, this is the led zeppelin version of The Legendary Guitar Amp Tapes, this is fucking amazing

you know it's a good "how many more times" when peter grant has been arrested by the end of it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTzcJsW4wwE

wow @ san bernardino '69 recording

i'm gonna just post this for the cover art, for a library music record this is absolutely amazing and makes me really want to hear the whole thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5DQZ4EKMLc

the aesthetic on this fucker!

i was looking up Harriet Padberg's work to see if there are any recordings... guy named Anthony Caulkins had made a recording based on her theories. it sounds pretty bad honestly, but i went exploring from there. here's an upload of his MFA thesis recital. this on the other hand i do kind of like, definitely up my alley.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctJmw4I66_Y

Hey, this thread is mostly dormant, I've mostly moved on to my blog, but I was just thinking about this song today, and I really think it's a good one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KojUYqEo5t8

You know that ilx needs this thread tho right

I mean. There is a reason why this particular board needs this particular thread.

It's not just because you have exquisite taste. It's because you have the sense to question whether having exquisite taste is a good idea.

This thread is the antidote to so much "classic or dud?" bs

Awww, thanks. I've really grateful that folks have read this thread and gotten something out of it. It's been a great experience doing it. I can't promise to continue to update this thread regularly like I did between August 2018 and May 2020, but I will recommend that anybody who's enjoyed it check out the blog my friend Sedric and I run at:

https://www.alanauch.org/wtob/

which covers a lot of the same territory as the stuff I've posted here.

Help me find a music video please. Someone posted a youtube on ilm 10-11 months ago. It was indie/punk/tronic music. It had two t-girls in a single frame (like a webcam) and the song felt like it was segemented into two distinct parts. The end was heavier and the lighting in the room changed. The girls ended the song singing "you can't understand, you can't understand" (or something like that) in a sort punk/emo way.

Thanks

don't know the video you're talking about, i would prefer that you not use the term "t-girl" in future, it has some unpleasant connotations.

ok, it was about the time you were talking about octa octo in the rym thread so I thought it might of been them.

(urban dictionary said t-girl was a generally accepted "polite" way but it did seem wrong when I posted my question. my cousin started h-therapy this week and I was looking for that video to post on their wall when I tell them that I 100% support them)

that particular term is a complicated and fraught one, i don't want to get into it in detail but i would definitely take urban dictionary's recommendations on trans-affirming language with a grain of salt. :) i've found "trans woman" or "transgender woman" is generally a safe descriptor, but we're a diverse bunch and i can't speak for all trans women!

you might want to check in with imago, the thing you're describing sounds kind of like his scene, there's a thread he curates called "OUT OF FLUX WITH THE UNIVERSE: the canada trans electropop scene".

OUT OF FLUX WITH THE UNIVERSE: the canada trans electropop scene

hopefully the video you're thinking of isn't like black dresses or anything because there's been some, uh, complications going on around that former group. i can't really give you more details because it's not something i'm really informed about and they were never a group i listened to much of.

okay, it is Black Dresses. HERTZ.

Thanks for helping me find it. Maybe I'll skip posting a video.

no worries, hearing a message from you is going to mean more to them than a video anyway :)