connexion: the selector

I mentioned Virginia last time, and I have done that a lot in the last six years. I almost have a problem with that place—the beginning of my time in Kent, my earlier city had a ridiculous amount of significance for me, And why shouldn’t it have had that? I went through adolescence there into the very beginnings of adulthood, got committed, lost my virginity, started school, met some of the closest friends I have right up until today. I was younger. I didn’t know what was coming.

So for a year or so after I moved here, I almost felt like my time in Ohio was going to be an unimportant footnote to Virginia, but this turned out to be totally incorrect. Some of the happiest and most content days of my life were here, and also some of the worst. And, as established in my last post, I’m not going to say a thing about them.

I will say that recently I got three albums by the Staple Singers and that I’m So Glad is among my favorite songs on any of them. A couple of weeks ago, I was driving somewhere with my sister in the middle of a panic attack. Listening to this loudly, we slowed down the car to about 15mph and belted it out right along with them, doing stupid dances the whole time. I felt much better then.

Dinosaur L was, from what I understand and I could definitely be wrong so please correct me if I am, the name under which Arthur Russell released some of his earlier disco stuff. I can’t explain what it is about Kiss Me Again that I like so much. Though I’ve had this song around for a while, lately I can’t get enough of it. Anyway this one takes me pretty much right up to now, a little after 9 am on October 31, 2005. Like I said, I decided to take this semester off to rest, and this morning I’m doing what I’ve spent the past three months’ worth of mornings doing. I’m smoking, I’m taking painkillers, I’m drinking coffee, I’m stretching slowly. I’m excited to see autumn through the blinds, and I’m excited to get out into it. I feel like I’m coming to life again.
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photo by joshua kessler

Though They Might Be Giants could be “wacky” enough to be thought of as an appropriate band to feature for Halloween, that’s not why I ended up posting them tonight.

Oh no.

I am posting them tonight because I just love them so damn much. I have watched Gigantic: Tale of Two Johns twice this week and right now I am listening to the commentary while I put together this post. I believe I will buy the DVD, rather than just keep this Netflix copy entirely too long, which had been my original plan.

When I saw TMBG live at the Ventura theatre during the Flood tour, they played the entire first album, in order, and then launched into a full 2+ hour show. We danced and jumped up and down and I don’t think I can remember a show where the crowd was as happy as we all were that night.

It was one of my very favorite shows ever.

(I also saw this guy whip out his junk, for reasons unknown, while we were all waiting for them to come on. The junk whipper-outer was one of the Straight Edgers from my town, so it must have been some weird, sober, homo-erotic thing that they always seemed to be engaged in. “They” being the Straight Edgers. I don’t have any first person knowledge of any homo-erotic things that TMBG might engage in, sober or otherwise, should they engage in such things. Of course.)

TMBG is a band I always seem to come back to, even if only briefly, because they make me so happy.

There’s just something so pleasingly clever, random and often sad about their songs. In about a thousand trillion years, I would never think to put down those words and ideas. This may not be surprising because I do not make music, but I think even if I did, there’s just no way, ever, that I would come to such weird-ass brilliance.

I mean, holy crap, “Rabid Child”. And if you were to call me on the phone you would hear “Minimum Wage” as a ringback tone. And for like a year when my sister and I had our own landline during high school, our answering machine (crud, remember answering machines??) had “Spider” play, which still makes me laugh no matter whatever my mood might be when it comes on.

And “Ana Ng” always finds a way to make me cry.

I love you, John and John.

[ps: While daylight savings is the worst idea anyone ever had, the end of daylight savings is the absolute best idea anyone ever had. And I had latkes and apple sauce and sour cream for dinner, so my life wins.]

Download: They Might Be Giants - Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head, Toddler Highway, Rabid Child, Ana Ng, Purple Toupee, They’ll Need a Crane, Dead, Minimum Wage, We Want a Rock, I Palindrome I, The Statue Got Me High, Spider
Buy the Album: They Might Be Giants - Self-Titled, Lincoln, Flood, Apollo 18

I thought I would be too busy tomorrow watching monster movies on DVD and handing out candy to local children, so I thought I’d upload this track, which I’ve been saving, a little early.

One of my favorite monster movies ever! And this is the terrific theme sung by Ethel Ennis … with a little inspiration from Shirley Bassey and John Barry’s Goldfinger.

Happy Halloween, everybody!

I am ludicrous, here’s a mixtape. Why is this on the front page? I don’t know how to move it. I like to move it, move it.

1: Dion McGregor - Ass Bit (0:09)
2: Maher Shalal Hash Baz - (0:14)
3: Sun City Girls - A Throne’s Stow (0:19)
4: Can - Pnoom (0:26)
5: Yesterday’s New Quintet - Harlem River Drive Interlude (0:30)
6: The Rondelles - Indication (1:13)
7: Brujeria - Pura De Venta (0:41)
8: The Tape-Beatles - Elevator Music (0:10)
9: Anal Cunt - Cleft Plate (0:17)
10: The Denver Zest - By The Time Buddy Holly Was My Age, He Was Already Somebody Else (1:01)
11: The Pipettes - It Hurts 2 C U Dance So Well (1:04)
12: Peanut Butter Wolf - Sit Down And Shut Up (0:15)
13: The Homosexuals - High And Low (0:22)
14: Bun-B - Me Against The World (0:45)
15: Barbara And The Boys - Hootie Sapperticker (1:40)
16: The Scene Is Now - Cool Pool (0:39)
17: Boogaloo Combo - Boogaloo (0:53)
18: The Field Mice - An Earlier Autumn (2:01)
19: Shriek - Nuthin (0:46)
20: David Greeneberger - More Professional (0:11)
21: Sun City Girls - Is It Stroked? (0:15)
22: Happy Stars - (I’m A) Baby Pigeon (1:56)
23: The Sadies - Guns Speak (0:42)
24: Wire - Different To Me (0:43)
25: The Tape-Beatles - Different Tool (0:18)
26: The Mountain Goats - Down Here (1:35)
27: Kicking Mustangs - Kicking Ass (1:53)
28: Olivia Tremor Control - Jumping Fences (1:52)
29: Peanut Butter Wolf - Top Illin (0:24)
30: Mick Turner - Borracho Sol I (0:31)
31: Maher Shalal Hash Baz - (0:21)
32: Swell Maps - Vertical Slum (1:12)
33: The Homosexuals - Vociferous Slam (1:34)
34: West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band - As Kind As Summer (1:10)
35: Billy Childish and the Blackhands - This Is The Blackhands (1:21)
36: Dion McGregor - Thought For The Day (0:32)
37: The Tape-Beatles - Metro-Pulse (0:36)
38: Sun City Girls - Zeke Cambridge (0:23)
39: Cub - Little Star (1:14)
40: John Fahey - West Coast Blues (1:25)
41: The Godz - May You Never Be Alone Like Me (1:34)
42: Bun-B - We Do (0:49)
43: Gorguts - And Then Comes Lividity (0:43)
44: Maher Shalal Hash Baz - Muddy Water (0:15)
45: Rudy Ray Moore - Herman Griffiths Radio Spot (0:21)
46: Money Mark - Have Clav Will Travel (1:22)
47: Roger Miller - Dream Interpretation No. 9 (1:43)
48: The Makers - I’m A Concrete Wall (2:48)
49: The Goblins - Selena (0:44)
50: Sun City Girls - Priest On The Run (0:38)
51: The Tape-Beatles - Rah Rah Up And Down (0:21)
52: The Homosexuals - There Are Shy Moons (Backmask) (0:38)
53: The Monarchs - Sandal Stomp (1:07)
54: Wire - 106 Beats That (1:12)
55: Coffee - 44 FIngers (1:22)
56: Gravediggaz - 360 Questions (0:33)
57: Mick Turner - Borracho Sol II (1:29)
58: Jim Copp and Ed Brown - Eula Mole (1:01)
59: Minutemen - Futurism Restated (0:58)
60: Stock, Hausen & Walkman - Rash (0:36)
61: Anal Cunt - Josue (0:10)
62: Som Tres - Tanga (1:58)
63: Supreme Dicks - Viva La Speedy Orgone (1:45)
64: The Zombies - The Way I Feel Inside (1:31)
65: Peanut Butter Wolf - Ten Minutes Left (0:19)
66: Bun-B - Kodak Moment (0:47)
67: The Homosexuals - Regard Omission (0:52)
68: The Holy Modal Rounders - Euphoria (1:34)
69: Kim Fowley - Werewolf Dynamite (1:39)
70: The Scene Is Now - Yellow Sarong (1:56)
71: David Greenberger - Squeegee Message (0:11)
72: Sun City Girls - Electrocution (0:07)

Songs for Self-Obsession Served with Fever-Flavored Tea, Part Two

Everything becomes watercolor

and

whole worlds can fall into my pupils,

like stones dropping into a well.

Download: The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Cause, I Lover
Buy the Album: The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Their Majesties’ Second Request

Songs for Self-Obsession Served with Fever-Flavored Tea

It gets mixed in, and then I dissolve.

Download: Debussy - Clair de Lune / Sonic Youth - I Love Her All the Time
Buy the Album: You can find this Debussy piece on just about any $5 compilation that you dig out of your local record shop’s classical music compilation bin. / Sonic Youth - Bad Moon Rising

Forsheez I’m a Geez. UK Rap / Grime Part V

I believe the first grime track on TheSelector was Kthor’s Lady Sovereign post. It seems like the then scheduled album has been splitted into an EP with her UK stuff on Chocolate Industries in November, followed by a full album on Def Jam early next year. Well, if that means more good material, who can complain. Until then, here’s the incredibly charming Cheeky remix.

S.O.V.’s upcoming label mate H.O.V.A. dropped some great verses on La-La-La (Excuse Me Again), but the chorus always felt somewhat lacking. Donae’o set things straight with his completely wonderful Forsheez I’m a Geez.

Songs for My Brother, Part One

Jon will be here in just two weeks. We’ll spend four whole days together, without interruption. I am so excited I can barely contain my smiling.

Whenever my brother comes see me, it’s always like this. An idea, a comparison of schedules, and a decision to see me, always never too long to wait.

Jon is my one person, you know? That person I never have to hide from, the one who is always in my corner.

The one who drove me across country to try a different life, the one who drove me back when things didn’t work out. We shared Wyoming at sunrise with gas station coffee and chain smoking, mix-tapes and plans for the new leg of adventure in my life.

When we’re together it’s always music, drinks, art and food, in that order. I have so many new music discoveries to share with him, and he is bringing me more work to hang on my walls. He will mix me new personalized cocktails and I will cook him a fine dinner using some of the new tricks I have up my sleeve.

We’ll share pitchers of beer and play pool, and when we go to bed at night I’m sure we’ll be up for hours talking before sleep descends.

This Northern Picture Library track is right up his alley and today he called me excitedly to serenade me with “Patience,” which he made me promise to post tonight, in his honor.

Download: Northern Picture Library - Insecure / Guns N’ Roses - Patience
Buy the Album: Northern Picture Library - Alaska + Love Songs for the Dead Che / Guns N’ Roses - G N’ R Lies

Forsheez I’m a Geez. UK Rap / Grime Part IV

I first heard Shystie with the the brilliant remake of Dizzee Rascal’s I Love You. But for some reason I forgot about her and only recently realized that she actually has an album under her belt. It surprises me that it didn’t create more buzz, especially since she sometimes feels like a bastard UK sibling of Missy. In all the good, kickass ways.

Man, there is nothing so soothing about being sad and heartbroken as wallowing in it with some of your favorite love songs.
Most of my favorite love songs were written in the fifties and sixties, when people were still soft on love and longing and the world was less jaded.

Also, Eric Burdon breaks it dizzown at the end of this version of “To Love Somebody,” and it’s pretty… wow. Eric Burdon? Breaking it down? Yes!

What can I say about Tetsu Inoue that has not already been said by more succinct and intelligent minds than my own?

His music will be listened to by future denizens of Earth and classified as “completely ahead of its time,” I have no doubt.

Most people go on and on about Ambiant Otaku (and the misspelled name has always bugged me), but, for me, Slow and Low is where it’s at (and, to a lesser extent, Organic Cloud). It’s easy to forget that Fax records was releasing some mindblowing stuff once upon a time.

This track has it all—it stretches both into Inoue’s past, with the lovely synth echoes, and into his future with the strangely soothing DSP noise. While Inoue’s recent output has been a little too microsound for my tastes, these last ten years, it’s easy to imagine myself playing Slow and Low in 2040 and still being calmed by the gentle futurism.

Forsheez I’m a Geez. UK Rap / Grime Part III

Perhaps I was not completely honest in Part I, because in this post I would like to paraphrase Mr Eden: Who the heck are they? I stumbled over six songs by this artist, but unfortunately Google has not been very helpful. The only things I know about these tracks is what I’ve been able to decipher from poor file names and the music itself:
• Tracks labeled with Solo, but lyrics suggest name of group is Desperadoes
• Features Anton, Dinero, Lil’ D, and Wayne
• Probable titles of additional four tracks: My Woman, Exorcist, Fluid, and Tube Riddim
• Original source most probably vinyl
• Released 2004 (or later)

I really love the mix of calm sadness and eerie desperation in these songs.

Less a “whatever happened to?” artist and more of a “who the heck were they?” artist, Sine appeared on several compilations on the influential Em:t record label in the early nineties. Sine, also Mendocino, also Symmetrics, was C. Webster, according to the official Em:t website. Well, that’s great.

Anyway, “What’s On Your Mind?” could be one of the sweetest, most romantic ambient-techno tracks I’ve had the pleasure to bliss out to. Em:t 3394 was one of the label’s best compilations (released domestically as Instinct Records’ Em:t 2000-disc two, featuring great tracks by David Toop, Gas, A Small Good Thing, and others. This was always my favorite track, though.

When you come to my galactic therapist’s office, and you lie down in my galactic therapist’s chair, and I turn on my galactic therapist’s CD player, and play the decidedly galactic Sine, and I ask, “What’s on your mind?” you say. . . ?

Forsheez I’m a Geez. UK Rap / Grime Part II

Annoying means fun and simple is great. The flute calmes down and leaves my mind wandering.

Songs for Ritchie

St. Hildegard von Bingen

Born in 1098 to a noble family, St. Hildegard was a weak and sickly child. Her parents promised her to the service of God at an early age. She was given to a reclusive, holy woman at the age of eight and received little education because of the severity of her illnesses, including the use of her eyes. She learned to sing the Latin psalms in order to perform the Divine Office, but never learned to write. She eventually took the Benedictine habit and was appointed Mother Superior of her convent some years later. Postulants began to seek her out to learn her teachings, but St. Hildegard went to another location by virtue of a Divine command. She settled near Bingen by the Rhine river with eighteen other sisters in the year 1148.

Because of her frailty, she led a deeply interior life, using all for her own sanctification. She was favored particularly with visions, seeing events of the future as if in the present. Her revelations were eventually published during her lifetime, ranging from the prophetic to the contemplation of nature through faith in God.*

But although I heard and saw these things, because of doubt and low opinion of myself and because of diverse sayings of men, I refused for a long time a call to write, not out of stubbornness but out of humility, until weighed down by a scourge of god, I fell onto a bed of sickness.

*Found online on one of the many pages I read about St. Hildegard this weekend, but I copied it into a file and forgot to save the site, so if by some off chance you wrote this and I didn’t give you credit, please accept my deepest apologies.

Download: Tapestry - O Nobilissima Viriditas / Sequentia - Responsorium: Ave Maria, O Autrix Vite
Buy the Album: Tapestry - Celestial Light: Music of Hildegard von Bingen / Sequentia - Canticles of Ecstacy

Forsheez I’m a Geez. UK Rap / Grime Part I

I’m hopefully making a short trip to London in a couple of weeks. Besides giving me the foremost pleasure of seeing a good friend, it will also bring me the joy of visiting London for the first time. I doubt there will be shitloads of traditional sight-seeing, but I reckon a record-shop marathon or two should be in order. So until I find out about what’s brewing under the surface, here are some of my UK rap / grime favourites among the less hidden artists. Part one of five.

I was somewhat disappointed by Lethal Bizzle’s debut album earlier this year. I guess the single Pow! (Forward) had left me expecting something more raw and energetic. But then came Forward Riddim 2, which does not only manage to kill the excellent Pow! by simply being Pow! at hyperdrive, but also contains what might be the BEST rhyme I’ve heard all year. Check 0:40-1:05. Most songs ended up somewhat dwarfed next to Forward 2 so the Wiley diss is more of a bonus track. I just love the fact that he’s rapping over Kylie.

When I first heard this album, I nearly wet myself. It combines the harsh noise sound of Whitehouse with the strange, dark, sometimes folky, sometimes ambient sound of Nurse With Wound.
This is an oddly perfect collaboration and I love it as much as NWW’s collaborations with Stereolab, Organum, and Current 93, though for clearly different reasons.
Fascinating fact: the record version can be played at any speed, and it’s just as transcendent and creepy.
This is one of my favorite albums to listen to in Autumn.

Songs for Laura

we’re just going to drink tea from dark wooden cups.

we’re just going to sit in stocking feet and watch the sky turning and grey from your window.

we’re just going to go to the toy store and buy each other plastic horses, to keep on our windowsills, pointing towards each other from across the country.

we’re just going to stare quietly and be comfortable because you and i don’t need words, dear.

Download: Cat Power - Coat Is Always On, The Greatest
Buy the Album: Cat Power - What Would The Community Think, “The Greatest” appears on the forthcoming album of the same name.

I was flattered when Daniel expressed interest in a mix focusing on the early nineties and all the forgotten wonders that were swept away by the modern things people are interested in now. I’m not any kind of nostalgia junkie (at least not about the nineties) but I thought, while I considered my options about mix choices, about another early nineties band that I liked so, so much (and still do very, very much).

So my first Selection of two is of the post-shoegaze (does that even make sense?) band, Lovesliescrushing, who were unfortunately on the goth/darkwave label Projekt who I’m sure didn’t treat them right, and they should probably have been on some other label, though which one I don’t know. I saw them in concert when they’d released Xuveytn and they were just spellbinding—two pleasantly nerdy guys on guitars and a pretty girl and her voice. One fellow strummed with a butterknife and it encapsulated the whole evening. (One of the other bands playing was by the guy who is now recording as Aarktica, and it was his horrible goth-folk project called Fade, thereafter known as Dead Leaves Rising, and who thinks of all of these terrible names?, and we made faces at him during the concert because they were so cheesy, and to this day I cannot listen to Aarktica, though I have been given to understand that I’d probably like them.)

Anyway, Lovesliescrushing were/are truly original, turning the whole My Bloody Valentine thing right on its head. Supposedly Projekt’s got another CD by them in the pipeline, but I’m not holding my breath, as gothy as that gesture would be.

And lest Sara Danger think I’ve completely forgotten about dark ambient, I’m posting a track from the latest, apocryphal (100 copies? WTF!) Andrew Chalk CDR, The River that Flows into the Sands. Chalk’s so underrated (and it doesn’t hurt that you can’t seem to get his records because they are such ridiculously limited editions).

This CDR is long gone, already selling for $100+ online, but I read that an unlimited CD version is coming out or out already. I don’t trust CDRs, so I’m totally getting it and ditching my own CDR copy—that’s how much I think Andrew Chalk’s curious ambient belongs to posterity. Enjoy it, it’s all guitar.