connexion: the selector

“Once he was showing me a book of twentieth-century art he liked, and there was a picture of an automated sculpture called Dead Birds Fly Again, a thing that whirled real dead birds around and around on a string, and he smiled and nodded, and I could see he felt the artist was a spiritual ancestor of some kind.” —William Gibson, “The Winter Market”

I put together this mix over the past few weeks, and then dedicated it to our Jessica, whose heart had coincidentally been rendered metaphorically akin to a dead bird, with the hope that it might be of some help to that organ, or at least make it feel dizzy.

What we have here is some very, very sad music, mostly classical in nature, together with some less-sad but still fitting tunes to impart some momentum. Hopefully by the end the old ticker is whirling around like, if not quite its old self, then at least like an actual living heart and not a dead bird.

Gabriela Friðriksdóttir — “Tetralógia”
Zoe Keating — “Legions (War)”
Victoire — “A Door Into the Dark”
Alan Morse Davies [after Claude Debussy] — “Claire de Lune [Hotel Commodore Ensemble, 1927; remixed]”
Aram Khachaturian — “Gayane Ballet Suite, Adagio”
Arvo Pärt — “Cantus In Memory Of Benjamin Britten”
Kalter — “Svalbard”
Murcof — “Ulysses”
Kyle Gabler — “Jelly [from the “World Of Goo” soundtrack]”
Philip Glass — “Pruit Igoe”
Victoire — “A Song For Arthur Russell”
Terry Riley — “Half-Wolf Dances Mad In Moonlight”
Marsen Jules — “Brouillard”
Eluder — “Moon Plea”
Gas — “Oktember”
Âme — “Rej [A Hundred Birds Mix]”

Listen, download, etc: “Dead Birds Fly Again”

I really did nick the title from an early trilogy by Samuel Delany, and the cover art from the Tower card of the Rider/Waite tarot deck (and from a visual representation of part of the mix process) … but both of those do bring to mind a real-world cataclysm. So no, this mix isn’t ‘about’ 9/11, although it’s emphatically about crescendoes and collapses and apocalypse and the end of civilization. It just grew…

I started from the Savage Republic song — rediscovering them after many years — and looking for things to fit together with it in a mix. Early Sonic Youth was an obvious choice, but somehow I also thought of the eerie decay of the detuned strings in Ligeti’s “Ramifications”. That didn’t quite do it, but it reminded me of the similar intro of the Slow Six album I listened to a lot last year. And sliding the tracks around onscreen I put the entire Savage Republic song atop Slow Six, and goddamn if they didn’t fit together perfectly, like puzzle pieces punched out 25 years apart.

I left it at that for a few months until I rediscovered the unfinished mix last week, and finished the whole thing in one intense evening. It’s a bit on the short side, just under an hour, but there just wasn’t any discernible seam left to splice another track into.

00:00 Ben Frost — “Stomp”
05:16 S.E.T.I. — “Concealment”
05:48 György Ligeti — “Ramifications”, version for 12 solo strings
08:15 Slow Six — “The Pulse Of This Skyline With Lightning Like Nerves”
08:57 Savage Republic — “When All Else Fails”
11:53 Sonic Youth — “Making The Nature Scene”
14:31 Mission Of Burma — “Weatherbox”
17:51 Pain Teens — “Lady Of Flame”
20:39 Hula — “Jump The Gun”
24:24 Hunters & Collectors — “Droptank”
29:10 Tussle — “Eye Contact” (version)
31:40 Amp — “Lightdripglow”
34:36 Rahdunes — “Rivers In Egypt. Set Sail”
38:27 Somei Satoh — “Litania”
42:23 Murcof — “Cometa”
47:22 Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis — “Suiren”
50:00 Glenn Branca — “Symphony #3 (Gloria)”, first movement
58:47 Total

Download: The Fall Of The Towers [67MB]
Compare & Contrast: Slow Six - “The Pulse Of This Skyline With Lightning Like Nerves” [buy] … Savage Republic - “When All Else Fails” [buy]

I wasn’t expecting a deluxe two-disc reissue of Seefeel’s “Quique”, but it’s not too surprising that it’s happened — it’s a beloved, Really Important album, and making fans buy their favorite CDs over and over again is a common tactic for record labels. Nor is it surprising that Too Pure would add a bunch of remixes and out-takes, since that’s how you coerce the fans into buying.

No, the really surprising bit is that the out-takes are just as good as the album proper. I kid you not. I can’t remember the last time that happened! So what that means in this case is that

OMG QUIQUE JUST GOT THREE SONGS LONGER, DUDES!!!

Listen: Seefeel — “Clique”, “My Super 20″
Buy CD: Seefeel — “Quique (Redux Edition)”
Buy MP3s: Seefeel — “Quique (Redux Edition)”

(Painting: Tove Janssen, cover of Comet In Moominland)

The oceans have dried;
We wade the abyss.
Soon the comet will strike.

Will Sergeant, guitarist of Echo & The Bunnymen, self-released Themes For GRIND in 1982. I had never heard anything like it, and it was many years before other similar music started to surface. The name of the joke record label on the sleeve — “92 Happy Customers” — was a little too prophetic, and this album’s always languished in undeserved obscurity. But it hasn’t aged a bit, still a masterpiece of spooky industrial ambience.

Listen: Will Sergeant, “(scene 6)” and “(scene 9)”
Buy: Themes For GRIND

For the benefit of the few who don’t read Neil Gaiman’s journal, I’m posting this here, because it is so very Selectorian:

A promise/warning: Halfway through, it changes.

[Sorry, I don’t know an official site for the film, or where to download/buy the music.]

Because you can never have too many versions of the “Super Mario Bros.” theme!

(Picture by Bill Mudron, from the awesome Life Meter Comics)

Listen: OneUp Studios - “Super Mario Bros.” (club mix) … James Hill - “Super Mario Bros.” (ukelele)
Buy: OneUp Studios - “Club Game Music” EP (free!) … James Hill - “Playing It Like It Isn’t”

This mix-tape is a continuation of the shameless personal exercise in nostalgia I began in my “80–82” compilation. “1983” picks up where that one left off: September 1982, when I arrived at college. It covers only one year, up until September 1983, because there was so much great music we listened to, that it became clear that each year would need its own CD.

This is 1982-83 through my eyes, not chosen by any abstract criteria like release date or cultural significance. I picked 20 songs that had the greatest impact on me at the time, arranged in, roughly, the order in which I first heard them. This is the music I remember when I close my eyes and think of the rooms I lived in, the friends I made, the places I went. Many of these really do have senses of place associated with them, sometimes overwhelmingly so. I’ve added little notes about each track to try and share some of this, like little offhand snippets of autobiography.

Read & Download: DJ sneJ - “1983″

Most 1980s electronic music hasn’t aged very well, I find when I go back to it. The “state of the art” digital synths sounded terrible (I blame the DX-7 most of all), the beats were clunky and quickly turned into clichés, and the malign influence of David Bowie and (especially) Bryan Ferry caused everyone to wear mascara and sing in poncey voices and take themselves far too seriously. What a relief the rebirth of the TB-303 and its scrubbing acid bubbles, as the decade ended.

But there were exceptions. The more I listen to it, the more I think Cabaret Voltaire’s “Sleepwalking” (1985) could be the pinnacle of everything that came out of synthpop. It starts with one of the biggest, fattest, loudest electronic sounds ever devised, and mixes in clattering rhythms, bursts of guitar, bass and violin, spooky dub interludes, and Steven Mallinder’s sexy whisper. It’s HUGE and eerie and menacing, in a way that CV’s peers (like Depeche Mode, Ministry, Hula) never really managed to match.

Cabaret Voltaire made terrific videos, too, dense collages of TV news footage and shaky home movies that always seemed to be on the brink of telling a story but never did. I knew there was one of “Sleepwalking”, but I’d never found it until no. God bless YouTube!

AND one Cabaret Voltaire video just isn’t enough. A close second to “Sleepwalking” is the earlier “Crackdown” (1983). There’s a bit too much footage of the band walking around trying to look tough; but otherwise the video makes especially effective use of blurry TV footage of riot police. It’s weird how the heavy dose of FLV compression further alters this stuff, which was already deliberately distorted by being filmed off a TV screen. The compression also has trouble with the rapid cutting and jerky camera movements, but I think the band would have approved.

Musically, I like how organic-sounding and muddy the sound is: I think this was one of their last songs to make really effective use of Mal’s bass guitar, before it was largely replaced by synths.

Buy: Cabaret Voltaire — “The Sword, The Covenant, And The Arm Of The Lord” / “The Singles 1983-1985″

“I can hardly describe the clothes. The figures were all robed and had crowns on their heads. Their robes were of crimson and silvery gray and deep purple and vivid green: and there were patterns, and pictures of flowers and strange beasts, in needlework all over them. Precious stones of astonishing size and brightness stared from their crowns and hung in chains around their necks and peeped out from all the places where anything was fastened.

…

The last figure of all was the most interesting — a woman even more richly dressed than the others, very tall (but every figure in that room was taller than the people of our world), with a look of such fierceness and pride that it toook your breath away. Yet she was beautiful too. Years later, when he was an old man, Digory said he had never in all his life known a woman so beautiful.

[[György Ligeti — “Ramifications” (for detuned string orchestra)]]

The thing in the middle of the room was not exactly a table. It was a square pillar of about four feet high and on it there rose a little golden arch from which there hung a little golden bell; and beside this there lay a little golden hammer to hit the bell with.

“I wonder … I wonder … I wonder …” said Digory.

…

As soon as the bell was struck it gave out a note, a sweet note such as you might have expected, and not very loud. But instead of dying away again, it went on; and as it went on it grew louder. Before a minute had passed it was twice as loud as it had been to begin with. It was soon so loud that if the children had tried to speak (but they weren’t thinking of speaking now — they were just standing with their mouths open) they would not have heard one another. Very soon it was so loud that they could not have heard one another even by shouting. And still it grew: all on one note, a continuous sweet sound, though the sweetness had something horrible about it, till all the air in that great room was throbbing with it and they could feel the stone floor trembling under their feet. Then at last it began to be mixed with another sound, a vague, disastrous noise which sounded first like the roar of a distant train, and then like the crash of a falling tree…

…

When she stood up … you could see at once, not only from her crown and robes, but from the flash of her eyes and the curve of her lips, that she was a great queen.

…

The Queen put her other hand under Digory’s chin and forced it up so she could see his face better. Digory tried to stare back but he soon had to let his eyes drop. There was something about hers that overpowered him. After she had studied him for well over a minute, she let go of his chin and said:

“You are no magician. The Mark of it is not on you. You must be only the servant of a magician. It is on another’s Magic that you have traveled here.”

…

[[György Ligeti — “Atmosphères”]]

They were looking from a high terrace and there was a great landscape spread out below them. Low down and near the horizon hung a great red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group. And on the earth, in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen. And all the temples, towers, palaces, pyramids and bridges cast long disastrous-looking shadows in the light of that withere sun. Once a great river had flowed through the city, but the water had long since vanished, and it was now only a wide ditch of gray dust.

“Look well on that which no eyes will ever see again,” said the Queen. “Such was Charn, that great city, the city of the King of Kings, the wonder of the world, perhaps of all worlds. Does your uncle rule any city as great as this, boy?”

—C.S. Lewis, from The Magician’s Nephew

Images:

• Apnea, photographed by LithiumPicnic
• Max Ernst, “The Robing Of The Bride”
• Max Ernst, “The Entire City”

Sometimes you can find good things by clicking banner ads. Last night I found Dynamophone Records, a newish indie electronic label with nice aesthetics and pretty music.

I know the music’s pretty because they kindly let me download a free four-track sampler EP. It’s all twee as fuck, but that’s a good thing. Beats clicking or snipping like scissors, bubbly synths, atomized guitar drifting in the air, and in the corner an androgynous figure in an anorak is cooing to hirself. I make no apologies for loving this kind of stuff; you need this as well as the scary noise. And if you listen to the words of this song, there are some disturbing things half-said.

(”It’s like I’m having the most beautiful dream, and the most terrible nightmare, all at once.” —Donna Hayward)

Listen: R/R Coseboom — “Eejit”
Download: Free “Cast No.001″ EP from Dynamophone
Buy: R/R Coseboom — “Beneath Trembling Lanterns”

Listen: Death Cab For Cutie - “All Is Full Of Love”
Buy: Death Cab For Cutie - “Stability”

Listen: The Wind-Up Bird - “This”
Read: Stylus Magazine review of “Whips”
Buy: The Wind-Up Bird - “Whips”

I’ve been emotionally wobbly for the past week, so yesterday morning lying on the couch I picked out some favorite music that I find comforting — beautiful without being sad, uplifting without being too pushy, and without too many words getting in the way. Then I tweaked some crossfades, and uploaded it to share with you all.

Robert Fripp & Brian Eno — “Wind On Water” and “Evening Star”
Yume Bitsu — “The Frigid, Frigid, Frigid Body Of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg”
The Orb — “Close Encounters”
Gus Gus vs T-World — “Purple”
Seefeel — “Minky Starshine” and “Plainsong (Sine Embossed Dub)”

To quote the slogan of a local radio station: “Familiar Soft Hits!” Because on a rainy Sunday when you’re feeling jittery and sad, that’s what you need.

Download: DJ sneJ — “Comfort Food”
Buy: Evening Star, Yume Bitsu, U.F.Orb, Gus Gus vs. T-World, Polyfusia

In answer to the long-gorgeous-noisy things Jessica has been posting of late…

Margaret Leng Tan plays Somei Satoh’s “Incarnation II”, for solo piano (or maybe two overdubbed pianos? I’d have to check the liner notes) and digital delay. I like all kinds of piano pieces, but this is way, way around the bend from George Winston or the “Moonlight Sonata” or “Round Midnight”. Eighteen minutes of shivering tremolos forming slowly morphing tone clusters, rising from near-silence into crescendoes.

“Litania” is an earlier composition, very similar in form (though possibly with a different number of pianos); but it comes quite unhinged, building up past crescendo, into violence you could surpass only by smashing the piano with a sledgehammer.

Download: “Incarnation II”, “Litania”
Buy: Litania: Margaret Leng Tan Plays Somei Satoh [Amazon] [eMusic]

[Vinyl reissue series, #3]

I don’t know a lot about the Pain Teens, so I can’t go all Greil Marcus on you about their cultural significance. I know they were from Texas, and their album “Born In Blood” was getting a fair bit of airplay in 1991 on the college radio stations I listened to; and I liked several of the songs, so I bought it.

And here it is 15 years later, and I dust off the record, and I still like several of the songs, in particular the rather wicked “Lady Of Flame”. Turn up the volume, light the black candles, and let it be the soundtrack to your next late-night unspeakable magick ritual.

Listen: Pain Teens - “Lady Of Flame”
Buy: Pain Teens - Born In Blood

[Vinyl reissue series, #2]

Drowning Pool* were an L.A. band who released several incredible records in the late ’80s, but never quite attained even cult status, and subsequently vanished. I’ve just dusted off and imported their debut album from 1987, and it’s even better than I remembered it. I’ll go as far as to say that it’s equal to the best that 4AD or Rough Trade released that year, and was ahead of its time in ways that make it fit eerily well with the directions that Scandinavian bands like Sigur Rós and Under Byen are traveling in today.

Nowadays we’re spoiled for choice when we want music with that vintage 4AD swirly-spooky-dramatic sound; it’s become a style that bands draw on, like rockabilly or psychedelia. But the results suffer somewhat from being consciously retro. Drowning Pool, on the other hand, were being visited by the same muses at the same time as the Cocteau Twins, Dif Juz, Dead Can Dance and Cindytalk, and making their own music that stands as its equal. I’m sure they were buying the same import LPs at the same record stores that I was (Poo Bah, Aron’s), and listening to them as obsessively; but they put the sounds together in their own ways and were evolving forward in parallel with their UK peers, and with the small number of local experimental bands like Savage Republic, Fourwaycross and Opal. But not enough people noticed.

I think Drowning Pool’s fate was a sad accident of time and place. If they’d formed four years earlier in the U.K. they’d have been signed to 4AD in a flash; but by 1987, though Ivo Watts-Russell had discovered the USA, he was more interested in quirky indie-rock bands like the Throwing Muses and the Pixies. Or if they’d been in London in 1990, they might have fallen in with the shoegazer scene. Later in the ’90s they’d have been a great find for Kranky or Thrill Jockey, and nowadays they’d fit in well in NYC or Reykjavik.

But in L.A. in 1987 it was hard to know what to make of them. The record store where I bought their debut record put a hand-written sticker on it saying “Local band that sounds like the Cocteau Twins!” Not really, although they did open for the Cocteaux when they played the Palladium in 1986, which is how I discovered them…

Update! Thanks to comments on this post [see below] I’ve discovered that there is an official website, with CD reissues of the albums, as well as a MySpace fan page. Cool!

Listen: Drowning Pool, Romans and New Trembling Fingers
Download: The album Drowning Pool [47MB ZIP]
Buy: CD reissue from Scarface Charley Records

* no relation to the present-day metal band of the same name.

Andy Summers of the Police and Robert Fripp of King Crimson made this instrumental album in 1981-82. The results are mostly Fripp-like, with his pointillist style usually in the lead, while Summers contributes his chiming rhythm guitar and washes of background texture.

I bought the record when it came out in late ‘82; I was a total Police fanboy and had just discovered King Crimson’s “Discipline”. At the time, it didn’t really sound like anything else … electric guitar, but not rock or jazz, and emphasizing texture and rhythm over melody. Today we call that “post-rock”.

Sadly, it’s been out of print for years, and a used copy on CD costs quite a bit. But thanks to the new USB turntable my wife gave me for Xmas, I’ve recorded and cleaned up my battered 24-year-old LP, and converted it to CD and MP3.

This is the title track. It’s my favorite, and the most rock-like, with excellent and instantly-recognizable solos from each player.

Listen: “I Advance Masked”
Info: on Andy Summers’ website
Buy: (at outrageous prices) from Amazon.com or via GEMM

Here is my new end-of-year mix:

William Basinski & Richard Chartier … Expo ’70 … Krill.Minima … DJ Olive … Biosphere … Loscil … Yagya … Lähtö … Hammock … Eluvium … Frost … Max Richter

Webpage: DJ sneJ — I Will Not Forget That I Have Forgotten

The light’s edge crawled,
crinkled, on all fours,
the tail end of a lever
the other inside the sun.

I’m kind of stunned by lähtö — the contrast between the excellence of the music and the utter obscurity of its release into the world. It’s a Cornell box found in a thrift store.

The music is ambient drone. If you need melody and rhythm and clear tone in your music, look elsewhere; but if you like the huge, amorphous, swirling hypnotic clouds of glowing murk produced by masters like Stars Of The Lid, Aloof Proof and Eluvium, then please click those links below right now.

There’s a definite progression to these three albums. “Departure”, the first, is more an exercise in timbres than coherent music. Fortunately, on “Footnote” the sounds are hooked into compositions that ebb and flow. Some parts are extremely noisy, but in an exhilarating way; other parts are barely there but impart an interesting color to the silence. The brand-new “Leaving Behind The Sun” leaves behind the noise but is extremely dense and beautiful.

This music is Not Available In Any Store (online or off), isn’t on CD, isn’t on a netlabel, isn’t on BitTorrent, isn’t on a hosted website. It’s in anonymous zip files on megaupload.com, one of those seedy no-questions-asked file-download sites. I found it via a blurb on a LiveJournal MP3-trading community of questionable legality. The guy behind lähtö was kind enough to make his music “free to download and distribute”, so since I have lots of room on my site I decided to mirror it, and that’s what I’m linking to below.

Listen: lähtö - “Take My Hand And Come With Me” from Leaving Behind The Sun; “Aglow I” from Footnote
Buy Download The Albums: Unofficial lähtö mirror site hosted by yrs truly (music is free to download/distribute)

“The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson

I went and looked up an old musical flame from high school. That can sometimes be a dangerous or embarrassing exercise, but in this case I think the music lives up to my memories; and even though I hadn’t heard it in many, many years, after a few listens I remembered every twist and turn of the solos.

This is historical evidence that “jazz fusion” didn’t originally mean lite pop instrumentals with tinny soprano sax. Ponty started out a fairly straight violinist, but then played in Frank Zappa’s band and the Mahavishnu Orchestra and came out with some pretty wild ideas. Yes, it’s a hair’s-breadth away from Prog-Rock, and sometimes a little too full of itself, but that’s outweighed by the killer electric violin and especially the yummy analog synth sounds.

Download: Jean-Luc Ponty - “Don’t Let The World Pass You By”
Buy: Cosmic Messenger [1978]

It’s not fair to say I’m not here. I am here, on the living room couch in the sleepy old house. So many late night keystrokes have sifted down into these cushions. I’m not having much luck, though, reaching farther out into astral travel. I can sit in the glow of those same screens, same sites, and there is abundant evidence that there are many others there. And I can type words of my own and they appear to end up in that same “there”. But it’s not the same place, the words and minds just shoot past each other like spacecraft whose docking plans were the tiniest bit off.

And every time it gets harder to summon up the energy to try to reach someplace else. “In the room downstairs he sat and stared; I’ll never make that mistake again.”

But sometimes music lets me hear someone singing, very close, only one paper-thin wall away from where I am.

Under Byen - “Hjertebarn” from Kyst (I do not know where to obtain this album)
Under Byen offical website …. fan-site

Did you hear it too?

I don’t idolize Rock Stars, or get caught up in nostalgia trips for music made before I was old enough to read, but there was something uniquely cool and tragic about Syd Barrett, and his recent death touched me. I wrote elsewhere that it was a weird combination of pathos and bathos — the inevitable conclusion of a sad story that most of us had forgotten was still going on.

But then again, who are we to say it’s sad? For all I know, Syd Roger led a perfectly nice, ordinary life in the 35 years since he cocooned himself away from the public eye. Meanwhile, other artists were clothing themselves in the butterfly skin he shed, viz.:

Download: Last Laughs For The Madcap … a mix for Syd [73 MB]
View: the track listing

Pushing my own boundaries — I am at home with drones & waves of swirly dissonance that might be offputting to some. Lately I have been tentatively downloading some tracks whose weirdness is along a different axis: fractured, manic, sowing discord. This mix fits some of these together with older gems that fit in well with them.

Enjoy the sparkles but watch for sharp edges as you dance…

My latest end-of-the-year mix…

(My son drew the cover cartoon, based on his occasional comic strip Cloudy And Her Friends.)

Borgar Þor Magnason — “South”
   from the soundtrack of Gabriela Friðriksdóttir’s installation Versations/Tetralogia
The Heartless Bastards — “New Resolution”
   from Stairs And Elevators
Deerhoof — “Running Thoughts”
   from The Runners Four
Aeriel — “Airtight Angels”
   from Winks & Kisses
The Lionheart Brothers — “Love Ludicrous”
   from the compilation Rock Around The Block
Bloc Party — “Like Eating Glass”
   from Silent Alarm
Tree Wave — “Sleep”
   from Cabana EP+
Namco — “You Are Smart”
   from the video game Katamari Damacy
Radio Magenta — “Like A Radio Magenta”
   from the compilation So Far, So Good … So What?
Aarktica — “Glacia”
    from No Solace In Sleep
Eluvium — “Under The Water It Glowed”
   from Lambent Material
Mono — “The Kidnapper Bell”
   from Under The Pipal Tree
A Northern Chorus — “Prisoners Of Circumstance”
   from Bitter Hands Resign
Under Byen — “Plantage”
   from Det Er Mig Der Holdern Træern Sammen
Marsen Jules — “Aile d’Aigle”
   from Herbstlaub
Meat Beat Manifesto — “Bohemian Grove”
   from At The Center
Stockfinster — “All Becomes Music”
   from the compilation Red, Green, Blue & Other Summer Feelings
Sufjan Stevens — “Out Of Egypt, Into The Great Laugh Of Mankind, And I Shake The Dirt From My Sandals As I Run”
   from Illinois
Deerhoof — “Chatterboxes”
   from The Runners Four
Namco — “Angel Flavor’s Present”
   from the video game Katamari Damacy

Download: Cloud Sculpture

There is a wrenchingly sad string-quartet theme — fading in on a high chord that blossoms into dissonance — that’s been going through my mind lately, and I can’t quite remember what it is. It isn’t Somei Satoh’s “Toward The Night” (though that’s about as heartbreaking as they come). I thought it might be something from this Kronos Quartet album, and it isn’t either, but I’m still glad I played it again. Half the tracks I just don’t get, but the rest are gorgeous.

Terry Riley’s “Half-Wolf Dances Mad In Moonlight” delivers exactly what the title promises. It has the wild energy and jarring changes in course of some kind of experimental techno, but is still every inch a string quartet. Quite a ride, but I hang on tight and it never throws me off into the weeds (not like that John Zorn track later on, one of the ones I don’t get.)

Arvo Pärt’s “Fratres”, which is the next track on the album, is the polar opposite. It has one slow theme, and it revisits it over and over, with a few beats in between. Every time, the timbre and arrangement change, effecting a gradual rise and fall. Apparently the piece is meant to evoke monks chanting — if so, they are approaching closer, then at the loudest point the monks, who have been cloaked figures until then, lower their hoods and you see their worn and tired faces.

Here’s the second in my Minor Arcana themed series of mixes: the Knight Of Cups, who is fanciful, temperamental, introspective � an INFP if I’ve ever seen one.

00:00 Eluvium ~ “New Animals from the Air”
05:52 Lars Blek ~ “Tristess”
08:12 The London Apartments ~ “Streetlights are Soldiers”
11:47 Below The Sea ~ “Preface”
16:57 Bloc Party ~ “So Here We Are”
20:44 Stella Luna ~ “A Bridge to Nowhere”
27:10 Kitchens Of Distinction ~ “The 3rd Time We Opened the Capsule”
30:13 Weevil ~ “Too Long Sleeping”
35:19 Eltro ~ “How Did it Happen so Slowly?”
39:23 Reed Rothchild ~ “The Great Century”
44:59 Philip Glass ~ “Osamu’s Theme: Kyoko’s House”
47:57 Fonoda ~ “Neu mit Haus und die Menschen Dort”
54:53 Alarm Will Sound ~ “Blue Calx”
60:54 Tlon ~ “Torch Number”
67:28 Under Byen ~ “Om Vinteren”

This isn’t a song so much as an entire mix CD I made as a Xmas present for friends in 2000. I had made gift mixes for a several years, but this was the first time I let the mix be exactly the way it wanted to assemble itself, without consideration for whether other people would like it. I had just finished reading The Amber Spyglass, the end of Philip Pullman’s incomparable trilogy, and was still in a daze from it and from discovering music that seemed to match it in mood, most strongly Sigur Rós and Tarentel. And so I put this together, an 80-minute dream.

“Lyra felt something strange happen to her body. She felt as if she had been handed the key to a great house she hadn’t known was there, a house that was somehow inside her, and as she turned the key, she felt other doors opening in the darkness, and lights coming on. She sat trembling … And inside her, that rich house with all its doors open and all its rooms lit stood waiting, quiet, expectant.”

Godspeed You Black Emperor! “Moya” (pt 1)
Sigur Ros “Staralfur”
Fascia “Ringhollow”
Transient Waves “Always Ascending”
Rachel’s “An Evening Of Long Goodbyes”
Laika “A Single Word”
Mogwai “Rage : Man”
Radiohead “In Limbo”
Bowery Electric “Lushlife”
Sigur Ros “Svefn-G-Englar”
Tarentel “Looking For Things”

“God did not create the angels. He found them already existing and enslaved them.”

Sometimes on our Brownian motion through the Web we hit some pinball target, and chimes sound and lights blink, and a flipper accelerates us to a blur, and after much bouncing about the next thing we know we’re at the checkout counter with a Shiny New Thing in our, uh, hand.

[This would have sounded better in French, where instead of “we” I could have used “on“, i.e. “one”, without sounding like a dork.]

So it was last night when I described the following trajectory:

� Click bookmark of Pitchfork to see what new & unknown indie music they have written [too] clever [by half] things about today;
� Home page is pre-empted by an announcement of their new streaming radio station;
� Paste that URL (<http://pitchforkmedia.com:8000>, but it seems to be down right now) into iTunes and start listening, since the toy project I’m working on is going to spend five minutes crunching numbers anyway;
� Masterful shimmery pop music comes from the tinny speakers, allegedly “Come On Feel The Illinoise” by Sufjan Stevens, drawing admiring attention from my knitting wife;
� Chimes & lights & bouncing about, thanks to Google;
� Stereogum, an MP3 blog, has a review of the album and a full track-listing, including many very long & wonderful song titles such as “11. To The Workers Of The Rockford River Valley Region, I Have An Idea Concerning Your Predicament, And It Involves Shoe String, A Lavender Garland, And Twelve Strong Women” and “14. A Conjunction Of Drones Simulating The Way In Which Sufjan Stevens Has An Existential Crisis In The Great Godfrey Maze”;
� ��Then!! TeachingTheIndieKidsToDanceAgain, another blog, has a post about the album, with an honest-to-god MP3 of the song I just heard, which I download, even though the battery poops out 4/5 of the way through and I have to go to the living room to plug in and resume;
� While playing the song at higher fidelity on the stereo I bounce about the Web some more and come to rest in a shopping cart at Asthmatic Kitty records clutching a spectral virtual copy of the CD (which will not become real until the 5th of next month);
� As a fitting coda, buying the CD involves bouncing to first a separate payment-processing site, then to PayPal, and then back.

So now I’m out $12 but I have one great song to listen to now (which is apparently about both the 1893 World’s Fair and Illinois poet Carl Sandburg) and 21 more to look forward to in the mailbox in a few weeks.

And you should listen to the song too. I’m not very good at describing pop music: I do better when I can focus my purple prose on pure texture. I will say that there are layers and layers of instruments here: piano, violins, bells; and Sufjan’s innocent-sounding voice and many backing singers; all forming a wall of sound with no electric guitars needed. It’s ‘lush’ and ’sunny’ and ‘orchestral’ without being a Beach Boys pastiche or in any other way ‘retro’. In fact, I’m hard-put to say what else it reminds me of. Fortunately for you, it doesn’t matter, you can just click below and hear for yourself.

Danielle Dax’s music is, for me, all about the summer of 1986. I had an informal summer job at a computer lab at college, where I wandered in barefoot and sat for long hours coding things to make the system work better, taking breaks to argue about music on Usenet, and to eat microwaved frozen burritos.

Outside the lab it was a hot Pasadena summer. I lived right across the street in a big corner room on the second floor of a cozy old house. I could open the window in each wall and get breezes and watch the passers-by on Holliston Avenue. My best friend Peter lived across the hall, where he played R.E.M. and Bauhaus loudly. We would amble onto campus and find people to hang out with in the long warm evenings.

The record store of choice was Poo Bah. They had very interesting used bins, always worth trawling through. One time someone sold a bunch of records by someone I’d never heard of named Danielle Dax. They had pretty good covers (my benchmark at the time being 23envelope, of course) and weird titles like “Jesus Egg That Wept” and “Yummer-Yummer Man”. The next time I went, they were still there, so I bought a few.

“Pop-Eyes” was the earliest, and the best. Danielle Dax’s career arc as a solo artist began in 1983 with her sitting on the floor of her apartment surrounded by toys, all listed on the album cover: various analog synths, guitars, horns, and for percussion, assorted pots and pans and a TR-808. She recorded onto four-track a collection of songs that were enigmatic and playful and spooky and impossible to peg into any existing genres. To me they sound just as fresh and original today: not synth-pop or industrial or ambient. Nothing but what came into Danielle’s head that day.

“Here Come The Harvest Buns” is some kind of nursery rhyme, with a bouncy little TB-303 hook set to a rhythm of spoons clinking bottles. But it wobbles and fuzzes and there’s something about being “sick as a pig when morning comes”. In “The Wheeled-Wagon” the menace is more up-front, as the sinister school bus of the title rolls slowly onwards, with the children trapped inside, to the accompaniment of woozy saxophones and distorted guitar and a tap-tapping 808.

I hear these songs and remember that room. Playing these records on the stereo and feeling that special joy of experiencing something you can’t quite figure out, but that you love anyway. Something no one else knows about yet, something you can share. Someone made this music for no other reason than that it amused her, without any desire to copy what anyone else was doing, but with melody and sly wit. If I could make my own music, I’d want to do the same.

Under Byen, from Denmark, provide that sensuous eeriness that we’ve come to expect from Scandinavian bands (OK, except those from Sweden), while still remaining unexpected and alien enough to actually merit those comparisons.

The singing may seem familiar, but on closer inspection isn’t: where the sainted B—k growls and rolls syllables around in her mouth like marbles, Henriette works with sighs and whispers, her voice breaking. And instrumentally, it’s unlikely that S—- R– would risk breaking their elfin spell by pitching John Bonham down a flight of stairs for a rhythm track.

Under Byen pull in odd directions: elsewhere, “Batteri Generator” begins with trendy glitches but ends in a jazzy barrelhouse piano improvisation, and throughout the album one can’t tell whether intermittent screeches originate from a laptop, electric violin or a musical saw. A band whose cellist dares to wear angel wings in concert can also decide to show their mud-covered singer dead in a ditch on the album art.

Adding to the mystique, the band remain (undeservedly) obscure in a growingly One-Click world. Having first stumbled on the gorgeous video of this song, my subsequent frantic efforts to buy the CD were stymied: neither Amazon nor iTunes had ever heard of Under Byen. Nor had InSound or Pitchfork! Instead I was led on a merry chase through obsessive fan pages and shoddy foreign CD shops, finally making the transaction in Euros at a smoke-filled Dutch website. I didn’t actually leave the couch, but it felt like the days of old when I’d finally find a long-rumored disc at the back of the cut-out bin in the ninth record store of the afternoon.

It’s that delightful obscurity that I want to shatter by telling everyone how great Under Byen are. Because I’m like that: I’m The Selector. Thanks for having me on the show.