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

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

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

Carl Stone - Four Pieces (1986-1989)

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

MUSIC MADE FROM SOUND EFFECTS

For newcomers looking for a crash course, or vets who want to relive old favorites, check out the now-archived 3 hour Music For Maniacs special on WFMU's Bodego Pop, a look back at ten years of blogging. On to the next decade!

My fave new discovery was recently sent to us by Australia's sound collage superstar Buttress O'Kneel, who co-recorded this in 2000/2001 with Panthera Leo (who is now the mother of the kid in Stinky Picnic) and is finally letting it out of the can. The Fruiting Body used no guitars, no keyboards, no drums...heck, no instruments of any kind. Check the ingredients for one song: 

2 rubber bands, plucked 
1 retractable ball point pen, clicking 
2 Bessemer saucepan lids, ringing 
1 elephant, thumping 
1 elephant, spraying 
1 elephant, rumbling 
1 extremely low sine wave
Sample, loop, and serve. Could have been a gimmicky novelty, or a dry piece of conceptual art, but it's really just good music. I started listening out of curiosity (what does a radar, owl, and air raid siren sound like mixed?) but ended up being quite struck by both the technical ingenuity and the musical qualities. The song "Eel Race Road" is freakin' epic. Free/name-your-price download here:

The Fruiting Body: "Nudibranch and the Moondew" (click on 'lyrics' to get each track's ingredients)

This album reminded me of the early days of sampling, when the idea of finally being able to make music out of everyday sounds was an exciting new one, e.g.: Bernie Krause' 1988 all-animal-fx classic "Gorillas In the Mix." But sampling existing musics (and tv, radio, etc) as a way to deal with our 'media environment' quickly took precedent, Ms. O'Kneel being one of it's foremost proponents (she claims that the events of 9/11 also pushed her into that direction.)  And there's also the fact that it is simply easier to make music with music then with hairdryers and trains. Still, there's a lot of potential for this approach. Back in 2005 we wrote about Matthew Herbert's yummy album that used only food sounds. It is now available to listen/purchase:

Matthew Herbert "Plat du Jour" (song notes HERE.)

The notes point put that the first song uses, among other sounds "chickens being killed for a local farmers' market and its feathers washed and plucked." Oh man, now I'm hungry. Who's up for some KFC?! 

Ambient-Abstract-Noise

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

27 minutes of: ambientabstractnoise




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

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

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

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

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

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

I also quite liked THIS. 

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

Negativland Live - "Helter Stupid Tour" 1989

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

Negativland Live - Hampshire College 1989

Side 1:

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

Side 2:

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

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

Enjoy.

colunco23"


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

RIP Snuggles.

ODD-STRALIA pt 3: The Invented Instruments of Rod Cooper

Another strange-music-making Australian ("odd-stray-alien," as our expert in such matters Buttress O'Kneel says) is the chap in the above video, Rod Cooper, a metal-worker who makes fantastic plunky/boingy/screechy hand-built metal instruments. Seeing him live would be the optimal way to experience him, I would imagine, considering how, to quote B'O'K: "he used to play in subterranean stormwater drains and stuff, secret illegal gigs that utilised the tunnels' natural reverb to the fullest." And of course, you'd get to see these gizmos up close.

He has a few albums for sale, but here's one you can listen to via Bandcamp as Klunk, a duo with John Bell on vibraphone and percussion:

Klunk: "Metalic"

Many of these improvised instrumentals are nice indeed, with Cooper coaxing all kinds of atmospheric, almost ambient soundscapes out of his Highly Resonant Object. No harsh industrial pounding here. The interplay between vibes and HRO on "Aluminum" is quite lovely, and the dramatic "Columbium" is compelling.  I love jazz vibes, but on some tracks the aimless wandering vibraphone doesn't do much for me. Tracks like the sparse, haunting "Stainless" are more successful.

Here are two samplers, both almost 6 minutes long:

http://www.divshare.com/download/25367194-1bb

http://www.divshare.com/download/25367195-e86

And then there's:

Interview

Artist Statement - Like the man says: "Comfort Through Dissonance"

ODD-STRALIA pt 2: Stinky Picnic

"If you're dead, you're totally dead
If you're dead, you're totally dead, not alive"

Can't argue with that.  These words of wisdom come from the title track to shoegaze-y electro father/daughter duo Stinky Picnic's latest name-your-price album. We've been following their career for a bit now, so li'l girl singer/lyricist/conceptualist Indigo must be getting pretty old.  What is she, like, six now?

The fun and innocence of this is so opposed to our previous example of strange music from Australia, dark satanic rapper Ice Cold, that it could give you whiplash. Highlites include the catchy above-cited title tune, the awesome 2-part "I Am A Robot" (a totally cool bit of pre-school Kraftwerk-goes-psych) and the 54-second "Lullaby for Bunny," in which dad puts down his space guitars and lets a little girl sing a simple song for her bunny - so pure and sincere it could put a lump in the throat of the most heartless bastard. All music should be like this.

Stinky Picnic: "Totally Dead"

THE EVERYDAY FILM Speaks!

Will wonders never cease? Jandek now tours, Dot Wiggin of the Shaggs has a new album, and our own fascinating outsider music discovery (actually, he discovered us) The Everyday Film has given his first interview. This coincides with a new video (see below). We now have a name, face, and a bit of background on transgressive audio artist The Everyday Film, courtesy of Italian writer Davide Carrozza:

Interview with the Everyday Film

Longtime readers of the blog may recall that the Everyday Film project has been so steeped in mystery that we've never known the slightest thing about who or what is responsible for these most striking, disturbing, and mordantly funny recordings. CDs would just show up unannounced and unexplained in my PO box. Well, we now know that the Everyday Film is one Drew Steinman, lives in New Jersey, likes Rick James and Meat Loaf, and is the sole brain behind the music, videos, and artwork.  He admits that he has no musical influences that he can detect, and that just might be the most impressive thing about TEF, that he isn't, unlike just about everyone else, the sum total of his record collection. Steinman's stepping into the light does not destroy the illusion of a bewildering enigma, not with such choice quotes as: "My ideal audience is the person completely alienated and losing touch with reality."

Carrozza also reviews and analyzes TEF's ouvre in a separate article. It is gratifying to see someone take the works of a so-called "marginal" figure of the music world like TEF and give it such a serious treatment.

This site is still the only place to get most of the Everyday Film releases, e.g.: the first four albums. And we have a new video, a preview of the forthcoming album "Bleed Over."  He sez: "Unlike my other stuff this tune is very danceable." 

The Acapella Death-Metal of EyeSea

What's more ridiculous than death metal? Howzabout acapella death-metal? EyeSea's "blue ten" is an entire album of Cookie Monster vocals going 'rowr rowr rowr', screams, and silences. And they don't cheat by sneaking in other sounds - there really are no other instruments.  Are they even "singing" in English, or is this a guy clearing his throat for 22 minutes?  Whatever it is, I was laffin'!  

To the remixers and sound-collagists of the world: you're welcome.

 EyeSea "Stück 6"

Bandcamp Is Still The New Cassette Culture

Like I was saying...Listen for free, buy if you like.

This batch is loosely associated by a shared fascination with the surreal and fantastic,  injecting a little much-needed magic into our world.

- Ergo Phizmiz "Idiot": The prolific madman across the water has two more winners. This one's a generous 18 tracks of mostly instrumentals (w/some sampled vox) cobbled together out of found-sounds and whimsical instruments. "Ornidisco" is a dance track ingeniously fashioned entirely from sampled bird sound effects. "Night on The Town" is an absurd disco raver performed entirely acappella (complete with beatboxing) that's as funny as it is funky. Avant-garde, or just good ol' British eccentricity? Price: free.

- Ergo Phizmiz "Music for Pleasure": "A 17 track behemoth of Ergo Phizmiz's singular take on guitar based rock'n'roll & pop music." Yep, these ramshackle constructions suggest actual rock music, sometimes in the Neil Innes or Syd Barret vein, with much Kink-y garage punk energy. Bonus points for reviving Bobby Goldsboro's '60s bubblegum gem "Little Things." Album title = truth in advertising. Price: £7.

- Doctor Midnight "Crotch Rocket Extremities and​/​or Popular Culture Atrocities": What the ..? This short (12 tracks in 23 minutes), utterly unpredictable album makes as much sense as that album title. This duo comes from Alabama, not with a banjo on it's knee, but plenty of other noises: sound effects, screaming, computers, piano, marimba, guitars, and scary hillbilly voices that may be sampled, or may belong to the band members. My fave moment is when "Chocodino" almost turns into a remake of Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain," followed by 38 seconds of "There Ain't Shit On TV!" Price: free.

Paul and Pierre "Eggs Benedict With Mr Wu On The Seahorse Monorail": Pierre is the man behind naive/ toy-pop masters Carton Sonore; this time out he's joined by Scottish warbler Paul Vickers for actual songs, but still retaining the whimsy of past projects. Acoustic instruments like musical saw and mandolin meet Casio-tronics to realize sea shanty-like sing-alongs replete with fantastical imagery. Well written, wonderfully evocative, effortlessly enjoyable. Price: €7, tho the super song "Lon Chaney" is free, and you know a song has to be good if it's about Lon Chaney.

- Zlata Sandor/Shaun Sandor "Band on the Moon": If you're pressed for time, here's 5 minutes of a father and his 4-year-old daughter singing about the kinds of things you would expect little girls to sing about, e.g.: party balloons, animals, and playing on the moon. C'mon, how can you not like this? Price: $1.00.

Timur and the Dime Museum "X-ray Sunsets": These Angelenos conjure up a dark carnival for accordion, ukulele, violin, and on the rollicking "Distance Of The moon," a spot of toy piano, with a bona-fide opera singer up front; I featured their amazing take on Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" here previously, but this album is all original and it's all good. Don't be surprised if David Lynch uses the dreamy doo-wop ballad "Asleep At The Wheel" in his next film. Flamboyantly theatrical without quite being campy. Recommended, even if you hate opera. Price: $7.

Tho he was hardly an indie band/ bedroom producer like the above, I still would like to point out that - holy crap! - there are now 48 Fela Kuti albums now available on Bandcamp.

Bandcamp Is The New Cassette Culture...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Strangest Album Ever Made?!

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

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

Free listening/download here:

Five Starcle Men  "Gomba Reject Ward Japan"

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

T.V.O.D.

Turn on the t.v., watch a movie, what do you get? Inane sitcoms, "Transformers," cops chasing serial killers for the umpteenth time...but what's this?!  Video being put to good use for a change, producing such feasts for the eyes and ears as

Nintendo audio played by player piano and robotic percussion:

"This system allows for Nintendo gameplay audio to be played through an acoustic player piano and robotically controlled percussive instruments. The piano and percussion play live during actual gameplay."  It's true, watch the game in the upper left to see how it triggers the robot instruments.

I wrote about Gnarboot's nutty album in 2011, but this video from earlier this year isn't so much kooky as it is pretty sick 'n' twisted.  Imagine David Lynch making children's programming. Over an eerie electronic score, the title phrase "Cats In Pajamas" is chanted mantra-like by a childlike vocalist, as people in cat masks mysteriously appear and disappear.  My three-year-old came over to my computer when I was playing this, intrigued. After all, it's kitties, right?  But when the scary knife-wielding clown showed up, she ran from the room.  Thanks a lot for scaring my kid, Gnarboots!

Speaking of sick and twisted...the gold standard of such, The Everyday Film, who released an album we reviewed earlier this year, have now added video to their arsenal of weapons of mass hysteria.  It's for the short version of their song "Goool" and, like a slideshow of early Jandek album covers, features a series of blurred, discombobulated photos in as compelling a video realization of alienation and disconnection as you're ever going to see.

Need a laugh now? Another M4M fave, the absurdist mad scientist and his "singing" robot duo the Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra, have also released their debut video, "Frankenstein's Laundromat," another welcome bit of their trademark electro-poppin' surreal humor. This is a preview of the forthcoming album, "Experiments With Auto-Croon."

Swedish female duo The Haggish Moue have a bunch of videos up on the youtubes, and I watched 'em all.  Not sure if I really need to listen to their wistful brand of electro-psych on it's own, but the largely-instrumental (+ somewhat ethereal vox) music works great as a soundtrack to spacey video art acid trips that you can get lost in. Let's fall into space...

"Bangs Glitter"

FREE LUNCH DINER

("Halloween Stomp" is back on-line)

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

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

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

And dig these individual tracks:

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

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

More freebies to come, ya cheap bastards...

BeerBottle Percussion, NewWave Music-Boxes, Avant-Catholic Masses

Last year's assortment of experimental/alt-classical/unclassifiably weird new releases received a succinct two-word comment from reader Outa-Spaceman: "Astonishing stuff!" Like last year's roundup, these are new(ish) commercial releases that are well worth your hard-earned dollars/francs/pounds/heads-of-cattle/etc., with album moods ranging from Carton Sonore's charming toy-pop and the krazy kovers of Hanna Peel and Misfit Toys, to chin-stroking Afro-tronica and new avant-chamber music; from modern-day high holy masses to Neon Lushell's creepy "No Religion" - we're covering a lot of territory. And when was the last time you heard music performed entirely on beer bottles? Prepare to be astonished!

Astonishing Stuff!

1. Paddy Steer - "A. Welson Senior II": reader Phil C. hepped me to this Mancunian cat with this description: "He's a crazy one man moog/ glockenspiel/drumkit band with a penchant for paper maché robot/creature heads. I saw him at a tiny little festival a couple of years ago (he was on after the band I was with) and it was the best and strangest thing I've ever seen. For the whole of his set I felt like I was having an acid flashback." One of the best albums I've heard in recent years.  Was very hard to pick representative tracks, they're all doubleplus good. Watch the vids on his label site!
2. Misfit Toys - "Alone Again Naturally": from the ridiculously entertaining debut album "Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is," a mad collection of '70s covers performed on banjo, bowed banjo (?!), marimba, oboe and clarinet, among others, radically reinventing Stevie Wonder, Chicago (as you may have guessed by the album title), Tony Orlando and Dawn, Black Sabbath, Talking Heads, the Gilbert O'Sullivan song featured here, and more. Transcends novelty, but still a must for any Maniacs' party.
3. Neon Lushell - "Black Confetti": I really liked these Midwesterners debut "Modern Purveyors of Filth and Degradation" and their new one (to be released Oct 8) is just as good - two-discs bulging with experimental ambient evil, as dark as goth or metal but without those genres' kitschy cliches.
4. Mammane Sani et son Orgue - "Bodo": hypnotic '70s Space-Age organ instrumentals from Niger, Africa; who knew such things existed?
5. Gunnelpumpers - "Bottley Functions": The six musicians of this Chicago-based avant/improv group perform here only on beer bottles. From their new one,"Montana Fix."
6. Gunnelpumpers - "Buffalo Jump": groovy percussion with three double-basses; that's like, what, 6 basses total? (boom-tish!)
7. Hannah Peel - "Electricity" - Peel's splendid 4 song EP "Rebox" performs '80s hits by Soft Cell, New Order, Cocteau Twins, and the song featured here, OMD, on sampled antique music box. May be corny as hell, but I love it.
8. Phil Kline - "John the Revelator - Sanctus": We reviewed this NYC composer's Christmas music for massed boom-boxes previously, and reader James C. recommended the Catholic inspired "John The Revelator;" the eclectic music sometimes doesn't immediately suggest a mass, tho it does get a bit Gregorian at times; quite lovely. 
9. Kurosounds - "Manège d'éléphants": Fantastic hypnogogic ambient soundscapes; looped delayed instruments echo rhythmically as dreamy sound effects drift in and out; owes as much to psychedelic dub as it does to  Minimalism. 
10. Bruce Cropley - "March Into April": This Aussie's excellent album "Modal Podal" is almost all instrumental, exploring a wide variety of styles that aren't necessarily all that weird; which makes it all the more unique - he's not afraid of risking his avant credentials by throwing some perfectly pleasant jazz fusion-type stuff in with the almost Zappa-like quirkiness; makes one realize how even "strange" "experimental" music can be predictably formulaic.
11. Bruce Cropley - "Modal Podal": Copley's is also the man behind the super-swell "Quirky Music" on-line radio station
12. Juan Blanco - "Musica para Danza": Was I surprised to find this album in my PO box - "Nuestra Tiempo" is a retrospective of Cuba's electronic music pioneer, Juan Blanco. Cuban electronica? As in, with those infectious Latin rhythms? Yes, on one almost 14 minute -long track. The rest of the album doesn't offer much mamboing, just tasty analog bloopiness, like this track from 1961, the very first piece of electronic music ever recorded in Cuba, available for the first time.
13. Tino Contreras - "Santo": Perhaps not as historically startling as the Blanco album, but "El Jazz Mexicano de Tino Contreras" is another worthy reexamination of an overlooked Latin American artist from decades past; this one unexpectedly veers from psych Afro-Latinisms to exotic international styles, to such oddities as numerous tracks from his groovy '60s a-Go-Go Catholic mass, like the track featured here that mashes up Latin (in the original sense of the word) chanting with Brubeck-esque cool jazz and sleazy electric organ. Que pasa?!
14. Paddy Steer - "Stun phlogiston"
15. Carton Sonore - "The Mexican Roads": The latest from France's adorable "naive music" toy-pop maestro.

Le Enfant Terrible: Music Made from Pots, Pans, and Toys

Manchester band Le Enfant Terrible sent me a link to their new album, describing it thusly: "It's effectively 'World Music' but not quite. It's music made from pots and pans, and toy instruments bought off street venders around the world." I thought: no way. But the opening moments of the really good tune "jucomeba comebi chi" convinced me otherwise.  Still, that description may not be entirely accurate, as there do seem to be some "proper" instruments on these somewhat exotic, mysterious, percussive instrumentals, but maybe they just really know how to play their toys. Recommended for fans of the Forgotten Fish Memory Orch. Picks To Click: "jucomeba comebi chi", "wasashi tono cupora."

Name-your-price/listen/purchase here:

Le Enfant Terrible: daeli cane

(Apologies if this blog is getting a bit neglected: trying to catch up on work, summer holidays, etc. Many more silly/naughty/filthy old 78s coming soon!)

JUNK ORCHESTRAS Pt 3

I'll be guest dj-ing once again this Sunday, 8pm PST on Spacebrother Greg's "Radio Misterioso," bringing up another batch of wild sounds that have mostly not been featured here. Listen live at http://killradio.org/ so you can call in and/or go on Greg's facebook page and leave comments 'n' stuff.

And now...on with the show:

My recent posts about musicians who build their instruments out of junk reminded me of similiar artists I'd written about, whose songs posted ages had long since gone off-line.  I was also reminded of a recent single re-release, and miscellaneous records I'd had for years.

Junkyard Bands

The Junkman - 'Beat The Can' [both from his album 'The Junkman 2," available from his site - the liner notes break down exactly what objects are used for each song]
The Junkman - 'Drug Puppet' [bit of a Residents kinda thing going on here]
Electric Junkyard Gamelan - 'Bigbarp' [pictured above]
Car Music Project - 'Noodles'
Gamelan Son of Lion - 'Bang on a Tin Can'
Electric Junkyard Gamelan - 'Nutbutter Challenge'
The LA Drivers Union Por Por Group - 'Por Por Horn-To-Horn Fireworks'
Electric Junkyard Gamelan - 'Space Kitty' (excerpt)
Staff Benda Bilili - 'Sala Mosala'
Wendy Chambers - 'Star Spangled Banner' [on the legendary car-horn organ, pictured right]
Wendy Chambers - 'The Kitchen' [not only are kitchen implements used as instruments, but an actual meal is supposed to be prepared during the performance of this piece!]
The Junk Yard Band - 'The Word' [killer Def Jam single from the '80s - a group of children playing gogo funk from DC; that lead singer rivals the young Michael Jackson]
The Watts Little Angel Band - 'Nik Nak Paddy Wack' [same concept as The Junkyard Band, but from a decade prior; this must-have single, whose b-side is an oldies medley 'New Orleans/Land Of A 1000 Dances,' has recently been re-issued]

All of this had me thinking about Test Dept (none of whose music I can recall off the top of my head) and Einstürzende Neubauten (think I did like some of their stuff), two '80s bands whose use of found percussion was popular with the industrial crowd, as it was seen not only as a way to be real noisy, but to seem shocking and rebellious and what-not.  

Also from the '80s: the L.A. band Savage Republic used things like an oil drum and a railroad tie - anyone else use junk percussion mixed with conventional instruments, in the service of actual songs? Think I read David Byrne saying that he and Eno played junk on "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts."

And did the Bang On A Can group ever actually bang on cans?

JUNK ORCHESTRAS Pt 1: The Gas Tank Orchestra

I haven't been posting anything new lately, cuz I've been trying to re-up albums that were victims of the Great Mediafire/Rapidshare Takedown of 2013 by request. Which I'm happy to do, but I wasn't able to find: The Full Life All-Stars, The Lavender Jungle, "Ya No Hay Beatles," The Musical Betts, March Fourth 2012. 'Til then, dig these crazy sounds made not by guitars, not by keyboards, not by trap-drum kits - man, that old-fashioned stuff is for squares - but by stuff. Junk. 'Found objects,' and what-have-you.

The Gas Tank Orchestra does what it says on the tin, making their instruments out of discarded auto parts. The now-defunct New Orleans combo has an excellent posthumous free download album now available that does wander around somewhat aimlessly at times, as improv groups are wont to do, but really hits the gas (sorry) on nifty toe-tappers like "Making Way," "Bunnys Bolero" and "Desire Project." The GTO don't make the kind of racket that groups like Einstürzende Neubauten used to make - their sound is subtle, atmospheric even, with a keener sense of rhythm. They are from one of the world's funkiest cities, after all.

The Gas Tank Orchestra - "Homeshed"

Another album of theirs is available for streaming/purchase that features a more sampled/cut-n-paste production at times. Pick to Click: "Oilspeak."

The Gas Tank Orchestra - soundclick album

More junk orchestras to come in future posts.

SIX ACCORDIONISTS GO RIDING ON A CAROUSEL...

...No, that's not a joke set-up. It really happened on the Santa Monica Pier in 2010. Daniel Corral and his group the Free Reed Conspiracy actually sat on carousel horses that went up 'n' down, up 'n' down, playing a near-30 minute powerful drone piece - like Glenn Branca for squeezeboxes. "...the audience listened as the music spun past them." Watch it here (can't see the musicians much, unfortunately):

NEOTROPE

or download the mp3 from Corral's website if you scroll down a bit

HERE

tho it's not as densely loud. The acoustics of the 80-year-old carousel building no doubt caused much reverberation, which I prefer to the pristine studio version.

There was apparently an entire evening of music and performance on the carousel and, as I live in Los Angeles, am bummed that I wasn't there. Encore, encore!

PLEASE ACCEPT THIS FREE GIFT

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

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

B'O'K  "The Four Four Seasons"

Which reminds me of this similar mix:

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

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

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

OH/EX/OH "Entropic"

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

OH/EX/OH "Tokyo Field Recordings"

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