Deutschland

from the LP Burn Berlin Burn, Grand Royal Records, released: 1997, recorded: 1995



Typically, when someone announces that they are an anarchist, it’s met with understandably doubtful expressions & exhausted sighs---even the Black Blockers I knew up in Minneapolis (deemed by some to really be “true” anarchists) were mostly just angsty, middle-class white kids acting out their pre-conceived notions of rebellion (i.e. “smell me, motherfucker…”). Thus, it was with a suspicious & cynical mind that I first laid ears on digital hardcore forbearers Atari Teenage Riot, although it was admittedly more enticing due to the press reports of them being banned in their own country following a spate of riots that had erupted after their performances; I don’t mean that I think riots are cool or anything vacuous like that, but when art causes people to lose it, I can’t help but take notice. The results, musically speaking, were a pretty mixed bag: much of the album (not an LP proper, but a collection of their previously released 7”s & EPs) was filled with jackhammer gabber-beats which proved to be near unlistenable to all but the most dedicated of hardcore fans (see: people high on glue), but a few of the tracks where they slowed things down have become a consistent part of my library over the years, including this song---the one which got their LP barred from stores in Germany. For us Americans, it’s like the Weather Underground going techno, radical slogans & brash tunes; frankly, somebody out there needs to sample Alec Empire (the band’s leader) when he says, “…we react very strongly to tranquilizers, you know…” Seriously though, given Angela Merkel’s declaration last month that multiculturalism in Germany is dead, and the rise of right-wing neo-fascism spreading across Western European politics like wildfire, maybe these guys weren’t just being paranoid or dramatic…

Lusty

from the LP Lamb, Fontana Records, 1996



Having been locked up from February of ‘95 – May of ‘97 meant that I’d missed an inordinate amount of music releases, and I can still recall my many fervent footsteps throughout the mall to get to a Camelot music store (remember those…), more than ready to make up for some lost time. I actually corralled a sales associate and told them something like, “I’ve been away for a couple of years and need to get caught up”, after which I proceeded to list off a laundry-list of band’s I loved, both for updates & to garner suggestions of new musicians I might dig. This LP, by Manchester duo Lamb, got purchased in that first chunk of new tunes, suggested on the weight of my professed love for Portishead; the vocal stylings of Louise Rhodes are the main element that links the two crews up, but the beats in Lamb come across a lot tougher & closer to breakbeats than trip-hop. Good looking out music store dude!

Space is the Place

from the LP Space is the Place, Blue Thumb Records, 1972



Sun Ra and his far out Arkestra remain (and likely will always remain) a wholly unique phenomenon inside the world of jazz music, and for most intensive purposes, outside of jazz as well, having no contemporaries for many years in either philosophy or sound. Sonny, as he sometimes called himself, was born in Alabama in 1914, suffering through the realities of the American South and finding himself to be magnetically drawn to the piano. Through his career he often spoke of the moment his life changed, being teleported to the planet of Saturn one day in the late ‘30s while he was contemplating existence in his room, being filled with the light of the universe, and being told that Earth was heading for some terrible times, which he could help diminish by spreading an interplanetary musical message of peace & understanding. Can you fucking dig it, man?! I want some of what he was smoking that day… It might just have been a bunch of mumbo jumbo except for the fact that Sun Ra was a prodigious talent, both musically and poetically, becoming something of a jazz philosopher over the years. Most consider this work to be his magnum opus, a sprawling piece of avant-garde electronic jazz wrapped around a steady column of modal (somewhat traditional) cadence, lifting the listener into that ether where he & his Arkestra made their home; considering the cosmological fact that we are all, indeed, essentially the remnants of star dust, and certain laws of quantum physics would make possible a psychic (and perhaps even physiological) journey to Saturn, maybe homeboy was on to something. Space is the place. Word.

Cosmovital Force

from the LP Zomes, Holy Mountain Records, 2008



You wouldn’t be out of line for thinking that this project was yet another lo-fi basement tape experiment from some young buck born in the last couple of decades, but you’d be dead wrong, as this dreamy slice of backwards looped madness is the work of none other than guitarist Asa Osbourne, long-time stalwart of the east coast underground (in the ‘80s with band Reptile House, and through the ‘90s with post-hardcore poster children, Lungfish); to be perfectly honest, when I first heard this album and was told that it was somebody from Lungfish, I would’ve bet money on it having been Daniel Higgs, but I was wrong too. The only comparisons I can really draw are perhaps mid-career GBV on downers, or maybe Olivia Tremor Control after hauling a tank of nitrous into the studio and letting it roll---in as much as it takes my mind away to the same drifty place, I’d have to include Bibio on that list as well. Nothing to write home about I suppose, but the balmy textures Osbourne wheedles from his guitar continue to keep me sated; another “wake-n-bake along with the rising sun” kind of track if there ever was one.

Kilngklang

from the LP Kraftwerk 2, Philips Records, 1972



It’s always an illuminating experience to seek out the earlier recordings of a band who went on to become massively influential or popular, even if the music itself bears little resemblance to what came later, imbued with an adventurousness that typically gets sanded down after more time in the music business. Freed from the limitations of using real drummers, Kraftwerk (which is German for “power station”) really begin to come into their own on this, their second LP; to be honest, I doubt they would have changed their sound so quickly if not for the departure of drummer Klaus Dinger (to form his own band, the legendary NEU!), but it put machines at the helm of their rhythms, leaving Ralf & Florian free to experiment with all manner of other instruments & electronics. The influence of producer Conny Plank can not be over-stated, as he worked with virtually every electronic musician of that period, cross-pollinating the vibes of several krautrock crews; my guess is that the early work of Popol Vuh or Kluster served as their biggest inspiration here, perhaps too much so, as Kraftwerk have been known to refer to these early albums as “archaeology”. As young & abstract as this piece comes across, you can’t deny the inherent warmth found within that droning repetition, an approach the boys would later perfect after a little more time in the studio.

Helen Butte > Mr. Freedom X

from the LP On the Corner, Columbia Records, 1972



What do you get when you cross a jazz icon’s re-emerging taste for hard drugs with a desire for his music to reach the ghetto, add an entirely skewed sense of fusion, then flood the above mixture with a buttery batter of Sly & the Family Stone cut with Funkadelic? You get On the Corner, Miles Davis’ earthiest and perhaps most indelicate concoction, a heady bisque that was possibly more a product of the times & the extra players (perchance) than ol’ Miles himself. For real, this shit is far out but entirely danceable... well, maybe not actually danceable, but you know what I mean: relative to Miles’ other jams. Having assembled a veritable legion of players behind him (no less than 12 people on this cut, or as Miles put it, “…I got everybody in the band but the devil on tambourine…”), the music develops accordingly, sinking into a cavernous groove from the very first measure onwards; quite frankly, there is scarcely a vestige of proper “jazz” to be found herein, but pure funk this is surely not either, its closest relative (which may have served as an influence here) was probably Funkadelic’s track “Wars of Armageddon”. The torrent of polyrhythmic vibrations swirl around the listener from all angles (two drummers, congas, djembes, tablas), that rubbery bassline showing you the way forward, and all the while Miles squeaks away in the background, seemingly disparate pieces to a puzzle which coalesce into a funky union---in my humble opinion, it’s those trusty sleigh bells that hold everything together!

Frozen Warnings

from the LP The Marble Index, Elektra Records, 1969



Disembodied & incorporeal, Nico’s voice always threatened to break at any moment, and yet, her harrowing delivery (particularly here, paired with John Cale’s atonal, perpetually crying viola and a backwards tracked harmonium) sears right through the listener’s retinas and eardrums, charging into the brain and manually unplugging the emotions that might get in the way of this dissociating dirge, “…friar hermit stumbles over, the cloudy borderline…a thousand cycles to come, a thousand times to win, a thousand ways to run the world…frozen warnings close to mine, close to the frozen borderline; frozen warnings close to mine, close to the frozen borderline…” Where her first album was composed entirely of other people’s songs and pushed a pop-folk feel, Nico wrote all the offerings here herself and it’s a decidedly less pop-related affair---in fact, there’s nothing even resembling “pop” music here, which is what makes these haunting landscapes so compelling. This song feels like the soundtrack to those moments in life when you realize things have become so much stranger than fiction you could never even come up with such a journey in your wildest daydreams, the strangest life we’ve ever lived.

Impressionism

from the LP The Strange World of Bernard Fevre, L’Illustration Musicale Records, 1975



Having major Spring showers here today, it even began to snow for a bit; anywhere else that would a downer, but out here weather like this is practically a novelty for crissake, so I’m enjoying the hell out of it---soaked in the tub, ate a savory warm lunch, smoked some dank wonderful, and now I’m zoning out to the enchanted sounds of Bernard Fevre. The recent rediscovery of so-called library music has proven to be rather fruitful for all the beats-heads out there, although I detest the genres given name; to steal a line from the wonderful Stereolab, how about calling it “space age bachelor pad music”? Whatever you want to call it, these spacey slices of electrical atmospheres are marvelously hypnotic, particularly when one is stoned and gazing hazily out the window at lightly falling wet snow (you know, those big-ass snowflakes the size of a half-dollar). Mr. Fevre went on to much underground acclaim in the dance music world as ‘Black Devil’, but it’s his early experimental stuff that really gets us geeks wet!

Hallucination Generation

from the LP 99%, Play It Again Sam Records, 1990



Jack Dangers (aka ‘Meat Beat Manifesto’) always seemed to be equally interested in both dark and light, crafting loops which managed to be sinister & facetious at once, wry smiles behind hypervigilant eyes. The influences are broad (me like-y) and seemingly divergent: Chrome, Nitzer Ebb, Gristle, Detroit techno, golden era hip-hop, even some flourishes of psych rock can be heard across his discography. This was the first album of his I owned, on CD no less, so maybe that’s why I still love it so much---admittedly, it’s a pretty bare-bones affair, but it still rocks my fucking world. It’s like tripping inside of some twisted carnival ride, a haunted house or something, “…those innocent fun games of the hallucination generation…”; that sample of some chick attempting to talk, presumably taking a stab at explaining her chemically altered state, and just collapsing into a knowing psychedelic giggle absolutely slays me every time. Not to mention, one of the cheekiest band names to ever cum around, hands down (puns fully intended)!

Pinch

from the LP Ege Bamyasi, UA Records, 1972



I can remember my first encounter with the bizarre music of Can: having been primed by some of my older peers for an experience that was going to absolutely blow my mind, I had prepared myself for some super crazy shit, and upon hearing the first few measures of this track, all I could think of was cavemen---it sounded like a group of Neanderthals who had just come upon some instruments in a cave and decided to fuck around with them. Hell, even Damo Suzuki’s “vocals” sound as if they might be coming from the throat of early man! Admittedly, being a snotty punkish brat at the time, it didn’t excite me much and I heaped them into my then-sizeable pile of “weird trendy rubbish” which I fancied set myself apart from the typical undergrounder (I don’t know how any of us had any time for anything other than our own identity management when we were teenagers?!). Over time, these wild German acid-heads have grown on me like humidified fungus, blissfully submitting to the near-modal cycles of their grooves, the danciest, not to mention hypnotic, goddamn deconstruction of pop music around. Heavy breaks-heads out there, if you don’t already know, you better get up…

Melody Day

from the LP Andorra, Merge Records, 2007



Although it was inspired by a failed relationship of some girl with a funny name and Dan Snaith’s, the mastermind behind projects Manitoba & Caribou, this track could just as well be the theme song of how both the right and left feel about the White House right now (and, perhaps, vice versa as well), “…melody day what have I done, now our hearts are locked up tight again, and when I pray it's all begun, and when you smile it melts away again… melody day where have you gone, all the hope I had has gone away, and what we had has come undone, and when you smile it melts away again…tell them, tell them I always knew why; so long, so long to say goodbye…” Admittedly, I concede that the status quo is indisputably better than what might have come forth under the tutelage of Capt. Grumpy Gramps & the Backwoods Bitch, but I do feel a bit sorry for all those weepy saps who actually thought this presidency was going to look different from other administrations in the past. For the record, I have never & will never register under any party affiliation, because with exceedingly few exceptions, politicians at the federal level are the absolute highest order of narcissists, selfish and bloated in every conceivable way; to be honest, I only vote avidly on local issues anymore, casting my federal votes merely out of my hatred for other competing options or, at the least, to allow me sufficient cover in order that I may continue to gripe on about “things today”.

Judgement / Pressure

from the 7” single, Flapping Jet Records, 1997



Yet another case of being too ahead of the revival, Gogogo Airheart were exploring the depths of post-punk’s carcass literally years before Franz Ferdinand or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs had even formed as bands; not to mention, as evidenced by this glorious Ubu-esque trainwreck of a song, they truly did justice to post-punk’s spirit of adventure and boundless curiosity, not just ripping off the dancey drumming (although, truth be told, that snappy break sure does help). Even cooler that Airheart are from San Diego, a town mostly known for it’s shocking lameness and snooty conservatism, as contrasted against the rest of California’s dippy flake action anyways. This is one of their earlier singles, and don’t be put off by the roughly minute-long jazz intro, because with the scratch of a record they explode into a real hot mess, and never did look back.

Robots

from the demo OK Calculator, self-released, 2002



This track is surefire proof that the Brooklyn crew of art freaks known as TV on the Radio are, indeed, not hipster trash with their heads stuck up their own asses (as some retarded critics have accused them of being); frankly, there are plenty of annoying little things about this group’s music, so if all you can come up with is the fact that their tunes are challenging and trendy people like them, and this becomes your rationale for declaring them (not just their fans) vacuous scenesters, you suck at your job as a music critic and are, most likely, a douchebag. That being said, these cats are also not defining a new zeitgeist or re-shaping modern rock music the way that some ass-kissers would like us all to believe. This demo is what got them signed, and as a whole it almost comes off like an ever-so slightly smarter & more electronic version of early Ween recordings, all over the map stylistically and sarcastic to a fault. The first time I heard this song I laughed so hard that I spit my drink out, “…I could not help but noticing, all these robots fucking in the middle of the mini-mall…robots fucking in the car wash…robots fucking in the middle of the Jay-Z video…pictures of Oprah Winfrey fucking robots for sale, on ebay...sold, to the highest quitter…” Just because an artist is intelligent doesn’t make them condescending, and TV on the Radio’s wry brand of postmodern deconstruction is just fine with me!

Obert a la Llum

from the LP Music Has the Right to Children, Warp Records, 1998



These guys are a very special group for me; they evoke sensations and trains of thought inside my mind that I rarely experience outside of ingesting psychedelic substances. Taking their name from the very nature films which inspired their musical direction (documentaries by The National Film Board of Canada), Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin are actually from northern Scotland. They began self-producing cassettes as teenagerss in the mid ‘80s, but it would be another decade before most of the world was able to start getting their hands on this incredibly distinctive and awe-inspiring music. Due to their reclusive lifestyles and general unwillingness to give many interviews, they have risen to near-mythic status among many adoring fans; to be sure, if you do a google search for “Boards of Canada” and “hidden meanings”, you will find all sorts of whackjobs insisting that the duo are, in fact, a cult, or belong to one, or some such paranoid nonsense. Both of them have a good-natured attitude about such stuff when asked in the few interviews they’ve given, but insist that cults, and religion in general, are just some of their curiosities which inspire their music, but not actual endeavors. It’s a challenging thing to put into words, the way this song and much of their musical output makes me feel---it’s almost as if you are in an IMAX theater, or a hot air balloon, investigating glaciers out where people don’t live. The vintage analog synthesizers & equipment used is integral to the bucolic and pastoral affect they create, and those of us in a certain age group will instantly recall the sound effects from such TV shows as 3-2-1 Contact, the Electric Company, even the sounds which accompanied that glorious spiraling rainbow of lights that capped any cartoon by Hanna Barbara in the ‘80s. Maybe that is exactly what makes their music so pleasurable and trance-inducing for me: they invoke the unyielding curiously and wonderment of childhood so well that you almost drift backwards in time…like a spool of Super-8 film, at times playing in slow motion and other times flying through time lapse, your life drifts in front of your mind’s eye, in that place where memories and dreams intersect, twisting into a whirl of surreal yet organic familiarity and recall. Extra points for the tripped out cover photo.

TV as Eyes

from the LP Half Machine Lip Moves, Siren Records, 1979



While Throbbing Gristle may generally be regarded as the whole genesis of industrial music, seeing things that black & white oversimplifies the matter entirely, in my opinion anyways; yes, Gristle brought extreme white noise into our lives, but industrial music has never just been about dissonant clattering, and one could make a substantial argument that San Francisco project Chrome actually had more direct musical impact upon later industrial bands than anyone else in the first wave. For all intensive purposes, Chrome consisted of the core duo Damon Edge (handling the “vocals”, synthesizers, and other programmed effects) and Helios Creed (slaying of guitars), and the music they created remains some of the most cosmically fucked up shit my ears have ever had the luxury of becoming acquainted with, at once experimental & yet inviting; above all the skronk, Edge & Creed’s influences are clear: Pere Ubu, The Stooges, Hendrix, Hawkwind, krautrock and punk rock in general. That being said, when it all gets mixed together and you throw in some trippy overdubs culled from random television broadcasts, Chrome’s tunes are indeed their own breed and they have aged considerably better than most of their avant-garde peers.

Rosa

from the LP Zuckerzeit, Brain Records, 1974



Much like the chilly breeze that is currently blowing in through my window & the leaves on trees which seem to have magically changed their colors overnight, this song feels like autumn to me; reflecting upon the passing away of another cycle, journeying towards the inevitability of winter, something about this time of year always gives me strength, and that goes for this song as well. Cluster invited their pal Michael Rother along for the ride, whom they had been collaborating with for the couple years prior to this, thus it isn’t surprising that their sound here is much closer to the music they were making with him in Harmonia: spacey, repetitive, ambient, out there shit. I often wonder what it was that attracted the German music scene to electronics before everyone else; maybe something to do with the war, a musical expression of the dissociation this generation felt from their parents’ choices, perhaps even mixed in with some by-proxy guilt on a global scale, which encouraged the insularity of their scene…I don’t know. Whatever it was, I’m interminably grateful for & gratified by these detached soundtracks...the view is lovely from outer space!

Hot on the Heels of Love

from the LP 20 Jazz-Funk Greats, Industrial Records, 1979



Anyone unfamiliar with Throbbing Gristle’s earlier sonic experiments would view the title of this album as rather misleading, and rightfully so, as there is nothing that even approaches the constructs of jazz-funk on this LP; however, relative to virtually every single other bit of recorded “music” that Gristle had loosed upon the masses up to this point, the album was actually deeply accessible and, frankly, down right welcoming. Built around the unorthodox mind of Genesis P-Orridge, who at the time was still dressing as a man, Throbbing Gristle seemed less interested in making music than they did in challenging people to look at the sicker things in life; one hallmark of early shows was to splice images through a projector of straight & gay porn cut with gruesome pictures of war, people being executed, flesh burning, etc… These exorcised demons are the foundation of industrial music, plain and simple.

Movements of a Visionary

from the LP Phaedra, Virgin Records, 1974



Having left behind any connection to pop-songcraft and having almost totally abandoned traditional instruments, the evolution of Tangerine Dream seemed near complete on this, their debut release for Virgin Records; while electronics had always played a role in the group’s sound, it was on this release that the sequencers & synthesizers really took over, and any semblance that their sound previously had to “rock” music dissipated. The classic lineup of Tangerine Dream is fully assembled on this LP (founder Edgar Froese, Peter Baumann & Christopher Franke), and listening to this album I can’t even conceive of what it was like being in the studio with them; I’d imagine a lot of chemicals, but I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if they were totally sober either. The ambient textures these guys shaped and twisted gave birth to the entire New Age music movement in the 1980s; you know, that stuff you were supposed to meditate to, or some crap---back when the Dream made this, it was a soundtrack for psychedelic wanderers.