- Rare Outer Richmond night: everyone’s windows are open. Out for walk, it’s all hip-hop & saccharine elevatortronica in Asian & Slavic modes. #
- Afternoon listen: "Instrumental Hip-Hop" @pandora_radio channel. Pete Rock, Krush, Alchemist. Should credit producers, but otherwise great. #
- RIP, Alex Chilton (b. 1950). First concert I saw (in New Orleans) after 911. Everyone sang along. And we froze every time a siren passed. #
- Down at Ocean Beach, where the heavy surf serves as one of nature's great engines of generative sound. #
- No idea why brain had stuck on idea Scott Tuma was Souled American drummer, not guitarist. One of first bands I interviewed professionally. #
- Luc Sante on David Shields: "So what constitutes reality…? It can be as simple as a glitch…a dropped beat." http://is.gd/aLlTz #
- Too much fun. The late J Dilla's slo-mo electro take on Men Without Hats' "Safety Dance." MP3: http://is.gd/aJ90n Info: http://is.gd/aJ91F #
- Down at Ocean Beach, the roar of the surf provides audio accompaniment to the planes that pass mutely overhead. #
- Listening to Oddisee's Traveling Man; noodling how the city names of its 24 tracks align with how they sound. "San Francisco" fares well. #
- Happy Pi Day. Here's a neat way to turn the first 10,000 digits of pi (i.e., 3.14159 …) into a musical sequence: http://is.gd/aF39I #
Trinkets from a Dark Clinician (MP3s)
The 16 tracks that comprise The Coat Hanger Clinic, its title and content reportedly informed by a binge of Korean horror flicks, range from vocoded computer vocals to elegiac piano to 8-bit giddiness to abstract electronica to saccharine pop. Recorded by Cursed Chimera (aka Benatos Thompson, and formerly L.A.M.P.), it’s a purposeful mixed bag, but in that bag are some fine treats. These are the highlights: “Desi Watfah,” a mix of church bells and choking androids, intermittently punctuated by ritual percussion (MP3); “Face Breaker,” a kind of microwave patchinko noise madness that slowly lets its emotive side show (MP3); and “Two Teeth In,” which is simply good old pneumatic pounding (MP3).
[audio:
http://www.archive.org/download/bp054/02_-_Cursed_Chimera_-_Desi_Watfah.mp3|titles=”Desi Watfah”|artists=Cursed Chimera] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/bp054/07_-_Cursed_Chimera_-_Face_Breaker.mp3|titles=”Face Breaker”|artists=Cursed Chimera] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/bp054/09_-_Cursed_Chimera_-_Two_Teeth_In.mp3|titles=”Two Teeth In”|artists=Cursed Chimera]
http://www.archive.org/download/bp054/02_-_Cursed_Chimera_-_Desi_Watfah.mp3|titles=”Desi Watfah”|artists=Cursed Chimera] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/bp054/07_-_Cursed_Chimera_-_Face_Breaker.mp3|titles=”Face Breaker”|artists=Cursed Chimera] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/bp054/09_-_Cursed_Chimera_-_Two_Teeth_In.mp3|titles=”Two Teeth In”|artists=Cursed Chimera]
Get the full release at archive.org. More on the musician at myspace.com/cchimera. Visit the releasing netlabel at bp.bai-hua.org.
Nostalgic Hungarian Techno (MP3)
The excellent Complementary Distribution netlabel isn’t as prolific as it has been in the past, but a recent EP makes up for lost time with five tracks by four different artists, among them nAsty, Banyek, and NiT Grit, all working broadly speaking in a dubstep vein. The highlight of the record, titled Dubstep Is Fun! Vol. 2, is by tOOk. His is a nearly six-minute piece titled “Honvágy,” which appears to mean homesickness or nostalgia in Hungarian (the label is based in Hungary, though tOOk appears to be in Belgium). The latter definition, nostalgia, fits with the sample of haunting vocals that is the core of the piece. The track opens with the voice all contorted, and when it shows up later, a verbal lamentation heard amid pounding drums and somnolent synths, it’s all the more affecting (MP3).
[audio:http://cod.mosfet.hu/codif002/codif002_b2-took-honvagy.mp3|titles=”Honvágy”|artists=tOOk]
Get the full release at bitlabrecords.com/cod. More on tOOk, aka Tukács Gábor, at soundcloud.com/took.
Broken Folk from Scott Tuma (MP3s)
When they remake the film Deliverance — and they will, because everything gets remade, whether directly or indirectly — Scott Tuma (long ago guitarist with Souled American) will be hired to do the score. There will be no dueling banjos this time around. There will only be the creaky, meandering, semi-melodic noodling of old coots on a porch, a porch swamped by kudzu and collapsing under its own weight, what weight there is left in those old boards, eaten through as they have been by termites. The old coots’s half-remembered songs will break apart like the distracted thoughts they are, and they’ll be heard, in the film’s score, as mere fragments, muddied by audio effects that simulate the dank environs. That score may exist already in the form of Dandelion, Tuma’s new solo album, three tracks of which have been made available for free download by its releasing label, Digitalis.
There’s “Free Dirt,” which sounds like broken folk music played with equipment purloined from a Superfund industrial site, bent metal, shattered cymbals, and slowly stoked chords making their plaintive case (MP3).
There’s “Hope Jones (Jason’s Song),” which opens with the rough fire of a field recording before moving in and out of sour melodic figures (MP3), a voice appearing occasionally, straining to be heard.
And then there’s “Red Roses for Me,” which at times has the maudlin flavor of a great Pogues song, but works more as a series of self-contained aural segments, including snatches of birdsong (MP3).
[audio:http://www.digitalisindustries.com/scott_tuma-free_dirt.mp3|titles=”Free Dirt”|artists=Scott Tuma]
[audio:http://www.digitalisindustries.com/scott_tuma-hope_jones.mp3
|titles=”Hope Jones (Jason’s Song)”|artists=Scott Tuma] [audio:http://www.digitalisindustries.com/scott_tuma-red_roses_for_me.mp3|titles=”Red Roses for Me”|artists=Scott Tuma]
|titles=”Hope Jones (Jason’s Song)”|artists=Scott Tuma] [audio:http://www.digitalisindustries.com/scott_tuma-red_roses_for_me.mp3|titles=”Red Roses for Me”|artists=Scott Tuma]
More on the release at digitalisindustries.com. More on Tuma at myspace.com/scotttuma.
Madlib’s African Scrapbook (MP3s)
The cunning, big-eared, abstractionist hip-hop producer Madlib has as much Robert Rauschenberg in him as he does Afrika Bambaataa. His works are often sewn from pre-existing material, but he’s less a DJ than he is a die-hard object-oriented composer, forming from pre-existing parts these wide, broad pieces of music that are entirely his own, yet take few if any pains to lose sight of the myriad places from which those individual parts originated. Madlib’s music often has its closest equivalent not in a DJ set, or a mix tape, but in a collage — and his audio collages bring to mind some manner of large-scale cork board, covered with items that overlap each other, ever so slightly, and thus both locate unexpected parallels and highlight under-appreciated details. The resulting assemblage may seem haphazard, but it divulges its logic, and its pleasures, in time.
Madlib’s latest album does double duty, serving both as the third in his planned monthly releases for 2010, a quest he’s called the Madlib Medicine Show, and as his latest under his Beat Konducta series of instrumental hip-hop. Titled Madlib Medicine Show #3: Beat Konducta in Africa, it’s built from countless bits of African recordings, and its sample-layering, beat-limning marvels are hinted at by two free tracks made available by the releasing label, Stones Throw: “The Frontline (Liberation)” (MP3) and “African Voodoo Queen (Drama)” (MP3).
[audio:http://www.stonesthrow.com/jukebox/madlib-bkafrica-frontline.mp3|titles=”The Frontline (Liberation)”|artists=Madlib]
[audio:
http://www.stonesthrow.com/jukebox/madlib-bkafrica-africanvoodooqueen.mp3|titles=”African Voodoo Queen (Drama)”|artists=Madlib]
http://www.stonesthrow.com/jukebox/madlib-bkafrica-africanvoodooqueen.mp3|titles=”African Voodoo Queen (Drama)”|artists=Madlib]
The full album has 37 tracks in all, and on at least one, “Spearthrow for Oh No,” Madlib (born Otis Jackson, Jr.) gives nod to his brother, Oh No (born Michael Jackson), who went to Africa on a virtual crate-digging trip last year, resulting in the excellent collection Ethiopium.
More on the album at stonesthrow.com.