Musical Discoveries of 2008 Part 2 of 3

Harmonic 313 - EP1 / Dirtbox (Warp, 2008)

Mark Pritchard has flirted with using old synth sounds with hip-hop previously on the Global Communication Fabric mix and his nod to old library music project, Harmonic 33. He fully realizes those sounds on his latest project, Harmonic 313. Releasing two EPs this year, EP1 finds Pritchard in similar territory as some of J Dilla's electronic hip-hop producations while Dirtbox has mostly a dubstep sound. Harmonic 313's remix work is also worth a listen.


Jacaszek - Treny (Miasmah, 2008)

Miasmah continues their excellent output with Polish musician, Jacaszek. Combining chamber orchestra, female vocals, and prepared electronic sounds, Jacaszek manages to portray music of forgotten memories.


Kail - True Hollywood Squares (Alpha Pup, 2008)

This year was a little short of hip-hop for me, but Kail's concept album featuring different characters describing the true seedy underbelly of Hollywood rang to for me. Producation ranges from 8-bit video game samples to big band horns. Kail is a true ghetto tour guide.


Lambert and Nuttycombe - At Home (Fallout, 1970)

In a simiar style of Simon and Garfunkel, Lambert and Nuttycombe feature subtle guitar strumming with delicate two-part harmonies. There is a terrible sadness to this album that really shows the issues of Lambert's heroin addiction. I think I listened to this album more than any other from this last year.


The Left - Jesus Loves The Left: The Complete Studio Recordings (Bona Fide, 1984)

With all the recent so called punk music rotting on modern radio, many people want to claim that punk is dead. There are a few bands carrying the punk torch, but no other punk album that I heard this year hits like The Left. The Left capture what is best about punk: tiredless teenage boredom, asking questions, and wonderfully sloppy melodies.


Lindstrøm - Where You Go I Go Too (Smalltown Supersound, 2008)

Dance and electronic albums typically suffer from having one or two tracks that are great, and the rest of the tracks sound the same. I guess dance music is usually best in DJ mixes and live sets. That said, Lindstrøm manages to craft an album that combines many of the best parts of current dance music trends - am bient keyboard flourishes, disco breakbeats, and melodic dynamics - all into 3 epic and ambitious tracks.


Märtini Brös - The MB Factor (Poker Flat, 2008)

A mix album of the Märtini Brös best tracks from the last 10 years. Not since Tiefschwarz' Fabric mix has a minimal house mix sounded so good. Throw in some subtle flourishes over the 70 minutes with funky basslines, and it's all good.


Metro Area - Fabric 43 (Fabric, 2008)

The Fabric serious this year has some great contenders: Luciano, Ame, Robert Hood, and Mark Farina. Metro Area's mix beats them all out of sheer fun. The album starts with them commentating over the first track to give it a goofy feel, and then they settle into some rad Italo-disco and electro from the past 20 years.


Nik Bartsch's Ronin - Holon (ECM, 2008)

The European Jazz scene is one which has many different niche's and different styles. I am a fan of free jazz and improv jazz, but no other jazz album from the last year had the most intriguing mix of styles as this Swiss pianist's Ronin group. Modern classical, jazz, funk, electronic drone, and world music all find their way into these 6 varied tracks.


Noisia - Fabriclive. 40 (Fabric, 2008)

Each year, Fabric has a shining example of what's hot in the drum and bass world via their Fabriclive series. Noisia's release foregoes much of the cheesier vocal sounds of typical drum and bass and aims for dark complex beats. For 80 minutes, this mix consistently deals with the ebb and flow of the beats attempting to descend into glitch chaos.

Musical Discoveries of 2008 Part 1 of 3

My apologies for not blogging in so long. I've been busy working, reading, playing Call of Duty, socializing, playing with my dog, watching movies, and hanging out with Capree.

Typically, in years past, I would be up on the current year of music enough to do a full list of music from that year. I have listened to enough music from this last year to do a list, but I felt that this year also had a lot of older music that affected me. I'm also getting rid of numbering albums because I feel like all of these albums had something I really enjoyed in some way.

The list is simply albums (with one exception). This rules out much of the music I listened to this year. I spent much of time this year listening to dance singles, web mixes, and podcasts. This allowed me to continue to listen to music even though my work environment is more complicated and less music friendly than in the past. This next year, I'll make sure to document what I'm listening to regardless of format, year, or genre.

So without further ado, here is part 1. Part 2 will follow tomorrow, and part 3 the day after that.


Aaron Lightman - Aaron Lightman (Fallout, 1970)

Similar in style to some of Donovan's music as well as other more successful musicians of the baroque pop tradition, Aaron Lightman intersperses shorter pop tracks with longer orchestral arrangements. The reissuer, Fallout Records, is a UK label that specializes in reissues of lost music from the 60s and 70s. I attribute my interest in baroque pop music this year to the label's strong output.


Blue Sky Black Death - Late Night Cinema (Babygrande, 2008)

Having been blindsided by their first album, A Heap Of Broken Images, back in 2006, I have been eagerly anticipating their next instrumental full length. Kingston and Young God combine samples from classical, blues, soul, movie soundtracks, and other places unknown with their own instruments such as pedal effects guitar, cello, and keys. The eclecticism of their tastes really shines in their style of Godspeed dramatics with boom bap beats.


Colin Blunstone - One Year (Water, 1971)

Another baroque pop gem. Colin Blunstone is the singer from The Zombies who took to doing his own work after The Zombies broke up. Tracks like "I Can't Live Without You" highlight the sheer madness of Blunstone's vocal dexterity over chamber orchestral arrangements.


David Axelrod - Seriously Deep (Dusty Groove, 1975)

Long out of print, Seriously Deep is one of the most sampled records during the golden age of hip-hop. David Axelrod was known for his productions, and his own album captures his variety of styles: jazz, funk, electronic, classical, and the prototypes of hip-hop. Capree says this sounds like cheesy porn music, but I don't care!


The Final Solution - Brotherman OST (Numero Group, 1975)

A funk and soul soundtrack for a blaxploitation film that never came out. Numero Group has been doing fantastic deluxe reissues of lost funk and soul of the 70s and 80s for a few years now. This is my favorite release of theirs from this year.


The Frogs - It's Only Right And Natural (Homestead, 1989)

The Frogs do what most irreverant gay music cannot: avoid kitsch and novelty. The Frogs sound like early Pixies or Nirvana demos, but with a passion and humor really unheard by my ears since Xiu Xiu. While Xiu Xiu's main drive is emotional intensity, The Frogs use satire to highlight the ridiculousness of the fears of the socially conservative.


Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet - The Breadwinner (Erstwhile, 2008)

Two musicians known separately for their work in experimental music come together to remind us how to use the physical space of a studio. All sounds on this album were original recordings from Lambkin's home: the radiator, the creaks in the floor, the silence/noise of the various rooms/hallways, the neighbors talking through the wall, etc. Using the physical medium of tape to stretch, distort, and splice, Lambkin and Lescalleet remind us of the power of sampling: the ability to recontextualize and present something new from something old, tried, and common.


Grouper - Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill (Type, 2008)

Grouper has always had potential, but I found the concepts on her earlier stuff to be done much better by bands like Charlalambides and Christina Carter's solo work. With Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, she has given more structure to her typically ambient/drone folk. What ended up happening is a melancholic fresh take to the late 80s 4AD roster such as Cocteau Twins and His Name Is Alive.


Guilty Simpson - Ode To The Ghetto (Stones Throw, 2008)

I first heard of Guilty Simpson from Madlib and Jay Dee's Jaylib project and Dabrye's Two/Three. I have always found his brash rapping about living in Detroit to be hypnotising. It captures the documentary style found in the best rap and hip-hop. Madlib, Oh No, Black Milk, Mr. Porter, and J Dilla all contribute fantastic production. My favorite hip-hop album of the year.


Gultskra Artikler - Kasha Iz Topora (Miasmah, 2007)

Miasmah is hands down my favorite label currently. Erik Skodvin, half of Deaf Center, snatched up Gultskra Artikler after Lampse put out the fantastic 2006 release, Pofigistka. Kasha Iz Topora is a continuation into the Siberian madness of previous releases. Classical cello and piano, electronic flourishes, and field recordings are combined to evoke haunted Lynchian memories with Russian folk tale flair. Miasmah is the new Kranky!

'Nuff Said

"That's not light red. It's pink."

http://gwenspot.blogspot.com/2006/08/light-red-vs-pink-in-which-gwen-clears.html

The marrying of media

One of my favorite experiences in the world of art is when worlds collide. Two musicians I respect and admire come together for a project, a writer teams up with a director, and so on.

To go along with this, a favorite of mine is to keep track of what The Criterion Collection is putting out every month. Around the 15th, they unveil usually 3 to 5 new titles coming out three months from the unveiling. Almost as much I enjoy seeing what titles they have coming out, I peruse their cover art. It consistently surprises and amazes me how well the layout and design of the packaging compliments the films themselves. Other media that I enjoy does this as well, but I wanted to focus on Criterion.

The main graphic designer that I admire that works with Criterion is Eric Skillman. You can reach his blog, Cozy Lummox, here. He describes the behind the scenes design process that goes into designing the layout of Criterion's titles as well as other projects he is involved with. So without further ado, I wanted to highlight 5 titles that he designed that I particularly enjoy.

1) Divorce, Italian Style (illustrations by the famous Jamie Hernandez)



2) Yi Yi



3) Robinson Crusoe On Mars (painting by Bill Sienkiewicz)



4) Night And The City



5) Hands Over The City (illustrations by Danijel Zezelj)

Rewatching Movies

"Foreigners are just children who don't know any better..." -- Setsuko Sato on NPR

Japanese-American view of Lost in Translation

More often than not, I would prefer to watch a movie I haven't seen than one that I absolutely adore. I simply get restless with my movies, music, books, and other media. However, it seems that I am coming to a point where I am definitely interested in watching films that I have seen 5, 10 years ago.

Yesterday, Capree and I watched Lost in Translation. There were a few things that time and changing of perspective have done for me with this film:

Scarlett Johansson looks really little in this movie.

She is supposed to be playing a 20s-something who just got married, but definitely looks like a teenager. When filming this movie, she had to be 17 or 18. She's come a long way.

The movie is definitely not rascist.

When I saw this movie the first time, I wasn't sure if Sofia Coppola was portraying the Japanese very respectably. The "Lip My Stocking" scene is hilarious, but it felt like it was playing on the core stereotypes that American's think of with the Japanese. After viewing it yesterday, I realized quite the opposite. Someone so fixated with showing the Tokyo landscapes, and shooting on location shows a tremendous amount of interest, fascination, and ultimately respect for the Japanese culture. The link I posted above is a reading by a Japanese-American women who felt that it was in fact that the Japanese were frustrated and placating their American guests. See quote above.

Bill Murray is wearing eyeliner for quite a bit of the movie.

I definitely missed this one the first go around, but after I watched the behind the scenes footage, they made note of his makeup artists putting some sort of eyeliner on him. Throughout the entire movie, he had dark circles around his eyes that were more than his trademarked natural droopy eyed look.

Founding Father

Here is what the "Father of the Constitution" said:

"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home." -- James Madison

Check out more quotes here. I have to ask myself where we are now when I read comments from the people who were instrumental in forming our country, but whatever...

Concept albums

Top five concept albums that I create in the next twenty years.

1) A gangster rap album from the perspective of a persecuted Mormon travelling west. (Album title: "Mo' Ghetto")

2) A chin stroking album of field recordings from the wild Savannah of computer programmers talking to each other. (This one has to be under my musical alias "The Swami of Bits")

3) A country western album told from the view of a rogue cop in Detroit (Album title: "Bringin' Home The Red, White and Blue Bacon")

4) A musique concrete album of different animals giving birth. (Album title: "Physiological Expulsion")

5) A death metal record with the backup, harmony vocals done by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. (Musical alias: "Fall From Grace").

Daydreaming

Today, I got a massage while down in Cedar City visiting Capree's parents. About 30 minutes in, I was finally in a place where I felt fully relaxed. Something odd happened where I was daydreaming so intensely that it seemed real and true.

I dreamed that I had a brain tumor and that I was dying soon. I went to everyone I knew and said my piece to each person that needed to be said. What was said isn't clear, but it happened in a flash. My friends, my family, my wife, and all those I've met along the way.

When I felt I was at a place of piece and complete clarity, I snapped out of it. Yet, I came back completely free from worry or stress.

That hasn't happened in a while.

The real meat

So it begins. The real meat of the presidential nomination. The entire pomp and circumstance of it all can make one nauseous, but at least we can start discussing the real differences in the nominees. Old vs. new. Experienced vs. naive. More of the same vs. change.

I hope serious discussion will occur about how these nominees will shape our future . Time to stop being bitter, and have civil discourse to help us raise ourselves out of the doom and gloom of the present day. Hopefully, neither candidate will turn personal and treat each other as enemies like the current administration. Above all, we are Americans - not conservative - not liberal.

Grand Theft Ignorance

- By Mr. Beck's own logic, Pong, released in 1972, trained efficient killers in Vietnam.

- "Killing each other is not a natural human instinct." Cain and Abel rings a bell....

- Where'd he get his statistics from? The quote goes, "41.8% of all statistics are made up."

- The fact that he draws parallels from video games and the military is quite funny. The military is trained to kill its enemies.

So it begins where the mainstream media attempts to shoot down Rockstar. The genius behind Rockstar really is that they really embrace all this media scrutiny. The Hot Coffee scandal would ruin most people, but instead, Rockstar has pushed the boundaries even further in GTA4.

The irony of all this is that everyone is calling GTA4 the greatest artistic achievement in video gaming. Too bad, people who haven't played the series have to make knee jerk comments. They won't understand the political satire, the freedom of choice, excellent game mechanics, or the rest of it. You have to appreciate the attention to detail that they have crafted in the latest of the series.

And I'm not going to apologize that this makes me laugh:

It costs $99 to fill this thing

Cities made of polygons. Bit by bit. byte by byte. word by word.
debug my workweek. Design my night. charge my soul and type my life.
Cities made of traces. Stack by stack. core by core. bug by bug.
thread my eating process. Manage my sleep. code the Haxan and test my stress.

Schedule schedule schedule brief brief brief view review.......

The dust will not be blown from our tongues. split the lip and down a Rockstar.
Crooked scripture for the war outside; bent men for the silent kill inside.
We're living in a spiritual cemetery where the gallows are created in droves.
I'm put on bus just to make a living with a sugar on my teeth hell bent on dysfunction.

'sall good.

First Aid Sleep

Another day, another dollar, another hustle....

The sun has finally decided to show. It's punching me right in the eyes right now, as I commute to work. The taste of old-fashioned donuts and diet mountain dew lace my breath, and all I can think about is the crappy spring mattress that they have in the First Aid room at my work.

Last week was a gray haze as I couldn't find a rhythm of sleep. I was consistently getting 4-6 hours of sleep. Because of this, work was a difficult to say the least. It has percolated into a fit of foggy depression, and I knew that it was simply because of the lack of sleep. I set out to find a place to take a nap. I couldn't sleep on the floor in my office because of a few reasons. First, people would come knocking . Even when I lock my door, and close the blinds, people don't get a hint very well. Secondly, I actually wanted a dark room with quiet. My office has a large window overlooking at the mountains, that lets the sun in even though the blinds are shut.

After a recommendation from my buddy at work, I found my way to the First Aid room on the third floor. They have a first aid room on each floor of the people (for a total of 3). When you approach the door, there is a sign a la an outhouse that says "Vacant" or "Occupied". You can't help think of people having a passionate love affair when it says OCCUPIED in big red letters. Upon opening the door, I found a a bed, telephone, and a stack of what appeared to be sheets. Next to the stack of sheets was a sign on the wall that said, "If you are sick, please call this number. We need to keep track of usage of this room." I don't that's really necessary especially considering that when I'm sick, I usually want to be left alone. After observing the sign, I moved onto the bed. Covered in sheets from a 1980s hotel, I noticed that the pile of sheets weren't sheets at all. They were disposable pillow covers. I guess they want to let you lay your head on the pillow and drool to your sick hearts content.

Closing the door gave myself complete freedom. The room was pitch black and nary a sound. The only thing I could hear was the corporate hum of electricity in the rafters above the ceiling. I set my cell phone's alarm for an hour in the future, and got the best sleep I had all week.

Alvadar's Destiny Afire

"I've got eye goop again!"

"It's flaring up?"

"Yeah."

"How does it feel?"

"Like an American miniature horse taking a dump on my eye."

"Ohhh."

A short pause.

"Eww....miniature horses are creepy. They're creepy looking. Come look at this photo. They're freaky."

A short walk to the other room.



"Huh."

Erased blog

*Sigh*...

I wrote this long blog about baseball and how some memories from when I was a kid, but somehow it didn't post.

Another time now. The time has gone.

Blogs are like comics...

The amount of interest oscillates up and down and all around.

I know that no one is reading this since I stopped writing since the Xbox arrived and pushed my interest in video games to the forefront. If I don't consistently write these, people leave. So I write this blog as an exercise of my own memory which has always been poor when recalling events and not list of facts.

Capree and I just watched the documentary, "Comic Book Confidential", thanks to our friend Kayla. We both had a smile on our face the entire time, as it brought back many memories from our lives. I let Capree explain her thoughts on her blog.
http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
I started reading comics in the cliche way through superhero comics. I believe it came about from the reprinting of the X-Men stories from the Chris Claremont Dark Phoenix Saga. This were released in the early 1990s to reprint the X-Men stories from the 1980s. Placing supplemental new stories with reprinted stories would show up in the Classic X-Men line.

What's great about this memory is all the things that are triggered with thinking about it. My brother, Quinn, and I would go to Night Flight Comics after we got our haircut at the Cottonwood Mall. We'd always go look through the back issue bins, trying to find new series that were mentioned in the Classic X-Men issues. It's funny now that I think of it that I never kept up with the most current story of X-Men at time. I always followed 5 to 10 years behind. While it is and was obvious that Marvel Comics was milking the franchise for it was worth through it's countless spin offs, I simply didn't care. There was so much to discover. I remember I got a X-Men superhero encyclopedia through the Scholastic Book Club in elementary school. I wish I knew where that was...

Eventually, I broke out of my boyhood transfix on superheroes. Using my interest of
The Simpsons at the time, I found interest in Bill Morrison who worked on the Simpsons comics. He actually did an appearance at Night Flight where he signed the Treehouse of Horror comics and did a personalized portrait of your favorite Simpsons character. I asked him to do Groundskeeper Willie, and he drew it in like 5 seconds. Again, I wish I knew where that was...

At this point, I started to take notice of individual artists and followed them from series to series. I remember Battle Chasers and The Darkness during this time. But I had found that I was still trapped in the mainstream notion of what comics are. Big chested women (and men), technically and meticulously colored, with stories that simply never end until the reader loses interest.

Two particular comics came about that really changed everything for me: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth. My friend, Tyler, and I would look for all the issues of Johnny while I found Jimmy Corrigan on my own. I had read that Jimmy Corrigan had received a National Book Award which seemed impressive because graphic novels never seemed to be critically acclaimed or accepted as a art form like a book. I ordered the hardcover edition, and the rest is history. From Jimmy Corrigan's author, Chris Ware I found a world of independent comics where real world stories and issues were addressed. In addition, the artist's style was completely at their whim without any preconceived notions of what a comic book should be.

I could continue on, but I'll save some of my thoughts for another time. I'll just say, that all of this really culminated at ComicCon last year where all my the different phases were mashed together. Giant superhero publishers with big movie deals and the individual artists who pulled just enough money together for a booth, it is all there. For those of you are into comics at all (I'm looking at you), go to ComicCon.