Ohrenschmaus

https://docs.google.com/uc?id=0B6VP-jaS7U-JOWVjNDJkZjMtM2I2ZC00NmE4LTg1MWQtZmExMmY4NWQ3YjNm&export=download&hl=de

I’ve said I’m wrong when I’ve been right
I’ve seen times when I’ve been sure but still I find
I’m just the first that you take

Not all of the synthesizer music in the eighties was rubbish. On this song there is a two note motif – which is played first after hundred seconds – so full of yearning and longing that it is impossible not to fall for it if you have a soft spot for romantic feelings. Like a cork-screw it drills deep into my heart. But this is just a tiny part of the gorgeous song. There is also Paul Webb’s cosy, bubbly electric bass and the omnipresent drumming and percussion. Not to forget the trumpet solo and last but not least Mark Hollis singing which is rather restrained and confident here. The marriage of pop music with other genres like jazz, world and classical music has hardly ever been as convincing as on this track.

***

A question for my English readers. Are you actually reading what I write here or does this not reach you at all? For the last couple of weeks I have alternated between German and English but I didn’t get any feedback of English-speaking readers so I wondered if there is a point in continuing the English exercise. Thanks for answering.

(The list of all 361 selections since 1st February 2010 is here).

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Lying on my back,
I heard music,
Felt unsure & catastrophic,
Had to tell myself it’s only music,
It blows my mind,
But it’s like that.

That verse could almost be about me. Kazu Makino, Blonde Redhead’s Japanese high-pitch voice, sings about an Alex but apparently it is the teenager from Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange who gets a kick from listening to Beethoven. At one point of the story Alex is subjected to an overdose of classical music and tries to kill himself by jumping out of a high window. That it is a setting I have always been afraid of. To be driven crazy by having to listen to my favourite music forever. The biggest nightmare imaginable for a music lover.

(The list of all 359 selections since 1st February 2010 is here).

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Yes I’ve heard
of your misfortune
Our misfortunes are nothing new
Yes it’s true
I’m watching you
It’s my wish to be with you
Cry to me

One of the swan songs of Jeffrey Lee Pierce from Lucky Jim, the last album of his band. The groovy keyboards and the guitar sound very much like Carlos Santana but the track is still 100% Pierce. Quite unlike the early, demonic stuff which was in between punk, blues and rockabilly though. Here he seems to have found his peace of mind after all the sex, drugs & rock’n‘ roll. Three years later he died of liver failure. He was thirty-eight years old.

(The list of all 357 selections since 1st February 2010 is here).

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Suddenly I stop
But I know it’s too late
I’m lost in a forest
All alone
The girl was never there

How do you say Schnapszahl in English? I don’t know of any song which defined a band better than this one. The Cure without A Forest would not have been The Cure for me. I wrote about A Forest before when I chose my fave 1980 album. There is not a lot to add here. Maybe one thing. The guitar sounds so snakelike on this one, I never really thought about it before but the guitar is extremely smooth – I wanted to write the French „souple“. And the later dance remix is great as well. I don’t remember any cover of this. I don’t think this song can be separated from Robert Smith and his group.

(The list of all 355 selections since 1st February 2010 is here).

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Today I read an interview with Henryk Broder in Die Zeit where he said something about the angst of the – even after 47 years I hesitate to write ‚us‘ – Gernans. He thinks the Germans are still waiting for the punishment for what they have done to the world and especially to the Jews 70 years ago. In the meantime another nation which fought on the same side as the Germans has been punished twice. First in August 1945 when the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on two Japanese large cities: a cruel operation which was totally useless in terms of military logic. And for the second time yesterday morning. One of the strongest earthquakes ever hit the main island, a tsunami followed and a nuclear plant only 240 km from Tokyo has apparently exploded. We don’t know what will be the next terrible news from Nippon but I am sure the cherries will blossom in the next two weeks like they do every year. Nature is simply stronger than death.

(The list of all 353 selections since 1st February 2010 is here)

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Window paine
Around my heart
Shadows streak
Around my heart

Do what you got to do
And say what you got to say
Do what you got to do
Yes, start today

There was a short period of time when I thought Billy Corgan and his Smashing Pumpkins were the greatest band on earth. The reason for this slightly exaggerated evaluation was their first album Gish. An amazing debut fusing heavy metal, psychedelic rock, goth rock, prog rock and something else hard to pin down. You could call it mystic. Additionally there is a lot of quiet-loud dynamics on this album – less on this song which stays pretty disciplined all the way through. Tracks are usually hardly audible in the beginning, get louder slowly and peak later. A little like post-rock though there is a hardcore element here. I used to listen to this album after having drunk and smoked with a friend. I always listened on my own on headphones. And each time it was an expedition into some weird continent which I somehow associate with snakes and magic. As I read just before starting this entry Billy says that Gish is a spiritual album. And other people think it was made under the influence of LSD. All that makes a lot of sense to me. The paine in „window paine“ seems to be an amalgam of pane and pain. At the same time the window is an object made of glass to look through and something which causes pain, maybe when the glass is broken. The quoted verse also reminds me of my favourite line by Blixa Bargeld of the Einstürzenden Neubauten.

Nagel mein Herz ans Fensterkreuz
(Nail my heart onto the crossbar)

I still think this song has hold up quite well against the ravages of time. Especially Billy’s voice is still bearable, later on his high-pitch singing (a typical heavy metal trait I abhor) became totally insufferable.

(The list of all 349 selections since 1st February 2010 is here)

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Come my love
Kick the line
Afield lies nothing but squalor to turn on

There are great days, there are normal days and there are shitty days. Guess what kind of day was today? I am glad that it is over and that I can hide under my blanket now, a blanket made of Mark Hollis voice, some percussion, guitars, harmonium and a trumpet.

(The list of all 345 selections since 1st February 2010 is here)

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Miss America sits in the shower
She’s plucking hours from the sky
Picks up the telephone into another home
Don’t ask me why

When you think it’s over, it has just begun. I have become addicted to post music on a daily base. I started a little more than a year ago with My Bloody Valentine’s 5’34 song I Only Said – which is still online btw – and counted down until 0’00. What now? The most obvious thing to do would be to count up from where I started. And that is what I am going to do. The whole thing will stop when I have no more tracks on the hard disk with the demanded length.

In the beginning I wanted to choose Yo La Tengo’s beautiful ballad Today Is the Day which immediately gave me the heebie-jeebies but then I went for this Blur track from their second album Modern Life Is Rubbish which is actually my favourite of theirs. Today’s song is not typical for that rather uptempo and rocking album. It would have fit better on Thirteen, the more sophisticated and varied later release.

It begins with someone shouting „Michael“. Apparently it is Graham Coxon, the guitar player, who calls the producer. Then someone else laughs. Immediately we are in a lively setting, the studio is not the clean, perfect place you’d imagine, no the studio is alive. The whole recording seems rather imperfect, the music starts with some seemingly disconnected tones, they just hang there in the room. And then the melody slowly unfolds. The piece is dominated by the warm sound of the acoustic guitar strings, the chord changes can be heard, the atmosphere is intimate. The melody is sweet and tender, to me the track is like the foreplay, it never really explodes, until the end it stays in slow-motion. And of course that is the charm of it, I recently listened to it when waiting to board an airplane on Frankfurt airport on Monday morning and I was immediately hooked and could not refrain from smiling while moving my feet very slowly. The rhythm had caught me and I closed the eyes to retreat into the music; my brain did not want to share it with the visual perceptions of my eyes. There is also a dozy and somnambulant quality to this song which is underlined by Damon Albarn’s gentle singing. And at the same time the guitar strings vibrate as if they were slightly drunk. In the good old cassette days I would have said the tape wows and flutters.

Concerning the lyrics the interpretation that he does not care about Miss America as he loves his (probably) British girl-friend, seems most likely. The words are occasionally cryptic and surreal, could that have to do with the inability of the narrator to understand American girls and especially the apotheosis of them, Miss America? In any case this is an uplifting love song and that makes it even more attractive and powerful. Magic music if there is any. Great to fall asleep to or wake up to.

(The list of all 335 selections since 1st February 2010 is here.)

Now here is the final piece of my music countdown project. I learnt normal whistling about 40 years ago from my father’s mother. My parents gave up soon on me but she had enough patience to teach me how to do it. Actually out of tune whistling is the only music production technique – except out of tune singing – that I master. Today’s track though concerns a slight variation, the finger whistle which I learnt a couple of days ago. Many thanks to my colleague A. who gave me the idea. This is the video where I learnt it from and the secret is actually to fold back the tongue with the four fingers. Something which sounds easy but isn’t. My fingers usually slip on the tongue and I have big problems to get a whistling sound out of my mouth. Here I succeeded to whistle this way for a short time, that is one reason why the track is only a second long.

(The list of all 334 selections since 1st February 2010 is here.)

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Apparently this jingle is quite well-known in the US, I had never heard it before, not being an expert or aficionado of US coffee brands. Johnny Cash wasn’t the first to record it, I don’t even know from when his version dates. Hopefully he really liked the coffee and did not only sing for the cash.

(The list of all 328 selections since 1st February 2010 is here.)

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Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

Rowing down the stream of life together with a smile and the realisation that it’s all just a dream, that is quite a lot of wisdom in a little nursery rhyme.

(The list of all 324 selections since 1st February 2010 is here.)

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I never had it too, too hard, you know
all my life, you know
just everything I touched, turned to gold
I am not rich but you know I always have some dollars in my pockets

From one of the great underrated masterpieces, Joni Mitchell’s Mingus. Joni always had a faible for bass players who in turn loved her, she even married one later on. Charles Mingus had contacted her after having heard the phantastic improvisational orchestrated piano piece Paprika Plains from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and wanted to work with her. The fruit of their collaboration was the Mingus album which was released without a lot of critical feedback just after his sudden death. Here he raps with his warm bass voice about his rather serendipitous relation to money.

(The list of all 323 selections since 1st February 2010 is here.)

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Noch dreizehn Sekunden und wir haben es geschafft. Melt Banana ist wieder so eine Mädchenband, die ähnlich wie Bikini Kill die Frauenpower in die Rockmusik bringt. Das ist auf jeden Fall eine gute Sache auch wenn die Musik jetzt nicht immer hundertprozentig meinen zugegeben manchmal schwierigen Geschmack trifft.

(Die Liste aller seit 1. Februar 2010 ausgewählten 322 Stücke ist hier.)

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Top Gear was a BBC radio programme in the sixties. At the time the BBC had lost a lot of its young audience to RTL and pirate stations. In the early years of BBC Radio 1 from 1967 on the show was revived and by then it featured mainly progressive music. This small bit can be found on a Pink Floyd bootleg called Celestial Voices. John Peel announces the bands and artists he will play on the show and there is some menacing rather extraterrestrial sounding instrumental music by Pink Floyd, I suppose, in the background. This is radio and rock history.

(The list of all 316 selections since 1st February 2010 is here)

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136.1 Hertz or 136.1 Hz is the standard frequency of the Om tuning fork. It’s also the sound signature of the earth as it travels around the sun.

136.1 Hz is the frequency used to tune the instruments for Indian temple music. It is called Sadja, or Sa, the base tone of the Sitar and Tambura. The Om Tone is said to stimulate the Anahata (heart chakra) and hence is widely believed to be good for meditation. (s)

The world is full of egocentric assholes, narrow-minded crackpots and shameless liars. They drive me crazy. They suck the few energy which is left in me out of me. But there is a solution and it is easy. It is called Om, a syllable I should intonate more often. Humming all the shit away…

(The list of all 315 selections since February, 1st is here)

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I already had part 1 of this track in this program. Both are from disc two – which assembles the instrumentals – of the wonderful compilation of rarities, alternate versions and out-takes Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo. Which I cannot find anymore at home for some reason. It’s always the same, the stuff you don’t care about fills the racks and the stuff you really, really love gets swallowed by a black hole or something. Besides that I am a little tired as I have just spent five hours on 550 km German motorways between Frankfurt and Berlin. I think I have earned my two Weißbier by now. Sleep well in your Bettgestell everybody!

(Die Liste aller 314 seit dem 1. Februar 2010 ausgewählten Stücke ist hier.)

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A guitar instrumental from the second Cat Power album Myra Lee. Yes, I must admit that I was in love with Chan Marshall. Though I am not quite sure anymore if it was her body, her hair, her eyes or her voice which attracted me most. When listening to this it suddenly dawned on me. It must have been the sound of her guitar.

(The list of all 304 selections since February, 1st is here)

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IIRC Deerhoof are a music collective from San Franciso. Most striking about them is their singer of Japanese origin with a high-pitch voice you can’t forget. I am not sure but Japanese women seem to be able to scream like no other females (Yoko Ono or the singer of Blonde Redhead come to mind). I would like to have been at this Tokyo concert of The Beatles in 1966 just for the screaming of the Nippon girls. The song is a letdown as the band doesn’t get its act together – esp. Paul seems to be totally out of sync – but I think they can be pardonned with all that shrieking action of the audience going on.

(The list of all 293 chosen tracks since February, 1st, 2010 is here).

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Saturday sun came early one morning
In a sky so clear and blue
Saturday sun came without warning
So no-one knew what to do.

The complete version of this song finishes off Nick Drake’s first – and my favourite – album of his. Here he just starts the song on the piano, sings a couple of verses from the distance and then closes the lid of the piano with a bang. This broken up rendering with some classical opera(?) music in the background somehow summarizes Nick Drake’s life much better than the long version. Additionally it is Saturday tomorrow and according to the weather forecast sunshine will be quite improbable in Berlin. So if it occurs nobody will know what to do again! This is actually the first time I have chosen the same song twice. I should have done that more often.

(The list of all 291 chosen tracks since February, 1st, 2010 is here).

https://docs.google.com/uc?id=0B6VP-jaS7U-JMWZmNGMxMWEtYTU3Yy00MGEwLTljNzgtYmZiZmU4Nzk0ZTZk&export=download&hl=de
Winter has arrived in Berlin today. On the way to work – I walk about a mile up the Motzstraße to catch the subway at the Nollendorfplatz – it was raining a mixture of rain and snow. On the way back finally it snowed snow and the temperature was below zero degrees Celsius as I could scratch the ice from the windshield of my car at home. When this instrumental came up on my iPod I could not refrain from dancing, it is such a fun to bounce up and down to this easy-going tune full of good vibrations.

(The list of all selected tracks since February, 1st is here.)

https://docs.google.com/uc?id=0B6VP-jaS7U-JYThhNGYwNGItNmM5MC00NTI3LTkwNjYtYTczYTk4NzIwOGFk&export=download&hl=de

I got no lips, I got no tongue
Where there were eyes, there’s only space

A ninety second glimpse into the crazy mind of Black Francis aka Frank Black born Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV. You have been warned.

(The list of all 245 chosen tracks since February, 1st is here.)

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If we never make it back to California
I want you to know I love you
But my love is like a dark cloud full of rain
That’s always right there up above you

John Darnielle kenn ich ein bisschen von I Love Music und von seinem Blog Last Plane to Jakarta. Er ist ein Heavy Metal Fan, eigentlich eine Spezies, die ich aber sowas von nicht verstehe. Aber diesen Song und das Tallahassee-Album auf dem er drauf ist, kann ich sehr gut nachvollziehen. Hassliebe, Alkoholismus, Selbstzerstörung. Ein Paar, das nicht miteinander aber erst recht nicht ohne einander leben kann. Don’t we all know it? John ist glaube ich Psychotherapeut oder sowas ähnliches. Er weiß, wovon er hier singt.

(Die Liste aller seit dem 1. Februar ausgewählten 223 Stücke ist hier.)

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You’ll be sorry when the sun has roasted you to
Lobster red, nothing said

Man muss auch mal schweigen können.

(Die Liste aller seit dem 1. Februar ausgewählten 208 Stücke ist hier.)

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I wonder to myself
Burn down the disco
Hang the blessed D.J.
Because the music that they constantly play
It says nothing to me about my life

This is what I wrote about the song a couple of years ago:

October 1986. I was on the Greek cyclade Naxos where I met a black English guy who was deejaying in a club in the main town. He was ranging his LPs as the season was over and he was about to go back to rainy England. Before he played a single for me. A song by a band from the whereabouts of Manchester I had never heard of. Called The Smiths, a name I instantly loved for its modest ubiquitousness. The song was called Panic but it took me at least seven or eight years before getting that title. From the beginning on I thought it was called after the chorus at the end, Hang the DJ. A two minutes and something pop song which didn’t impress me much at first but which somehow stayed in memory. Which became a token song for nostalgia. I don’t know how many times I asked deejays for this song. Usually because they only played music which didn’t say anything to me about my life. Sometimes they played it (as they liked the song themselves but didn’t realise why I asked for it), many times they didn’t. This song starts the wonderful compilation of singles, b-sides and 12“ extra songs called The World Won’t Listen (how could I not love that title) which came out in early 1987. Whatever Panic is about (e.g. riots in England and radio deejays who pass stupid songs on the public radio after Chernobyl has happened a couple of hours before), it has a feel of power which in the end becomes so totally overwhelming and irresistible (that kid’s choir is angelic). As if changing the music could change the world. That’s what I always liked most about Morrissey. He always incarnated the romantic side of revolution for me.

(Die Liste aller seit dem 1. Februar ausgewählten 195 Stücke ist hier.)