Ohrenschmaus

When I saw David Freel last year in Weinheim in front of about twenty people he told me that there will be a new record out soon under the awkward moniker Be My Weapon and I thought, oh well, really? Swell was the band which defined my seven year stay in Luxembourg best. The smell of sweet grass in the kitchen in my flat in Limpertsberg with the phone on Don’t Give from 41 ringing into the void on a hot summer afternoon when I was having a Weißbier on the balcony and A. was about to join me there. There was a very relaxed atmosphere of light heartedness in the air. We were at the right place at the right time. I have not had that feeling so often in my life. Hardly ever for such a long time, almost a year. And Swell’s music was part of it, the slightly distorted guitar playing bittersweet tunes which carved themselves in my brain, the forceful drums & bass, the long pauses mounting the tension, David Freel’s calming baritone. I hardly ever listened to the words, they were more or less banal I think but it was not important. Swell released a lot of hit and miss records in the past ten to twelve years, David Freel on his own or with always changing band members, I bought them all, my love is hard to kill. I did not expect a lot of the new release which I bought from his site, so I was in for a nice surprise. It sounds almost like a Swell album from the old times. I Miss Your Mischief, the song from above, has got this melancholic touch combined with this sluggishness I adore. It is not yet grand cru again but it is at least premier cru. Thank you, David.

[Nada Surf – 80 Windows]

Clusters of people talking secretly to each other

In a bar you cannot talk openly
to anyone you don’t already know

4-year olds
They have got the right idea
They jump the line and hit it on the nose

When we sit and we get quiet
Then we look and see who’s home across the way
There are 80 windows we can see

It’s Christmas-time and they all have the same tree
You tell me the patterns you already see

I wonder if they see us in our bed

You said you like the one with the father
who always eats with his son

I like the rows of lights
because they keep me calm

I feel far away from you
So what else is new?
The moon is closer to the sun
than I am to anyone

Why must happy hearts break so hard? I am pretty sure I posted this song already. But I am too lazy to search. This time Daniel Johnston is accompanied by Okkervil River. The country treatment with a banjo and a pedal steel does this song quite well. It has this cocooning effect. This song needs friends, the more friends the better.

Anton Fier was the drummer on the Feelies debut Crazy Rhythms. Later on he founded the Golden Palominos. I first heard of Mark Robinson when he played in a band called Air Miami whose only album Me. Me. Me. I bought in Luxembourg in 1995. What a refreshing guitar powerpop album. Full of hooks, full of bubbles, full of goodness. Later – when I had already started blogging the Absintheur who at the time also blogged about music and other stuff sent me Perfect Teeth, the second album of Unrest, the previous band of Mark Robinson. Another tuneful indie guitar gem. Today an old ILM thread was revived and I started listening to the first Unrest album Imperial f.f.r.r. for the first time. And got stuck at the third track, Imperial. It is seven minutes of one simple rhythm guitar figure accompanied by a wee bit of singing. And there is not one second of boredom in all that repetition. I think the fascination has to do with the fact that the guitar is actually played in real and not just sampled and looped. It breathes and lives. I love dancing to it in our cellar where I type right now on the keyboard. It is the dance where I just move the body, swirl the arms around and stare at my feet. With a smile on my face.

– Anton Fier, Bill Laswell, Nicky Skopelitis, Arto Lindsay, John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Fred Frith, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, David Moss, Bob Kidney, M.E. Miller, John Lydon, Syd Straw, Jack Bruce, Richard Thompson, Jody Harris, Michael Stipe, Matthew Sweet, Don Dixon, Peter Holsapple, T-Bone Burnett, Amanda Kramer, Bob Mould, Lori Carson, Knox Chandler, Nicole Blackman (some people who have been in the Golden Palominos)

– Nicole Blackman has got that voice which is crystal clear, razor sharp and attractive at the same time, I have to listen to what she says, I cannot not listen to the words coming out of her mouth. Her whispering sprechgesang is quite similar to Laurie Anderson’s actually but more feminine and seductive. The song has got this road movie feeling, just a simple beat and her voice luring us into the darkness. The atmosphere reminds me a little bit of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. The song is going where it has to go, nobody is going to stop it.

Things only feel true
when someone’s abusing you
You are sometimes startled you are never surprised

There are only two speeds: fast and faster,
now you’re lashed to mast and lashed to master
Whether you’re in bed or in court, everybody gets off

Slow slow quick quick slow — ride.
Slow slow quick quick slow — ride.

So she smokes to keep from eating
and you fuck her to keep from feeling
and this is a taste, and this is a waste
and these are all of your days sacrificed

(from the lyrics)

I am totally addicted to this rock song right now. It is from 1975 by a band from Detroit who has been rediscovered this year. Three black guys riffing hard. What a phantastic dirty guitar sound. Imagine Jimi Hendrix with a better more varied voice switching between rap, soul and shout.

I have never been a big fan of Prefab Sprout – too melodramatic or something for my likes – but this song from their upcoming new album is a keeper. There is a lovely tenderness in Paddy Mc Aloon’s voice and the track bursts with positive vibes.

The first thirty seconds of this beam us back into the glorious post-punk days of the early 1980s. A marriage of the powerful, gloomy atmosphere of The Cure around Seventeen Seconds with the minimalistic low-key indie pop tunes of the Young Marble Giants. Sometimes retro can be really cool.

I know you have all been waiting for this desperately. Just plain text. Without links to youtube or whatnot. Additionally the choices are extremely predictable. I am such a sucker for simple tunes. By the way Lovesong would have been #11. The order is more or less chronological.

• 10.15 Saturday Night
• A Forest
• Play for Today
• M
• Boys Don’t Cry
• Just Like Heaven
• Close to Me (Mixed Up)
• Untitled
• A Letter to Elise
• Friday I’m in Love

There are things I want to do but I don’t know
If they will be with you, if they will be with you
There are things I want to say but I don’t know
If they will be to you, if they will be to you

(Teenage Fanclub, Alcoholiday from Bandwagonesque, 1991)

Recently I was in New York and I finally bought an ipod. The classic version which has 120 gb (111 gb to be correct). Now I have a problem which I wouldn’t have had immediately if the ipod still had a capacity of 180 gb as in the past. I have more music on the hard disk of my pc than fits on the ipod. So what I did was putting all artists from a to q in a playlist and synchronise it with the ipod. Whenever I listen to songs on the ipod now I rate them. One star means I really dislike the song, it will be deleted from the hard disk. Two stars means I don’t want to have it on the ipod but it can stay on the hd. Everything from 3 stars onwards stays on the ipod. In the past weeks I have rated well over 2,000 tracks. More than 600 got two stars. The last band I have added is Silver Jews. So I am slowly managing my way through my mp3 collection. At Christmas the latest I should arrive at Z and the ipod should include only music I like if everything works well. Right now I have 20,435 songs on it. Somehow I don’t believe that there are more than 20,000 good songs out there. And you? (first posted here)

I don’t think it is necessary to write one sentence about this track. It’s music you feel or you don’t. The perfect music for a summer party with lots of people who like to move their bodies. Rave on. How come that I don’t remember ever having heard this song at a party? Maybe I was always at the wrong parties? There are other great tracks on Primal Scream’s chef d’œuvre Screamadelica but this is the one I’d like to save from the record if I could save just one. There are some positives vibes emanating from it. And it feels like a hymn for freedom.

Though the various components repeat themselves incessantly, it’s how they interact and build that determines the sound — and that’s the essence of most electronic dance music, that complex interplay between several repetitive elements.
(The AMG on Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 which was recorded in 1981)

Formulated like this it seems to make sense. The repetition of the elements drum machine loop, guitar line and synth figure is not 100% linear. There is a dynamic operator fusing those three in the equation. But as can be heard in this small extract the variational element is too small to not bore the listener even after less than five minutes. This piece actually goes on for almost one hour. A torture for anybody who hasn’t taken the adequate drugs. The funny thing about this track is that it is actually by Manuel Göttsching who was in Ash Ra Tempel from Berlin, one of the early krautrock bands. They were electronic pioneers playing similar spherical music as Tangerine Dream. Klaus Schulze was even a member of Ash Ra Tempel. So in the end techno was just one little twig from a particular branch of the huge krautrock tree. And it became a German speciality again.

This hypnotic live song is originally from 1983’s The Crackdown. Totally different from the two tracks I posted before which were machine music whereas this has a very human touch. Especially the phantastic tribal drumming together with the deeply resonating bass gives it a funky down to earth groove. This sounds very much like something from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Eno & Byrne. It has a world music vibe which is married with some out of this world synthesizer sounds and Stephen Mallinder’s singing which in places sounds like scat, i.e. random syllables. It’s great that there are still amazing bands like that out there for me to discover.

There is 70 billion people over there. Where are they hiding?

This is from 1982. And I like it. It sounds like techno. But techno didn’t exist (under that name) at the time. Why in the world do I find techno so brainless? And this inspired in comparison? One reason might be that I don’t really know techno, another that techno arrived too late in my life. In 1990 I was 27, my music taste was more or less forged already. Which is actually not true. I discovered indie in form of the Pixies, the Blue Aeroplanes, My Bloody Valentine, PJ Harvey etc. And I loved all of them. I always found that techno was a stupid name. Which was actually fitting the music very well. I think namewise I would prefer a genre called no tech. Another reason why I like this song is that sentence with the 70 billion people. Either there are billions of people on other planets or the song was recorded in the future. And the future is bright as mankind will not only survive but propagate.

they sound like music played by really shitty robots, like if you’d buried an early prototype of Kraftwerk in toxic sludge, then accidentally uncovered them two hundred years later and OH SHIT THEY’RE STILL ALIVE WHAT AN UNSPEAKABLY HORRIBLE EXISTENCE (q)

.

I never really got into them before tonight. But right now they seem to be the greatest band of all-time. Or at least of post-punk. After having listened to them I understand even less what all the fuss about techno was about. They made techno in the early eighties. And it sounded so much better than any techno I have ever listened to. It was inventive, varied, obsessed. Besides that they were into synths, dance, dub, funk, punk, tribal rhythms, industrial, noise, goth, trash, medieval choirs almost anything that gave music a distinctive flavour in the past 30 years. Put Suicide, New Order, The Pop Group, Einstürzende Neubauten, Devo, Throbbing Gristle, Black Sabbath, Gang of Four, the Talking Heads and PIL into a mixer and the result will be something like the Cabs.

… I think the book’s crowning glory is the chapter titled „Neil Young and the haphazard highway that leads to Unconditional Love“.

(from a customer review on Nick Kent’s The Dark Stuff)

Talking of coincidence. A colleague introduced me to two bands today which I had hardly heard of. At the same time somebody revives an old I Love Music thread: Taking Sides: Moloko vs Morcheeba. It’s got to be Moloko, I suppose. Just have a look at them live, what a groove, what a performance.

I had forgotten about this great song (yootoob). What a nasty and energetic riff. Exactly the right kind of music to start a day. It would kick a dead out of bed. But I tell you in advance: you won’t get the melody out of your head for the whole day long.

I only came across Juana Molina recently but I loved her slightly detached, dreamy voice immediately. She is from Buenos Aires and sings in a soft Spanish accent which sounds almost as melodic as Italian. E.g. the way she slowly pronounces profundamente. Apparently it is Rioplatense Spanish. Río Seco is a sad song which doesn’t surprise considering the title. A dry river is unnatural, even frightening. And the electronics in this song create a spooky atmosphere. There is this sustained noise in the beginning which is repeated all the time. For me it sounds like a coyote howling in the middle of the pampa. The acoustic guitar is mainly a rhythm instrument here. Juana sings the tune herself. Río Seco is the starter on her fourth album Son from 2006. Her new album Un Día seems to be more electronic and less folky.