The Mole People - Break Night

the mole people - break night

Armand van Helden released this trailblazing long-form monster under the Mole People pseudonym on Strictly Rhythm in 1995. It's an acknowledged deep house classic. Rudimentary tribal drums and two endlessly unspoiling laser loops, glowing with phaser swirl and traversing a shimmering expanse, opening up an endless void like in "Tomorrow Never Knows."

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I was speaking with brave about the latest Shed record and he said "it sounds great if I'm driving, but if I'm IMing people it just sounds like some beats." Which pretty well sums up the two kinds of attention you can pay to music, especially the heavily rhythmic minimal-beat kind. but it's not like one form is better than other form. Walter Benjamin (the implicit or maybe not so implicit forefather of AC) made a point of stressing how important distraction is in modern life as a form of experience. 

distraction is valuable in modern life because there's a lot of it. there's suddenly alot of things coming at you and most of the time you're not zoomed in on them, they appear in this shifting thicket of sensation, and when images or sounds or words sensed in distraction pass into your psychic self and begin to live there, they will be not as things you really remember or can identify, but as lurking, immortal ghosts.

so pay close attention to 'break night'. or put it on while you gchat. see if I care.

Captain Beefheart's 10 Commandments for Guitarists

at AC we ride for Turzi. if you're not clued in to these Parisians' blistering hawkwind/gates of dawn psych jams, we can recommend you do so. Their guitarist has a blog and on this blog he posted Captain Beefheart's 10 commandments for guitarists. For example:

"1. LISTEN TO THE BIRDS...That's where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren't going anywhere."

the rest are viewable on Clemens' blog, !!!Korrect!!!

UND of course props to dj slow for the find.

ridin high podcast: 01.13.09: adrath bey

download link

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file under: cosmic africa, tribal deepness, beats of no country

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adrath bey - ankh dub

carla bley - A.I.R.

starlight - mao mao

lula cortes e ze ramalho - pedra templo anima

coconot - tao

Kamphopo  - TVB(Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit) 

orchestra poly rythmo - dis moi la verite

dan boadi and the african internationals - money is the root of all evil

animal collective - lion in a coma

petro loa - no rada no rada

lee jones - safari

la pena - A1

voyage - kechak fantasy

fleetwood mac - tusk

vetiver - been so long (neighbours remix)

ghost note - holy jungle (mark e pressure dub)

ozo - anambra (long version)

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one of the most solid ridin' high podcasts yet, a heady soundscape of deep ethno-tribal weirdness. but who is adrath bey? what does he want? what is his real name? why does his heavily dubbed-out mix of out-jazz, ethno-tinged indie jams, minimal house and extreme beardness come scrawled with the phrase "ceremony of minerval?"

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track commentary by adrath bey

"This podcast contains a doctrine of substantial occult significance. The listener before admission is bound by an obligation in which he recognizes the DJ as the Supreme Authority. This represents the free choice of a free will to submit itself to the magical formula represented by the DJ. The listener is seized, blindfolded and bound head and foot. This represents the first operation of this formula. The soul is drawn within the planetary current and its sight and freedom of action are immediately taken from it. the carla blay jam is courtesy of an acquaintance I made while home in Austin over Christmas; Ryan allowed me to pick through a box of used LPs he'd gained for free during some donut socializing - bley's jazz opera "escalator over the hill" was the yield. starlight is another jean-pierre massiera concoction, extremely bugged. coconot is el guincho's band, equally sun-dazed and tropicalistic. money is the root of all evil. don't put the lion in a coma. petro loa comes from a possible hoax compilation called "extreme music from africa" and sounds like an animal collective song being beamed across a secret satellite. "Tusk" is Fleetwood going native, together with the USC Trojan marching band. Vetiver remixed himself. The last ten minutes of this mix are so bearded, they're methusalahean. Anambra is a Mancuso-era classic, its magical flutes giving a misty incantatory ending to another night at the loft. Also it always reminds me of Joe Versus the Volcano for some reason."

glacial lakes dj set: thurs @ savalas

glacial lakes - festival

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UR invited: this thursday @ Savalas in Brooklyn: 285 Bedford Ave. 10PM. 

jonathan & billy are glacial lakes. at Savalas they will be playing:

deep kicks

balearic bliss

robot disco

cosmic beats

as well as some original productions and exclusive re-edits of stuff like  'long train running' by the doobie brothers. counteract winter climes and their concurrent affective disorders with activities such as: pleasant conversation, good-natured socializing with friends and well-meaning strangers, drinking, dancing, and giving your favorite glacial lake DJ a hug. 

and check out a GL track just for you, the sun-dappled 'festival,' recorded on location during j & b's visit to the african nation of balearia.

related podcast material: ridin' high w/glacial lakes

01.06.09

12.02.08 

playgroup - dj kicks

playgroup - dj kicks

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1. maurice fulton presents boof - we

2. ana rago - you're god (I: cube remix)

3. material - ciquri (discomix)

4. harlequin 4's - set it off

5. impedance - tainted love

6. random factor - broken mirror

7. cultural vibe - ma boom bey (love chant version)

8. metro area - caught up 

9. tiny trendies - the sky is not crying

10. smith n hack - to our disco friends

11. zongamin - tunnel music

12. charles schillings - no communication, no love

13. nigo - march of general (chicken lips conquest dub)

14. j-walk - buggin' becky (tim 'love' lee fully bearded mix)

15. kc flightt - let's get jazzy (dope dub mix)

16. Human League - Do or die (dub)

17. the parallax corporation - anti-social tendencies

18. playgroup - behind the wheel (dj kicks electroca$h radio mix)

19. ralphi rosario - get up, get out

20. bobby o - still hott 4 U

21. dexter - i don't care

22. wanda dee - gonna make you sweat (acapella)

23. the rapture - house of jealous lovers

24. the flying lizards - money b

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this is one of my favorite mixes ever. it first taught me what weird dance music could be. Trevor Jackson, the legendary UK DJ, put it out under his Playgroup moniker in 2002, right during the revival of 80's electro. It sounds like it would appeal to tastes at the time but it's way too singular and inspired to have its energies completely dissolve in the tides of cultural flux.  

it's one of those favorite-ever things that you can actually forget about for a long time. I remembered it because bret and I went to broadway east the other day to see lovefingers dj, and he played "mah boom bey" by cultural vibe and I kicked myself for a day or two trying to remember where I'd heard it, and then it hit me, back on this playgroup mix on which I know every single note by heart. spare, weird, captivating, it's full of sweet tunes you've never heard of but sound instantly good. like the harvey 'moonshadow' mixes that are some balearic deepness before most people got around to it, jackson's dj kicks is weirdo disco before such dancefloor oddness became jams du jour. a top-shelf eye opener that can take you down the rabbithole of occult electro-disco mysteries. let's hope you don't come back.

jonathan - li song

jonathan - li song

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An acknowledged classic exclusive.  On the heels of Heldon, it's some extremely rare, awesome seventies German deep scifi-prog, with a powerful head-nodding drum groove that's very DJ Shadow-worthy. On top of the solid Bonham pound there's heavenly shimmering organ chords like on Popol Vuh and cheerful analog flutes.  I really want to hear this song with hip-hop scratches. Remember how on Endtroducing there's a part that uses the break from "Sunday Bloody Sunday"? You could do something like that with this. Look out for an exclusive "808s and Drum Breaks" remix here soon. 

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here is the backstory of finding this album. two summers ago my glacial lakes partner jonathan came to visit brave and I in Berlin, where as is our custom we were holded up for the season, practicing in Prenzlauer Berg, spieling fahrrads, hanging with falcon, and drinking beer on the streets. there's a good story involving being a hero goose that is too long to attend to here. Suffice to say one weekend afternoon we were scouting around the Mauer flea market, poking through records, when I handed a copy of the Jonathan album to its namesake, and we beheld its lovely serendipity - you see the music of Jonathan is performed by a keys & drums duo, which is exactly the same lineup of my band with brave. The coincision of these elements had a near astral intensity. J, however, in an odd move, put the record back, noting its high price tag. Curiously, that was only one of two magic flea market finds that day which would fail to make it back to the States with us - brave later procured a fantastic druid garment that quickly became an inofficial band outfit, truly coronating him as the homeless wizard he is. That find too somehow missed rescue, cosigned to the absurdly spacious sublet apartment we left behind in Kreuzberg. 

Needless to say, it's not hard to regret passing up purchasing a tantalizing obscure record that bears your own name, especially when the cover art is your name in huge stone letters on the moon, and there's a kind of apple that's also your name floating above it. Also, trying googling this album. We all thought it lost to the dustbins of time, until one day stina and I were in a random East Village record store and spied it, there, hanging on the wall! the Jonathan record! 

The End

Heldon - Interface

Heldon - Interface

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legendary lazer-rock face-melter from Richard Pinhas' 70s experimental trio Heldon. Trippy electronics, barrelling, careening drums and siren-squall feedback guitar, it sounds like Sonic Youth jamming with Suicide. no, really, that's what it sounds like, like the sky has cracked and light from the future is shooting down, blinding people. 

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sometimes it pays to judge a record by its cover. I was at Kim's, digging around in the psych rock section, and pulled this martian jedi pilot out from among the dusty sleeves, and bought the thing on sight. You see, I have an excessive faith in the unpredictable. I take alot of hard left-turns. sometimes this means I wind up in the hidden cave of Aladdin, surrounded by spectral, bosomy virgins and occult scrolls, other times I find myself on the wrong end of the rabbit-hole, cast onto a frozen desert, wandering shelterless in the dark. in this case my faith was rewarded - interface is a real mind-blower, one whose first listen can pack enough wallop to shake any nerdic genealogical tree of twentieth-century music.  

riding high podcast 1.06.09: glacial lakes

download mediafire (re-up)

download divshare

jonathan forgang and william rauscher reconvene as glacial lakes for 2009, sending you more echoey downtempo bliss, cooked with brazilian nuts and marinaded in dub, but this time beginning with a little AM radio muscle. as is the GL tradition, the real gems here are some exclusive jams borne on the backs of smooth grooves, which take flight under a glowing moon before finally leaving you face down on the beach at sunrise. you know, we just can't help ourselves - we try to stay on the shore, but when the oceanic birds of paradise begin to call, the synth solos and echo chambers come out and it's all over. 

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file under: balearic twilight, infinite smoothness, so bearded 

tracks:

doobie brothers - long train runnin' (gl edit)

kongas - tattoo woman

tim buckley - sweet surrender (gl edit)

glacial lakes - deep release (south beach demo)

henrik schwartz, ame and dixon  - D.P.O.M.B. (version 2)

glacial lakes - carla

michel hoeullebecq depresses the shit out of me

edu lobo - feira de santarem

caetano veloso - canto do povo de um lugar (gl epic edit)

glacial lakes - raindance

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as we're dealing with a lot of original material here, in lieu of track commentary, some things should be noted:

FIRST, don't bother trying to edit the doobie brothers sober. you're going to need one, maybe two brooklyn brown ales in you at least before you can even approach the doobies' wavelength. 

SECOND, if you screw up and accidentally record yourselves talking trash about contemporary european fiction while digitizing vinyl, leave it in. 

THIRD, if you're composing spacey shoreline tunes, don't restrict yourself to test-running them in your drab apartment in a frozen northeastern metropolis. in this case, jonathan personally went all the way to florida just so he could be absolutely certain that these new glacial lake jams are the real deal. he literally floated in a saltwater pool and listened to them coming out of speakers hidden in palm trees while babes walked by. scientific proof.  

dj harvey - moon shadow mixes

dj harvey - moon shadow part one

dj harvey - moon shadow part two

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Dj Harvey

these are the best easily-available mixes from harvey. The other recordings you can find with little difficulty are the black cock edits, which are widely credited as reviving interest in the disco edit as an art form but aren't that exceptionally rewarding as home listening, or the late night sessions, which harv oversaw during his residency at ministry of sound in the UK, but which sound like some generic jazz-lounge house. The kind of generic jazz-lounge house that reminds me of that place Radost FX that we used to eat at all the time when we studied abroad in Prague. Remember that place? It was severely euro-trash and had a faux-harem interior and great vegetarian food. They must have hated our guts except for the part where we dropped heavy USD every day. 

Radost FX, where we used to eat all the time, remember that?

Harvey's moon shadow mixes are deeply chilled-out, 3am outer-space epics. they involve smooth robots making love on the beach. They are great if you are interested in such activities as riding high, playing piano under the stars on LSD, and traveling to other planets in a cruise ship while drinking free mimosas. These mixes can easily serve to demonstrate everything important about being a good DJ. Here's the list: play good songs, play songs no one's ever heard before but are awesome, play songs in a good order. that's it.

Mollino polaroid

on a related note, I was explaining Carlo Mollino to a friend, and said that in addition to being an architect, designer, race car driver and pilot, Mollino had a home called Casa Mollino that was full of amazing furniture and artefacts, but in which he never slept, instead using it as a spot to bring prostitutes which he then photographed in highly elaborate and visually stunning polaroids. My friend remarked, "yes, a masturbatorium. this is what all men, consciously or not, are striving for." I said that one of my musical goals was to provide the imaginary soundtrack to Carlo's Casa - consider these mixes as Harvey's unknowing contribution. Oh, and go see him at his regular gig at Love in Greenwich Village. 

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There's no complete tracklisting for either mix. If you look on DJHistory you see some partial reconstructions at best. I'll help out with this: the last track on mix one is...Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, the best song ever made.

thanks to simply good music for posting these.

zip password: simplygoodmusic

electronic signals from videoland

the deal with a limitless resource like youtube is that there are long spells where it is a infinite wasteland of boredom, but then there are moments when you strike a deep well of links and related videos and you're down the media-archive rabbithole. My report on some latest findings of the synth-pop variety:

1. Jo Lemaire - Je Suis Venue Te Dire Que Je M'en Vais



Awesome haunting cover of a Serge Gainsbourg tune. You'll notice that the track is entirely synthesizers but the backing band is...some dudes on bass and drums. The tune has a wispy electronic sheen similar to "Take My Breath Away" by Berlin, which is the best song ever made. It's also surprising that you've never heard this before, considering how much you like 80's music. I hadn't either, and I thank the angels for letting rare gems like this come to light.

Here's the track so you can listen along at home.

Jo Lemaire - Je Suis Venue Te Dire Que Je M'en Vais

2. The Passions - I'm in love with a German film star

Icy melancholy fantasy of a 'glamorous world.' You know, I would argue that if Severin, the protagonist of Sacher von Masoch's Venus in Furs and the literary source for the psychoanalytic concept of masochism, were alive today, he would be an 80's synth-pop fan, and he would ride for this song. You can just see Dietrich in furs, and Severin espousing her aloof, icy allure.

and guess what? Sam Taylor-Wood, one of the Young British Artists of the Sensation era, recently recorded a cover version. It's produced by the Pet Shop Boys and released on the German label Kompakt - in a sort of heavenly alignment of conceptual art, British pop and Teutonic electronics.

3. The Droids - The Force

Inexplicably, I didn't post this video when I posted the Droids record. This tv clip for their song The Force is a minor theatrical triumph. As a friend remarked, it could be described as "Space Egyptians in the Chamber of Cabinets." Everything in this clip is perfect, including extremely hammy keyboard 'playing,' weird aluminum costumes, and a ballet dancer. A mesmerizing artefact that represents one of those weird off-roads on the highway of culture that no one ever really followed up on.