Norwegian space-disco auteur Hans-Peter Lindstrom's first real full length, Where You Go I Go Too, is an expansive, symphonic sci-fi wonder. It's so bearded, it's astro-methuselah. The 30-minute titular opener was the perfect soundtrack to a vehicular ascent of the dizzying northern face of the Fagaras Mountains. Here's my interview with Lindy on Prefix:
http://www.prefixmag.com/features/lindstrom/interview-lindstrom/21023/
Evil Steeple (is People) (divshare)
Evil Steeple (is People) (zshare.net).jpg)
The American Friend (divshare)
The American Friend (zshare.net)
Two debut tracks from Brooklyn producer Sextant. The first, Evil Steeple (Is People), is a horror-disco banger reminiscent of Moroder or Zombie-Zombie, with haunting organs and demon-pitched vocals, apparently inspired by the midnight menace of red-lit churches in Berlin's Kreuzberg. The steeple is watching. And it's people in a soylent way, if you follow. It's also rumored to possibly be a remake or remix of an hour-long Dopesmoker-style doom-metal epic called "It's People" and attributed to a group called "Evil Steeple," but I don't know any more than that.
The flip, "The American Friend," is a more tech'ed up burner, with punchy, swaggering drums and groovy, echoey synths. It's a nod to Wim Wender's classic 70s noir (starring Dennis Hopper as Mr. Ripley) and a bit of musical diplomacy, transplanting the German capital's sexy minimalist throb to the streets of Brooklyn, - an ode to Berlin's techno strongholds like Berghain and Watergate, and further evidence that the sonic love affair between the two cities is still going strong.
A super-dope reissue of a Belgian New Wave group called Allez-Allez is now out on Eskimo records. Very post-punky dance-y with tribal beats and steely production. Definitely recommended if you need some more ESG/Liquid Liquid goodness in your life - but while there's definitely a connect to that NY brittle & bare-bones skeleton funk, the Allez-Allez sound is much deeper and well, bearded. Also good if you're into Bow Wow Wow, the Slits and other female-lead angular tribal jams. Finally, it's no wonder that the reissue comes with a slew of dope remixes by key bearded/space disco dudes: Quiet Village, Aeroplane, Optimo and Lindstrom.
Here's the flagship track, and also the Lindstrom/Prins Thomas remix, which is a pretty stellar object lesson in how to remix a track. It reminds me that electronic music production is more akin to building an automobile than anything else: it's a matter of fitting parts together, testing it for speed and endurance, and then hitting the open road.
"Allez-Allez"
"Allez-Allez (Lindstrom & Prins Thomas Remix)"
Oh and coincidentally/not coincidentally, Allez-Allez is also the name of a great UK DJ team. Check out there website where they get new artists all the time to post guest mixes, latest is from Low Motion Disco who turn in a mix featuring David Byrne and Panda Bear:
Allez-Allez DJ website
or, Sound Advice for Digital Living
http://www.fabriclondon.com/podcast/
http://www.samurai.fm/home/
One of the unexpected outcomes of the historical rise of democracy in industrial society is the way in which it is possible for freedom of choice to dialectically invert into an oppressive force. This largely stems from the twin motors of capitalism and technology, which operating in sync are quite capable today of overloading and distracting you with an abundance of irrelevant things to be decided upon.
"In ancient Rome there was a poem
About a dog who found two bones
He picked at one
He licked the other
He went in circles
He dropped dead
Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom of choice!"
It's sound advice for digital living to know when and how to engage decision, when to sideswipe it and when to outsource it. Information overload means the need for people you know to occasionally serve as human data filters. Maybe you do this unconsciously, sorting acquaintances and social contacts into "friend who knows where to buy shoes" and "guy at the office who is a college basketball obsessive" and "friend's boyfriend who brings rare, illegally-cured ham to your superbowl party."
Listening to mixes online is thus a great away to avoid the painful abyss of human freedom (although confronting this freedom has its benefits as well, for example it's a great way to procrastinate, to spend an hour or so curating a playlist).
Here are three excellent sources of such mixes:
1. The Fabric podcast. Fabric is a techno club in London, a venerable temple to electronic music. It is a very thoughtfully-branded entity, combining nightclub, record label and other ventures, all of which lay their primary emphasis on the pleasures of musical experience. Seriously the club rules and if I lived practically next door to it, as my good friends Leonard and Caireen do, I would be there every weekend. The DJ lineups are out of hand.
Their latest podcast is from British(?)person Howie B, the world-class electronic producer, who slings together a bunch of great funk (Fela Kuti, George McCrae) and often describes a song as being an "absolute stonker". These podcasts are of general interest and not only enjoyable for techno nerds.
2. The Resident Advisor podcast. RA is a first-class electronic music news website. Sort of like Pitchfork, but for grown-ups who don't pee on themselves about bands with names like Mystic Wolf Palace. Its podcasts center more on straight A-list techno DJs, such as Richie Hawtin aka Plastikman, who recently did the 100th installment. Definitely more techno-nerd but you're just putting it on in the background while you do spreadsheets at work anyway, so don't worry about it.
And, in actuality, minimal techno is pretty much the best at-work shit you can listen to. It doesn't ever interfere with your consciousness but it burbles steadily along so it keeps you going, like fizzy water.
3. Samurai FM. Just discovered by me because the Earplug newsletter linked to it. Has also a host of good DJ mixes available for streaming, including most recent by Norwegian space-disco prince Lindstrom. Also has a good selection of archival mixes including Italian legend Daniele Baldelli, the George Washington of beardo disco.
Now get back to work.
[Handwritten Caption:] "There is so much evil coming off this page I had to send it away. Please don't try anything funny."
Norvorg is the name for the legendary Swedish evil spirit that preys on unsuspecting vacationers near bodies of water. This is nothing exceptional: pagan Swedish mythology is rife with malevolent forces that embody aquatic anxiety. In Norvorg's case, however, the method developed to hold the spirit at bay was unique: over generations, rural Swedes passed down brief, inanely cheerful songs, called abbania, intended to subdue the demonic entity with their breezy effervescence. Such is the direct origin of Swedish pop music as a genre, as well as Abba, the name of its most successful export.
Thus in Sweden, smooth music, at least in the bubblegum variety, was created as a mythological means of reckoning with nature, being functionally a mixture of art, technology, and religious ritual. It wasn't merely a means of accentuating a chilled-out maritime soiree, but of securing the chill-out by staying in tune with a potentially hostile universe.
Should you in the coming days find yourself in a leisurely state by the waterside, let us recommend these six sonic talismans:
- Lenny Kravitz - I Belong to You
Yep. Listen to this track and tell me it's not sick. Back when Lenny also produced "Justify My Love" for Madonna. Could you put this on while you made out with somebody, or would you laugh?
- Gabor Szabo - Azure Blue
From the Hungarian jazz guitarist's album High Contrast, which also contains the original version of Breezin', the instrumental later made famous by George Benson. Like Christopher Cross' "Sailing," "Breezin" is so programmatically smooth, it's a blueprint for the revolution. "Azure Blue" is included in the playlist instead, however, because this is the midterm: Breezin', Sailing and other such master classics are pre-reqs for the course.
George Benson - Breezin' (Live on the Old Grey Whistle Test)
- American Analog Set: The Magnificent Seventies
In high school my friends and I wore out this track and the accompanying album, From our Living Room to Yours. Wistful and lightly propulsive, like staring out of your suburban bedroom window while listening to Ege Bamyasi, the track is a jewel of airy melancholia and poppy-tinged daydreams, and is great company when navigating late at night those endless asphalt tracks that comprise the Texas highway system, and which arch in the dark like the backs of prehistoric beasts feeding on the dead.
- Lee Ritenour: Morning Glory
In crate-digging, the actual pilfering through milk crates, or Google reader or whatever it is you use, is only the first step. The second is scouring a whole album looking for that one song, the one that strikes a nerve. Smooth noodley jazz is certainly rough waters for the impassioned digger, because there is a very low diamond to shit ratio. But as Lee knows, such excursions are all part of the captain's journey. "Morning Glory" is well Steely, with a bit of CSN and some elevator thrown in for good measure.
- Azymuth: Montreal City
Azymuth [album]
Alan H. sent this in, and I've probably listened to it every day since then, Azymuth's '74/'75 Brazilian jazz debut. Alan quite correctly anticipated that I would be well down with this, as it matches nimble tropical rhythms with tinny martian synthesizers like something from the second half of either Bowie's "Low" or Closer by Joy Division. It's a fantastic record, one that rewards repeated listening. It might be a case of creeper beats: they might not hit you in the face at once, they may wait until you think you're safe and sound to deploy their weapons of sunbaked smooth....highly recommended. Alan and I had an extended follow-up conversation in which he made the observation that alot of American yacht rock ends up following a curious class trajectory, being the product of ennui-ridden rich California rockers living in the lap of luxury, sulking amidst their cuervo gold, white lady and nineteen-year olds, and making its way via muzak-systems to the quotidian world of the midwest supermarket.
- Quiet Village: Singing Sand
Another track from QV's new "Silent Movie" LP, a distant smooth cousin to DJ Shadow's Entroducing. Or as one bulletin boarder put it, beardo disco = the new trip-hop.
After three or four days in a row of epic band practices interspersed with late night brooklyn loft parties I was totally worn down and brain-dead, so while, framed by my old white window, the evening light settled softly behind the williamsburg bridge, I lay with headphones on and passed out to this new record. It is an afternoon springtime nap masterpiece. It is also shit-smooth gentle tide disco made by two bald DJs. I want to share it with you, Like a lot of very good music, it is highly practical to listen to, being a kind of sonic frozen margarita, or light Mexican beer. This track makes me think of coconut-infused suntan lotion and the gentle movements of brown skin in the dark. It's what doin' it on the beach sounds like.
The song "Rainbow Connection" is sometimes considered to be the iconic Muppets song, the way that "When You Wish Upon A Star" is so for the Disney corporate universe.
Guess who wrote it? Paul Williams, who among other things, also wrote all the songs and starred as the villain in Brian de Palma's pre-Rocky Horror pulpy sci-fi musical thriller "Phantom of the Paradise."
Here's the greatest (aka most satisfyingly nerdy) scene from the film, an extended trip into a fantastical analog-synth recording studio. Williams is the Svengali sound engineer, titular Phantom the singer.
The wall-to-wall synthesizer surrounding the Phantom is TONTO, the same unit used all over Stevie Wonder's Innervisions. There's a sick, sick clip of Stevie recording with TONTO on Youtube which we've posted before, so feel free to enjoy the archival glee of looking it up for yourself.
The POTP clip above makes us yearn for more images of futuristic/fantastic recording studios. Obviously alot can be done from an allegorical point of view with glorious space-console design in general, from the death star, 2001, etc, but digging up explicitly audio-centered sci-fictive studios remains an unfinished task. There must be some related Daft Punk imagery somewhere.
In lieu of that, we give you another image of cosmic disco demigod Daniele Baldelli throwing down in his DJ console, a glittery multi-limbed Mr. Potato-head from the future.
...Now if the reader came of tv-watching age in the 80s in the US, then the following clip is most likely very familiar, in the way that a certain sugar cookie was familiar to Marcel Proust. The difference being that, although this song is inscribed in your cultural DNA, so insidious is it you will most regret now being reminded of its hypnotically moronic tones.
Now, we're assuming the reader was not aware of the song's original context, which if you think about it sort of radically alters the implicit content of the muppet skit. The song "Mah Na Mah Na", written by Piero Umiliani, first appeared in a 1968 mondo film called Sweden: Heaven and Hell that has bosoms in it. Also supposedly it was once covered by a pre-electro disco Giorgio Moroder.
Clips from "Sweden: Heaven and Hell"
Now go back to the Muppet clip. Doesn't it seem a lot more implicitly sexual? I mean, not to join on the severally annoying bandwagon of retroactively pointing out how all the media monuments of childhood innocence are actually overcoded with all manner of vulgar gutter-business, but come on.
Postface:
Not making this up, were you aware that German Sesame Street ("Sesamstrasse") doesn't even have Big Bird?? They replaced him (her?) with "Samson", a bear character that looks like someone threw diarrhea all over a sofa that's been left on the curb for a week. What the fuck, Germans? It makes sense though, because what are two things that Germans love? Bears and shit. Plus so the kids will love him more they died his hair pink, aka the exact same hairstyle as all German moms.
Samson the shit-bear
