Is it summer yet

I came across this old article from the NYT about the glorious Fort Tilden out in the Rockaways. As we dig our selves out from this weeks snowstorm, I find myself dreaming of sand and sun. Nothing beats the feeling of driving over the Marine Park Bridge and rolling down the windows. While the occasional dirty tampon or hipster gang blasting MGMT may deter some...I stay loyal.

Night Plane Podcast for Soul Clap

photo by JM

Adventures of Soul Clap Episode 66 - Night Plane

The entity known as Night Plane are highly psyched to bring you this - a podcast of all original NP material for Boston's esteemed Soul Clap crew. Tracks by William + mix by Harry = cosmic medicine. File under Disco/House/Psychedelia. And check the epic conclusion, a chopped & screwed version of the unreleased "Enemy Lands."

Catch Soul Clap on tour in Europe at the moment - and stay tuned for Night Plane "Crimes of the Future" 12" on Thisisnotanexit this summer.

Night Plane - EVR live mix

Night Plane live on EVR, January 28th, 2010

In case you didn't feel like showing up, here's a link to the archived EVR stream. Thanks again for Still Life for allowing brutes and fools like us to cause trouble live on the internet. And special thanks to NP official hype man DJ Loud Noises. stay tuned for Loud's forthcoming mixtape, "God Hypes Those Who Hype Themselves."

Rebel Rap: A Mix of Haitian Rap Kreyol

DJ Still Life - Rebel Rap: A Mix of Haitian Rap Kreyol (courtesy of Mad Decent)

A good friend of mine is, like myself, a graduate student in literature. Over the past several years, her regard for the academic world has visibly waned, replaced by a growing fascination for creative expression and Eastern religion. Her waning regard turned into open disgust, however, in a recent Facebook post, in which she bemoaned the university conferences on Haiti that were being organized in the wake of the island's recent earthquake disaster. Look at these sad academics, my friend opined, all they can do is organize conferences instead of really helping, really changing, really acting. To her this only underscored the stuffy pointlessness of the university.

It must be said here that action is never the point of the university. Conferences and papers and peer-reviewed journals can never take the place of, say, an immense international rescue effort designed to minimize the ravages of a nationwide disaster. The university can't be criticized for being itself, it is responding to the news of the day in its own language, that's exactly its task. So is the task of the DJ in this situation. Will a mix of Haitian rap save a life? Maybe, actually, if listening to it reminds you that you should donate to the relief effort. Is the point of the mix to save a life? No. the point of the mix is to respond to the events in Haiti in its own language, in music language.

Props to our friend Still Life for assembling some nasty-ass tracks. Enjoy.

The Blank Generation: Blank Tapes NYC 1975-1985

This first-time ever compilation of producer Bob Blank's work from his legendary Blank Tapes studios showcase a wildly diverse sonic menagerie - you got everything from underground disco like "Over Like a Fat Rat" and the Arthur Russell-helmed "Wax the Van" to Sun Ra's cosmic free-jazz to gritty no-wave skronk from Lydia Lunch and James Blood Ulmer. A collab from two venerable institutions, Strut records and DJHistory.com, it's a glorious insight in the fast, cheap and out-of-control realm of underground music in New York City.

for more visit Strut Records, where accounts by Blank of his time behind the board are in abundance. for example, here's Bob talking about recording the disco classic "Go Bang!" with Arthur. It's a fine example of Arthur's application of the Zen precept "First Thought Best Thought" to music composition - they rolled tape as soon as the musicians sat down, although they thought they were merely jamming it out and warming up.

"First Thought Best Thought" underscores a valuable lesson in creativity - that will is the opposite of grace. It's a theme most exemplarily explored by Kleist's brilliant short text, "On the Marionett Theater" which stages a number of scenes that circle around the problem of the first thought. Like, for example, a handsome young man who notices the grace of his accidental pose in the mirror, and then struggles in vain to repeat it. If only Bob had the tape running.

THISISNOTANEXIT - MANIFESTO #1

Beware this forthcoming label-comp! Because it is two CDs of wildness from the TINAE roster, including Naum Gabo, Pink Stallone, The Dark Esquire, Professor Genius, Spectral Empire, Club Silencio, and also Night Plane. It will rain like fire, and burn the bridges where they stand.

new TINAE online shop!

Order a personal copy of Night Plane - Chinese Shadows 12" from the lovely new THISISNOTANEXIT online shop. Buy this twelve inch online, and then it will appear at your house! On this twelve inch, three songs have been etched onto vinyl, which can be heard according to a record player. You can like them!

Psychedelic Australia

buffalo - freedom

some lost heavy-psych wildness from Australia's Buffalo, from their 1973 LP Volcanic Rock. If "Freedom" by Buffalo off of Volcanic Rock isn't the most testosteronic-sounding song listing ever, I don't know what is. Personally my associations with Australia are that it is as if you made Texas an entire continent, which Texas already believes itself to be. Australia is like Texas' fantasy version of itself: an entire continent where you drive around in the wilderness, drink too much, and have psychedelic visions in the outback while jamming songs about "Freedom." You'll note as well that this song is a dead ringer for Soundgarden. When you hear dude sing try and not think about Chris Cornell.

Two years after Volcanic Rock, Peter Weir directed Picnic at Hanging Rock, which is also about psychedelic aussies, except instead of brawny biker types it's about boarding school girls who go into the wilderness and have a group freak-out. Here's the film's central scene.

Australia reminds me also of course of mi madre, born in Taree, New South Wales, north of Sydney. She lived there until she was nine, when her family immigrated to the United States. My mother was personally not very psychedelic, although she did have a pet kookaburra as a child. Having weird pets is kind of psychedelic, especially if it is an unusual species that only exists in one part of the world.

We visited Australia for a month when I was twelve, which was the coolest thing ever. I got to feed kangaroos and hug a koala bear. On my birthday, my father took me up in a private airplane, which he flew, over the Great Barrier Reef.

At one point we stayed at a bed & breakfast that was on a ranch. The family had a daughter about my age who took me around on a four-wheeler. At one point my father and the owner of the ranch were talking about the owner's dogs. "Yeah, they're bitches." He remarked, and because I was twelve I was like whoa can he say that?? Later the daughter explained to me and my brother about weird prepubescent Australian sex rituals, which involved wearing and then breaking a bracelet called a "nigga-band" and then "rooting" each other (not making this up).

The history of Australia's colonization involves the Brits taking all their unwanted denegerate types and then leaving them on a beautifully trippy, completely unique unexplored continent where the indigenous tribes have psychic powers. It's basically an episode of "Lost."

Promo Mixes

(Front Club, Hamburg Germany, 1989)

promomixes.com is a new mix site focusing on historically-influential clubs. Each monthly mix will feature the sounds of a particular club mixed by a DJ who played there, someone who danced there, or someone who simply still jocks the sound.

The first mix is from Berlin's Finn Johannsen and concerns Hamburg's Front Club, one of the first European venues to start playing house music.And apparently a fun place to visit - see the pic of a young couple handcuffed while dancing. Finn has put together "a tape he'd want to slip the owners of Front Club in 1990." Consider it the inaugural offering for a site that promises to offer classic electronic satisfaction together with some important history lessons.

Omni Ciani

Omni magazine was a science/futurism publication founded by Bob Guccione Jr. that ran from the late seventies to the mid-nineties. It ushered in a new era of popular science journalism, being something like the Wired magazine of its time, but with more of a speculative bent. Omni regularly featured pieces from science-fiction luminaries including Arthur C. Clarke and William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace in Omni's pages. The speculative side also meant a predilection for new age-y and UFO-related pseudo-science. In the mid-nineties Omni was the first print publication to go entirely online. You can read an article in Slate magazine here about the history of Omni, and as well visit the online tribute site.

Here is a clip from Omni's short-lived TV incarnation, featuring the analog synth wizardress / nerd pin-up Suzanne Ciani as she composes music for a pinball game. Not only is it remarkably hypnotic to watch her program computers and synthesizers, I also love the smug goofball TV show host at the beginning, lounging by a space lamp and saying "isn't it amazing that electricity of this kind will one day be used to regrow human limbs?" in a ridiculously smug voice, summing up the sort of self-oblivious giddiness of 70s futurism.

Ciani, a student of synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla, has enjoyed a successful career as a musician and commercial composer for several decades, having composed the sound effects for the MECO disco Stars Wars record, releasing her classic Seven Waves album, and scoring numerous commercials. These included a coke commercial in which she used synthesizers to generate the satisfying PSSSHT sound of a soda can being opened.

WAV files of Ciani's designs for the Xenon pinball game shown in the Omni clip are posted on her website.

Here is Suzanne in another clip, this time from the children's tv show 3-2-1 Contact, explaining the properties of electronic sound.