WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Random Linkage to Avoid Office Work By

To say the least, I could be in a worse office situation - when I explained to my boss, the freaky bug-fixated musician Irene Moon, that FMU blog needed a post for today, she told me to take a bit of time off to tell y'all about how the International Space Station is asking school kids make up experiments for astronauts to try out in zero gravity.  And also that scientists are trying to learn if there are ski-able conditions on Jupiter.  Enjoy these links in a separate tab if your boss is breathing down your neck.

Bob Brainen just pointed out to me that coming up soon is a new book about ESP Disk, the pioneering free jazz and psych label.

A few months ago, Brooklyn DIY venue Shea Stadium published a massive backlog of live sets recorded HQ.  Here's a great set from FMU psych faves Tonstartssbandht playing a few weeks back.  The brotherly duo seems to be moving more in the direction of the related project Eula, which uses an automated harmonizing pedal to create breezy Beach Boys vibes.  But the set ends with a raucous psych shred-fest ala Trag Gras Och Stenar that was more typical of the band in the past.  There are 50+ hours of streaming mp3s from so many great bands available on the Shea Stadium archives.

And while I've got the mic, can I point out that there's a ridiculous amount of similarity between the Janie's Got a Gun, the Law and Order theme song and that Eric Clapton song Change The World?  Somebody oughtta get sued over this.

A friendly commenter shared a link on my DJ Screw post last week pointing out that the University of Houston's DJ Screw Collection has cool online offerings on this massively influential turntablist.  Share some links in the comments section to this post so we can all avoid productivity together, won't you?

Meanwhile, I'm listening to this mix over and over and over...

Don’t Say “Gorilla” if You’re Wearing a Monkey Costume: The Monkees’ 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee

by Ryk McIntyre - 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee

What's on Network Awesome today?

There is a little-known story from the history of The Monkees, the band that were a bunch of TV executives' answer to the overwhelming popularity of The Beatles. They were initially hired just to sing the songs and be the faces of the show. Over time, the band wanted to show they were more than pretty faces/actors and started demanding to play on their own songs, as well as perform live as a real rock ‘n’ roll band. So, out they went on tour.

Now, whoever put the tour together picked an opening act that had started to gain acclaim in England and, on the basis of that, wanted to play in America. All the promoter knew was this was Pop music too. So imagine the scene when, in front of an audience of mostly young teen girls and their parents, Jimi Hendrix is doing his opening spot, complete with guitar humping and the like.

And that’s as good an intro to the wonder that is 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee.

For Fans of Francis E. Dec

"Masons Torture Children To Death! They burn children alive, use gang green torture, and wash off the child's face with acid. They implant the child's cornea to gain access to "The Illuminati" or the "All Seeing Eye" that is on the back of every dollar bill. Dolls were used to make this video, and no children were involved whatsoever. Learn the secret of their god of light Lucifer, the Eye, and Scientology and Masonic Witchcraft. Please rise up and put these criminals behind bars. Comments Welcome! Thank You, Macon Carrington."

Thanks for Jesse from Grasshopper for pointing this one out to me. This guy, Macon Carrington has 84 videos of rants about various conspiracies.  A few other good ones Jesse pointed me to - Heavy outsideness from Fort Worth, 80s dad singing in falsetto, and an guy playing Chuck Mangione in a field.

Very Lewd Beastie Boys Japanese TV Live Performance

RIP Adam Yauch.  Here's a video clip Brian Turrner pointed out to me, which "would never fly in the USA".

Smegma live in the 90's + a house party + local news discomfort

Searching for videos of Smegma is a laborious prospect, both due to the obvious turn for the worst that comes searching their name (for obvious reasons) as well as the thousands (it seems) terrible bands who've called themselves "Smegma" or utilized the term in their moniker (mostly juvenile, toilet-humor worshiping jocks from what it looks like). But of course the Smegma I'm referring to is the delightfully debased, maniacal improv ensemble tied to the infamous Los Angeles Free Music Society and residing for many years in Portland, OR. Since the 70's, the ensemble has performed and recorded arrestingly damaged and sublimely erratic takes on free-improvisational form along with dabbles into demented forms of punk, jazz, and garage rock (see their single "Swamp Dick"). My search for 70's and 80's video came up empty-handed, but here's a couple solid early 90's clips along with a more recent missive at a Smegma "house party." Dig:

Pekinška Patka's "Poderimo Rok" (1979)

Hey, it's Novi Sad, Yugoslavia's coolest punk rock export: Pekinška Patka.  Here we see the band ripping through their anthemic "Poderimo Rok" -- behind glass, for whatever reason -- in '79.  By the time they filmed this footage, the groundbreaking quintet had already established a sizeable cult following with Yugo Youths hungry for new sounds, and they lose their minds in this manic vid.  I would've, too.  Enjoy. 

 

Mining the Audio Motherlode, Volume 165

Give the Drummer Some's
Favorite Downloads from the MP3 Blogosphere 

Ten years ago, while reading a review of Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize–winning Master of the Senate, his 1,200-page third installment of a planned four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, I blurted out that I wished I had the time to read such a thing. With every-waking-moment music obsessions to attend to, I'd kind of fallen off the pleasure-reading bandwagon. Blessedly, my wife dashed out and bought me a copy, and I've been enthralled with Caro's work ever since.

Yesterday was the official pub date of The Passage of Power, Caro's fourth, but (as it turns out, not final) LBJ volume, so if Mining the Audio Motherlode over the next number of weeks appears a bit thin, it's only because I'm reading and just don't have the time.

Sharing my sonic discoveries with you is a great pleasure. There are times when I wish I could just reach out and grab you by the collar to get you to listen to some of this stuff. Well, my enthusiasm for Caro's writing is just as impassioned. Trust I don't say lightly that I find the experience of reading his books to be as miraculous as any music I could recommend.

Pádraig O'Keeffe  ~  The Sliabh Luachra Fiddle Master
(Blog: Ceol Álainn)

Leaves You Reeling
"A deleted recording of the Sliabh Luachra fiddle player and teacher taken from RTÉ archive recordings made by Séamus Ennis between 1947 and 1949. This is absolutely brilliant Sliabh Luachra music, and the final set of tunes - a duet with Denis Murphy - is a classic."  (Description by Dragut Reis, at Ceol Álainn)

The Good Vibrations Reach Nashville (MP3)

Floyd Cramer  -  Good Vibrations  

In addition to making quite a few records under his own name, Floyd Cramer played piano on thousands of Nashville recording sessions.  He can regularly be heard on records by Elvis Presley (Heartbreak Hotel, for instance), the Everly Brothers, Don Gibson, Eddy Arnold, Brenda Lee, Chet Atkins, Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline to name just a few.

Most of the records he released under his own name are pleasant enough, I suppose, but I find them a bit too refined and full of pop flourishes to track them down and purchase them.  Exceptions can be made however and here's one of them.  In 1967, he released a 45 rpm recording of Stood Up (#53 on the country charts) and decided to put the Beach Boys' Good Vibrations on the b-side, a seemingly suprprising choice. Or maybe it wasn't so surprising, as he also recorded the LP Floyd Cramer Plays The Monkees in the same year.

John Peel's Record Collection is Listenable Online Today

For many fans of FMU, John Peel needs no introduction.  As a champion of adventurous taste on BBC Radio 1 for decades, Peel's one of our patron saints.  Thanks to the liberal funding policies for the arts across the pond (as opposed to here in America...Mayday...Mayday...), John Peel's entire record collection is being digitized and released online.  Many are available for free streaming and detailed info is available for the rest.

Click here to see the Peel Archives online.  Hate to draw attention away from FMU, but crap, this will easily take up your entire day and totally mess up your work productivity (if you aren't chronically jobless...Mayday...Mayday).  Today all the records starting with "A" are streamable, and it looks like a letter will be released for listening every week.

Also!!  Bonus points.  In the left of the Peel archives homepage, under the speaker...what's that??  A wfmu bumper sticker!  Screencap's to the left...

Dr. Adrian Ostfeld Speaks on LSD Research, 1967 (Exploring My Reel-to-Reel Catacombs, Volume 28) (MP3's)

Today's sampling of my reel to reel collection features a tape containing a speech made during a gathering at Lake Forest College in Illinois, on February 22, 1967. On that date, Dr. Adrian Ostfeld, then the head of preventive medicine at the Univeristy of Illinois College of Medicine, spoke about his findings as an early researcher (at the beginning of the 1960's) into the effects of LSD.

As you will hear, he generally found the effects to be fairly limited, with the exception of a very few subjects who had quite extensive responses to the drug. Because of the many visual effects reported by those involved in the experiments, he expanded his research into those who were blind, and who had experienced the removal of their eyes, and he reports on the findings with those subjects, as well.

He goes on to discuss the vast difference between his rather banal findings and the amazing LSD experiences being reported by a variety of sources in the press and elsewhere, in those more recent days of 1966 and 1967, and speculates on some of the reasons for this, before ending with his own views on the likelihood of discovering anything worthwhile via the continued study of the drug.

This was apparently part of a larger presentation or event: the tape begins with a brief organ piece and an equally brief choral piece, before someone named Dr. Smucker introduces Dr. Ostfeld (another piece of music is beginning as the tape is shut off, after the speech). I have separated this four minute set of introductory items into a separate file, for those who might not be interested in this material, and the speech (which runs about 35 minutes) is heard in the second file, below.

Organ Prelude, Choral Piece and Dr. Smucker's Introduction (MP3)  |  Dr. Adrian Ostfeld - Speech Regarding LSD Research, February 22, 1967 (MP3)  |  Tape Box (JPG)

SPK Live at Oddfellows Hall, San Francisco, on 5-16-1981

A recent posting of the SPK Brickwerks performance video got me to thinking a bit about what was an important and exciting band for me in the early 1980's, and about the aesthetics and techniques of "Industrial / Noise" outfits at that time.  Seeing SPK live in 1982 was to be a defining moment for me artistically and socially, and I'll go into that in the part two post about "System Planning Korporation" aka "Surgical Penis Klinik" in two weeks (May 12th, 6pm EST). Unfortunately I missed the performance featured today, from a year earlier, but it was caught on cassette by my friend Mr. Rob Wortman, from whose archive I've presented several rare live tapes here on BOTB. More about this gig after the jump.

Keep the Smooth: An Interview with Yacht Rock Creator JD Ryznar

by RJ White - Collection - Yacht Rock

What's on Network Awesome today??

In 2003, Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab founded the monthly film festival Channel101 with a simple premise: Make a five-minute pilot and if enough of the audience at the live screening in LA votes for it, you have one month to make another episode. If they vote for it again, you make another. Repeat. In 2005, JD Ryznar submitted Yacht Rock, which would go on to become one of the most successful shows in 101’s history and, over 12 episodes, create a new notch in the Internet’s heart for smooth, smooth music. We caught up with Ryznar for this interview...

Ryuichi Sakamoto and "Derrida," a Decade Later

A decade ago, the groundbreaking documentary on Jacques Derrida, Derrida, was released around the world to celebrate to elusive philosopher. Ryuichi Sakamoto composed 29 short pieces inspired by Derrida the fill the soundtrack to the documentary. The tracks, simply called "jd" (Jacques Derrida) and followed by a number, range from warm, minimalist piano trills (as in "Jd017") to haunting soundscapes ("Jd022") to chilling electronic echoes of a distopian present and future ("Jd029").

"Jd017", "Jd022", and "Jd029".

The range of tones and themes loosely played with by Sakamato brilliantly mirrors not only the intellectual contributions of Derrida to literature, philosophy, and thought, but also the man himself. Famously refusing to be photographed until 1979, Derrida's increasing visibility and even celebrity peaked with the release of Derrida, a mere two years before his death. The documentary, appearing in full here, documents both symbolic moments in Derrida's life, such as his visit to Nelson Mandela's jail cell, and the mundane day-to-day details of Derrida's life.

After a brief scene in which he tries to find a camera-worthy matching ensemble, Derrida himself says that the "traditional philosophy excludes biography, considers biography as something external to philosophy." This examination of Derrida rejects the traditionalists and shows that the life of an author and his philosophy are necessarily intertwined (an idea Derrida discusses explicitly in the 1970s and 1980s). As the filmmakers attempt to deconstruct the life of Derrida and his work, Derrida himself engages in destructively deconstructing the film, the nature of memory and human interraction, and the very idea of seeing and understanding. 

"Jd028", "Jd009", and "Jd001"

To have the soundtrack of Derrida composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto is fitting. Sakamoto's career is marked by brilliant deconstructions of rhythm, of texture, of sound, making his audience question what, exactly, it means to hear and to listen (two verbs which are not by any means synonymous). Like the documentary, the premise of the soundtrack is superficially dull -- an instrumental, stripped-down interpretations of a philosopher whose own work is difficult, confusing, and problematic. However, both prove to be incredibly entertaining, enjoyable, and thoughtful reflections on how life, whether through sound or through film, can be best represented.

More text and video clips below...

Come on Down To Noise Park and Meet Some Friends of Mine

Noise Park, a pretty funny new tumblr that depicts noise icons as South Park characters.  Below is Aaron Dilloway.  

Don't You Flush?

Turn on these videos concurrently. Thank you.