Dig That Sweet Sound!

Hiatus

2011-10-23T15:01:00.001-07:00

If anyone reads this, I apologize for the recent silence. I recently began a new life as a full-time teacher, and I am adjusting.

DTSS! will have to go on hold for a little while, but I'll be back soon, catching up with Madlib, telling you all about Matana Roberts (our new musical champion!) and some other good stuff.

Stay tuned.

ZOMBY: Dedication

2011-07-20T09:30:00.000-07:00

When I wrote about Zomby’s debut album, I was struck by how it looked backwards, flirting with the line between music-as-art and music-as-discipline. “Maybe” I said “Zomby is making one last nostalgic stop before launching into the wide unknown.”

I guess this is the wide unknown. Shorter than his first (it’s a hair over 35 minutes), Dedication could easily be mistaken for another of Zomby’s many EPs. Packaging music as an album rather than an EP gives a listener certain expectations, though. Traditionally, the EP is interstitial and transitional, taking artistic risks in a safer, below-the-radar release likely to only be heard by people predisposed to be root for you. The album, on the other hand, is expected to be a fully-formed statement with a cohesive structure.

One thing carried over from Where Were U in 92? is Zomby’s preference for short tracks crammed together end-to-end with sudden transitions (or, put another way, without transitions.) Those short running-times (along with nervy syncopation on tracks like "Digital Rain") might remind you of the L.A. beat scene, but without the textured warmth that gives Teebs and Flying Lotus their playful bent, Dedication has the dead stare of an NES game-over screen. On Where Were U, this was the quick-minded excitement of a bedroom-studio raver ready to party. Here, though, it’s more like the fractured conversation of someone who is deeply distracted. The inner jacket, in stark white-on-black text, says “Dedicated to BDM 11.11.46 – 25.06.10”. I know a quick Google could probably fill in the gaps, but if Zomby thought I required more backstory, he would have written liner-notes.

What is clear is that this is music in mourning. Everything is dark here. The minimal cover lists titles like “Witch Hunt”, “Vanquish”, “Riding with Death” and “Things Fall Apart”. The second track (“Natalia’s Song”) is so pretty and eager and desperate, not only the (probably sampled) female vocals, but also the minimal, Burial-esque percussion and the swaying synths sulking through their dirge chords. It’s one of the few tracks given a chance to develop, (at four minutes it is by far the longest on the album) but it still strains against some plastic sheet trapping it against the ground, as if it wants to take off into something cathartic but never does. On “Witch Hunt” gunshots (the saddest sound in the world) are used as percussion. Everywhere, crisp synths with sharp, digital timbres, loop in big empty warehouses, with reverb ping-pong against cement and steel. There are no breaks or breakdowns, and the clouds never part. Even a guest spot from Animal Collective’s Panda Bear does nothing to break the cold, morose spell.

This is a record with an emotional purpose singular and clear. I actually find the unrelenting gloom to be a little overwhelming. The way incredible moments like “Vortex” are cut short is almost cruel, but I found myself with a kind of Stockholm Syndrome while listening to this. Dedication made me uneasy, and it captivated me totally. Comparing it to Where Were U in 92? reveals considerable range on Zomby’s part, and I’m sure both records will occupy unique roles in his slowly-growing body of work.

MADLIB: Medicine Show No. 11 - Low Budget High Fi Music

2011-05-08T16:53:00.000-07:00

Here's the paradox: Madlib's music is, on the one hand, deeply intertextual and, on the other hand, perplexingly insular. To the theory that music can only be about itself, The Bad Kid offers a revision: His music can only be about other people's music. And, repurposed and scrambled as it is, much of it (in one way or another) literally is other people's music. Hijacking is Madlib's art, and he's brilliant at it. When he's not curating or sampling the work of others he's interpreting it with Yesterday's Universe, naming tracks after his heroes, or aping their styles and rhythms.

In theory, this project should be deeply intertextual, connecting to and reflecting the work of others, but it is strangely self-contained, and the resulting music functions best as an obsessive binge. I don't listen to Madlib's music in a rotation with other music. Instead, I listen to Madlib almost exclusively for a chunk of time, and then forget him until the next big Madlib Kick. This is not because he's made about 700 albums, or the fact that his work is diverse enough to be a complete musical diet. It is because his music only makes sense according to the laws of nature in Madlibland.

You can think of this place as underground hip-hop's version of The Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. Direct routes are forbidden, and the ground is littered with long forgotten artifacts and debris. When I'm not there, I'm not interested in it and I can't see the appeal of this erratic, scattered mindspace. I'd rather go somewhere safe and warm like Abbey Road. When I feel that specific pull to Madlibland, however, I have to answer and like the Stalkers who lead passengers through The Zone, I have an obsessive compulsion to evangelize the experience.

Among this terrain's most distinct features are the jagged, abrupt changes. Beats and verses and grooves tumble out of the toybox with no obvious structure, sequence, or any transitions a Q-switch couldn't provide. At any moment, any idea can halt or start right in the "middle" of things. Quick cross fades and chaotic sound collage make it impossible to get your bearings. This infuriates outsiders, delights the die-hards, and has never been more prominent than it is on the Medicine Show. If that's not by design, it's a very happy accident. There's something transitory about these volumes, and the release schedule, flexible as it has turned out to be, makes the series something no one will even try to follow unless they are perfectly tuned to Madlib's ADHDJ wavelength.

Low Budget High Fi Music is a microcosm of Madlibland. Inconsistent, messy and scattershot, this volume is vault material (most from around 2005, some more recent) put together like those 1970s Miles Davis records that were pieced together from various late-60s sessions (think Water Babies and Big Fun). The archival nature doesn't bother me - Madlib's release schedule rarely corresponds to when the music is actually made, particularly in the Medicine Show, which has reached as far back as the 1990s. The execution is a little lacking, though. When Teo Macreo spliced and overdubbed those Miles Davis jam sessions, he sculpted them into something more cohesive. Cohesion has no place in Madlibland, and on Low Budget things are even more scattered than usual. Verses fade in and out in medias res, a Beastie Boys cover is split into two (a little here, and some more of it there.)

I wish Madlib employed a more judicious editor (I humbly volunteer!) and I wish he would expand the stable of MCs who rap on his beats (I humbly volunteer for that, too, Madlib) but this is how you listen to prolific eccentrics – you take the good with the bad. Thankfully, the good (the short Loop Digga instrumentals, for example, and the Strong Arm Steady remix) outweighs the bad, and the listening experience is an adventure. I’m going to be sad to see the Medicine Show end.

GENESIS: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

2011-05-03T18:33:00.000-07:00

"Mike, if Prince wrote a song about peanut butter, it would sound like this." Nate’s Prince impression was a profound relief. If there hadn’t been one other person on the dreaded Youth Retreat who could make a reference like that, I might have lost my shit.

The Midwest Christian-youth culture in the 1990s was obsessive about what pundits call "the culture wars." There was a cottage industry of embarrassing simulacrum with pseudo-Christian themes, syrupy earnestness and budget-priced production. People in church would actually say things like "They’re sort of like a Christian Pink Floyd, Mike, you’d like them!" Please, friends, contain your nausea. This nihilistic conformation to the ways of the world filled a void created by a party-line mantra that "secular music" was evil. A woman who volunteered with the youth group once tried to explain what a troubled lost lamb she had been. "I even owned a Led Zeppelin album," she told me. It was a lonely moment for me: By that point I owned every Led Zeppelin album, even Coda. I just assumed that my fondness for “The Battle of Evermore” wasn’t likely to be a priority for Jesus.

On this retreat to a Washington D.C. convention, however, it was a priority. (These trips away from home and family are called "retreats." The irony, dear reader, is yours to unpack.) Our youth pastor Jason told the busload of smiling, pimple-marked teenage faces under his guidance that certain among us had brought secular music and were listening to it on the bus. This weekend was supposed to be about drawing closer to God, he said, and those things were distractions.

Of course they were distractions, Jason. Other than talking to Nate about our shared interest in David Lynch and Radiohead (what another kid in the youth group called "all that weird stuff you guys like"), the only thing getting me through the ordeal was the little wallet of CDs in my backpack. Without that, I might have grown up to be Christopher Hitchens.

When our bus stopped at a shopping mall so we could eat in the food court, I slipped away to Harmony House with the money my mom had given me for food. I bought The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway because I had seen a magazine article about progressive rock and I was working my way through the sidebar of "essential albums" with each band name, title and trippy album cover retained like a shopping list of holy relics. By this point I was already obsessed with Fragile, Aqualung, 2112 and In The Court of the Crimson King. Genesis was next in line, even though material put out by more recent incarnations of the band made me reluctant. (The guys that sing "I Can’t Dance"? Seriously?)

Prog-rock was a good fit for an archetypal dork like me. The compulsive rhythms and coitus-simulating guitar wankery of traditional rock music didn't speak to me in any way other than to bitterly remind me of all the fun my schoolmates (the worldly counterparts to the youth group kids) were supposedly having while I listened to Gentle Giant in my parents' basement. Anyway, songs about cars and girls were utterly pedestrian and I fancied myself too sophisticated for that kids' stuff. The satirical theatrics and surreal, stately pomp of Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake & Palmer was music from another place, music that WAS another place, and I loved that alternate universe, contra-Pete Townshend, sans Green Day. (I know what you're thinking, jaded music snob, but stop right there. The circus-show wackiness and extensive musical vocabulary employed by 1970s prog is no more bloated than the "three chords and TRUTH" pretension preached by Joe Strummer and it’s a hell of a lot more creative than the stolen blues and statutory-rape fantasies of The Rolling Stones.)

Back on the bus, I discreetly leafed through the liner notes. The lyrics were included, along with an absurdist prose piece ("Autoghosts keep the pace for the cabman’s early mobile race...") by lead singer Peter Gabriel (The guy that sings "Shock the Monkey"? Seriously?) that ostensibly explained the rock-opera plot. My little portable CD player, perhaps the most cherished Christmas gift in my young life, sputtered into operation and I heard the opening cascade of piano arpeggios fade up like stage lights. I stared out the window at passing cars and buildings, occasionally pressing the headphones tight against my ears to hear the quieter passages over the hum of the bus engine and the chipper, chaste silliness of my peers.

This is an ideal headphones album, and not just because a young Genesis fan doesn’t want Mom and Dad to hear lyrics like "Erogenous zones, I love you! Without you what would a poor boy do?" (The hilarious answer, delivered in the song’s climax: "Without you mankind handkinds though the blues!") On headphones, the dense arrangements, meticulously produced and stereo-panned, surround you in a subterranean cathedral built from Steve Hackett's inventive guitar, Tony Banks' alien synths, Mike Rutherford’s thick bass lines, Phill Collins' bursting, technical percussion (before he was Lord Pantywaist of the Soft Rock Kingdom, he was an amazing drummer) and Peter Gabriel's arsenal of cartoon voices. Lamb creates the kind of atmosphere that makes you forget you're trapped on a bus with thirty kids who think you're weird. As that bus carried us to the nation's capital, I was winding through purgatory with Rael.

Rael. Or as he’s known in the title-song, "RAEL IMPERIAL AEROSOL KID!" He is nether the grim narcissist of Pink Floyd's The Wall or the hippie messiah of The Who's Tommy. This is a much more dangerous story than those classic rock bitchfests-of-the-famous. Rael is a New York punk rapist who burns things for fun and descends into an underground afterlife that exists only in Peter Gabriel's twisted imagination, where he chases his genitals into a tunnel, or something like that.

I was enraptured with this album. It was dramatic and theatrical, contrasting chaos and serenity, building careful countermelodies and quirky chord changes. The melodies were familiar, but strange, like nursery songs shredded and patched back together. The phantasmagoric allegory in the lyrics particularly captivated me. This wasn't the hollow motivation-speak that I thought surrounded me at church, and it wasn't the winking worldliness that I thought surrounded me at school. This was uncomfortable. There was some dark territory here; rape, castration, damnation, that part where Rael has sex with the snake women and then they die and then he eats their bodies… It took some figuring out. It was ambiguous and confusing. Paced with a number of tension-building passages, it required patience. Filled with meta-textual detail, (quotes from other pop songs, lines about Lenny Bruce, etc.) it presupposed prior knowledge. It demanded a reaction from the listener in order to complete the experience.

Apart from Genesis and Nate's Prince imitation, the retreat was embarrassing or boring or upsetting, depending on the moment. There were loud, earnest presentations. There was dull, swaying "praise music" and lots of showy public prayer. I was terrified at how many products were being sold in the name of Jesus, and when I mentioned to the youth pastor that it reminded me of that business in the temple when Christ chases out the profiteers, he stroked his goatee and said I might be on to something. Of course, this event was not about the Christ depicted in the gospels; it was about Sanitized American Jesus, who lacks all the danger, creativity and disturbing viewpoints of his scriptural counterpart. Real shame, that. I loved danger, creativity and disturbing viewpoints. Whenever I had a free moment, I was back between headphones, absorbing The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which was filled with all three.

My youth pastor worried that the dangerous messages in the music I liked were distracting me from his ministry and he was right, but this distraction was the very escape I needed. In the denouement of Peter Gabriel's mad narrative, Rael sacrifices himself to save his brother and the Imperial Aerosol Kid is redeemed. The world is haunted and frightening, but if we learn to lay down our lives for others, somewhere in all this mystery even the most troubled lost lamb has hope for redemption.

A dangerous message indeed.

NICOLAS JAAR: Space is Only Noise

2011-04-12T09:02:00.000-07:00

On his debut album, released earlier this year, Nicolas Jaar creates caverns like King Tubby, sputters kicks and clops like Flying Lotus, sings like a young Leonard Cohen, samples soul voices like RJD2, plucks at pianos like Max Richter, cyberneticizes like Kraftwerk and locks organic sounds into electronic grids like Ricardo Villalobos. These reference points are handy, but misleading. This is a cohesive suite of tracks that all sound like Nicolas Jaar; playful and patient in wide open spaces. It's a lazy record; not artistically lazy (Jaar's ingenuity is obvious), but relaxed and dreamlike. When you were a kid, did you ever play outside first thing in the morning? That feeling of still-heavy eyelids and dawning possibility is what it feels like to listen to Space is Only Noise.

What roots Jaar most firmly in the "electronic music" camp is the way many of these tracks are structured according to the addition and subtraction of layers. Like Legos, each element is designed to fit with every other element. Jaar's pacing is uncanny, never hurried, never tedious, and when something new is added it is not just an insular earworm - it alters what is already present by subtly shifting context. During "Keep Me There" a piano part cycles and cycles, and when an extra sprinkling (of three simple notes) is dashed in, the original piano cycle is suddenly new again, changed by its relationship with the surrounding elements.

This isn't just a series of loops and grids, though. Not only does Jaar play some lilting live piano (meticulously edited, it seems, but basically live) on "Sunflower" and the two similar tracks that bookend the record, he performs some bona fide pop songs (the whimsical "Problems With the Sun" and the monochrome neon synth-pop gem "Space is only Noise if You Can See"). It’s a testament to Jaar’s big-picture cognizance that these tracks sit so nicely alongside things like the marshmellow synths on "Colomb" and that vocoded Demis Rousso soundalike crooning through "Balance Her In Between Your Eyes".

I hate this guy a little, because he's only 21 and this record accomplishes everything I've tried (with a tragic lack of success) to accomplish in my own paltry attempts to make electronic music. What a jerk, right? I mean, the audacity! It's a safe bet that Nicolas Jaar isn't interested in burrowing into one little niche and staying there. Future projects could take him anywhere, and envy aside I hope they do.

RADIOHEAD: The King of Limbs

2011-04-08T02:53:00.000-07:00

Since everyone is going to assess this only in relation to previous Radiohead releases, I'll just be upfront:

1. Kid A

2. OK Computer

3. In Rainbows

4. Amnesiac

5. The King of Limbs <---------------- (Not bad!)

6. The Bends

7. Hail to the Thief

8. Pablo Honey

I never thought I would describe a Radiohead record as playful and sexy, but here it is. When I was in junior high, OK Computer hit me like a freight because I was paranoid and pretentious and it was too. Hail to the Theif came out just as I was developing an interest in (and by that I mean "a chip on my shoulder about") politics. In 2011 I've mellowed out quite a bit, and even if I wouldn’t describe myself as "playful and sexy" I will say I’m far less concerned with sneering technocratic rebellion than my teenage self. Like so many of their previous records, this one kinda hit me at just the right moment. I came home on a Friday after an emotionally exhausting substitute run at a local high school, found out it was available A DAY EARLY and collapsed to it. Just what I needed.

This is a good one. I even like the latest installment in Thom Yorke's quest to write "Pyramid Song" as many times as possible (this one's even better than "Pyramid Song"!).

I saw Radiohead do a webcast on the internet in 2007 or so. Part of it was the band acting as DJs and they played Fela Kuti, M.I.A. and Burial. MF DOOM claims he's making an album with ThomYorke. "Excuse me, I noticed you like the same bands I like - let's be best friends forever." See, Radiohead take influences from all these different things I like (Penderecki, Autechre, Can, Mingus, The Stone Roses - even Flying Lotus on this one) and then spit them back out as pretty pop songs. I'm on board with that project, and I think it's fine that Radiohead's influences (the usual stuff loved by insular music nerds like you) are so prominently displayed on the sleeves of their fashionable fair-trade jackets. This band is like a filmmaker who is so immersed in the oeuvres of the auteurs that his own work is covered in Bergman sauce and minced Ozu. What's-a-mattah, you don't like a little Ozu on your pulp?

We were playing this at my after-school job and these were the reactions:

First Coworker: "I don't like this. It's just a bunch of sounds."

Me: "That's what music is - a bunch of sounds."

First Coworker: "Yeah, but this is too... different."

Second Coworker: "It's like being in a tripped-out video game."

Third Coworker: "I'm glad we're listening to this because this music makes me feel really good."

Third Coworker wins.

My girlfriend, upon discovering that after three years of silence Radiohead put out an album that is 38 minutes long, said "That's all they've got after three years? In that time, I earned a doctorate." She did, too, and I perfected my Thom Yorke impression. It scares little kids and old people.

EARL SWEATSHIRT: EARL

2011-04-03T14:17:00.000-07:00

Earl Sweatshirt is a member of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, a collective of rappers and producers from California who have been attracting attention with their voluminous releases given away for free online. Their notoriety has grown so much they’ve been on network TV, backed up by the Roots. (if you watch that video, note the enthusiasm displayed by Mos Def as well as Jimmy Fallon’s delighted grin.)

Check out this excellent and astute write-up from Feminist Music Geek. I agree with what she said and won’t bother to repeat, but I would like to ask one question: When we talk about this album (and let’s be honest, provoking analysis, criticism and controversy is a big part of Odd Future’s creative endeavor) are we contributing to the delinquency of a minor?

The video for Earl’s eponymous track (the one where he raps about using roofies to commit date rape, using a trumpet to sodomize a girl, eating human flesh mixed with feces and how his purpose on this Earth is to commit hate crimes against Catholics) features Earl and his friends mixing an assortment of substances (pot, apparently, some cough syrup, liquor and something from a prescription bottle) in a blender, drinking it, and vomiting before injuring themselves skateboarding, having seizures, and bleeding from their eyes, nostrils, and nipples. A kid pulls off his thumbnail. A kid pulls out his own hair. A kid pulls out his own teeth. A lot of it is probably fake, though I doubt Odd Future would admit that, and if it isn’t fake, this is child abuse because Earl was SIXTEEN at the time.

Sorry to be the square, but maybe we should be a little more concerned about what happens to a kid who grows up surrounded by the voices of music-nerd hipsters praising him for his hostile, bigoted hate-speech and his dangerous antics.

His mother’s rumored decision to send him to boarding school, keeping him away from his Odd Future friends, seems like the logical, responsible thing to do. Smirking bloggers and Odd Future fans crying “Free Earl” are suggesting that they would be willing to deprive a teenager of an education and a healthy life just so they can hear some more music that they will like. That attitude is callous and hateful.

I heard someone praise Heath Ledger recently for “Basically giving up his life for his art.” I don’t buy the premise that the method-acting that went into Heath Ledger’s work on a Batman sequel ended his life, but if it’s true, then I wish that movie had never been made. When an artist suffers for his art, that art (no matter how much other people like it) will never outweigh the suffering. The well-being of any person is more important than any work of art. I realize that some suffering can’t be avoided, but some suffering can. If I find out animals were intentionally killed during the production of a movie, I won’t watch it. That movie shouldn’t exist. If I find out a kid’s life was derailed by his participation in the making of some rap music, I won’t listen to it. I’m not saying this is the case here, but it might be.

I am in no position to diagnose Earl or tell him what to do, but the possibility that his lyrics cross the line between shock-theater and symptoms of serious psychological problems, or the possibility that his participation in Odd Future could have a damaging effect on his educational and professional future is reason enough for me to bow out.

In the song discussed above, Earl snarls at his critics: “Try talking on a blog with your fucking arms cut off.” I guess he’s talking to me so I’ll respond: Earl, try applying for a job when typing your name into Google brings up the rape-obsessed rap music you made as a teenager.

COLIN STETSON: New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges

2011-03-29T17:10:00.000-07:00

I remember the exact words: My band teacher flipped out when I walked between him (standing in the hallway with his back to the wall) and another adult (standing with his back to the opposite wall). I walked between them (couldn't go around, couldn't go under) and didn't say anything. The absent exclamation of "Excuse me, a thousand pardons my dear chaps" drove him to bellow at my lapse in civility. I'll omit the tedious body and skip to the climax of his little harangue: "And you're no good at playing the saxophone, either."

I was never good at playing that thing, suffering derisive critiques from my classmates, blushing at the accidental squawks and squonks, and always sitting in Last Chair. (For those of you who've never had the experience, school bands place kids into savage hierarchies so everyone knows who is better than who. It makes music into a sport.) I remember another band teacher offering me this constructive criticism: "Well, you need to work on your posture and staying on the beat, and staying in tune, and your articulation, and your tone, and your vibrato and... basically everything." Message received. Enthusiasm gone. (Let's just put on fascist costumes and be a halftime show.)

I remember waiting for class to start, sitting in the hard plastic chair in the band room, blowing aimless air through the big brass body, not letting the reed vibrate, just listening to the gentle rushing. I remember clicking the keys and getting to know their individual sounds - this one a click, that one a thump - and noticing how the timbre of even this atonal air was changed by lifting my fingers and pressing them down again. And most of all, I remember wishing I could find my own voice, but instead forcing myself to stay inside the lines so no one would notice how awful I was.

When I graduated from high school, my saxophone collected dust in the closet of my childhood bedroom, which had become a graveyard for toys, books and other mementos from my unhappy schooldays. I went to college to earn a teaching degree, discovered electronic music and hip-hop and began obsessively making music from samples, eventually adding various silver and black boxes. (I've been told those machines make it possible for "non-musicians" to make music. But wouldn't the act of making music mean that they they are... never mind.)

I only started playing the saxophone again when I discovered Ornette Coleman. What inspired me wasn't just his music (brilliant, emotional and nourishing as it is). I was inspired by stories of jazz pundits and purists with batons up their butts calling Coleman a charlatan, smugly deriding his work as random and un-technical, even violently attacking him (Max Roach did this, seriously) because they thought he sucked. Ornettle Coleman said "There is no single right way to play jazz." If the way Ornette Coleman plays is wrong, then being right is for assholes.

I once had an argument with an insufferable college classmate (now employed, presumably, as a high school band teacher). I suggested that while there are certain skills that are useful in making music, we could also, alongside those, teach kids to find their own voice. There's no wrong way to play music, after all, and you can't objectively say that some music is superior to other music.

She retorted, dismissive, that there is a wrong way, and yes you can say that some music is objectively superior. I assume she meant the powdered-wig cannon - they don't teach ragas in high school (too brown) and they sure don't encourage funkiness (too black). Snapping, she announced that she knew all about this stuff and I didn't. "And we're done talking about it," she said.

I wasn't done talking about it, though, and I don't think I ever will be. Are you keeping alive an art form you love, music teacher? Or are you unable to distinguish between resuscitation and taxidermy?

A few weeks ago, a Canadian label called Constellation (you know them as a post-rock epicenter) put out this album by saxophonist Colin Stetson. It's the middle part of a trilogy tethered around a compelling narrative that Mr. Stetson hopes to adapt as an accompanying graphic novel. Most of the album's compositions are pieces for unaccompanyed saxophone - alto, tenor and bass.

You can find a lot of information online about the process used to make this record (first takes, a thousand microphones) but the maestro himself said in a recent interview that he "would like for people to appreciate the album musically whether they knew how it was made or not." It's pretty cool that he thought to put a contact mic on his throat, but what really matters is how thrilling this music is. It is knock-me-out powerful.

We've heard unaccompanied winds players before. Anthony Braxton's revered For Alto is the example most often cited, but Jimmy Giuffre, Albert Mangelsdorff and Lester Bowie have all done it. And it wasn't always pretty music. They played their instruments the wrong way. (Check out Roscoe Mitchell's Sound to hear an embryonic Art Ensemble of Chicago - Bowie included - doing things with instruments that get band stuidents sent out in the hall.) Colin Stetson's musical Aufhebung builds on that tradition (can you imagine a beautiful world somewhere where Anthony Braxton's music is considered traditional?) and carves a daring new trail. Often, the booming bellow of a bass saxophone is all the bulldozer he needs.

Colin Stetson is finding beauty in the sounds that I tried to suppress during my ill-fated formal training on an instrument. The tapping of keys – clicks and thumps – that fascinated me are employed brilliantly here. This is music I could never have dreamed of making, but I wish I could have.

Though there are respites, much of this music is sonically destructive. I love this, in no small part because I am at a point in my life when destruction is beginning to take on positive connotations. The collapsing of structures and of meaning is a caving-in but also an opening-up. I am beginning to see stable philosophies as spiritual death, and the only escape from them, as far as I can see, is a kind of intellectual kenosis. It’s lonely out on that cracking limb, like playing the saxophone all by yourself, but this desolation is every bit as provisional as the monuments crumbled behind us. I can hear that in this music. (There are shades of Albert Ayler's music, turning abrasive sax sounds into spiritual catharsis.)

During "Judges" Stetson's voice writhes through his horn crushed by the tapping of keys and the reedy cycle of notes around it, and what I hear is anguish. Anguish is not incompatible with hope, though. They're kissing cousins and any good gospel singer knows that. Stetson says that particular piece "specifically speaks to the themes of this record — those being isolation and the pendulum swing between fear and transcendence" and that "all of the music in this series is my attempt at creating a personal gospel canon, not out of dogma, but rather from the human experience alone."

This makes perfect sense to me, but in case it wasn't clear enough, Stetson brings Shara Worden aboard for an honest-to-G-d gospel song ("I Just Can't Keep from Crying Sometimes") that you might have heard before. It's perfect here. People forget how terrifying gospel music is and should be. It's about anguish and death and mystery. Comfortable people can't have gospel music, (though they can keep what passes for it in their glitzed-up mega churches) and every now and then we need to snatch it back and let it howl.

People on the internet want to call this one of the best albums of the year but that's pointless, not because it's only March, but because this music is too adventurous, nourishing and powerful to be dropped into someone's dumb contest. It's not a sport. Just let this be amazing. Let it mean something to you. That something might be different for you and for me and for Colin Stetson, but there is no single right way to respond to this.

EMBRYO: Steig Aus

2011-03-27T06:05:00.000-07:00

According to the liner notes in the 2004 reissue, the music on this album was recorded in 1971-72 for a label that refused to release it. Too lengthy, too interested in “ethno-fusion”. Record companies are stupid sometimes. Christian Burchard, the drummer, sold the tapes to a little label called Brain Records and they released it soon after. Now it’s regarded by many as a canonical Krautrock classic.

Krautrock’s psychedelic Teutonic trance is one of the most insular genres in music geekery, and while NEU! 75 is one of my favorite albums, and I like Can, Faust, Amon Duul II and Kraftwerk, so far I’ve really only scratched this genre’s surface. There is, thankfully, a contingent of record hounds that focuses deeply on narrow avenues like this, tracking down positively everything, and I’m glad they’re around to dig through the mountains of forgotten recordings, sorting chaff from wheat and boiling it down to a Beginner’s Guide. (It must be a full-time job –becoming a leading expert on Afrobeat or Chicago House or something. I’ve often wondered how these specialists find time for variety.)

So I’ve been told that beyond the aforementioned staples, Embryo is the place to start digging deeper. Curiously, this album (reputed as one of their best) is a bit afield from what I imagine as “Krautrock”. The Motorik rhythms you expect are supplanted and augmented by tricky, spastic drumming (including hand-drums) and the bass is fluid and always moving. Embryo are remarkably funky - I’d be shocked if I found out no one has ever sampled the first fifteen seconds of “Call”.

Embryo despised commercialism and embraced expert musicianship and spontaneity, relying on first takes, few (if any) overdubs and a frequently-changing line-up. Listening to Steig Aus, the spontaneity is obvious. After the pretty into (complete with a sample from Moroccan radio), “Orient Express” has all the wah-guitars and a rubbery bass and chugging organ you’d expect from a good old fashioned jam session. I hate the phrase “jam session” because it makes me think of stoned white guys playing blues licks for a tedious eternity (followed around the country, no doubt, by admirers in vans adorned with tie-dye teddy bears). Embryo doesn’t sink too deeply into that “crunchy groove, mahhhhhn” quagmire, thanks to their chops and ability to listen to each other, but this track still isn’t particularly dynamic. Everyone just kind of freaks out.

“Dreaming Girls is a big step up; moodier, more spacious. The music breathes and builds. For me, though, the album’s highlights are the complex drums-and-marimba section and Edgar Hoffman’s ensuing violin terror in the closing “Call”.

Percussion instruments and rhythms picked up on the bands travels through Africa are sprinkled in, tantalizing, but are never pursued as much I would like. There are little percussion breakdowns here that could go on and on and I wouldn’t complain. Maybe I’m a sucker for drums. I’d just rather hear rattling layers of percussion than rocking-out organ, but that’s just me.

The three tracks here are sequenced to give you a sense of wandering farther and farther away from home. I like that. I don’t know if this will satiate your Krautrock cravings, exactly, depending on what you expect, but it’s an enjoyable release from musicians who are obviously very talented.

TEEBS: Ardour

2011-03-20T02:00:00.000-07:00

The usual criticism thrown at everything put out by Brainfeeder, the California-based label headed by Flying Lotus, is "It sounds just like Flying Lotus." Copying Flying Lotus is so hip, even Radiohead is doing it these days, but Teebs is taking a few cautious steps in his own direction. Listen to Flying Lotus' Los Angeles. Did you feel that basement claustrophobia? Hit your head on that rusty pipe? Were you astral-travelling in the dark? Teebs, in contrast, is all daylight, open windows and comfy armchairs.

Ardour sounds like music designed to accompany reading, which is the best and worst thing about it. I love records that wrap around you like a blanket, as this one certainly does, but I also expect that music will be able to function also as the object of a close, engaged listen. And that's where Teebs could stand to improve.

These tracks are remarkably, almost admirably static. It takes a lot of confidence to allow your music to remain this austere, and the absence of sudden shifts or contrasting dynamics focuses the listener’s attention on the compelling textures created by Teebs’ laptop-mangled samples. I like, for example, the juxtaposition of crystal-clear samples with lo-fi, musty counterparts (see "While You Dooo" for reference).

This close attention also exposes the music's flaws, however, so a music-blogger's gotta nitpick. For every two or three details that work, there's one that doesn't. Example: "Arthur's Birds" is too long and marred by amateurish use of dynamic over-compression that makes the shimmering chords dip with every kickdrum hit, pumping obnoxiously like someone fiddling with the volume constantly when you're trying to listen to something pretty. The same thing Happens on "Felt Tip."

For the most part, these tracks are too short and disconnected for the album to succeed as ambient headphones music, but too swaying and quiet to really hold my attention. It’s an awkward middle ground. Nearly every track has something that will make you say “Oh, that’s cool” right before your mind drifts back to grocery shopping or the weather or other music. Not a good sign.

The best stuff is fantastic, like the romantic soar of "My Whole Life" or the gentlebreezefeel of the appropriately titled "Wind Loop." Honestly, I love the basic approach Teebs takes throughout, even if this isn't as fully-realized as I would hope. I'm eager to see where he goes from here. The nice thing about labels like Brainfeeder is their willingness to let artists develop rather than dropping them right away if the debut isn’t a smash-hit. Teebs is giving us something to look forward to.

BILL COSBY: Badfoot Brown & The Bunions Braford Funeral & Marching Band

2011-03-14T04:47:00.000-07:00

I can say without reservation that this album rules. Do you like jazz? Do you like funk? Do you like things that are awesome? If so…

I love the warm, slightly murky production and the heavy, deep soul this band brings to the plate. Bill Cosby (who, incidentally, was also known to moonlight as a comedian) directed this intrepid band (credited on the LP jacket as "assorted mysterious musicians") through two albums in the early 1970s. This first one is from 1971. The liner notes cite Miles Davis (especially his "latest ventures" – which would have included the superlative Bitches Brew, A Tribute to Jack Johnson and Live-Evil) as the main influence, along with Mingus, Duke, and Gil Evans.

It's the Miles Davis influence that matters most. We're treated here to a pair of side-long compositions (not unlike Jack Johnson or the first disc of Bitches Brew) constructed from long vamping takes pieced together via tape edits (the liner notes mention that this band is unlikely to appear in person because "this is a recording band. There are too many things to set off, to isolate, to edit down, so that it sounds like what I want it to sound like.") Repetition and groove are the key; ostinato bass and layered percussion provide a churning bed for open, Wayne-Shorterish sax lines, slinking guitar and Cosby's twinkling electric piano.

The first side is "Martin’s Funeral", Martin being MLK. Cosby's liner notes describe the funeral procession for the assassinated civil right leader, and how the long slow walk took on different shades; hostile, conversational, depressed. An elegiac four-chord vamp, (which some of you may have heard elsewhere), cycles around for that slow walk, interrupted by ominous percussion breakdowns or blurred by the twitching of dissonant guitars. Program music usually doesn't work too well in a jazz-funk setting, (no time for tone painting, we gotta vamp and blow!) but the picture is vivid here, and the music is sad or hopeful or whatever, depending on the moment or the listener's present predisposition.

"Hybish Shybish" allows the gang to rock out a bit more. Cosby’s chops ain't bad, and the group is loose and daring. Listen for that electrifying harmonica! That acoustic/electric piano duet! The rolling and tumbling congas and cowbells!

It's a shame there was only one follow-up to this album, an almost identically-titled record that came out soon after. I'm keeping my eyes open for that one.

RUFUS HARLEY: A Tribute to Courage

2011-03-08T06:22:00.000-08:00

So here’s something I’m a sucker for: funky soul/jazz laid confidently down by total pros cutting loose. It’s 1967 and Rufus Harley is recording his third album for Atlantic Records. He’s got a vision, he’s got a great lineup of players, and he’s got his set of bagpipes.

And there’s another thing for which your humble narrator is a born-every-minute: unconventional instrumentation in jazz. You know those beautiful Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane records where the harp becomes the funkiest thing known to man? Who would have guessed? If that can work, I don’t see why the bagpipes are any different.

And Rufus delivers, right? On the eye-bulging opener “Sunny” it is pure joy to hear him charge through those funky congas, piano, bass and drums like a bleating badass. That particular song has a bouncing-around-the-room quality I can’t resist. Excellent. Well-played, gentlemen. Off to a great start.

Next up, the title track opens like a rousing spiritual-jazz hymn (complete with “Yes, Lord!”) and you wouldn’t be surprised to hear Alice Coltrane drop in for a bit with her shimmering harp. That doesn’t happen, though. This is a Rufus Harley album, so it’s a solo on the bagpipes. And here’s the first sign of trouble: The notes are perfectly selected and the accompaniment is dynamic and sympathetic, but bagpipes are simply incapable of anything resembling vibrato or dynamics. Notes trail off until a sudden stop or a leap into the next note and every one is blasted out with an identical timbre. It’s actually kind of a relief when the pipes take a rest and Oliver Collins delivers a skillful piano solo.

The following rendition of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” is kind of middling. “Amazing Grace” is so often played by kilt-wearing bagpipers, so why not this one? Rufus Harley makes it work pretty well, against all odds, but I’m not requesting it for my Viking funeral.

The second half of the record is actually stronger than the first, in no small part because Harley puts down the pipes to pick up some woodwinds. He’s really good! “Ali” swings and pops around a slightly cluttered but very soulful flute solo. “X” winds around a spazzing, staccato sax line, and “About Trane” is a worthy tribute to the oft-tributed Saint John of the Tenor. It's all classic stuff - not quite A Love Supreme, but what is?

I feel bad saying it, but this album’s big draw is a pretty ineffective gimmick. When an employee at Detroit’s People’s Records (tangent: people who work in record stores are usually insufferable snobs, but the fine gentlemen at People’s Records should be commended for their kindness and impeccable recommendations) excitedly told me about Rufus Harley, two things stood out: a) Rufus was compared to Dorothy Ashby (prompting a mental “yes, please” from this eager jazzophile) and b) “BAGPIPES!”

As good as it is, there isn't a lot to distingush this record from thousands like it other than the bagpipes, and they are the weakest link. Kudos to Rufus Harley for blazing his own trail. That’s something I admire. And the bagpipe performances here are far from a failure, they are just not as exciting as the music he makes when he chooses a more conventional axe. The bagpipes are the least expressive instrument designed by human hands.

For those keeping score: The opening track and all of side two are terrific. Keep an eye peeled for a copy of this album, just don’t scale Kilimanjaro for it.

MASTODON: Leviathan

2011-02-25T15:40:00.000-08:00

Michael Stohrer: My listening habits make Leviathan inaccessible to me. Untangling this complicated (and often jarring) series of sudden shifts and convoluted motifs demands an attentive listen, and I typically associate “attentive” listening with calm moments, headphones, and a soothing cup of coffee. In that context, I can be still and engrossed while I concentrate on, for example, In a Silent Way. You have to focus to really grasp that record, and it invites a calm, meditative listen. This record, on the other hand, demands an equally attentive listen, but one that is anything but calm. I just don't know how to listen to it. Maybe it should come with a complimentary inflatible punching bag.

Manny Fewer: Or maybe you should just stop being such a big baby girl and get some metal in your blood.

Jesse Howell: This album doesn't wait for you to get your cup of coffee and get settled into an armchair- It throws you right out on the churning open waters. I can't think of an album I've listened to recently that could conjure up such vivid imagery and sustain it throughout the listen. I feel a part of the impossible task and the epic journey. Michael mentioned the sudden shifts, and I have to agree that it is often jarring and exciting. Unexpected (and good) transitions are something I really enjoy in music. This album is full of them. Can you guess which one, (about mid-album) that I flipped over?

Jordan Carr: I find myself having to revise my listening habits with this album as well. I'm not unfamiliar with heavy metal but Leviathan strikes me as a nearly impenetrable wall of sound. This album does not expect you to passively listen. It demands your attention regardless of your wishes. At first this turned me off but upon repeated listening I found myself struck by how much the sound mirrored what I imagine the icy, unforgiving ocean would sound like if it could rock my face off rather than simply drown me. The driving pulse that punctuates much of the album evokes images of barreling toward glory and/or destruction.

Michael: Pardon me while I get stupidly heteronormative: A lot of classic metal has an androgynous element, particularly in the shrill vocals (not to mention feathered hair) of bands like Iron Maiden. Those elements are totally absent in Mastodon’s music, which lacks anything I would associate with femininity. Moby Dick, a story where women are basically non-entities, is perfect subject matter.

Jordan: This could easily have turned into a rather silly concept album. I rolled my eyes at the Norse themed lyrics but, in context it all seemed appropriate. On a raw, emotional level, this works, although a part of me would have preferred some sections with greater musical contrast. I'm thinking some passive section interrupted by the crushing drive. Working off of something as epic and dense as Moby Dick requires a very complex structure to not merely the music but the overall structure of the album as a whole.

Michael: I would have liked more contrast, too, but I realize that this non-stop pummelcrush works on a conceptual level. Chasing a whale across the ocean in order to kill it is a very macho kind of derangement, and the participants in this doomed errand are in immediate danger of being crushed, suffocated or swallowed. Fittingly, the music on Leviathan relentlessly crushes, suffocates and swallows the listener. (It does this, of course, in a sea of testosterone.)

Jordan: Complaints aside, if I was to go hunting for my white whale I would choose this before anything softer.

Jesse: One thing I appreciate about Leviathan is the variety of voices you hear. It really seems to pry into the hearts of the each of the cast of characters in the story, and tell each different perspective. How do you prepare your heart for an inevitable disaster?

DJ/RUPTURE & MATT SHADETEK: Solar Life Raft

2011-01-24T15:21:00.000-08:00

Based on a sci-fi concept laid out in the short narrative in the liner notes, Solar Life Raft is set adrift in vast floods over the post-civilization East-coast. Scavengers discover sounds, the last remnants of dead cities now up to their penthouses in melted polar ice. Survival and loss haunt every moment, and so does hope.

The mix was put together by turntable theorist DJ/rupture and his Dutty Artz co-founder Matt Shadetek. Starting with an imagined setting and then selecting music to score it sounds like a recipe for contrivance, but /rupture and Shadetek select songs that suit the narrative abstractly. You won’t hear them spinning Peter Gabriel’s “Here Comes the Flood” or anything like that. Like any good musical project, this leaves room for your imagination.

Listening to music is better than watching movies. Movies (with a few rare exceptions) constantly tell me exactly how to feel about everything, employing a million trite manipulations (the most egregious of which is, ironically, the musical score) to force everything into a tight interpretive box. Some music does this too, and that music is boring to hear and boring to write about. Solar Life Raft is exactly the cure for that tedium.

There is a certain wobbly, sea-sick quality to Dubstep that fits in with however you imagine this particular post-apocalypse: Tempos are slow and swaying, with deep foghorn synthbass, sounds reverberate across the endless waterscape and the sampled or dubbed vocals (like the snippethook in Babylon System’s “Get On Up” and the mournful singing in Pulshar’s “Mr. Money Man” respectively) sound preserved or submerged, echoes and ghosts of prophets whose warnings went ignored. When Nico Muhly’s Lanskyesque piece “Mothertongue: Pt. 1” makes an appearance, cutoff and resonance knob-twiddling is creatively employed to simulate what it sounds like when you bob up and down in water, your ears submerging and emerging, sounds muffled and then clear again.

This mix was made the old-fashioned way: in real time, on actual turntables. It’s seamless and technically perfect, other than the occasional moment where two records in incompatible keys are layered, (although that clang of dissonance may be by design, or a happy accident accepted for the extra ear-tension.) The peaks and valleys are sequenced perfectly, like a tightly structured film. The most emotional moments come at just the right time, and the ratio of blissed-out mood beats to sing-along moments is perfect. When it ends, I feel like I've had a complete experience, adrift in the dubby floods.

MADLIB: Medicine Show No. 10 - Black Soul (Disco)

2011-01-16T06:11:00.000-08:00

This is a party. When I hear music like this on FM radio, the DJ tells me we're bringing it back to the Old School as he wishes Anita Baker a happy birthday and middle-aged listeners call in to say "Oh you know I've got to hear some Commodores tonight." Requests, dedications, maybe a friendly Old School vote (Cameo vs. Morris Day?) and I do not change the channel. This is Disco and Funk; in-pocket drums that anyone can dance to, and the sharp edge of slapped basses and early digital synthesizers.

This mix isn't intended as a repudiation of the creeping racism and homophobia that fueled Discophobia; we can leave watered-down gender transgressions to Lady Gaga's Disco-pastiche. This is all about smooth grooves and easy syncopation, Earth Wind, Fire and Chi-Lites and someone whose name is Bootsy (Player of the year!)

Of all the mixes in the Medicine Show so far, this is my favorite. Madlib is clearly growing as a DJ. His mixes in the past were haphazard listens, tumbling through a pile of musical excerpts and funny sound clips with little cohesion. I usually didn’t mind, though, because no matter what genre he was mixing, he always brought incredible finds to the (turn)table. Black Soul (Disco) is no exception, but what makes this his best (and most re-listenable) mix isn’t just the selections themselves. This is a focused, skillfully assembled mix with an impeccable sense of timing. Madlib knows just when to kick it up a notch and just when to slow it down.

The transitions aren’t complex mash-ups, usually they’re just well-timed Q-switching, but they get the job done. (For example, listen to how James D. Hall steps aside for Don Blackman during the second track, or how Caroline Crawford segues into Brief Encounter during the third.) The easy groove never stops for long here and we even get a few brief beat-matched overlaps, something we haven't heard a lot on past Medicine Shows.

The trade-off might be that this mix isn’t stamped with Madlib’s trademark lunacy and the mixing lacks “personality” or whatever, but I’m fine with that. A mix shouldn’t be about the DJ. It should be about the music he plays. Mixes can liberate music from the cult-of-personality that sucks the fun right out of it and sticks us in a dull blogging rut when we should be dancing our asses off. The fact that Madlib is so willing to let his selections be the star shows confidence.

I first heard this on a drive between Dearborn and Ypsilanti at the end of a day-long trawl through Metro-Detroit’s finest record stores. My friend Brett was driving, blissing out and I saw people in other cars nodding their heads in time, as if they were listening to the exact same thing. I wanted to call Madlib and tell him "Great work, but you know I've got to hear some Commodores tonight."

STEVE REICH: Music for 18 Musicians

2011-01-11T08:40:00.000-08:00

Jesse Howell: I've listened to Music for 18 Musicians a number of times, and it doesn't ever seem to lose its impact. So when I woke up in the middle of the night, no longer able to sleep, putting on M418 seemed like a reasonable idea. So in that dead silence of early morning I snuck downstairs and slipped on a pair of headphones and got down to business.

What I quickly realized is that M418 may be the most successful abstract work of art, ever.

Abstract art is often non-representational, that is to say devoid of subject matter. Maybe it becomes just about color, or shapes, or texture. Maybe it is just about the sheer joy of slopping paint around on a blank canvas. Like a good abstract painting, M418 doesn't spell out how the listener is supposed to encounter it, or what meaning he/she should receive from it. However, it points to something. What that is isn't exactly clear, but there is a source involved, which is inspiration for the work. It invokes different responses out of different listeners: M418 is a blank canvas where the listener can paint his/her own meaning. The type of imagery that M418 evokes is vast and relatable to an audience in many different ways.

I think back to the times I have listened to M418 in the past. Sometimes I was alone, other times I was with a group of friends. Sometimes we just listened in silence, other times we talked as it played. What I can say about it is that in every encounter with this piece of music, something special has happened. M418 is the kind of piece that is transformative. It has the power to transform the listener, and at the same time is adaptive. M418 simultaneously absorbs and permeates any context. I remember listening to the piece with Michael Stohrer, and as we sat on the dorm floor we remarked how the sound of cars outside did not detract from the experience. No, in fact it added to the experience. In this way “noise” became part of the “music.” Thank you, Mr. Cage.

Michael Stohrer: Jesse pointed at things in the music while we listened, as if these sounds were happening in the space around us. The strange thing is that I always knew exactly what he was pointing at. We used to talk about the emotional content of this piece. Someone could dismiss this as “wallpaper” but like Jesse said, it is a blank canvas. I would say it’s more like a mirror. This music is too visceral to allow us to make meaning intentionally and cerebrally. What happens is spontaneous. During a joyful evening with friends, it percolates and swells with jubilance. During a lonely winter morning, it mourns and embraces the listener to offer comfort. It reflects whatever I bring to it: apprehension, love, agitation, reflection. The music is undecidable, each listener makes involuntary meaning with each unique encounter.

I don’t listen to it very often, maybe once a year or so, and nearly every listen through it sticks with me, including the very first: On my freshman floor we kept our doors open and I heard something coming from the room across the hall. It was a series of notes, repeated in a rapid cycle. I stuck my head though his door and asked my floormate Nathan “What is this music?” It was “The Grid” by Philip Glass. Eager to know more I asked the librarian later that afternoon and he told me, grinning, “We have some Philip Glass, but you don’t need that.” He led me to the CD racks. “What you need is THIS!” It was Music for 18 Musicians. Sitting on the industrial carpet in my dorm room, I listened on cheap headphones. That was a very short hour. The Philip Glass piece had shocked me with its uncompromising sterility, and while 18 didn’t sound entirely dissimilar (at that time I was totally unacquainted with the canon of minimalism), I couldn’t get over how warm and human Steve Reich’s composition was.

Jesse: M418 may be the most human piece of art. It is has the steady pulse of an assembly line or a freeway, but entirely organic. The patterns that comprise M418 have the life of a breath, gradually rising and falling. Phrases build gradually over time. The repetition and overlapping of phrases form patterns that interweave themselves and become much more complex than they would be on their own. The phrases are economical, not overly complex, but add up to a gestalt-y percussive sense of movement and poly-rhythm. There is an added sense of variation in tempo that I can only describe as human error, although hardly detectable, which adds to the celebratory and joyful nature of this work.

There is additional variety in the voices of the different instruments. The attack of a voice is different from a woodwind, from the mallet instrument or a stringed instrument. This variety is haptic, and you can feel your attention shift between these contrasting tonal qualities or textures. In this way the focal point is continually shifting, as no one instrument takes the lead, but gradually swells and falls like the others. Perhaps the most steady or continuous element is the mallet instrument that forms a sort of rhythmic framing for the piece.

It makes me wonder how I can translate that much hope life, change and dynamic breath into my own work. M418 makes it readily apparent how static or fixed imagery can be in other art works. How do you allow for more than one access point for viewer? More than one interpretation? More that one response? I go back to the thought of the adaptability of this piece of music, and its ability to fit in any context. M418 says it without saying too much.

I might be able to relate a couple of visual artists that evoke similar responses or share some characteristics to M418. I'm not sure if they approach the same totality of vision of M418, however. In the sense of the breath or life in M418, the artist Oscar Munoz evokes a similar feeling; of ephemera, life/death and impermanence. And in the sense of economy and distilling a phrase down to its most basic blocks that point to something greater, I think of the artist Piet Mondrian.

Michael: I’ve always loved records that were pieced together unnaturally with special effects like overdubbing, editing, looping and time-stretching. These records are like animation, depicting sound events that never actually took place and creating surreal visuals - alien landscapes, amorphous nebulae… I can love a real-time recording of a performance - a good hard-bop record, for instance, can conjure a thousand emotions - but the visual is always that of musicians playing instruments in a room. Strangely, Music for 18 Musicians actually IS a recording of musicians (guess how many!) playing instruments in a room, but it conjures images that are incredibly alien and abstract. There’s something spatial to this music, something that allows Jesse to point to specific sounds. And without any imposing programmatic elements (I’m glad this piece isn’t called “Visions of Manhattan” or “Requiem for Gettysburg” or something like that) the inescapable visual element, created by each listener, is always new and changing.

GANGRENE: Gutter Water

2010-12-01T07:34:00.001-08:00

I can’t help it. I really do admire skillful rapping, and the potential for complex word play is one of the things that draws me to hip-hop, but frankly, if you create an amazing beat, you can rhyme “fire” with “desire” more than once and I’ll forgive you. I know there are people who look for meaning and skill from an MC first, who can live with bland accompaniment as long as the lyrical flow hooks them. I know that a lot of rap fans are barely aware of how this music is made (I once had to explain to a group of students, all self-professed rap enthusiasts, what sampling is.)

I’m a producer-first hip-hop fan, and that’s my unapologetic prejudice. I could squeeze out a list of favorite rappers, but I’d qualify all of them with “In his prime, anyway…” or “Even though he’s pretty hit-or-miss” and it wouldn’t be the greatest display of enthusiasm you’d ever see from me. Ask me about my favorite producers, though, and I’ll ramble all day and pull out records and play you ten seconds of a beat before I absolutely must play another one and we’ll just end up listening to Donuts.

So here we’ve got an album-length collaboration; The Alchemist and Oh No doing what they do best and crafting a series of earworm beats from scratchy samples and breaks. I guess they rap over them, too, but that’s almost an afterthought. These guys are producers who rap, not the other way around and that’s fine with me. They’re great producers, demonstrating how you can do amazing things even if you don’t have access to orchestras, Rihanna and a million-dollar budget the way *ahem* some producers do.

This thing is a beast packed with details. The Alchemist gives us haunting harpsichords (“Chain Swinging”) incredible basslines (“Get Into Some Gangster Shit”) and even makes the ultra-clichéd twinkling pianos fresh on “Not High Enough”. Oh No gives us awesome vocal samples (“Wassup Wassup”) and horns (“Ransom”) and Kung-Fu strings (“Boss Shit”). As a bonus we get crushing turntables from DJ Romes (“All Bad”) and great guest verses from Raekwon and Guilty Simpson. And we’re like kids at Christmas.

The lyrics aren’t brilliant, mostly just talking shit and celebrating leafy intoxicants, but they’re delivered well enough to compliment the production. The album does feel a little long, and if it had been a thirty-minute beat tape instead, I’d be just as happy with it. Either way, it’s a completely worthwhile release, and if you like low-fi hip-hop grit, this is for you.

KANYE WEST: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

2010-11-22T06:20:00.000-08:00

Why do we blog and Tweet and use Facebook? So we can mythologize and idealize ourselves. So we can be obsessed with ourselves in front of everybody. So we can use the vernacular of meme and pop-culture to interpret our feelings. So we can justify our behavior and draw out other people's feelings about us. So we can launch an opinion into the public square and carefully control the extent to which (and the context in which) we take responsibility for it. The only difference between Kanye West and the rest of us is the fact that he has the resources to do this on a gigantic scale in front of not hundreds, but millions of people. He is social-networking writ large. Writ HUGE.

In addition to possessing the resources to do it big, he possesses the imagination to do it compellingly. That he does it it at all makes us hate him, because we see in him an unpleasant portrait of our own insecurities and vanity. That he does it so well makes us love him, because he turns our anxiety into something beautiful.

Just like his previous work, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy displays Kanye's mastery of the pop song. Rock, soul, jazz, and hip-hop all produce art-music and pop songs, and the pop song doesn't vary substantially between genres. The ingredients are easy to spot but difficult to master: a distinct hook that immediately sticks in the listener's mind, a structure and pacing that feel familiar, and an emotional snapshot that is relatable and vivid. If you've never tried, it's easy to believe that writing a durable pop song would be easy, but it requires a skill that few posses. The Gershwins had it. Lennon & McCartney had it. Kanye West has it. And unlike the Beatles (who had to rely on George Martin's expertise) Kanye also excels at the art of the pop record, building on both the innovations of Phil Spector's wall of sound and the careful construction of sample-centric hip-hop. Sampling adapts the appropriation and transmission of the folk tradition to a technology-based and product-centric musical climate, and the up-to-the-minute tabloid specificity employed in Kanye's lyrics connects his music to a certain place, time and culture. His almost-unbearable candor is a populist, if circuitous, examination of a zeitgeist. More than a popsmith, then, Kanye is a folk musician.

I know what you're thinking: "Michael, I'm-a let you finish. Kanye's album is good, but Radiohead made one of the best albums of ALL TIME!" Acknowledged. I'll concede that Radiohead is more consistent and does things Kanye West could never do, but Kanye West also does things Radiohead could never do. Their records are admirably impressionistic, but there is no protagonist. There is only a formless existential crisis moaning through a technocratic nebula.

Meanwhile, Kanye's records give us a champion of sorts, an anti-hero who battles not with political forces or the wiles of nature, but with his own materialism and self-absorption. We have a stake in this battle, because we're fighting it too. We're not afraid of the Karma Police, even if we should be. Instead, we're afraid of the way trivial preoccupations vaporize the potential for meaning in our lives. Kanye West glares so unflinchingly into this vapor one doubts his ability to flinch.

This oblivious/astute gaze is more folly than epiphany, and the albatross of Kanye's public persona tempts us to emphasize the former. That albatross is a part of the show, however. The game he plays with the media (a game equal parts accident and strategy) is referred to numerous times in the lyrics, and Kanye (one of the few rappers to release music under his actual name) is even more self-referential than his peers. He makes it impossible to separate the art from the auteur and easy to confuse the two. (And if we're going to dismiss Kanye on account of his bad behavior, it's time to take another look at Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, Miles Davis, Michael Jackson and Elvis.) People have strong feelings about this guy, but those feelings, ultimately aren't about him. They're about what he represents. Kanye West is an icon of entitlement, luxury, victimhood, adolescent bitterness, self-importance, guilt and disappointment.

Thankfully, all this entitlement, luxury, victimhood, adolescent bitterness, self-importance, guilt and disappointment is wrapped up in pop music that makes you nod your head and grin.

In the coming weeks, you'll be hearing a lot of opinions about this album, all of them as biased and subjective as mine. If you thought people hated Kanye's concept album about millionaire's guilt, just wait until the backlash brought on by the perfect scores Fantasy has been given by every publication under the sun. That stuff hardly matters, though. You've probably already decided to buy this album or decided to avoid it completely. You might already know about the impressive stable of beatmakers who joined Kanye on the production side, or the roster of guest vocalists. If you don't know, you will.

This is an aggressive, ambitious work and Kanye accomplishes a lot with his collaborators (like getting John Legend to sing the MF-word over your kid sister's favorite Aphex Twin track and allowing Nicki Minaj to absolutely steal the show from Jay-Z and Rick Ross during a posse cut). Hooks abound, and I promise you will be listening to "All of the Lights" very loudly as you drive this winter, wishing it was warm enough to roll down your windows.

There are a few missteps: the poor mastering job, the out-of-place vocal effect that diminishes some of Kanye's best rapping so far ("Gorgeous"), the hopelessly misogynist skit with Chris Rock, a lame Black Sabbath parody ("Hell of a Life"), the awkwardly employed King Crimson sample ("Power") and some less-than proficient singing on Kanye's part ("Runaway"). It's also a bit of a let down to see the extent to which Kanye's charming self-deprecation has been replaced with an overload of vulgar hatred.

Those caveats aside, this is still some of the most emotionally-stirring commercial art I've encountered in a while, a widescreen memoir brimming with rage and desperation, encapsulated at one point by this thesis statement, a heartbreaking admission of Kanye's own contagious hubris: "You've been putting up with my shit for way too long... Baby I've got a plan, run away fast as you can." We can't though, and he knows it.

MADLIB: Medicine Show No. 8 - Advanced Jazz

2010-11-09T12:32:00.000-08:00

During a conversation about music while I was substitute teaching, a student told me "I'm going to get into jazz eventually, Mr. Stohrer, probably when I go to college." I told him that is exactly what I had said, and exactly what I did.

As a Prog-rock obsessed teenager, I was no stranger to prolonged instrumental passages and emphasis on technical musicianship, but Jazz was an intimidating stranger. I had Kind of Blue, A Love Supreme and Mingus Ah Um but I sorta had to force myself to choose them over something more instantly satisfying. (Think about how The Decalogue languishes at the bottom of your Netflix queue while seasons of The Office keep getting bumped to the top. You know Kieślowski's masterpiece will ultimately be more satisfying than Dwight Schrute but, ehhh... It's been a long day and you want something easy to get into.) When I put on that jazz I was constantly aware that I was listening to something acclaimed and esoteric that other people had instructed me to like, but to me it was a novelty. All I got from it was mysterious wallpaper.

In college, surrounded by new friends with expansive tastes (not to mention access to the university library and college-town record stores) I was able to get acquainted with this stranger and his gnarled, winding language. By that I don't mean I learned how to name by ear which scale the 'Trane is blowing, and I don't mean I memorized Blue Note session dates and personnel. I just mean I got hip to what those cats were laying down. Dig? My friend Jesse Howell would play me something from The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions and his reactions (mouth agape in astonishment, eyes squinted in overwhelmed laughter) gave me the jazz-bug more than anything before. We traded names: "Have you heard Grant Green?" "Do you like Horace Silver?" We swapped albums: "Take this, you're going to love it." Jazz became the meat in my musical diet and I was a fiend for the robust emotion and wily jubilance jumping from those drumkits and horns. Somewhere along the way, Mingus and Monk became my go-to music for waking up, driving, working out, doing dishes - doing everything. Finally, I sorta had to force myself to listen to Pink Floyd. Rock music didn't leap at me any more, at least not the way Eric Dolphy did. (What if I'd been raised by Beatniks instead of Boomers?) All it took was time, time to get hip to the vernacular.

So here's Madlib, evangelizing connoisseur, dropping the needle on 80 minutes of jazz. With an album cover I desperately want to hang in my kitchen someday, mixing that is more curatorial than technical and a definition of "jazz" that is rightfully inclusive, he's put together a fun mix. Anyone who's been following Yesterdays Universe will know what to expect: clattering, loose grooves and vamping keys. Free-form Sun Ra, a little Art Blakey. I don't recognize most of this stuff. I guess I don't need to.

People still make something of the fact that when On the Corner first came out, no credits were included. "Who's playing that organ? Who's on bass?" Not knowing who plays what separates music from the hero-worship that smothers the simple joy of listening with Mike Portnoy posters from Modern Drummer. Madlib (for different reasons) includes no information, leaving the sleuths to I.D. this tune and that, making us work a little harder than Jesse Howell when he excitedly thrust an Alice Coltrane CD into my hands. Madlib isn't here to guide us through specific discographies, though. He's here to get us hip to the vernacular.

I love that there's no pretense of narrative here, no Ken Burnsing, no attempt to form a coherent (read: simplistic) linear arc. Some of the found-sound folded into he mix informs (like Herbie Hancock explaining how he came to work with Miles Davis) but most of it is Beat poems and comedy records, free from documentary minutiae. There's no canonical through-line, either. We're not hearing played out excerpts from "Take Five" and "So What". This is Advanced jazz. Madlib is spinning stuff your college friends don't know about.

Jazz has an unfortunate reputation as an exception to the rule that pop music is easy to like and understand. This reputation is cemented by The Keepers of Esoterica ("Funk has no place in jazz" they blaspheme) and the Populist No-Thank-Yous alike. (Senior year in high school, I was listening to Bitches Brew for the first time when my mom popped her head into my room and said "Let me know when they're done warming up.") Don't listen to those people. Listen to Madlib.

HORSEBACK: The Invisible Mountain

2010-10-07T05:30:00.000-07:00

Here’s a voice, disintegrating in a bed of chiming guitars and misty drones. It was a roaring fierceness once, but now there’s only a shadow. Sounds get thicker, and it’s either tense or very, very soothing or maybe it’s both somehow. We span glaciers then. No catharsis is given. The song is called “Hatecloud Dissolving Into Nothing.” That’s a perfect name.

That howling voice reoccurs throughout this album as a trapped animal under the hulking doom-metal monolith – sinister as it lashes out, hopeless as it resigns. The lyrics are indecipherable to me, but the voice is just a key sonic detail among sonic monuments. It is not the primary focus. Like a lot of metal music, this record devalues the human voice and makes it slave to the guitar/bass/drum hellstorm. The humanity and intimacy a human voice can provide is replaced with the unsettling sound of an alien presence. There’s something living and organic about it, but it’s a creature formed from unholy unions. We’ve heard this before, in the goblin-screech of Black Metal and the demon-growl of Death Metal, but Horseback lets the creature loose in a surprisingly un-modern heave that draws a line straight to Black Sabbath, ignoring everything between Ozzy and Iommi’s early 70s milestones and this album’s 2009 release date.

That’s not to say this is an Electric Wizard retro hash-bash. There’s nothing very technical, just the slow creep of towering riffage inching slow, slow, slow over something barren and dead, but it doesn’t feel like the product of a pot-fueled delayed reaction time. This is patient music. Clean guitars ring frequently over the main riffs, and use more negative space than we’re used to hearing from “metal” guitarists.

It’s easy for this album to fade into the background, but it deserves a close listen. The desperate emotional weight that uncompromised metal can evoke is in full-force here. It’s more like a hypnotic post-rock apocalypse than a blood-and-guts metal thing. This fits the trend I’ve been noticing as I’ve explored more metal, the same trend that applies to my interest in basically any music: I am drawn to things that trespass beyond the boundaries of the genre.

BARONESS: Blue Record

2010-09-22T06:26:00.000-07:00

The latest release from Baroness is an album that walks a lot of tightropes. It’s accessible, but it doesn’t pander. The guitar motifs are majestic and baroque, but not corny. It’s not innovative, but it isn’t clichéd, either.

Baroness integrates distinctly un-metal genres like Southern rock (“The Gnashing”) and ambient music (“Ogeechee Hymnal”) but not in the form of pastiche. Everything here suits a distinct atmosphere without obvious “atmospheric” tricks and sound-effects. That good old-fashioned Heavy Metal Malevolence is around, but this isn’t the Clive Barker Halloween party usually associated with the genre. It’s distinctly American, even Southern. The band strums an acoustic guitar and sings in somber harmony during the ballad “Steel that Sleeps the Eye” and the build that leads it into its sister song “Swollen and Halo” is pure Ennio Morricone, squinting and fingering its pistol in that Civil War cemetery.

At a few points, Baroness blur the line between melodic singing and guttural growls. Switching between the two is a standard tool of the metal trade, (think of it as the distortion pedal for singers, with only an “on” and an “off” position) and it would be nice to see more vocalists make use of shades in between, but it doesn’t work here. Growls and screams are atonal, but melodic singing has to be in tune, particularly in a genre where precision is required to prevent the music from melting into cacophonous mush. Some of the half-melodic screams here are basically just bum notes.

That caveat aside, this is a great record. The second track (preceded only by the chiming bookend “Bullhead’s Psalm”) is called “The Sweetest Curse” and it’s everything Baroness does well. Pete Adams and John Dyer Baizley intertwine their vocals and synch up harmonized guitar melodies as they gallop to some kind of rescue. It sounds heroic, but not in a dragon-slaying way. Add that to the list of tightropes.

ORNETTE COLEMAN: The Music of Ornette Coleman - Forms and Sounds

2010-09-13T11:53:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine told me about the first time he heard The Shape of Jazz to Come: “I had heard that this was just the most out-there thing ever, like it was going to be totally off the wall. I was surprised that it was so tame. Once I got over that initial disappointment, I got into it.”

Ornette Coleman’s reputation as an iconoclast precedes him, but despite the accusations of charlatanism once lobbed at him by purists and formalists, and despite the inaccessibility of his out-jazz progeny, his music is usually very approachable. If anything, his emphasis on melody over all else means listeners predisposed to pop music will know exactly what to listen for.

Usually, anyway. The leap from Ornette Coleman the horn-playing bandleader to Ornette Coleman the composer is not an easy one for most listeners to make. While his classic small group records on Atlantic and Blue Note have grown in stature, his forays into Third Stream music are still approached as curiosities. “Does this guy know what he’s doing?” It took years for conventional critical wisdom to realize he did, at least as a free-jazz innovator. For most of us, the jury is still out on Ornette Coleman the composer. Maybe we just haven’t caught up with him yet.

To put it in context, Forms and Sounds was made in the spring of 1967, between the Golden Circle trio records and the Love Call/New York is Now sessions. Skies of America was still few years away.

The first side is a collaboration with the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet called “Forms and Sounds” in which short passages for woodwinds are linked by unaccompanied trumpet interludes in a strange variation on the call-and-response format. The woodwind passages hover and chuckle and never quite settle into anything cohesive, which is probably on purpose. He knows what he’s doing, right? As Ornette says in his liner notes: “The music on this record is performed by classical musicians playing the compositions of one whose musical life has roots in jazz.” That musical life, rooted as it is in jazz (and the blues, for that mater) had by 1967 grown into something quite distinct: the hovering, unsettled sound of Ornette Coleman Music, and Ornette Coleman Music is always distinctly Ornette Coleman Music. His gnarled melodies are perfect for rowdy, careening free jazz, but don’t translate particularly well to this setting.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the trumpet solos are more pleasing than the sections composed for the winds. Ornette Coleman’s music is about players operating spontaneously, not ensembles working in structured tandem. Even his classic quartet records from the late 1950s and early 1960s, though they contain attentive, responsive dialogue within the group, are designed to give soloists as much free reign as possible. Isn’t that the whole point of chordless jazz? And isn’t that why Ornette and Don Cherry are so upfront in the mix on The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century while the rhythm section is so frustratingly buried? According to reputation and hearsay, Ornette never told the members of this quartet what to play; he simply demonstrated the head of a tune and let them do what ever they wanted. Some of that free reign is given to the instrumentalists performing “Forms and Sounds” (the score allows them to change register at will) but it’s a far cry from the pulsing, immediate jubilance of Coleman’s best work. His trumpet playing at this stage was not as spry as his sax playing, but that works in his favor, slowing him down so his trademark melodic twist is more bluesy than usual.

“Saints and Soldiers” is a piece for string quartet. It sways and it spirals and never lands on anything. Like most Coleman pieces for strings, we’re left holding our breath. Just before the six minute mark the sway is interrupted by abrupt sawing. I think that part is supposed to be the “soldiers” but who knows? After that, trembling strings melt into mush, alternated with angular, lurching motifs. Listening to it, I find myself wishing the music would either launch into deranged Penderecki territory, or smooth out into a lovely Arvo Part cascade. What we get is a middling waiting room of sound. There are intriguing motifs and ideas, but they lack the structure that could make them powerful. Yes, I just complained that music by Ornette Coleman is too unstructured. The irony is not lost on me.

My favorite track here is not coincidentally also the shortest. “Space Flight” has a pop-song running time and a splattering, angular energy that reminds me of John Adams’ “A Short Ride in a Fast Machine.” It belongs on your “Best of Ornette Coleman” mixtape. The rest of the album remains a curiosity. If this music had been made by someone who wasn’t also one of my musical heroes, I don’t know that I would pay much attention to it. I have faith, though, that Ornette Coleman always knows what he’s doing, even if I don’t always understand or enjoy it.

MADLIB: Medicine Show No. 7 - High Jazz

2010-08-31T19:53:00.000-07:00

After a few practice-run EPs and a collection of Stevie Wonder covers, Yesterdays New Quintet released Angles Without Edges in 2001. As I understand it, all five members of the group (Malik Flavors, Ahmad Miller, Otis Jackson Jr., Monk Hughes, and Joe McDuffrey) are Madlib, playing instruments, sampling himself and overdubbing. Angles is my favorite of Madlib’s jazz releases not only for its consistency, but also because it solidly combines so many of the things I love about hip-hop and jazz into one delicious cocktail. The rhythmic tension of great jazz is there, but so is the strophic structure and hypnotic head-nod of great beatsmithing. It’s one of the few records that actually manages an equal marriage between jazz and hip-hop, something that should be a cinch, since both genres revolve around an ethos of personal expression and individual skill, creating an open space for improvisation easily infused with any number of musical directions.

It’s not an easy thing to do, though, and with very few exceptions (parts of Blowout Comb, maybe) most hybrids of the two are really just one or the other. I love A Tribe Called Quest, but live stand-up bass and samples from jazz records do not a subgenre (“jazz-rap”) make, no matter how much it reminds your Pops of bebop. When Guru collaborated with actual jazz musicians on his Jazzamatazz, it was a missed opportunity: generic hip-hop beats played by live musicians are still generic hip-hop beats. When the combination comes from the other side, it is usually little more than a jazz musician including token gene signifiers in a failed bid to assert his relevance. (For reference, listen to Miles Davis’ Doo-Bop or Ornette Coleman’s Tone Dialing. Or better yet, don’t.)

Releases after Angles had less kinship with hip-hop and became more and more about homage: In 2003, Madlib got access to master tapes in the Blue Note vaults and put out Shades of Blue. Ostensibly a remix album, it features more covers than remixes, as the members of YNQ cover Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. In 2004, Monk Hughes and the Outer Realm put out a tribute to Weldon Irvine. In 2005, Sound Directions put out The Funky Side of Life, which teamed Madlib up with guest musicians to cover David Axelrod and Cliff Nobles & Co. In 2007 we got Yesterdays Universe, a compilation of YNQ offshoots and side-projects, tracks supposedly taken from actual forthcoming albums. Earlier this year, two of those releases became reality: The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz and Percussion Ensemble put out Miles Away, a percolating set featuring covers of Phil Ranelin and Roy Ayers tunes alongside originals dedicated to Sun Ra and Woody Shaw, and Young Jazz Rebels put out the Arkestra-style free-improv gem Slave Riot. Interestingly, most of these releases contain original compositions that sit remarkably well next to the covers.

High Jazz, like Yesterdays Universe, is a compilation of music by Yesterdays Universe, the “loosely connected group of jazz musicians performing under several elusive group names, all produced and arranged by Madlib.” This format works well for Madlib: While some of the YNQ offshoot releases have been a little monotonous (like the Otis Jackson Jr. Trio’s Jewelz and Malik Flavors’ Ugly Beauty), each imaginary group sounds wildly different from the others. As a result, High Jazz is constantly changing and surprising.

We get some frantic free-jazz from The Russel Jenkins Jazz Express, low-fi funk from R.A.M.C. and that stupendous title-track, which is just a sweeping string arrangement away from a classic Blaxploitation theme. Elsewhere, Generation Match plays a polyrhythmic groove for a strangled synthesizer on “Electric Dimensions” and The Joe McDuphrey Experience do their best imitation of Pete Jolly’s Seasons. “Pretty Eyes” (by The Jahari Massamba Unit) swings with beautiful piano and organ work, as well as a trumpet solo that reminds me that somewhere along the way, Madlib started including more contributions from other musicians (a good decision, since jazz, unlike the more hermetical process of beatmaking, is best produced socially.) We even get fifteen minutes of a “live performance” from Yesterdays New Quintet, including a Stevie Wonder cover and a rendition of Angles highlight “Broken Dreams”. Ostentatious demonstrations of virtuosity are nowhere to be found, and each player, real or imagined, is equal in these arrangements. The way these halting electric pianos, free-time drums and staccato woodwind honks wind around each other is messy and incredibly fun. Spontaneity and energy are the big draw.

The liner notes tell us a little bit about the (ostensible) releases from which these recordings were taken: Japanese and Brazilian releases, private pressings, and things only found in Madlib’s personal collection. Even if Stones Throw puts out a few of these records at some point in the future, it is safe to assume that most of them will never fully exist. Play along, though, and you will be reminded of certain joys that have been lost for music lovers. There was a time when a person could comb through record bins, stumbling across mysterious records that have languished in obscurity, and only know what the liners on the sleeve told them. A professed fan of a certain jazz maestro might stumble across a release he didn’t even know existed. In the internet age, that mystery and adventure is lost. Discographies are a click away. Every album you want to hear can be found via the internet, legally or otherwise. Madlib’s alternate reality brings that elusiveness back, even if only for pretend. Looking at the album covers in the booklet and listening to the selections included on this CD, I can wonder about Poysner, Riggins & Jackson or The Big Black Foot Band. It is nice to think about music that remains tantalizingly out of reach.

Building this imagined discography, Madlib has become a kind of musical Sergio Leone, creating a universe of homage that has taken on a life of its own. Just as Leone’s films are impressively badass even if you don’t realize how they borrow and subvert Western iconography and conventions, music from Yesterdays Universe is great even aside from all this conceptual coolness.

Madlib's jazz releases are getting more and more ambitious, though there is one major frontier I'd like to see him cross. Other than "Great Day" on Madvillainy, the world of YNQ has been segregated from Madlib's hip-hop forays. Listening to some of the more groove-oriented moments on this release and others like it, I can't help imagining DOOM or Strong Arm Steady or Guilty Simpson dropping verses into the mix. A record of MCs rapping over grooves provided by Yesterdays New Quintet would be amazing. If there is anyone who can marry hip-hop and jazz without simply cobbling together genre cliches, it's Madlib.

This is my second favorite of all the Medicine Show releases so far, after History of the Loop Digga. The second half of 'Lib's monthly endeavor is off to a great start. Next up is a jazz mix. Stay tuned.

DOROTHY ASHBY: The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby

2010-07-02T05:42:00.000-07:00

I was in People’s Records in Detroit one Valentine’s Day, hurriedly flipping through the jazz bins as quickly as I could so as not to exhaust the patience of my long-suffering girlfriend. There was one other customer, dropping old funk sides onto a portable turntable, obviously looking for his next million-dollar sample. My lovely ladyfriend was browsing through The Real Detroit and I was rescuing old Hugh Masakela LPs from the dollar bin when I heard HER.

Barely a melody, more like a chant, but layered, harmonized. “The moving finger writes, and having writ…” I tilted my head and mouthed the words “What is this?” and then THAT BEAT kicked in. I saw Cratedigger’s head pop up like prairie dog. The money-break, dusty and warm with the kind of natural reverb now made extinct by tacky digital sheen. Strings, vibraphone, saxophone, and that chunky-goodness bassline! My girl gave me the “Are you done?” look and I gave her the “I have attained Nirvana” look. Straight to the counter with me.

Me: What is this music?

Unusually Nice Record Store Guy: This is a jazz harpist named Dorothy Ashby. She graduated from Wayne State, just down the street there.

Me: Is this record (bashful) for sale, or anything?

UNRSG: This copy is pretty beaten up and the first track doesn’t play, but even so, if it was for sale, it’d be about sixty bucks. I had a decent copy last week, and like, an hour after I got it this Japanese record dealer scooped it up for a hundred.

My heart sank. A luxury afforded only to original-pressing-only-fetishists. Enjoy it now, Michael, while you can, because you’ll never hear this music again.

UNRSG: But you can get a reissue for about ten bucks.

Dorothy Ashby had already made a couple of solid, swinging cocktail-funk records by the time this session was held in late 1969. According to the liner notes, she was planning to record just a couple of these songs, and Richard Evans (who produced and arranged The Rubaiyat) had to convince her to make this record. Thank you for that, Mr. Evans.

Evans’ arrangements, while not ground-breaking, are all top-notch. The strings are warm and expansive without overpowering the soloists or blurring the mix into a syrupy mush, and strong basslines are everywhere, (check out “Drink” and “Wax & Wane”). There are upbeat tunes (the jazzy “Wine” and the lilting “Shadow Shapes”) and mellower, more evocative songs (“For Some We Loved” and “Heaven and Hell”) and the shifting moods are complimented with a variety of timbres, like Ashby’s koto playing, Lenny Druss’ wailing oboe on “For Some We Loved” and some vibes, kalimba and electric guitar. Throughout, Ashby’s harp sweeps with a confident ease.

I don’t want to reduce this enchanting LP to a play-by-play, but I can’t hold back about the first 120 seconds. The first sound is a harp, sweeping through caves and waterfalls, joined by an equally reverbed koto. As the picture comes into focus, a brief snake-charmer motif creeps out from vials and jars, incense is lit, lamps go dim and a lumbering boom-bap propels an arcing string arrangement while harp arpeggios fall like snowflakes. A tense, here-it-comes chord is held and released, and what seven-minute overtures fight to earn has been won effortlessly in 40 seconds. Earned and not squandered. Ashby’s opening serenade is bone-chilling. This verse, which brings us to the two-minute mark, renounces with confident ease the “foolish prophets” of science and saintliness. The worldly and the spiritual now dispensed with, Ashby proceeds to play a harp solo that swings the way harps don’t; no cloud-straddling cherub here. This is precise, sexy jazz-funk.

A few people have told me that they prefer Ashby’s Afro-Harping, mainly because they just can’t get into her singing. Those people are wrong. Ashby’s timeless voice, with its wide vibrato, is probably my favorite thing here and if anything was to be changed about this basically perfect record, I might ask for more of that voice.

The lyrics are all taken from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a collection of Khayyam’s 12th-Century poetry compiled and translated (loosely) by 19th-Century Englishman Edward Fitzgerald. Khyyam’s Rubaiyat is lovely stuff, celebrating life and encouraging us to shalalalalala live for today rather than mortify ourselves with a self-flagellating stink of piety. It’s all very Sufi, or very humanist, or both, or neither. Ashby picked all the best lines to sing, usually starting a song with a short sung passage, sometimes reprising it at the end, and letting the instruments do most of the talking.

This album is something special, but it isn’t always readily available (I have the 2007 reissue on the Dusty Groove label, which seems to be going out of print) so keep an eye peeled and grab it if you see it. And watch out for jet-setting record dealers. This should be in everyone’s crates.

ALBERT AYLER TRIO: Spiritual Unity

2010-06-28T00:58:00.000-07:00

ESP-Disk was named for founder Bernard Stollman’s interest in Esperanto, a universal language designed to unify mankind in peace and understanding. The label’s original aim was to release recordings of songs and spoken-word projects in this new language, but today ESP-Disk is best known for releasing the music of free-jazz giants like Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra.

It’s fitting, then, that the label’s story starts with this 29-minute fireball recorded in one quick summer session in 1964. LBJ had just signed the Civil Rights act into law, Barry Goldwater was on the cover of TIME magazine, and A Hard Day’s Night had just opened in theaters. The musicians arrived, microphones were set up, and this half-hour of music was apparently recorded in a half-hour. No outtakes, no overdubs. Regarding Ayler’s trio, a catalogue description included in the liner notes of other ESP releases reads “American youths brainwashed by the big hype of plastic fantastic rockshuck are only now beginning to recognize the quiet giants of world music among whom stand these three.”

Yes, the kids thought the Beatles were pretty cool until this hoarse horse of a saxophone wail obliterated all that “Ticket to Ride” nonsense. By 1965, Beatlemania had totally tanked and Ayler-fever was sweeping the nation. Nary a sock-hop could be heard that didn’t include a partner-dance to Sunny Murray’s free-time drums, heard on this recording in crazed monaural sound, and bassist Gary Peacock was the new teen-heartthrob, adorning the bedroom walls of a million swooning girls.

I know. That didn’t happen. But while the Beatles brand is fused to videogames and lunchboxes and all varieties of received nostalgia, Spiritual Unity enjoys a sleeper-hit, classic-status reputation to this day. It’s easy to see why. This record has huge, brassy balls.

It’s not what they do, it’s what they DON’T do. Chords? No. Time signatures? Barely. Rules? Of course not. Look at your copy of any ESP-Disk release and you should see the label's motto printed on it somewhere: “The artists alone decide what you will hear on their ESP-Disk.” Imagine the meeting between Ayler’s trio and a three-piece suit at Major-Label headquarters. “Fellas, we want to give the kids something to dance to, can you play something NICE for a change?”

Thankfully, that didn’t happen either. With total creative freedom, these three “quiet giants” made an incredible racket, walking a duckling/swan tightrope in boiling tension for a relentless 29 minutes. That’s a short running time, but I’m not sure our faint little hearts could withstand much more than that. The manic clatter never lets up and it’s an exhausting listen in the best possible way. Whenever I hear this record I feel like I've been splattered in the sweat pouring off of these three. Ayler’s caterwaul is such odd, fractured beauty as he speaks in tongues with his trembling vibrato and his kamikaze phrasing spirals to abrupt stops. When he lays out, the spotlight falls on Peacock’s prickley audiopuncture bass, darting around in spasms and seizures. All the while, Murray’s drums ramble in paragraphs without pattern or meter. I suppose “Spirits” is this trio’s version of a romantic serenade but I don’t recommend you play it on a first date, unless you’re trying to scare away timid suitors.

Don’t be put off by all this iconoclasm. While the Ayler Trio operates with very little rhythmic structure or conventional harmony, there’s always something to latch on to. The singsongy theme that introduces “Ghosts” (included in two different “variations”) sets the right tone; playful and energetic. You’re not going to be able to sing the stuff in between from memory (though your attempts to do so would be a great submission to Youtube) but give this a chance, rock-and-rollers, and hear that ecstatic energy you dig so much pushed through a warped prism of total musical freedom. That jubilance is the attraction. This isn’t austere, alienating music for graduates of the abrasion-endurance-test school of music listening. This is genuinely fun! These guys found their new language, and it’s not Esperanto - it’s AYLER.

Just a couple of years after this debut, John Coltrane got Ayler signed to the Impulse! label, even including him on Ascension alongside people like Pharoah Sanders and John Tchicai. In the late 1960s, Ayler put out some quickly-dated, accessible records that just weren’t EXTREME enough for his purist fanbase, and by 1970, he was dead (suicide, apparently.) The candle that burns twice as bright… Thankfully, Ayler left behind a body of work that demonstrates the kind of fearless music that is made when “the artist alone decides” and the creative process is not tethered by market concerns and “plastic fantastic” hype.

FLYING LOTUS: Cosmogramma

2010-06-25T07:02:00.000-07:00

On his latest record, Flying Lotus races through seventeen complex and creative tracks in forty-five minutes. Without a tracklist, you might never know where one title ends and the next begins. That’s not because it all sounds the same, (it doesn’t) but because the individual tracks, far from being self-contained, fit together so perfectly into this cohesive, well-sequenced suite of oddly inviting music.

The boney gangle of 2008’s austere Los Angeles was persistently claustrophobic and the album felt like a collection of sketches, but on this follow-up FlyLo lets the music breathe and develop. The organic polyrhythmic lope you expect from him is augmented with a larger sonic toolbox, including string arrangements and other live instrumentation. It’s no less spacey, but far easier to warm to.

Some of the songs even feature sung hooks, and the vocals (by the likes of Thundercat, Laura Darlington and some guy called Thom Yorke) are as singalongable as anything we’ve ever heard under the Flying Lotus name (save for maybe Gonjasufi’s infectious cameo on Los Angeles).

The contributions from guest musicians are great, most notably Thundercats’s fluid bass pyrotechnics and Rebekah Raff’s harp.

That harp is one of the most obvious links to FlyLo’s heritage (Alice Coltrane is his Great Aunt), along with the way “German Haircut” and the aptly named “Arkestry” pair lo-fi jazz drumming with saxophone solos played by Ravi Coltrane. Rather than let these elements of 1960s spiritual jazz tie him down to the past, though, FlyLo adopts and adapts them to suit his purposes. A nostalgic homage wouldn’t be as true to the music of Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane as a record that continues to push boundaries they way they did.

The reference points are obvious, (video game music, post-Donuts instrumental hip-hop, the rhythms of jungle and house) but this is as fresh and unique as anything I’ve heard in a long time and it’s a pleasure to hear it now, before the inevitable onslaught of Flying Lotus imitators makes it seem less special. There’s an ease to the ideas here, the open approach of a musician carving out his own space and kicking down doors like its no big deal. Even if some of those inevitable imitators make a more sophisticated or complex version of this music, I doubt anyone will ever make it with the same kind of fearless joy.

Any list of the huge-grin-inducing moments here will be incomplete, but some of my favorites are the ping-pong percussion on “Table Tennis”, the scat singing that introduces “Do The Astral Plane” and Todd Simon’s trumpet-playing on that same track.

The “Flying Lotus sound” is perfected here. No matter how programmed or looped the percussion is, it swings with humanity instead of snapping artificially to a computerized grid like hyper-perfect robot drums. Compressor-overload kicks pummel surrounding sounds, synthy tones are glitched and gutted, voices are timestretched and pitch-shifted, but no matter how tweaked and trimmed, these sounds are weirdly, beautifully soulful.

MADLIB: Medicine Show No. 6 - Brain Wreck Show

2010-06-21T13:51:00.000-07:00

For better or worse, this is the mix I’ve been waiting for Madlib to make, not for the content (“global psychedelic, progressive and hard rock & funk circa 1968-1976”), but for the execution.

A great DJ mix repurposes pre-existing material in a context that gives it new life, combining portions of disparate works in a self-contained, linear experience (whether for discotheques or living rooms) that voyages from valley to peak, tension to release, in a meticulously-paced arc. Along the way, the DJ reveals unexpected connections and contrasts between the original works, but you’re free to just revel in the music, totally oblivious to all that label-spotting and dancefloor-critique. The DJ did the legwork for you, combing through tons (literally) of records to find that one song, sometimes that one little part of a song, that will complete your musical life.

Madlib’s mixes, on the other hand, usually seem less about creating a new experience from repurposed records, and more about drawing attention to the original recordings. They’re sort of a demonstration for record hounds, put on by the ultimate record hound. Flight to Brazil was a tour of a specific region’s diverse musical landscape, and 420 Chalice All-Stars was an aficionado’s take on a particular genre, and both pointed listeners down specific paths of cratedigging inquiry. That’s why the lack of original track information alongside the Medicine mixes, while understandable from a legal standpoint, is so frustrating.

Finally, though, Madlib has made a mix that isn’t about the source material, but about the mix itself. While taking on an impossibly broad category as his unifying theme, for the first time on any of his mixes he has cast his pet treasures in a new light. It’s just too bad that this light is kind of ugly.

This is the most chaotic and abrasive of Madlib’s projects, interspersing noisy, psychedelic rock music with long sound-collage interludes. Early on, a man with a heavy accent singing a Spencer Davis Group song prepares you for an upbeat excursion through a DJ’s favorite obscure rock and roll. It’s a red herring, though. The songs here are smothered in mangled sound and frequently cut surprisingly short. Just when you start getting into a song (like the melodic tune in the first half of the third track) it is interrupted and rescinded. Attentive listeners will hear material they have heard sampled elsewhere, but what stands out more than anything is how much of the mix relies on spoken-word interludes, spacey intros and “freak-out” portions of songs. At times it feels like the “rock” has been taken out of this psychedelic rock. I think that may have been the intent. When a bluesy saxophone solo pops up in the second track, it’s run through a gauntlet of mixing effects and covered with barely identifiable sounds so it lurks and scowls where, on the original record, it grinned. Brain Wreck Show’s album cover, depicting anthropomorphic rabbits mid-coitus, suits the hallucinatory feel of the mix perfectly (as do the paranoid liner notes, compiled from an unidentified creationist text about Israeli dinosaurs, Chemtrails conspiracy theories, some DJ Quik lyrics and slightly-tweaked excerpts from a controversial book written by one of the founding Seventh-Day Adventists.)

I’m not opposed to music that is jarring and abrasive (can’t get enough Einstürzende Neubauten!) but this mix tries my patience as it descends deeper and deeper into a paranoid Labyrinth of disembodied voices and hallucinatory sounds. Sirens! Screams! Novelty records!

Psyche-rock as far back as Freak Out! and Sgt Pepper’s has always incorporated found sounds (Stockhausen-lite? “Poème Électronique” by way of The Mothers of Invention?) and it makes sense that this is one of the elements of that music that Madlib would hook onto. However, while the interludes on Before the Verdict were tangents at best and distractions at worst, the atonal found-sound here doesn’t feel like a break from the main attraction. To a great extent, it is the main attraction. How you feel about much of this CD will depend on how you feel about sound collages and tape-music.

There has always been an element of musique concrète in Madlib’s projects. Technically, all sample-based music is concrete music, but Madlib, moreso than almost any other hip-hop producer, frequently finds space on his releases to push closer and closer to “Williams Mix” territory. On this mix we have plenty of that, like the dissonant section in the fourth track covered with anti-drug PSAs read by the Looney Tunes or the extended “Eighteen nuns!” bit. This stuff is, from a listening standpoint, my least favorite part of Brain Wreck Show, but in the context of Madlib’s developing methods, it’s actually more intriguing than the songs.

We can think of this mix as analogous to the unaccompanied solos Lester Bowie plays on the second disc of All The Magic or Jimmy Giuffre’s solo clarinet experiments on Free Fall. The turntable/sampler set-up is Madlib’s primary instrument, and with this mix he’s pushing it to new places. A musician who doesn’t explore will surely stagnate. Not every experiment will be a success, but if iconoclasts played it safe, they wouldn’t be iconoclasts, and a lot of our favorite music would never have happened.

I’d like to see Madlib take some of this approach and develop it on future mixes, scrambling and mangling songs even further, blurring the lines between “beat-tape” and “mix”. There are three more mixes to go in this series, and it will be interesting to see how they’re put together.

In the meantime, we have reached the halfway point, and July’s release, High Jazz, sounds very promising.

MADLIB: Medicine Show No. 5 - The History of the Loop Digga, 1990-2000

2010-06-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

This may as well be called Beat Konducta in the 1990s. The fifth Medicine Show release, and the third to feature Madlib’s original work, is a mix of production Madlib farmed out on beat tapes as he was making his name in the 90s.

Hearing the work a favorite artist did in his formative years can, if nothing else, illuminate that artist’s development and the roots of his more recent work, but History of the Loop Digga is more than just a chronicle of Madlib’s dues-paying. While it is fun to spot the signs of things to come (Quasimoto cameos, that “grass increases creativity” sample from “America’s Most Blunted”), this record is a work that stands on its own.

Part of what makes this such a perfect listen is the massive volume of ideas. There are 34 tracks here, but the indexing is pretty meaningless, since most tracks feature two or more distinctly different beats, and there are a thousand little snippets in between to tease us with the thought that Madlib’s vaults are bottomless. The mixing and editing keep things moving at a fast clip: an incredible beat will pop up and then get yanked away in as little as thirty seconds. The only way to bounce back from cutting something like that short is to immediately hit us with something just as good or better, and that is what happens here. This structure is made possible by the fact that ten years of work (from a notoriously prolific artist) are being whittled down into what fits on one CD, and the fast pace is a smart move because the full-length versions of these tracks would, presumably, be pretty repetitive since they were designed to accompany rappers.

Despite how they were intended to be used, I like listening to these beats without rhymes. This way, I can imagine the infinite possibilities, the endless ways a thousand different MCs could rock this beat or that beat. And this must be how producers like Madlib listen to music; imagining the infinite possibilities, how that break or this bassline can be flipped a thousand different ways.

Among all the breaks and basslines here a few recognizable samples pop up, and while I don’t want to get anyone into trouble, I’ll just say it is particularly cool to hear samples from two of my favorite concept albums: a legendary soul singer’s underrated album about his divorce and a Detroit-based jazz harpist’s unjustly overlooked song cycle based on the poetry of Omar Khayyam (I get chills whenever anyone samples that album).

Madlib circa the 2000s samples things no one else would think to use (dig that prog-rock sample in Madvilain's “Strange Ways” for example) while Madlib circa the 90s uses a lot of material you would expect a hip-hop producer to use, but it’s the dish that matters, not the ingredients.

And this is a dish for connoisseurs, one focused more on skill than innovation. This is, naturally, closer to Lootpack in sound and approach than anything else in Madlib’s catalogue. And while the production isn’t as daring as, say, Beat Konducta in Africa, it’s amazing how Madlib’s distinct verve comes through even in this more conservative boom-bap milieu.

As samples of strings, vocals, horns and pianos, (frequently digitized by hardware, bit-crushed and compressed) weave around snippets of speech (locked into the beat or hovering over it) and rapping (acapella tracks scratched on turntable), the drums swing with a classic in-the-pocket bounce. Kick drums are heavy and snares are solid brick, not as sneaky as some of Madlib's more recent beats.

One of the things that makes Madlib’s production so diverse and addictive is the way he’s willing to allow a beat to be sneaky. If you want to know what I'm talking about, listen to Beat Konducta Vols. 5-6. Not everything is a hard four-on-the-floor that even accountants can dance to. This is why Madlib works so well with Guilty Simpson: Guilty’s rapping is all about punching you in the mouth with words, and over those sneaky beats (see “The Paper” on Medicine Show No. 1 for reference) he doesn’t have to compete with a louder-than-bombs BOOM on every downbeat and his voice can be the muscle.

Of course, the opposite can also work, like C.L. Smooth rapping in his incredibly, well, smooth cadence over a booming Pete Rock beat. In the final portion of History of the Loop Digga, we’re treated to some rapping along those lines, laid back vocals in tandem with hard-nodding drums. It’s all pretty solid rapping (courtesy Declaime, Wildchild, Madlib himself, and others), but nothing that will change the art form forever. What makes this portion of the record so enjoyable is how loose and fun it is, like we’re listening in on a few pals just messing around, putting down lyrics and making records for the sheer joy of it. Their enthusiasm is contagious.

It’s impossible to get bored with this thing, and you can’t shut it off halfway through, because everything is tied together in a well-sequenced and cohesive whole. There are several reoccurring sounds, like the “Surgeon General’s warning” and a certain James Brown grunt that show up over and over. Likewise, the sample in “Episode XIV” comes back, for exactly one downbeat, in the next track, used as a transition. Those little touches make this a more immersive listen, a journey from point A to point B instead of a bunch of unrelated ideas thrown at the wall in a see-what-sticks melee.

The album art veers away from the consistent aesthetic found on all the other Medicine Show releases so far, (a visual unity akin to the classic Blue Note covers from the 60s), replacing it with a hyper-violent Blaxploitation comic by Benjamin Marra. (Note to record companies: liner notes that are comic books are awesome.) The incongruity of the artwork, as well as the archival nature of this release, make it stick out in the Medicine Show a little, and I think it would have found more success as a stand-alone release, since the “Volume 5 of 12” tag might put off listeners who aren’t Madlib fanatics. If the Medicine Show eventually goes out of print like Madlib’s Mind Fusion series from a few years ago (impossible to find, trust me!), I hope this one sticks around or goes to a second pressing, because it’s easily in the top tier of Madlib’s releases.

I don’t want you to think that I am some kind of biased Madlib fanatic, but I do want you to know that this particular album is an incredible, joyous listening experience made for music lovers by a music lover. Stop surfing the internet and go get it.

Five down, seven to go. Up next is another mix, and then, as rumor has it, the Medicine Show is going full blown jazz for a couple of months.

JANELLE MONÁE: Metropolis: The Chase Suite

2010-05-18T08:58:00.000-07:00

Janelle Monāe's first full-length album (The ArchAndroid) comes out today, and it's a good time to go back to the beginning of the story and review. By "the story" I don’t mean Monāe's press-kit bio. I mean the story of Cindi Mayweather, the organic-android singer on the run from the law in the futuristic hellscape of Metropolis, sentenced to disassembly for falling in love with a human named Anthony Greendown. In Metropolis, under the authoritarian rule of the Wolfmasters, robots are forbidden to love. You know the rules.

As the product of a prog-rock-fueled youth, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing, and it's too bad musicians who develop a narrative across numerous releases are such a rarity. Jaded Lou Reeds will tell you that pop music is all about sex appeal and authenticity, and concept-nerds like Magma or Coheed & Cambria are an affront to the strum and grit of rock-and-roll™. Whatever. Pop music is all fiction and don’t kid yourself. Liquid Swords is not real and neither is "Folsom Prison Blues".

I think Janelle Monāe's exuberant, unironic creativity is a breath of fresh air. She has an amazing voice, and actually uses her entire range, sweeping from lower registers to soaring high notes and changing her inflection to suit the narrative and mood. She could easily get by on the strength of that voice, in fact, and make a career putting out well-sung and totally generic pop/soul records. Lucky for us, however, she's aiming much, much higher.

Yes, her discography (or at least this first phase) will always be accompanied by a "When we last left our heroes…" summary, but even if it is fairly well-worn territory for science fiction, the sci-fi concept doesn't prevent her from coming up with some outrageously good songs. In fact, if the difference between the on-concept songs here (four, not counting the orchestrated spoken-word intro) and the unrelated bonus tracks (an original and a cover of Charlie Chaplain’s “Smile”) is any indication, it seems like Monāe does her best writing when she's immersed in the dystopian Tomorrowland in her imagination. The unrelated songs are the weakest on the EP; well-sung, professionally accompanied, but lacking the zing! of the other tracks. That's only minor caveat, by the way, and it looks like The ArchAndroid sticks to the Cindi Mayweather saga (it features parts two and three of the four part suite, with this EP being part one.)

The music here is jubilant future soul; syncopated drum loops, loping horns, fizzing guitar solos, turntables, gothic organs, Disney strings, and a people-mover momentum that tumbles through an impressive array of ideas. "Violet Starts Happpy Hunting!!!" blasts out of the gate with a sneering/soaring proclamation: "I- I- I'm an alien from outerspace! I'm a cyber girl without a face, a heart or a mind!" and Monāe rides an Outkast-esque beat, all choppy rhythm guitars and careening synths, her vocals punctuated with a chorus of backup vocals. The thrill I get from this song is identical to the thrill of seeing the first Star Wars (A New Hope, not The Phantom Menace) for the first time. This segues into the highlight, "Many Moons", which is exactly the kind of song that obliterates everything else you were listening to this week. A wiry organ introduces the opening verse, sung in a husky Grace Jones voice and the rest of the song is packed with so many cool moments and inventive details that it would be shame to spoil them. I remember hearing this song for the first time; every time I thought I had it pegged, another hook popped up out of nowhere, sliding naturally into the track's structure.

A classical guitar, what sounds like an accordion and a cathedral organ accompany a robot's aria during the brief "Cybotronic Purgatory" and then the descending horn samples of "Sincerely, Jane" drag Cindi into the underground Wonderworld. None of these arrangements are without precedent or anything like that, but they're remarkably fresh and memorable. This EP never gets boring, no matter how often I hear it, and I am convinced that Janelle Monāe is one of the most inventive and exciting artists in pop music right now. I'm glad she's here.

CECIL TAYLOR: Conquistador!

2010-05-15T12:54:00.000-07:00

Just look at that album cover. Cecil Taylor is going to play the piano now, and he's going to play it exactly how he wants and if you don't like it he doesn't care. Conquistador! is a 1967 Blue Note release, which means, for those of you not into jazz, it will kick you in the face.

Personnel: Bill Dixon is on the trumpet, Jimmy Lyons on the alto sax and there are two bassists; Alan Silva (plucking the upper registers and bowing the strings) and Henry Grimes (booming out those bottom notes). The skittering drums are played by Andrew Cyrille.

Play by play, like a sportscaster: Side one is the title track, opening with sprays of piano and a tumble of bass. A horn motif, loose and easy. Cecil Taylor's fingers on those keys are a rolling, fumbling beautiful thing while Lyons plays melodic lines in tension with the out-excursions of the rest of the group, eventually getting more and more sporadic and squonky as the music winds up into that Blue Note mayhem we love so much. Cyrille keeps a galloping pulse, heavy on the cymbals, clattering. Five minutes in and it's Dixon's shot. A mourning start to his solo as the band winds down, getting out of his way. Taylor punctuates the trumpet's soft wail and Cyrille lays out. The bowed bass responds. A hi-hat chops in tentatively, and steam is picked up. Winds in unison, moaning bowed bass, heavy cymbals, and that relentless, jagged piano playing. Cecil Taylor's gnarled piano lines are so strange. Listen to his solo at the nine-minute mark, with those rap-tap-clap drum fills. Stuff like that is why I listen to jazz.

Taylor's got the joyful go-at-it-kid enthusiasm of a toddler who just learned to lift the piano lid… if this toddler is the reincarnation of Thelonious Monk. It's sharp, angular playing, winding around tricky lines, embracing awkwardness and uneasiness. It's tension! It's suspense! It's not telling you where it's going, it's just going to go there and anyone can follow if they want. Most won't. I will. Just try to keep up, kid.

I can imagine these guys playing with clenched teeth and squinted eyes, the face of a good thrashing metalhead. Thirteen minutes in and that horn melody teases us before drumrolls and squealing bow that follow Taylor's rolling keys all over the place. I love the way Grimes percolates under everything like it's no big deal. Just doing his thing, popping those low notes under all this musical tantrum. And when we finally get to the bass duet we're ready, but it's short, wound so tight the rest of the band has to jump on it to hold it down. And then you have to turn over the record. I guess these guys are playing to the LP format. Too far over fifteen minutes and the grooves are narrower and sound quality drops. More importantly, those narrower grooves mean it's not as loud, and this music needs to be LOUD.

Side two is called "With (Exit)" and it starts so pretty. And it's a gangly, duckling pretty and it won't ever be a swan, but who needs swans? And who told me free jazz is all experiment and no emotion? Someone who never heard this, obviously.

Lyons steals the show on side two, seriously. You might even forget that it's not his name on the cover. He hits just the right balance between discernible melody and spiraling soundsheets.

The second side is a lot like the first, but a little better. On the 2003 reissue, an alternate take of "With (Exit)" is provided, just to show they never played it the same way twice. Mingus would say they couldn't play it twice. But why would they want to? When I'm not listening to this album I can't recall a single note, but that just means it surprises me every time.

In high school my favorite English teacher told me she liked NPR, except when they played that "experimental jazz." One of my artist friends thinks it's all intellectual nonsense, structurally worthless. My girlfriend has remarked that this kind of thing sounds totally random. It's your loss, people.

MADLIB: Medicine Show No. 4 - 420 Chalice All-Stars

2010-04-28T04:56:00.000-07:00

The Medicine Show’s second mix was released on 4/20, and it’s not a coincidence. Before you even get the disc into your stereo, you’re faced with a (pretty fantastic) album cover that spoofs the iconic cover of Lee Perry’s dub masterpiece Super Ape. Where Perry’s simian mascot held a tree-sized marijuana cigarette, Madlib’s is hijacking an entire truck of medicinal marijuana. The liner notes contain a directory to every medicinal pot distributer in Los Angeles, and an FAQ about weed prescriptions. So I guess Madlib likes smoking pot or something. How his mother and I missed the warning signs, I'll never know...

It’s actually too bad ‘Lib couldn’t resist packaging this selection of Jamaican music in a (literal and figurative) green wrapper, because this music deserves to be presented as something more than ear candy for frat boys sitting under their Bob Marley banner taking tokes from a dragon bong. In the States, distanced as we are from Jamaica’s political and religious history by our own cultural insulation and good old-fashioned American Self-Attention, reggae is often used as a signifier of “good vibes” and a vague sense of righteous social awareness, man, though the only thing most Americans know about Rastafari is that weed is used ritually. (Don’t be too hard on those High Times subscribers, though; focusing on what suits our agenda and ignoring the rest is how Americans tend to approach all religions.)

While it’s true that War Ina Babylon and Two Sevens Clash can be enjoyed, like any great music, apart from regional and historical origins (is any song more universal than “Uptown Babies Don’t Cry”?) the religious and emotional depths of reggae and its related genres are too often neglected by American listeners, and to shift attention from those depths to the intoxicant of choice favored by the musicians is akin to understanding the rich tradition of American blues music as “misogyny songs.” There’s so much more to blues than just hating women.

All the concerns I had about Flight to Brazil apply here as well, so I won’t repeat them. I will say that this is a much stronger and more diverse mix than Blunted in the Bomb Shelter, Madlib’s mix of Greensleves and Trojan classics. Also, the transitions between tracks are pretty effective here. Even though a song is rarely allowed to play for more than two minutes, there’s a smooth cohesiveness to this mix. There are lots of little suprises, like the ska cover of the Mission Impossible theme, and a wide array of ska, roots, deejay and dancehall stuff; lots of toasting, singing and dubbing going on. As a listening experience, there's nothing to complain about here.

Four down, eight to go. Next month, the Bad Kid is unleashing an archival release of older material, as if he was Bob Dylan or something. Madlib has put out a few other releases this year in addition to the once-a-month Medicine Show releases: He produced a Strong Arm Steady album (released in January), his collaboration with Guilty Simpson is coming out on CD in May, and he put out two more records in Madlib’s Endless Quest to Make His Very Own On the Corner: Miles Away, as The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz and Percussion Ensemble and Slave Riot as The Young Jazz Rebels. Miles Away is a percolating goatee jazz and Slave Riot is an Arkestra-esque free jazz freakout. Both are in the top tier of Madlib's extensive jazz projetcs.

MADLIB: Medicine Show No. 3 – Beat Konducta In Africa

2010-03-31T06:32:00.000-07:00

Other than his collaboration with DOOM (which sadly doesn’t seem to be an ongoing concern,) the Beat Konducta series is my favorite of Madlib’s projects. The format is perfect for his frantic work-ethic: a great big pile of hip-hop instrumentals, usually clocking in between ninety seconds and two minutes. For those who came in late, the first six volumes were released separately on vinyl and combined on two-for-one CDs. The first two (Movie Scenes) were an eclectic collection of beats based primarily on soul and funk, but with quite a few curveballs thrown in. The third and fourth volumes (Beat Konducta in India) used samples from Bollywood soundtracks, and the last two were tributes to the late J. Dilla, incorporating samples Dilla had used in his own productions and creating a sorrowful/celebratory vibe perfect for a musical eulogy. As the title suggests, this installment is (mostly) made from samples taken from African music. (The same sample of American composer Steve Reich’s “Come Out” used on the Madvillain album is used here as well, and if I had the encyclopedic knowledge to recognize everything, I’d imagine there are other non-African snippets.)

Occasionally, Beat Konducta beats will be recycled in extended form as backing tracks for rappers, but I prefer them in this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it channel-surfing format. It can be erratic at times, and a lot to digest at once, but it keeps things moving. On the odd occasion when the Beat Konducta stays in once place for too long, (such as “Spearthrow for Oh No” on this volume) it’s tiring. Maybe my attention span is spoiled by the brevity of most of the tracks. Maybe Madlib is just more of a flash-of-inspiration producer, lining up one disconnected idea after another, as opposed to making song-structure instrumentals like RJD2.

Because of the massive volume of tracks, the Beat Konducta records get better with each listen, and that was exactly my experience with Beat Konducta in Africa. Repeat listens reveal a wealth of little moments like the horns that soar over “Red, Black and Green Showcase”, the vocal hook that distinguishes “Warrior’s Theme”, the submarine throb of "Umi (Life)" and the lurching waltz-tome of “Chant 3”. These are scattered among less effective ideas, like the interludes that pair a tourguide record with some of the more muted beats in this collection. “Yafeu” for example, drags on far too long (just under two-and-a-half minutes, but it’s relative, eh?) without ever really hitting us with a great hook. Some of these spoken word portions are actually repeated, which adds to the tedium.

That inconsistency is a symptom of Madlib’s try-anything approach, the same thing that makes his best moments so inspired. Even if this isn’t the strongest of the Beat Konducta records, it is always good to hear Madlib in his element, chopping up cool samples. Writing about the first volume in Madlib’s Medicine Show, I said “Hip-hop, by its very nature, has broken down concepts of music ownership so thoroughly that it would be absurd to fault an artist for one more form of cultural high-jacking.” In my review of the second volume, I accused Madlib of cultural high-jacking. And here I am, writing about the third volume, which I guess falls on the good side of the difference between hijacking another artist’s work and making something new from it.

I love sampling. Before I ever owned a microphone, I was making music patched together from samples. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing was the record that changed the way I approached making music. Once I heard that, I was done writing songs on a guitar. I spent most of my sophomore year in college crouched in front of my computer (I couldn’t, and still can’t, afford an MPC or anything like that) ripping CDs and looping and layering samples. I didn’t produce anything worthwhile, but I gained a new appreciation for the Pete Rocks of the world, and my interest in hip-hop went into overdrive. When I discovered Madlib, I had found this music’s Ornette Coleman, an artist doing things his own way, producing a diverse range of projects all tied together by a distinct feel that is difficult to pin down. Even when Ornettle Coleman is playing the violin or trumpet instead of his usual saxophone, it’s easy to recognize him. Likewise, whether he’s chopping up breaks or playing the drums or rapping, there is something uniquely Madlibish about everything Madlib makes.

And this particular slab of Madlibishness, while not his masterpiece, is a worthy entry into his perplexing canon. The samples from highlife and afrobeat and soukous give these beats have a unique feel, and the way “African Map Hustler” segues seamlessly into “Street Watch” might point the way for a more technique-oriented future for the Beat Konducta, which would be interesting to see. And, if nothing else, tracks like “Heritage Sip” and “Mighty Force” are essentials for anyone’s “Best of Madlib” mix CD.

Three down, nine to go. Next up: Madlib releases an album on 4/20. I'd give you three guesses, but you wouldn't need all three.

CHRISTOPH DE BABALON: If You're Into It, I'm Out Of It

2010-03-27T06:36:00.000-07:00

The story of drum and bass music has a hundred versions, but purists frequently lament an arc of compromise: jagged breakbeats are domesticated to score car commercials as ritual raves are co-opted by businessmen. An outlaw is deputized. For a listener like me, however (Midwest, mid-twenties) the mythology of psychedelic libertinism and socio-spiritual ecstasy is barely more than the dated liner notes packaged with an LTJ Bukem mix. It’s like how I really dig Jimi Hendrix's music but you couldn’t pay me to watch Woodstock: The Movie. The heroic iconography associated with the pure heyday of drum and bass (the Hendrix-torches-his-axe for the jungle crowd) has typically been the DJ leading his congregation through their rhythmic glory, but I have always preferred the producer, huddled monastic in his bedroom over sampler and calculator, perfecting his masterwork before turntable apostles take it to the world. It’s no surprise, then, that that I am partial to the armchair end of drum and bass. Imagine the difference between swing and post-bop, dance music made avant-garde art. The same radioactive spider that turned Benny Goodman into Eric Dolphy also turned Goldie into Squarepusher. Meanwhile, Sun Ra was from Jupiter and Christoph de Babalon is from hell.

If You’re Into It I’m Out Of It is grim, scary and unyielding. I suppose people could dance to it, but somehow I imagine them sawing through their limbs to escape some Jigsaw Killer death trap instead. You’re not getting out of this record alive, buddy. De Babalon uses the lo-fi claustrophobia of a thousand black metal opuses to pummel his listener with overdriven bass drums and the twitchy, digital bite of spring-loaded sounds. You know those PFM and Spring Heel Jack records that reach for the clouds with a breath of fresh air? This is not that. This music smothers and strangles and slices. It’s awesome. "Dead (Too)" has a bandsaw synth that cuts through all the other music you listened to today and leaves it in little shreds on the floor. "Expressure" is the sonic equivalent of two black eyes.

There are lengthy, drone-based ambient tracks interspersed with the fury and murder, but they are not a calm respite. The ambience is not Brian Eno’s wide-open public terminal, or even Tim Hecker’s day-after-Chernobyl wastescape. It’s more like that box where they locked up St. John of the Cross. That claustrophobia, combined with the almost-excruciating anticipation-of-a-bang tension, is pivotal to the album's structure and makes it a complete, immersive listen. Pretty? Pleasant? No. It’s better.

I know a lot of people would hate this music, (it failed the girlfriend test), but the very things that make it alienating are what make it so thrilling. There’s no arc of compromise here. This music will not work in a car commercial. Your crowd-pleasing DJ has no use for it. De Bablon doesn’t care. If you’re into it, he’s out of it. He painted the basement floor red and he’s got a bunch of strange-looking tools.

I work as a substitute teacher, which means I watch more educational videos than any person should be subjected to. It’s incredible how many of these pedagogy-Spielbergs use anonymous, generic (probably public domain) house and jungle-lite to score their “learning is fun” condescension. Using music as background noise is paying it the ultimate insult. (In that, I am not including using music for dancing, which is a way of actively engaging it.) I admire Christoph de Babalon for making an album that refuses to be ignorable. Great art makes you want to rip it off the wall, they say, either so you can burn it or take it home. This guy doesn't care which one you do, but if you even try to attack this music you'll probably lose the fight. Look at that album title. It's just as audacious as “The Shape of Jazz to Come”. De Babalon has the good taste to spare us the pop-prophetic, self-congratulatory liner notes favored by so many electronic musicians, but you can imagine the sort of Nietzsche-esque exclusiveness he might have included: “Perhaps not even ten men alive are prepared to hear my breakbeats.”

I love the dank atmosphere, the suspense of being chained to the furnace just below that mildewed waterline as the cement floor is sunk under a malicious flood. This is one of my favorite electronic albums. In case you were looking for one more thing Thom Yorke and I have in common (in addition to “scrawny” and “nervous” and “loved by millions”), I once read a review of this record that he wrote for the BBC (which you can read on de Bablon's myspace page). “I choose this record,” he wrote, “because it's the most menacing record I own and it's kind of how I imagined drum and bass was always going to be and then it wasn't.” I think I own some records more menacing than this, but that other part is exactly how I feel about it.

SCIENTIST: Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires

2010-03-24T07:58:00.000-07:00

It’s a dub record, so you know what it sounds like: The chunky wobble of the bass, the rusty scrape of the high-hat, the bass drum’s muddy thud, the horn section playing in a cave, the vamping guitar drenched in cement-floor slapback and the disembodied voices adrift in their delay-unit haze.

Scientist, once a protégé to dub innovator King Tubby, isn’t reinventing the dub wheel here, but he’s a master of his craft. His intuition is perfect, and the addition-by-subtraction process yields a work that never becomes repetitive or dull. There is a bright, crisp sound here, as opposed to the deep murk of, say, Lee Perry’s excellent Super Ape. Little spoken bits at the start of many of the songs (“I am the living dead!”) lend a kind of thematic unity, but it doesn’t really extend beyond those brief catchphrases and the album cover. Scientist’s albums all have amazing titles, by the way, like Scientist Meets the Space Invaders and Scientist Wins the World Cup. It’s like he’s going on all these great adventures, when really he’s just mixing some awesome dub. (He also made an album in 1980 called Introducing Scientist: The Best Dub Album in the World. I like it when artists aim high.)

Like strophic techno, dub is constructed by the addition and subtraction of layers. Each of the repeating elements is congruent with the others, and the music moves through a series of combinations as layers are added and removed, reintroduced or silenced as necessitated by the track’s momentum. Unlike techno, however, these elements are not programmed into a machine, they are parts played by session musicians, recorded to a multi-track tape where they can be isolated from each other in the mixing process. The musicians are typically not the stars of the show, however. It is the man at the mixing boards whose name (or pseudonym) graces the cover.

A few years ago there was a dustup when several tracks from this album were used in one of the Grand Theft Auto games without Scientist’s knowledge or consent. Scientist was apparently upset that his music was associated with anti-social wish fulfillment (“I don't understand why they have someone who steals a car and shoots up the place, then he's listening to reggae and Rastafari on the radio.”) The fact that he received no compensation probably stung a little as well. Just because the cover boasts his name doesn’t necessarily mean he is recognized as the author of this work, however. A managing director at Greensleeves Records said "Basically, Scientist was claiming to own copyrights in songs and recordings as a result of being the mixing engineer. Although we always felt these claims were ridiculous, we had to defend ourselves all the way to trial.” Greensleeves won in court, perhaps because certain people in the legal system just don’t understand how dub works. Apparently, according to precedent, the mixing engineer can not claim authorship of a recording.

So who is the author here? Henry “Junjo” Lawes produced the recordings and wrote the arrangements, which are played expertly by the Roots Radics Band. The original mixes feature vocals by Michael Prophet, Wailing Souls and others, though in Scientist’s mix, these are reduced to well-placed snippets.

Jamaican pop uses and re-uses riddims frequently, and the artistry most often recognized is what a certain performer does with those pre-recorded backing tracks. It’s not unusual for the same Sly and Robbie track to be used for several different songs by several different vocalists. This is similar to the way American rappers will recycle each others’ beats on mixtapes, except in the case of reggae and dancehall the practice is often a feature of “official” releases.

In the early days of dub, a single’s b-side would often be a dub version of the a-side. Somewhere along the way, dub became an art in itself, and whole albums of dub versions were released. I haven’t heard the original un-dubbed versions of any of the tracks on Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires, though I suspect I would like them quite a bit. It’s strange that those originals have fallen into obscurity while these versions comprise a recognized classic. Who's the author now?

MADLIB: Medicine Show No. 2 – Flight to Brazil

2010-02-25T13:56:00.000-08:00

The words of Jace Clayton, better known as DJ /rupture: “As a process, DJing is inevitable and necessary for our times, an elegant way to deal with data overload. As a performance, it's what the kids are grooving to the world over. As a product, it's largely illegal.”

Well, I’m certainly grooving to Flight to Brazil, and I’m sure it’s illegal. For the second Medicine Show release, (and the first of the mixes that will comprise the even-numbered volumes,) Madlib has compiled a wildly diverse mix of music from Brazil and there’s no indication (and very little chance) that the creators of this music gave permission or received compensation, though at the same time there is little indication here of any plunderphonic-politics. If any such comment exists, it is to be found in Flight to Brazil’s cover art (partially pictured above): It’s a painting of Christian missionaries arriving, presumably, in South America. Anachronistic details are added to the paining; firearms, a Coca-Cola can, pharmaceutical vials. Is someone making a comment about imperialism? Is someone being ironic?

Discussions about music piracy frequently cast narratives in which innocent college kids downloading Grateful Dead bootlegs are pursued by rapacious corporate slime, but there’s another side. Regarding the morally dubious business model of the Sublime Frequencies label, the aforementioned Jace Clayton wrote “It’s a sadly familiar economic model: sell the cultural riches of non-Westerners without their knowledge or permission.” Isn't Madlib essentially doing this with Flight to Brazil? No information about the composers or performers behind this music is included in the liner notes, either because of that white-label attitude that makes DJs feel like part of an exclusive “in-the-know” record club, or (more likely) because by releasing this, Madlib is committing illegal copyright infringement. (This may also explain why the words “Stones Throw Records” are nowhere to be found on the Medicine Show releases, though it is clear that Madlib’s home label is behind them.)

It’s a shame, too, because every song on this mix makes me want to know more. And isn’t that part of the value in such an endeavor? And wouldn’t that information likely lead to increased dividends for these musicians (thus compensating for their lack of, erm, compensation) as listeners who are exposed to their work via this mix begin to seek out more?

Even if they aren’t being paid, these musicians could at least be celebrated as unique artists, but instead, the curator is the star of this show. Apparently, the talent on display is Madlib's talent for finding and buying records. The musicians are just some anonymous Brazilian people who made some tunes that would have languished in total obscurity if not for their hip American savior. Without any information, however, this music is still obscure, still anonymous.

Is this anything more than one music geek showing off his finds to other music geeks, ethics and ownership be dammed? Like most of Madlib’s mixes, it’s hard to see any intention here beyond sharing a bunch of awesome records he found while he was digging for material to sample, but it’s hard to deny the middle finger extended (perhaps unintentionally) by a mix of Brazilian music this diverse. You know those cheesy compilations they sell at Starbucks and in the “World Music” section at Borders, the ones with titles like The Sounds of Brazil? This is not like that. This is the antithesis of the coffee-shop tourism that pretends to squeeze an entire nation’s musical output into one digestible smorgasbord of background sound for Yuppies who want to feel “multi-cultural.” Madlib’s fondness for Brazillian music is well-documented, and the depth of his knowledge (or, at least, the depth of his record collection) is impressive.

Likewise, the role of a curator is a natural compliment to his work as a producer of sample-based hip-hop, and while mash-up artists like Girl Talk have blurred the line between creating something new from other people’s music and simply (or complexly) recontextualizing that music, these roles remain sharply distinct in Madlib’s curatorial work, which also lacks the manifesto politics of, say, DJ Spooky, and is rarely any more conceptual than Flight to Brazil’s geographic theme. He’s also not a very technical DJ. This isn’t Gold Teeth Thief. These songs aren’t mixed in any complex way; they’re simply truncated and cross-faded, linked by a man’s voice announcing flights to and from places in Brazil, as well as a repeating sample of a woman going “Whooooo!” (It’s not as dumb as it sounds.)

Listening to this mix illuminates much of Madlib’s original music, particularly his excursions into fusion as Yesterdays (sic) New Quintet; a familiar piano line pops up at one point, for example, one I am sure is sampled by Madlib on another release (or maybe the song is covered by YNQ), and the feel of these rhythms is certainly captured by many of the compositions on Madlib’s fusion projects. That probably isn’t the point, though. With this mix, it seems Madlib is just sharing (read: selling) some cultural riches he found (read: stole). Here’s an awesome song. Now, here’s another. Of course, I am exactly the sort of person to whom this appeals. Yes, thank you, Madlib, I would love to hear some awesome records you found. And it's impossible to deny that the actual music here is terrific. I just wish I could enjoy this mix without fretting over silly ethical questions.

Two down, ten to go. Next up: The Beat Konducta goes to Africa.

MADLIB: Medicine Show No. 1 - Before the Verdict

2010-02-11T12:59:00.000-08:00

Madlib’s Medicine Show is a twelve-volume series that will be released once a month through 2010. The even-numbered volumes will feature Madlib in the role of obscurantist curator, compiling mixes of other people’s music, while the odd-numbered volumes will feature original Madlib productions (errr... “Invasions.”) We here at Dig That Sweet Sound have resolved to listen to all twelve volumes (budget permitting – now accepting donations!) and write about them as they are released.

This first volume is a rap record featuring Detroit-native Guilty Simpson. Some tracks are remixes with vocals from Guilty’s Ode to the Ghetto while others feature verses from OJ Simpson’s forthcoming debut. No, sports fans, the Juice has not made the move from sports and stabbing to gangsta rap (although that would be a logical career move). Madlib (known on his birth certificate as Otis Jackson Jr.) and Guilty Simpson use the moniker OJ Simpson for the work they do together. Supposedly, the duo’s debut album will be available sometime last year or this year or next year or something like that. Release schedules are pretty fluid in the underground hip-hop world (another reason why it’s a treat to be guaranteed a new Madlib record every thirty days or so).

As an MC, Guilty Simpson is all grit and testosterone, pushing every syllable through a tough-guy grumble. His lyrics are exactly what people who don’t listen to rap think all rap is about; sexism, gun-toting paranoia and criminal behavior. Even when his lyrics wear thin, however, his halting/forceful cadence is perfectly suited to the jagged found-sound setting created to accompany his rapping. The production here combines Madlib’s trademark pandemonium of hazy sound-collage and spontaneous, skillful sampling, continuing the “pirate radio” milieu of King of the Wigflip but with more of a mixtape feel; the vocals and samples are often recycled and mashed up rather than produced in tandem (the packaging also lacks label and copyright information). The beat from Madvillian’s “All Caps” re-appears on “Life Goes By” and the remix of “Ode to the Ghetto” has a beat eerily reminiscent of Deltron 3030’s “Virus,” presumably because the same sample is used. An obsessive record-collector like Madlib is no doubt aware of that similarity; he just doesn’t care. If the beat knocks (and that beat most certainly does,) it goes in the stew, no questions. Hip-hop, by its very nature, has broken down concepts of music ownership so thoroughly that it would be absurd to fault an artist for one more form of cultural high-jacking. The recycling here is a symptom of this format’s “everything goes” ethos; and that approach is well-suited to an insanely prolific artist with a tendency to throw everything at the wall and then put it all out on wax whether it sticks or not.

The Medicine Show series is exactly the format and release schedule Madlib has always needed. Following an artist this prolific can be frustrating, though if I’m keeping up with his work, it is obviously rewarding more often than not. I think artists who are open to anything - any process, any idea – tend to lack quality control. Madlib’s records are always at least interesting, usually good, and often great, but I can’t help thinking he could do better with a little more focus. Trim the fat! Maybe he worries that too much tinkering will spoil the spontaneous nature of his releases, or maybe he loses interest in one thing before he can tighten it up, moving on to the next alias, the next collaboration, the next beat-tape. Before the Verdict is a step in the right direction, though. Although a relatively small portion of the running time features vocals, the in-between stuff, the mashed up samples from songs and bits of stand-up comedy that have become par for the course on Madlib’s hip-hop projects, are used more effectively here than they’ve ever been used before. I don’t know how they will hold up during repeat listens, but as of now I think these moments are arranged in engaging and oddly “musical” ways, and they provide an important part of the overall picture. There’s an ebb and flow to this album that makes it more cohesive than, say, The Further Adventures of Lord Quas. If Madlib lacks quality control, he’s learning to make up for it with meticulous sequencing.

There are not a lot of artists who could get me to shell out for an album once a month for an entire year, but Madlib has built up that goodwill. I hope he can maintain it, and so far he’s on the right track. I had a good day with this CD today. I had pre-ordered it before the onset of my most recent period of financial ruin, and during another fruitless day of job-hunting the UPS guy brought it right to my door. I went jogging, shoveled snow and made lunch in the space of two complete listens. This was a sonic space I could retreat to, and it lifted my spirits, as imaginative, adventurous music always does.

One down and eleven to go.

Highlights:
"Life Goes By"
“I Must Love You (OJ Simpson Remix)”
“My Moment (OJ Simpson Remix)”

KRZYSZTOF PENDERECKI: Matrix 5

2010-01-11T06:57:00.000-08:00

I once heard David Lynch tell a story about listening to Penderecki’s music at earth-shaking volume, getting lost in the music until he suddenly realized his wife was shouting for him to turn it down. It’s no surprise that Lynch likes Penderecki. In fact, his recent films make a good compliment to this music in the way they (mostly) abandon traditional narrative structure in favor of an abstract headspace that Lynch refuses to explain, for fear his explanation will become authoritative and exclude a viewer’s personal, subjective response. Edgard Varèse once said that music could only represent itself and that might be true in if the music existed in an uninhabited vacuum. If Krzysztof Penderecki conducts an orchestra in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still irritate Mrs. Lynch? Or does music only represent something when it is processed by a listening human being?

This compilation of performances from the 1970s is the fifth installment in the “Matrix” series from EMI, a series intended, according to the liner notes, “to open up new horizons to the music lover who is looking beyond the standard repertoire.” In Penderecki’s case, he doesn’t “open up new horizons” so much as “fill the old horizons with the glow of burning cities.” I can respond in any number of ways. I could dwell on the fact that homes and people are being incinerated, for example, or I could focus on that mesmerizing aura of color. “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” is a thrilling piece of music only marred by a programmatic title that deprives it of possibility. I know what Penderecki wants me to think about when I hear it, (the aforementioned incinerating people) but I first purchased this album shortly after receiving an iPod shuffle as a gift and as the actual CD and case rested on a shelf at home and the music came with me everywhere in MP3 form, I had only a vague recollection of the individual titles to these compositions, without which, they can mean just about anything.

The fact that so many interpretive options are available is exactly what fascinates me so much about this music. Maybe I’m the product of one too many touchy-feely Reader Response classroom chats, but I love the idea of an exchange in which the listener is at least as important as the composer and performers. Penderecki makes abstract, challenging music that does not utilize any of the emotional signifiers of traditional harmony. The listener gives the music meaning.

When he made Music for Airports, Brian Eno set out to make music that was as ignorable as it was interesting, music that would reward different levels of attentiveness in different ways. In doing so, he also succeeded, perhaps by accident, in creating music that would compliment differently whatever the listener brought to it. The music was a setting instead of a story. The compositions on Matrix 5 are also Map Music. There’s no logical forward development, just a dissonant sound-world in which things happen. If those sounds have specific meaning to Penderecki, I don’t care to know about it. I choose to live inside this music when I hear it, making meaning from whatever I brought with me.

JOHN COLTRANE: A Love Supreme

2010-01-06T20:45:00.000-08:00

I had a friend in elementary school whose parents were pretty well off. They bought a high end stereo because that's what you're supposed to do when you have money, and on the first and only day I ever heard music in their house, my friend and I played chess while we listened to the one CD they purchased with the stereo. They got it, I think, because my friend played the tenor saxophone in the school band. I was confused by the strange music, and couldn't make sense of the way the chords and melodies didn't resolve right (not that I would have put it into those terms at that age.) It was kind of thrilling, though, because it made me feel like I was getting a peek into something foreign and strange and it reminded me that there was a whole world out there that I would discover some day. I remembered the title, A Love Supreme, though I didn't hear it again for many years.

I had a roommate in college who had the unfortunate experience of living with me during the honeymoon period of my first Big Jazz Phase. Constant Mingus. Perpetual Miles. A Love Supreme. Coltrane didn't have that funky mud-and-incense thing I got from electric Miles, and he didn't scrape my guts out like my new hero Ornette Coleman could do with that wiry pianoless quartet, but I had to give him a shot, because that's what you're supposed to do when you have a Big Jazz Phase. My roommate didn't like any of that stuff; he mostly liked Queen and Frank Sinatra. "I don't get jazz." I tried to tell him that there was nothing to get, but I wasn't sure if I really believed that. I didn’t "get" A Love Supreme, after all.

I had a professor who, while explaining to why she passionately hated Christians, told me that "religious art" was garbage. I argued with her, because that's what you're supposed to do when you're in college. Look, lady, if you want to hate an entire group of people without even having met all of them, that’s your business, but don't knock The Brothers Karamazov or The Staples Singers. I don't think she was convinced that the former was religious or that the latter was art. A Love Supreme popped into my head, but I just wasn't moved to go to bat for that one. I was still confused by it, the way I was confused by religion.

I had a quiet morning to myself, all alone in an empty house and it was early, still dark outside. A Love Supreme. A cup of coffee. A highlighting pen and Paul Tillich in weathered paperback. A Love Supreme. A period of religious inquiry and spiritual ambiguity. A Love Supreme. Hey, this is more interesting than I remember. A Love Supreme. Who can read with this going on? A Love Supreme. And then John Coltrane played that last solo and it was a prayer and it made sense the way doctrines and creeds never seem to make sense. It's so simple: A Love Supreme.

JUDEE SILL: Judee Sill

2009-10-10T05:56:00.000-07:00

Reading what the good Colonel has to say about Plastic Ono Band got me thinking about the relationship between my response to art and my response the the artist. He’s right to acknowledge his subjectivity, and I think if he hadn’t been exposed to the Beatle Cult so frequently during his youth, he would be able to enjoy that album as much as I do. An artist’s biography doesn’t have to sink their work, in fact, sometimes it can enhance it. Just ask your friendly neighborhood Proust scholar or Judee Sill fan.

Just as discussions of Fela Kuti (“The government killed his mom, man!”) and Sun Ra (“That dude was from Jupiter!”) can’t resist the biopic-ready anecdotes that liter liner notes and rock-mag retrospectives, trumped up for ecstatic record-store proselytizing and dialed down for stoic newswire obitu-blurbs, so too does some iteration of Judee Sill’s tragically short arc of delinquency, addiction, arrest, redemption, and fatal relapse accompany almost any discussion of her wonderful music.

Sill’s meager repertoire, however (she completed just two albums before she died) is so much more than the soundtrack to a desperate American girl’s chaotic biography. In fact, on record she sounds triumphant and hopeful, with just a hint of pain lurking around the edges. The back-story adds a layer of meaning, but it doesn’t turn the music into a death-watch like all those Kurt Cobain lyrics about guns.

Imagine a Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter’s version of Alejandro Jodorowski’s El Topo, and you’ll get a sense of the distinct setting painted in Sill’s songs; a dusty prairie populated by gun-slinging mystics riding toward Gnostic transcendence. Sill’s pristine, cathedral voice gives you an immediate taste: a certain angel-with-a-twang quality (“get” becomes “git”) that straddles the line between the Southwest U.S. and the kind of heaven imagined in Sunday-school daydreams. Beneath these soaring vocals, Sill crafts arrangements informed equally by J.S. Bach and the gospel licks she picked up during her incarceration.

Every song is filled with wounded hope, like “The Lamb Ran Away With The Crown”, a loping mystic nursery rhyme about apocalyptic wars between good and evil, with Sill’s soul as the battlefield. As it comes to an end, her double-tracked voice splits off into a soaring round. It’s absolutely elevating.

The obvious highlight, though, is “Jesus Was A Crossmaker”. A stop-in-your tracks beauty of a song, it’s been covered (poorly) by Warren Zevon, The Hollies, Cass Elliot, and Linda Ronstadt, who irritatingly changed the title to remove the potential for blasphemy. (Frida Hyvönen does an excellent rendition, however.) The song’s ambivalence is amplified by its context within Sill’s canon. The ridge-riders and archetypal men in her songs are overwhelmingly messianic. Rooted as she is in Christian mysticism, however, she only uses the name “Jesus” in this one song, which, as it turns out, is not about Jesus at all. Hersey has it that a bad relationship with a member of the Eagles inspired the lyric, and said FM-twang stalwart is portrayed as “a bandit and a heartbreaker” who enticed her before vanishing. He’s an exorcist gunslinger who chases the devil but leaves the door wide open for the devil to return. He is good plus evil, but who isn’t? Sure, he’s trouble, but, as the song reminds us, even Jesus was trouble. Anyone who has studied the gospels seriously is bound to have some ambivalent feelings about Jesus; he’s a troubling figure, a disturbing character filled with insane compassion and radicalized unorthodoxy. Caring for this Jesus is much harder than caring for the sanitized Caucasian logo of mainstream protestant comfort food. And if we can love Jesus not in spite of his troubling characteristics but because of them, then we can certainly love the people in our lives for their erraticness, their unreliability, their anger and their insanity.

That's not the easiest pill to take, but when it comes from someone as cautiously hopeful as Judee Sill, it’s hard to be cynical. This album’s final line could come across as kindergarten motivational-speak, but from a bank-robbing drug addict turned troubadour, it isn’t hard to believe that “However we are is okay.” Not perfect, not without flaws. Okay.

JOHN LENNON: Plastic Ono Band

2009-10-08T13:13:00.000-07:00

Plastic Ono Band is hailed by adherents as a powerful masterpiece but this album’s emotional punch depends entirely on the listener’s investment in the person of John Lennon.

The ex-Beatle’s direct, confrontational lyrics (delivered in a "seething fury" or a "wounded coo", depending on which emotional extreme he wishes to telegraph at the moment) offer litte beyond bland fodder for celeb-obsessed voyeurism, like peeking into the naughty diary of a big star who, as it turns out, is less than compelling. When he branches out beyond his own wounded psyche to discuss religion (“God”) or socio-economic stratification (“Working Class Hero”) he is unable to match his incredible vanity with any real insight, instead settling for watered-down Marxist slogans and self-deification.

Sometimes this kind of auto-bio-pop is compelling in a car-wreck kind of way. Kanye West’s entire career, for example, can be seen as an inadvertent concept piece about a materialistic narcissist whose irrational persecution complex gradually gives way to budding self-awareness. Kanye, however, despite his best efforts, is unburdened by the kind of naive hero-worship poured over Lennon’s grave by Boomer sycophants. Like Lennon, West believes that a recording contract is a suitable substitute for a basic understanding of political and cultural issues, but his delusion is his own. The John Lennon mythology hangs over every note of Plastic Ono Band like an ugly VH1 albatross.

It’s a real shame, too, because there are some nice ideas here, even if Lennon and producer Phil Spector (working against his usual modus operandi to make the album as self-consciously “raw” as possible) don’t exactly now what to do with them. "God" has an aching repetition that doesn’t require a detailed arrangement, “Isolation” has a clever chord structure, and “Mother” would be a wistful, enjoyable ballad without the screaming theatrics and pathetic post-mortem pleas for parental affection.

All of those good moments are squandered. The only way to purely enjoy this album would be to listen to it with no knowledge of who John Lennon is or what he inexplicably means to people. For me, however, such a blissfully objective listen is impossible. I grew up fully immersed in Baby Boomer mythology, a mythology I would eventually renounce as shallow, revisionist nonsense. I can never really enjoy this album as much as I would like to, because it is impossible for me to separate it from the life of the auteur.

ISIS: Wavering Radiant

2009-05-29T08:34:00.000-07:00

The music on Wavering Radiant, the fifth album from Isis, uproots the traditionally earthbound sonics of Metal, deploying genre tokens (cookie-monster growls, distorted guitars) for purposes far from that forehead-punching we all love so much. This isn't the studded-leather of an Iron Maiden B-movie or the booze-and-blood pummel-chug of a Slayer melee. This stuff is weirdly ethereal.

Like Sleep, Isis tug at your ear with texture over virtuosity, shifting moods with negative space and gradual thematic development instead of sudden good-cop/bad-cop dynamics and glittering guitar shred. Where Sleep's distortion-pedal texture is a lead giant, however, Isis use their fancy stomp boxes to craft a a warm stratosphere of misty guitar sound that drowns listeners instead of crushing them.

This abrasive/ethereal sound (downy-soft blankets on beds of nails) and the mixed-low vocals put me in the same woozy headspace as My Bloody Valentine's Loveless and it gets even less Metal than that, fist-clenchers and teeth-grinders: The opening of "Hand of the Host" actually recalls Disintegration by The Cure. You might say that this is the sensitive art-kid metal that gets beat up by Slayer and Death but doesn't want to play Final Fantasy VII with Dragonforce. It wouldn't be terribly surprising to see Isis swapping mascara and Carl Jung essays with Tool. (Tool's Adam Jones was even nice enough to take time out from his band's latest Epic Hiatus to play guitar on Wavering Radiant. And all the Metalheads hug each other and knit scarves and swap tofu recipes.)

I've got no Metal credentials, and I'm pretty much a weepy pantywaist, but lest you think my endorsement of the new Isis record is an indie-kid dressing up to play headbanger, let me assure you that my Thrash-threshold is up to snuff. (Emperor isn't so scary once you've heard Throbbing Gristle.) I know it sounds like my affinity for this music is based on how un-Metal it is, and maybe that's partially true, but I'm not so attached to any genre that I require a test of authenticity. Who needs that black t-shirt albatross when you've got creativity like these guys? Isis are not farting around. They aren't watering down the music you love so your mom and Simon Cowell will buy, buy, buy at the iTunes machine. They just don't need to puff up their chests in a more-satanic-than-thou pissing contest. This band has written the best set of American Metal tunes since at least Lateralus, if not Master of Puppets, and they play them like it's no big deal, interacting with confident, sturdy musicianship, actually listening to each other instead of trying to outplay each other. Who needs Metal Ethos? Give us Isis.

SLEEP: Dopesmoker

2009-05-24T18:45:00.000-07:00

The image of Godzilla, plastic buildings at his foam-suit feet, is as iconic as anything in 20th Century pop culture. In the 1998 Hollywood remake the creature was redesigned into obscurity, the lumbering icon replaced with a reptilian special effect that failed to leave a single footprint on our collective memory. This version was scarier and faster, and a greater threat to the puny protagonists, but it missed the point. Nuclear allegories aside, what audiences love about Godzilla isn't terror. We love watching this chubby harbinger of destruction on his molasses rampages because he looks so COOL. It's not complicated. It appeals to our simplest tastes. Godzilla is just plain cool.

In the same way, what many of us love about Metal isn't understood by the prog-technicians of technical metal. Why is Black Sabbath's legacy so unassailable while only a few guitar store aficionados sing the praises of Dream Theater? Maybe Metal's most durable contribution to culture isn't a penchant for certain malevolent modalities, but an uncomplicated (and incredibly cool) sonic palette of oozing sludge. Maybe the rightful heirs to Black Sabbath are SunnO))) and Merzbow, not Tool and Opeth.

Sleep's Dopesmoker demonstrates that music can thrill with pure heaviness as its only virtue. They have mined Metal and chipped away everything superfluous, leaving nothing but a down-tuned 4/4, plodding incessantly with no interest in flash or pomp. This is a triumph of timbre over pitch, compositional ambitions restrained to conjure a simple, foam-suit behemoth that lumbers for about an hour. And just so we're clear, that hour is ONE SONG.

Before hearing this album, I had heard it described several times. "These guys play one song for an hour! Etc." I couldn't understand why anyone would be interested in this, but , but the fact the the descriptions were always followed by an ecstatic recommendation stuck with me, and on one of those hungry but budget-constrained hunts through Ann Arbor's Wazoo records, a used copy of Dopesmoker was enough to make me put back whatever else was in my hands. I've always been uncontrollably curious about music that strains the limits of credulity. Good or bad, anything that will make me say "I can't belive this exists" is a must-hear.

The existence of Dopesmoker isn't nearly as hard to swallow as the record's immense entertainment value. Given the pot-numbed reaction time for which Doom metal musicians are famous, an album like this is inevitable. That this album is so listenable is a testament not to the music-geek reverence for "uncompromising" music, but to the power of a sludge guitar to pummel the brain's pleasure centers. Kinda like a drug.

The chant-growl vocals, narrating a Biblical stoner fantasy with just two notes, are welcome diversions from the distortion storm, and the guitar solo at the 15-minute mark and the part just past the 40-minute mark where they turn off the distortion pedal are also highlights, but the core appeal of the album is the Earth-sized monolith of turgid guitar tone. The way Brian Eno, Flying Lotus, Tim Hecker and Krzysztof Penderecki create sound worlds, settings instead of narratives, maps rather than comic books, Sleep have made a monument, a six-stringed Marshall stack mountain.

Though Jerusalem, an earlier and apparently compromised version of this album, was arbitrarily divided into movements, Dopesmoker is one marathon track. This makes it hard to listen to in increments, (though if you approach this album as sonic wallpaper, the first twenty minutes over and over are as good as anything else here) but it also means that listening to Dopesmoker is an event. There are plenty of albums that I listen to more often than I listen to this one, but there are few albums for which I carefully set aside a predetermined amount of time. Dopesmoker is a captivating trip (and I mean that in an honest spirit of sobriety) into a blinding void of heaviness. Make sure your CD shelf is damn sturdy before you buy this.

ZOMBY: Where Were U in '92?

2009-05-09T09:48:00.000-07:00

Somehow, Zomby got it into his head that his first full-length shouldn’t continue in the direction of the fantastic string of dubstep singles that put him square in the sights of subgenre-naming vinyl-only headz worldwide, but should be a 39-minutes-and-change fireball that affectionately recreates the sound of early 1990s jungle, with slight forays into the house and techno sounds of the day. If he had asked me, I would have said “In 92? I was in elementary school, learning to write in cursive, where were you, Zomby?” and then I would have told him to just make a whole album that sounds like “Liquid Dancehall”. Zomby, being a gentleman of sound mind and impeccable taste, would no doubt have had the wisdom to ignore my advice and make this album instead.

Most of these fourteen tracks have short running times and no real beginning or end, slamming into each other in an end-to-end brick wall of beats. This may inspire fantasies about delicious full-length versions of these tracks hiding on DATs in Zomby’s closet, but the album doesn’t quite play out like the DJ mix you might expect. The lack of smooth transitions echoes track one’s title (“Fuck Mixing, Let’s Dance”) and emphasizes Zomby’s preference for straight-banging dance music over careful sonic (or vinyl) manipulation. In this music’s delirious ecstasy (pardon the pun,) you can hear a bright-eyed nostalgia for a dance music culture before LTJ Bukem and the like “elevated” jungle into the polite terrain of smoother (and more arrogantly named) “intelligent drum and bass". This is not the refined sound of soundtracks and car commercials, and the aerobics-class cheese melted into much of this music bolsters its unpretentious, raving sincerity. Sincerity; not reverence. This album never feels like devotion so much as celebration.

Plenty of artists have traded in received nostalgia for a bygone slice of pop (The Poets of Rhythm, The Darkness, The Pipettes) often with enjoyable, if not durable, results. Sometimes this is ironic pastiche and sometimes it is affectionate imitation, but either way, it smells suspiciously like an admission of defeat, as if we have reached a cultural dead end and our record-buying future holds nothing for us except reissues and star-studded tribute albums. Will there be no John Cage or Grandmaster Flash of tomorrow? Maybe I’m jumping the gun. Maybe Zomby IS the next John Cage (although I like him better as the first Zomby.) Maybe Zomby is making one last nostalgic stop before launching into the wide unknown. When the liner notes proudly proclaim that this record was made using only early 1990s gear, it’s a big flashing clue that Zomby is... not crossing, but flirting with the line between an art and a discipline.

Approaching music as a discipline is rarely a good way to get me running to the record store with my hard-earned substitute-teaching money in hand. This kind of approach gives birth to many breeds of mutant snobbery, from the theory-head sanctimony of too-smart-to-like-the-Ramones music majors to the arch-conservative, Wynton Marsalis attitude that continues to turn jazz into a dusty wax museum instead of a thriving art form. Rebel! Reject! Renounce! Be a cultural heretic, a pop-apostate! Musicians obsessed with the past are doomed to repeat it. Or imitate it. Or cover it. The lecture blurted out to kids in Pink Floyd t-shirts: “Don’t let the Keepers of Taste stagnate the airwaves! Find your own heroes!” That being said, if you’ll pardon this dispatch from the Village Green Preservation Society, maybe there is something to be said for glancing back over our shoulders, even turning around for a moment or two…

Bob Dylan’s debut album was a precedent for Zomby's. Dylan began his career with a troubadour-repertoire of traditional folk songs and one original, the Guthrie tribute “Song to Woody”. Famous as an innovative, forward-thinking pioneer (although I might dispute that reputation), Dylan started out with a record as backwards-looking as possible. His conection with this tradition grounded him, and gave him a foundation on which he could build his ragged, thin-mercury folk rock. Charles Mingus is also admired for keeping alive embers of the jazz tradition, but his other foot was always placed firmly in the avant-garde. Traditions change, and an artist can inherit them without being enslaved by them. A great musician can expose the tradition’s un-mined facets, or use that tradition as a jumping-off point or a warm-up as their unique identity is developing. Sticking close to a tradition can also be a sneering (and probably deserved) finger-in-the-face to staunch demagogues like me who think music has to innovate in order to have value.

The music on Where Were U in '92? is too much reckless fun to be judged simply as craft, but the imitation is too exact for it to not be judged as a discipline. I am sure that this album will be listened to and discussed very differently in light of Zomby's work in the future. For now, though, I can enjoy it without the burden of any context other than possibility. I’m not sure what Zomby’s intentions are, but I think he might tell us “Fuck Criticism, Let’s Dance.”

KRAFTWERK: Minimum-Maximum

2009-03-20T08:21:00.000-07:00

If you’re interested in exploring Kraftwerk primarily for their historical importance, you’ll want to hear their classic 1974-1981 studio albums: Autobahn, Radio-Activity, Trans-Europe Express, The Man-Machine and Computer World (and if you can, snag a copy of the apocryphal 1973 gem Ralf & Florian.) If your primary interest in Hütter, Schneider and The Other Two Guys is less academic and more musical, however, Minimum-Maximum, a compilation of live performances form a 2004 world tour, is a great overview, and as close as it comes to one-stop-shopping for Kraftwerk.

I don’t know how much of this music is actually “live” in the sense that it is performed in real-time by human beings, but that’s beside the point. Or maybe it IS the point. I know that audiences at this show were treated to an audio-visual experience masterminded by four identically-dressed Germans standing at four identical podiums, each with a laptop – the logical update from the punch-card synths used to make the famous studio versions of these songs – and I doubt that much of the show is improvised, even if these synched computers are under the complete control of their operators. It’s possible that the members of Kraftwerk would tell you that the opposite is true, that the operators are controlled by the machines. This is the group, after all, who designed robots to take their place during concerts. Kraftwerk, since the close of the group’s infancy (that is, since the release of Autobahn), has always been primarily conceptual, and their meditations on the union of machine and man have provided the framework for and drive behind all of the actual beats and melodies. The focus may be bicycles, spacelabs, pocket calculators or laptops, but the sentiment remains positive, embracing rather than retreating from this cybernetic coupling.

With the fresh timbres of more contemporary equipment, the close kinship between the music of Kraftwerk and Ralf and Florian’s Detroit lovechild is more apparent than ever – not that anyone needed a reminder that techno was born at some imaginary intersection of Cass Avenue and the Autobahn. The fact that bedroom producers from Belleville, growing up so close to George Clinton country, heard the funk in THIS is one of those electrifying miracles of modern music. Personally, I originally didn’t feel this music luring my hips into any kind of movement, much less the endless bodily hedonism of a warehouse dancefloor. In fact, while working at a Michigan video store one summer, I began to notice that the exploratory Kraftwerk binge I’d been on (I was working backwards from Aphex Twin, you see,) had rubbed off on me considerably by leaving me in a state of comfortable emotional numbness, speaking in short, efficient sentences and moving with slight, controlled motions. (As impressionable as I apparently was that summer, it’s a good thing I was listening to Kraftwerk and not NWA.) Subsequent exposure to techno, however, particularly that of the Derrick May variety, has opened my eyes to the funk, no matter how rigid and asexual, that thumps like clockwork in the Man-Machine’s chest cavity.

As for the emotional numbness, that view of Kraftwerk was deflated by a rush back to Trans-Europe Express after a classmate in college told me that “Some of Kraftwerk’s music is sooo sad…” The melancholy is there, but like the funk, you have to look for it, for that steel and wires heart that looks like gears in a watch.

DAVID AXELROD: Seriously Deep

2009-02-18T03:25:00.000-08:00

David Axelrod’s Seriously Deep has obtained a reputation as a Holy Grail for crate-diggers. Long out of print and filled with breaks and beats that scream “Sample me!” it is exactly the kind of hidden treasure that aspiring hip-hop producers would go nuts for. Much of Axelrod’s current notoriety, in fact, stems from the frequent use of Axelrod samples in some rather noteworthy hip-hop productions. (For instance, fans of DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… are advised to seek out Axelrod’s wonderful Songs of Experience to hear a familiar piano line.)

Listening to a David Axelrod album, it’s easy to see why he’s sampled so much; his production gives everything a full (but not over-polished) sound, and he lets his compositions stretch out and develop, which means a lot of loop-able stretches of just drums or just drums and bass, particularly on this album. “Easy to sample” does not necessarily translate to “Fun to listen to,” but there’s another quality to Axelrod’s music that makes him appealing to sampling and non-sampling listeners alike: his penchant for evocative, cinematic grooves.

On Seriously Deep, Axelrod’s haunting string arrangements take a backseat, leaving the emphasis on Rhodes piano, syncopated clavinet, saxophone and, above all, a lock-tight rhythm section. This album is all about low-key, simmering funk. Perhaps the direction taken here is partially due to the fact that Axelrod, unusually for him, didn’t produce this album himself, leaving those duties to Jimmy Bowen and Cannonball Adderley, (Axelrod had produced several records for Adderly before this album was made), and is given a “Composed, Arranged and Conducted by” credit. The fact that anyone, particularly someone who is not also playing an instrument, is credited with “composing” gives you an idea of what this like. It’s funky jazz fusion, not too far removed from Headhunters-era Herbie Hancock, but with more structure than is usually heard in this kind of thing. The musicians don’t have room to noodle, and use their limited soloing space efficiently.

Axelrod doesn’t offer flowery melodic lines here, and often the other instruments seem like they’re just the icing on a great big drum cake, something to fill in the sonic empty space around the drums and percussion played by Ndugu and Mailto Correa, respectively. Frequently, everything else drops out, leaving just naked drums. The second-in-command seat is occupied by Jim Hughhart’s rubbery, assured (read: bad-ass) bass-playing.

Typically, jazz-funk isn’t focused on creating a setting or atmosphere, evoking, if anything, a sun-warmed Detroit sidewalk or a stoned house party. Even when working in a typically earth-bound mileu like this, however, the perennially cinematic Axelrod can’t help blasting into space; not the cartoon galaxy of Parliament, but a spooky, extra-terrestrial slow-drive. This record, album-closer “Reverie” in particular, takes its pimped-out groove to all kind of mysterious and seductive places. Occasionally, some dated synth-tones threaten to break the spell, but after a few listens you don’t mind.

This album is now readily available, thanks to the fine folks at Dusty Groove America, who reissued it in 2008. It appears to have been mastered directly from a mint-condition vinyl copy, and while there is a very brief dropout in the left channel during track two, and a tiny bit of static during track six, the sound is otherwise terrific; warm, clear and unhindered by the compression and questionable EQ-tinkering that often plagues digital remastering. It's a more-than-welcome release.

THE DILLARDS: Wheatstraw Suite

2008-09-28T14:13:00.000-07:00

Having made a name for themselves with guest appearances on The Andy Griffith Show, The Dillards, known primarily as a bluegrass group, released this half-hour opus in 1968. While bluegrass is the key ingredient in Wheatstraw Suite, the record is augmented with Byrds-style folk-rock and Nashville country music. Every song is breezy and short, with not a wasted note in sight. The songs are a mix of covers and originals, but they all fit cohesively with each other without sounding identical. A few of them feature orchestral arrangements, but low in the mix, just adding a touch of depth while leaving room for the dobro, mandolin, pedal steel and Herb Pedersen’s rollicking banjo, which is the most ear-catching thing going on in many of these songs, (particularly the rolling and tumbling instrumental “Bend the Strings”.)

Pedersen, who sings lead vocals on five of the thirteen songs included here, replaced Doug Dillard, who left the group shortly before the recording of this album (he went on to be the “Dillard” in Dillard and Clark). When Pedersen isn’t singing lead in his broad country tenor, Rodney Dillard takes over with his lithe, reedy voice, turning in a particularly affecting performance on “Lemon Chimes”. Both singers are great, and even better when the whole group is harmonizing, as on their cover of Tim Hardin’s “Reason to Believe” or The Beatles’ “I’ve Just Seen a Face”, (which is a great choice for this group, since it was practically a bluegrass tune to begin with).

While there isn’t a weak song in the bunch, it’s a good thing they saved “She Sang Hymns Out of Tune” for last, because I don’t think any song would want to be the song that has to follow something so beautiful and heart-breaking. Written by Jesse Kincaid, it’s a gentle waltz about a sad and strange woman and her lonely death. The Dillards allow it to build from verse to verse, adding more layers of sound as they do, wringing an unbelievable amount of emotion from such a simple song, never resorting to histrionic melodrama. These lyrics are particularly affecting, though it would hard to explain why:

She lived in a sorcerer’s room
she pounded the table and brandished a broom
she turned 10,000 when she touched the moon

MADVILLAIN: Madvillainy 2: The Madlib Remix

2008-09-17T08:32:00.000-07:00

Madvillainy was a perfect meeting of the minds: Not only were Madlib and DOOM both contributing work that ranks among the best they’ve done to date, but they proved to be an impeccable pairing. This might not be a surprise, as each man’s affinity for developing a new conceptual alter-ego for just about every project is matched only by their shared propensity for smoking marijuana. What the Madvillain project proved, however, was how parallel they are musically, particularly in how comfortable each man is with an unpolished, rhythmic looseness. Usually eschewing computers for manually-controlled samplers, they both employ a production style miles away from the pro-tools beatmapping and rigid drum-machines of slick aristo-rap. (For reference, see DOOM’s series of Special Herbs releases and Madlib’s Beat Konducta series.) Their rapping is similar as well: DOOM uses irregular meters and rhyme schemes, hovering around the beat with an Ornette Coleman flow that refuses to be tied too closely to the ones and twos. Madlib, as the helium-voiced rap cartoon Quasimoto, mumbles his lyrics in short, irregular spurts.

As musically kindred as they are, and even though I think Madlib is the better producer and DOOM is the better rapper, I’d love to see a record that switches their roles, backing baked Quasimoto raps with DOOM’s Metal Fingers production.

That would have been an interesting approach to the long- (and anxiously-) awaited follow-up to their sole album-length collaboration, but what we got instead was a Madlib remix of the first record. It may not be fair to think of this as the proper follow-up; maybe Madvillain 1 ½ would have been a better title, but DOOM’s increasingly erratic behavior/chicanery doesn’t bode well for a return the prolific release schedule one enjoyed by fans of the metal-faced villain, so it may be quite some time before we get completely new Madvillain music.

So what we have here is 51 minutes (that’s a longer running-time than the original) of hallucinatory sonic weirdness, the bulk of which is made up of DOOM’s vocals from the original Madvillainy (plus Madvillain’s non-album cut “Monkey Suite” and one vocal from DOOM’s collaboration with Danger Mouse) set to all new Madlib beats. In between, there’s more non-sequiter audio-collage than usual, even for a Madlib production. Production-wise, this resembles Quasimoto’s Unseen more closely than any other Madlib Invasion.

The charge that DOOM’s rapping is too disassociated from the accompanying beats, (a charge I myself made when I first heard him, before I warmed up to his approach,) is, paradoxically, refuted by the disassociation between the vocals and the beats on many of the tracks here, as compared with their counterparts on the original album. In their original context, these vocals were nestled into the music with an uncanny, psychedelic energy, correlating to Madlib’s samples in unconventional, but brilliant ways. Here, however, they sound detached. Maybe (if you don’t mind me acknowledging my own subjectivity), this is in part because I know how this album was made, with vocals ripped from their original setting with tempos stretched to match new instrumentation, but even a blind listen-test (for which finding a guinea pig is probably impossible, because anyone who’s on board with DOOM’s loose-rhythm flow has probably heard the original album) would reveal an awkward incongruity.

Madlib is an excellent producer, (my favorite in hip-hop) and one would think he’d be able to overcome obstacles like these. Maybe it’s me; maybe my affinity and familiarity with the original makes me too loyal to it, too unwilling to accept a redux. (Another subjectivity alert!) For example, “Borrowed Time” replaces the “Accordian” beat with an ominous airiness that I would love under other circumstances, but when I hear the lyrics, it’s hard not to miss the original production. If these instrumentals had new vocals from DOOM, I think I would like this almost as much as the first Madvillain release, maybe more, depending on the quality of DOOM’s contribution.

Some moments still work. “Invasion (Interlude)”, a 90-second instrumental, would have fit right in on Beat Konducta Vol. 1. Perhaps owing more to the shortcomings of the original, “Drainos” is a success, repurposing DOOM’s regrettable singing from “Rainbows“ and layers it over a less tonal backdrop, actually improving on the original track. “Running Around With Another” avoids sounding like a remix, and would have been a highlight on the original.

The original Madvillainy was a grower, so maybe in time I’ll like this more. As it stands, I think it’s a good, but not great follow-up.

HEATWAVE: Central Heating

2008-09-13T09:32:00.000-07:00

Heatwave’s Rod Temperton is probably best known for having written a few songs for Michael Jackson, including the title track from Thriller, a song you are required to like if we are to co-exist peacefully. Heatwave, the group he put together with brothers Johnnie and Keith Wilder in the mid-1970s, made five albums between 1976 and 1982. You might know their 1976 ballad “Always and Forever”.

Central Heating is their sophomore LP, and it’s a succulent slab of smooth groove. This is a slicker brand of funk than the gritty, James Brown-style 60s funk, and a less loony brand than His Eminence George Clinton and his disciples. This lies somewhere in the ballpark of Kool and the Gang or Earth, Wind and Fire; shoulder-shuffling, Soul Train-style, feel-good music.

The album opens with a “message for the nation” about dancing and getting funky and that sort of business. It’s exactly the kind of platform I support, and the kind we’re just not hearing enough of in this contentious election season. The band warns against the total bummer of being one of those “Party Poops”, and we should all heed their advice. Hardships are acknowledged on this record, like the rent and welfare woes described on “Send out for Sunshine” but Heatwave invites you to forget all about them and just get down. The album standout “The Groove Line” invites you to “Leave your worries behind” and it makes a musical argument convincing enough to win over even the most cynical person you know. Give it a try! “The Groove Line” funks harder than anything else here; after a broiling intro, spiky rhythm guitars set up lead vocalist Keith Wilder’s snappy commands: “Pack your grip! Taking you on a trip!”

Much of the album consists of ballads, and they're just as excellent as their dancing cousins. "Mind Blowing Decisions” is the best of the slow-burners here. With a gorgeous sway and a counter-melody to die for (“Must decide how to go…”) this will find its way onto your after-dark playlist.

METAFORM: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

2008-09-11T09:40:00.000-07:00

One afternoon last year I was listening to a local rock radio station and the disc jockey, after playing Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks”, mused about having heard those drums sampled countless times. “And we believe,” he said, apparently speaking on behalf of the middle-aged, ponytail-wearing Guitar Center employees that listen to his program “that sampling is not music.” He called it “stealing.”

It’s only fair to mention that “When the Levee Breaks” is one of the few times Led Zeppelin actually gave credit to the source of their own theft; the album jacket credits Memphis Minnie, the actual writer of the song, as a co-author, along with Page and Plant, who did no more to change it than the countless other performers who have interpolated it. Led Zeppelin were notorious plagiarizers: Jimmy Page didn’t write “Dazed and Confused”, and Led Zeppelin were not, contrary to the writing credit, the authors of “In My time of Dying.” Listen to the song “Taurus” by the band Spirit (a great band, by the way,) and then listen to “Stairway to Heaven”, released two years later. Yeah, you could call that plagiarism. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

There’s a quote often attributed to T.S. Eliot: “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” Picasso is credited with saying “Mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal.” Stravinsky is quoted as saying “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.” Obviously, someone was stealing from someone, which, given the nature of the quote, is apropos. T.S. Eliot went on to say “The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.”

Creating art through the amalgamation of appropriated sources is not new; even the book of Genesis is made up of various myths, recast to suit ancient Judaism. The American folk tradition includes countless songs of ambiguous origin, many assembled from parts of other songs. “Well I woke up this morning,” the Stagger Lee story, and the 12-bar blues chord progression must have started somewhere, but we have come to enjoy them as a communal pool of raw materials available to anyone wishing to create music.

Now that our interaction with music is so dominated by recorded music, it’s only natural that recordings join that communal pool. The Amen Break, for example, is like a modern version of the 12-bar blues progression. (See this great short film on the break's significance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac) While legal ideas about copyright and intellectual property interfere from time to time, the art of sampling has thrived and allowed for some of the most creative popular music made since the late 1970s. In fact, without sampling, Hip-Hop and Drum and Bass music wouldn’t exist. Thus, the world would be 30% more boring.

Metaform’s Standing on the Shoulders of Giants wouldn’t exist either, and my summer would have been 30% more boring. I spent practically all summer with a pair of headphones pumping this music into my brain and I’m still not tired of it.

This isn’t a beat-tape or a feature-length mashup (not that there’s anything wrong with either of those things,) this is a fully formed, original album, probably the best of its kind since Endtroducing.

Metaform doesn’t just stack beat-mapped loops on top of each other; he composes songs from raw materials samples from other records, unopposed to recording his own instrumentation to sweeten the deal. This album blazes through 19 tracks in 45 minutes and there’s never a dull moment. Where some producers will drag one idea out past its limit, Metaform knows exactly when to change course, and this album is perfectly paced and constructed to create a “whole of feeling”. Laid back, soulful and shifting carefully between dusky moodiness and bright cheerfulness, this music makes it clear that it didn’t take Metaform five years to make it because he’s lazy, but because his attention to detail is impeccable.

The drums sometimes skitter and sometimes bob, horns and guitars swell and disappear, synths percolate and a number of sonic textures drop in; vibraphones (“Lonely Boy”), flutes (“Lamenting Break”) and a fantastic saxophone solo (“Urban Velvet”).

Metaform makes good use of the human voice, as well. The melancholic “Sunday” layers a wispy vocal snippet over twinkling keys and muscular drums to great effect, and the Radiator Lady from Eraserhead makes an unexpected cameo during “Heaven Can Wait”.

A lot of the samples used on this record have been used before; David Axelrod, James Brown, the “Apache” break. In the blog on his Myspace, Metaform explains “we are all digging in the same crates… A photographer can take a picture of the Pyramids in Egypt, which have been photographed millions of times, but their picture will still be totally unique. There are many factors to consider: experience, lens, angle, and so on. The picture will be unique.” T.S Eliot would be proud.

ORNETTE COLEMAN: The Shape of Jazz to Come

2008-08-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

This is unpredictable, organic stuff with all sorts of gnarled twists and turns and gorgeous solos. Typically, the pieces on this record consist of a brief melody, then a lot of improvisation, then a reprise of that melody; a pretty familiar way to structure jazz. What was innovative (though probably not unprecedented) about The Shape of Jazz to Come when it was first released was the absence of chord structures. Ornette Coleman’s quartet has no piano or guitar; just Ornette on alto sax, Don Cherry on trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Billy Higgins on the drums. All four are dynamic, expressive musicians and the music they make together is incredibly engaging thanks to the ramshackle spontaneity Ornette allows them with his anything-goes approach to leading a combo. Unlike the tyrannical perfectionism of Charles “Fisticuffs” Mingus, Ornette allowed his sidemen to play things as they pleased in a democratic collaboration. While certain things are sacrificed, like Mingus’ compositional genius and the immaculate accuracy of his groups, what we get in exchange makes this one of the most invigorating records of its era, an era brimming with invigorating records.

Don Cherry’s trumpet flutters like some so-far undiscovered jazz sprite from another dimension or swings like headturning dancefloor hips. Higgins is an ideal anchor, energetic and playful. Haden’s dexterous bass is so snappy that not only does he make it sound easy, he’ll leave you convinced that without it, Western civilization would implode for lack of bottom. And Coleman…oh man.

Ornette Coleman plays the saxophone like Jimi Hendrix plays the guitar. Or, to correct the chronology of that statement, Jimi Hendrix plays the guitar like Ornette Coleman plays the saxophone. He plays saxophone the way I imagine saxaphones being played in my wildest dreams. He plays his horn the way people talk, he makes it human; sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming, and sometimes not making a whole lot of sense. His clear, bright tone is supposedly thanks to a plastic sax (though I suspect it has as much to do with the user as it does with the hardware), melodic lines sway and snarl with a snaky stride, and his splintering, seizuring solos flicker and dance like a good campfire. Listen to that boppy solo on “Congeniality”! Listen to those acrobatic bursts of sound! It’s the kind of moment that makes you want to root him on with a hearty “Go cat, go!”

This jubilant sax is located in the left channel of the stereo mix, with the trumpet in the right and the rhythm section steadily centered. While some may see the sax/trumpet interaction as sloppy, particularly when they play unison rhythms, I like that Coleman’s sax and Cherry’s trumpet retain their own identities even when playing together. They don’t sound like two notes on the same keyboard. They slither over their rhythm section as two unmistakable singularities in a tenuous tandem. These guys don’t play it safe, and the fact that they can sound like they’re going to fall apart at any moment gives the proceedings a sense of tension. If you’re into rock music, think of this quartet as the jazz equivalent of The Who in their prime: four musicians seemingly determined to make their part interesting enough to stand on its own, while somehow, against all odds and logic, fitting together as an ensemble.

Every one of these songs has something great to distinguish it from the others, even beyond their memorable, unique melodies. There are some nice details here. “Focus on Sanity” has a great bit at the start that sounds like the saxophone is laughing, (that horn is like a human being!) and then there’s a fantastic upright bass solo before the performance climaxes with a wonderful, understated drum solo. (Everyone gets a chance to shine on this most democratic of records.) The opening few minutes of “Peace” alternate bowed bass with bursts of winds, with the drums completely dropping out or playing in unison with the winds from time to time. It’s really, really neat. And don’t even try to tell me that Haden and Higgins don’t get your toes a-tappin’ during “Chronology”.

Like all the best jazz groups, The Ornette Coleman Quartet doesn't simply conjure up images of musicians in a studio and musings on structures and scales. They invoke real emotion. Give a listen to this album’s opening number “Lonely Woman”, with its quiet locomotive cymbals and its seductive melody swelling and swaying like moonlight and ruby red lips. That saxophone cries and cries, not like a saxophone, but like a wounded lover.

RADIOHEAD: Kid A

2008-06-26T09:06:00.000-07:00

The Great Big Canon of Important Records is a silly idea, and of course I don’t buy into it much, but whenever someone makes a Great Big List of the Best Albums Ever I have to sheepishly admit that I own most of the top 100. Like it or not, my exploration of popular music began with the canon.

The first album I ever listened to in its entirety was the “White Album” and the next three or four were Beatles albums as well. The Joshua Tree, Dark Side of the Moon, IV, London Calling, Blood on the Tracks and Who’s Next were all albums that impacted my young brain in the early days of my pop-obsession, and Fear of a Black Planet, Daydream Nation, A Love Supreme, Ziggy Stardust, There’s a Riot Going On and Doolittle have all become favorites since then. Though many of my favorite records are perennially canonized, I can’t help it if I recoil from those lists of albums that all start to look the same. You know… like this list in this paragraph.

If there is one thing I can say in favor of the canon, it’s that it has the potential to make a specific record a communal experience, a work that (albeit only in hindsight) provides a definitive view into a specific zeitgeist. When my mother was in college, everyone knew Tapestry by heart. People have, to my shock and amazement, excused the behavior of a pedophile because “Thriller is SO GOOD!”.

Peeking into zeitgeists isn’t why I listen to music, though. I love Are You Experienced but couldn’t care less what people were doing at Woodstock. For the most part, the canon makes it hard to approach a recording with open ears, unfettered by expectation and unthreatened by that guilty “What-am-I-missing?” feeling I got when I first heard Pet Sounds.

When I was growing up, listening to Abbey Road, for example, I would try to imagine what it was like for people hearing it upon its initial release. I would feel a twinge of jealousy, and a dull regret that I’d never have the experience of hearing an album like that before it was tainted by critics, nostalgic fandom and, I suppose, canonicity. See, the cannon also teaches you that pop music’s masterpieces are already made, and will never be topped. Unless Jann Wenner says so.

I know better now, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to hear a lot of what are now my favorite albums before they were burdened by expectation. It helps that I started listening to music that was not made before my sixth birthday, music that has had less time to be dissected and worshipped. The first record that convinced me to keep up with the present was, (speaking of dissected and worshipped) Radiohead’s OK Computer. Even my first listen to that was tainted, though. It had, in only a few short months, already been canonized by the sorts of people who make big lists of albums (gulp), leaving it ravaged, analyzed and written about way more than any rock and roll record needs to be (double gulp). Hearing it for the first time (Memorial Day weekend, 1998, my uncle's basement,) was the exact moment when I decided that popular music wasn't a dead art with all possibilities exhausted, but it wasn’t a moment of discovery; the album’s achievement was already conventional wisdom.

My fist genuine moment of discovery, then, was October 3rd, 2000.

It’s hard to imagine this now, but in 2000, the prospect of a new Radiohead album inspired curiosity more than rabid anticipation. It wasn’t something we felt assured we would love. It was a follow-up to an album we loved, but plenty of great albums have been succeeded by duds. (Ok everyone; stop glaring at the Stone Roses.) Some of my excitement probably had to do with the fact that I didn’t think there was a whole lot else going on in popular music at the time. (I was wrong, of course; 2000 was also the year that brought us Dopethrone, Deltron 3030 and The Unseen.)

My tradition of buying Radiohead albums on the day of release began when my mother drove me to Best Buy after school to get Kid A. I remember not wanting to listen to it in the car because I wanted to hear it the way I liked to hear Pink Floyd albums: from start to finish, uninterrupted. When we got home I sat in the basement, by lamplight, and did just that. I was transfixed.

Kid A is like an encyclopedia of the music people discover when they graduate from “someone who likes music” to “music geek.” Free jazz (“The National Anthem”), ambient music (“Treefingers”), “experimental” electronic music (the title track) and elements of modern classical, dub and Krautrock melt together in a way that isn’t innovative so much as it is well-integrated. Of course, in 2000 I didn’t know what any of those things were, but even after this record was exposed to me as a stew of influences, I still love it, which is a testament to the ingenious creativity and the quality of the songs.

At the record's very beginning, the 10/4 keyboard pulse of “Everything in It's Right Place” sucks you into embryonic hallucinations and uses Thom Yorke's urgent and feeble vocals to create a neck-twisting intensity without relying on guitars or drums. It's an odd and beautiful song, pressing out of some sonic womb somewhere, and I distinctly remember being bewildered and confused and completely engrossed when I first heard it. The title track follows, much less repetitive and all the more confusing because of its unusual structure and incomprehensible robotic vocals. While live performances of this song would bring out an anthemic, yearning quality, the studio version does a lot to cement this album’s climate: If OK Computer was a war with technology, then the sound of Kid A must mean that technology won. The neo-luddite militia armed with guitars is gone, and (some years after it happened to Kraftwerk), the Man-Machine has taken over. The alienating neon metropolis of OK Computerhas been replaced with a ruined, claustrophobic atmosphere and songs that, rather than raging against the (literal) machine, slump down in defeated melancholy.

“Treefingers” bored me at first. I kept waiting for something to happen and when it didn’t I felt cheated; down to just nine real songs, bummer. Of course, at the time I hadn't heard of ambient music, and if I had, I would have thought it was all boring and stupid (I don't feel that way now, of course…) “Treefingers” is important though. The impeccable construction and sequencing of this album depends on every track being right where it is- everything in its right place, y'might say. Kid A calms down at just the right moments (the dissonant horn torture of “The National Anthem” giving way to the swaying strum of “How to Disappear Completely”) and picks up again at just the right moments (“Treefingers” followed by the record's most straightforward rock song, “Optimistic”.) When the dense, polyrhythmic “In Limbo” is followed by the lone, untangled drum machine of “Idioteque”, Kid A officially becomes the textbook on how to sequence an album.

“Idioteque” is such a brilliantly simple song it’s a wonder that no one wrote it before. An unrelenting beat is joined by a simple motif that could be a minor-key variation of the Simpsons theme (Psssst: It’s a Paul Lansky sample.) The various vocal parts bleed together and the simple, sorrowful melody becomes more and more panicked and apocalyptic: "Women and children first!" It’s the most chilling moment in a repertoire filled with chilling moments.

And how else could it end but with a dirge? “Motion Picture Soundtrack” is perhaps the most beautiful ode to depression ever penned. The harps and soprano voices (real or synthesized, I can't tell) give the impression of floating through those pearly gates, and Thom promises "I will see you in the next life." We started with something vaguely resembling birth, so it's fitting to end with death.

Was this really a genuine moment of discovery? Not quite; everyone and their cousin was geeked for this record. That’s a good thing. Kid A is so good I want everyone I know to hear it at least once.

Teenagers a decade from now will listen to this album and peek into that Y2K zeitgeist, but I’m going to assume that peeking into zeitgeists won’t be why they listen to music, either. I hope I’m not contributing to the analysis and dissection that will hinder their honest enjoyment of this record, but luckily, it’s good enough to withstand even the most rabid fanboy ravings.

FLEET FOXES: Fleet Foxes

2008-06-11T06:45:00.000-07:00

An essay in the liner notes to the self-titled debut from Fleet Foxes recalls the disappointment felt upon discovering photographs that overlap vivid memories, and the uncertainty that those memories were born independent of the photos. Making folk music immediately invites accusations of simulacra, charges that the music in question is a photograph and not an authentic memory. This leads to a lot of desperate appropriation and pastiche. Certainly appropriation is a part of the folk tradition, but it’s easier to imitate that tradition than to stand inside of it. Because so many of the melodies and chords in American folk are similar or identical, (dig the Delta blues for an example) the battle to make moving folk music is won or lost in the performance. A great performer posses a certain quality that I’m hesitant to label “authenticity” (bad memories of East vs. West gangta rap), but which relies on emotiveness and charisma. The worst folk performers change their diction and accent to imitate Americana stereotypes. The best folk performers just ARE. Doesn’t even matter what they are, most of the time, so long as they ARE.

Take this band, for example. Rather than romanticize and imitate music and song rooted in America’s past, the Fleet Foxes inhabit it themselves. They do so quite vividly, in fact, and rising above the irony or pastiche that so often accompanies “folk music” they don’t lean on someone else’s imagery; not Faulkner’s, not Leadbelly’s and not Dylan’s. This music sounds like the humid South, but hedges westward thanks to the thick, Brian Wilson-style harmonies. No fake accents or Dustbowl posturing exists. Singer Robin Pecknold’s voice is as passive as it is beautiful. He tends to lets the songs themselves do the emoting, no need for hysterical hamming. The emotiveness and charisma is there, but it is so natural you may not notice it consciously.

Fleet Foxes manage to vary their song structures without jarring convolution and their arrangements are perfectly subtle; while acoustic guitars pervade, piano, organ, mandolin and hand percussion dutifully arrive when needed. Occasionally drums and electric guitars are present, but just as often the instruments drop out, as on the closing track “Oliver James”, which leaves Pecknold’s voice almost totally exposed. He’s got a great voice, a timeless voice, an effortless voice.

There are a lot of great moments here. There’s a fantastic campfire round in “White Winter Hymnal”. The instruments fold in at the start of “He Doesn’t Know Why”, gradually elevating from heavenly to EVEN MORE heavenly. The song’s opening melody is Beatles-quality. So are the harmonies. “Your Protector” opens with mellotron flutes and a composed mourn that morphs into a gallant march. And so on. This album is a great moment from start to finish. The surprising abundance of reverb, rather than mask thinness of voice, enhances the more chilling moments on this record, pushing it into nocturnal spaces. I can imagine this band performing in a tiny white church hidden in the woods. They’d be worth the hike.

I don’t know if I love this record just yet (I only heard it for the first time about a week ago,) but an infatuation exists.

BOBBY WOMACK: Lookin' For A Love Again

2008-05-29T16:16:00.000-07:00

Most of these songs are over before they go anywhere, but they don't need to go anywhere because they're already there, and so are you when you listen to them. The problem is, once you’re there, you want to STAY there. Rather than stretching these songs out to Fela Kuti proportions, however, Bobby Womack leaves you wanting more, biting your tongue to hold back pleas of "Rewind, selector!"

Perhaps the economical running times are a symptom of Womack's crisp, confident showmanship. With a voice that recalls his old mentor Sam Cooke's whiskey/velvet croon, he is a master of both vocal restraint and freedom, never falling into the equally tempting traps of tasteless histrionics or catatonic, technical recitation. He's smooth, very smooth. As a descriptor of music, "smooth" is almost always pejorative; connoting a certain clinical slickness. Womack’s smoothness, however, is different. His singing is heartfelt, and he's giving it 100%, but in a manner that suggests giving 99% or less is something he doesn’t even know how to do. He's good, and he knows he’s good, but he doesn't need to prove anything to anyone. The second "You're Welcome, Stop on By" kicks in, every head within earshot starts nodding along. The hard funk of "Don't Let Me Down" can not be listened to sitting down. Even the most devout feminist will sing along with "Lookin' For A Love", despite the looking-for-a-maid lyrics. And if you needed further proof that Bobby Womack can cross any boundaries, look how deftly he fits into the slightly more country-western settings of "Copper Kettle" and "Point of No Return".

This is a modest masterpiece, beaming with exuberant musicianship (dig that Muscle Shoals horn section!) and a strong, memorable repertoire of songs. Why it has remained overlooked is a mystery. This deserves to be placed among the best works of Curtis Mayfield and Al Green.

BIG STAR: Third / Sister Lovers

2008-05-28T11:13:00.000-07:00

Third/Sister Lovers appeals to me as if it were a dusty diary discovered under some boxes in the musty old utility room. Listening to this record is like overhearing a private conversation. The songs play out like secrects, some of them nostalgic, some of them agonizing, all of them candid.

This album has been released in a few different configurations, but the 1992 CD reissue is, luckily, what you're most likely to find. The extra tracks appended to the now-rearranged tracklist fit in seamlessly. A haunting reading of Nat King Cole's "Nature Boy" and the more-than-adequate run-through of The Kinks' "Till the End of the Day," for example, are welcome additions.

They aren't the only covers; even in its original form, the album contained a cover of The Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale" that annihilates the forced, stilted original. This take on the song brings out a gentler element and is incredibly lovely. The "she's a femme fatale" hook becomes the indecipherable voice of some siren and Alex Chilton's vocals are fragile and pleading. Like most of the record, the arrangement feels a little uneasy; as if it were a rehearsal and the parts weren’t quite finalized. For all I know that could actually be the case, but the spontaneity that comes with that is a big part of this album’s appeal.

Perhaps as a result of the circumstances surrounding its creation (anecdotes I won’t burden you by repeating) this album is reckless, frantic and totally fearless. Alex Chilton is throwing himself into this music like most rock stars are too cool to ever do. It doesn’t feel incomplete, however.

The production is simple, with a fairly rough mix and more reverb than most would prefer. Throughout the proceeding Jody Stephens plays the drums like he’s trying to stop the kit from falling over. On "Kangaroo" and the rollicking "Kizza Me" the record actually sounds as if were in danger of coming apart at the seams, but instead of making it unfocused this gives the music it’s distinct personality; one that is anxious and pitiable. Little vocal asides ("we’re gonna get born now", "play it for me, guitarist"), that punching-the-keys piano solo in the opening track, the cowbell that appears randomly for one verse and scores of other spontaneous details crop up – the kinds of "mistakes" that are so integral to a song you can’t imagine that song without them.

A few of the tracks are familiar Big Star territory with just slight twist. "Thank You Friends" is beautiful power-pop with only sprightly strings and gospel backup vocals to distinguish it from the first two Big Star albums, as well as the sneering, sarcastic vocals that give it an extra sinister kick. "Jesus Christ" is an is as good as anything on Radio City but with lyrics that just happen, incongruously, to be about the birth of Christ (notice the Yuletide sleigh bells on the chorus.) "You Can’t Have Me" is a great 60s garage rock nugget; all slashing electric guitar chords and retro organ, still maintaining the frustrated, depressed edge that ties this album together.

The depression really kicks in on "Big Black Car." An airy, depressing meditation on self-deception, this is a total inversion of typical power-pop car songs like "Back of a Car" (from Radio City). Listen to Chilton's falsetto in the coda for an example of what people mean when they say a piece of music gives them goosebumps. "Holocaust" is the most depressing song here, to the point where it could easily be described as "harrowing." Over simple piano chords and a weeping slide guitar, an exhausted Chilton sings from some irretrievable depth: "Everybody goes, leaving those that fall behind… your mother's dead, you’re on your own… you’re a wasted face, a sad-eyed lie, a holocaust." Faint backing vocals and a cello appear, absolutely heart-wrenching. It's the emotional centerpiece of Third/Sister Lovers.

This is what the offspring of Astral Weeks and Pinkerton would sound like; dormitory singer-songwriter cries for help ("Get me out of here/I hate it here") floating over a serene soundscape that manages to be sparse and lush at the same time. And when Chilton sings "Girl if you’re listening, I’m sorry I can’t help it…" doesn’t it sound just a bit like "And God, if you’re listening"?

BURIAL: Untrue

2008-05-28T11:03:00.000-07:00

Every time I’ve tried to describe this album to one of my friends, (which, for a while there, was an almost daily activity,) I’ve compared it to that near-ache of trying to remember a song you heard only once, when you can just barely form an idea of some snippet, but it’s hazy and unanchored. That’s what this record sounds like while you’re listening to it. It’s a shadowy, nocturnal record with a wide-open, empty atmosphere. Voices drift in and out, mangled, remote and disembodied like echoes. Percussion clatters and clinks in a gangly shuffle. The murky synths are nervously aloof. One affecting moment after another sneaks up and mesmerizes, like the sad child voice that strains through "Endorphin", the dub-gospel coda to "Shell of Light", and the surprisingly upbeat final track, "Raver", which offers a light at the end of a very dark tunnel that you didn’t particularly want to leave anyway.

So far, Dubstep is a pop-bandwagon that’s been worth hopping. I can’t imagine anyone actually dancing to those Kode9 tracks that crawl like they’re dying under snailspeed Spaceape rhymes, but apparently people do that sometimes. I do know that on a pair of headphones in the middle of the night, this kind of stuff is really fresh and invigorating. Inevitably, a (sub?)genre of British dance music has to make the leap from drug-addled crowd-grinds into bedroom-recluse CD libraries, and Burial is just the man (or woman, no one knows for sure) for the job. Soul Jazz records put out a nice Dubstep compilation this year called Box of Dub, and as good as it is (it’s super-cool and highly recommended), it’s amazing how adeptly Burial’s contribution blows every other track out of the water.

One has to wonder how much of Burial’s music is meticulously designed and how much is instinctually made. Every last detail here evokes something and contributes to the big picture. Like the way the sampled vocals in the title track, recontextualized and almost incongruous, relate to each so uncannily. Or the way the snippets of lyrics in one song are often reminiscent of the snippets in another. Or the way the chords in "Homeless" seem like they’re going to resolve a certain way but never do, never losing the tension seething under the surface no matter how many times they repeat. Or like the way "Etched Headplate" threatens to develop into a full-blown pop chorus, but can’t push past a muffling layer of…something; the same something that obscures every sound here. These sounds are coated in a thin layer of mist, damp like the three-in-the-morning chill that makes you pull up your hood and zip up just a little higher. When you hear this album you feel like the rest of the world is asleep, or raptured up to dubstep heaven (St. Skream at the gates), leaving you all alone with the blurred memory of distant raves and white labels and sub-sub-bass frequencies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hI4bSCy9iE

YESTERDAY'S NEW QUINTET: Yesterday's Universe

2008-05-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

The latest installment in Madlib’s Beat Konducta series was a little disappointing, but the latest record from his jazz-hop fusion side project is one of the finest recordings yet from the exceptionally prolific producer. Yesterday’s New Quintet is a jazz combo comprised of five musicians who are all actually Otis Jackson Jr. a/k/a Madlib a/k/a DJ Rels a/k/a Quasimoto etc. Each of the five members has released an EP of one of their side-projects, and while those EPs are enjoyable, they each lean towards tedium after a while. This record, however, is an eclectic compilation of music made by a diverse group of musicians and ensembles who all just so happen to be the same guy, huddled in a basement somewhere with some instruments, turntables, and samplers.

Allegedly, there are some contributions from other people here, but the record sleeve dispenses with any personnel listings to keep the ostensible intact. Not that you would have gone scrambling for credits anyway; nowhere on this album will you hear a display of Earth-shaking chops. This is all about an endless, hazy groove that captures the FEEL of the jazz records Madlib must have grown up listening to, without recreating their technical aspects. As a spiritual cousin to post-bop and fusion, rather than a genuine entry into either genre, this album filters an out-of-order jazz encyclopedia (with funny doodles in the margins) through Madlib’s glassy-eyed enthusiasm for listening to as may records as he can get his hands on.

Like most Madlib projects, this sounds like it was tossed off in one weekend, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Nothing is over-tweaked or scrutinized. It’s loose, instinctual and free. Kind of like all my favorite jazz records.

PETER GABRIEL: Peter Gabriel III (Melt)

2008-05-28T07:36:00.000-07:00

You have to hand it to an album that sneaks up on you the way this one does. A heart beats on the verge of panic (via icy drum kit) and there's that creaking of sneaking, and he's whispering in your ear. He knows all about this stuff, opening windows and moving quietly across floors so you don't wake up. He's thankful for the thrill you give him, laying still as he carefully slides open your dresser drawers, feeling and smelling your pretty dresses. He's the first of the record's disturbed characters we meet, and he's actually the most harmless.

Peter Gabriel's third solo album, popularly called "Melt," is a paranoid, psychotic trip into the collective subconscious of perverts, criminals, obsessives, and the insane, threatening at any moment to explode in a violent melee. Each song is a tone-poem portraying a particular state of mind along a spectrum of unsettling attitudes and behavior that gradually leads to bigotry and violence. Sounds like a hit, eh?

Fortunately, Gabriel manages to execute such a concept without resorting to overblown theatrics or dreary catatonia. Every song here is memorable and sonically unique. Presentation is Peter Gabriel's strength, as he demonstrates on "Games Without Frontiers", the album's most famous song, featuring ominous synthesizers, Kate Bush's French pronunciation of the title, and nursery rhyme verses about children with dangerously familiar first names playing normal children's games- flying flags, pissing on goons in the jungle, and orchestrating genocide. This is probably the weakest song here from a melodic standpoint, but it's shortcomings as a song are made up for by its achievement as a record. The River Kwai whistling, the distant minimalist guitar, the auxiliary percussion and all the other ingredients give the track more than enough to hold your attention on repeat listens. The entire album is as detailed and textured as well as this song. Gabriel barred his percussionists Jerry Marotta, Morris Pert and Phil Collins from using cymbals, and without that particular crutch they fill up space with a series of fitting and diverse percussive textures. The contributions from the other musicians are just as important; particularly Tony Levin's Chapman Stick playing, which makes "I Don't Remember" a surprisingly funky song about amnesia.

"No Self Control" is an intriguing number: jittery marimbas and groaning guitars all unsettled and threatening to come unhinged at any second, and on top of it all Gabriel's disturbingly convincing vocal performance gets more and more desperate, or maybe more and more resigned, but either way, you wouldn't want to bump into him on your way home. "You know I hate to hurt you…but I don't know how to stop." The way Gabriel fits his voice to the situation is masterful; the whispered chanting on "Intruder", the anthemic flippancy of "Not One Of Us", and the musical acting of the record's centerpiece "Family Snapshot".

"Family Snapshot" opens with a dreamy scene of camera crews and crowds waiting for someone important, a scene set with just voice and piano. Something about "shooting into the light," enough to make you think about an amateur photographer. The intensity slowly builds when he sings "I've been waiting for this…I'm alive" and then we're off, in a heroic, marching singsong of an assassination plot, settling into the modest "I don't really hate you…" It's exceptionally unnerving, and plummets headlong to the climax as our protagonist let's "the bullet fly" and the scene changes to a hushed childhood- a neglected boy with divorcing parents and a toy gun. It's the most disturbing song in Gabriel's repertoire, spine-tingling and melodically heartbreaking.

These lyrics are exercises in minimalist narrative, particularly "Lead a Normal Life". In only six lines a patient in an institution is visited by his parents, who uncomfortably make disjointed small talk about the view, observe that their child isn't allowed to have knives, and ignore the uncomfortable implications of that by abruptly returning the conversation to the view before blurting out "We want to see you lead a normal life." A gentle piano motif sways like the branches outside the patient's window, and there's a sad sense of departure, of being left alone with those strange noises coming from somewhere… The relation between lyric and arrangement is impeccable.

It's hard to say why the album closes with "Biko", which would be much more at home on Security (featuring the song "I Have the Touch", which would be right at home on this record- they should really consider a trade.) This does seem to follow a direct line of thought from "Not One Of Us" and "Games Without Frontiers". The album's focus has expanded from lone sociopaths to entire societies of destructive behavior. While the violence in the previous vignettes was hidden, in late-night trespassing, tucked away in an institution, or in the mind of a neglected child, the murder of Stephen Biko is very, very public. "The eyes of the world are watching now," Gabriel sings in the chilling final lyric before the music fades and the chanting, community of voices is cut short by a gunshot snare.