Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

In 1993 a left-hand keyboard exercise I came up with evolved into a full-fledged cop show theme, which I called "Theme from Gunnerman" because that sounded suitably unsubtle for a 70s cop show. I got to play it with the band (Cafe de los Muertos), which was great--I really enjoyed hearing it all fleshed out--but we never recorded it. So that was the first thing I worked on when I started playing around with ACID and VST plugins a few years ago. It was great fun scoring all the parts, adding a horn section, cheesy sound effects, drum fills, cowbell, etc. I never got it near a professional-sounding state, but you can probably tell what I was aiming for in the last mix I did before moving on to another interest:

Theme from Gunnerman

Bill Barnett

Getting back to this year's bumper crop of deep funk releases, I found that L.A.'s Breakestra has done in one song what I attempted to do in blog posts two years ago: give a worldwide overview of the deep funk scene. Many of the acts name-checked in "No Matter Where You Go" have been featured here; just click the "deep funk" tag bring them up.

09 - No matter where you go

Breakestra

Bernard Sumner is not looking so great lately, but his musical talents are undiminished, possibly even better than ever.  "Sink Or Swim" by his new band Bad Lieutenant has been lodged in my brain for a week now:

That is ten different kinds of catchy!  Sumner's reappearance set me off on a New Order listening binge, in which I was reacquainted with my favorite New Order song of all, the non-single "This Time of Night" from Low Life:

My search for bands similar to high-energy Norwegian jazz-prog-rockers Elephant9 paid off again with the discovery of Shining, another Norwegian jazz-prog-rock band with whom, not coincidentally, Elephant9 share a drummer (Torstein Lofthus).  Shining serve up less funk and more metal, calling for more headbanging and less hipshaking (and if I were a so-called "creative type" I would draw up a diagram of the human body highlighting which parts move when exposed to what types of music):

02 Shining - Grindstone - Winterreise

Shining

Then on the quiet side of the spectrum I've just found Danish trio Skyphone. I am always skeptical about "quiet" music; usually it's either ambient music in which nothing happens for long periods of time, which I find deadly boring, or it's New Age-y noodling with mild syncopation and totally safe, predictable chord changes, the aural equivalent of a Thomas Kinkade painting.  Or "painting", as it were. Skyphone avoid both pitfalls, and even manage to make glitchy percussion work for me (which I have likened in the past to insects chewing on books):

01-skyphone--cloudpanic

Skyphone

Steampunk as a literary subgenre seems to have garnered more adherents, and thus achieved more staying power, than cyberpunk ever did.  There is even a sizable body of both animated and live-action films to go along with it (not to mention that several older films were instrumental in shaping the worldview of steampunk fiction in the first place).  Now there are even steampunk bands, such as Darcy James Argue's Secret Society:

According to the official band bio:

Secret Society evokes an alternate musical history in which the dance orchestras that ruled the Swing Era never went extinct, but remained a popular and vital part of the evolving musical landscape. Adopting a steampunk-inspired attitude towards the traditional big band, Argue refashions this well-worn instrumentation into a cutting-edge ensemble.

I really like the music, which is a creatively-arranged mix of jazz and rock, but I find it more evocative of Peter Herbolzheimer's funky big band from the 70s than Victorian steam-and-brass technology.  Or take Abney Park, as close to an official band of the steampunk movement as there can be:

They've certainly got the requisite 19th-century-mad-scientist look, but in the music I hear no "steam" or "punk", just Goth Lite a la Xymox.  For my money, you can't be truly steampunk without a real steam calliope:

Add some percussive heavy machinery to that and then you might have something that lives up to the Steampunk moniker.

Elephant9's DodoVoodoo is such an exciting slab of jazz-rock fusion that I wish they had more than just the one album.  So I thought I'd try out some of those Web 2.0 music visualization and discovery tools to find similar music.  Back in 2007 I bookmarked a page that linked to several such tools; the most common approach was to create a dynamic mind-map chart based on Amazon's API.  I won't bother linking to that page, because two years on, some of the sites are gone, some don't work with the new Amazon API, some don't find Elephant9, and the ones that do give poor results or have an unusable interface.  But Last.fm, which tallies up every track that its members listen to, offered up some fruitful avenues for exploration on the Similar Artists tab, all in lowly hyperlinked text format.  And thus on the second page of Similar Artists I discovered Naikaku, "a young Tokyo based four-piece band featuring a female flautist that creates music that is both aggressive and lyrical.... [T]hey’ve been compared to bands ranging from Osanna and King Crimson to Dream Theater."  Heavy prog rock with jazz flute?  Check.  Band members perform in lab coats?  Check.  At least one band member's performance consists of eating a bowl of noodles?  Check.  Bring'em on!

That was a serendipitous find, because my next search was going to be for more jazz flautists, so bravo to Last.fm!  The most recent Naikaku album I could find is Shell from 2006; here is a track from it called "i found a deep dark hole and i am going to jump in!" (though I prefer Mrs. V.'s alternate title for it, "Spy Party!") --

03 - I found a deep dark hole and i am going to jump in!

Naikaku

It's time for another Norwegian jazz jag: from the meditative lyricism of trumpeters Mathias Eick and Nils Petter Molvaer, to the dusky vocals of Sidsel Edresen, to the energetic power fusion of Elephant9, Norway is at the forefront of (my perception of) the contemporary jazz world.  So I've been sampling lots of Norwegian jazz albums, and the one I keep returning to is Camel Walk by the Maria Kannegaard trio.  Who doesn't love Vince Guaraldi's music for the Peanuts specials?  If the Peanuts gang grew up to be sophisticated adults, then "Drifting Down the Nile" would be the perfect soundtrack for them:

01. Drifting Down The Nile

Maria Kannegaard Trio

Perhaps you remember listening to Styx's Pieces Of Eight album, scratching your head at "Aku-Aku", the mellow instrumental at the end of the album, and writing it off as filler.  But I posit that young Robin Guthrie took it as divine inspiration, forming the basis of his guitar and composition style that would come to fruition in the Cocteau Twins.  Compare "Aku-Aku" with a representative track from Blue Bell Knoll:

10 Styx - Aku Aku

Styx

Cocteau Twins_Blue Bell Knoll_08_Spooning Good Singing Gum

Cocteau Twins

Not exactly light-years apart, eh?  Of course it could just be a coincidence, but wild speculation is so much more fun.

The cool animated videos just keep on coming!  Here is "The Sunlamp Show" by The Aliens, a band formed by ex-members of the Beta Band (who I really only know from High Fidelity):

The "Sing Sang Sung" video is gorgeous, but a single track is not enough to appreciate how good the new Air album is.  So why not listen to the whole thing right here?  Air brings the music of 70s soft-porn soundtracks into the 21st century for pure dreamy delight.

Love 2

Air