Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

Parker and Hawkshaw in charge

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:15:30 -0700

As promised yesterday, here are a couple tracks showing what 70s-era guitarist Alan Parker and keyboardist Alan Hawkshaw got up to in their sound library careers, not playing second banana in an also-ran wizard-prog band. I put the de Wolfe library's best-of collection, Bite Hard, on the mp3 player today, and I felt like a total badass walking home with Alan Parker and William Parrish's "The Hawk" as my personal soundtrack:

02 The Hawk - Alan Parker

Alan Parker

Not on the mp3 player but just as badass (well, maybe not quite) is Alan Hawkshaw and Brian Bennett's "Auto-Pilot" from their Themes International Music library album Synthesizer and Percussion:

06 Auto-Pilot

Alan Hawkshaw & Brian Bennett

I've put the "car chase music" tag on that one; it's a bit low-key for that but still serviceable.

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Shawn Lee and soundtrack music

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 21 May 2008 20:23:33 -0700

Shawn Lee has just put out yet another new Ping Pong Orchestra album! It's called Miles of Styles and, as the title suggests, it's got the most varied genres of any record in the series (and it's also double the length). The tunes are mostly instrumental, and Lee uses the song titles to telegraph their content: "Punjabi Lullaby," "Brazilian Bubble," "Lagos Calling," "Heist in Helsinki," etc. Here is "Italy 73"--

09 Italy 73

Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestr

Is that an homage to 1970s Italian thriller soundtrack masters Goblin? I think it's a safe bet; here's some Goblin:

15-La_via_della_droga_-_31

Goblin

So far we've had two of the four kinds of soundtrack music:

Fake library music. Real library music is marketed to film producers to use in film soundtracks. Usually the records or discs are several times more expensive than "consumer" recordings, because the price includes royalties for unlimited use in films. This is where most of the music in instructional, promotional, and documentary films comes from. Feature films with too small a budget for original music also rely on library music. Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra albums are consumer products; anyone wishing to use the music as a soundtrack must negotiate licensing fees. Thus, "fake" library music.
Real soundtrack music. Commissioned for a specific, actual film, as Goblin's track was.

The third category is real library music, such as Eddie Warner's Cops, Crooks and Spies album for library label l'Illustration Musicale, with tracks like "Detective Theme," "Prohibited Sector," "Manipulated Code," and the Goblinesque "Infernal Crime"--

A6 Infernal Crime

Eddie Warner

Finally, there is fake soundtrack music, or music composed as the soundtrack to an imaginary film. J.G. "Foetus" Thirlwell has put out three such albums under the moniker Steroid Maximus. Thirlwell's psychotic rantings can become tiring to listen to, but his Foetus backing tracks were always interesting. It turns out he really is a gifted composer and arranger, and the mostly vocal-less Steroid Maximus albums showcase that facet of his talents. I haven't put up any car chase music for quite a while, so here is Thirlwell's excellent "Chaiste" (get it? chased?) from the 2002 album Ectopia--

11 Chaiste

Steroid Maximus

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Lost 80s: A Primary Industry

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 21:48:30 -0700

Here's a first: an intersection of my 80s rarities thread with my car-chase music thread. The first song released by A Primary Industry was "Perversion" on Life at the Top, the LP companion to Abstract magazine number 4 from 1984:

A Primary Industry - Perversion

A Primary Industry

Abstract was the brainchild of Rob Deacon, who died last month in a canoeing accident at age 42 (same as me). Life at the Top was issued by Third Mind records, and introduced me to several cutting-edge bands such as Pornosect, Attrition, Bushido, Stress, and Muslimgauze. I have two other issues of Abstract, and they are equally chock-full of creamy postpunk goodness. Deacon evolved Abstract into the Sweatbox record label, which I consider one of the top five labels of the 80s. Sweatbox launched Meat Beat Manifesto, for one, and issued records by A Primary Industry, In the Nursery, Adi Newton's post-ClockDVA group The Anti Group, and probably some more that I can't think of at the moment. They were all great records in beautifully-designed sleeves.

A Primary Industry put out another song on another Abstract LP, an EP (7 Hertz), an LP (Ultramarine), and a 12' remake of Blondie's "Heart of Glass" (all on Sweatbox), then disappeared. I have only now discovered that they didn't actually disappear, the core of Paul Hammond and Ian Cooper just regrouped under a different name, Ultramarine. I never got around to checking them out in the 90s, but I will make up for that shortly.

I can never hear "Perversion" without thinking of Pigbag's signature tune, "Papa's Got a Brand New Pigbag" (1982), so here's that too:

They go together well, no? Perhaps a little too well, if you know what I mean? I think it's safe to say that API were "influenced by" Pigbag, and "Perversion" is their homage. They got away from it on their album, though.

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Cop show themes continued: The Pinker Tones

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:30:52 -0700

I look at all the online music maps, and all the retailer recommendations, but I still didn't learn about Barcelona's The Pinker Tones until I was at my neighbor's house and they were playing on his stereo (that's the boxlike device that sits on a shelf and shoots sound out into the air instead of directly into your ears). He had heard of them on the radio, of all places, although it was NPR and not an actual "music" station. Like Skeewiff, The Pinker Tones are a dynamic duo, Professor Manso and Mister Furia (and with aliases like that, who cares about their real names?); they are a little more stylistically diverse than Skeewiff (more lounge, ska, and synthpop), and much more linguistically diverse, with lyrics sung in English, Spanish, French, and German. Again like Skeewiff, they nail the cop-show theme genre, with "In Pea We Nuts" from The Million Colour Revolution:

08 - In Pea We Nuts

The Pinker Tones

"Love Tape" is the best examination of the role of the mix tape in relationships since High Fidelity:

The Pinker Tones - Love Tape

Finally, The Pinker Tones get bonus points for naming a song "Pink Freud."

The Pinker Tones MySpace page
The Pinker Tones on YouTube

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Cop show themes: Skeewiff

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:02:52 -0700

I haven't been very impressed with many online retailers' recommendation systems. Amazon, for instance, keeps suggesting to me items that I have already bought from them; it's a safe bet that I'll like it, but it's not a safe bet that I'll buy a second one. Emusic, though, delivers pretty well in that regard. What solidified my loyalty to Emusic is that it recommended Skeewiff to me. I'd never heard of them before, but in listening to the online samples I realized I had discovered kindred spirits: they make fake cop show themes! And car chase music! And funky organ jams! And breakbeats galore! Skeewiff is the London-based duo of DJs/producers/songwriters Alex Rizzo and Elliot Ireland and their circle of musical pals, releasing records and CDs through their own Jalapeno Records label. They've done a couple of explicit fake cop show themes--"Cop Show" and "Farsky and Crotch"--but I think they capture the milieu best in "Light the Fuse" from their 2006 CD Private Funktion (and the Wet Your Beak EP):

Skeewiff - Light the Fuse

Skeewiff

That veers pretty close to car-chase music too, so I've tagged it as that as well. Spy music too, to cover all the bases. Skeewiff make simply the best drum tracks around, I think the key to their sound is the liberal use of tambourine. Forget the cowbell, I want more tambourine! And how about that logo--an anthropomorphic jalapeno pepper in a sombrero, playing bongos! Is that super-cool or what? Someone at Murdoch College in Australia must like Skeewiff as much as I do, since they've used them for the soundtracks of several (well, three at least) videos on YouTube. You can listen to more Skeewiff songs on their MySpace page, including, finally, a club version of "Man of Constant Sorrow." Which reminds me of Rednex, but that's a story for another day.

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Cruisin' with the Big Organ Trio

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 20:39:41 -0700

I thought I was done with the Cruisin' thread, but I just picked up the debut album by LA's slyly-named Big Organ Trio and "Road Rage" cried out for inclusion. Mike Mangan mans the B3 here, getting an almost guitar-like sound on his leads via a wah-wah pedal. The rhythm section of Brent McConnell (drums) and Bernie Bauer (bass) is augmented on this track by Damion Corideo, who provides some Latin percussion. The song is just on the edge of cruising and almost into car-chase territory:

Big Organ Trio - Road Rage

Big Organ Trio

Yes! You know you're doing something right when Keith Emerson keeps coming up on stage to jam with you. What do they sound and look like live? Like this:

Road Rage

There are several live tracks available as free mp3's at the band website (Music page), and an entire show (March 17, 2007 at SOhO, Santa Barbara) posted in the Internet Archive.

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The chase is on!

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 03:19:23 -0700

Anyone who's spent any time looking for music that is both fast and funky has found that 1970s car-chase music, with its relentless hi-hats, wah-wah guitars, and frenetic basslines, will score every time. Then you find yourself spending hours looking through the soundtracks section in used record stores, looking for telltale track titles like "The Chase," "The Getaway," "Pursuit of the Pimpmobile," and so forth. But sometimes great car-chase music will just drop into your lap, which brings me to today's offering. As a teenage record fiend I of course spent all my limited cash on records, scouring the Rolling Stone Record Guide to get an idea of what I should be checking out, and then getting as many of my wantlist items as I could afford. I saw Atomic Rooster records a couple times, but I never actually bought one. And that's too bad, because now that I'm catching up with their first four albums (1970-72), I find that the teenage me would have liked them a lot. Founded by Crazy World of Arthur Brown keyboardist Vincent Crane after that band broke up, Atomic Rooster had plenty of heavy rock organ, and lyrics imitative of Arthur Brown's apocalyptic style, like a Pentecostal Deep Purple. The organ is the only continuity from one album to the next, as Crane was the only permanent member of the group, the other band slots changed a lot. The fourth album, Made In England, has a funkier feel to it than the first three, and a fantastic instrumental (after the false-start gospel) which is pure car-chase, "Breathless." There are a couple passages I like to call "Funkular Bells," and watch out for the guitar solo, it comes in loud:

06 - Breathless

Atomic Rooster

As with Speedometer, it's the excellent drumming that really drives this song along. Drummer Ric Parnell would turn up years later as a drummer for... Spinal Tap! From an Atomic Rooster fan page:

From "Dixie" Howard, August 2000......*Spinal Tap are a fictional band? Comprised of American comedy writers portraying British musicians who made a movie in 1984 about all the pitfalls bands go through. The ironic thing is, just about every incident in the movie actually happened to some of the bands we know and love. Ric Parnell played Ric Shrimpton the drummer (the only real musician in the band) who died only to be replaced by his twin Mick Shrimpton (who died also - combusted on stage). Very funny stuff. In 1992 they reformed and held auditions for the drumming position. 100's applied (including Mick Fleetwood & the guy from Jane's Addiction ,only a send up). But they settled on Ric & Mick's cousin, Parnell again (only to be credited as the unknown drummer courtesy of Ric Shrimpton, courtesy of Mick Shrimpton) and released a new album "Break Like The Wind"....

Vincent Crane would occasionally get together a version of Atomic Rooster for a concert or two throughout the 70s and 80s, but it all came to an end with his suicide in 1989. His widow, Jeannie Crane, maintains atomic-rooster.com in his memory.

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