5 posts tagged “electro”
Item 1: Mrs. Veneer buys Ryuichi Sakamoto's CD of solo piano pieces, BTTB. It's quite beautiful and Sakamoto mostly avoids the New Age clichés that plague so many piano CDs. Some of the pieces are obvious homages to classical works, such as "Opus," which evokes the Gymnopédies of Erik Satie:
Item 2: I learn from Wiel's Time Capsule that Mark Stewart is preparing a new album (his first of new material since 1995!) and tour, and that he has a new video out:
Connection 1: Hey, didn't Mark Stewart include that same Gymnopédie on his 1987 album? Yep, as part of the backing track for "Stranger" (a.k.a. "Stranger Than Love"):Connection 2: I've heard some of those lyrics before: "Somewhere, there is a place for us". They're from "Somewhere," from West Side Story. David Sylvian recorded a version of that for a TIAA-CREF commercial:
Connection 3: Sylvian and Sakamoto's collaborative song "Forbidden Colours," from the movie Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, is perhaps the best-known song by either of them in the US:
Connection 4: Hey, Mark Stewart did two versions of "Forbidden Colours" on that very same album! Here's the dub version:
It's all connected!
Of course everyone knows that "On the Road Again" is a blues standard made famous by Canned Heat in 1968:
But I didn't know that in the 80s; my first encounter with it was on synth band (or what in retrospect is referred to as "minimal wave") Schleimer K's debut album from 1981:
I love the stuttering kick drum in this version, you won't hear that beat anywhere else. Probably. The organ noodling by Dominique Brethes is also nice. What does it say about me that my favorite song on this album turned out to be an old blues cover? Obviously my musical tastes were not as esoteric as I once thought they were. I'm fine with that now, but it was a rather embarrassing bit of self-discovery when I finally heard the Canned Heat song for the first time. (And even that is a cover of sorts, based on a much older song by Floyd Jones, which in turn is based on an even older song. I lack the fortitude to track down the whole provenance.) This Schleimer K album is one of the many I sold during the 90s, thinking I would never listen to it again, so why keep it? Ten years later my life is completely different, and I do want to revisit the music I used to like, and thanks to Mutant Sounds and Phoenix Hairpins I can. And I still like it!
Finally, since every song reminds me of another song, I'll mention that Schleimer K singer Michael Wolfen's offhand, half-spoken vocal style was used extensively by Nik Fiend on Alien Sex Fiend's second (and best) album, Acid Bath. The atmospheric quality and midtempo beat of "Breakdown And Cry (Lay Down and Die...Goodbye) make it a good pairing with "On the Road Again"--
Some other time I'll relate how Alien Sex Fiend almost played in Adelphi, Maryland.
The Spiderman theme is fine as a jingle, but I've never thought of it as an actual cop-show theme. Until today, that is, when I found Norwegian electro duo Ugress's groovy remake:
That's definitive; I doubt you'll ever hear a better version of that song. Who are Ugress and what are they all about? Rather than trying to paraphrase I'll just paste in the statement from their MySpace page:
Ugress is mad sound professor Gisle Martens Meyer and his groovetight percussive assistant, The Igor.
With a sexy crew of guest vocalists and instrumentalists, Ugress bloom with references to the last decades of pop, film and cult culture.
Symptoms of exposure include subtle drift towards the dancefloor, uncontrollable rhythmical movements, hightened auditive pleasure and a out-of-reality experience reported as "being part of an epic film".
On stage an überhybrid mash-feist of mad professorizing, cloned musicians, steampunk instruments and multiple synchronized video projections keep your eyes, ears and consciousness glued to an escapist reality of multiple dimensions.
Belgian electro-rock band Goose put out their album Bring It On in 2006, but I'm just getting around to it. Not surprisingly, they sound like Belgian electro-rock band Soulwax, who sound like the older Belgian electro-rock band The Weathermen. Also not surprisingly, they appear to be Soulwax proteges, or buddies at least. That's okay, it's all gooood. The first track on Bring It On is "Black Gloves," which is one of two songs stuck in my head this week. I envision it as the soundtrack to a robot hot tub orgy, but video director Steve Glashier saw battling kustom dumpster-karts instead:
Now that's how to do an instrumental--keep it moving! Unfortunately they add vocals to most of the songs on the album, which kind of ruins the proto-techno effect, but it's growing on me.
Protest music can come from the unlikeliest places. German DJ and recording artist Malente came up with the supremely catchy "Open Secret" last year, which turns out to be quite a relevant protest song as well. The lyrics are clever, offering ironic support for government's lust for ever-increasing search and surveillance powers (all for our "security," of course) and culminating in the chorus of
All the things I do, the things I say
Are an open secret, that's okay
Tell me how to funk, and I'll obey
'Cause I'm an open secret anyway
That's right, if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to worry about. That's the theory. It's refreshing to find incisive political commentary in a music genre (electronic breaks) littered with lyrics like "Breakbeat suckers, we're the real motherfuckers" (Cirrus) and the like. So "big ups" to Malente, or whatever we're supposed to give people these days to show appreciation. (Kudos? Props? Two snaps up in a circle? High-five? Chest thump? "Yee-ha!"? Any ideas?) (Not that I don't like Cirrus, in spite of the idiotic lyrics. That's guilty pleasure #422 or thereabouts.)
