Burl Veneer’s Music Blog

Ultramarine reminds me of 23 Skidoo

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:38:44 -0800

Upon discovering, just last year (fashionably late again) that A Primary Industry had morphed into Ultramarine in 1990, I got Ultramarine's first album, Folk. It's a nice extension of the softer side of API, with lots of layered reeds (from both woodwinds and accordions) loping, dubby basslines. The bassline for "Bullprong" sounded familiar...

Ultramarine - Bullprong

Ultramarine

... because it's lifted straight out of 23 Skidoo's "Language"--

23 Skidoo - Language

23 Skidoo

Granted, it's only the bassline for part of the song, and Ultramarine builds a different musical environment on top of it, and it's no more blatant than a lot of sampling that goes on, and both bands came out of England's 80s "industrial" scene, so I guess it's okay. Now that I've called out API for copying Pigbag, and Ultramarine for copying 23 Skidoo, I'm going to make an effort to find a strikingly original Ultramarine song to post here. And I've got more to say about 23 Skidoo, but it's a bit of a jumble at the moment so that will have to wait, too. Enjoy these two tracks in the meantime.

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Everyone can use a little Goose now and then

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 17:40:50 -0800

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:

Goose - Black Gloves - Dir: Steve Glashier

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.

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Another Tunewidget: Proof of Concept

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:50:18 -0800

There are so many directions I want to go in right now that I can't decide on one, so while I'm deciding I'll just plop in another Tunewidget, this one for Proof of Concept:

I like MySpace's two-way dynamic: while music fans are looking for new music to be fans of, musicians are seeking new fans. It works best if they're conscientious and send friend requests to fans who might actually like their music, based on the fans' existing friends list. That is mostly the case. So I got a friend request a while back from Proof of Concept (James Foster), and I checked out his profile and listened to his music, and I liked it. It's electronic broken-beat with a pretty good synthesized double bass, noirish sensibilities, nice counterpoints, and some tasty breakbeat passages; definitely backgroundable but interesting enough to pay attention to as well. So he's my friend on MySpace now, which means I see all the bulletins he posts, and he just posted one to say he set up a Tunewidget on Reverbnation. Since I already think the Tunewidget is just about the coolest widget going, and I already like Proof of Concept, I have no qualms about slapping it in here. There's 15-20 minutes of good music in there if you're inclined to listen.

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Here and now (but not really here)

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 17:07:04 -0700

I don't only trawl through my archives, or the dusty corners of my brain, searching for music from decades past; I also keep half an ear open for music that's happening right now. Once in a very long while something new will pin my "Oh yeah!" meter; yesterday it was discovering Italian band Morkobot (or, as they write it, MoRkObOt) on the Anthem of the Space blog (not one that I explicitly monitor, but they send updates to Totally Fuzzy, which I do). MoRkObOt operate at the intersection of prog rock, noise, and electronica, which is a combination I don't recall hearing for several years, at least. I also discovered the video embedding feature of last.fm, which allows me to present the following MoRkObOt clip:

MoRkObOt MySpace page

While I'm playing with last.fm, I might as well drop another video onto the blog. Here's a band I actually first heard on broadcast radio! Remember that? Of course it wasn't a commercial station, it was WICB, the Ithaca College radio station. The band is the Klaxons, the song I heard on the radio was "Gravity's Rainbow," the CD was a family favorite for a few weeks, and the video is for "Atlantis to Interzone":

Klaxons MySpace page

On an unrelated note, I was particularly pleased with today's necktie.

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Drums

nobody@vox.com(Burl Veneer) — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:39:51 -0700

About a year ago I finally got back around to making music, something I hadn't done for about 10-12 years. And this time I went a step further than I ever had, which was to compose all the tracks (in Noteworthy as MIDI) and arrange them in a real "studio" application, ACID Pro. I soon grew frustrated with the limitations of scoring drums in MIDI, so I tried out some drum apps and settled on Hotstepper for its flexibility, ease of arrangment, controls, and ability to accept any .wav file as a "drum." Even with the increased facility that Hotstepper gave me, my drum tracks still lacked a certain something. So I started reading about drumming techniques, and above all, listening to real live drummers. Pierre Moerlen of Gong was the first drummer to catch my ear; most recently I've been admiring Alphonse Mouzon's work on Eugene McDaniels's 1971 album Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse: not just the beats, but the fills, trills, embellishments, accents, and whatever else you call all the things he does with the drums so that no two measures are quite the same. Here's the leadoff track, "The Lord is Back":

01 The Lord is Back

Eugene McDaniels

Apart from Mouzon's drumming, the album contrasts a message of Christian love with some bitter anger against racism, warmongering, and societal inequties; in other words, problems that are still with us, for pity's sake. In that respect Horsemen is timeless. Deeper insights than mine are available at Uppity Music and Stylus Magazine.

As is always the case, my mission to "see how it's done" took on a life of its own, and I found myself listening to more and more music, collecting and cataloguing (figuratively) and not getting back to my original project. But I am embracing the fact that collecting and cataloguing is my project; I've always done it, it brings me joy, why fight it? But a side effect of getting so attuned to drummers is that now it's hard for me to listen to any music built around drum loops. They sound so sterile and lifeless. Too bad for me, most of electronica is built around drum loops. A genre I used to enjoy has become less fun than it was, with one notable exception. Tom Jenkinson, a.k.a. Squarepusher, creates amazing drum tracks (using nothing more than Roland drum machines, I understand). He must use some looping, but he manages to do something different in most measures (well, not in all his songs, but a lot of them). And if one measure of an artist's success is his employment of techniques that are specific to the medium, Jenkinson succeeds by including bits in his drum tracks that are impossible for a human drummer to play. It could be too many drums at once, or incredibly fast snare rolls, or different reverb patterns on the drums that make them sound like they're being played in different rooms, but at the same time. His drum programming skills are right up front on "Squarepusher Theme" from 1996:

01 Squarepusher Theme

Squarepusher

Jenkinson is also a wicked bassist, as you can see on the front page of the official Squarepusher website. Take that, Ivan the slap-bass-hating bear!

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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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