You Have - In Your Big Shorts

2010-06-24 by Hal Berstram

Frank Sidebottom – Guess Who’s Been on Match of the Day

I was devestated by the news this week that Chris Sievey, the creator of one of the greatest ever musical performers – Frank Sidebottom – had died of cancer aged only 54.

One of the first conversations I had with Alboy was discussing Frank’s set at Reading Festival 1991 which I only saw part of I am ashamed to say, but it was wonderful. And this track used to come up a lot in casual conversation.

There have been other attempts to do great music with only a Casio keyboard and a sense of humour – John Shuttleworth, my old mate Foley from school, the later work of Steve Winwood, and others. But none of them have a papier mache head so they just can’t compete.

You’ll be sorely missed, Frank.

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Campaign tracks (4)

2010-05-05 by Hal Berstram

For the Labour Party:

BBC Sound Effects – Train Crash

And so to New Labour.

I thought long and hard about what song would best capture the momentum of the campaign. There were several strong contenders, e.g:

Wedding Present – “Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft”
Led Zeppelin – “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”
The Smiths – “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish”
New York Dolls – “Personality Crisis”

and I came very very close to putting up 10cc’s “I’m Mandy, Fly Me”(!?)

But in the end it had to be “Train Crash”. Courtesy of a 1977 BBC Sound Effects LP called “BBC Sound Effects No. 16: Disasters”.

It’s a rather sedate crash to be honest – maybe that was state of the art in ‘77. Nowadays we expect a little more bloody and guts… and I think there will be plenty of that tomorrow night when the count starts. :-(

It’s been a fun election, but I’ll be honest, it looks like it’s gonna be a real train wreck of a result. But I could be wrong about that… we’ll see.

Campaign tracks (3)

2010-05-04 by Hal Berstram

For the Liberal Democrats:

Wendy Carlos – Title Music From A Clockwork Orange

I was stuck for one to put up for the Lib Dems for some time: possible candidates included Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck In The Middle With You” (Nick Clegg would particularly like the line “clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right”) and anything by Yellow Magic Orchestra.

But the Lib Dem posters I’ve been seeing around (zilcho in my constituency of Witham, but squillions in Colchester, where they are defending the seat) look more orange than yellow. They have a very 1974 feel about them (and more to come from 1974 tomorrow, as I post up a special boot-sale find) and the seventies seems in retrospect to have been a very orange decade. Orange and Brown. (but not Gordon).

Anyway this is an absolute classic. The soundtrack album for the Stanley Kubrick movie A Clockwork Orange, banned for several decades in this country on orders from Kubrick himself after a couple of dweebs in boiler suits started beating people up (the ban has since been lifted and not a boiler suit in sight – Burberry, yes, but that’s not in the film I don’t think) was performed by Wendy Carlos on her gigantic modular Moog synth.

Carlos first came to prominence with the Switched-On Bach LP in 1968 which featured painstakingly assembled multitracked renditions of Bach chamber and small orchestra pieces on the Moog. The Clockwork Orange soundtrack mixes her renditions of pieces by Beethoven and Rossini with original compositions.

The track I’ve posted here is the title music, which is based on a theme by the English composer Purcell but sets the scene for the film perfectly – dark and moody. Overall it’s a great album, ranging from the avantgarde stylings of “Timesteps” to the ludicrous Benny-Hill style speeded up version of the “William Tell Overture”.

If only most of today’s film composers were allowed to demonstrate 1% of the ingenuity on display here.

Note that although I’ve provided a link to a reissued expanded CD version of this soundtrack, the vinyl, like all early Carlos, is not hard to come by – these were the most successful of all the “Moog” records of the “electronic easy listening” boom of the late 60s through to mid-70s (even though Carlos’s output was much more highbrow than your average easy listening fodder), and so they probably turn up in vast quantities at charity shops and car boot sales near you. I’ve sourced this off the vinyl for that authentic seventies snap, crackle and pop.

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The genesis of sampling?

2009-03-05 by Hal Berstram

John Cage and David Tudor – Variations IV (excerpt)

Now here’s an interesting piece of experimental work which could perhaps be one of the first extended uses of sampling (or indeed ‘DJ mixing’) in the recorded medium. John Cage (1912-1992) was a brilliant (and/or notorious, depending on your POV) American composer who spent most of his career exploring the role of chance processes in music. The typical Cage compositional process involved the composer setting up a system for producing music (e.g. rendering star charts as musical notes, or using the I Ching to decide performance length, number of performers, and the score each would play) and then accepting whatever came out of the process. Sometimes this made the results unlistenable to most of us (although Cage would probably have argued that the term ‘listenable/unlistenable’ was meaningless) but sometimes he happened on the most amazing sonic innovations through this technique.

“Variations IV” is a series of excerpts from an audio-visual installation at an art gallery in Los Angeles which Cage set up with friend and fellow composer David Tudor in 1964. The sound sources consisted of tape decks, radios and record players, plus some microphones inside the gallery itself and outside in the street. These were mixed and broadcast in the gallery and recorded to tape for later mixdown and release as an album.

What you’ve got here is an excerpt from the proceedings between 7pm and 8pm. Pretty random stuff, but a massive influence on later artists including Orb, Future Sound of London, Scanner etc. And a good listen in its own right – I particularly like the banjo at 1:55 or so. The poor quality of some of the vinyl reproduction (whether due to worn records, knackered styli, bad original recording, or was that just what record players sounded like back then?) adds to the charm.

More weird and wacky stuff as I get time to post it.

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crafty hols post

2008-08-19 by Kevvy K

Patti Smith – Piss Factory

Sorry folks for prolonged radio silence on my part. Between running around like a blue-arsed fly at the climate camp for more than a week and then almost immediately running off on much needed hols, I haven’t had the time to devote to the old blogarooney.

But before I did bust a move from the not so green and pleasant land, I did have the presence of mind to upload 3 songs that I have had on fairly heavy rotation of late, with the intention of blogging them proper from a crafty Iberic cyber-caff, which is I am now. The problem is with this first track, is that I hadn’t taken into account just how incongrous the song is with my current mood and surroundings.

The song – everyone’s favourite proto-punk poetess gets all free-associative and consciousness-streamy on the degrading futility of Mc-Wage Labour in the rather unpleasnt sounding Piss Factory, over very jazzy, driving piano shenanigans that somehow give me great plasure.

And me – ensconced in bourgie pleasure in a flat overlooking the beach, swimming twice a day, taking in obscene amounts of sun, reading trashy paper backs, drinking icey beers all day and being fed by two octogenarian Spanish matriarchs who manage to effortlessly dispell by attempts to induce more equitable gender roles in the kitchen.

They don’t quite go together… I can’t actually listyen to it anyway, so I hope it might have more immediate resonance or meaning to some of you out there. My hols are only for the two weeks so will be seeing you all back on the Piss Factory floor soon enough.

According to wikipedia, this was the b-side to the first single released by the Patti Smith Group and “describes the helpless anger Smith had felt while working on a factory assembly line and the salvation she discovered in the form of a shoplifted book, the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations.”

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Say it loud - I'm MOR an' I'm Proud!

2008-06-26 by Babe Rainbow

Langley Schools Music Project – Sweet Caroline

Miss Rainbow here is still in a state of excitement after seeing Neil Diamond at the O2 on Tuesday! Yep, I woz there watching Neil resplendent in a glittery black shirt struck his funky stuff. Believe me, for a man old enough for a freedom pass, he sure can strut. He had it all going on, key changes, brass section and a moving stage. 15 thousand people singing ‘I Am I said’ and ‘Forever in Blue Jeans’ was heavenly.

Now before you all start running screaming for the hills, I haven’t posted a Neil track. Its my own little tribute to him. This version of ‘Sweet Caroline’ was recorded in the 70s by a group of school kids in Canada. Their teacher got them to chose various pop songs to sing (including ‘Band on the Run’ and ‘Space Oddity’). The St Winnifred’s school choir it ain’t. The recordings are raw and sometimes out of tune but that makes them even more gorgeous and often moving. So here is their version of a Neil Diamond classic. As the man himself would say, it’s a beautiful noise….

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Seven deadly synths (6)

2008-06-23 by Kevvy K

Harry Thumann – Underwater (Mischief Brew edit)

Both a deadly synth, and from a synth-pioneer.. according to Wiki-P, (and I have to quote as I’m nowhere near the synth nerd that Hal is), “Always quick to embrace new technology, Thumann recognised the potential of MIDI and used Commodore 64 computers with MIDI cards controlling a system that evolved into a huge MIDI-controlled synthesizer installation including a plethora of synths and modules, plus a Fairlight II and Moog 3C modular system. This led to a string of albums of Rondo Veneziano, which married both acoustic instruments and synthesizers. His album Andromeda is still a favorite among synthesizer buffs.” Which, in all honesty, doesn’t mean that much to me.

This wonderful, synth-fuelled, space disco opus is from 1979 and has been cropping up a lot on a recent DJ History poll on the best dance records of all time. I think many of you all will have the OG, so I’m posting this tweaked Mischief Brew edit from a couple of years back.

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Seven deadly synths (3)

2008-06-01 by Kevvy K

Chaz Jankel – 3,000,000 Synths (Sean P edit)

No numerically-synth-themed week would be complete without this! And it’s not here because the title fits so perfectly, its a bloody great electro-funk oddity from 1981, that got this edit on a 12” last year from the wonderful Tirk retrospective of the incredibly-gifted Blockhead that I hope everyone has a copy of by now. I’m also really loving his collaboration with Laura Weymouth on the recent and excellent Compass Point compilation that strut put out.

Some other just released and very excellent news… regular and faithful readers may remember a long, long time ago I posted Rico’s wonderful reworking of DC fave I Can’t Go For That by Hall & Oates? Well its finally been pressed, and very reasonably priced and available here on the Pointless Edits label. Pleading requests for re-uppage will fall upon deaf ears… go support the label – I’m sure Hall & Oates will have already done quite nicely for themselves off this particular track.

It also includes a great, funky, psyche-rock (Rare Earth?) edit by the Hardway Bros tht you can check out on their myspace page. As seen in discerning record boxes, right now.

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Tryouts for an 80s synth-pop sound

2008-05-30 by Hal Berstram

Sparks – The Number One Song In Heaven

Kevvy K’s “7 deadly synths” series got me thinking about some of the pioneers of synth pop – and in particular the ‘synth duo’ format (strictly speaking, usually keyboard guy plus singer) which became so common in the 80s with Soft Cell, Yazoo, Pet Shop Boys, etc. Normally these bands came about because the guy with all the synths (and it usually was a guy, for some reason) couldn’t sing and so had to get a mate to do the vocals for him.

Sometimes you’d see variants of the formula: for example two synth men plus singer (early Human League), synth man plus three mates who sing badly but can play one-finger basslines (first Depeche Mode album), synth man who also sings but has to put dancer on stage as he’s too dull (Howard Jones), footballers as synth duo (Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle). But I think the blueprint for the “synth duo” format has to be Sparks, in 1979, with the Giorgio Moroder – produced “Number 1 In Heaven” album.

Sparks first came to public attention as a five-piece who enjoyed hits with an operatic take on hard pop-rock: “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For the Both Of Us” and “Amateur Hour” both went top 10 in 1974 in the UK. Following a commercial slide through the mid to late 70s, the American core of the group, brothers Russ Mael (vocals) and Ron Mael (keyboards and Hitler moustache), discarded their British sidemen (including the superbly named Dinky Diamond on drums) and went it alone. Well, not quite alone, as they got Giorgio Moroder in to produce. The result was 3 hits in 1979: “Beat the Clock”, “Tryouts for the Human Race” (great title!) and this little number.

I’m not sure whether this is the full album version – my copy of the track is from a compilation album called “This Album’s Big Enough – The Best of Sparks”. I do have the 7” somewhere but couldn’t find it – story of my life.

Anyway this sounds like 2 attempts at the same track, with a faster, more insistent version kicking in at about 3:30. I like both of ‘em, anyway. Fairly obvious this is Moroder when you listen to it.

In total, Sparks have now released 21 albums of which at least 7 are classics. They are currently playing a run of 21 dates at the Academy in Islington where they are playing their entire back catalogue, album by album. I don’t think any band with this much recorded output has ever done that before. For one thing, the rehearsal time involved must have been crazy – even though the 80s albums are mostly electronic and so probably easier to play (just press ‘start’ on the sequencer I guess.) The run climaxes with the world live premiere of their new album “Exotic Creatures of the Deep” at Shepherds Bush Empire on 13th June. And if I can get my act together I’ll probably be there.

Good luck, guys!

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Seven deadly synths (1)

2008-05-30 by Kevvy K

Robert Gørl – I Love Me

Listen up blog-slags, its synth week on Dilated Choonz. I love synths… spacey out there krautrock ones, sleazy new wavey ones, big poofy 80s pop ones… they all float my boat in a big way. I realized that its a sound I’ve been dipping into time and time again recently, and figured it might make for a nice thematic grouping on here. It’s not all quite clear in my head, and I’m hoping for contributions from my fellow bloggers, so consider the seven in the title as just a half-hearted pun rather than a quantative guarantee.

Firstly, a tune I have been loving so much of late, from Robert Gørl’s wonderful 1984 album Night Full of Tension. I love the arpeggiated synth sound, which together with the driving beat and the sleazey narcissim of the vocals (I can relate to the bits towards the end when he goes on about how much he loves his hair.. I often feel the same stepping out of my front door in the morning) makes for a very danceable and somewhat neglected classic of this sort of genre.

Gørl was of course, the less-hairy half of electro-punk pioneers Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, who might also be getting a look in over the course of this week. This album has Annie Lennox (who was apparently knobbing Robert at the time) doing great guest vocals on a number of the tracks.

Coincidentally enough, Another Night on Earth has just posted a wonderful guest mix in the Press Play series comprised of “early 80’s, synthy, left of center, New Wave made for dancing and thinking at the same time.” Well worth a punt.

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