Murcof - Rostro

2011-02-25 by T Pot

Just having a look at some old recovered MP3s that I previously lost…..just came across this one. Its very minimal ambient techno….Murcof uses samples of Orchestral Instruments alot – this track is no exception.

This track is ‘Rostro’ from the 2005 LP Remembranza.

Amazing production skills here for sure.

Very nice tune – glad I found it !!

Buy Remembranza from Amazon

murcof.com

more tunes on youtube

Enjoy. T-pot.

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Something I have been working on recently

2010-06-10 by Hal Berstram

Brother Typewriter – Hushed Tones in The Recording Industry (edit)

This is just a little thing I was working on last month with the Burning Lodge immersion composition group.

I miss the old days of 1970s vinyl when you could get albums which had one track on each side, normally about 17 or 18 minutes long. So I did an album like that.

“Hushed tones…” starts off a bit Floyd and then goes into something a bit like the 70s Tangerine Dream. When the sequencers were primitive and didn’t like to be tuned properly. And then… who the hell knows.

At some point I might post the other “side”, titled “The Great Shortage of Songs About Shop Work”. Named in honour of an in-joke too lame to explain here.

More mad stuff as it becomes available.

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pizza hut i don't do...

2010-01-30 by The Mighty Alboy

A completely compelling song about fried chicken and chips- amazingly catchy, hilarious and completely bonkers!

:)

peep this…

Anybody for the Keith Emerson synth sound?

2010-01-21 by Hal Berstram

Like-A-Tim – It Ain’t Perfect Till It’s Perfect

Strange little track, this, primarily because it combines a minimal, D’n’B-ish techno backing with a lead synth sound from an entirely different arena – prog rock. And it was in the arenas that you were most likely to see Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP) complete with large Moog modular system – which was probably the most interesting part of the band.

The late, great John Peel described ELP as “a waste of talent and electricity” and he was certainly right. I mean, I will listen to quite a bit of prog – I’d die in the last ditch for early Yes, for example – but most ELP LPs are unlistenable pomposity. Brain Salad Surgery is the only one I can listen to for pleasure. But I can confirm that Keith Emerson’s favourite solo synth sound (which I think was included as an example patch in the Minimoog user manual?) is reproduced faithfully on this track.

“Like-A-Tim” is an alias for Timothy van Leidjen who has been doing fairly bonkers techno for many a year now (his other pseudonyms include A Bald Lunatic…) this is taken from his 2000 LP Red and Blue Boxing as well as the Rephlex records (the Aphex Twin’s label) compilation Rephlexions (which is where I found it.) The whole compilation is recommended if you like this sort of off-the-wall thing. Which I do.

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Merry Christmas Everybody

2009-12-24 by Hal Berstram

Brother Typewriter – Merry Christmas Everybody

Now, I must let it be said here that I’m no great fan of Christmas-themed songs in general. They’re either lame tracks by artists who are usually good, or super-lame tracks by artists who are usually lame. Even The Wedding Present’s “No Christmas” is weak compared to their other output.

So I decided to do a Slade cover – but not as we know it, Jim. Now I’m not gonna diss Slade as they were probably the best of the early seventies glam rockers (not difficult many of you might say, but have you managed twelve number one singles in a row, or whatever it was?) but ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ represents probably their worst track – if you had one seventies track that you could delete from the timeline and never be listened to again, it might well be that (god knows though, it’s got serious competition). Just imagine December 1973. Flared trousers, the 3 day week and then “Merry Xmas Everybody” at Number 1 – how did anybody make it through alive?

So this is unpromising material to cover and I’ll admit that with no qualms, but I have attempted to use the ‘record the words backwards and then play it forwards’ technique as pioneered by Michael J Anderson – aka “Little Man From Another Place” in Twin Peaks – and it’s worked OK. I forgot to say “So here it is… ” at the beginning (or in fact “si ti ereh os” at the end) but never mind.

Next year – similar treatment for Wizzard’s “Wish It Could Be Xmas Everyday”. Or, in fact, not.

...ydobyreve eno doog a evaH

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If you're gonna be a bear...

2009-12-17 by The Mighty Alboy

Grizzly Bear – “While You Wait For The Others”

Had to post something from these guys, as they’ve been solidly on my playlist ever since I was somewhat randomly introduced to them on Halloween, when I saw them play at the Barbican with the London Symphony Orchestra. Random happenstance caused by a longtime associate of german/greek extraction, given to equally random and happenstance appearances.

Never been a massive fan of fusion experiments, and the rock/orchestral combo didnt do a lot to change my mind, but it was interesting listening. The band drowned out the orchestra a fair bit of the time, and given there’s already a good deal of harmonies and depth to Grizzly Bear’s tracks- and the fact that their one-man-band bassist plays everything from the bass to some weird kind of sax whilst singing flawless falsetto- there wasnt a lot the orchestra could bring.

It’s like if you have a band that pretty much make a wall of sound type sound, there’s not much point in putting another wall of sound behind it. And cumulatively, the effect was likened by my associate to being spoon-fed heroin.

Anyway, it was a memorable night for various reasons, and I found myself caught on a number of their tracks over the next few days, leading to me buying their latest album Veckatimest which is pretty awesome. And also is on Warp Records a long time personal and DC label of choice.

So here is a good example- an off-kilter somewhat soul-enfused number off their latest long player. Worth checking more- and especially the video for Two Weeks, linked below…

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"Synth Britannia" tribute

2009-10-21 by Hal Berstram

The Human League – Flexi Disc

This post was inspired by the BBC4 documentary “Synth Britannia” which aired last Friday (still available on the BBC iPlayer for UK residents) – a good documentary on the late 1970s and early 1980s UK ‘synthpop’ scene. Well worth 90 minutes of your time.

Synth-”pop” started out as a bunch of geezers in industrial locations such as Sheffield, Liverpool and East London influenced by science fiction and early Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream records. The Human League were right up with the best of them. This is from the commercially unsuccessful, but more quirky and probably more interesting ‘Mark I’ line-up which featured frontman Phil Oakey plus Ian Marsh and Martyn Ware (who later became Heaven 17).

‘The Dignity of Labour’ was the Human League’s second release (1979), a 4-song instrumental ep with a picture of the first man in space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, on the front. It wasn’t really what you’d call ‘commercial’ – certainly not compared with the reasonably catchy debut single ‘Being Boiled’. In an attempt to boost sales, the group decided to include a flexidisc with the single. For the benefit of anyone under about 30, flexidiscs were one-sided flexible vinyl sheets with a music track pressed into them which could be played with a standard record player – although the quality wasn’t great (as you can hear on this track, which was included on the remaster of the League’s debut LP Reproduction as a bonus track – sounding like it’s been remastered from an original copy.

In an inspired move, the flexidisc track features the group deciding whether to have a flexidisc or not (and what to put on it). It’s a piece of self-referential humour which shows that the League could just as easily have been an alternative comedy group as an experimental pop outfit. Oakey’s line at the end is inspired:

“What we’ve got in this is not simple like everything else, and it’s not even complex… it’s MULTIPLEX. The picture of Yuri Gagarin isn’t just about the Russian space effort and it’s not just about Russian society… it’s about the individual as opposed to the group, and it’s about human frailty; no matter how big you are, you’re gonna be dead pretty soon.”

Well you can’t say fairer than that.

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Soundtrack for a bad day

2009-06-04 by Hal Berstram

Angelo Badalementi – I’m Hurt Bad

The first in (hopefully) a series of soundtrack-related postings from me over the next two weeks. This is taken from the second CD of music from the TV series Twin Peaks which was released in the US in 2007 but – like the Series 2 DVD box set – has yet to come out here. (The first Peaks CD came out in the early 1990s, closely followed by the soundtrack CD for the prequel film Fire Walk With Me.)

Although this new CD bills itself as ‘all new Season 2 music and more’, a lot of the best tracks are actually from Season 1 rather than Season 2, and “I’m Hurt Bad” is one of these – in fact it’s from the pilot episode.

For those of you that know the series, it’s the tune that Bobby Briggs puts on the jukebox in the RR diner when he leaves with Shelley Johnson. Or at least the first minute or so of the track is… it then devolves into strange ambient territory. Not a long track, but the piece was one of my favourite bits of music in the series, so it’s good to see it released at last.

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71 years and still groovin'

2009-05-24 by Hal Berstram

Holger Czukay – Persian Love

This post is as a tribute to the best gig I’ve seen in years – Holger Czukay at the Roundhouse, London on 14 May. It was the best performance I’d ever seen by an artist in the free bus pass age group, and indeed one of the best performances I’ve ever seen by an artist of any age. More details here.

My previous hero in this age group was country star Willie Nelson – largely because Willie had to record an album for the US Internal Revenue Service just because he owed so much unpaid income tax, and also he was busted for possession of mushrooms at age 73. ROCK’N’ROLL! I can’t see Willie Nelson contributing live improvisation over a Schubert string quartet at a gig, though (although I would be pleased to be proved wrong.)

I should say something about the track really… this is from Holger’s 1980 album “Movies” which was a pioneer in fusing Western dance music beats with sounds from “the East” (middle East in this case). “Cool In The Pool” from the same album is better known but I really like this one. One could call it “fusion” except that that particular category is reserved for the frenetic 1970s collision of jazz and rock… I’ve put this in the “funk/weird” category but it defies easy description.

Right, now it’s off to the car boot sale and I may post something that I find there later on (if it’s suitable. Or even better, if it’s not.)

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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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