Nonwrestler Blog

Weekly mp3 #89: Universal Robot Band - Barely Breaking Even (Club Version)

The Fader was one of several sites that linked to this tune in 2009, although it's from 1982...

Um, huge (13 minutes) 80s disco number, male vocalist, amazing keyboard licks, great beat. A massive party about being broke.

I think the original mix is actually a bit better, but this is not too far from that and still awesome.

The Universal Robot Band were active in the mid-70s, were big on the New York disco scene, and reformed for this one tune in the early 80s. The famous members were producer Greg Carmichael, keyboardist Patrick Adams and songwriter Leroy Burgess. This mix is by John Morales and is contemporary with the song's initial release.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

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Some music I liked from this year

Kind of hate how seriously end of year lists seem to get taken, but on the other hand I do like to hear people's recommendations, especially if they wouldn't give them otherwise... So...
If you're reading via Facebook you're missing shit loads, click View Original Post
For those who don't follow my music news either here or via Facebook, I put a Jet Jaguar EP out through Angry Rabbit and aged net label Monotonik put out a Malty Media EP too. I'd better mention that up-front, cos it's not like I have any budget to promote the stuff any other way. :p

Group Five (Andrew who runs Angry Rabbit with Stuart & I) just put out his third EP, Retrenching, and it's a good way to round-off the nepotistic phase of this round-up. The shift from wilfully budget / crusty breaks to a wider palette of tweaked drum machines and so on suits my tastes well, and his particular mix of summery and chilly vibes is its own thing.

Electric Wire Hustle's debut album has sustained heaps of repeat listens in the last few months. Here's the vid for 'Perception', which is not my favourite track on there at all, but is pretty indicative of the kind of territory.



Vocalist Mara TK does some pretty blatant Marvin Gaye throwbacks, which is all for the good compared to a lot of soul vocals that don't seem to really stretch beyond ... well, acid jazz type antics. My favourite track is the unabashedly sincere love song 'Again'. I can't pretend to be anything but a soft-cock. :D

Julien Dyne also released Pins & Digits, a great album of the kind of jazzy smoothness that tends to divide people. Mara TK from the above does some vox on some tracks. It's much more polished and, well, smoother than Electric Wire Hustle which is sometimes a strength and sometimes a weakness. For example, straight-up jazz closer 'Spirits' does little for me, but I love the pulsing layers of 'Falling Down' (with Parks on vox). Here's a live version of the latter, I'd recommend having that running in another window while you read or look at something else. ;)



I was really glad to hear Atom™ doing something not-so-gimmicky with Liedgut. His stuff as Senor Coconut, LB, etc. has its moments, but he has such fantastic production skills I'd been hanging out for him to get stuck into something that wasn't trying to be funny. The album has a theme running through it, basically following a strand running through German music from Romantic stuff through to Kraftwerk. It's sometimes a bit dry and hard-going - waves of white noise being pushed about through effects while robot voices intone German phrases - but it still has plenty of character.



Rad packaging too.

At the opposite end of techno, DJ Koze's Reincarnations is a decent collection of remixes from the last few years. I posted a link to a free MP3 of his remix of Matias Aguayo's 'Minimal' last year and that's still a fave, but throughout the album there are heaps of good times, lots of humour and psychedelic combinations of sounds. Pitch is as much of a plaything as rhythm - chipmunk vox vs. bending strings and squelching synths... Heaps of goodies, including some much straighter techy numbers like Heiko Voss's 'Think About You' and Lawrence's 'Rabbit Tube'.

Lastly on the albums front, Australian Lawrence English turned out my fave ambient album of the year, 'A Colour for Autumn'. Nice mix of electronic-sounding stuff and obviously acoustic sources, including wordless vocals, some woodwind and guitar. The 12k label website has some full tracks to stream.


Heaps of great singles this year.

Free ones I've already blogged about:

Kuroma - 'In New York, Everything Is Tropical (El Guincho Remix)'
Miike Snow - 'Animal'
Dãm-funk - Toeachizown

Free ones I probably will blog about:

Major Lazer - 'Cash Flow (Classixx Glass-Bottom Dub)'
Lindstrøm & Christabelle - 'Baby Can't Stop (Aeroplane Vocal Remix)'
Bot'Ox - 'Blue Steel (Azari & III Remix)'

Not supposed to be free ones:

Parallel Dance Ensemble - 'Weight Watchers'


Hot Toddy - 'I Need Love' + Morgan Geist remix of same

Joker - 'Digidesign' / 2000F & Kamata - 'You Don't Know What Love Is' = phenomenal split single!

Worst Friends - 'AG (Tom Croose Inner Space Ski Boot Remix)'

Gah, I could go on and on - enough!

Labels: music

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Weekly mp3 #88: Pierre Omaar - Neon Heatwave

Not sure why I've never posted links to mystery man Pierre Omaar and his release for Angry Rabbit, downloadable via the Internet Archive.

Hell of a Christmas gift this one, a thing of beauty. Fade in... A steady 80s disco beat accompanies very subdued electric piano chords and a fat synth bassline. The track is very low-key and often switches bits and pieces around, with the bass carrying the melody for a good chunk before a higher synthline drops in. The track keeps cruising, totally chilled out, but always flowing between riffs and melodies.

This should've been huge, at least in an underground way - should've been New Zealand's answer to Metro Area.

Ah well.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

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Weekly mp3 #87: Pellarin & Tiger Baby - One Day It's You

This is on a self-titled Pellarin EP that was released in 2004 by the net label Observatory Online.

Occasional drum machine kicks go doof, mournful chords come in, and funny noises gurgle and scratch about, speeding up and slowing down. The general vibe is super mellow. Repeating lines from a soft-voiced female singer loop about, often layered over each other. It all cruises along in that kind of vein, with the beats becoming bigger and developing further as it progresses. Hints of guitar come in towards the end.

Reminds me most of Björk's All Is Full Of Love, but if you don't like Björk's voice don't fret that the singer sounds like her.

I'm presuming this is "actually" a remix of Danish band Tiger Baby by fellow Dane Lars Pellarin. Not sure. Tigerbaby singer Pernille Pang shows up on a more recent and thoroughly awesome Pellarin-related thing, Pellarin & Lenler's 'Going Through Stages' from 2006.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

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Weekly mp3 #86: Kindness - Gee Up

Another one from RCRDLBL.

One minute 45 second vocal disco / funk track, guy sounds like he's desperately keen to be Arthur Russell. All other tracks I've heard by Kindness are way more new wavey and weird - this is definitely the straight end of what they do and I like it more for that.

Video if you want it: (Facebook users need to hit View Original Post to see this)



Kindness is/are from the UK and fairly well practiced in obfuscation, by the looks of it. Fine then.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

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Black and WTF - amazing photos

I've become semi-addicted to this Tumblr thing, Black and WTF.

Some sample pics...







It came from the Morgue.

Labels: misc time-wasting

Posted at 1:32 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #85: Zero 7 - Everything Up (Zizou) (Joker & Ginz Remix)

You can get this from NME's MP3 of the day. NME has sucked a lot for at least a decade - their editor doesn't even describe the magazine as a music mag anymore - but there are occasional goodies to be leeched from them.

This is a good example of British dance music gone all blurred lines and genre confusion... Seems like a big thing all over 2009. We start off with some funny little percussion and a distorted electric piano type melody, then a heavy slo-mo beat comes along with some double-time shoogadooga bits. A snatch of a guy singing from the original song before the hugest synth bass drops in. HUGE. Things drop in and out a lot, many layers of riffing coming and going, and big doses of tension and release. There's squelchy stuff that reminds me of Prince and a distorted synth lead that makes me think of nothing so much as the distorted scat stuff from Sly & The Family Stone's 'Don't Call Me Nigger Whitey'. It's also weird how much some of the sounds are like 90s electronica like Mouse on Mars, yet it seems like it'd have huge dancefloor crowd.

Another remix I'm rating because of the remixers, not the original artist. Zero 7 are a pretty dull downtempo outfit. Joker & Ginz are ostensibly young guys from Bristol, usually described as making "dubstep", sometimes "wonky", but in their own words, "the purple wow". Ha, best genre name ever? I basically hate dubstep (at best don't really care about it), but bods at the fringes are taking stuff in awesome directions.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

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