Nonwrestler Blog

Weekly mp3 #94: Toro Y Moi - Blessa

2010-02-02T18:00:00.001+13:00

Download this absurdly sunny tune (and 3 others if you like) from RCRDLBL.

Backing vox of the drawn-out "Ahhhhh" variety start the track, half-suggesting a contented sigh as much as 60s pop. A loud burst of slide guitar drops in seemingly out of nowhere, bends completely out of shape in a way I can't even begin to do justice to, and then surges up again in a canyon-size wash of reverb. Turns out that's just the intro, and the track switches direction with a bouncy backbeat and bassline, the backing vox laying out some chords. The guy starts singing, and it's hard to say whether he's harking back to Brian Wilson or just been listening to Panda Bear or Atlas Sound doing the same. From here it's basically just a really mellow little pop song. Somewhere towards the end, everything breaks down to a shambling guitar lick and then the song gives up the ghost.

Although this is a full song, the overall feel reminds me quite a lot of the El Guincho mix of Kuroma I wrote about 40 weeks back...

Chaz Bundick is a wild enough name, so not sure why the guy goes by Toro Y Moi for his music. I was not exactly shocked to hear he's from Southern California. Am really hoping the album is as good as the best of the MP3s I've heard.

Weekly mp3 #93: Hulk - Elephant Memory

2010-01-26T18:00:00.000+13:00

The Frozen Elephants Music net label released this track on its first compilation, The Map Is Not The Territory.

Little snippets of a woman singing give way to plucked strings. A higher plucked instrument is fitfully accompanied by pizzicato bass. Is that muted brass or distant foghorns passing through? Are we lost at sea? Should I be happy about this? (Because I'm pretty stoked.) The vocal fragments come and go and the track shifts restlessly. Higher drawn out notes might be strings. Lower drawn out notes definitely are strings, and are playing something quite beautiful. Is that an old film projector left running after the end of the reel?

Irish producer Hulk evidently runs a label called Osaka. He's released some other good stuff and seems to be good. I picked up his most recent album last year via Amie Street and it's pretty good.

Corey Haim + lots of drugs

2010-01-21T11:40:00.002+13:00

I found this video pretty sincerely odd. He seems so broken. The Youtube uploader wrote this about it:

After Corey fucked himself up on tons of drugs (vicodin, valium, percodin, soma -which was the killer according to him on his THS) and was negatively plastered all over magazines he attempted to convince the public he was better by making this video. The purpose of the video was immediately defeated the minute they began taping Haim. Corey was obviously on drugs (probably his favorite combo ten valium 10 mg, 10 vicodin extra strength and 15 somas)and made a complete fool of himself, He's obviously delusional in this believing he has some musical ability.

the lucky guy is probably out swimming with dolphins and sea horses right now. He still bangs on keyboards according to his E! THS, however his ability has not improved.

If you're looking at this via Facebook you're missing an embedded video. Click "View Original Post" down the bottom.

Weekly mp3 #92: Mulatu Astatke & Menelik Wossenatchew - Fikratchin

2010-01-19T18:00:00.001+13:00

Get this from The Fader magazine.

Heavier rhythm than the tracks from the Broken Flowers soundtrack, which is surely the most famous Mulatu Astatke stuff outside Ethiopia, and this is a vocal track rather than being led by those huge modal horn lines. Classic jazz rhythm section - drums played with brushes, bass (well, guitar) and piano. There's a pretty solid backbeat there, but there's also enough craziness in the timing on both bass and drums to mess with my head whenever I pay enough attention. Mr. Wossenatchew's got a light tone and the whole thing's pretty restrained.

These guys are both from Ethiopia and this track was recorded sometime between 65 and 75. There have been some interesting interviews with Astatke online, such as on the StinkInc blog and The Quietus.

Weekly mp3 #91: Bot'Ox - Blue Steel (Azari & III Remix)

2010-01-12T18:00:00.002+13:00

XLR8R for the download.

Menacing house, basically. Those who know Get Physical stuff, it's a lot like if Booka Shade decided to turn to the dark side. Doofs along with a repeating distorted noise filling in as a bassline, some acid bits squelching about, trancey stabs that swell and fade. When the vocals from the original come in they're often distant and ringing, like she's singing through a long pipe. Flurries of handclaps add to the cold rush of the thing...

Bot'Ox are a French duo, consisting of the guys pictured in the above shot. Cosmo Vitelli is the one I knew of beforehand. They seem to have a car thing going on. On this track they have a guest singer, who I guess is the passenger in the back seat.

My heart's yearning, cos Paris is freezing.

Weekly mp3 #90: Taken By Trees - My Boys

2010-01-05T18:00:00.001+13:00

Farewell 2009. Here's something 2009-enough to close out on, and summery enough for the time of year here - nice cover of Animal Collective's 'My Girls', with one of the guys from Studio producing it and the recordings done in Pakistan. Better Propaganda gives up the goods.

Handclaps, tuned percussion and a harmonium / pump organ. Chipper guitar melodies and plucked bass sounds that makes me think of Cuban music. The singer sings in a hazy way that makes me think of a euro version of Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval. Street sounds of Pakistan can be heard at the end, but sadly it cuts off cos that flows into the next track on the album. Oh well.

The Swedish singer behind Taken By Trees is someone I'd only heard doing the Bardot-ish deadpan on Peter Bjorn & John's 'Young Folks'. Turns out she's done three albums under this name, as well as fronting a band called The Concretes outside that. Ah well.

Dubai is built on slavery

2010-01-05T10:10:00.004+13:00

The Independent site has a depressing article about what Dubai might actually be like, called rather banally The Dark Side Of Dubai.
The writing is a bit shit, but the content is well worth a read, especially if you're unaware of all the slave labour there.

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

2009-12-29T18:00:00.002+13:00

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.

Some music I liked from this year

2009-12-23T14:05:00.004+13:00

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!

Weekly mp3 #88: Pierre Omaar - Neon Heatwave

2009-12-22T18:00:00.001+13:00

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.

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

2009-12-15T18:00:00.001+13:00

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.

Weekly mp3 #86: Kindness - Gee Up

2009-12-08T18:00:00.003+13:00

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.

Black and WTF - amazing photos

2009-12-05T13:32:00.003+13:00

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

Some sample pics...

It came from the Morgue.

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

2009-12-01T18:00:00.000+13:00

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.

Weekly mp3 #84: Faux Pas - Silver Line

2009-11-24T18:00:00.001+13:00

OK, am bumping my scheduled weekly mp3 to bring you Faux Pas's new release, as announced on his site yesterday. The title / unmixed by other hands version is a free download in that post.

All kinds of spiralling and spangle synths rise up before a kick pulse drops in. A nice little vocal lines comes and goes, sometimes pitched up, sometimes all wandering. From there on in the track maintains a crazy (crazy awesome) mix of Jean-Michel Jarre / ELO high drama (those huge, spiralling synth arpeggios) and much more contemporary sliced and diced approach that you might hear in all that blissed out Californian beat head stuff or amongst all the weirdness going on on the frienges of dubstep.

Jeez, had better quit it. Did I mention I have a head cold?

I shelled out for all the mixes and reckon they're well worth it.

I've written about who Faux Pas is before, when talking up a track from his last EP back in February.

Weekly mp3 #83: Yuichiro Fujimoto - Open Window (For Piano)

2009-11-17T18:00:00.000+13:00

You can fetch this tune from Mr Fujimoto's own site, where it says "Listen" next to the particular tune.

Contains what's written on the tin. Starts with birds chirping and a completely unadorned piano piece begins. The low, mellow tones remind me of the piano versions of the theme from The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, although the melody shifts away in different directions pretty quickly. Sounds like some kids start playing outside. Maybe it's not really one recording by an open window, but, whatever, it sounds that way.

I also thoroughly recommend 'Old Bird Tape' on the same page. I just thought it was a bit short and sketchy to make it the main subject for this post.

You'll be shocked to discover that Yuichiro Fujimoto is a Japanese man. He's released albums of this kind of delicate, deliberately homemade-sounding acoustic music on Norwegian, American and Japanese record labels. Seems like his website's quite out of date, which is a pity. I guess he would be in his mid-20s now, so maybe he's been confronted with the excitement of working life in Japan. Maybe.

Weekly mp3 #82: Dãm-funk - Toeachizown

2009-11-10T18:00:00.001+13:00

Another XLR8R MP3 goodie and another vaguely arcade game-sounding thing. Well, the guy covered one of the songs from Outrun...

Squelchy synthfunk instrumental. The snares are probably big enough. Probably. It's like a throwback to stuff like Warren G, Ice Cube a la 'A Good Day', but looking further back than that to that ridiculously smooth Californian 80s soul stuff I used to leech from the op shops in Dannevirke and Woodville.

Wouldn't surprise me if Dãm-funk is not just well-known but totally played out by the time this queued post actually gets published. He's a keyboardist who apparently played on a whole lot of the key g-funk albums back in the early 90s and has been knocking away in LA for however many years.

Weekly mp3 #81: Disrupt - International Karate Championship

2009-11-03T18:00:00.002+13:00

Last year I linked to another release on the crazy Jahtari label. Figured I should point out at least one of the many tracks by Jahtari founder, Disrupt. This is the very first of Jahtari's net 7" series.

Well, it's Rob Hubbard's classic theme from the game I used to play on the Commodore 64, still sounding very like an 80s computer game sounds, but with off-beat reggae chords, booming dub effects and a heavy bassline. Samples from 'Enter The Dragon' echo echo echo about. That's about all you need to know.

Disrupt is a man called Jan, living in Leipzig, Germany. That's about all I can find about him, and it's all from his bio page on Jahtari. Otherwise, there are many, many fun tunes on his label. Some of them get a bit too typically "digi-dub" for my liking, but most of the time the synthesis (gah) of reggae music and video game sounds slays all comers.

Christopher Walken demonstrates cooking a chicken

2009-10-30T16:44:00.001+13:00

If you're reading this you're probably looking at this post via Facebook. Click View Original Post to see the embedded video.

Weekly mp3 #80: Steinbrüchel - Snowfall

2009-10-27T18:00:00.003+13:00

This is from the first Summertour Remix compilation. They're collections of tracks made by remixing field recordings Sawako made while on tour. In summer.

Um, ridiculously ambient. A peaceful, easy feeling. Take it easy. I can't tell you why I'm quoting The Eagles, maybe it'll make sense in the long run. Basically, it's top-drawer, delicate (as opposed to moody, dark) drone and you already know whether that sounds great or awful to you.

Ralph Steinbrüchel is a Swiss producer, who I've played a bit when I DJ the DEEP show. In fact my music news page came up when I was doing a search for images for this post. Weird.

Cute albatross chicks on Midway Island

2009-10-21T22:13:00.005+13:00

These photos are sooo sweet.

The thing the mummy albatrosses do where they feed their chicks plastic that they mistake for food? Where they do that until the chicks keel over and die? That's real funny. Makes me "lol", bro.

Weekly mp3 #79: Buildings - Slow Cradle

2009-10-20T18:00:00.001+13:00

Hosted by The Audio Foundation, a bunch of people dedicated to "innovative audio culture in New Zealand".

The track sounds like processed field recordings - distant sounds of cars on wet roads? - mixed with some very long, slowly changing horn notes that may just as likely be a ship's horn. Haunting. The last minute or so of the six minute track suddenly adds in some thick synth noises that sound a bit like SND.

It's very hard to find any information about Buildings online, but I emailed the address on there and have lined up a copy of the CD this is from. It's a solo project by a guy called Paul Winstanley. A magazine's website describes an issue that includes Paul "murmuring vaguely about his obscure solo electronic / improv projects in New Zealand" and if you then scroll down the page it lists all the different projects and one of them is the Buildings album Travel In A Balloon. That's about the guts of what I'd found online before I emailed him directly. Snooping based on the "Eden Gully" bit of the email address on that page also reveals that there's a New Zealand label by that name apparently run by Paul Winstanley and Mark Sadgrove.

Weekly mp3 #78: The Wooden Birds - False Alarm

2009-10-13T18:00:00.003+13:00

Bla bla RCRDLBL download bla

Strummy guitar, tapping hand drums... all acoustic apart from a very gentle sounding bass guitar. Oh shit it's so mellow. A man sings softly, joined by a woman singing harmony in the middle of the song. It's a bit country rock. Things get totally raucous with occasional taps on a tambourine and some tremolo guitar. Easy tiger!

The Wooden Birds are an American band fronted by Andrew Kenny, which is how I ended up checking them out. Kenny was the singer for a good band called the American Analog Set (not to be confused with American Music Club) and did some great solo songs on a split EP with Ben Gibbard (Postal Service / Death Cab for Cutie). So there.

Weekly mp3 #77: High Places - From Stardust to Sentience

2009-10-06T18:00:00.003+13:00

Lucky for us High Places' Aus. / NZ label, Mistletone, is more generous than their American one, Thrill Jockey.

Slushy noises turn into quiet but naggingly broken-up beats. Like a typing pool that rests at the end of every bar of the song. Some crazy electronic shit happens which I can't really describe without just going all technical on you. I think of people hitting marimbas, conches, woodblocks... all kinds of tuned percussion, basically. But it's more like a robot parrot is listening to that and trying to imitate what it heard. Gah. Sorry. I shouldn't have tried. :) Anyway, it's really chilled out and pretty. A woman sings a simple and lovely melody about the nature of life from a materialist's viewpoint. Nothing outstays it's welcome.

The album this is off is a good example of one of the dumb things about end of year lists - it came out in 2008, but I didn't hear it until June this year... OK, and it's a bit shit and doesn't deserve to be on a best of 2008 list, but, man, this song is awesome!

American duo High Places apparently met while one was studying bassoon and the other was teaching in the visual arts. They sound like it. Those confounded comfortable white people and their arty pretensions. Oh wait.

Eat a sundae every Monday / popsicles in my Hyundai

2009-10-05T18:56:00.003+13:00

Holy shit, what's up with Mr Bobbi Soxx? Lightest falsetto ever? OK, I love it. The video disturbs me, but suits the song totally.

If you can see this it's hopefully because you're looking at it via Facebook, in which case you're missing out on an embedded Youtube link. Click "View original post"

Also, how about peak oil?