HAPPY (BAND)CAMPERS: CHILL EDITION

I don't even know how to deal with the death of David Bowie, at least so far as this blog is concerned. He was such a monumental figure in my musical upbringing that I wouldn't know where to begin. Ah well...in lieu of anything relevant, here's the post I had planned for today. If, like me, you've just been listening to lots of Bowie and want to take a break for something a little new and different, I must say that the mood of these songs is strangely appropriate: 

What will you do with all that xmas scratch your relatives laid on ya? What, they didn't give you anything? Bastards! No matter - these zesty-flavored new(ish) releases can be listened to, and in some cases downloaded, for free.

We're long-time fans of Twink, The Toy Piano Band, and not only can you now check out his entire discography on the Bandcamps, but you cats must also dig his latest:

"Dust Bunny"

This album is inspired by winter, and so has a somewhat more somber tone to it. Somber, yet cartoon-ish, if you can imagine that. The master of toy-tronica is in fine form on such pick hits as "Pipper Snitch," and "Sparklemuffin."

Not sure how I discovered Corpus Callosum, probably by searching for unusual instruments, but this bunch of eccentric California folkies have come up with what is possibly the most gorgeous tune on Bandcamp. Musical saws and accordions beautifully creak along with sing-along vocals:


Corpus Callosum: "Hymnal"


Now that you're all properly relaxed, I shall send you off to dream-land with this stunning bit of Eno-Frippy drum-less drone courtesy of the Connecticut combo Landing.

Landing: "Yon"


As with the Corpus Callosum track, I haven't really listened to much else by this group. I just keep returning to this one. Music to hibernate by... 

Oh Come On, MORE Experimental Psychedelic Bagpipe Music?!

Count 'em

Yeah, I know, but this one's really great. Julia Wolfe, of New York's Bang On A Can posse, released this a few years ago, and is performing it for the first time in Los Angeles this week - on a bluff overlooking the ocean. For FREE. It's a teaser to get you to see the BOAC concert. The whole piece runs about 13 minutes. No other instruments, just bagpipes. 

The first part is total mind-melting psych drone, like Glen Branca in a kilt. Not only does it sound nothing like what I thought bagpipe music was supposed to sound like, it pretty much caved in my skull. And I do not take drugs. Part 2 sounds more bagpipe-y, and gets into subtle minimalism territory.


Julia Wolfe "Lad (for 9 bagpipes)" parts 1 and 2

from the album "Dark Full Ride"

BANDCAMP IS THE NEW CASSETTE CULTURE: Dark Ambient Edition

It's fall, Halloween is around the corner, so let's get moody with these FREE! listening/download contemporary internet releases of a decidedly strange and obscure nature. If Lovecraft's Miskatonic University had a college radio station, these albums would be on heavy rotation.

Ak'chamel: "Old Norse Mara" - Like the Residents attempting to summon occult entities (or The Elder Gods), this album is dark, distorted, evil ambience, culminating in the compelling "Death Was On You From The Moment of Birth." But it's then followed by an utterly incongruous surf-punk instrumental(?!). No matter, a demonically-possessed muppet then takes over the lead vox for the next track. (The more overtly shaman-istic "Fucking With Spirits" is plenty cool, too.) Price: Name your price.

Sasha Olynyk: "1955" (EP) - What is this, a '50s crooner & an EZ orchestra collaborating with Portishead? It's hard to tell thru the hallucinogenic fog. 25 minutes of mysterious melancholy,  sometimes quite beautiful, a la Boards of Canada, only Olynyk really is Canadian. The moment in "Surfers Dream" where the "Rebel Without A Cause" soundtrack morphs into the song is magical. Price: Name your price.

Hanetration - "Murmurist" ep - One of our fave ambient-ists. "Begin" is indeed a great place to begin; the gently clanking percussion + church organ drone of "Sundown" = one of his best ever. Price: Free

Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel: does what it says on the tin. Tho sometimes joined by guests, most of these free releases are by an Atlanta, GA duo who deliver deep drone instrumentals that sound nothing like the Space Age sounds you'd expect from theremins, or the usual country/Hawaiian-isms of steel guitar. All live, all improvised. Price: Name your price. See also: http://duetonline.net/sample

Ross Bolleter's Music For Ruined Pianos

A reader left a comment today: "How does one download from Google on a Mac? I cannot figure it out..." I'm not a Mac-intologist. Anyone?
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rather than take old, decrepit pianos and attempt to repair and tune them, Australian composer/improviser Ross Bolleter makes new music out of "ruined" pianos. Bolleter approaches each piano as a singular entity, utilizing each instrument's lack of standard tuning, missing keys, broken strings, etc. to create strange, haunting, stirring sounds that would not be possible to make on a new piano. Which seems like a much more logical approach than taking every sound-making thing on the planet and forcing the limited range of the Western scale on it.

The music on this album hardly sounds like "piano music." The lengthy opening track is meditative loveliness, ranging from Asian gong sounds to birds calls in the background (this really is a 'field recording') to horror movie atmospherics. The remaining short tracks sound similar to John Cage's prepared piano works, but while Cage's pieces were gamelan-inspired and strictly written, these are free and jazzy. So ingenious one wonders why no-one thought of doing something like this before?

Ross Bolleter - Secret Sandhills and Satellites (Pieces For Ruined Pianos) (2006)
(UPDATE 7/15: Missing track now in file.)

Count Otto hepped me to this cat via this article about "Touring Australia's Piano Graveyards."

Pardon my Amazon cut-and pasting:

ROSS BOLLETER ruined pianos (+ accordion on 7)

1 - SECRET SANDHILLS - 28:00
2 - AXIS - 6:47
3 - DEAD MARINE - 6:10
4 - AND THEN I SAW THE WIND - 3:22
5 - CHORUS LINE - 1:39
6 - SAVE WHAT YOU CAN - 2:40
7 - GOING TO WAR WITHOUT THE FRENCH IS LIKE GOING TO WAR WITHOUT AN ACCORDION - 4:23
8 - TIME WAITS - 5:59
9 - COME NIGHT - 2:02
10 - JAUNTY NOTES OF PADDOCKS BRIGHT - 4:22
11 - OLD MAN PIANO - 1:46

"All digital recordings made in Australia around Perth and Alice Springs 2001-2005. Pieces for ruined pianos and pianos on the edge of ruin... The main work, inspired by an Aborigine painting, is the 28-minute Secret Sandhills, a generally slow-moving work spliced together from performances on six ruins. There are also 10 shorter and generally faster Satellites, some of which were performed on two ruined pianos simultaneously. Fresh new sounds from decaying old instruments."

I'm Bringing Weirdness Back...

If you feel like genuine musical weirdness died with Sun Ra and Captain Beefheart, take heed!  We have some 

stone-cold freakazoids in our midst even today. To whit:

- The Everyday Film is raising funds for his next album. Judging by the excerpts of works in progress in the video 

below, it's the veteran outsider's most ambitious project yet, as it moves beyond his usual industrial nightmares 

into some realms of sound that actually resemble, well, music. Y'know, that some people will like to listen

 to? So give, brothers and sister, give 'til it hurts:

The Everyday Film - "Bleed Over" (GoFundMe site)

- Ostrich Von Nipple is such a great name that I thought there was no way that their music could measure up to it, 

but their latest album is an absolutely awesome acid-bathed assemblage of spazz-jazz-tronica, weirded-out lyrics, 

and a guest guitarist who has played with the Residents, no less. Songs like "Mad Martian Beach Party" actually

sound like their titles. One 10-minute track suggests prog, but prog is rarely this humorous and surreal.  Originally

released last year in hard copy formats thru Psychofon Records, including a very limited vinyl run, it's now available

digitally thru outlets like Amazon and iTunes. In Maniac-universe, this album would sweep the Grammys.

"Ostrich von Nipple Quantifies Absurdity" album Amazon page 

Ostrich Von Nipple "Upright Jerker" (mp3)

- Petunia-Liebling MacPumpkin, the gal who's so cray-cray she makes Kate Bush look like Barbra Streisand, is the

 one who hipped us to the Nipple. Her own latest video "Picked Fences" (see below) is another outlandish mixture of 

live action, animation, puppets, toys, video effects, and art-song.   

- Womb Pals' brief (13 minutes) name-your-price download EP "Baby Spinach" is mostly pleasantly low-key

piano ambience, but is notable for the track "perfection," which ingeniously samples the sounds of coughing and 

throat-clearing. No other instruments. Exactly the kind of thing that Maniacs might find clever and funny, and 

Normals might respond to by running away, hands over ears. That's irri-tainment! 

http://wombpals.bandcamp.com/releases 

- The Chewers are the twisted Southerners whose two previous albums got rave reviews from Yours Truly on these 

here virtual pages. They're still spewing out their inbred hell-billy guitar rock primitivism, but with seemingly

a bigger budget. More instrumental sounds, cleaner production, guests vocalists - they sound better

than ever, tho the songs are not sticking with me the way their earlier work did. One track, however, the utterly

over-the-top "Misanthropic Bones," just might be the greatest thing they've ever done. It's a kind of rap song, 

with a clenched-teeth Chewer sptting out rhymes like "I don't get enough sun or sleep/I'm a hollow, distorted 

creep."

Well, aren't we all?

The Chewers "Dead Dads" album Bandcamp page

The Chewers  "Misanthropic Bones" (mp3)

The Psample-delic Psounds of Carl Stone's "Four Pieces"

If you think sampling in music means MC Hammer looping "Super Freak," you gotta another think coming: Los Angeles legend Carl Stone has been using custom software to spin complex, beautiful webs out of found sounds since before most people even owned a computer. The closest comparison to another composer one might make would be to John Oswald and his Plunderphonics, but Oswald often hits with an ADD-addled aggressiveness. Stone takes a more trance-inducing path that sometimes approaches Minimalism, but the results are still too thorny to ever function as yoga music.

Track #1 "Wall Me Do" is not, as the title suggests, a Pink Floyd/Beatles mash-up. The title, like most of Stones' titles, comes from an LA area Asian restaurant. It's glitchy electronica, not unlike Aphex Twin, but years before the fact. #2 is pretty funny, slicing and dicing that classical classic "Pictures at an Exhibition" into an increasingly unrecognizable delirium.  #3 ("Shing Kee") from 1986 hypnotically loops unidentified sounds (inc female vocals) into dreamy gorgeousness; tho reminiscent of Frippertronics and Steve Reich's early tape-loop works, the gradually unfolding patterns bear the stamp of Stone's original style. Play this with the lights out, glass of red wine in hand. Aaahhh... And #4 is Stone sampling himself, in this case remixing #1. I actually prefer it to #1 - it's all Minimalistic grooviness, but with no predictable looping and phasing.

Carl Stone - Four Pieces (1986-1989)

I was happy to see that Stone is performing live this March 22 with LA Free Music Society vets Tom Recchion and Joseph Hammer. Those two have been using extreme turntablism and tape-loop tomfoolery to great effect for as long as Stones' been tweaking his Macs. Don't think Stone was ever actually a member of the LAFMS, but note that Recchion designed the insert to this album.  And the two used to rule the KPFK airwaves in the 1980s with back-to-back (Tuesday night?) shows, Stone with "Imaginary Landscapes" and Recchion's "Soundings II, aka the Tom and Tony Show." Between Stone's alt classical-to-Yma Sumac approach and Tom 'n' Tony's avant-tarde mix of free noise, kitschy thrift-store records, and live antics (e.g. playing the entirety of "Sgt Pepper" on fast-forward when the CD was first released), Young Master Fab's mind was suitably re-aligned. Tom Waits said he wept when he first heard Gavin Bryars' "Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet" (which Waits would later sing) on LA radio in the '80s. 'Twas on "Imaginary Landscapes" - I was listening that night, too.

Ambient-Abstract-Noise

For those moments when you need to get away from the idea of music as, y'know, tunes, what with all those distracting rhythms, melodies, lyrics and other fancy accouterments, and you just want to, as Cage said, let music be itself: tracks from recommended new(ish)* releases that soothe body and soul in a colorful sonic bath. And by "soothe" of course I mean that this ain't no New Age audio wallpaper, but can get rather dark and weird at times.

27 minutes of: ambientabstractnoise




1. Philip Jeck "1986 Frank Was 70 Years Old" (from "Surf") - Turntableism as ambient sound collage; guest vox from Woody Woodpecker.

2. Back Magic "Future Graves" (from "Chorus Line To Hell") - Duo's guitar/drum lo-fi racket sometimes resembles actual rock music, and quite nice rock music at that; then we get to this chilling instro, based on a keyboard and air-raid siren sound effects; the apocalypse has never sounded so appealing.

3. Carolina Eyck & Christopher Tarnow "10,000 Bells" (from the as yet unreleased "Improvisations for Theremin and Piano, Vol 1") - Another duo, but they're German, and have had music lessons. Eyck in fact, studied under Lydia Kavina, Leon Theremin's grand-niece and former member of Messer Chups.

4. Allen Ravenstine & Robert Wheeler "Nocturne" (from "City Desk") - YES!! The once and future synth wizards of the mighty Pere Ubu have teamed up for two albums ("City Desk" and "Farm Report") of pure unadulterated analogue electro improv sci-fi soundscape loveliness. "At points one or the other musician would leave the room, letting the antique synthesizer fill in his parts until he returned." 

5. Chris Campbell / Grant Cutler "Song 2" (from "Schooldays Over") - The all-too-brief album is a meditation on Ewan MacColl's 1961 Irish folk ballad about kids moving straight from school to backbreaking labor; the song is teased apart and beautifully reconstructed on such self-descriptive tracks as "Pump Organ, Gongs, Balloon Bassoons." Marimbas, glockenspiels and kotos also join the keyboards in beautiful melancholy.

6. Chris Campbell "Water Mirror" (from "Things You Already Know") - Campbell's really been hittin' it lately, what with his work for the crucial Innova label, and not one but two excellent recent albums. On this one, a fairly large cast perform both on standard stuff and on invented instruments and oddities like propane tanks, psaltrys, and singing bowls for something in between ambient, minimalism, and freak rock. So nice.

I also quite liked THIS. 

* Except for the Philip Jeck which came out in 1998 but I only just discovered it.

Negativland Live - "Helter Stupid Tour" 1989

At the time this excellent board tape was made, multi-media collage/ performance art/ prankster legends Negativland had been around since the early '80s, releasing several albums that served as warm-ups for their glory years of the late '80s/early '90s, when they ruled college radio, signed to the indie label everyone wanted to be on (SST Records), and generally moved from being mere (if brilliant) performers/recording artists to becoming a genuine cultural force, merry pranksters manipulating the gullible mass media, and daring to pull down the pants (so to speak) of some of the biggest figures in the music industry.  They paid for their hijinks big-time, but ultimately came out the other end bloodied but unbowed. Lo these many years later, as seen in today's post-internet media-overload environment of mashups, youtube, etc., they seem positively visionary. And this performance finds them at the top of their game. Even if you're very familiar with Negativland's "Escape From Noise"/"Helter Stupid"/"U2" era (as I would imagine many, if not most, Maniacs are) this is still a fresh experience, as they take elements from their album tracks and rework them into lovely new mutations.

Negativland Live - Hampshire College 1989

Side 1:

1 - Christianity Is Stupid
2 - Helter Stupid
3 - Escape From Noise
4 - Time
5 - Another Perfect Cut
6 - Free TV Or Pay TV
7 - The Playboy Channel

Side 2:

1 - Playboy Channel 2
2 - Why Don't They Blow Us Up?
3 - I'd Like A Piece Of Meat / Michael Jackson
4 - U2
5 - Car Bomb

This comes to us from maniac Bob Berger. Can't thank him enough. He writes: "Recorded off the sound board onto Maxell XLIIS cassette with whatever tape deck was present, this tape has been legendary among all of my friends for many years. The sound quality is amazing... I've never heard Negativland recorded quite so well... Given our state(s) of mind at that show, I have no idea how we managed to capture this as well as we did... but here it is. At home, I've chopped these bits up into each track as best I could, but I figured that it would be best to preserve the whole show's continuity as two sides of the, now infamous, cassette.

Enjoy.

colunco23"


And - hey! - let's not forget to salute "guest vocalists" like the recently departed  Casey Kasem, and  L.A newscaster Hal Eisner. When on those rare occasions I stumble across Eisner's TV appearances, I chuckle, almost expecting him to say, "This is Hal Eisner. This is stupid."

RIP Snuggles.

ODD-STRALIA pt 3: The Invented Instruments of Rod Cooper

Another strange-music-making Australian ("odd-stray-alien," as our expert in such matters Buttress O'Kneel says) is the chap in the above video, Rod Cooper, a metal-worker who makes fantastic plunky/boingy/screechy hand-built metal instruments. Seeing him live would be the optimal way to experience him, I would imagine, considering how, to quote B'O'K: "he used to play in subterranean stormwater drains and stuff, secret illegal gigs that utilised the tunnels' natural reverb to the fullest." And of course, you'd get to see these gizmos up close.

He has a few albums for sale, but here's one you can listen to via Bandcamp as Klunk, a duo with John Bell on vibraphone and percussion:

Klunk: "Metalic"

Many of these improvised instrumentals are nice indeed, with Cooper coaxing all kinds of atmospheric, almost ambient soundscapes out of his Highly Resonant Object. No harsh industrial pounding here. The interplay between vibes and HRO on "Aluminum" is quite lovely, and the dramatic "Columbium" is compelling.  I love jazz vibes, but on some tracks the aimless wandering vibraphone doesn't do much for me. Tracks like the sparse, haunting "Stainless" are more successful.

Here are two samplers, both almost 6 minutes long:

http://www.divshare.com/download/25367194-1bb

http://www.divshare.com/download/25367195-e86

And then there's:

Interview

Artist Statement - Like the man says: "Comfort Through Dissonance"

ODD-STRALIA pt 2: Stinky Picnic

"If you're dead, you're totally dead
If you're dead, you're totally dead, not alive"

Can't argue with that.  These words of wisdom come from the title track to shoegaze-y electro father/daughter duo Stinky Picnic's latest name-your-price album. We've been following their career for a bit now, so li'l girl singer/lyricist/conceptualist Indigo must be getting pretty old.  What is she, like, six now?

The fun and innocence of this is so opposed to our previous example of strange music from Australia, dark satanic rapper Ice Cold, that it could give you whiplash. Highlites include the catchy above-cited title tune, the awesome 2-part "I Am A Robot" (a totally cool bit of pre-school Kraftwerk-goes-psych) and the 54-second "Lullaby for Bunny," in which dad puts down his space guitars and lets a little girl sing a simple song for her bunny - so pure and sincere it could put a lump in the throat of the most heartless bastard. All music should be like this.

Stinky Picnic: "Totally Dead"

THE EVERYDAY FILM Speaks!

Will wonders never cease? Jandek now tours, Dot Wiggin of the Shaggs has a new album, and our own fascinating outsider music discovery (actually, he discovered us) The Everyday Film has given his first interview. This coincides with a new video (see below). We now have a name, face, and a bit of background on transgressive audio artist The Everyday Film, courtesy of Italian writer Davide Carrozza:

Interview with the Everyday Film

Longtime readers of the blog may recall that the Everyday Film project has been so steeped in mystery that we've never known the slightest thing about who or what is responsible for these most striking, disturbing, and mordantly funny recordings. CDs would just show up unannounced and unexplained in my PO box. Well, we now know that the Everyday Film is one Drew Steinman, lives in New Jersey, likes Rick James and Meat Loaf, and is the sole brain behind the music, videos, and artwork.  He admits that he has no musical influences that he can detect, and that just might be the most impressive thing about TEF, that he isn't, unlike just about everyone else, the sum total of his record collection. Steinman's stepping into the light does not destroy the illusion of a bewildering enigma, not with such choice quotes as: "My ideal audience is the person completely alienated and losing touch with reality."

Carrozza also reviews and analyzes TEF's ouvre in a separate article. It is gratifying to see someone take the works of a so-called "marginal" figure of the music world like TEF and give it such a serious treatment.

This site is still the only place to get most of the Everyday Film releases, e.g.: the first four albums. And we have a new video, a preview of the forthcoming album "Bleed Over."  He sez: "Unlike my other stuff this tune is very danceable." 

The Acapella Death-Metal of EyeSea

What's more ridiculous than death metal? Howzabout acapella death-metal? EyeSea's "blue ten" is an entire album of Cookie Monster vocals going 'rowr rowr rowr', screams, and silences. And they don't cheat by sneaking in other sounds - there really are no other instruments.  Are they even "singing" in English, or is this a guy clearing his throat for 22 minutes?  Whatever it is, I was laffin'!  

To the remixers and sound-collagists of the world: you're welcome.

 EyeSea "Stück 6"

Bandcamp Is Still The New Cassette Culture

Like I was saying...Listen for free, buy if you like.

This batch is loosely associated by a shared fascination with the surreal and fantastic,  injecting a little much-needed magic into our world.

- Ergo Phizmiz "Idiot": The prolific madman across the water has two more winners. This one's a generous 18 tracks of mostly instrumentals (w/some sampled vox) cobbled together out of found-sounds and whimsical instruments. "Ornidisco" is a dance track ingeniously fashioned entirely from sampled bird sound effects. "Night on The Town" is an absurd disco raver performed entirely acappella (complete with beatboxing) that's as funny as it is funky. Avant-garde, or just good ol' British eccentricity? Price: free.

- Ergo Phizmiz "Music for Pleasure": "A 17 track behemoth of Ergo Phizmiz's singular take on guitar based rock'n'roll & pop music." Yep, these ramshackle constructions suggest actual rock music, sometimes in the Neil Innes or Syd Barret vein, with much Kink-y garage punk energy. Bonus points for reviving Bobby Goldsboro's '60s bubblegum gem "Little Things." Album title = truth in advertising. Price: £7.

- Doctor Midnight "Crotch Rocket Extremities and​/​or Popular Culture Atrocities": What the ..? This short (12 tracks in 23 minutes), utterly unpredictable album makes as much sense as that album title. This duo comes from Alabama, not with a banjo on it's knee, but plenty of other noises: sound effects, screaming, computers, piano, marimba, guitars, and scary hillbilly voices that may be sampled, or may belong to the band members. My fave moment is when "Chocodino" almost turns into a remake of Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain," followed by 38 seconds of "There Ain't Shit On TV!" Price: free.

Paul and Pierre "Eggs Benedict With Mr Wu On The Seahorse Monorail": Pierre is the man behind naive/ toy-pop masters Carton Sonore; this time out he's joined by Scottish warbler Paul Vickers for actual songs, but still retaining the whimsy of past projects. Acoustic instruments like musical saw and mandolin meet Casio-tronics to realize sea shanty-like sing-alongs replete with fantastical imagery. Well written, wonderfully evocative, effortlessly enjoyable. Price: €7, tho the super song "Lon Chaney" is free, and you know a song has to be good if it's about Lon Chaney.

- Zlata Sandor/Shaun Sandor "Band on the Moon": If you're pressed for time, here's 5 minutes of a father and his 4-year-old daughter singing about the kinds of things you would expect little girls to sing about, e.g.: party balloons, animals, and playing on the moon. C'mon, how can you not like this? Price: $1.00.

Timur and the Dime Museum "X-ray Sunsets": These Angelenos conjure up a dark carnival for accordion, ukulele, violin, and on the rollicking "Distance Of The moon," a spot of toy piano, with a bona-fide opera singer up front; I featured their amazing take on Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" here previously, but this album is all original and it's all good. Don't be surprised if David Lynch uses the dreamy doo-wop ballad "Asleep At The Wheel" in his next film. Flamboyantly theatrical without quite being campy. Recommended, even if you hate opera. Price: $7.

Tho he was hardly an indie band/ bedroom producer like the above, I still would like to point out that - holy crap! - there are now 48 Fela Kuti albums now available on Bandcamp.