Breathing is a beautiful and affecting short by Anna Österlund (Ravishing Mad) and Truls Bråhammar. The film is based on an original composition by multi-talented composer Mikael Karlsson, taken from his series of “Talk Pieces” called Traps.
The film shows two little girls seemingly at play in the forest, but as we linger with them we start noticing that they’re measuring time and behaving in irrational, robotic or animal ways. They’re on a very strict and hectic schedule somehow, and [our] watching them worries them.
An effective society sometimes forces people into apathetic behaviour in order to cope with everyday life and the sense of being trapped in a treadmill can be frightening. What do we do in situations when inexplicable routines traps us like animals, do we manically continue forward or do we protest?
”A creature in captivity is often driven to pointless, repetitive behaviour.”
Starring Ada Bråhammar and Olivia Holmgren, with Karlsson’s music is performed by the Sirius Quartet.
Can’t get enough of the Spin Doctors’ “Two Princes?” I didn’t think so. Well, here’s enough to make you puke.
I can’t tell you what a thrill it is to be the first member of the Dangerous Minds’ team to post something related to the Spin Doctors. Coming up: Phish and Blues Traveler.
A whimsical mélange of Kraftwerk’s “Robots” and 70s Soviet sci-fi film Teenagers in Space. According to Coilhouse, the movie is a children’s film “about evil robots.”
That’s pretty much all I need to know to make this a “must see” for me.
If you want to watch Teenagers in Space in its entirety, go here.
Long before they covered The Beatles, Cannibal & the Headhunters, James Brown, Elvis, George Gershwin or Hank Williams, in 1971, the Residents rudely took on Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” (rechristened “Holelottadick” and letting the intention of Robert Plant’s lyrics really hang out there) on their unreleased (but widely bootlegged) Baby Sex album.
Baby Sex was once broadcast in its entirety on Oregon radio station KBOO-FM during their “Residents Radio Festival” in 1977. The album’s second side is an astonishing studio collage piece titled “Hallowed Be Thy Wean” which includes a live recording of The Residents at San Francisco’s Boarding House in October 1971 with Snakefinger, the first time that “The Residents” moniker was employed by the group.
Baby Sex also features a rippingcover of Frank Zappa’s “King Kong,” that could almost be the Mothers of Invention playing. The Residents’ direct musical and sonic debt to Zappa (and Pink Floyd’s “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict,” for that matter, “sampled” at length in “Hallowed…”) becomes much more obvious after you’ve given Baby Sex a listen. (Original Mother Don Preston would later collaborate with The Residents on their epic 1977 Eskimo album).
Elsewhere on the album, the cryptic ones “steal this riff” from Tim Buckley’s “Down By The Borderline” (from Buckley’s Starsailor album, which was released by Zappa’s Straight Records) and manage to sound like a geeky version on Santana.
In recent weeks Slow Nerve Action has uploaded a treasure trove of Flaming Lips concert footage to their YouTube channel. There are hours upon hours of Lips’ concert footage I’ve never seen before and I bet you haven’t either. Picking the “best of” is impossible, but this one shines for audio and visual quality: Flaming Lips on Austin City Limits, 2004.
Set list:
00:05:18 Race for the Prize
00:12:09 Fight Test
00:20:20 The Gash
00:26:00 Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1
00:34:00 Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 2
00:38:30 The Spark That Bled
00:45:49 Lightning Strikes the Postman
00:52:57 War Pigs (with Cat Power)
00:59:20 Somewhere Over the Rainbow (with Vernon Drozd)
01:04:25 In the Morning of the Magicians
01:14:46 She Don’t Use Jelly
01:22:45 Do You Realize?
As far as I can tell, this is the first time this show has appeared on YouTube.
Power trio: Lydia Lunch, Bertei and Anya Phillips.
If you lived in downtown New York City during the late 1970s and were a fan of new music, the odds are you encountered Adele Bertei. She was a member of seminal No Wave band The Contortions and could be seen performing and hanging out at the Mudd Club, Pep Lounge and CBGB’s, along with a formidable number of musicians and artists that made those clubs their second homes.
Petite and powerful, Bertei is a renaissance woman, much like her hero Patti Smith, who can operate within the worlds of music, literature, dance and film with a fine-tuned ferocity and grace. Moving from the unhinged funk of The Contortions to dance floor hits produced by Jelly Bean Benitez, Arthur Baker and Thomas Dolby weren’t no big thang for the mercurial Bertei. The transition from No Wave to New Wave and disco may have had a commercial design but Bertei did it all without selling her soul. Along with a number of downtown bands (Blondie, Talking Heads) she expanded her range, infiltrating the discotheques with bohemian raps riding big beats. Even her slicker stuff had a knowing quality that said “I can do this stuff too. So, why not.” The walls between uptown and downtown were crumbling, along with the bridges, subways and ghettos.
Bertei is working on a memoir, No New York: Adventures in the Town of Empty, which will chronicle her experiences in New York City from 1977 to the late-1980’s. Those were amazing years to be in Manhattan and if anyone can get at the heart of what made it such a wildly creative time, Bertei is the person to do it. She’s developed into a very fine writer - precise, heartfelt, tough and delicate. Her life story is the story of a city in flux and the people who rode the crest of a very tumultuous pop culture wave. Her early years alone include a stint as Brian Eno’s personal assistant through the Contortions and her all-girl band The Bloods to being a major label artist and collaborator with musicians as diverse as Matthew Sweet, Lydia Lunch, John Lurie, Scritti Politti and Sparks. If you’re interested in learning more about No New York: Adventures in the Town of Empty check this out.
My own experiences of Bertei were the several occasions on which I saw the Contortions and The Bloods. Uncompromising as hell, both bands took traditional funk and rock styles and played them with an aggressively manic edge that mirrored the vibes of a city hovering between decay and resurrection while also serving as a kind of curative - a headshot to the zombies that lurked at the edges of night.
It is arguable that artists and musicians did far more to exorcise the dark spirits embedded in New York City of the Seventies than the useless politicians helplessly choking on clots of meaningless rhetoric and the cops randomly arresting harmless panhandlers while heroin dealers ruled the Lower East Side with impunity. In clubs like CBGB’s, we gathered to re-fuel our engines before returning to the garbage-strewn streets, with their wall-to-wall carpeting of glassine bags, dessicated condoms and dog shit, to look the dead-eyed rat of reality straight in its big fucking smirk of a face. Within this doomsday scenario, we chose to contort ourselves into shapes that hieroglyphed our inner urgency to drown out, with the beat of drums and clang of metal, the grim wails of sirens that tore through the dank poisonous air like sonic razorblades. We had come to make a bigger noise. We weren’t going to take the shit of civilization lying down. We were going out fighting or at least fucking things up. As it is, some of us made art that cooled the jets of the degenerate culture of death. While Rome burned, we did more than fiddle. We rocked.
The videos I’ve included here give testimony to Bertei’s range and musical spirit. Stiff Records’ motto “fuck art, let’s dance” was good to be sure. But in Adele Bertei’s world, you can create art while dancing because they’re the same fucking thing. I know Stiff was trying to make a point about pretentiousness in music, and No Wave was an easy target for that argument, but when the Mudd Club (co-founded by Anya Phillips, Contortionist James Chance’s lover) opened its doors in 1978 and punkers had a dance club they could call their own it was amazing how quickly we went from cretin hopping to eventually burning down the house. The demonization of disco seemed like a waste of time. And segueing from “Le Freak” to “I Wanna Be Sedated” was as smooth as the seats on the L train.
“Jackie is a punk, Judy is a runt
They went down to the Mudd Club
And they both got drunk
Oh-yeah”
The Ramones
As many times as you may tell your story, it is true that it will never be the same as you are never the same. Memory is flux as is life, although some people may tell you you never change. Stay away from those people. Weed the snakes from your garden. Navigate always toward the love. No matter how much they tell you we are born alone and die alone, it doesn’t make the need for love any less necessary to the in-between.” A. Bertei.
Tom Jones performs Leonard Cohen’s “Tower Of Song’ on the Jools Holland show - May 11, 2012.
Jones may not quite get the humor in the lyrics, but there’s no denying the man IS a tower of song. A monumental voice. And the guy is still built like a brick shithouse.
“Tower Of Song” appears on Jones’ new album Spirit In The Room which comes out on June 5 in the United Kingdom. This is the second new album release I’ve wanted to purchase that hasn’t been made available in the USA other than on expensive imports. The other is Richard Hawley’s Standing At The Edge Of The Sky. You can’t even buy em as MP3s. And Spotify won’t let you listen to Hawley’s album if you live in the USA. What’s with that? This is bad business for the artists and encourages illegal downloading. The music industry just doesn’t learn. The death wish continues. The only place to hear some of these new albums is on YouTube…and that may not last for much longer.
If I’d have only mentioned Raymond Listen or the Licorice Roots in the title, would you even be reading this? Probably not, right? And who could blame you? Even by obscure band standards, they’re still damned obscure. Obscure to the point where pretty much no one has ever heard of them. That’s why I made the Neutral Milk Hotel comparison up front, to draw you in (For some of you, admit it, I had you at “Neutral M…”). Stay with me here, though. You will be glad you did.
Still, it’s not really that egregious of a blog “bait-n-switch” title thing, either, because if you are a fan of Neutral Milk Hotel’s classic 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea or John Lennon’s Imagine or Mind Games albums, for that matter, I can assure you that you will find a whole lot to love about the quirky low-fi pleasures of Raymond Listen and the Licorice Roots, too, in particular their 1993 debut, Licorice Root Orchestra (There was a name change after the first album from Raymond Listen to The Licorice Roots, to clarify. The leader/singer/songwriter is a guy called Edward Moyse).
I’m not going to pretend that I know anything about this band, but I’ve listened to this album, A LOT, in the past twenty years. Kramer, of Bongwater/Shimmy Disc fame produced the album and he gave me the CD when it originally came out: “This is a masterpiece,” I recall him saying in his WC Fields-esque way. “This guy is a fuckin’ genius.”
I’d have to concur. I also recall Kramer telling me that they once had about 15 musicians onstage, all tied together (how great is that?) and that there was “one chick who just plays finger cymbals.”
When Licorice Root Orchestra came out, Melody Maker had this to say:
This, their divine debut, works as an ensemble piece. These 13 dream-dipped delights provide the perfect soundtrack to some sepia-tinted silent movie and manage to pull off the near-impossible: they are appealingly gauche but never gormless, naive but never nerdy. Most are under three minutes, their wealth of tiny details strung on a delicate, twittering frame.
“September in the Night” and “Cloud Symphonies” are pop songs like you’ve never heard them, impressionistic, hazy things that throb with wobbly, sub-aquatic strings and a piano that sounds like it’s floating up from the cellar. You can thank Shimmy’s chief kook, Kramer, for that, of course. There’s a general air of uneasiness beneath the charm, though, of Something Nasty never far away. “Lemon Peel Medallion”, for example, is full of fairground melancholy, while “Tangled Weeks” begins like the band started playing something else and then had to quickly change tack. Like most of these tunes, it moves to a strange, seesaw waltz, tinkling with glockenspiel, flute, finger cymbals, and piano.
“Licorice Root Orchestra” is a delicate work of weird genius; violet-tinted, sherbert-sweet, and lonely as Coney Island on a wet Sunday. Dip in.
The NME sayeth:
“Syrup-sweet flute and piano ditties offer simple, magical, childlike tones.”
And like I say, it’s been nearly two decades that I’ve listened to this album a fuck of a lot. I’ve made many, many copies for people on cassette and then on CD-R. I unabashedly love the Licorice Root Orchestra album and it holds a special place of esteem (and obscurity) in my record collection. There’s something so ethereal and gossamer delicate about the sound, and then there is an element of Edward Moyse’s guitar playing that I love where he somehow always manages to sound like he’s trying catching up to the rest of the band (and I mean that in the best possible way, he’s got an idiosyncratic guitar technique every bit as unique and off-kilter as Keith Levene or The Bevis Frond). An out-of-tune upright piano laden with reverb is another Lennon-esque element to their sound and Moyse’s voice is a divine and languid instrument, calling to mind a blissfully stoned Marc Bolan. His/their sound has also put me in mind of Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” (the song not the album).
To be honest, although I listen to that first Raymond Listen album at least once a year, if not much more often than that, before yesterday, I never really looked them up on the Internet or YouTube. I was under the impression that they’d recorded just one album. There’‘s very little information out there about them, even the Raymond Listen website is just a few stills and no text whatsoever. The Licorice Roots website isn’t that much more forthcoming, either.
What if, instead of splitting off to form Neutral Milk Hotel, the Olivia Tremor Control, and the Apples in Stereo, the original core members of the Elephant 6 collective had formed one band that incorporated Jeff Mangum’s scratchy lo-fi folk, Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss’ trippy experimental tendencies, and Robert Schneider’s knack for clever pop hooks? The results would have sounded very much like the Delaware psych-pop trio the Licorice Roots. In fact, the Licorice Roots pre-date the recording careers of all three of those bands, but the band’s low profile, coupled with wide gaps between releases, has made them hidden treasure for all but the most devoted fans of modern psychedelia.
But before the Licorice Roots, there was Raymond Listen. Singer/songwriter and guitarist Edward Moyse and drummer David Milsom formed Raymond Listen in the college town of Newark, DE, in 1990. By 1992, organist and percussionist Dave Silverman completed the group, and in 1993 they scored the coveted Cute Band Alert blurb from the post-feminist teen magazine Sassy. Raymond Listen’s debut album, Licorice Root Orchestra, was produced by New Jersey noise pop maven Kramer and released on his Shimmy-Disc label that same year. The band added a second guitarist and percussionist for a national tour in early 1994, but split up shortly thereafter. However, only a few months later, the core trio of Moyse, Silverman, and Milsom regrouped as the Licorice Roots. Their first album under the new name took three years to complete before being released as Melodeon in 1997. A second album, Caves of the Sun, was self-released in 2003. In 2006, the Licorice Roots signed with the Chicago-based indie Essay Records and released their third album, Shades of Streamers. At the same time, Essay reissued Licorice Root Orchestra in an expanded and remastered edition under the Licorice Roots name.
Holy shit. that means there are four other albums from these guys, plus a reissued, expanded version of the one they made with Kramer? As unlikely as it seems to me that I’d never even once done a Google search for one of my top favorite albums of all time (Licorice Root Orchestra would easily be in my top 100, if not top 50 albums), I’m happy to hear more (and it’s all on Spotify. I can’t embed the track called “Coronation Day” here, so go to Spotify and listen to to that and “Saturn Rise,” post haste!). You can buy the CD of this minor masterpiece used on Amazon for as little as .70 cents, which is ridiculous.
Some of their YouTube videos have had fewer than twenty plays! First up is “Cloud Symphonies”:
The practically unseen music video for “September in the Night”:
After the jump, more Raymond Listen/The Licorice Roots
As Britain prepares for the Diamond Jubilee celebrations for Her Majesty, here is The Queen is Dead - Derek Jarman’s Super 8 film triptych (made in collaboration John Maybury, Richard Heslop and Chis Hughes) for 3 classic tracks by The Smiths: “The Queen is Dead,” “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” and “Panic.”
Inner city angst, urban decay, alienation, cute hairstyles, and lots of hand held camera work, well it was the eighties.
More gorgeous electronic pop, this time from the Glasgow-based one-man-band Miaoux Miauox, aka multi-instrumentalist Julian Corrie.
Set to release his debut album Light Of The North on the celebrated Glasgow indie label Chemikal Underground on June 11th, with production from Paul Savage who has previously helmed work by Mogwai and WuLyf, Miaoux Miaoux has just released the first video from the long player, the rather beautiful “Better For Now”.
Light Of The North is an accomplished work. The songwriting couples the summertime breeziness of Hall & Oates with the adolescent yearning of Hot Chip. The production, while rooted firmly in the one-man-in-a-bedroom aesthetic, has shades of trip-hop, post-rock and the psychedelic post-crunk of fellow Glaswegians Hudson Mohawke and Rustie, all riding over synth funk bass lines and samples and beats with a real 90s-dance feel. Keep your eyes and ears peeled for this one - you can pre-order the vinyl and CD, and download the MP3s, from the Chemikal Underground online shop.
There’s a little bit more information about Miaoux Mioux on the site www.miaouxmiaoux.com, but if you want to hear more music, then check out his Soundcloud page. This is just one of the download tracks on offer:
Miaoux Miaoux “Hrvatski”
And here’s the above mentioned video, coming on like a no-budget Jodorowsky with a slowly decaying skull made out of flowers:
(There was a name change after the first album from Raymond Listen to The Licorice Roots, to clarify. The leader/singer/songwriter is a guy called Edward Moyse).
