Sometime Ariel Pink cohort, and an undoubted forefather of the chillwave phenomenon, John Maus has just released his new album We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves on the evergreen independent label Upset The Rhythm.

Isn’t it great when someone you really want to like is actually someone you really do like? Because if John Maus wasn’t as good as he actually is, I would be seriously pissed off that someone else had nicked my idea of doing for synth-pop what Portishead have done for spy soundtracks and torch songs. Even moreso than Ariel Pink, Nite Jewel or anyone else on the haunted-call-it-what-you-like-scene John Maus seriously ticks my boxes. For the uninitiated, it’s pretty simple. Maus takes synth-pop and squeezes it through a lo-fi, shoegazey filter until it comes out the other side dripping in an unreal atmosphere. Imagine OMD on 33rpm, or the soundtrack to a long forgotten 80s art film you saw on cable one night, multiply it to the power of a bongs-and-mushrooms trip, and you’re nearly there. It’s so spectral it’s as if you have dreamt it before. In fact maybe I didn’t invent this idea and it’s all just aural deja-vu.

Fans of Maus’ previous work won’t be disappointed with We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves. In it he retains all the core values of his last album, the officially awesome Love Is Real, but now the sound and the songs have had a wee tightening up. But don’t worry yourselves with thoughts of “sellout” - where before the lo-fi nature of the recordings created a dank haze the listener had to aurally peer through, this new, slightly more clean approach gives room for the individual parts to breath. Being able to distinguish them in the mix in no way detracts from their shimmering nature and actually adds to their power. There are less tracks than before, and the running time is just over half an hour. There is little over-indulgence here - and that is a very good thing. From the Upset The Rhythm website:

Pitiless Censors’ as an album displays a more delicate touch than its predecessors. “Hey Moon” is John’s first duet, performed with Molly Nilsson, who originally wrote the song. It’s a serene elegy that subtly weaves an impression of nocturnal loneliness and romantic dreams.

Closing track “Believer” is equally evocative with its bells, choral soaring and echoing sentiment. Of course, a John Maus album wouldn’t be a John Maus album without the same anthemic genius and dark humour that we’ve seen previously with songs like “Maniac” and “Rights For Gays” and this new album finds its succour in “Cop Killer”. The eerie waltz-time offspring of Body Count’s controversial 90s protest track, it is dystopian, bleak and ridiculous and, in short, classic Maus.

Unlike the last two albums, ‘Pitiless Censors’ looks towards the future in all its absurdity. It’s a record where promise takes the lead for the first time, providing a counterpoint to John’s default existential calling. The cover of “Pitiless Censors” depicts an airbrushed lighthouse, thrashed by wave after wave, bringing to mind Beckett’s quote “Unfathomable mind: now beacon, now sea.”

And one final thought -  the slightly grandiloquent title undoubtedly has a proper explanation (Maus is a philosophy professor) but maybe it’s also a subconscious pitch to have his music featured in the work of Adam Curtis? It’s definitely worth a shot, as the two would go beautifully together.

John Maus - “Believer” (available for free download here)
 

 
John Maus - “Cop Killer”
 

 
John Maus - “Matter Of Fact”
 

 
John Maus - “Keep Pushing On”
 

 
You can pre-order We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves on vinyl from Upset The Rhythm. For more info on John Maus,visit this page.

 
Sad to hear that Larry “Wild Man” Fischer died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on Wednesday at the age of 66. Fischer, a mentally ill street musician who was at one time a familiar face on the Sunset Strip selling his songs for 10 cents apiece, recorded several albums (one produced by Frank Zappa), appeared on the Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In television series, and had a documentary made about him, dErailRoaDed in 2005.

He performed with Linda Ronstadt, Tom Waits, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Rosemary Clooney, Barnes & Barnes and Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo. In 2004 Fischer performed “Donkey vs. Monkeys” on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Thomas Pynchon mentions Fischer in his 2009 novel Inherent Vice on page 155.

From The New York Times obituary:

Lawrence Wayne Fischer was born in Los Angeles on Nov. 6, 1944. From his youth on, whenever he was in a manic upswing — a state of intense creative energy he would call the “pep” — songs cascaded out of him.

At 16, after he threatened his mother with a knife, she had him committed to a mental institution. He was committed again a few years later.

After being released for the second time in his late teens, he lived mainly on the streets. Dreaming of becoming a famous singer, he performed in local talent shows.

He gained a small following and by the mid-1960s was opening for the soul singer Solomon Burke. He later opened for Alice Cooper, the Byrds and others.

Most of the time, though, Mr. Fischer stood on the Sunset Strip, where for a dime, or even a nickel, he would sing for passers-by. Mr. Zappa discovered him there and in 1968 released “An Evening With Wild Man Fischer” on his label Bizarre Records.

Mr. Fischer eventually fell out with Mr. Zappa, as he did with nearly everyone in his orbit. He languished until the mid-1970s, when he was almost single-handedly responsible for the birth of Rhino Records.

Rhino had been a record store in Los Angeles; Mr. Fischer, a habitué, recorded a promotional single, “Go to Rhino Records,” in 1975. Demand for it proved so great that it catapulted the store’s owners into the record-producing business.

I ran into “Wild Man” Fischer quite a few times over the years. The first time I saw him was on the third day I spent in Los Angeles in 1991. I didn’t have a car and so I took a bus to Tower Records. When I was going back to the hotel, I was sitting at the bus stop and a homeless vagrant started to get menacing towards me. It took me about a split second to realize who was confronting me and I thought it was probably a good idea to get away from him FAST, so I walked to the next bus stop. Sometimes you’d see him outside of rock clubs on Sunset or in the parking lot of the liquor store near the Chateau Marmont.

The last time I saw him was in 2004. My cell phone had run out of juice and I was making a call from a pay phone outside of a 7-Eleven store on Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood. As the line was ringing, I saw a stream of urine roll past me. I followed it to its place of origin and there I saw an unconscious Larry “Wild Man” Fischer pissing himself. When I saw the dErailRoaDed movie a few years ago, I realized that when I saw him, that this was at a time (shown in the film) when none of his family even knew where he was for several months. May he rest in peace.
 

 
I think someone lost their job over this one…

Click here for larger image.

(via reddit)

 
British stand up comedian Stewart Lee has returned to the BBC with a second series of his opinion dividing show Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. A ratings flop on its first run, it seems like a small miracle that it has made it back to our screens at all. Not least because a lot of hardcore comedy heads just don’t like it - and that includes some of our own writers here at DM, who have turned off episodes of the show in the past.

Lee was one half of the hip 90s alt comedy duo Lee and Herring, who starred in the cultish TV shows Fist of Fun and This Morning with Richard Not Judy. Since parting with Herring some years ago, Lee has followed a more polemical route without resorting to agitprop or being in-yer-face. He also took a very long hiatus from TV before returning in 2009, and seems to have ironed out some of the flaws from the first series of Comedy Vehicle. The involvement of Chris Morris, Arnold Brown and Armando Iannucci has perhaps helped too (worth particular mention are the interview cut aways featuring a very spiteful Iannucci and a deflated Lee).

In comedy terms this is very much an acquired taste. If you are happy to be a passive consumer of lowest common denominator observational humor, then this is not the show for you. If you are a fan of slapstick or rapid fire gags, Lee does neither. Even if you consider yourself a comedic connoisseur and you get what is is that he does, you still might not like it. And I’m not going to lie, Lee can be very hit or miss. But when he hits he hits hard - to answer the question in the headline I think he might actually be a comedy genius.

Watching the first episode of series two, which is ostensibly about “Charity” but is actually about Lee’s fictional grandad’s love for crisps, I felt like I had never seen anyone perform comedy that was this self-reflexive yet this funny before. Maybe I was in the right place at the right time, and in the right frame of mind but Lee manages that incredibly rare, almost magical feat of signposting a joke from miles away yet making the journey to the punchline, and the payoff itself, very funny indeed. See his grandad’s “crisps”/“crips” confusion (and even the repetition of the word “crisps” itself). This had me in stitches - contrary to the suggestion by some critics that his style will inspire a smirk rather than a belly laugh.

Stewart Lee manages to deliver comedy about comedy that keeps an audience engaged and laughing, without resorting to crudity or obviousness. He walks the thin line of being very knowing, and also knowing that we know he knows, without (completely) disappearing up his own arse. The viewer definitely has to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate Lee’s tangental, mumbly approach but if you’re willing to invest a bit more attention to a stand up comic than normal, it is richly rewarded.

Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle - Series Two, Episode One “Charity” - Part One
 

 
Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle - Series Two, Episode One “Charity” - Part Two
 

 
I have written about Ben Butler and his magical Mouse Pad on DM before, calling Joe Howe (who is in effect Ben Butler) the “Herbie Hancock of the Scott Pilgrim generation” and “Bernie Worrell jamming a Gameboy”. I stand by that because Joe is a brilliant producer. His lo-fi synthtastic noodlefunk is not to everyone’s liking, but if you dug some of the skwee sounds I posted a wee while back, if you like some 80s MOR pop but think it’s just too slick, or even if you just have a general interest in leftfield electronica, then BB&MP are worth checking out.

Having released their debut album Formed For Fantasy earlier this year, BB&MP’s record label LOAF are now giving away as a free download the first single, “Infinite Capacity (For Love)”, which features The Niallist on lead vocals. Who is that I hear you ask? Yes, it is me, and I know that makes me open to accusations of nepotism, but I would post about BB&MP even if I didn’t know Joe. There’s a reason I worked with him and that is because he is really good, and I am very happy with our collaboration. But you can judge for yourself - to have “Infinite Capacity (For Love)” sent to your inbox, enter your email address into this widget:
 

 
Other guest vocalists on the album include San Francisco’s Vice Cooler (aka Hawnay Troof), LA’s Bobby Birdman and the brilliant Scottish oddbod Momus. Formed For Fantasy is being streamed in full on the LOAF Records website. For more info (and free tracks) check out the Ben Butler & Mouse Pad Bandcamp site, and for general shits and giggles they also have a Tumblr. LOAF have also just released a new video for the track “Design” featuring Bobby Birdman. It’s the wigged out animated tale of a psychedelic Jesus-meets-Vishnu character:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Supermotion: The sound of Ben Butler & Mouse Pad

 
The Baby Bullet looks innocent enough, right? No, no it’s not. Pure. Nightmare. Fuel.

You can watch the original Baby Bullet infomercial here.

 
(via TDW)

 
Are there any readers of Dangerous Minds in France? If you do live there, then I would recommend getting your hands on the next edition of the well known rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles, which comes with a free cover mount CD featuring the best of the renowned post-punk and mutant disco label ZE Records.

ZE has been a longtime favourite label of mine, since I first started getting deeper into collecting disco and realised not all of the genre was dripping cheese with a boner for a chart placing. The releases were smart, weird, original, sleazy, camp, funny and funky as hell. The records came in a distinctive sleeve featuring the label’s iconic logo and a graphic featuring a New York City taxi cab. You didn’t even have to listen to tell that they were dripping in the atmosphere of that place and that time - hell, it may not even have been real, it may just have been the disco/punk New York of my imagination, but it sure did sound great.

Founded in New York in 1979 by British entrepreneur Michael Zilkha and the French publisher Michel Esteban (hence the name), ZE specialised in releasing both “Mutant Disco” for the uptown set, and more downtown experimental sound of “No Wave”, both co-existing side by side in a way that kinda made perfect sense. What united them was an attitude born of not giving a fuck. ZE acts spanned the gamut, from the noise-fests of Mars to the ground-breaking Lydia Lunch, from the proto electro of Suicide to the more rock output of Alan Vega, from the twisted dance punk of James White & Blacks to the sassy boy-baiting of The Waitresses, from the new wave Euro pop of Lio and Garcons to the veteran Velvet drone-meister John Cale, from the geeky freak funk of Was (Not Was) to the dancefloor experiments of Bill Laswell and Material.

My favourite ZE associated act is one August Darnell, better known by his stage name of Kid Creole. He worked with many different acts and under a variety of different names, including Cristina, Coati Mundi, Gichy Dan, Don Armando’s Second Avenue Rhumba Band and Aural Exciters, not to mention being the driving force behind two other seminal disco acts, Machine and Dr Buzzard’s Original Savanah Band. He brought to the music a heavy influence of golden era jazz and Cab Calloway. And it wasn’t just a a sly wink to the past - beneath his sometimes quite strange arrangements lurked classic Broadway songwriting chops and killer one liners (check “Darrio” below). I feel August Darnell has been overlooked in the history of popular music, and I hope to cover him more in depth in the future.

We have already covered a couple of ZE Records acts in the past few months here on Dangerous Minds, namely Cristina and Lizzy Mercier Descloux. it seems only right now to introduce the label to people who may not have heard of it, and/or to remind others who have of just how good it is. As I have mentioned before, it is worth signing up to the label’s mailing list to keep abreast of what they are up to (the next release is a remastered re-issue of John Cale’s Sabotage/Live LP recorded at CBGB’s in 1979 and featuring the Animal Justice EP). To sign up, visit the label’s official website. The entire ZE catalog (with info on how to obtain what is available) is on Discogs. This is the Les Inrockuptibles cover mount CD streamed from the ZE Records Soundcloud page - a pretty good summation of the label’s vast and influential output:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Is That All There Is?’: No Wave cult singer Cristina covers Peggy Lee in 1980
From Heaven With Love: Download the best of Lizzy Mercier Descloux for free

 
The World Beard and Moustache Championship was held on Sunday, in Trondhejm, Norway. The American team (“Beard Team USA”) brought home a respectable total of six gold medals, in categories such as “Full Beard Styled Moustache,” “Hungarian Moustache” and “Imperial Moustache” (congratulations to Burke T Kenny, Bruce Roe and Giovanni Dominice respectively). The big shock of the tournament was the dethroning of the popular Jack Passion (above) by his fellow American Rooty Lundvahl in the “Full Beard Natural” category, a title Passion was defending after a win in Alaska last year.

While all this looks great on paper, it wasn’t enough for Beard Team USA to defeat arch rivals Germany, who took home gold medals in a total of seven categories. I know the Americans had a lot riding on it, but as a European I can let you in on a little something we have known for a long time - you can never beat Germany at facial hair. Sorry, but it’s their precision engineering. Their wins this year included yet another overall competition win for Elmar Weisser in the “Full Beard Freestyle” category. This guy is untouchable, and I would fear for any competitor going up against him (have you seen his Brandenburg Gate!?). This year he really outdid himself, managing to sculpt his beard into a forest scene. Featuring a reindeer:
 

 
Fans of such matters (me included - I have been known to sport a Dali from time to time) should check out the trailer for a new series currently in production from the Independent Film Channel called “Whisker Wars.” As the name would suggest it’s a reality TV program that follows the trials and tribulations of some of the members of Beard Team USA (including Jack Passion) as they talk about their facial hair, the problems it can cause them, their grooming regimes and their preparations as they enter into local championships. I know this is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I cannot wait to watch this:
 

 
Not according to Kerry Campbell and her daughter Britney. who regularly has Botox injections and also gets “virgin” waxes even though she has not yet hit puberty. You know, ‘cos being 8 can be rough on your skin! From the UK’s Daily Mail:

California mum Kerry Campbell has come under fire after admitting she injects her young daughter Britney with Botox to get rid of ‘wrinkles’ that appear on the girl’s face when she smiles.

...

Kerry also admitted to waxing her daughter in the name of pageant success.

‘They call it little fluffy hair,’ she said. ‘They get judged on all that stuff. It’s a tough world, the pageant world, I’m telling you. The kids are harsh.’
Eight-year-old Britney added: ‘I just don’t think it’s ladylike to have hair on your legs. I did that one time. It was super, super hard. It hurts.”

Thanks to Samantha Veal for the link, who would like to make it known that she is NOT a regular reader of the Daily Mail.

 
A wonderful discovery from the archives of Mills College For Women, long a hotbed of revolutionary musical experimentation. This early 50’s newsreel of Harry Partch conducting the students on his battery of self-invented and built instruments (Partch famously described himself as a composer seduced into carpentry) is entirely too brief. Fortunately, due to the Youtubes, there’s been an explosion of materials on the great man for one and all to discover. I include as a bonus but a few of the lesser viewed examples of his greatness and encourage explorers to seek out recordings of Partch’s utterly unique music.
 

 
Harry Partch Music Studio a short film by Madeline Tourtelot circa late 50’s. (in two parts)

 
Much more after the jump…