Trish Keenan, lead singer of the British indie/electronica group Broadcast, died today of pneumonia following a swine flu infection. Associated with Stereolab, the band had a similar psych-pop-esque sound, if a bit more electronic and sample heavy. Having released some of their earliest work on Stereolab’s Duophonic label, the band found a more permanent home on Sheffield’s reknowned Warp records. Broadcast really deserved their reputation as one of the best bands the UK has produced in the last 15 years, and I guess that Ms Keenan’s death spells the end for them. Very sad news indeed.
I wanted to call shenanigans on this, but the person who uploaded it on YouTube says,“This video was discovered by someone who used to work at a public library several years ago. This has not been edited in any way. This is 100% authentic.”
There’s even a poor man’s Portishead tune that reminds you to “Think about this.”
Just to muddy the water even further, “Kosmiche” the genre should not be confused with “Cosmic” the genre, also known as “Afro-Cosmic” and “Cosmic Disco.”
“Cosmic” is named after the Italian Cosmic Club, where in the late 70’s and early 80’s DJ Daniele Baldelli (with a little help from Beppe Loda and TBC) pioneered a strange, slow-motion mix of disco, Afrobeat, prog and electronica. Tracks were often played at the wrong speed with added sounds and percussion, to a hypnotic and druggy effect perfect for a crowd moving from cocaine and marijuana onto harder drugs. These mixes are quite unlike anything else. Early electro is mixed with tribal chanting and percussion before blending into a new wave or disco hit of the day (played at 33 1/3 rather than 45rpm of course). It can take a bit of listening to get used to, but it is expertly mixed and effortlessly musical.
Cosmic C80 Mix side A part 1
Cosmic C42 Mix side A part 1
Cosmic C84 Mix side B part 1
Cosmic Club and the Afro Cosmic sound was a big deal at the time, with mixtapes and stickers selling aplenty, and a dedicated fan base known to loiter in the parking lot if they couldn’t get inside. It remained largely unknown outside Italy and certain pockets of Northern Europe until a recent renaissance among disco music fans and fringe music cognoscenti. Baldelli’s numerous mixtapes from the era, along with those of Loda and TBC, have become cult musical artifacts eagerly collected and traded on the Internet, and a new generation of house and post-dubstep producers undeniably bear its slo-mo trace. Baldelli is still a successful dj, and has released a few official mixes including a two cd and book set dedicated to the Afro Cosmic Disco sound, and the excellent Cosmic Disco? Cosmic Rock! mix/compilation.
Velvety dirge kings The Black Angels perform with fellow Austinite and high priest of Texas psychedelia Roky Erickson at this Halloween show at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles. A perfect union. The Angels are the heirs to Roky’s tattered day-glo throne. Their album “Phosphene Dream” and “Grinderman” were my favorites of 2010.
If you like this video, there’s more here for purchase on DVD.
On September 26, 1956 Elvis returned to his birthplace Tupelo, Mississippi to perform a homecoming gig at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. The Tupelo Daily Journal reported…
[...] the fair this year has the strongest grandstand lineup in years. It has Elvis Presley, the current biggest drawing card on the American entertainment scene; and it has an outstanding lineup of livestock and agricultural exhibits.”
During the show a teenage girl rushed the stage and practically knocked Elvis off his feet. Later, when she was asked why she’d stormed him, she replied, ‘I want him and I need him and I love him.’
Brief clips from the Tupleo show have floated around the internet for awhile. But they’ve been silent or dubbed with audio from other sources. Here’s the longest version I’ve seen and the first that has sound from the actual performance. It’s a great piece of rock and roll history.
Britain’s The Klaxon Institute has developed a revolutionary technology that is one small but significant step toward solving world hunger.
As the name suggests, reverse liposuction, or the stretch-and-blow technique, is liposuction turned on its head. Developed by Dr Herod Richards at the Klaxon Institute on Harley St, London, it involves the removal of excess fatty tissue, as with ordinary liposuction procedures. The crucial difference is that this valuable resource is not wasted. Instead, the excess fat is stored and then introduced into the bodies of those with a shortage of fats. This could be for purely aesthetic reasons – but the Klaxon Institute has pledged to use it for humanitarian reasons. Fat from the west is flown out to some of the poorest people in the third world and donated to them. This allows people who would otherwise starve to build up a reserve of fat that they can live off for months at a time, removing the need for them to try to feed themselves.
Watch the video. But more importantly become involved by donating to the Klaxon Institute here.
If you haven’t been able to tell from all of the Monkees posts I’ve been doing recently, I’m going through a bit of a Monkees “phase” right now and probably annoying the hell out of Tara with it. It started when I was listening to “Sunny Girlfriend” from Headquarters. I must have played that song fifty times last week. I couldn’t get enough of it. It’s so catchy!
Then I moved on to other of their hits featuring Mike Nesmith. Pretty much 100% of the songs he wrote and sang (and even the material he sang but did not write, for that matter) with the Monkees are total winners. And distinctively his.
After Nesmith bought himself out of this Monkees contract in 1970, he formed a country-rock group called Michael Nesmith and The First National Band. Nesmith and the group released two albums in 1970, Loose Salute and Magnetic South. If you like the sound of his Monkees contributions, you’ll find no surprises with the First (and later “Second”) National Band material. Clearly it’s the same songwriter and voice we all know so well, but with a more mature style that compares favorably with The Flying Burrito Brothers. And the songs are still as catchy as hell. The guy’s an absolutely ace songwriter.
The reason Michael Nesmith doesn’t get as much credit for birthing the country-rock genre as he should is simple: the stigma of being involved with such a commercial proposition as the Monkees tapped his street cred. That’s too bad, because from the vantage point of 2010, Loose Salute and Magnetic South seem like criminally overlooked classics overripe to be critically reassessed.
Here’s a sampling of three of my favorite tracks from Michael Nesmith and the First National Band:
“Silver Moon” (dig the pedal steel guitar solo from longtime Nesmith collaborator, Red Rhodes):
“Joanne”
“Tumbling Tumbleweeds” (from the 1935 Gene Autry movie of the same title)
A Pathetone Weekly news featurette from the 1930s, in which our intrepid news hound guessed what the average woman about town would wear in 2000. The light-bulb head-dress is a winner.
Jim DeRogatis’ book, Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic is a book that you either devour in one sitting or else you’d never pick it up in the first place. Me, I sucked it down like it was oxygen. Lester Bangs was one of my heros and I loved him to pieces. To read such a meticulously researched and well-written bio of the man was like a dream come true for me.
In the book, DeRogatis tells the tale of his own visit with Lester Bangs at his messy apartment on Sixth Ave and 14th St, in New York. DeRogatis was still in high school at the time and was there interviewing the writer for a class assignment. Two weeks later, Bangs was dead from an accidental drug overdose. As a nice digital coda to Let It Blurt, DeRogatis gave the complete interview to the Perfect Sound Forever website. Here’s an excerpt:
Jim DeRogatis: That makes it easier. I’m kind of turning the tables on you now.
I’m not a hard interview.
How did you get your start writing about rock ‘n’ roll?
They used to have a little box, believe it or not, in the pages of Rolling Stone in like 1968 that said, “Do you write, draw, take pictures? Send us your stuff.” So I started sending them reviews. The first four reviews I sent, let’s see, I said that Anthem of the Sun by the Grateful Dead and Sailor by Steve Miller were pieces of shit and White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground and Nico’s The Marble Index were masterpieces, and White Light/White Heat was the best album of 1968. I couldn’t figure out why they weren’t printing any of these things. Then this MC5 album, Kick Out the Jams, came out, and they had this big article in there saying the MC5 were the greatest band in the world and all this, so I went out and bought it. Just like anybody, you buy something you don’t like and you feel like you bought a hype. And I wrote this really like, blaaah!, scathing sort of review. And I sent a letter with it and said, “Look, fuckheads, I’m as good as any writer you’ve got in there. You better print this or give me the reason why.” And they did, they printed it, and that was the beginning.
How long were you with Rolling Stone?
I was never on the staff at Rolling Stone. I freelanced for them from that point, which was like March of 1969, until about ‘73, I guess, when Jann Wenner threw me out for being, quote, “Disrespectful to musicians,” end quote. I wrote a review of Canned Heat, an album called New Age, that said, “Why do we love Canned Heat? Let us count the ways. We love them because they did the longest boogie ever put on record. We love them because…” I mean it was making fun of them. I guess you’re not supposed to do that. Well, obviously not in that magazine.
Did that change your opinion of Rolling Stone?
No. I knew it was a piece of shit. The reviews I did for them really stuck out like sore thumbs. And I never did get along with Jann, because he really likes the suck-up type of writing. He doesn’t like people that are stylists unless it’s somebody he wants to suck up to himself, like Norman Mailer or Truman Capote or someone like that. And Jon Landau, my editor there at the time, did not go to bat for me, which Paul Nelson did later. When Paul Nelson got the job of record review editor, he told Wenner, “There’s certain people I want to write for the magazine.” And he said, “Like who?” And Nelson said, “Well, like Lester Bangs.” And Wenner said, “No way.” Nelson said, “Well if you don’t take him, you can’t have me.” That’s what kind of a friend Nelson is. He has integrity, which Landau didn’t have. Landau was saying things at the time like every Glenn Campbell album, every Jerry Vale album, every Helen Reddy album, every Ann Murray album was a distinct piece of art which should not be looked at as a piece of product.
That’s definitely against your theory, right? Rock is not art.
Oh, I don’t know. I double back on myself so much. There’s the trash aesthetic and all that. The way I’ve written about the Velvet Underground and Van Morrison, of course it’s art.
A mashup of imagery from 1970s Hungarian Sci-fi TV series Tales of Pirx the Pilot (based on Stanislaw Lem’s book) and soundscapes from electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack, this video pays tribute to the roots of digital pop culture.
[...] specifically focuses on tracks using Haack’s self-made vocoder, which he named “Farad.” This was the one of the first truly musical vocoders, and first to be used on a pop album, pre-dating Kraftwerk’s Autobahn by several years.
In his music and lyrics, Haack explored the interface between humans and machines in the beginning decades of cybernetics. Releasing groundbreaking experimental records as early as 1962 using synthesizers, early proto-types of the vocoder, rhythm machines and the touch sensitive Dermatron, Haack’s visionary sound still seems fresh.
Back in the days when there were video stores, you’d find 1977’s Chatterbox in a faded box stuffed on a dusty shelf alongside Roller Boogie and Slammer Girls . Released by ubiquitous B-movie merchants Vestron Video, Chatterbox isn’t good or bad enough to be a cult hit or sexy enough to be a softcore pud tugger. One would think a movie about a singing vagina would have one or two money shots, but no, not even a closeup of a lip syncing labia. What it does have is Tarantino’s favorite sex kitten Candice Rialson (Candy Stripe Nurses, Hollywood Boulevard, Summer School Teachers) in the role of Penny and the erotically challenged Rip Taylor and Professor Irwin Corey.
Chatterbox isn’t a total bust as you will see in the following clip where Penny’s vagina (named Virginia and dressed in what appears to be one Liberace’s fur coats) belts out a show tune, “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo,” accompanied by a bunch of Studio 54 bartenders in molting bird costumes. It all comes to a mindboggling climax on a giant spinning donut.
Lift up your skirt and sing along if you like.
A DM reader brought to my attention that it’s Rip Taylor’s birthday today. Happy birthday Rip!
