Los Angeles-based newcomer Jenny O has a knack for creating feelgood, upbeat, and wildly catchy folk tunes, but it’s her unique voice—calling to mind Janis Joplin in her sunnier moments and Melanie Safka simultaneously—that makes her stand out from the crowd. Her Jonathan Wilson-produced EP, Home will be released later
this year.
In the video clip below, Jenny O performs “Learned My Lessons,” “Get Lost” and “It’s In Our Hands” at SXSW on March 16th, 2012
Here’s a nice Kraftwerk cover mix by DJ Food which is “The first in a mix series featuring cover versions, sample-heavy tracks or songs that obviously owe a debt to the Dusseldorf quartet. Each mix is laced with spoken word, interviews or info about Kraftwerk, too.”
Tracklist:
01: Michael Bailey - Solid Steel intro
02: Fearless 4 - Rockin’ It
03: Pelding - It’s More Fun to Compute
04: Trouble Funk - Trouble Funk Express
05: Makoto Inoue - Europe Endless / Neon lights
06: The Divine Comedy - Radioactivity
07: Senor Coconut - Trans Europe Express
08: Senor Coconut - The Man Machine
09: Souxsie & the Banshees - Hall Of Mirrors
10: Senor Coconut - The Robots
11: Balanescu Quartet -The Robots
12: Tafkafb - Waltz Mit Der Robot
13: Apoptygma Berzerk - Ohm Sweet Ohm
14: Frenchbloke & Son - Neon Love (Cha Cha Cha)
15: Jason Moran - Planet Rock
16: Tremelo Beer Gut - Das Model
17: Big Black - The Model
18: Rammstein - Das Model
19: Ride - The Model
20: Frenchbloke & Son - Sexy Model
21: Buffalo Daughter - Autobahn
22: Dark Side of the Autobahn
23: Rot Front Trikont - The Robots
24: Senor Coconut - Showroom Dummies
25: Girls On Top - I Want To Dance With Numbers
26: Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force - Planet Rock (Elecktric Music Classic Mix)
27: Coptic Rain -The Robots
28: Erasure - Blue Savannah (Der Deutsche mix)
29: DMX Krew - Showroom Dummies
30: Melt Banana - Showroom Dummies
31: Aqua Vista - The Model
32: Senor Coconut - Home Computer
33: Senor Coconut - Tour De France
34: Elakelaiset Poro - Reindeer/Robots
Keith Richards interviewed on Friday Night Videos (a spin-off of Midnight Special ) in 1984.
Listening to Keith in this interview you can sense the memoir he would write two and a half decades later. A great storyteller with great stories to tell.
Many thanks to Jim Laspesa for sharing his awesome archive of rarely seen, hard-to-find and just plain cool videos.
When the promo for the new single by Norwegian nu-disco maestro Lindstrom dropped into my inbox recently, I was unusually excited. Not just because it was some new sounds from one of the undisputed masters of the genre, but because of these three magic words: “Todd Rundgren Remix.”
At first I thought it was a typo, or a mislabeling - surely they meant it’s a Lindstrom remix of Todd Rundgren? I mean, you can tell Lindstrom is a fan just from listening to his music (it’s all about those stacked synth chords) and besides, Todd doesn’t do remixes… does he?
A little bit more digging around proved that this was no typing error. One of my all-time favorite artists had indeed remixed a song for the first time, and with his usual immaculate taste, Todd had decided to remix a song by one of my favorite dance music producers. Through connections in the extended Rundgren fan network (which is itself an amazing thing, more like a family than mere rock fans) I was able to get some questions to Todd himself.
Dangerous Minds really needs more Todd Rundgren on our pages, so I am glad to share his answers:
You’ve been making music for a long time, but this is your first ever commercially released remix - how did it come about?
I was contacted by Lindstrom’s label. I’ve been making contributions to other artists’ recording projects over the years so it didn’t seem like that unusual a request. I don’t often get asked to be involved in ‘trans-generational’ collaborations, so that was different.
Your music has been a big influence on modern dance producers, but in particular the whole nu-disco/cosmic-disco genre - were you aware of any of those particular artists? And did you hear a musical connection when you listened to Lindstrom’s track?
Since I don’t usually focus on a single genre I don’t think of myself as having a ‘style’. It’s a little odd because in the 70s we thought of ourselves as prog-rock players and that disco was something of a sell-out for artists like Rod Stewart and Blondie. This ‘nu disco’ is a more organic movement, especially the emphasis on the instrumental aspect and lack of lyrics. That does remind me of some of the experimental excursions I’ve taken in the past.
I love how you embrace new music technology (and the new music it can help create). I’m curious to know what sequencing/recording program you’re using, and if you have any recent-ish programs or bits of kit you’re enthusiastic about? For instance, have you used Ableton Live?
I stuck with analog until the mid-Nineties, mostly because I was trying to be thrifty. I used Pro-Tools for about 12 years but finally got fed up with the tempermental and expensive technology and poor support. Recently, I have been an exclusive user of Propellerheads Reason. Since they added recording capabilities I’ve been able to record and mix with my laptop and without any environmental restrictions. I haven’t tried Ableton, mostly because I have yet to do any live mixing.
What are you listening to at the moment? Any music of the last 5 years that floats your boat and you’d recommend for Dangerous Minds’ readers?
I’m a big fan of ‘outsider’ music. It’s not very useful as an influence (at least not right now) but it’s a lot of fun to listen to and takes your mind off the ‘serious’ stuff. I recently downloaded Lorne Greene’s “The Man” and was so amused I decided to work some of it into my solo shows. Now the fans want a whole night of Lorne Greene. The problem with outsider music is that it’s often only one great song in an obscure career of mediocrity.
What’s in the immediate future for Todd Rundgren?* And is there anything more dance music-based, like more remixes or perhaps even dj sets?
It’s been suggested that I take a crack at DJing, and it’s not such a far-fetched idea. In 1993 I toured a record called No World Order and built a system that allowed me to improvise the set each night using a midi controller and a program I devised that would recombine samples on the fly. I had to build that program from scratch using MAX. Now software like Ableton is the prefered way to go, although I have some ideas about how it could be done with Reason.
Thanks, Todd!
Lindstrom’s “Quiet Place To Live (Todd Rundgren Remix)”, released by Smalltown Supersound, is available to buy from Juno Download. You can listen to it right now:
It’s always tempting to call a younger, up and coming artist with an astonishing talent the “new” someone or another. Usually when it’s a female performer with an acoustic guitar, the facile comparison—indeed the _default_ comparison—is Joni Mitchell, but that’s not what I’m feeling with Madi Diaz, a 25-year-old Nashville-based singer-songwriter who is considered one of that musical mecca’s best kept secrets.
Within a sort of thoroughly modern “Americana” context, Diaz and creative partner Kyle Ryan write songs which spring from a pure pop idiom. Hear them once, you’ll never forget them. Diaz’s lyrics are not about abstract subjects, they’re very specific feminine observations of life and relationships. She’s singing about herself—or at least she often writes in the first person—and it can be very powerful, plaintive and heartbreaking. If you married Carly Simon’s knack for the catchy, confessional, pop hit with the DNA of the legendary Anthology of American Folk Music box set, the result of that union would be Madi DIaz’s music.
Madi Diaz, it’s also worth noting, was a student at the School of Rock (both her father and brother are part of the school’s faculty) and first achieved notice as one of the lead teenage protagonists of Don Argott’s 2005 documentary Rock School. As Madi admits, “It’s embarrassing enough to have pictures of you when you’re 15 or 16 years
old; I have an entire doc.”
Produced and directed by Joe Boyd and Gary Weis two years after Jimi Hendrix’s death, Jimi Hendrix is a solid documentary comprised of some great live performances and insightful interviews with friends, family and a cool mix of musicians including Peter Townsend, Lou Reed, Mick Jagger, Noel Redding and Little Richard.
There’s a particularly lovely scene of Hendrix playing a twelve string acoustic guitar… pure, simple and beautiful.
Live footage from Monterey, Isle of Wight, Woodstock, Fillmore East and the Marquee Club. Deeply satisfying.
‘What did you do in the 1980s, Daddy?’ For those who want to know what it was like to be young(ish) and middle class in Britain during the 1980s, then take a look at the Pet Shop Boys in their one-and-only feature film, It Couldn’t Happen Here. Originally planned as an hour long pop promo to accompany the release of their third album Actually, It Couldn’t Happen Here captures the style, the pretensions, the cultural obsessions and some of the most popular music of that decade.
The Pet Shop Boys are a hugely under-rated band, whose compelling, beautiful and catchy music by Chris Lowe, can often disguise the power and passion of Neil Tennant’s lyrics. For you see, despite what the music press claims (that means you NME), or the modes by which the band present themselves (daft hats and outfits), there is really nothing ironic about the Pet Shop Boys at all. They mean everything they do. Which is why It Couldn’t Happen Here is so frustrating. It could have been like The Monkees Head for the 1980s, with a hard, political edge, but it wanders without any sense of direction through a series of segments that revolve too literally around the songs.
That said, for a pop film it’s not all that bad, and the quality of the songs, and some of the eye-catching performances (Joss Ackland, Gareth Hunt, Barbara Windsor) make it almost passable. If only Derek Jarman (who collaborated on a stage show, and directed the promo for “It’s A Sin”) or Lindsay Anderson (the director of If… and O, Lucky Man! who would had directed the concert film of Wham, yes, Wham, in China) had been asked to direct rather than Jack Bond, then things might have been different. Even so, Bond made it look sumptuous and Neil Tennant found out he couldn’t act.
The Oyster Princess directed by the great silent-era pioneer Ernst Lubitsch, is the 1919 tale of the marriage of a spoiled millionaire’s daughter and a case of mistaken identity. It contains some of the most ridiculous images of obscene wealth and silly rich people ever committed to celluloid. It’s no wonder that the members of Austin’s avant garde quintet, Bee vs. Moth chose this film to re-score when the SXSW FIlm Festival commissioned them to perform a new work at the fest: In many ways it’s the perfect film for the new gilded age of 2012 and kudos to Bee vs. Moth for resurrecting and renewing this nearly 100-year-old classic for modern audiences.
Bee vs. Moth debuted their original score to The Oyster Princess at the 2012 SXSW festival with a live performance to accompany the film. The members of this eclectic ensemble are Sarah Norris (drums, percussion) Philip Moody (electric & upright bass), Aaryn Russell (guitar), Ivo Gruner (trumpet), and Thomas van der Brook (saxophone). Each of the members play in several other Austin bands as well as working together as Bee vs. Moth.
In the clip below, Austin’s Bee vs. Moth offer a taste of what makes them one of the standout groups in a city positively teaming with musicians. Additional performances of Bee vs. Moth’s original score for The Oyster Princess are scheduled for Dallas and Houston in the near future.
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