Monday, July 30, 2012

once upon a time in ye ol' western daze.


Once Upon a Time in the West is a soundtrack composed by ennio morricone from the once upon a time in the west western film of the same name directed by sergio leone, released in 1968. the film score sold between 5 and 10 million copies worldwide. - wikipedia

imma post the follow up to the indonesian tape i posted a while ago with the reyog ponorogo vol. 4 very soon dudes, but until then, here is an old favorite around these parts. figured since i dragged out ol' serge, why not some morricone as well?

Sunday, July 29, 2012

my apologies to all...


for the lack of posts, i have been without the internet for the last week. as a make up gift, i offer one of my favorites from the hippest cat since rilke.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

someone's alone in the city tonight.


Finding a dilapidated, old accordion in a junk store was the major cause in turning Susan Dietrich's life around. At the time, back in the early seventies when Richard Nixon was embroiled in the Watergate fiasco and the Vietnam war was still raging in Southeast Asia, she and her husband, Joel, and their tiny daughter were political exiles living like refugees in their own country, terrified that Joel would be imprisoned for having resisted the draft. For nine years they had subsisted on spare change and meager sales of their artwork on the streets of Boston. The discovery and purchase of that little squeeze-box inspired Susan to take it into battle, the war on their own personal poverty. Down into the dark, noisy subway stations of subterranean Boston she went, where she slowly learned to pick out simple, familiar tunes like Take Me Out to the Ballgame, and When Irish Eyes Are Shining. There must have been something rather quaintly charming about this thin little street waif literally singing for her supper, for in the very first hour she made twenty dollars in change plus a twenty dollar bill from an elderly couple wishing her well. She soon discovered that by playing from early morning rush hour through the entire day, she could pull in over eighty dollars, an impressive amount for the times and on the street, while Joel stayed home caring for the baby. The accordion was eventually retired in favor of the very first Casio keyboard released on the American market, a toy by today's standards. But with Joel's previous experience playing in various 60s rock bands, they plugged the Casio into a phase-shifter, mic-ed Susan's voice through an echo unit, created a light show by wiring her tip box with twinkling lights, and crowned her with a winged helmet complete with a blinking red ball on top. She worked out arrangements for songs with other-worldly themes, such as Fly Me to the Moon, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Ghost Riders in the Sky, Radar Love and Major Tom. The response from the public was overwhelming. Suddenly she was being referred to as The Space Lady, and pictures of her began appearing in the papers and on TV. The cash flow became phenomenal; a cassette of space music soon followed (as did another baby), and the small family was finally able to return to San Francisco where Joel and Susan had met back in the glory days of Haight/Ashbury. Her music was received even more enthusiastically there, and she was flocked by people asking for interviews or requesting to make videos. To this day, 20-some years later, she still receives letters and emails from her fans from coast to coast and around the world. But she says the most valuable and treasured aspects of her career were those of personal growth: acquiring street smarts, becoming humble and compassionate, appreciating people from all walks of life, and discovering her talents and inner strengths, such as her lovely voice, her creativity, her originality, courage, tenacity, and her ability to find humor in the most difficult of situations. And she owes it all to that little Stomach Steinway found in a junk store back in Beantown, Massachusetts. - myspace (whoever knew that site could be helpful in this day & age?)

some amazing lo-fi oddball casio covers of major tom & radar love brush shoulders with even more oddball covers of all shook up & the electric prunes' i had too much to dream last night. what's bizarre about this is that this sounds so now ya dig? as if this could have come out on night people instead of being a street performer from the eighties. just cop it folks & reach out yr hands to the one alone in yr city tonight.

Saturday, July 21, 2012

i still love the girl from bennington.


Suzanne Ciani (born June 4, 1946) is an italian american pianist and music composer who found early success with innovative electronic music.

She received classical music training at wellesley college and obtained her m.a. in music composition in 1970 at UCB where she met and was influenced by the synthesizer designer, don buchla. She studied computer generated music with john chowning and max matthews at stanford's artificial intelligence labs in the early 1970s.

In 1982 Ciani began to record albums in the new age genre, characterized by a mix of electronic and traditional instruments. Her first album, Seven Waves was first released in 1982 in Japan, and was later released in her native US in 1984 through atlantic records. Her 1986 album [[The Velocity Of Love, released by rca records, featured Ciani's best known song, the title track. In 1987 she signed to the private music label, which released a number of albums from 1988 to 1992, including re-issues of her first two albums. Although emphasizing electronic music in her recordings, her solo piano album Pianissimo, from 1990, became her best-selling album. Ciani ended her contract with Private Music with the compilation The Private Music Of Suzanne Ciani, in 1992.
In the 1990s Ciani founded her own music label, Seventh Wave, from which she has released all her subsequent albums, which have been more classically oriented than her previous recordings. 1994's Dream Suite was recorded in moscow with the Young Russia Orchestra, and was Grammy-nominated. 1999's Turning featured her first composition with lyrics, in the title track, sung by Taiwanese artist chyi yu.
In early 2006, Ciani's Silver Ship won in The 5th Annual independent music awards for Best New Age Album. Ciani was also an inaugural member of the independent music awards judging panel to support independent artists.
Five of Ciani's albums have been nominated for grammy awards. - wikipedia

just discovered her recently. ridiculously good. sublimely beautiful & utterly essential for everyone remotely interested in catchphrases like ambient, drone or finding yr footing in an ever shifting & boundless genre. for the lo-fi tweens out there in ripped sweaters & skinny jeans, here is yr new ferraro.

worried man blues.




thrillington
is a 1977 album by paul mccartney under the pseudonym of percy "thrills" thrillington. the album is an instrumental version of paul and linda mccartney's 1971 album, ram. - wikipedia

i've had this one sitting in my queue for a while now. pretty amazing, even if yr not a fan of macca. & if you haven't picked up the reissue of ram, then i highly recommend it. it changed my opinion of him for the better fershure.

Friday, July 20, 2012

for flashstrap with love.


6- and 12-String Guitar is the second album by leo kottke, a solo instrumental steel string acoustic guitar album originally released by john fahey's takoma records in 1969. It is popularly known as the armadillo album after the animal illustrated in the distinctive cover art (by Annie Elliott). Although Kottke has recorded dozens of additional albums 6- and 12-String Guitar remains his best-known album. - wikipedia

yr the best bbgrrl.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

victory flowers.


From the vaults of CAM comes this diverse soundtrack by Nora Orlandi (Lo strano vizio della signora Wardh, A doppia faccia), written for the 1968 French/Italian giallo directed by Romolo Guerriri and starring Carroll Baker, Jean Sorel and Luigi Pistilli. Presented in a 6-page digipak with original artwork, film stills and interesting liner notes, this world premiere CD release contains the LP tracks in both simulated stereo and original mono versions. Riddle, riddle, Debbie in the middle. Surprise, surprise, guess who dies? - amazon

more giallo steez from one of my favorite ladies. nora orlandi is amazing, & definitely deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as morricone or piccioni. & the description is terrible, but you know what to expect at this point. loungy strings brush up against gentle woodwinds to make you feel the rush of running down a deserted backalley while a man in white chases you to yr death.

p.s. a very special someone is letting me borrow their jump so i'm currently in the process of moving all of my files from my mediafire to the drive. i'm just safe guarding against the inevitability of getting shut down. the hydra is upon you...

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

hullo, is it me yr looking for?


Ilaiyaraaja, Ilayaraja, Ilayaraaja, Isaignani, The Maestro... The undeniable prince of Kollywood cinema, India's second largest film industry, Ilaiyaraaja is more than equal to his forward thinking contemporaries in Bollywood and Lollywood in both productivity and experimentation. However, once you have exhausted all possible leads using his various names (and the numerous misspellings) you're faced with the unenviable task of sifting through a 34-year career spanning more than 900 film scores in Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada in order to unearth some the heaviest dancefloor friendly electronic pop to ever emerge from Southern India. Impossible to pigeonhole and characterised by his own indefinable style the man is a genre in his own right. - hhv.de

some fucking godtier kollywood fyre folks. this shit is so insanely good it's going to blow yr minds. raw lo-fi electronic psych pop masterpieces made for the dancefloor covered in kali's blood sacrifices.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

we've all seen the queen.


The World of Oz were a British psychedelic pop group who released a sole self-titled LP in 1968, before fading into relative obscurity. Their song 'The Muffin Man' was a minor hit in the UK and US, and reached the Top 10 in a number of European countries. - wikipedia

that is seriously all i could find out about this band... there isn't a whole lot floating out there about them. all i can say is if you liked that hearts & flowers album i posted, then you'll dig this. this is a bit more pastoral folk pop with minor psych flourishes than that band, but it also reminds me a bit of the byrds as well. a really fantastic album with pretty goofy artwork. i've been really diggin' on this one hepcats.

lending a helping hand.


another exotica classique i got from good ol' flash. stanley wilson, while not on par with denny or lyman, is still a fella worth a whole lotta yr admiration. keep on fighting the good fight amigo.

on that cinex tip.



**Hugely anticipated collection of extraordinary Pakistani film music. Bursting with excitable indigenous percussion, crazy synth fills, exotic vocals and dazzling arrangements made to own the dancefloor!** "Once again, Finders Keepers Record is given unparalleled access to the EMI Pakistan vaults to bring you Life Is Dance - the follow-up to 2010's critically acclaimed groundbreaking Lollywood cinematic pop compendium The Sound Of Wonder! Here you'll find fuzzy, scuzzy, twang-happy, spaced-out and funked up Urdu-grooves complete with harmonium melodies and driven by some of the most random factor, freakish, finger numbing, percussion hat the South east Asian mainstream has ever had to offer. Above all, Lollywood soundtracks sound RAW! Re-imagine some of the most action packed Bollywood productions (which Lollywooders actively did) then fire the make-up department, take away the special effects budget and then improvise. The lack of gloss on a dusty Pakistani mini-LP makes for truly experimental Eastern pop music. So, it's time to meet the culprits. The names on the back of the records that'll keep you gambling on Ghazals and taking punts on Pakistani pulp-ballardy. As an introduction, in place of R.D. Burman and Asha Bosle, we have Mr. M Ashraf and his long-term female collaborator, Nahid Akhtar. This duo would provide Pakistan with it's Gainsbourg/Birkin or it's Morricone/Dell'Orso for over 20 years, recording squillions of cut-and-paste sonic collages and moog-fuelled desperate love/hate/chase/chill/kill songs mixing onomatopoeic Urdu lyrics with unexpected bursts of user friendly English language (which often elongates the running time passed the 5 minutes mark) and throwing in the odd motif froma Barry White or Donna Summer hit. We also have legends like Noor Jehan, a national treasure and household name in Pakistan whose discography of film songs have deprived the vaults of EMI Pakistan of floor space for half a century." Highly recommended! - boomkat

i love film music of all stripes & you should too. this is an essential collection to lose yrself in.

montenero blues.


Record Mart, an unassuming music store down in the sprawling complex of the Times Square subway station in Manhattan, should be considered one of Latin New York's most important historic musical landmarks. It its heyday, it was not only a place where occult knowledge and cultural legacies were exchanged and passed on from one person to another, but the shop also served as the home base for Montuno Records, a small but important independent label started by proprietor Jesse Moskowitz in the 1970s. The shop and label are inextricably intertwined and constitute a New York Latin institution of sorts. Thankfully, the two entities and its proprietor are alive and well today, keeping the spirit of Subway Salsa alive for old fans and future generations alike. This compilation is an homage, paying tribute to a label that stands out as a plucky cultural beacon from a time when Fania reigned supreme. In Jesse's cramped store one could soak up the sights of Latin album cover art, the tropical sounds blasting over the speakers, and eavesdrop on conversations among the diminutive shop's knowledgeable staff and customers. Just as the New York metropolitan transit system is a crossroads and a means of exchange and travel, so too is its sole surviving cultural tenant Record Mart, an underground urban grotto oasis that despite a period of closure and a dwindling market, seems to hold on as tenaciously as many veteran salsa musicians from the '70s still do to this day in the city. This collection samples the recordings from Montuno's catalog that exemplify danceable Afro-Antillean music, from Nuyorican salsa to Haitian compas, Latin jazz to traditional Cuban genres (including the all-percussion rumba, the flute and violin-flavored charanga, and guitar/trumpet-dominated son), as well as several interesting hybrids incorporating funk, doo-wop and Brazilian sounds. - amazon

when shit gets to be too much between home life & work life, i put this on & soak up the sunshine & let the tropical vibes wash over me. summer forever amirite?

pt. I // pt. II


p.s. upon my fifth listen, this record is some serious fyre amigos. download this or be bummed.

Monday, July 9, 2012

personality crisis.


if yr into the dolls (which if you aren't then what the fuck?), sparks or the quick record i posted, then this is for you. catchy glammy power pop perfect for summer activities. don't let the stupid name fool you, this record is pretty legit. not quite as good as the quick, but still essential. dedicated to zach. call me duder, let's get psychidelique.

shadows of the vatican.


what can i say that hasn't been said about this one before? absolutely essential.

reputation killer.


no fucks given. i'll post fahey then some jpop record right after. definitely not meant for laptop speakers.

cop killer.


Following the fulfillment of his two-album contract with Reprise Records and lackluster sales, Fahey was released from Reprise and went back to recording for his own Takoma label.

Fahey originally dedicated the album to Swami Satchidananda, but later said the primary reason he was involved with the "spiritual community in the mountains of Lake County, Northern California" was because he was in love with the Swami's secretary. Relating the background to the recording of Fare Forward Voyagers to Byron Coley in his article "The Persecutions and Resurrections of Blind Joe Death", Fahey recalled "Probably the primary reason I got involved with them was that I fell in love with Swami Satchidananda's secretary, Shanti Norris. So, I was doing benefits for them, hoping to score points with her, and along the way I learned a lot of hatha yoga. I could go over there and get food any time I liked. I didn’t believe in Krishna or anything. It was like being in the middle of The Thief Of Baghdad.”

The album and song titles are from American poet T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" set of poems. Fahey later said the songs were "too demanding" to play live.

An earlier version of the title track was released on the 2006 reissue of The Yellow Princess. Themes from "Requiem for Russell Blaine Cooper, "When the Catfish Is In Bloom", and "Dalhart, Texas 1967" can be found in the three songs. - wikipedia


fahey is on some godtier shit with this record. enough said.

to ghostcapital with love.


On the one hand, Iranian exiles have created via their media and culture a symbolic and fetishized private hermetically sealed electronic communitas infused with home, past, memory, loss, nostalgia, longing for return, and the communal self; on the other hand, they have tried to get on with the process of living by incorporating themselves into the dominant culture of consumer capitalism by means of developing a new sense of the self and what can be called an “exilic economy.” —Hamid Naficy

If you look, Iranians like to brag, you can find members of the diaspora anywhere in the world. I once was standing at a tram station in Gothenberg, Sweden, when I overheard Persian being spoken between a mother and child. It seems this frosty mid-sized fishing hub was the destination of tens of thousands of political refugees — mostly from left-leaning anti-Shah organizations — that ended up on the wrong side of the 1979 revolution. In Dubai and other cities on the opposite side of the Persian Gulf, flows of Iranian migrants are more reciprocal. There one can meet Iranians who not only survive but also thrive on economic and cultural links to the homeland. The highest prices for Tehran’s contemporary artworks are found foremost in Dubai, and only after that in Paris, Vienna, and London. The dusty whiskey I consumed in Tehran was likely smuggled in from a U.A.E. duty-free shop.

Nevertheless, I also met a self-appointed Iranian diva in Dubai who reminded me very much of the ideal of the diasporic exile. After listening to her talk about her bohemian lifestyle for several hours while she incessantly surfed Facebook, I asked her — since she was literally a half-hour away from Iran by plane — how often she went back. “Oh, I don’t go back. I haven’t been back for 30 years. And I won’t go back until the country that I left comes back.”

Meanwhile, the country moved on. Several years ago, the Iranian rap group ZedBazi penned the satirical hit “Irooni LA” (“LA Iranian”), which lambasted the rituals of “Tehrangeles” and turned on its head the once-celebrated closeness of the LA-based Iranian diaspora to American hyper-culture. After more puns than a Cliff’s Notes Oscar Wilde, the song ends by riffing in English, “Tehrangeles — are you jealous that you can’t come to Tehran?” ZedBazi is not allowed to officially release an album in Iran, and they mostly shuffle around European capitals, but they are putting out an online album this year with a guest appearance by Iran’s most famous rapper, Hichkas (“Nobody”). You may have seen him in No One Knows About Persian Cats, a film which portrayed a hellish hipster dystopia where Iranian rockers slink around Tehran trying to escape to the West. No one seemed to notice the most ironic aspect of the film: while sketching a society with no artistic outlets, it wears its coolness on its sleeve by featuring a host of underground artists that had risen to fame and notoriety in that very same place.

It is then a bit tiresome when each new Persian pop compilation — emerging from the perpetual motion machine that is the great reissue bubble of the early 21st century — begins with some variant of “There used to be a country called Iran, and it loved us.” Lurking behind this phrase, one so common to the pundit class, is the opposite: “But now, they want to kill us.” Journalists who travel to Iran almost always report a story that confirms one of these two well-burnished premises. If they actually tried to capture anything more complex, well, that’s what editors are for. Estrangement breeds weird vibes, Freud said, and when repressed memories resurface they can cause the sufferer to project a strangeness onto the outside world which, in reality, belongs to the self.

One may be tempted to read too much into the name of the label which released the two-disc Rangarang compilation of Persian hits from the 1960s and ’70s: Vampisoul. The notes are filled with paisley- and turtleneck-clad Iranians, many of whom appeared on the TV variety show which bore the name of this compilation. Songs are presented without original release dates, as if this was a single mass of music which is only defined in relation to a revolution that hadn’t even happened yet. The only date that matters is year zero: 1979.

This heaviness notwithstanding, Rangarang is likely the best Persian pop compilation from this period of all the recent offerings. Though there’s little explanation, it seems the music was culled from singles released by Ahang-e Rooz, one of Iran’s biggest labels at the time. Two superb Googoosh tracks not on the earlier B-Music compilation are here, and we also get an assortment of Beti, Pooran, and Leila Forouhar — pouty household names of early-1970s Iran. The first few lines of each song are translated in the notes, so listeners can get an appreciation of how Iran’s pop entertainment maintained the melancholia of their country’s modern literature even while a bossa nova, bubblegum, or Rimsky-Korsakov-styled orchestra swirled beneath the singers. A riff from the pages of Lee Hazelwood sits behind Habib Mohebian’s “Bi To Man” (“Me Without You”), and Giti’s powerful version of Iraj’s “Tarsam az Eshgh” (“Afraid of Love”) stands out with its refined, chic balladry. Soul-sucking vampire squid label or not, the compiler Eva Garcia Benito has an ear, to be sure.

When compilations used to give little or no notes to their big Third World aural excursions, labels were criticized for presenting the music devoid of history and politics. But when one does write-in history, whose history do you use? Rangarang looks like an authentic product of a time that is now gone, but it’s really more a mythic creation of the Iranian diaspora. As with most diasporas borne of revolution — Cuban, Russian, French — history tends to stop while the nostalgic conjuring of a golden age plagues the exiled generation.

We could read this compilation against the tragic grain of its vampiric intentions. As the inclusion of the Afghan pop star Ahmad Zahir on Rangarang shows, the cultural influence of “Greater Persia” stretched farther than the borders of 20th-century Iran. Persian was the lingua franca of much of Central Asia, including the Mughal court in India. Politics mattered less than the deeper tranches of musical and poetic exchange that crisscrossed the region. This foundation was something that a revolutionary interregnum could only temporarily paper over. 1979 was not year zero for an entire culture, although it altered the biographies of millions of Iranians, myself included. Most of these musicians ended up in LA or Europe, and the brutal 1992 murder of Fereydoon Farrokhzad in Germany, whose song starts off the comp, testifies to the harrowing experience of the oppositional exile.

But there was no Persian golden age. One could craft a compilation of recent underground post-revolutionary pop songs to go along with the pre-revolutionary ones, and it would be hard to tell the difference except for the brand of synthesizers involved. Yet such a release could easily be marketed as a secret and exclusive window onto the “real” Iranian culture that naturally loves us and, therefore, expresses itself in pop music form. Limited to 1000 vinyl copies. Mastered from the MP3 originals! In the tormented world of the Islamic Republic, rock is resistance and their guitars kill Islamo-fascists…

It may be facile, but it sells. If our drone-piloted bombs ever rain down on Tehran, we could clutch these gatefold LPs tearily as we assure ourselves that we’re bringing the golden age back to the Persian plateau. Alternatively, one could adopt the stance of ZedBazi, and approach music from other parts of the world by letting go the assumption that it always, inevitably and self-affirmingly, revolves around us.

Postscript: In mid-January, I caught supergroup Mitra Sumara in the East Village, performing an impressive hour-long set of Persian hits for an amazed audience. Lead singer Yvette Perez had recently learned Persian in order to sing Googoosh’s songs and other big band hits reissued on these many recent Iranian compilations. Instead of a hermetically sealed nostalgia sandwich, it was the type of cross-cultural celebration that vibrantly fused the music of the past with an urgency of the present. - Kevan Harris, dustedreviews.com


<3 u brah.


pt.1 // pt.2

Friday, July 6, 2012

church of all images.




The first release in a definitive series collecting psychedelic '70s music from Pernambuco, Brazil. Includes 19 tracks of humid Psyche Rock grooves from the Brazilian underground* "Fabricas de Discos Rozenblit was founded by José Rozenblit in 1954 in Pernambuco (northeast Brazil). Im addition to a record label the operation boasted the first ever vinyl-pressing plant in the state, a super-modern factory and a studio capable of recording a full symphonic orchestra. Location away from the expense of Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro gave them financial independence and the space to develop a truly unique voice in Brazilian music. Jose and his brothers invested substantial resources into local music styles sich as Ciranda, Maracutu, Carimbo and Frevo. Between the mid-fifties and mid-sixties the label released music by artists including Jorge ben, Claudette Soares, Os Megatons, The Gentlemen, Flaviola, Waltel Branco, Trio 3D, Dom Salvador, Lula Cortes, Zé Ramalho, Elis Regina, Tom Zé, Os Versateis and Os Baobas. - boomkat

another essential summer time psych rock record to fight those heatwavve blues.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

a light in the darkness.


Sory Kandia Kouyaté was a remarkable singer who died at the age of 44 in 1977, just a few years before western audiences began to more widely appreciate west African music. He was a celebrity in Guinea and toured widely as an ambassador for his country, even appearing at the UN, and would certainly have attained the global status of his compatriot Mory Kanté if he had lived longer. This intriguing double album is a reminder of why of he was special. It is divided into two very different sections: an acoustic set with backing provided by kora, balafon, and his own ngoni and guitar; and an even more distinctive set in which he is supported by two leading Guinean bands of the early 70s. They match electric guitar and brass against his sometimes startlingly powerful vocals, on rousing, stately praise songs for his country and its ruling party. The politics may be questionable, but the music is magnificent. - the guardian

this is absolutely stunning. his voice is angelic & the playing is beautiful. essential summer listening.

pt.1 // pt.2

high speed flight.


i can not gush enough about how amazing daphne oram is. a co-founder of the bbc radiophonic workshop in 58', she was a pioneer in electronic/ambient/noise who gets overlooked by some other bigger names. if you have never heard of her before, i highly suggest giving this a go as it's pretty mind blowing the sounds she was getting way back in the dark ages of electronics.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012