WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Sportsy Talk: Olympics Update!

Mitt Romney, former head of bribery-ridden Salt Lake City Olympics 2002, started off his Big World Diplomacy Tour (Three Whole Other Countries!) by pissing off his first hosts so much that the Prime Minister of England dissed him in public. Score!

Just because the London Games have involved social cleansing, Brand Police,  a ban on fish and chips without the fish, strikes, threatened strikes, security failures, rooftop rocket launchers, a battleship in the Thames, official mascots with security camera eyes that “record everything,"  a logo that looks like a sex act, the worst font ever of the 21st Century, empty seats, insulting flags, inappropriate remarks about beach volleyball, and badminton scandals, it doesn’t mean they’re not, you know, well-organized.

Then there was the Opening Ceremony. You’d think Mittens would have liked that Opening Ceremony, with its salute to the Poors Who Knew Their Place back in the England of the Industrial Revolution. The part he probably would not have liked was the part we didn’t get to see here in the US—the tribute to the victims of the 7/7 attacks. London won the right to host the 2012 Olympics on July 6, 2005, and on the next day terrorists detonated four bombs on London subways and a bus, killing 52 non-terrorists and wounding 700. The two events are linked in people’s minds, and the ceremony featured a moving version of the hymn “Abide with Me” sung by Emeli Sande, and a dance choreographed by Akram Khan. I couldn’t figure out why NBC cut this part of the program to run some stupid interview with Ryan Seacrest and Michael Phelps—which they reran the other night!— because I thought the point of American news media was to keep us in a constant state of fear about terrorism, and wouldn’t a tribute to terror victims help with that? But then the next day NBC said they cut the tribute because it “wasn’t tailored for the US audience.” So now I know that the main goal of American media isn’t to keep us frightened, it’s to keep us ignorant.

Here's the censored part of the ceremony:

 

And here's London Mayor Boris Johnson welcoming you to the Olympics!

 

Mining the Audio Motherlode, Volume 176

Give the Drummer Some's
Favorite Downloads from the MP3 Blogosphere 

Today is the fifth anniversary of the passing of Dirk Gjaltema, a young Dutch music blogger whose irreverent appreciations in Cities on Flame With Rock and Roll (still kept online as a lasting memorial by his adoring family) was one of my first thrilling discoveries in blogland.

Take a moment to read my earlier post about Dirk.

Dirk's great gift was the generosity with which he transformed his own ecstatic love for music into a communal experience. The kindred spirit of that gift courses through my own music sharing endeavors, on the radio and here in this weekly column. Rest in noise, Dirk!

 

Maggie Nichols  & Peter Nu  ~  Don't Assume
(Blog: Continuo's Weblog)

Don't Stand Down Maggie
"On Don’t Assume, and particularly on the eponymous, side-long track #4, Maggie Nicols carefully avoids anything resembling jazz singing in favor of an intermediary state between spoken word, sound poetry, thinking out loud and sprechgesang. Similarly, the piano accompaniment, a delicate, needle-point construction of ephemeral chords and non-rhythmic structures, seems to be floating mid-air in an uncertain pitch like some of Olivier Messiaen’s piano music. This strange alchemy works wonders and inevitably takes the listener by surprise."  (Description by Continuo)

Leo Addeo - Paradise Regained: The Exotic Music Of The Pacific (1961)

Yet another installment in the acclaimed Stereo Action series by RCA Victor, this 1961 album by Leo Addeo is also yet another adventure into Polynesian territory, building upon the themes of Hawaii and the South Pacific that were so popular during the time period. And Hawaiian it indeed is--this album contains more than enough ukulele, lap steel, and exotic "imagery" to be classified alongside Les Baxter and Martin Denny.

When I sat down and listened to this, my expectations were moderately high, being pretty familiar with RCA Victor, Stereo Action and mid-century Exotica. Really though, after the album's run time was over, I realized that none of the songs on it were distinctive enough to tell apart. The music that makes up Paradise Regained is, in short, kind of bland--it's not exciting enough melodically and it's a bit too mellow and lackadaisical for its own good. It ends up coming across much like many of the generic faux-Polynesian LP's on the catalogs of '60s budget labels, except with a noticeably higher standard of production. Also, having payed close attention to the stereo mix on this record, it's not up to par with many of the other entries in the Stereo Action series. Technically, even by today's mixing standards, the channel separation would be fairly modest. Addin to that the outrageousness of mixing that Stereo Action is generally known for and it becomes a little disappointing.

That aside, this music is pleasing to the ears and, at least superficially, capable in its exoticism. It's definitely in line with the values of the music industry during its epoch. It's also, without a doubt, in line with the values of the listeners of the time. However, when I compare this album to others like it, I can't help but point out its relative mediocrity.  Anyway, see what you think by hearing it for yourself below.

Ka-Lu-A | Lovely Hula Hands | A Song Of Old Hawaii | Keep Your Eyes On The Hands | Now Is The Hour | Adventures In Paradise | Every Little Moment | Trade Winds | Hello, Aloha! How Are You | Beyond The Reef | No Other Love | I'll See You In Hawaii

In case you didn't feel like showing up - Volume 40

Watch Odd Future+Trash Talk playing "Radicals" and "Awake" live at 285 Kent on July 26, 2012. Even though they do have a new and pretty wicked industrial sized A/C at the warehouse on Kent, condensation started dripping from the ceiling 2 minutes into Trash Talk's set. Bodies were flying all over the place, swinging from the sprinkler pipes on the ceiling and vanishing in a several hundred people strong mosh pit. It was sheer mayhem and the ruckus was definitely brought to Brooklyn last night. Musically, it wasn't all that. But hey, what does a room full of explosive energy care about song writing finesse.

Einsturzende Neubauten's complete Halber Mensch film

Massive thanks to my good friend Wendy Vogel for alerting me to this. I've seen bits and pieces here and there of German industrial stalwarts 1986 film Halber Mensch here and there, but now some wonderful soul has uploaded the complete package. Tons of great performance footage and surreally unsettling quasi-music videos spread throughout of Blixa and company in their prime.



On a related note, the film's director, Gakuryū Ishii, had perviously directed this film, entitled The Crazy Family, that I wish to make a point of seeing immediately:

"In 1984, Ishii directed his most widely-acclaimed movie to that point, The Crazy Family (逆噴射家族), the title of which literally translates to The Back-Firing Family (or more crudely, "the fucked-up family"). A savage satire of Japanese family life, it depicted an average household (mother, father, son, daughter, and later grandfather) moving into a new Tokyo home, only to have their perfect life collapse due to pressures from within and without. The daughter obsesses over her singing career; the nominally-demure wife does table-dances for the guests; the son stabs himself to stay awake during his exam-cram sessions; the father digs a giant hole in the living room floor, finds termites, buys ant poison and tries to kill everyone en masse. The film garnered the Grand Prix at the Saruso Film Festival." (from Wikipedia)

And back to Neubauten, here's a 1981 performance of the title track from their incomparable, underrated true first full-length album (not counting some early cassette works) Kollaps:

MP3 - A Crash Course, guest post by Jonathan Sterne

Today, there are more mp3s in circulation than all other recording formats combined. This alone would be cause to write a book about them, but I became fascinated with mp3s because of how they are made. An mp3 encoder uses a mathematical model of the gaps and absences in human hearing to remove some of the data in an audio file, in order to make it smaller. If the encoder “thinks” you won’t hear part of a sound recording, it yanks it out on the encoding end, so that the resulting mp3 file is smaller, and therefore easier to transmit over data lines or to stockpile on hard drives and flash memories.

I wanted to know where this model of human hearing came from and what it could tell us about our contemporary sonic culture. The result is my new book, MP3:The Meaning of a Format.

The technology behind the mp3 is called “perceptual coding,” and I quickly discovered it has deep connections to the development of hearing science and telecommunications over the last hundred years. Everything we think we know about hearing in the state of nature is a result of the interactions between ears and media in the 20th century.

MP3s also point to the importance of compression in the development of communication technologies. Each generation of new media is usually sold to consumers as being of higher definition and greater verisimilitude than its predecessor (think of how DVDs and Blu-Ray have been marketed, for instance). But developments in compression and lower-definition transmission are equally important for everything from telegraphs, to telephones, to color television, to satellite transmission to the internet. This other history is less apparent because it is manifest inside our hard drives, and inside the massive infrastructures that allow us to move data around. It is not as shiny or sexy as the latest consumer gadget, but it could well be more important for everything from aesthetics to policy.

Silver Bridge Disaster - Part 4 (MP3)

Yep, it's time for another dispatch about the Silver Bridge disaster.  I really never intended to do four of these, but somehow I keep finding additional 45s about this terrible event, and I'm contractually obligated to share 'em all with you, so here we go again.  Incidentally, parts 1, 2 and 3 can be found at the linked numbers in this sentence.

Lowell Varney & Jim Horn  -  The Silver Bridge

In case you're new to this tragic story, the Silver Bridge spanned the Ohio River between Kanuaga, Ohio and Point Pleasant, West Virginia from 1928 until December 15, 1967 when it collapsed and fell into the icy waters below.  The catastrophe, which happened during the busy afternoon rush hour, cost 46 people their lives.

The tragedy was the inspiration for a number of topical records; I'm up to nine at this point and I have a feeling that the well's pretty close to dry at this point.  The disc we're focused on today comes from the REM label, a Lexington, Kentucky outfit that took its name from the initials of owner Robert E. Mooney, who also produced this piece.

"Mitt Romney, A Hero In My Mind"

Thx to Kurt Gottschalk. Aaaaand to Irwin for this one.

Print Isn't Dead!

In connection with my little hoarding problem, I also have a bookstore problem. My New Year’s Resolution this year was to stay out of bookstores, and I have done so, unless you count Posman Books in Grand Central Terminal that I have pretty much stayed out of, except for drifting in … oh, not very many times at all. Hardly ever! And also, I haven’t bought any books there, except for a couple. But not really! Mostly, I just go in to look at the latest issue of The Believer to see whether there are any more articles by WFMU DJ Dave Mandl about WFMU DJ Kenny G., and so far there have not been. 

Posman Books does not have a terribly large selection of magazines anyway, not as large as any of the actual newsstands in Grand Central, so I’ve sort of lost track of What’s Going On In Magazines Today. Having been a magazine editor for a number of years, I still have a sad, schadenfreudish interest in the genre. So that’s why, when I got caught in the rain last Thursday down by Battery Park, I felt that it was all right for me to go into the big Barnes & Noble there to, you know, get a cup of coffee and look at some magazines; it was purely for research purposes, it wasn’t about buying books. Not at all.

Once inside, I got the very worst iced caffe latte I’ve ever had anywhere and began my investigation. Barnes & Noble has several shelves of magazines: How can there still be so many titles? Niche marketing, apparently. For instance, Glutes. Yes, Glutes, a “women’s fitness magazine” about making your butt look good. It turns out it’s not even a new magazine; Glutes has been around for years, apparently with the same headline on every cover, just changing the punctuation: “Your Best Butt Ever!” vs. “Your Best Butt … Ever.” Your best butt? Whatever. Check out Pole2Pole.

 

Okay, a magazine called Pole2Pole is about, what? Amundson, Scott, Shackleton …? No, it is a magazine about “the sport of pole fitness.” Pole fitness. Back in my day, it was just a sleazy way to supplement my college scholarship, but now it’s a sport. In fact, it is so very sportsy that there are several other magazines also devoted to pole fitness, such as Pole Spin and—my favorite—Vertical. And those are just the actual print periodicals; there are several other titles online.

A few years ago, I got a promotional copy of Garden and Gun, which I thought was pretty awesome: It’s like Martha Stewart with a Mossberg. It’s won a number of magazine-industry awards, and sells tons of advertising, but now I realize it is just the older, more aspirational cousin of Gun Girl and a slew of magazines featuring photos of women in bikinis holding assault rifles.

So the good news is, Print isn’t dead! It’s just turning into a Hooters franchise.

From a Soldier in Thailand, to His Girl Back Home (Exploring My Reel-to-Reel Catacombs, Volume 31) (MP3's)

Somewhere in my collecting travels, this reel came into my collection. On it, the recipient of (what I'm sure were) countless audio letters from her sweetheart, collected four of them, splicing what were originally three inch reels back to back onto a seven inch reel. 

The sender, as the tapes makes clear, was at the time a soldier stationed in Thailand. The month was June, and the days of the week mentioned (i.e. Saturday, June 19th) would indicate that the year was either 1965 or 1971 (assuming as I do that the tapes were made during the '60's or early '70's). 

The tapes begin on June 7th, but most of that tape seems to have been lost over the years, so I've included the fragments (the first two minutes of side one and the last two minutes of side two) at the end of this post. 

The meat of the audio here are three tapes from late June - on the 19th, the 25th and the 27th. The first tape is nice to hear, but to me doesn't contain as much of interest as do the other two tapes. In between the tapings on the 19th and 25th, the man speaking and a cohort took a lengthy trip to Bangkok, and the sites seen during that trip, and another shorter trip make up for the most interesting parts of the audio letters from the later in the month. 

The tape from the 25th describes the drive, and the endless farm fields, as well as some particularly interesting temples. The tape from the 27th has my favorite moment, in which talks about a bike ride he took with another soldier, and how they were invited into one of the temples, at the virtual insistence of the monks, the reasons why, what happened once they were inside, and... well, you'll hear it, as well as his explanation for why he believes they acted in that way. 

In between all that are descriptions of life on the base, discussions of the oppressive heat, random observations on other things, and many, many tender expressions of his love for the girl he is missing. 

Finding recordings as like the one on this tape is among the biggest reasons I spend my free time delving into the contents of old reels, and I'm sure there are others out there who will enjoy this just as much. Here are the three main recordings, split up into the two sides as they originally would have been heard on the small reels: 

From a Soldier in Thailand - June 19th, Part One (MP3)  |  From a Soldier in Thailand - June 19th, Part Two (MP3)  |  From a Soldier in Thailand - June 25th, Part One (MP3)  |  From a Soldier in Thailand - June 25th, Part Two (MP3)  |  From a Soldier in Thailand - June 27th, Part One (MP3)  |  From a Soldier in Thailand - June 27th, Part Two (MP3)  

Here are the fragments of the earlier recording, as well as a scan of the tape itself:  

From a Soldier in Thailand - June 7th, Fragment One (MP3)  |  From a Soldier in Thailand - June 7th, Fragment Two (MP3)  |  Tape (JPG) 

Kitty Wells, First Queen of Country Music

Like its southern sister, reggae music, the folkways inherent in country music songcraft tend to hold onto and remold a good melody when they catch one. The song "Wild Side of Life", by William Warren and Arlie Carter is one of the most famous examples, using the basic 1 / 4 / 5 arrangement from the Carter Family's touching "I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes", which was itself inspired by elder tunes of course; and had already been riffed upon once since the Carters as "The Great Speckled Bird" (a now seemingly antique song on its own) by Roy Acuff. According to writer Bill Malone, the song's co-writer William Warren found inspiration for "Wild Side ... in his memories of a relationship with a younger woman, a 'honky-tonk angel, as it were, who found the glamour of the gay night life' too hard to resist".  Hank Thompson's version of the song (recorded on December 11th, 1951, with his new producer Ken Nelson) was now his first charting single since 1949, living three and a half months atop the Billboard country chart in the spring and early summer of 1952.    Hank Thompson / The Wild Side of Life

Pretty soon, down in southern Louisiana a record was cut by a young lady from Washington, Louisiana, name of Al Montgomery and prepped for release by author Jay Miller on his own Feature label. Through a quirk of fate, Montgomery never got a chance to break through with her version, as the song fell into the 'right hands at the right time' to make it the biggest thing ever.

A Treasure Trove Of Classic R&B;: The Rhythm and Blues Revue

by Scott Marlowe

The Rhythm & Blues Revue (Apollo Theatre Harlem, 1955)

What's on Network Awesome today?

These days, contemporary R&B seems to be a genre of music with specific attributes and qualities that are easily identifiable—things like slow grooves, smooth production values, and lush vocal arrangements. And, depending on the singer’s gender, the listener is treated to either a Diva or Lothario begging their beloved, earnestly trying to convince the apple of their eye that they need to consummate their love immediately.

While some of these elements can be found throughout the history of the genre, the scope of R&B used to be much larger, encompassing many different, and often disparate, musical styles.

Rhythm and Blues was initially a catchall term; coined after World War II, it was used to describe music made predominately for, and by, urban African-Americans. Under the Rhythm and Blues heading, different

Les Baxter's Jewels of the Sea

Record labels (thankfully) continue digging through the vaults and reissuing old recordings on CD, usually remastered and very well-packaged. This album by the late, great Father Of Exotica is a very recent release (May 22, 2012) but remains faithful to the original LP issued on the Capitol label some five decades prior. It's also fully loaded with a great selection of bonus material (a good practice in the art and science … and economics … of CD reissues)

For those of you who haven't heard this album, it is, in some ways, very different than many of Baxter's other compositions. For one thing, this album stands out to me as being the most impressionistic (of the Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel persuasion) and classically-inspired effort I, myself, have ever heard by the man. Sure, it’s well-known that he was heavily influenced by modern classical composers (the Impressionists and Igor Stravinsky, most notably), but most of his work veered toward more jazzy arrangement and orchestration and was, more or less, still pop music. Jewels Of The Sea, on the other hand, oozes about as many distinctively classical qualities as popular music in the mid-20th century would have allowed, and possibly even then some. Don’t take that the wrong way, I don’t mean it as negative criticism. I've set aside enough time to play this entire CD on several different occasions and it still effectively quenches my hunger for Baxter, Exotica, and Space Age Bachelor Pad music alike. The fact that it’s a little more challenging just makes it all the more entertaining.

The Eleventh Anniversary of Carlo Giuliani's Death

"Carlo Giuliani; 14 March 1978 – 20 July 2001) was an Italian anti-globalist who was shot dead by a police officer during the demonstrations against the Group of Eight summit that was held in Genoa from July 19 to July 21, 2001." - via Wikipedia

In case you didn't feel like showing up - Volume 39

Earcandy for your eyes

Loren Connors+Thurston Moore playing live at Spy Fest at The Stone in New York City on July 14, 2012. This had to be one of the most sweltering shows ever since that Erykah Badu basement outing a few years ago. If you look up "Melted Men" you'll most likely find portraits of people that attended this show.

After the break: American Hardcore dinosaurs 7 Seconds at House of Vans as well as a lot of noise and experimental mayhem...