letting the busy non-diagetic soundtrack enter your consciousness

A little too spritely for my usual tastes, but Wynton Marsalis' string quartet At The Octoroon Balls (lala) is much better than I thought it would be. Ditto for his chamber piece A Fiddler's Tale added into this disc. They both have the feeling of not-really-watching an old movie but letting the busy non-diagetic soundtrack enter your consciousness. It was a lark well spent.

What I really wanted, though, was the meeting-of-motherfuckers that is Money Jungle (lala). The way Mingus makes his bass sound like an engine that won't turn over on the title track kills me each time I hear it.

The Madeleine Peyroux disc (lala) here because the lala recommended it, is just lovely. "Everybody's Talkin'" has never been talked at you with such coy sensuality as it is talked at you here. Sitting up at work, trying to coax a database engines into calculating a median correctly (this function is not built in?) has largely rendered all this as non-diagetic music: music that sets the scene in a film that is unheard by the actors on screen, or in this case, in front of one.

The Drained Wait is Over!

Of Montreal - John Brion Remix EP (lala) Skeletal Lamping just missed my top ten by the gap equivalent in length to my unwillingness to give it another listen in the week or two before making the list. I like the record, a lot even, and listened to it more times than things that were on my final list, but ultimately I find Of Montreal a little exhausting. I know that's what your are supposed to feel - perpetual disco rock orgasm - but an EP's worth will usually get me through the day.
Steffen Basho Junghans - Inside (lala) Fahey/Kottke acoustic guitar skills run through the sieve of minimalism. I really like the cut of this record - it is like he found a buzzing fret on his favorite guitar and built a completeness around that inconsistency, afraid that it might rectify itself or get worse and the opportunity to do so would be erased.
Squadra Omega - Tenebroso (OngaKubaka) Nicely doped-out noir-jazz from the darkest alleys of Italy. There was a tape I had a million years ago by a group called the Dirk Hartung Combo that manifested this same exact kinds of throbbing indie rocked smoke-filled jazz business.
The Dirk Hartung Combo - Drained Wait (http://diycassettemusic.blogspot.com) And here it is! Thank you Facts, Myths and Lies of D.I.Y. Music 1987-1993! Hollywood Memorabilia - Authentic Entertainment Memorabilia and Collectibles! I will rooting through your tape case in the weeks to come. I've already spotted long-forgottens like LMNOP and Mother Tongue on your RSS feed. As for Hartung, it's a little more sparse than I remember but still just as potent - like Sam Spade reluctantly conducting a seance in an opium den.
Duran Duran Duran - Very Pleasure (lala) On name alone! and they sound like their name in the most perfect way.
My Cat is an Alien - The Cosmological Eye Trilogy (lala) Alex is not available for your call, please leave a message after the endless electrical hum and random clanging sounds.

You let me drink your blood, I'll let you lick my wounds

The post about Love yesterday stemmed from an article in the Oxford American music issue about Arthur Lee after Forever Changes. There are two actually, one a survey of his post 1970 career, the other an account of being in Lee's final band lineup, both worth reading. I recognize it is a continuation of vanity to keep touting that magazine I am in, but really, the OA music issues are all ones I keep reading, and they continually send me places I wouldn't likely find on my own.

And, just to underscore that, the reminder about the launch party on Jan 23 at the Ground Zero Club in Clarksdale popped up in Facebook. And the CD for that issue was sitting next to my computer at work as I pondered what to listen to. I think letting an informed wind blow you around is large part of experiencing the forever that is always, always changing.

That's what compilations and these subscription services should do: sucker you in with the one loose connection you have, a tiny link analogous to that among amino acids forming proteins which, and use that link in the same manner to form a life. So an errant track by garage art-rock curiosity Insect Trust (featuring the late, great blues and music journalist Robert Palmer on recorder) coexisting on the OA CD and It Came from Memphis Volume 2 (lala) which contains its own treasures. For example, bear witness to the blues rock psychedelic mayhem of Moloach

Smokestack Lighting - Moloach

A quick detour from searching for volume one led to this succinct psychobilly couplet from The Fat Dave Crime Wave (lala), which in their blunt rawk manner, sums up the hunt

You let me drink your blood, I'll let you lick my wounds
You write the words, I'll come up with a tune

and Howlin' Wolf, on the opening track of I Am the Wolf (lala), offers this reflection about experience that could be applied to the trophies on one's wall

Man, you know I've enjoyed some things that kings and queens will never have
In fact, kings and queens can't never get
And they don't even know about

glorious Love action

Much as I love Forever Changes (lala) - I picked up the 33 1/3 book about it at the library today - I've never been that big on its predecessor Da Capo (lala) and have never before today listened to its successor Four Sail (lala). Da Capo sounds naive, while Four Sail has the exact opposite problem, but still there is some rather glorious Love action on both. In both records I find points in every song that I like, whereas on Forever Changes I find it hard to extract any parts from the songs.

imagery I enjoy

Same as yesterday actually. I like that Animal Collective even more on the third listen. I think they took the right things out of Sung Tongs and Panda Bear's solo record and jettisoned the extra baggage from Feels, and came up with a rather complete expression of their deal. It felt good in the new cheapo headphones I bought on my lunchbreak, and frankly, that is all that I ask of them.

Andrew Poppy (lala) is excellent background for the dull techy work I'm doing today. I didn't realize that collection was 3 CD's worth of material! Much of it has the air of a-vaguely-fashionable-and-hip-news-break is coming through, this just in - a truck carrying a load of iPhones just plowed into the nice Starbucks across from the Whole Foods. Which is imagery I enjoy.

Dig "45 Is", especially when the operatic voice pops in at the 3:30 mark, chirping about (I think) video game scores. I'm predicting a starkly lit stage with herky-jerky Pat Benatar dancers flanked by over-sized Asteroids machines.

45 IS - Andrew Poppy

Protocol Droid Pasta

Protocol Droid Pasta, originally uploaded by real_voodooboy.

Spaghetti, cauliflower and garlic bread in the shape of C3P0

HEY!

I am a Pitchfork reader and recognize them for what they are: a catalyst with an interest in keeping things interesting, but two needles in today's Pitchfork haystack poked at me a little: Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavillion is a fun little trip toy of a record, but granting an album a 9.6 on the 5th day of the year seems like a bad idea, no matter how groovy the album art - click on it for the full effect. Also, after hearing more Frankie Goes to Hollywood on satellite radio during our past trip than I have in the last 20 years, I have some fondness for the ambitions of the Zang Tuum Tumb label (name lifted from a sound poem by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti) that also gave us Art of Noise, 808 State and British minimalist Andrew Poppy (lala). The fork is pitched into ZZT's ambitious boxed set retrospective, deflating the cheery bubble these 80's Futurists-without-the-fascism created.

Sure, the label saw a drop-off in quality over the years, or even decades, but I remember getting those first couple of Frankie Goes to Hollywood singles as 45's, part of their curatorial "Action Series" that apparently they continued through 1988. I found the whole "Action Series" rather exciting; it felt like something important was being said on those little records in the mind of this impressionable 14-year-old. Their complaints might be justified given that I haven't heard much of ZZT's later output, but the ZZT knack for marketing up some synthy noodling as high art can be felt in much of the 80's revivalism that Pitchfork gleefully participates in.

It bears mentioning that among the pansexual aggro-disco of the label was a ZZT single for "Wild Hearts" by Roy Orbison


Art of Noise's "Close (To the Edit)" was my jam back then