not talking today

Will Saul & Lee Jones - Hug The Scary (Partial Arts Remake)

Lee Douglas - Ravm

Black Devil Disco Club - On Just Foot (Slide Inside Version With Prins Thomas)

Monday Movie [Parte 3]

Mr. T's Be Somebody... Or Be Somebody's Fool! (1984)/ dir. Jeff Margolis

Absoludricrous pleasures emanating from this home video only release. Part motivational seminar for children, part music video, 100% "First Name Mister, Middel Name Period, Last Name Tee" action. T preaches empowerment through some unholy combination of rap, breakdancing and honoring thy mother. The fashion of the earnest youngsters is something to behold. My housemate swears Fergie is one of them, an IMDb just confirmed this. Time to break out the Kids Incorporated reords.




Someone made an awesome YTMND that plays the theme song...
http://BESOMEBODY.ytmnd.com/

Of all the genre-defying tracks on M.I.A's new Kala (finally leaked, but out proper August 21), this is perhaps the weirdest. Over a trebly grime style beat and mournful "Blue Monday" chords, she busts out a verse from Frank Black's book, asking the eternal question "Where is my mind?". I might have time to sit around and think about it myself, but our favorite Sri Lankan has been cited all over San Francisco recently and she's looking for a husband. Here I come cutie, grrrrrrrr.

M.I.A. - $20

Roundup of some newish tracks I've been feeling, and an older one that I've recently come back to be able to hear again... an incredibly dense, super-busy remix of techno artist Marc Ashken from the ever-prolific dubstep king Ollie Jones that was included on his BBC Essential Mix awhile back... a taste of the kind of bizarre electro that Pilooski makes when not producing ace edits for D*I*R*T*Y.... Claude VonStroke's take on the latest Get Physical release... and past evidence of the brilliance of Joakim Bouaziz.

Marc Ashken - Size 3 (Skream Remix)

Pilooski - Cheikir

Samim - Heater (Claude VonStroke Remix)

Max Berlin - Elle Et Moi (Joakim Remix)

Light Keeps Me Company

Ingmar Bergman, 1918-2007

If you haven't yet, now is the time to pay homage. Watch them all. Persona, Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Hour Of the Wolf, The Virgin Spring and everything else this true film hero has made. I am falling asleep tonight to The Magician.

Promising things from Pitchfork: a new mix section with song-by-song roundup/ interview kicked off by none other than JD Twitch. Check it here.

A plea: please listen to this song as if you were up in the mountains or away from a city for the first time in a long time. Looking upward or lying on your back, noticing new constellations the lack of atmosphere brings. The stars you hadn't noticed now shining dimly and appreciated, they are filling in spaces in the blackness you forgot about. The ones you had seen and become acquainted with, more overwhleming than ever before.

Nôze - Piano

I tend to notice shapes and colors emerging when I listen in bed with headphones in the darkness. I am a minor synesthete, I think. The nightime sky metaphor keeps drifting back to me....

Monday Movie [Parte 2]

Maximum Overdrive (1986) /dir. Stephen King

Awesomely done piece of genre trash with an AC/DC soundtrack and Emilio Estevez. Sole directorial effort from Stephen King based on his short story "Trucks", where machines go haywire when an comet from hell passes too close to Earth. The action revolves around the Dixie Boy truck stop outside Wilmington, North Carolina and the hapless people trapped there by a gang of killer big-rigs. Did I mention the AC/DC? (Cock rock and evil machines... check.) Best summed up by three gonzo lines and what prompted them.

Jukebox explodes...
"The whole goddamn world's goin' tits up"

Automated arcade...
"Yo mama!"

In comet dust tail, truck drives itself...
"They can't do that.... we made you! Weeeee maaaaade yooouuuuuuu!!!!!"

Watch these previews and treat yourself to a copy.

"You Gotta Believe ....Hey ....Hey"

My hyper-literate monthly of choice, The Believer, has just issued their 2007 music issue the with an accompanying CD featuring some rare & exclusive tracks from Lightning Bolt, Magik Markers, Aesop Rock, No Age, Grizzly Bear, and many others. There are also articles aplenty: a search for reclusive folkie Bill Fox, a conversation between Khaela Maricich of the Blow and Miranda July, a rethinking of the famous & oft written about false dichotomy "Beatles, or Stones?", and the story of rock's rarest instrument - the Birotron - an offshoot cousin of the Mellotron keyboard made from nineteen 8-track decks.

The magazine also features a center fold-out lovingly chronicling every-metal-band-name-ever (!) beginning with the letter R. Excerpted the forthcoming book "All Known Metal Bands", which promises to be a "poetic document of the continual collapse and renewal of civilizations", this list brings up as many endlessly debatable questions as it answers. Who would have known, for example, there would be 21 "Requiem"-s and only 10 "Rigor Mortis"-s? 30 bands beginning with "Rotten" and only one "Roadkill Sodomizer"? This had me alternating between mind-blown disbelief and hysterical fit this past weekend as I lay floating in a canoe, flesh burning off from lack of suncreen, in the middle of Lake Pinecrest.

The thing that got me most excited however was this new song from Zach Condon who is the principal entity behind Beirut. They have a newish EP called Lon Gisland and one amazing LP entitled Gulag Orkestar that is everywhere by now and you should feel ashamed if you haven't listened to it. Most of the album sounds like it was recorded with a gypsy folk marching band (really just Jeremy Barnes from A Hawk and a Hacksaw & Neutral Milk Hotel-fame) but there are a few other songs featuring cheap synths and drum machines sounding like they are plugged directly into a four-track. This feeling is revisited here with a solitary trumpet line & Condon's multi-tracked vocals swooning over a synthscape straight out of Music Has A Right To Children.

Zach Condon - Venice

Oh, I also forgot to mention that I have an extra copy of the magazine complete with CD for one lucky reader (the one who write to the email address at the top of the screen first).

Cobblestone Jazz are so en fuego right now. Mathew Jonson's collaborative group had two of the most highly-tauted techno singles last year with Dump Truck and India In Me, and they are now making the rounds again with Dmt and Put The Lime In Da Coconut (all on the brilliant Wagon Repair label), as well as blowing folks away at MUTEK and elsewhere with their largely improvisational live show.

Their first remix is part of the Juno Records 10th anniversary series, responsible for reissues of classic tracks bolstered by newly commissioned mixes. On paper the combination of this one instantly got my mouth watering and it actually turns out pretty well. All the best elements of the original track are there, with the beat flattened out more 4/4 stylee and the groove extended much further, teasing out every part of the original pioneering electro track . With Cobblestone Jazz being primarily an improvisational outfit both live and in studio, it rightly ends up sounding more like a Mathew Jonson solo remix than their proper singles, especially when the "Zombie Bikers"-esque bass line uncoils itself just after the 3 minute mark.

Cybotron - Clear (Cobblestone Jazz Remix)

also check this interview from Fact Magazine

This beats the pants off of Kanye's new video. (I do crave a pair of those sunglasses though)

For more "Discovery" mixed with Transformers: The Movie go here

Jacko-lobos

A few months ago I went to the Folk Yeah! Festival in Heaven-On-Earth (Big Sur, California) for a low-key, stony weekend of camping with a bunch of hipsters in idyllic woods and watching a variety of folky-rock bands play this small roadside tavern. For the most part the music was pretty okay and mellow but I was totally unprepared & blown away by one of the last acts on Sunday night, a San Francisco band called BRONZE. They consist of vocals, drummer, and live electronics and have a very psyched-out dense sound that brings to mind Silver Apples if they had access to less primitive electronics. Accompanying their live show was some amazing lasers and projected visuals, but the absolute best part was the drummer: wearing an über-stylish neon green speedo, his nards kept falling out to the beat of the kick drum, but dude was so into the hypnotic grooves he did not care! Anyway these guys are killer, and are sure to blow us away with whatever they decide to record (hurry fellas!) but for now you can check out a live song and video on their-space. For those of us in 'Sucka Free, Bronze are playing this Saturday at a benefit for the El Rio along with other local luminaries & groove-hustlers Tussle, Paradise Island, Lemonade, & more.

Bronze - Scene Saw (Live) (link to MySpace)

Monday Movie [Parte 1]

The apparent death-knell of the whole first-wave of "let us entertain middle America with urban culture" movies has to be Body Rock. Tellingly, this was released in 1984 along with such heavyweights as Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. Starring an all-singing, all-dancing Lorenzo Lamas as Chilly D, enthusiastic street dude extraordinaire of the Body Rock crew, and his trials and tribulations of being tempted by the fame and money of a swanky Manhattanite club, prompting a re-evaluation of his musical passion, friends, and ambition. In this devastating scene, he encounters his old crew on the street wearing his new duds, and must tell his mother (Grace Zabriskie, the sour-faced grandmother from Big Love) that he is moving out so he can be surrounded by other artistes. The eventual epic, saw-it-coming reunion scene occurs in front of a giant friggin' boombox at the Rapstravaganza. Soundtrack ranges from new-wave soft rock to terrible electro and freestyle and includes Maria Vidal, Ashford & Simpson, and Laura Branigan.

Blank-Eyed, Nose Bleed

This weekend in the Yay we are blessed with another delicious event from the Gun Club party people -- the dark disco genrefuck of Padded Cell from D.C. Recordings. It's not an underground location this time, but the newly rejuvenated Fat City will do just fine. As for Padded Cell expect scuzzy basslines, loads of crisp conga percussion fills, dark bouncy synths, a touch of Feedelity-style comsic swerviness, and plenty smeared eyeliner debauchery. If me trying to pull out all the stops on that description wasn't enough, here is a sampling of their 2007 efforts:

flipside from their D.C. 12" Moon Menace
Padded Cell - Faces Of The Forest

and remix of
a long dormant,
former ambient d'n'b,
UK-based Planet Dog artist (!?!),
that appeared on a recent DJ Harvey bootleg mix
Future Loop Foundation - The Sea And The Sky (Padded Cell Remix)