Top Tens & Stuff
That's my Deasy! Record collectors love desert island & top ten lists. It's not because they're all that great to read, but because they force the listmaker to make cold comparisons that reveal oh so much about their personality. So go ahead and peek behind our bathroom mirror: ~ 
~ Mark Johnson Dec 2012 Jason Lescalleet "Songs About Nothing " CD (Erstwhile) Contortionist Jazz Exotica "60 min tape" CS (SELF) Aaron Dilloway "Modern Jester" LP (Hanson) Dan Melchior "Excerpts and Half Speeds" LP (KYE) Russian Tsarlag "Voyage to the Encrusted Pillow" CS (NNF) Ghédalia Tazartès "Voyage À L'Ombre" LP RE (Hot Releases) DJ Dog Dick "Yo Po Freestyles" LP (American Tapes) Exusamwa "Excusez-Moi!" LP (100% Breakfast) Achim Mohne "And It Could Of Been Dead" CS (Tapeworm) dYsgeniX "Dysgenik Epidemik" CS (Special Affekts Productions) ~ Josh Friedman Dec 2012 Can "The Lost Tapes" VA "I Lost My Mind" lp Neneh Cherry & The Thing "Cherry Thing" Bonehead Crushers Vol. 2 Manilla Road "Invasion" Cults Percussion Ensemble lp Black Hole "Land of Mystery" Chips and Beer Mag Trader Joe "Corn and Chile Salsa" ZZ Top's 1st Album Egisto Macchi "Voix" ~ Dave Gross Dec 2012 daphne oram oram tapes vol 1 [young americans] erkin koray mechui [sublime frequencies] mars live at artists's space [feeding tube] mars live at irving plaza [feeding tube] father's children who's gonna save the world [numero group] greg kelley/olivia block resolution [erstwhile] lee hazelwood the lhi years [light in the attic] egg, eggs the cleansing power of fruit [feeding tube] rangarang - pre-revolutionary iranian pop [vampisoul] omar souleyman haflat gharbia [sublime frequencies] ~ David McIntire Top 10 2012 Wandelweiser 'Und so weiter' (Another Timbre) Daphne Oram: The Oram Tapes Volume 1 (Young Americans) Mikel Rouse: Boost/False Doors (Exit Music) Jürg Frey: Piano Music (Irritable Hedgehog) Captain Beefheart: Bat Chain Puller (Zappa Records) Peter Hammill: Consequences (Fie!) Leah Kardos: Feather Hammer (Bigo & Twigetti, via Bandcamp) Can: The Lost Tapes (Spoon) Conrad Schnitzler: Rot (Bureau B) Pere Ubu: A Ghost Town Goes Where You Want to Go (Hearpen) ~ Dan Melchior Dec 2012 Willie Lane - Guitar Army of One - Cord Art X Wave - Cities On Flame - Little Big Chief Nocht The Only Ghouls - s/t lp - Vywyrd wurd David Novick - self titled - Sun Sneeze Spacin' - Deep Thuds - Richie Roach Clip - Al pastor 45 - Nostilevo Brent Lewiis Ensemble - Refreshing Hemorrhage 7" - BUFMS Brian Crook - Bathysphere - MEDS Aaron Dilloway - Modern Jester - Hanson US Girls - Gem - Fat Cat Kraus - Supreme Commander - Moniker Rake Kash - Herr Tambourine Mann - Chthonic records Reissues - Gareth Williams and Mary Currie - Flaming tunes - Blackest Ever Black Bruce Langhorne - The Hired Hand soundtrack - Scissor Tail Gus Coma - Color him coma - Paradigm Discs ~ Tobias Corell Dec 2012 1. Vatican Shadow – Ghosts of Chechnya (Hospital Productions) Feels like hovering above the desert hoping no one spots you. Nightmare-inducing move-around music from the grave of fallen soldiers. Best song: Snipers As A Breed Tend To Be Superstitious 2. The Young – Dub Egg (Matador) Boogied-out riffs and catchy melodies played with the same kind freshness Kurt Vile brought on with his Childish Prodigy record. Best song: Poisoned Hell 3. Actress - R.I.P. (Honest John's) A record full of dribbles of melted sounds. Dance music for people who don’t like to dance. Not too catchy, but very familiar. Best song(s): Caves of Paradise or Iwaad or N.E.W. (I can’t decide) 4. Élg – Mil Pluton (Hundebiss) Laurent Gerard sings along to hypnotic spaceship drones and sonar pulsation with guest appearances from Bill Kouligas and Jan Anderzen. Best song: O Pluto 5. Guided By Voices – Class Clown Spots a U.F.O.(Fire) The best of 3 GBV records from 2012. Pollard even makes trumpets work on this one. Best song: Class Clown Spots a UFO 6. Roland Tings – Milky Way (100% Silk) Pretty mind-blowing debut EP from Melbourne native Rohan Newman. Warm 808-beats and warmer sounds fall just short of being hot, which is a good thing. Best song: Loose Jaw 7. Sand Circles – Motor City (Not Not Fun) Musician from Stockholm playing background music to an old non-existent private eye-movie. Takes one back to Chris & Cosey’s Heartbeat from ’81. Best song: White Sand 8. King Tuff – King Tuff (Subpop) Frontman Kyle Thomas has a stoner metal band with J Mascis and used to play with fellow New-Englanders Feathers. King Tuff is his catchy garage-pop outfit with melodies reminiscent of the late Jay Reatard. Best song: Bad Thing 9. Umberto – Night Has a Thousand Screams (Rock Action) Umberto keeps on doing what he does best. Killing people with saw-tooth synths in his very own slasher movie. You can't ask for more. Best song: The Intervention 10. Sun Araw – The Inner Treaty (Sun Ark) An overlooked release, mainly because of the more famous Sun Araw/M. Geddes Gengras/Congos record this year. This gem includes a Pharaoh Sanders cover and the usual trippy guitars, yet it doesn’t sound like anything he has done before. Pete Kember/Sonic Boom mixed the record, so maybe that’s why. Best song: And I 11. Future Frequencies – Crystal Secrets (Self-released) Collab between FutureFunkRocker and Infinity Frequencies. Humorous and heartwarming samples linked with synth-melodies that find the middle-ground between elevator music and Angelo Badalamenti-melancholia. Best song: Sayonara 12. Human Teenager – Animal Husbandry (Spectrum Spools) Rubbery, messy bliss and some occasional acoustic guitars. Pretty crazy and, at times, very catchy. Greg from Gary War and Taylor from Infinity Window. Best song: Mainly Adult 13. Ital - Hive Mind (Planet Mu) When you have roots in a Dischord hardcore band called Black Eyes, a dance record is pretty unexpected, but if it sounds like Daniel Martin-McCormick has been playing with filters and oscillators for a while, it’s because he actually has done just that. This just his first album. Best song: First Wave 14. Dolphins Into the Future - Canto Arquipélago (Underwater Peoples) Turns out fragmented and incoherent songs suit Dolphins very well. Improvised new-age piano in the rain intertwined with weirdness. Best song: Noite 15. LA Vampires with Maria Minerva – The Integration LP (Not Not Fun) Dirty and playful album with a production that, if played in half-tempo, would be great on a rap-record. Very successful transatlantic collaboration. Best song: Supercool ~ Josh Burkett's video list Dec 2012 g harrison http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8LgEaXoGI4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13BK0OT4Py0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGbRHxM4X2g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfY3TcyQk3I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAd2odz3KRc beach boys http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRTlfFlJ4o8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFGTUesKyKY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-ThPN8ZY4I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZmNWU0QEhI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXB4LspLQE0 special bonus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1cxjUGDbJU ~ Angela Sawyer's Top Ten 2012 Various Pictures of Sound cd + book 2012/980-1900 When's the last time you heard a long, loud rasberry that's been saved for you for 150 years? Not good enough? How about music that was recorded before the year 1000? Dust to Digital is an esteemed label, but this project by Patrick Feaster is the best thing since records became 'unbreakable'. Visual representations of sound, most of them from before Edison's invention of the cylinder, are for the first time turned into sound you can hear. Circa 1850, most attempts at making sound reproducible were focused on writing- lots of them were actually attempts to invent a visual system that would transmit sound vibrations to the deaf. Entrepenurial spirits all over the world tried improving on the staff note system as a way of saving music over time, and they produced lots of drawings (which often look like lie detector or encephalograph results). Those systems/inventions are here made into roughshod whispers or glass harmonica foomping. Turns out, for example, that 18th century mechanical organ instructions look just like midi editors. You get spectrograms of eagles yawping and people talking, long dead folks from Iowa or Russia, buzzing noises, photographs of people blowing through rubber diaphragms onto candle flames, 17th century harpsichord playing turned into player piano rolls, medieval manuscripts, and even some detailed prints of lost early records that have been made audible once more. The cut that reset the date of audio recording's invention back nearly 20 years, Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville's 'Au Clair de la Lune' from 1860, is also here. For once, the inclusion of a big thick book makes a lot of sense, as you can match up the visuals to each track and you could even try turning them into sound yourself. New Surfsiders Kokomo/Good Vibrations 7 inch 2012 Dead brilliant doo-wop singing which skewers these beloved songs by being decidedly off-key but right on pitch. If you've ever been standing in a line at a shitty pharmacy/convenience store, hearing the Beach Boys 'Kokomo' waft over the musak speakers, and hated your life, this is a single that can provide you with all that was missing. A contemporary band, but clearly inspired by one of the all time greats, 'The Surfsiders Sing the Beach Boys Songbook' (which may or may not have Lou Reed on it). They also have a Christmas single! Mark Lindsay/W Michael Lewis Shogun Assassin lp 2012/1980 Mark Lindsay, aka the toothy leader of pirate-costumed 60s band Paul Revere and the Raiders was taking whatever songwriting work he could get by 1980. So when he got offered some extra work on a voice-dubbing project, he became the composer for this kung-fu cheapie. Cut together from 2 Toho studio movies that came out in 1972 (namely 'Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance' and 'Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx'), and redubbed by the director of 'Kiss of the Spider Woman'. Fantastic & spooky bargain basement synths plus lots of talking and squelching noises dropped in. Various The International Vicious Society Vol VI lp 2012/196x Dignity is for suckers, but the International Vicious society is for masters! There can never be enough daffy twists, clownish cha chas, dotty hops or wacko watusis for me, so I'm always excited to hear that this series has another entry. Songs long on stupid and more stupid from Frenchytown, Espana, Eetaly, Squishy Belgium, Stinky Peh-roo, and many more other places. Cackling laughs, zero chords. Billy Childish & Sexton Ming Dung Beetle Rolls Again lp 2012/2003-11 Grump, anti-art artist, & puerile surrealist Sexton Ming joins his cohort Childish in banging on boxes, injuring ukuleles/chord organs, & humming no-chord singalongs into cassette recorders. Their ability to poke blackhearted fun at defenseless animals, inanimate objects & elderly persons makes them the best duo to be birthed by the UK since Derek & Clive. A fine surprise, as it's their 1st new album in ten years, and it even includes a Doors & a Beatles cover. Time has only made Ming's voice wetter & uglier, & it couldn't be more gorgeous. Esplendor Geometrico Prehistoric Sounds Necrosis cd + 3x7 inch 2012/1980-81 Spanish industrial band named after a futurist tract. Finally, after a zillion reissues, someone put out the stuff you'd want most. Unadorned splats of evil & cold whumping, rhythmic metallic clankings, white noise grinding, toothache-causing beeps. Demos sent to the Ata Tak label in Germany. The cut chosen for the compilation 'Fix Planet' is close to a song, has vocals & could even be interpreted as some sort of dispirited new wave. Luckily, the rest of the band's early output quickly deteriorates into nothing but mean feedback splatter. Meridian Brothers Desesperanza lp 2012/2010-11 One of the reasons that recent experiments in cumbia revival (like Ondatropica & Frente Cumbiero) have been so juicy & fascinating, as well as straight up good, is because of the aesthetic skill & curiosity of Bogota's Eblis Alvarez. Here he shows you how it's done. Wiggling & krazy electronics & chipmunk voices serve up infectious salsa & caliente rhythms. So dizzy & imaginative! Bob Chance It's Broken lp 2012/1980 As disarming as it is disturbing, this is truly a perfect white guy come-hither record. If you're freaky enough. Gloriously inappropriate songwriting verve that recalls both the Beach Boys' 'Love You' & Gary Wilson's 'You Think You Really Know Me'. Irrepressibly sincere & vapid backing arrangements that range from innocent doo wop to roller rink disco, with organ & tiny little trebly drums. Bob has very, very hairy knuckles, but he nonetheless croons tenderly about rainbows, brown skin (he likes it... on his ladies... a lot), & gigolos who kidnap girls with pedo-vans. Wendy Rene After Laughter Comes Tears 2lp 2012/1964-65 Across town from the Stax studios in Memphis, high school student Mary Frierson & her brother Johnny decided to try out for the label by just taking the bus over & walking in the door. Stax's Jim Stewart liked Johnny's songs, but once he heard the funny little downswoop in Mary's voice (it's a whole lot like Mary from the Shangri Las!), the label gave her a new name and groomed her for stardom. She got to tour with Rufus Thomas & play on bills with Otis Redding, and the cream of the Stax house band put distorted guitar and supple chunks of organ behind her. After just a few singles she decided to become a mom instead, narrowly missing the plane crash that killed Redding. Elias Rahbani Mosiac of the Orient lp 2012/1974 The Rahbani brothers built the career of Fairuz from ingenue to Beirut radio star to national treasure. Middle brother Mansour wrote her lyrics and the eldest Assi not only wrote her music but starred opposite her in several movies and became her husband. Youngest brother Elias is here, making the sleek electric organ & ticklish bazouki undulate together in instrumentals. While his brothers dabbled in musicals, plays, & a steady stream of singing protoges, Elias embraced disco sleaze, & writing for languages other than Arabic (he did post-graduate study in France). A selection of what was originally a two volume set, criminally difficult to lay hands on for what was basically marketed as a belly dance record. honorable mentions: I spent a lot of time this year listening to shock radio and comedy records. Wouldn't have guessed that would happen, but happen it did. I also wrote lots of liner notes, and so discovered the glories of researching by google translation of foreign language you tube comments. ~ Kevin R's Feb 2012 Arzachel - s/t - Klimt V/A - Bambara Mystic Soul - Analog Africa Abner Jay - Folk Song Stylist - Mississippi V/A - Ongaku 70 - Hiroku Los Ovnis - Hippies - Shadoks Phillippe Besombes - Libra - Wah Wah V/A - The International Vicious Society Vol. 5 - University of Vice V/A - Juke Box Jam - Jazzman V/A - Thai Dai - Finders Keepers Daphne Oram - Oramics - Young Americans ~ W Simon Jan 2012 1. Getting married in a Buddhist Monastery in Upstate New York followed by reception in Mattapoissett with Debo Band and second reception in Eastern Kentucky with old time string band! (Special thanks to PJ and Danny) 2. Otto Piene and Hans Hacke at List Visual Arts Center MIT 3. Christian Marclay: The Clock at the MFA 4. Yamantaka//Sonic Titan: YT//ST LP on Psychic Handshake 5. John Cage Centenary at UbuWeb http://www.ubu.com/sound/cage.html 6. Lumerians: Transmalinnia on Knitting Factory Records 7. Somerville artist Zo� Mcdonnell (at Joy Street Studios, #25) 8. John Bullitt Japan Earthquake 2011 http://www.jtbullitt.com/earthsound/ 9. The Arab Spring 10. Somerville Brewing Co./Voltage Coffee & Art, Kendall Sq. (even tie) ~ Howie S' Top Ten of 2011 Jim Haynes "The Decline Effect" 2xLP Helen Scarsdale Agency, US (four sides of non-referential glory that sounds like dirt, grit, and faraway glacial hum... quite a nice object, too. Gatefold sleeve, a spine with the title on it. Classy!) David Payne "Reel to Real", "Real Too Real", "Real 2 Real 2" tapes Middle James Co, Canada (I once asked David why he makes such astounding music in editions of just 9 or 13 copies. His heartbreaking response: "Because that's about how many people want to hear it." Ooof. Do yrself a favor, and pick up any damn thing by David or his band Fossils. If the confounding everyday-tape-nonsense of Graham Lambkin, Angst Hase Pfeffer Nase, or Jason Lescalleet are at all your bag, these tapes need to find their way to your ears too.) Lethe "Catastrophe Point #7 & 8" 2xCD Invisible Birds, US (It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Kuwayama Kiyoharu... his recordings done under the Lethe banner tend to consist of him dragging metal debris around a gigantic concrete warehouse, then layering the natural-reverb-soaked recordings over each other. The sound is utterly massive. This lusciously-packaged double-disc set is more of the same, sure, but when the smae is so damn sublime, who cares?) Pete Swanson "Where I Was" LP self-released, US (a collection of his short, self-released post-Yellow Swans tapes. Epic lights-down drone/noise with the power of the last ringing chord of an arena-rock ballad... kinda.sorta in a similar vein as Birchville Cat Motel/Our Love Will Destry the World, but more harsh-blast than romantic-glory) Chromagain "Any Colour We Liked" CD Anna Logue, Italy (reissue of early 80s Italian synth-pop.. catchy, light, dated... yeah!) Foetus "Hide" CD Ectopic Ents, US (the unstoppable Jim Thirlwell's latest shows th' one-man-band grabbing orchestral bombast by the throat... just as strong as his previous album, "Love", with accessible tunes making his technical virtuosity seem easy. It now makes sense that he ended up doing soundtrack work) The Neon Judgement "Early Tapes" Onderstroom, Belgium CD (totally dated and cheapo-sounding Belgian new wave, a reissue of their first tape from the early 80s) Jeff & Jane Hudson "Flesh" CD Acute, US (another expanded synth-pop reissue... muscular, catchy sci-fi tunes from the 1980's Boston underground. Used to be able to find the originals for a buck in every record shop in town. Great to see them get the love they deserve. Now who's going to bring back the Modern Method catalog, hm?) Ernst Karel "Swiss Mountain Transport Systems" CD Groenrekorder, Germany (though Karel provides as much matter-of-fact context as you might like, feel free to ignore it and just turn th' thing up. This is music, not a documentary... it begs to be taken in like a machine bath of grinding metal, with a palpable sense of space and movement. Amazing!) Autumn "Synthesize" LP Minimal Wave, US (another old Belgian synth-pop tape, brought back from the dead. Again, a nearly-lost classic of light robot love songs, sparsely produced but polished up and presented on some pretty plastic for collectors to file away) Eric Lunde "Colorado Terrain Investigations" CD Freak Animal/Industrial Recollections, Finland (say what you'd like to about Mikko Aspa... it's all somewhat true. But beneath his celebration of degenerate amorality is a thoughtful guy who spearheaded the modern resurgence of interest in sound/installation artist Eric Lunde with a rather nice reissue program, the highlight of which is this collection taken from 80's RRR wax. I used to have the original, a 7" with lots of maps and mysterious texts, but now the CD packs it all in one useful place. Rough, crunchy noise for fans of Small Cruel Party, Chop Shop, and other stuff that kids don't know about anymore... seriously, kids and their tape labels these days, don't they know their history? Yeesh. Get off my lawn.) plus some things I listened to quite often, though they came out before 2011: The Sisters of Mercy "Floodland" CD Stereolab "Emperor Tomato Ketchup" CD Foetus "Love" CD Jin Singtae "Extensity of Hard Disk Drive" CD Frank (Just Frank) "The Brutal Wave" CD XTC "English Settlement" CD ~ Josh F's Xmas 2011 Nate Young "Regressions Vol. 2 (Stay Asleep)" LAFMS "Blorp Essette" Paula Deen "Takes 'Ludes and MakesFood" Fabio Frizzi "Zombi 2/Un Gato Nel Cervello" Silla Electrica "Ritmo Suicida" Beastie Boys "Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 2" Endless Boogie "Twenty Minute Jam Getting Out of the City" Carlo Savina "La Cripta E L'Incubo" V/A "Bollywood Bloodbath" Lee Perry "The Return of Pipecock Jackson" V/A "Wallahi Le Zein" Thin Lizzy "Jailbreak" and "Warriors" Judas Priest "Breaking the Law" Do What Thou Wilt "The satanic rites of British rock delivered from acetates and rare pressings 1970-1974" Morena y Clara "s/t" V/A "Cherrystones + Lovely Jon Present Leather Report" ~ Josh M's Xmas 2011 PJ Harvey, Let England Shake Wild Flag, Wild Flag William Parker, Crumbling in the Shadows is Fraulein Miller's Stale Cake Bill Orcutt, How the Thing Sings Bibio, Mind Bokeh Cold Cave, Cherish the Light Years Jens Lekman, An Argument with Myself Thurston Moore, Demolished Thoughts the Ladybug Transistor, Clutching Stems Martial Canterel, You Today ~ Jason's Xmas 2011 Number ten is the Stan Hubbs re-issue. Numbers 9-1 are all the attached photo I took in the park.  ~ Angela's Xmas 2011 1. Various Wallahi le Zein 2cd Latitude 2011 A zillion compilations of West African music out there, but most of them have to ignore Nouakchott, Mauritania, the largest city in the Sahara. Full of shanty towns made out of sand covered tents, it's a place where you have to buy water, and also a place where almost all music is performed live rather than disseminated through recordings. Intensely dirty, burning & ornate electric guitar solos, studded with hammer ons & phase shifter pedals, all improvised, & seemingly powered by car batteries that're busy leaking psychedelic green acid. Those lines wind, pop & shudder over drum bonks, underneath vowel-wrestling singers, & respond with jarring immediacy whenever someone that you can't see dances well or hands over cash. Collected by Matthew Lavoie (of Voice of America) by recording shows onto cassette. Extremely detailed notes give a history of the last 30 odd years of music in the city, explain why drag queen drummers are in demand for weddings, give you some idea of what combination of electronics and dirt make those noises, who had the dream that caused everyone to put 20 extra frets on their necks, etc. 2. Various Nihon Indigo cassette 2011/193x-195x Trilogy Tapes Bananas about this little collection of melancholy, graceful Japanese pop, mostly from the 40s & 50s. Yearning gieshas, singing starlets, enka balladeers caught in the endless rain, and crisp instrumental flourishes on strings, shamisen, guitar, etc. Impressive notes for a tape release too. 3. Evariste Do You Know the Beast lp No Smoke 2011/1967-69 Hard swingin ye-ye with loony screaming and growling, sound effects (specifically sheep & sine waves), and lyrics about integral calculus. Evariste was a legit student of particle physics (under his real name Joel) before deciding it would be more fun to have an extremely lopsided haircut & flail around like Freddie from Freddie & the Dreamers while singing an impression of a rooster. Superbly cutting, brilliant arrangements by Michel Colombier (of Pierre Henry fame, as well as Serge Gainsbourg). Evariste's complete discography is here, and though it's just a few singles, a comparison to a giant like Kim Fowley is not out of order. 4. Various Street Musicians of Yogyakarta lp + 7 inch Mississippi 2011/1976-78 The exquisite, dreamy & prismatic major/minor harmonies of Indonesian folk & pop are on full display between market stalls & outside restaurant doorways in one of the heaviest tourist spots outside of Bali. Troupes that become possessed, whip each other & eat fire, or just play Dangdut, Ronggeng, Melayu, Kroncong (western ukulele trios derived from sailor songs). Covers from the radio, covers of classical gamelan songs. Endearing interview excerpts in which you learn which instrument looks like a goat, and how many years you must play until you can successfully make jokes at people's expense. Recorded by Jack Body, an Australian composer who was teaching in Indonesia for a couple of years. And it's easy to see why he freaked out as soon as he arrived & heard this stuff. Just fall down dead beautiful. 5. Matsuo Ohno Choju Gigaku 7 inch EM 2011/1970 Brilliant little single of wheezy chirps, oinks & croaks that suddenly start burping out everything from 'Clementine' to Italian opera. In the mid 1950s a guy in Copenhagen (named Carl Weissmann) released a version of 'Jingle Bells' that was made out of musique-concrete-chopped dog barks, thereby inventing the well known holiday scourge the Singing Dogs. 15 years later this inspired some nurt working in the publicity department of Expo '70 to comission this recording: one of Japanese folksongs that had been constructed out of tuned animal noises. Avant garde sound effects composer Ohno, who made the goopy blips for the 'Astro Boy' cartoons, rose to the occasion. He coralled his frequent collaborator Takehisa Kosugi (Taj Mahal Travellers) and several others to help, as the tuning & cut up work had to all be done on a single reel-to-reel recorder. The many overdubs also keep things hissy & dry, so it's not even especially cartoony. Ought to sit right next to Pierre Schaeffer's trains in every record collection. 6. Los Destellos Constelacion lp Secret Stash 2011/1971 Lima's psychedelic cumbian masters. Enrique Delgado started playing guitar as a child & was already touring by the time he was 13. His parents disapproved & kicked him out of the house, so he couch surfed as a teen. He picked up the electric guitar for the first time in 1962 & started Los Destellos in '66. The band started incorporating Colombian timbales for that cumbian rhythm (here played by Cesar Arias), but also the surf/beat guitar that was so popular in Europe & America. The sparkling surfy sound that named the band has been partly been taken over by wah & Santana fuzz by this 7th album. You can easily hear the beginning of chicha, and the verbed-out spoken introduction to 'Onsta La Yerbita' is as slinky as music ever gets. Instantly the best thing on Secret Stash. 7. Void Sessions 1981-83 lp Dischord 2011/1981-83 Columbia, Maryland's unhinged hardcore geniuses make for the best Dischord release in forever. Unreleased sessions, the stuff from the 'Flex Your Head' comp, outtakes from the classic Faith/Void split (on which they wipe the fucking floor with the Faith), & a couple of really amazing live tracks full of crazy braying & guitar destruction. The band quickly went metal, but you won't hear it here. Instead, the fun they're having in the studio is undeniable, especially when they throw in half of a Circle Jerks cover. 8. Catherine Christer Hennix The Electric Harpsichord cd Die Schachtel 2010/1976 A big black bucket of tintinnabulating stars, made with 3 tuned Yamaha keyboards, sine waves, and processed with delay. Hennix is Swedish, and met La Monte Young & Pandit Pran Nath at the impressionable age of 21, at the turn of the 70s. She studied with them while pursuing a career as a math professor at MIT & SUNY. 56 page booklet that includes amusing notes by Henry Flynt (who says Europe should never have been invented), a couple of short poems by La Monte, & a lot of math symbols from Hennix herself. 9. Various Those Shocking Shaking Days 3lp Now Again 2011/1970-78 Fat slab that throws open the doors on the deep & seemingly boundless Indonesian music scene of the 70s. A couple tracks have seen expensive psych reissues in the past few years, but at 3 lps, there's plenty to discover- and you can skip past the innumerable ballads on most albums & head straight for the over the top, totally badass fuzz bombs. All those Sabbath, James Brown and Grand Funk knock offs were precipitated in part by President Suharto's pro-West but authoritarian stance. But since most bands only got flat compensation for albums & made their living from shows, tons of releases with several quick experiments were relatively common. That still doesn't explain why the guy from Golden Wing hung upsidedown when he played the minimoog. Or why multiple bands chose to combine the template of Hendrix' 'Stone Free' with anti-drug messages. The Rhythm Kings even have a chant asking the band members whether they prefer grass, morphine, lsd, "stone", or sex- and they say no to most of it! Compiled by a Canadian rap producer whose resume includes making beats for Ghostface Killah & Raekwon. 10. Various Intercontinental Transmissions Vol. 1 lp Kala Bandar 2011/196x-80 This stroboscopic little story starts, as you likely already know, in your backyard with sparkly instrumental combos like the Ventures & Shadows. But it ends out on the other side of the flat earth. Peruvian cumbia with whistling, Iranian twist records, beautiful Polish beat girls, Indonesian proto-metal fuzz monsters, flashy soundtracks that go way beyond Bollywood- they're all here. And just as the twang-addled, ye-ye mad, go-go kids in these bands once infused their local styles with the laquered cool of the big, bad, far-off West, psychedelia geeks and beats dudes are stretching their own boundaries to hear it today. Obscure, impossible-to-find baubles that were left behind by a foolhardy world indifferent to their vivid allure. Compiled, liscenced & released by Boston's own Jesse Kaminsky, music director at MIT's WMBR and also the host of a 5-year running show dedicated to music in languages other than English. ~ Dimitri's Acid Top Ten 1. Mystic Tide - Solid Sound Solid Ground 2. Fraction - Moonblood 3. High Tide - Sea Shanties 4. Headstone - Still Cooking 5. Khazad Doom - Level 6 1/2 6. The Deep - Psychedelic Moods 7. Erkin Koray - Tutkusu 8. Various - Psych Funk Sa Re Ga 9. Bachs - Out of the Bachs 10. Various - Waterpipes & Dykes Vol. 1 ~  ~ Seth Tissue's 10 shows (not the only 10) that blew my mind in 2010 - Keith Rowe (duos with Sebastian Lexer,Emperor Tomato Ketchup Sean Meehan, Jason Lescalleet) @ Diapason Gallery - Toshimaru Nakamura @ Issue Project Room - Morton Feldman "String Quartet" @ Bargeworks, "String Quartet II" @ Issue Project Room - Nmperign & Jason Lescalleet @ Neon Marshmallow - Iggy & the Stooges @ House of Blues - Merzbow @ Issue Project Room, Le Poisson Rouge - Eliane Radigue @ Issue Project Room - Kevin Drumm @ MIT - Ut @ Great Scott - Anthony Braxton @ Wesleyan ~ Josh Friedman 12/10 Sun City Girls-Funeral Mariachi Endless Boogie-Head House Blues Personal and the Pizzas-Raw Pie No Balls Frieder Butzmann “I’m a 7” Single” 7” Satan’s Satyrs Demo cs Buckingham/Nicks s/t Bill Orcutt “Way Down South” Blood Brothers Mix http://www.maddecent.com/blog/blood-bros-first-blood ~ Dennis Stepp Bakers Dozen 2010 1. Deux Pipes-Anton Bruhin-Alga Marghen-LP 2. Kemialliset Ystavat-Ullakkopalo-Fonal-LP 3. Ghost Moth/Bolide-Split-Archive De Sangre De Dios-Tape 4. Charanjit Singh-10 Ragas To A Disco Beat-Bombay Connection-2xLP 5. Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides -Blew In The Face-Chironex Records-LP 6. Shangaan Electro-New Wave Dance Music From South Africa-Honest Jon's-CD 7.Omar Souleyman-Jazeera Nights-Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria-Sublime Frequencies-CD 8.Tirogo-Float-QDK-CD 9.Leif Elggren-All Animals Are Saints-The Tapeworm-Tape 10.-Witch-Lazy Bones-QDK-CD 11. Leo Coomans-Basement Tapes 1978-1982-Ultra Eczema-LP 12.-Ilios-Kenrimono-PAN-LP 13. Parasites of the Western World-Self Titled-De Stijl ~ Josh Malamy Seattle, Wa 12/10 Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy William Parker, I Plan to Stay a Believer: The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield Eri Yamamoto Trio, In Each Day, Something Good V/A, Sensitivity Training Ash Pool, For Which He Plies the Lash V/A, Anything's Better Joanna Newsom, Have One on Me Mycale, Mycale: The Book of Angels Volume 13 Earn, In a Year CocoRosie, Grey Oceans ~ Gordon Marshall: Ten Select Recordings of 2010 1. OMRhttp:/ brSwiss Mountain Transport Systems brSwiss Mountain Transport Systems/www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-ThPN8ZY4Ibr12;Willisau 2. Hamid Drake & Bindu—Reggaeology 3. William Hooker—Earth's Orbit 4. Henry Grimes/Rashied Ali—Spirits Aloft 5. Bill Ware—Played Right 6. Evan Parker/John Wiese—C-Section 7. Azar Lawrence—Mystic Journey 8. David S. Ware—Saturnian 9. McPhee/Duval/Rosen/Trzaska—Magic 10. Steve Swell's Slammin' the Infinite—5000 Poems ~ Thomas Gilmore 12/10 Favorite Baker's Dozen of 2010 Gunslingers "Manifesto Zero" Birds of Maya "Ready to Howl" White Fence "s/t" Black Time "More Songs About Motorcycles and Death" Group Inerane "Guitars From Agadez Vol 3" Hayvanlar Alemi "Guarana Superpower" Neil Young "Le Noise" Running "s/t" Dead C "Patience" Internatio Carlo Savina nal Hello "s/t" Krewe of Eris "Feasts of the Appetite of Eris" Messages "After Before" King Blood "Eyewash Silver" Favorite Baker's Dozen Reissues/Comps Mike Rep & Tommy Jay "Grim-O Comix Sequence" Ron House "Blind Boy in the Backseat" Rob Jo Star Band "s/t" Various "A Range of Great Dividing" Various "Ecstatic Music of the Jemma El Fna" Chin Chin "Sound of the Westway" Kebab "We Live in a System" Vertical Slit "Slit and Pre-Slit" Parasites of the Western World "s/t" Rikki Ililonga & Musi-O-Tunya "Dark Sunrise" Shirley Collins "Sweet England" Angel Face "Wolf City Blues" Various "Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music from South Africa" Favorite Baker's Dozen 7" Jooklo Duo "The Warrior" Timmy's Organism "I'm a Nice Guy Now" Garbage and the Flowers "Alamo Rose" Hallogallo 2010 "Blinkgurtel" Holy Cobras "Feed Yr Head" Birds of Maya "Regulation" Puffy Areolas "Rock 'n' Roll Express" Willie Lane "Arrested for Decay" Radar Eyes "Shakes" Druid Perfume "Don't Eat 'Em They're Poison" Meercaz "Never Too Late To Learn" King Lee "Tire Shop" Big Troubles "Freudian Slips" ~ Angela's Xmas 2010 1. Muehl, Otto ~ Psycho Motorik ~ none lp 2010/1971 Mmmm, darned if I don't adore the truly wondrous, yummy world of Otto. Viennese Aktionist who, along with Hermann Nitsch, Gunter Brus & a few pals decided that painting had become boring & they would do well to make it more visceral. Shortly thereafter, Otto, who seemed to see the whole world like a big ball of playdoh, began to appear in his own films & others'; pouring ketchup into vaginas, breaking eggs onto pretty girls' boobs, having Barry White-style sex with a goose, poking his dick through fruit arrangements, & other fun & visually arresting stuff. Muehl eventually formed a commune to try & break off from typical society, and ended up getting arrested for cavorting with children. Eventually he got out & started a new commune in Portugal. Here he shows off his rather brilliant & under-documented capabilities for blubbering, burping, slapping thighs, and yelling like a deranged Nazi over classical music. Several of his commune children play trad jazz these days, and there's even a band that they all have together called the Sahara Baby Jazz Band. 2. Various ~ The Sound of Siam ~ Soundway cd/lp 2010/1964-75 Once again, Soundway shows everybody how it's done. Wonderful junket through several related subgenres of Thai 60s/70s music (Luk Thung, Luk Krung, Molam & more). Urban pop, countryside songs that explore morality & vocal tricks, the trance-inducing mouth harp that looks like a couple of sets of pan pipes glued into a pair of bird wings. Twangy high vocals that often tease, a gentle weaving rhythm, and a lot of odd western moves thumping away in the background. Funk-drenched intros kick in just like Marvin Gaye's songs do. Over here, someone nabs the bass line from Carol King's 'It's Too Late', and someone else sings a snippet of Buddy Holly/Bobby Vee's 'More Than I Can Say'. But it's not just riffspotting- you'll swoon over the featherlight voice of Ream Daranoi and the possessed beatnik noir of the Viking Combo Band. Notes detail the content of the lyrics, which are also pretty incredible. 3. No Balls ~ No Balls ~ Permanent lp 2010 Drajan Bryngelsson (drums) & Dan Raberg (who may well be the greatest trumpet player alive today) of Sweden's utterly mighty Brainbombs. All the convulsive, abrasive guitar you could want, jaggedly hitched to a rhythm section that moves like an SUV crunching down a black diamond slope. Vocals are there less often, & buried deep, but still run through some sort of shitty nazi-megaphone. One 7.Omar Souleyman-Jazeera Nights-Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria-Sublime Frequencies-CDcan only hope the lyrics which kept away pussywhipped listeners are still in effect too. So, so, so many bands out there who think they play heavy when they merely shovel college kid bar fodder. Get on your knees now, as the riffs of nihilism are ready to hammer your forehead & provide a cure. 4. Ike, Reiko ~ Kokotsu No Sekai ~ Bamboo cd 2010/1971 The drop dead beautiful Pam Grier of Tokyo, whose entry into pinky violence movies caused a scandal because she was supposedly only 16 years old (actually the hubub was publicity stunt & she was 18). The bad press made her enough of a star that she could switch to delinquent schoolgirl flicks, where instead of having sex onscreen she led gangs, weilded shotguns & ran around in leather jackets with no shirt underneath. Unforgettable album that takes a left turn at Serge Gainsbourg's 'Je T'aime Moi Non Plus' and never looks back. Zippy lounge & nightclub vamps, with a lot of dusky jazz-flute & vibes, behind endless orgasm sighs, whip cracks, scintillating whimpers, funny little grunts. Perhaps best of all is the somewhat badly recorded mewling that runs throughout. Only thing that could make me like this better is if it had been reished on Schimpfluch instead. 5. Adkins, Hasil ~ White Light White Meat ~ Norton lp 2010/1958-6 Thin Lizzy Various 5 Yes baby, yobru can have peanut butter AND chicken on your hot dog. The one-and-only huncher who whipped up amateur monster makeup looks in his spare time away from his gloriously mangled home-recordings of rockabilly. A greatest hits that's collected with the same kind of obsessive care that Haze's neighbor Jesco White put into boot polishing. Folkways style jacket & easily the best (and best-earned) title of a record in 2010. 6. Tudor, David ~ Bandoneon ! ~ Microcinema dvd 2010/1966 Vintage footage of Tudor's explosive installation, inspired by a previous Maruicio Kagel piece for the tango noise box. In a very large, reverberant hall (an empty armory about the size of an airplane hangar), Tudor hooked a South American accordion up to a bunch of telephone relay systems, electronics & oscillators. The accordion ran like some horrific alarm system through the huge PA. It's blistering waveforms produced some visuals, and even radio-controlled a bunch of wooden statues on wheeled platforms puttering around the room in circles. A screaming mess, clearly incredibly loud, with harsh lights & crude mechanical monsters. And all of it run by Tudor, with his effeminate little voice, tidy suit & horn rimmed glasses. Tons of fascinating talking heads, including Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, David Behrman. 7. Sabu ~ Palo Congo ~ Blue Note lp 2010/1957 Louis Martinez (aka Sabu) came from Spanish Harlem & started playing on the street corner with cans. He went to Puerto Rico as a teenager, & landed back in the states just in time to take the conga chair from Pozo in Dizzy Gillespie's last band. Heroin kept Sabu from becoming a national name, and he spent a couple of years running a strip club in Baltimore. Utterly raw, afrocuban percussion workout that in no way belongs on the dapper Blue Note label. It seems impossible that this barbed-wire, street ugly record was issued only 1 year after Harry Belafonte's primping 'Banana Boat Song'. That thing that sounds like somebody hammering on an electric fence is Cuban bandleader Arsenio Rodriguez (the inventor of the modern conjunto lineup) playing the tres guitar. 8. Orchestre Regional de Mopti ~ Best of the First Biennale of Arts and Culture for the Young ~ Mississippi lp 2010/1970 Oh cripes, that hypnotic guitar is so bewitching! The rest of the record is good, but the phantasmal clipped riff & liquefying horns on "Recital" brings you one of the finest moments in African music. Period. The song is dedicated to Seku Amadou, the leader of the Massina Empire, who founded Mopti as a city & ruled from 1818-1845. Mopti lies as the x point in the cross of Mali's geography and it's rivers. It's the venice of the Niger delta, not far from mud mosques & where the Dogon see stars without telescopes, and the capital for Mali tourists. The band was 14 members strong, led by singer Sory Bamba, funded by the state. Besides a 10 inch sized single, this is their only album. 9. Rob Jo Star Band ~ Rob Jo Star Band ~ Pomme lp 2010/1975 French band that's very 13th Floor Elevators, but with freaky, badly-made synths in the place of the jug. Trebly fx-free rhythm guitar (it almost sounds acoustic... whiff of punk/Velvets there) & decrepit fuzz-as-frying-pan electric solos. One helluva long way from Magma, that's for sure. At the time I think it may have prompted the question 'Avez vous utilise la console de mixage avec ton cul?', as the Michael Yonkers electronics tend to be way up front. English lyrics to 'Not the Crazy Man' song are laughingly self-defeating in an accent so thick. 10. Various ~ Flipper Psychout ~ Vampisoul 2lp/cd 2010/1969-75 Nothing starts the heavy panting and the pink spotlights spinning faster than those three delectable little words: Italian library music. The orchestra/studio system/hit factory was well entrenched in Rome throughout the 60s, and the competing RAI & RCA studios employed what seems like a kazillion highly skilled musicians full time. Side forays into jazz or avant-something weren't uncommon. Many inventive composers dipped into the lucrative library recording markets for insta-jazz-lounge and psych-funk-schmaltz. Amedeo Tommasi (piano) & Piero Montanari (bass) were in a jazz band together in the 70s. Tommasi was also the electric pianist for Ennio Morricone during the 80s. Il Maestro's famous whistler, Alessandro Alessandroni, also shows off his arranging chops here. Moody fuzzy breaks & mouthwatering rarities, compiled by Italian DJ Alessandro Casella. honorable mention, 'Let's A Go Go', 'Nippon Girls', 'Roots of Chicha 2', 'La Cripta e L'Incubo' tape ~  ~ Josh Friedman's Tops for Today 02/10 Grippers Nother Onsesers "Live at Slimer Beach" Judas Priest "Stained Class" Love Cry Want 2lp Carlos Antonio "El Hombre Orquesta" cs Shirley Ellis "The Clapping Song" The JB's anything No Balls "Come Clean" lp Love Joys "Lovers Rock" lp Wreckx-N-Effect "Rump Shaker" 12" Sound of Wonder: The First Wave of Plugged in Pop at the Pakistani Picture House ~ Stuart Ellis Radiodiffusion Internasionaal 12/09 Orchestre Poly Rythmo de Cotonou • Echoes Hypnotiques Vol. 2 [Analog Africa] Various Artists • Raks Raks Raks [Raks Discos] Various Artists • Singapore A Go Go [Sublime Frequencies] Mehrpouya • Sitar [Persianna] Various Artists • Ghana Special [Soundway] Various Artists • Thai Funk Zudrangma Vol. 2 [ZRM] Various Artists • Psych Funk 101 [World Psychedelic Funk Classics] Various Artists • Siam Soul: Thai Pop Spectacular Vol. 2 [Sublime Frequencies] Golden Ring • Iranian Styled 60s Garage & Other Exotic Sounds [Persianna] Various Artists • The Sound of Wonder [Finder's Keepers] ~ Seth Tissue Live Top Tens 2009 Merce Cunningham Dance Company @ Rockefeller Park NYC Os Mutantes @ Somerville Theater Jandek @ Issue Project Room Throbbing Gristle @ Masonic Temple Butthole Surfers @ Paradise The Sons of God @ No Fun Fest, @ Mass Art R/S (Rehberg/Schmickler) @ No Fun Fest Pedestrian Deposit @ No Fun Fest Ouest @ Piano Factory New England Phonographers Union @ Studio Soto, @ Democracy Center & many honorable mentions Seth Tissue Live Top Tens 2008 Merce Cunningham Dance Company @ Rainbow Quarry (Waite Park, MN) Ornette Coleman @ Chicago Jazz Festival Cecil Taylor & Tony Oxley @ Village Vanguard Misha Mengelberg @ Hungry Brain music of Helmut Lachenmann @ Goethe Institut, @ New England Conservatory Jandek @ German Society (Philadelphia), @ Bug Theater (Denver) Consumer Electronics @ No Fun Fest Mars Williams/Jim Baker/Brian Sandstrom/Steve Hunt @ Hotti Biscotti The Dead C @ Jonny Brenda's, @ Bowery Ballroom, Gate @ Rehab John Wiese @ Piano Factory ~ Tim Morse 12/09 10. Rhianna getting her ass kicked 9. Chris Brown Beating up Rhianna. 8. Hanging out with Tim Saint Lewis 7. Touring 6. Recording with Anal Cunt again. 5. Angela and Weirdo Records. *thanks Tim!* 4. Working with Paul Rajpal, Greg Prescott, Jake Reid, Dennis Stepp, Dave Collins, Donna Lamborghini, and many more. 3. Oliver 2. My wonderful daughter Chey graduating high school. 1. Selling Michael Jackson bad dope. ~ Morris V Belette Malade 12/09 1. Ha#8212;Spirits Aloft 4. Ike, Reiko ~ Kokotsu No Sekai ~ Bamboord-Ons With Neil Hamburger Six Pack (American Exports, Red Lounge Records) 2. Thee Oh Sees I Can't Pay You to Disappear (Dog Poison, Captured Tracks) 3. Michael Hurley & Ida Wildegeeses (Ida Con Snock, Gnomonsong) 4. Skygreen Leopards Dixie Cups in the Dead Grass (Gorgeous Johnny, Jagjaguwar) 5. Mulatu Astatke & The Heliocentrics Chik Chikka (Inspiration Information, Strut) 6. Cheveu Happiness (Cheveu, Reissue Secret Stashbr Gunslingers Love Cry Want 2lp on S-S) 7. Hue Blanc's Joyless Ones The Beginning of the...(7", Static Wagon) 8. Intelligence Universal Babysitter (Fake Surfers, In The Red) 9. Bardo Pond Lord Of Light (7", Trensmat) 10. �l-G Al-Kado (Tout Ploie, Reissue on S-S) 11. Bill Callahan Too Many Birds (Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, Drag City) 12. Die Goldenen Zitronen Wir verlassen die Erde (Die Entstehung der Nacht, Buback) 13. Haunted George Blood on the Moon (Where's Charlie Jones?, In The Red) 14. Dan Melchior und Das Menace Muggy Weather (Obscured by the Fuzz, Topplers) 15. Sic Alps L. Mansion (7", Slumberland) 16. Jackie-O Motherfucker Nightingale (Ballads of the Revolution, Fire) 17. Nothing People Late Night (Late Night, S-S) R.I.P. Jack Rose & The Black Twig Pickers Goodbye Booze (st, Klang) ~ Justin Snow Anti Gravity Bunny 12/09 10. Gregg Kowalsky - Tape Chants (Kranky) Minimal long form tape drone meant for deeeep sleep and/or meditation and/or my favorite kind of parties. 9. Nicholas Szczepanik - The Chiasmus (Sentient Recognition Archive / Basses Frequences) Enormous drone, fills your house/head with wonderful smooth tones, mostly of the euphoric variety. 8. Ophibre - Approaching The Ionized Piezo Kiosk (Earjerk) Simultaneously melancholic and blissful drone tearing you in two for a half hour. Literally stunning. 7. Keith Fullerton Whitman - Dream House Variations (Arbor) 4 tapes of differing length meant for simultaneous play and manual fucking around (fast forwarding, speed manipulation, etc) is encouraged. This is just fucking brilliant. Oh, and the music's great too. 6. Acre - Isolationist (Isounderscore) Even though two of the three tracks on this were previously released (though unheard by me and therefor irrelevant), the brand new track is awesome enough to warrant being in everyone's top 10 list. It's the densest, warmest, drone ever and came right in time for winter. 5. Usputuspud - Live In The Shit (The Nafs) Murky drone disco. That's why. 4. The Golden Sores - A Peaceable Kingdom (BloodLust!) This is where drone is going. The is the new drone of the future. Everything about this record is utterly fantastic. Chill ambient style, guitar psych feedbackage, and everything else. This is how it's done. 3. Mountains - Choral (Thrill Jockey) Unbelievably amazing ambient naturey organic drone. So life affirming. Put this record on and your stress is instantly zapped. 2. Jason Crumer - Walk With Me (Misanthropic Agenda) Walk With Me is the noisiest drone record I've heard all year. Sometimes it gets almost unbearably rowdy but it's the kind that gives you chills. The final two songs are probably the best sequenced tracks of the year. 1. Eluvium - Life Through Bombardment (Temporary Residence Limited) This takes the number one spot with ease. Every Eluvium album on vinyl for the first time. It's like hearing each record anew and in the proper way. Plus, have you seen the packaging on this beast? It's gorgeous and epic. It's a fuckin BOOK. And it's personalized. TRL really went for broke on this and it's absolutely worth every penny. ~ Angela Sawyer Xmastime 09 1. Circuit Rider-Circuit Rider (Circuit Rider) lp 2009/1980/1971 All the way from Norwalk Connecticut into your lacerated veins, comes Circuit Rider, and he is no more and no less than the traveling preacher you need. Most especially if you happen to be a meth-cooking, biker-mama-slapping, beer-shotgunning Jim Morrison fan who hasn't had a wink of sleep since Friday. Hard psych that's more acoustic than fuzzed, suprisingly, with laughably slurred vocals & wtf songwriting. Really glad to see this reished/booted. Freetard rock ain't had it so good since the invention of the cigarette lighter. 2. Various-A Orillas Del Magdalena: Coastal Cumbias From Colombia's Discos Fuentes (Domino Sound) lp 2009/195x-7x Radiant cumbias from Colombia in the 50s & 60s. Soft accordions with snaking melodies, an insistent rhythm said to sound like the bouncing shackles on the ankles of slaves, and also horns, chants and tons of unusual percussion accents. If you travel to Colombia today, this would be the equivalent of listening to 'Sitting on the Dock of the Bay' (that is to say, trashy parent music), but with such a slinky sound, you can easily hear why cumbia spread hastily through the rest of Latin America. Compiled by the fine New Orleans store Domino Sound Record Shack. 3. Beatty, Robert-Solos (What The) lp 2009 Breathtaking free electronics, and basically the only great noise record that came out all year long. Where all the other young drugged up goofs of today would put disco bullshit and/or Klaus Schulze knockoffs, Beatty instead gives you knotted, gnarled, nasty spirals & kinked up slinkers. The guy's a serial killer living amidst a country full of the deferential & delicate. Thank Christ there's somebody to relate to! 4. Cipriani, Stelvio-Femina Ridens (Vadim) lp 2009/0969 Those of you who visit Weirdo in person probably know that I listen to this yummy Cipriani soundtrack way, way too often. Impossibly jazzy organ, off-kilter heavy breathing & femme singing by Edda Dell'Orso, spy brass, crippling bass grooves. Arrangements are decorated with touches of harp, circus-themes on harpsichord, & a few lines stolen from Bach. Cipriani didn't come from a musical family, but was encouraged as a kid and worked his way into a job as a pianist on a cruise ship. He eventually landed a job working for Rita Pavone, & turned it into a few spaghetti western scores, before scoring an Italian answer to 'Love Story' called 'The Anonymous Venetian'. The movie here is a surprisngly complex sex-exploitation flick about a financier who gets his secretary to come to a castle for a weekend & turns out to be a sadist. But the joke's on him when the victim mistress turns out to be the master of all men. 5. Vampires of Dartmoore-Dracula's Music Cabinet (Finders Keepers) lp/cd 2009/1969 German studio/library guys get together for a sleazoid horror funk workout. Same basic idea as a porn soundtrack, except that the typically flagrant groans of ectasy are replaced by chains rattling & the endlessly amusing grunting of the undead. Phantasmagoric organ that's somehow both lurid & itchy. A couple of sonic punchlines along the lines of knock knock jokes- and of course they get funnier the more times you hear them. Couldn't love it more. 6. Orcutt, Bill-A New Way To Pay Old Debts (Palilalia) lp 2009 The Tortuga pirate Cap'n Francois L'Olonnais, annoyed with the silence of some Spanish prisoners, is said to have suddenly cut out the heart of one man and bitten into it before it stopped beating. First solo album from Harry Pussy guitarist since 1996, and it is an all acoustic guitar SMOKER. Orcutt might've buried his treasure & gone to suburban prison for 13 years, but he never forgot his map. So here he comes, sticking an index finger in & wiggling around in order to reach some old doubloons that've been hidden away from the light, waiting to gleam like crazy. 7. Various-Eastern Standard Time (Weltraum) lp 2009/1962-75 Sway and succumb to the clutches of these dazzling, trebly instros from Asia & the Middle East. Whether it's the undulating picking of Omar Khorshid, enchanter of Beirut, or the giddy accordion of Bollywood's 'Choti Si Baat', the delerious scales of Maqams & the beats of the talas go toppling over each other. Egyptian pop majesty, Japanese eleki/easy listening, Pakistanti folk tunes alit with electric guitars, acoustic psychedelia from Istanbul, and belly dance parties from all over. Very tasty indeed. 8. Lambkin, Graham-Softly Softly Copy Copy (Kye) cd 2009 Beguiling bits of wagging & groaning fly past as you get dragged like the owner of a new mastiff puppy through Mr. Shadow Ring's incredibly dour mental estuaries. Field recordings of wet, waving thrushes are suddenly overtaken by gulping electronics. Ducks in a pond grapple with a large latex bubble that mysteriously grows in their midst. A large, heavy breathing wallabe chases you through an industrial wasteland, and then the scene is swallowed by jungle vines. Bells toll impossibly inside an aviary. How great is Lambkin? 9. Various-String of Pearls: International 78s (Mississippi/Canary)lp 2009/1923-52 Harry Smith knew and so should you: some songs have a contemplative, diaphanous lustre. They seem to inch out from deep shadows, & evoke unimaginable utopias that're only enhanced by time or distance. And no matter how much you know or don't, they resist the cookie cutters in your head, remaining eternally mysterious. Rembetika, Turkish taqsims, Jamaican calypso, cantor prayers, court music from Java, folk music from the Carpathian mountains or New Mexico. It's all here & was compiled by Weirdo's very favorite 78 collector, Ian Nagoski (Black Mirror, True Vine, Halana, etc.). Waited for this one to be released for forever, & hope there'll be lots more pearls to add to the necklace as time goes by. 10. Hjuler, Kommissar & Mama Bar-Asylum Lunaticum (Intransitive) cd 2009/2007-08 All who have ears for the odd should take a moment to enter the uniquely contorted world of Danish policeman Kommissar Hjuler & his wife Mama Bar. Hear the violence of breathing chopped up against itself, or enjoy Mama's creepy singsong voice. Near the end, it sounds like the Kommissar beats her with a blow up doll while giving an angry lecture. Brilliant collection of their low-run edition cdrs which actually lends a patina of laser focus to this loosey-goose Fluxus couple. Honorable Mentions: Milan-Hell Bent for Leather (Licorice Schtik) lp, Group Doueh-Live at Les Instants Chavires (broadcast by Brian Turner on WFMU, 6-2-09) ~ Gordon Marshall's Twelve Apostles of Rock 11/09 James Brown Godfather of Soul. If Elvis was the plug, Brown was the transformer, generating sparks and gyrating hips, his own and others’, hippest cat ever, planting the beats that still beat in every heartbeat in today’s music, from hip-hop to avant-pop. Elvis Presley Big Bang bursting the beaker, in “Heartbreak Hotel,” primal song of rock and roll. My father still remembers playing “Don’t Be Cruel” over and over again, when it first came out, at a party when he was seventeen. No more proof is necessary. Holgar Czukay (Can) Czukay, bassist and sound manipulator, was the driving force behind Can, the Stockhausen-tutored German band formed in the late sixties. Many claim they best The Beatles. However this may be, they forged the template for avant-garde rock, all for the sake of music, agendas be damned. John Lennon “The late great Johnny Ace,” Paul Simon called him. Bigger than Elvis, his succession to the latter is the Oedipal story of the modern age. He means more things to more people than any artist who ever lived, period. Bob Dylan The greatest poet of the 20th century. Paul McCartney Wings notwithstanding, Macca makes us all swoon, even the moonlight. Jimi Hendrix Broke the color barrier, broke the sound barrier. ‘Nuff said. Robert Wyatt (Soft Machine) Soft Machine was doing what Miles Davis did, before Miles. Granted, Miles, like Lennon and Dylan is one of the greatest artists who ever lived, and did fusion just as well as the former, but he’s on the jazz list…Wyatt also went on to create many beautiful solo albums (most recommend Rock Bottom, but I recommend Schleep). What’s more, he has a sublime voice. Its scion is Peter Gabriel’s. Christian Vander (Magma) Magma is the greatest prog band ever, bar none. Christian Vander is kind of like a cross between John Coltrane and Tom Jones, stagy to an adorable fault. Magma sings their songs in Kobaian, an invented language, which Vander belts out with an unbridled fury anticipating icons of recent times as varied as Bono, Eddie Vedder, and Method Man. Brian Eno Without Eno, Bowie, U2, and Talking Heads would be footnotes. Content to be a footnote himself, Eno is the tail that wags the dog, like his own Christian name (Peter George St. John Baptiste de la Salle) wags his surname. Descended from three generations of British postmen, he has a workman’s modesty, to go along with a megalomaniacal ego, justified to the max by his great contributions to the rock genre, which involves creating a genre of his own, ambient, as well as a slew of inventive rock albums proper. Bob Marley My brother Andy had a dream where Bob Marley taught him to play guitar. We should all be so lucky, and perhaps we are. Morrissey He—yes—succeeded in deconstructing the Love Song. No more would a boy have to have a sweetie in tow, on his arm, or anywhere, to identify with the heroes of verse in music. What’s more, no longer was there a binary opposition between irony and pathos, not to mention gay and straight. I used to sing along to all the songs on Hatful of Hollow, the recordings of BBC sessions The Smiths released in 1985. I did that night after night, afternoon after alcoholic noon. ~ Gordon Marshall's Ten Greatest Jazz Artists 11/09 1. John Coltrane 2. Louis Armstrong 3. Duke Ellington 4. Evan Parker 5. Miles Davis 6. John Zorn 7. Charlie Parker 8. Thelonious Monk 9. Billie Holiday 10. Art Tatum ~ Josh Friedman 3/09 Boredoms "Boretronix" lp (bootleg) Sodom "Obsessed by Cruelty" (Kamikaze) Beyond the Implode "This Atmosphere" EP (Siltbreeze) Inquisition "Magnificent Glorification of Lucifer" lp (No Colours) Bathory "The Return" (Black Mark) Ruth "Mon pote/Mescalito" 7" (Poutre Apparente) Amanaz "Africa" lp (Shadoks) The Barry Sisters "Our Way" (Reboot Stereophonic) Hans Krusi lp (Alga Marghen) Los Holys "Sue�o Sicodelico" (Plustapes) The Silver "Do You Wanna Dance?" 7" (Pop Con) J.T. IV "Cosmic Lightning" lp (Drag City) Chandra "Transportation" lp (Cantor) Keith Hudson "Brand" (Pressure Sounds) Bloodstains Across Texas lp Sandhy & Mandhy "Para Castukis" lp (Lion Productions) ~ Mark Dreikosen's Dawn of the New Ice Age Sound Investments 2008 Freedom's Children: Astra/Battle Hymn Of The Broken Hearted Horde/Galactic Vibes (Shadoks) Cold Sun: Dark Shadows (World In Sound) Raven: Back To Ohio Blues (Owl) Daughters Of Albion (Fallout) The New Age: All Around (RD) Dredd Foole: Kissing The Contemporary Bliss (Family Vineyard) Yoshi Wada: Lament For The Rise And Fall Of The Elephantine Crocodile/Off The Wall (Em) Khan: Space Shanty (Esoteric) Akira Ishikawa & Count Buffalo: Uganda - Dawn Of African Rock (Tiliqua) Holy Moses!! (Fallout) O.W.L.: Of Wondrous Legends (Locust) Truth and Janey: No Rest For the Wicked (Rockadrome Vintage) Rayne (Shadoks) Ol' Paint (Fallout) Gunslingers: No More Invention (World In Sound) Rainman (Fallout) I'll Give You My Heart, I'll Give You My Heart: The Cherry Red Records Singles Collection 1978 - 1983 (Cherry Red) The 5th Dimension: The Magic Garden (Rev-Ola) Phantom Guitars - Twangin' Instrumentals from the UK 1961-1964 (Psychic Circle) Group Doueh: Guitar Music from the Western Sahara (Sublime Frequencies) Group Inerane: Guitars from Agadez: Music of Niger (Sublime Frequencies) Instant Orange (Shadoks) Figures Of Light: Smash Hits (Norton) Jade Stone & Luv: Mosaics - Pieces Of Stone (Subliminal Sounds) The Contents Are: Through You (Shadoks) Mandu: To The Shores Of His Heaven (Aztec) Ghost Eye Seeker: Crow Tongue (Hand/Eye) Bill Cosby: Presents Badfoot Brown and the Bunions Bradford Funeral & Marching Band (Dusty Groove) Greer: Between Two Worlds (Erebus) Terence: An Eye For An Ear (Fallout) ~ Some of Jarrod Fowler's favorite hip hop instrumentals from 2008: Black Milk - Music From the Color Purple Cupp Cave - Garbage Pail Beats dak - Trial Version DeloFi - Dirty Tapes, Volume 3 Durlin Lurt - Him Jenson mgr - Ruffins Mr. Dibiase - Million Dolla Dream Beat Tape Ras G & The Afrikan Space Program - Ghetto Sci-fi Ra Washington - Between Being and Blkness Samiyam - Rap Beats, Volume 1 ~ Josh Burkett of Mystery Train Records Dec. 08 ---1.jd blackfoot-song of crazyhorse ---2.give me love- baghdad 25-29 comp ---3.ralph white lp (we put out) -- 4.robin williamson' new one br---5.bermuda triangle- missing tapes ---6.ts bonniwell-solo album (schlocky post music machine...) ---7.a lot of tucker zimmerman ---8.haack-haackula ---9.christina carter/pocahaunted split ---10.little jeremy (soon to exist) ~ Dennis Stepp December 08 1. Loosers- Natives are Restless 2xLP (QBICO) 2. The Skaters-Physicalities of The Sensibilities of Ingredietial Strairways LP (Eclipse) 3. African Scream Contest 2xLP (Analog Africa) 4. Way Of the Cross-Mind of the Dolphin LP (Phoenix Records) 5. 1970's Algerian Proto-Rai Underground LP (Sublime Frequencies) 6. Klondike and York-The Holy Book LP (Weird Forest) 7. Zomes-Zomes LP (Holy Mountain) 8. Harmonia -Live 1974 CD (Water) 9. Emeralds Solar Bridge CD (Hanson) 10. Delta Dandies -Dance bands in Nigeria 1936-1941 CD (Honest Jons) ~ Danny Gromfin December 08 Top Ten Boston Facial Hair 1) Keith Fullerton Whitman (Mimaroglu Music Sales) 2) Dan Hirsch (NonMore Songs About Motorcycles and Death cs-Event) 3) Ricardo Donoso (Epicureans, Ehnahre, Semata) 4) Saul Jacobowitz ( Drajan Bryngelsson (drums) brHuman Hairs) 5) Greg Davis (technically VT but he must be on this list, Autumn Records) 6) Shaun Gummere & Chokdee Rutirasiri (Story & Structure) 7) Rob Forman (Sedimental Records) 8) Bhob Rainey (BSC, Nmperign) 9) Howard Stelzer (actually a beard emeritus, Intransitive, Ouest, BSC, Skeletons Out) 10) me ~ Joshua Harris December 08 1) Sun Ra - Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (LP, Saturn) I've always had trouble finding Jazz that appeals to me. Angela recommended this as the entry point to Sun Ra. It goes far beyond that. This record is no less than the Rosetta Stone of Jazz, decoding all that came before and all that comes after into sensible language. It deepened my appreciation for the Jazz records I was already familiar with and equiped me for all that will follow. 2) Susbrbran Alcorn - And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar (LP, Olde English Spelling Bee) Bringing home a pedal steel record with a Faheyesque title, it is natural to have a few expectations. Once you've got this one on the table though, you'll see how wrong those expectations are, and by the end of the first side you'll wonder if you have ever been right about anything. There is no tinge of Country Western, at times the instrument sounds like an analog synth, at times it sounds meditative and expansive without going raga, sometimes just a gorgeous dreamy wash. To call this album essential is like saying "I occasionally enjoy breathing." It is full of surprises and warmth and space and leads to place I never expected. It is records like this that make me collect and keep searching for new musics. 3) Tony Conrad - Four Violins (1964) (LP, Table of the Elements) Monumental. Dense. Near perfection. When we're honest with ourselves, we can say that drone records have a way of blending together. This record is truly cut from its own cloth. 4) Jack Rose - I Do Play Rock and Roll (LP, 3 Lobed) If you have been looking for the missing link between Jack Rose's solo records and his work as a member of Pelt, this is the record for you. Worth picking up if only for the sidelong "Sundogs," where Jack rocks the slide back and forth across the strings, building up overtones in a shimmering mass. Previously available in shorter form on the Eclipse/Time-Lag 3LP, but here it has more room to spread out, and that's exactly what it does. 5) Luie Luie - Touchy (CD, Companion) I had no idea this was even coming out until I saw it on the Weirdo e-mail. I immediately jumped out of my chair, fist raised over my head and yelled out "ALL RIGHT!!" My officemate is used to such outbursts on Monday morning while reading the Weirdo e-mail. I have known and loved the "single" from this record for many years, and was so pumped to finally hear the full length. It does not disappoint, "The Touchy" is every bit matched (and arguably surpsassed) by "Tortilla Touchy." Plus it has the spoken bonus track of Luie Luie railing against bootleggers and explaining how the Touchy came to be and the new music he's working on AND it comes with Touchy buttons of your very own. 6) 3 Day Band - 3 Day Band (CD, Important) John Fahey and Ayal Senior lay down psych jams so dense you can cut them with a knife... until John's neighbor calls and tells them to knock it off. The rest of the CD is tracks of Fahey explaining life and the finer points of the theology of the Great Koonaklaster. Two very necessary Fahey issues this year, and a longer list would have also included "The Mill Pond" (also on Important). 7) Can't - Private Time (Part 2) (LP, Weird Forest) I totally spaced this record when initially compiling my list, then I woke up in the middle of the night and thought "Wait, didn't Can't put out a record?" Yes, yes they (she) did. Jessica Rylan makes by far what is my favorite type of noise, all textural and inviting. This record also has more of the acoustic guitar work, which adds another facet to a record that already bounces around yet remains a cohesive whole. 8) Chris Corsano - The Young Cricketer (LP, Family Vineyard) Beats plus squeeks from the great Corsano? Sold! Catchiest rhythms I've heard in forever. The cover and titles make you think it's a concept record, and maybe it is, but to me, the concept is drum beats that I compulsively need to sing as I walk around for weeks after listening. 9) Burning Star Core - Challenger (LP, Plastic) Every record I have from this guy sounds completely different, yet instantly recognizable. I dig this one for its smooth drones and chopped up vocals. 10) brbr#8217;s more, he has a sublime voice. Its scion is Peter GabrielCosmic LightningAnthony Braxton - For Alto (2LP, Delmark) The competing reviewer in my house summed it up: "Never play that record again. EVER!" You can guess what's playing next time I'm home alone. Shows: Best overall event: No More Bush -August 4, PA's Lounge Great music, hilarious readings, Bobb Trimble!?!? Please Byron, don't wait for another illiterate dictator to commandeer our government to put together a tour this white hot again. Runner up: Smash Palace (December 4-6, YMCA Cambridge) Overwhelming, but great. Best performance: Paul Metzger (November 18, PA's) Savage and unhinged while uterly controlled and focused. Love the records, but seeing it played out before my eyes was quite powerful. Runner up (tie) The New Monuments (September 12, Nom D'Artiste) Ben Hall's face when the cop reached over the kit to tap him on the shoulder was priceless. nmperign + Jason Lescalleet (April 29, Middle East Upstairs) It sounded like the universe was being ripped apart. Slightly disappointing when the set ended and I realized the laws of space/time were still in effect. ~ Gordon Marshall November 08 Top Fifty Psychedelic Albums Revolver Abbey Road A Love Supreme Achtung Baby Sgt Pepper Can-Future Days Cosmic Jokers-Galactic Supermarket Miles Davis-In a Silent Way Miles Davis-Bitch Judas Priest es Brew Zorn-Electric Masadbrbra Led Zeppelin IV Highway 61 Flower Travellin Band Blonde on Blonde Acid Mothers Temple-Everything The Doors The Peace-Black Power Piper at the Gates of Dawn Soft Machine 1-2-3 Kevin Ayers and The Whole World Terry Riley-A Rainbow in Curved Air Cluster-First Three Faust-Everything with Uwi Nettlebeck (i.e. '70s) Taj-Mahal Travellers Magical Power Mako Krafterwerk-1 & 2 Tangerine Dream-Zeit Amon Duul II-Yeti Amon Duul-Para Dieswarts Yoshi Wada-The Appointed Cloud The Monks-Black Monk Time Jefferson Airplane-Surrealistic Pillow Ash Ra Tempel Grateful Dead-Live Dead Country Joe & the Fish-Electric Music for the Mind and Body Plastic People of the Universe-Egon Bondy's Happy Heart's Club Banned Charlemagne Palestine-A Sweet Quasimodo between Black Vampire Butterflies Sun Ra-Strange Strings Brian Eno-On Land Terry Riley-In C Daevid Allen-Banana Moon (!) Gal Costa-Gal Gilberto Gil Caetano Veloso Gong-Camembert Electrique Os Mutantes Captain Beefheart-Trout Mask Replica Coltrane-Om Zappa-Hot Rats Mike Oldfield-Tubular Bells ~ Morris Vollman December 08 Chansons de la Belette Malade Hear the mix here Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle - Nokturn (F.S.K., Buback) Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs - Getting High for Jesus (Dirt Don't Hurt, Damaged Goods) Neil Hamburger - At Least I Got Paid (Neil Hamburger Sings Country Winners, Drag City) Dan Melchior and Das Menace - GTF#2 (Christmas for the Crows, Daggerman) Jack Rose - Fishtown Flower (Dr. Ragtime and His Pals, Tequila Sunrise) Sic Alps - Gelly Roll Gum Drop (U.S. EZ, Siltbreeze) Ween - Fat Lenny (At Cat's Cradle 1992, Chocodog/Schnitzel) Nothing People - Omega Man (Anonymous, S-S) Bardo Pond - Push Yer Head (Batholith, Three Lobed) Jackie-O Motherfucker - Valley of Fire (Valley of Fire, Textile) Giant Sand - Stranded Pearl (proVISIONS, Yep Roc) Dan Melchior and Das Menace - Street of Crocodiles (Christmas for the Crows, Daggerman) Jad and Nao - Lonely Song (Half Monster, Misc. Music) Joe E. - Come On Sign (Love Got in My Way, Eabla) Bohren & Der Club of Gore - Karin (Dolores, Play It Again Sam) Wooden Shjips - Clouds Over Earthquake (Vol. 1, Holy Mountain) Alan and Richard Bishop - Rookoobay (The Brothers Unconnected. A Tribute to Charles Gocher & Sun City Girls, Abduction) ~ Mattias Gustafsson (Altar Of Flies/Hosten & Korset) The best 2008 in no particular order... Singer-Unhistories LP (Drag City) Hokan Hellstrom-Fur Sent Fur Edelweiss LP+7" (EMI) Handicapper Horns-Sax In The City = One LP (American Tapes) Warmer Milks-Soft Walks CD (Animal Disguise) Knife & Ape-Night Touch LP (Moptaco Dics) Wolf Parade-At Mount Zoomer LP (Sub Pop) Emeralds/Quintana Roo LP (Arbor) Sewer Election-Kassettmusik CD (iDEAL) Hum of the druid-Raising The New Wing & Braided Industry LP (Scratch And Sniff Entertainment) Glass Candy-BEAT BOX LP+7" (Italians do it better) Other highlights: Mahmoud Ahmed - Ere Mela Mela With The Ibex Band LP (L'Arome Productions), Eldkvarn-Hunger Hotell CD (EMI), Optic Nest- TIGERS RUN WILDLY BLINDLY 7" (Moptaco Dics), Hair Police-Certainty Of Swarms CD (No Fun), Ex Cocaine/Yellow Swans split LP (Not Not Fun), Rohbau Jugend-Hair And Blood Collector CS (Moptaco Dics), the Skull Defekts-Waving 7" (Important), ARA-Toxic Motions CS (Rampart), Time Deleters-Behold the pyramid CS (KSP), Skullflower-Taste The Blood Of The Deceiver LP (Not Not Fun), Secret Abuse-Violent Narcissus LP (Not Not Fun)... ~ Mary Staubitz November 08 One thing really trumped all others!! V/A - 1970s Algerian Proto-Rai Underground (Subliminal Frequencies) V/A - 1970s Algerian Proto-Rai Underground (Subliminal Frequencies) V/A - 1970s Algerian Proto-Rai Underground (Subliminal Frequencies) V/A - 1970s Algerian Proto-Rai Underground (Subliminal Frequencies) V/A - 1970s Algerian Proto-Rai Underground (Subliminal Frequencies) V/A - 1970s Algerian Proto-Rai Underground (Subliminal Frequencies) V/A- African Scream Contest (Analog Africa) George Coleman-Bongo Joe (Mississippi) Krysmopompas-Heute Schlafen/Morgan Aufwachen (S-S) Philip Cochran and the Artistic Heritage Ensemble-Malcom X Memorial (Mississippi) ~ Thomas Draudt  ~ Travis Johnson November 08 10 things i really dug (old and new): 1. The Sidrassi Organ 2. Jamison Williams/Cole Lee duet at the Nest in St. Augustine, FL 3. Cryptids - THE 7 SISTERS OF SLEEP (CD-R; got it from Weirdo!) 4. DON'T GO IN THE WOODS (film) 5. Whitehouse - THE RACKET (LP) 6. music of Ami Dang 7. THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (film) 8. A BOOKSHELF ON TOP OF THE SKY (film) 9. Head Molt 10. Heavy Psych Art Zine ~ Dan Lopatin New in '08: Tlasila - Merely Resurrected Steve Hauschildt - The Summit James Ferraro - Multitopia Flower Man - ?? ???? ??? ??? ???? Jammed these records a lot in '08: Bernard Szajner - Welcome To Death Row Sensations' Fix - Finest Finger Brume - Permafrost Nuno Canavarro - Plux Quba Steve Tibbetts - Northern Song X-Tet - Premiere Ligne Grateful Dead - Cornell 1977 David Borden - Music For Amplified Keyboard Instrument My Fleetwood Mac mix (mostly Christine McVie jams) Single most jammed track of '08: John Martyn - Over The Hill ~ Dusty Hill November 08 1) Mark Tucker "In The Sack" De Stijl 2) SALO or The 120 Days Of Sodom Criterion Collection DVD 3) Puffy Areolas "Sweat Edition" Cassette Layaway Butch 4) Sic Alps "U.S. Ezy" Siltbreeze 5) Porter Wagoner "Cold Hard Facts Of Life/Soul Of A Convict" Omni 6) Birds Of Maya "Vol. I" Holy Mountain 7) Zola Jesus "Poor Sons" 7" Die Stasi 8) J.T. IV "Cosmic Lightning" GZD/Drag City 9) Hellhammer "Demon Entrails" Century Media 10) Gunslingers "No More Invention" ~ Angela Sawyer Xmastime 08 1. Bros. Unconnected-Live @ Knitting Factory NYC June 22, 2008 Live performances don't squeeze my juice nearly as much as records do, but this one was quite the high wire act. I'd seen the movie 4 times, performers needed a week of codeine syrup to rub the scratch out of their voices, & most of the jokes were older than Henny Youngman's. That coulda been good enough, frankly, but I also got to find out what the lyrics to 'I Knew a Jew Named Frankenstein' were, & see an uberhip NYC audience instantly reduced to shocked gasps and nervous giggles. Probably still available for download someplace, so get googling. 2. Shuggie Rodelle & his Imperial Imbiblio Band-s/t (Conner) cassette 1978/1966-77 Deeply sick group grope from San Fran that smacks of Godz, Fred Lane, Starship Beer, etc. Prime & loose non-music. I got obsessed & asked everyone I'd ever met if they knew anything about this for a few months. Turns out it was led by Bob Conner (son of filmmaker Bruce), who was also the keyboard player in the KBD band The Maggots ('Let's Get Let's Get Tammy Wynette'). Fantasies of lavish reissues bloom behind my eyelids. Minimal The Barry Sisters brbrlong form tape drone meant for deeeep sleep and/or meditation and/or my favorite kind of parties. 3. Nino Ferrer-Le Telefon Mirza (Riviera) lp 1967 Nino's ability to turn James Brown into pop eurosleaze gold is trumped only by his ability to fit into those incredibly skinny Italian suits. Blase, sarcastic, rich enough to enjoy horse breeding as a hobby, and stuffed full of raw suave energy, his French-Italo-English ye ye is tres amicalement. 4. Various-Give Me Love (Honest Jon's) 2lp/cd 2008/1925-29 More amazing 78s dug out of the EMI archive, this time documenting the rich, fluid, urban kaleidescope of 20s Baghdad. Arabic folk singers, professional Jbrewish oud players, dabka dance songs, Kurdish violinists, double reed zurna players & forbidden women singers all rub shoulders like calligraphy curlicues in book margins. Effervescent frission and haunting calls to God just explode from the grooves. Incredible notes that include translations of lyrics, analysis of styles, & a story from of the city once bedecked by coffeeshops & victrolas by a man who knew most of the musicians on the recordings when he was a boy. 5. Various-International Vicious Society Vol. 4 (University of Vice) lp 2008/196x My favorite series cracks out a new volume, and it's party time. Kee-razed sicko genre-imploders from around the world. Hear the chinese gongs of Belgium, the cajun accordions from Colombia, the sniggering chimpmunks of Mexico, and loads more frat-trash that's unlikely as hell & full of stuttering twist-psycho freakbeat fun. Beee-ooot-i-ful. 6. Tunnel Canary-Tunnel Canary (Run Down Sun) 2lp 2008/1978-84 Vancouver's best kept secret until pretty darn recently. Ebra Ziron's demented & cathartic female screeching is 2nd only to Hijokaidan's Junko, & backed by supreme guitar destruction that might as well be a chainsaw. Once you sit back & enjoy that incredible shrieking, the band turns out to be full of sophisticated long form improvs that exude slow rippling surges of tension & release. 7. Dennis Tyfus/Dylan Nyoukis-s/t (Ultra Eczema) lp 2008 Well slap me on my alveolar flap if there aren't some glutinous uvular plosives coming outta these two sets of phlegm lips. Vocal based slimers with gasping, panting, snoring, grumbling, whispering, and all sorts of other ducky babble, abetted by siren electronics & looping. Nyoukis side seems to've been culled from tapes of an aboriginal cannibal feast, with baby gurgle cameo. Tyfus side has some tender drone built out of vocal overdubs, which gets interrupted by a sped up tape of a tibetan monk, and then just when your tears might start to fall he trashes it with a bit of verbed-up Heino eurovision singing. 8. Chrissy Zebby Tembo & Ngozi Family-My Ancestors (Hummingbird) cd 2008/1970 Wonderfully naive shit-Hendrix ripoffs mixed with dirty Zambian funk & somewhat inept lyrics in English. A great companion piece to Chubby Checker's fake-Hendrix record, as well as more obvious choices like all those Nigerian funk compilations that've been around lately. 9. Menstruation Sisters-MA (No Fun) lp 2008/2000 Nick Kamiussis (aka Nik the Greek, Nick Rizili, Black Throated Wind) might be the best singer alive on earth at this juncture. All I've ever heard about him is that he was once a postal worker in Sydney, but since when does the government hire pig footed bandicoots to deliver the mail? Unholy imitations of Grover, the Tasmanian Devil, a broken weed whacker, a six year old girl getting her toenails pulled off, an oscillator that's having it's insides poked with a wire hanger, etc. Oren Ambarchi ain't no slouch either & I'd say he runs over his guitar with a lawnmover here, then whips out some primo ape-on-the-loose drum bashing. Repeat from my top ten of 2000 probably, but it's too good to give a shit. 10. Sandy & Mandhy-Para Castukis (Lion) lp 2008/1969 Yummy organ-driven melancholy psych with Zombies-type harmony vocals, gorgeous bits of bossa. Members of a couple of local teen bands in Argentina (Los Free Men, La Maquina de Musica) hit up Billy Bond to try & get a record deal. He said that he had enough bands, but could use a folk duo. They promptly became a fake one & pressed 110 copies of a demo with no cover. Upon giving one to Billy, he said it sounded too much like a band with a duo name. When the band gigged around Buenos Aires, they had to carry their Farfisa to & from rehearsals by walking it down the street, and had to take instruments to shows on the subway, because nobody in the band could afford a car. ~ Gordon Marshall June 08 Top Twenty Psychedelic Albums Revolver Abbey Road A Love Supreme Achtung Baby Sgt Pepper Can--Future Days Cosmic Jokers--Galactic Supermarket Miles Davis--In a Silent Way Miles Davis--Bitches Brew Zorn--Electric Masada Led Zeppelin IV Highway 61 John Wesley Harding Blonde on Blonde Acid Mothers Temple--Everything The Doors Physical Graffiti Piper at the Gates of Dawn Soft Machine 1-2-3 Kevin Ayers and the Whole World ~ Josh Friedman Jan 08 in Williston, VT 1. Sweet Kelly "Tape Fed Into a Garbage Disposal" (This needs to be reissued!!!) 2. Shadow Ring "Lighthouse" 3. Live Fast Die "Pissing on the Mainframe" 7" 4. "Hold Tight" by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky Mick & Tich 5. Porter Wagoner "The Rubber Room" 6. LAFMS (Smegma, Airway, Ju Suk, Dinosaurs with Horns, Dennis Duck) 7. East of Underground LP 8. Four Mints "Gently Down Your Stream" 9. Lamborghini Crystals 10. Happy Dragon Band 11. Afflicted Man "Complete Discography" 12. M.B. Evidences Box 13. Broken Flag Box Key Labels: Sublime Frequencies, Creel Pone ~ Steve Lowenthal August 2007 These are things i've been listening to lately. 1. Django Reinhardt-8 XLP Affinity Box- the best thing ever. 2. V/A-Fun on the Frets- 2 yrs later, still have to listen to this once a week at least. 3. Double Leopards/Mouthus Tour split- Love the DL side. 4. Religious Knives/Woods tour cassette- RK's cover version of "96 Tears" fuckin rules. 5. Prurient-The Golden Chamber cassette. 6. The Action-Rolled Gold- "Strange Roads" should be as big as "More than A Feelin" 7. Sun City Girls-Multiple Hallucinations of an Assasin-casette- I downloaded this somewhere and it rules very much. Eclipse should be reissuing this one day on LP says SRB. 8. Homostupids-The Intern LP- punk lives! 9. Everyday Loniliness-s/t cassette- Pedestrian Deposit in bummer mode. 10. Fursaxa-Alone in the Dark Woods- LP- Masterwork, so much better than everyone right now. ~ Angela Sawyer Xmastime 2007 It's the only time of year I enjoy the music in the supermarket The Oscar Moore Quartet with Carl Perkins-s/t (Tampa) cd 1992/1954, not that Carl Perkins, but the crippled pianist Various-The Black Mirror (Dust to Digital) cd 2007/1918-55, Nagoski's cdrs of his 78s are also tops Hair Police/Redrot-s/t (Aryan Asshole) cdr 2007/2006, my fave 'horror reggae' noise cassette reished Various-Waking Up Scheherazade (Grey Past) lp 2007/1966-72, check that Raks track, superhot Various-The Sweeter Side of Latin Soul (Latin Soul) cd 2006/197x, achingly gorgeous, plus a salsero version of 'Baby I'm a Want You' Marc Wilkinson-Blood on Satan's Claw (Trunk) cd/lp 2007/1971, cimbalom + ondes martenot + satan = sold R.D. Burman-A Bollywood Legend (Sare Sama/Times Square) 2cd 2006/1957-93, all the wackiest ones in one place Various-Sounds of Nepal (Hanson) 4cdr 2007/2005, different from the 'Radio Nepal' cdrs from last year Various-Life is a Problem (Mississippi) lp + 7" 2007/1950-75, Elder Beck gives rockin' pneumonia, plus rare Bongo Joe The Golddiggers-We Need a Little Christmas (Metromedia) lp 1968, Andy Williams' wonderfully square backup singers ~ Darien Valentine Oct 07 Top 11 Orange Flavors: 11. Orange juice 10. Cheap orange juice 9. Oranges 8. Orange soda 7. Orange sherbet 6. Tangerines 5. Orange Tang 4. Orange-Ade 3. Creamsicle 2. Orange soda float 1. Orange Tic Tacs ~ Spectre & Goosewind July 2007 Top Ten Albums EVER Cars-Panorama Blondie-Auto American Swans-The Burning World Bauhaus-The Sky's Gone Out Scorpions-Animal Magnetism Pink Floyd-The Wall Blue Oyster Cult-Secret Treats Immortal-Diabolical Full Moon Mysticism Cure-Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me Joy Division-Unknown Pleasures Die Kruezen-October File Deep Purple-Perfect Strangers ~ Jeffrey Parker Oct 07 Top 10 Glistening Dewdrops Das Oath @ Tufts University The Dicks @ Great Scott M.I.A. "Kala" Easy Action @ O'Briens Charles Gayle @ MIT Roky Erickson @ Union Park Little Claw "hobobabyor zeus" Times New Viking @ PA's Lounge Some Girls @ ICC 32 oz. iced coffee, black @ 1369 ~ according to Andrew M.K. Warren in no particular order Twenty awesome items on the Weirdo Records site as of 8/7/07 1) Alvarius B Blood Operatives of the Barium Sunset lp 2) Mulatu Astatke Mulatu of Ethiopia lp 3) Baby Grandmothers s/t cd 4) Blops box 3cd 5) Brainticket Cottonwoodhill cd 6) Coyle & Sharpe These 2 Men Are Impostors 3cd+dvd 7) Fall Live 77 cd 8) Jim Fassett Symphony of the Birds cd 9) Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza Azioni 2cd + dvd 10) Noah Howard The Black Ark lp 11) July & The Second of July cd 12) Michio Kurihara Sunset Notes cd 13) La Dusseldorf Viva lp 14) Moondog The Viking of Sixth Avenue 2lp 15) John Jacob Niles My Precarious Life in the Public Domain cd 16) Skull Snaps s/t cd 17) Sun Ra and his Astro Infinity Arkestra Strange Strings cd 18) Los Vidrios Quebrados Fictions 10 inch 19) Walking Up Con Los Walkers 10 inch 20) Music of Idris Ackamoor 2cd ~ Joshua Hickey/Teenage Whore Tapes Oct 07 Top Ten Cassettes of the Moment (Some New, Some Old, All KILLER) 1.Deep Jew - Find a Way (Callow God) 2.Air Conditioning - The Ocean (Callow God) 3.Sixes - Hexane (HLAH?) 4.Cadaver in Drag - Dissolved in Acid (HLAH?) 5.Sudden Infant - Dark Sperm (Teenage Whore Tapes) 6.Warmer Milks - Tiger (Husk Records) 7.Sword Heaven - Horsing (23 Productions) 8.V/A - Prayer is the Answer (777 was 666) 9.V/A - All Kindsa Noise (Anti-Everythng Noise) 10.Newton/Sick Llama - Travel Rations (Breathmint) ~ Nick Krynski Dec 07 here's what i've listened to (and enjoyed) mostly this last month: -- albert ayler: holy ghost box set -- herbie hancock: sextant -- leroy jenkins: space minds, new worlds -- bernard bonnier: casse-tete -- hala strana: s/t -- filth: the shit split -- phil ochs: all the news that's fit to sing -- psychic tv: dreams less sweet --serge gainsbourg & jean-claude vannier: cannabis -- ulver: nattens madrigal ~ Geoff Grunkmeyer Fall 2007 Totally Hardcore Flipper-Generic + most singles, shit, wtf? everything, I guess.. Minor Threat-everything Negative Approach-everything Angry Samoans-1st two + VOM Bad Brains-everything up to 84 or so including demos, live tapes, whatever Germs-GI Siege-all Deep Wound-all Avengers-everything Black Flag-everything Minutemen-everything Sacharine Trust-Pagan Icons Faith/Void-the Void side The Minutemen-everything ummm, wait that was more than ten, oh well.. ~ If you have a list or just a passing thought that you'd like included here, just email it on over. We're pretty damn friendly about that sort of thing.br brbr The best 2008 in no particular order... 6) Birds Of Maya 6. The Action-Rolled Gold-/a a story from of the city once bedecked by coffeeshopsbrbrbr Amon Duul II-YetibrDemon Entrails 9) Burning Star Core - Challenger (LP, Plastic) The Rubber Room 7) Can't - Private Time (Part 2) (LP, Weird Forest)br 3.Sixes - Hexane (HLAH?) |
Happy listening & crank 'em up loud.