Club music songs are very much like Marimekko fabrics - a few elegantly simple design ideas in sort of modular pieces that can be reliably recombined and usually work out, as long as you're not expecting anything other than what they are.
Pulling a mid-90s UK house 12" named "I Believe" by an ensemble called the Happy Clappers out of the "to be listened" pile pretty much guaranteed a certain kind of listening experience, with the only variable being whether it would actually be good or not (it proved to be pretty good).
Were there any doubt that this was to be a well-crafted specimen of its time and place (and not much more), a glance at discogs.com shows that they had two hits, "I Believe" and "Hold On," which they rereleased in endless 12" vinyl and CD configurations and then recycled them through a series of compilations, most containing the word "Ibiza" in the title.
The lyrical phrases "I believe" (sometimes punctuated with "in love") and "comin' to ya" alternate over a 4/4 kick drum, some congas, the standard slightly gospel-inflected three-chord piano vamp and some synthesized strings, and, of course, hand claps.
None of this explains why these records are sometimes convincing and often not - the precise tension and release structure (where the kick drum drops out for a bit, the piano chords pause or accelerate and so on) is not obviously quantifiable. For that matter why is "If You Should Need A Friend" by Fire Island (hmm, who are they appealing to?) better, or in what ways is it better?
For one thing the piano part has four chords and more chromatic motion between them and there are synthetic horn blats in place of the strings. The lyrics, although banal, attempt to be about something rather than just generic feel-good dance floor hollers and singer Mark Anthoni injects a little gritty expressiveness. At the opening, before the lyrics start, he takes a simple two-note wordless melodic fillip and jumps back and forth between his falsetto head voice and high tenor register to very good effect.
The record label, by the way, is Junior Boy's Own which I've found to be pretty reliable - I'll have to see what else is kicking around here on their imprint - in the meantime, should you (for example) find several hundred in a dumpster, give them a listen!
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Brass Monkey
There was a flurry of rediscovery around here centered on The Acoustic Folk Box, which was inversely inspired by missing Martin and Eliza Carthy (and Norma Waterson) at Symphony Space a couple of weeks ago.
The box itself has many pleasures, one of which is a track from Martin Carthy's early 80s quintet called Brass Monkey. The group combined Carthy's guitar and voice with fellow Albion Band alumnus John Kirkpatrick on concertina, along with percussion and brass instruments, trumpet, trombone and saxophone (sorry not to list everyone's name and dozens of other affiliations). They made two vinyl records on the legendary Topic label in 1983 and 1986 and the two were combined onto one CD, The Complete Brass Monkey, in 1993.
The Acoustic Folk Box includes "The Maid and the Palmer," the single best piece from their eponymous first LP, and the second LP, See How It Runs, has one equally astonishing song, called "The Handweaver and The Factory Maid." On both, Kirkpatrick's playing on the various small accordion-type instruments (concertina, melodeon, button accordion) has a remarkable propulsive quality - you can feel the air pumping in and out of the device, urging on the rhythm like a bellows stoking a fire. The brass parts, lending throughout an air of the concert hall or military band which takes us away from the farmyard, have an almost modernist edge, with their repetitiveness and the slightly off-kilter folk metric patterns - lots of dropped crochets and two beat measures. The parts, to my wildly free-associative way of thinking, are reminiscent of Rhys Chatham's marvelous "Waterloo, No. 2" (try this snippet on Last.fm which should give you the idea).
Finally, the lyrics to "The Handweaver and The Factory Maid" are intriguing as, according the liner notes, the song was originally titled "The Handweaver and The Chamber Maid." The change of focus from petty rural class rivalry to the industrial revolution, the factory maid now representing the new class that is replacing the handweaver, is quite brilliant. Furthermore, despite his family's disdain for factory girls, the narrator seems only too happy to give up the "wearisome trade" of the weaver who is "so bent that he's like to crack" and instead "trudge to the mill in the early morn", where the girls are!
The other big reminder upon revisiting the box was find out more about Eliza Carthy - her closing track, "10,000 Miles," is one of its high points and her 2002 release Anglicana, currently digitally unspooling for my delighted ears, suggests that was no fluke - more to come!
The box itself has many pleasures, one of which is a track from Martin Carthy's early 80s quintet called Brass Monkey. The group combined Carthy's guitar and voice with fellow Albion Band alumnus John Kirkpatrick on concertina, along with percussion and brass instruments, trumpet, trombone and saxophone (sorry not to list everyone's name and dozens of other affiliations). They made two vinyl records on the legendary Topic label in 1983 and 1986 and the two were combined onto one CD, The Complete Brass Monkey, in 1993.
The Acoustic Folk Box includes "The Maid and the Palmer," the single best piece from their eponymous first LP, and the second LP, See How It Runs, has one equally astonishing song, called "The Handweaver and The Factory Maid." On both, Kirkpatrick's playing on the various small accordion-type instruments (concertina, melodeon, button accordion) has a remarkable propulsive quality - you can feel the air pumping in and out of the device, urging on the rhythm like a bellows stoking a fire. The brass parts, lending throughout an air of the concert hall or military band which takes us away from the farmyard, have an almost modernist edge, with their repetitiveness and the slightly off-kilter folk metric patterns - lots of dropped crochets and two beat measures. The parts, to my wildly free-associative way of thinking, are reminiscent of Rhys Chatham's marvelous "Waterloo, No. 2" (try this snippet on Last.fm which should give you the idea).
Finally, the lyrics to "The Handweaver and The Factory Maid" are intriguing as, according the liner notes, the song was originally titled "The Handweaver and The Chamber Maid." The change of focus from petty rural class rivalry to the industrial revolution, the factory maid now representing the new class that is replacing the handweaver, is quite brilliant. Furthermore, despite his family's disdain for factory girls, the narrator seems only too happy to give up the "wearisome trade" of the weaver who is "so bent that he's like to crack" and instead "trudge to the mill in the early morn", where the girls are!
The other big reminder upon revisiting the box was find out more about Eliza Carthy - her closing track, "10,000 Miles," is one of its high points and her 2002 release Anglicana, currently digitally unspooling for my delighted ears, suggests that was no fluke - more to come!
Saturday, March 3, 2007
Pourquoi Je Chante
I was browsing through the track list of "Ultra Chicks Vol 1: Filles In The Garage!" (a collection of French 60s female pop - there were at least 6 volumes in a bootleg series) and noted "Stella" among the many first name-only noms d'étape. I recalled that this was almost certainly the same Stella who subsequently married Christian Vander and they founded the still extant progressive rock band Magma in 1969 and with a few seconds of Web searching, my recollection was proved correct.
Rather than repeat myself on Magma, you can read a quick and entertaining summary in this Time Out New York piece and I'll do a post culled from my secret desert island discs catalog on my two favorite Magma albums at some later date.
Meanwhile it is Stella Zelcer Vander who is of interest today. One of the so-called Yé-yé Girls, Stella apparently became disenchanted with the superficiality of the musical style, hence her eventual move to a rather more esoteric musical realm and now bills herself as "the anti-yé-yé girl" on this rather elegant MySpace page (it's so rare that these things look good, it's sort of a cause for celebration when they do - compare Magma's own page).
My friend's digital copy of "Ultra Chicks..." proved to be corrupted on her track "Nouvelle Vague Blues" - it was just white noise, and surmising this not to be the original intent, I went on the hunt, only to find everyone on Soulseek had the same corrupted copy. Finally, I tracked down a 2-CD compilation that came out in France in the late 90s called La Collection Sixties des EPs Français. Forty tracks of this stuff may be more than the casual fan needs, but it is thoroughly enjoyable in the right doses.
The "Nouvelle Vague Blues" itself fulfills the promise of its title, with a jazzy backing track and lyrical references to "Jules et Jim." The song "Beatniks d'occasion" (audible on her MySpace page) also takes an ironic look at fashionable Bohemianism, although some of the songs recorded when she was very young (she started at age 13) are charming for the opposite reasons - "Douée Pour La recré" is a schoolgirl complaining about how tedious all her academic classes are and she's best suited for recess, and "Les parents twist" is (I'm assuming) a complaint about oppressive parents based on some sort of Americanized teenage slang ("Mon Dieu, que c'est triste, d'avoir des parents twist!") - just the sort of linguistic borrowing Jack Lang campaigned against during his tenure as Minister of Culture!
Finally, don't miss this interview. Also, I noticed a lot of this French 60s pop is tagged with "velocipede radio" on last.fm, a phrase I can't find anywhere else, so I'm going to contribute to its spread by using it here (but not on Del.icio.us which doesn't support two-word tags!).
Rather than repeat myself on Magma, you can read a quick and entertaining summary in this Time Out New York piece and I'll do a post culled from my secret desert island discs catalog on my two favorite Magma albums at some later date.
Meanwhile it is Stella Zelcer Vander who is of interest today. One of the so-called Yé-yé Girls, Stella apparently became disenchanted with the superficiality of the musical style, hence her eventual move to a rather more esoteric musical realm and now bills herself as "the anti-yé-yé girl" on this rather elegant MySpace page (it's so rare that these things look good, it's sort of a cause for celebration when they do - compare Magma's own page).
My friend's digital copy of "Ultra Chicks..." proved to be corrupted on her track "Nouvelle Vague Blues" - it was just white noise, and surmising this not to be the original intent, I went on the hunt, only to find everyone on Soulseek had the same corrupted copy. Finally, I tracked down a 2-CD compilation that came out in France in the late 90s called La Collection Sixties des EPs Français. Forty tracks of this stuff may be more than the casual fan needs, but it is thoroughly enjoyable in the right doses.
The "Nouvelle Vague Blues" itself fulfills the promise of its title, with a jazzy backing track and lyrical references to "Jules et Jim." The song "Beatniks d'occasion" (audible on her MySpace page) also takes an ironic look at fashionable Bohemianism, although some of the songs recorded when she was very young (she started at age 13) are charming for the opposite reasons - "Douée Pour La recré" is a schoolgirl complaining about how tedious all her academic classes are and she's best suited for recess, and "Les parents twist" is (I'm assuming) a complaint about oppressive parents based on some sort of Americanized teenage slang ("Mon Dieu, que c'est triste, d'avoir des parents twist!") - just the sort of linguistic borrowing Jack Lang campaigned against during his tenure as Minister of Culture!
Finally, don't miss this interview. Also, I noticed a lot of this French 60s pop is tagged with "velocipede radio" on last.fm, a phrase I can't find anywhere else, so I'm going to contribute to its spread by using it here (but not on Del.icio.us which doesn't support two-word tags!).
Thursday, March 1, 2007
The Name Of This Blog
The phrase Sold By Volume is the title of a 10" vinyl record by the band Tono-Bungay (which I am in). It was actually coined by Robert Dennis, so I am hereby giving him credit, even though I have now appropriated it.
You can hear a track from the record on the band's MySpace page, read clever blog entries there, look at long lists of experimental rock bands - and so on!
You can hear a track from the record on the band's MySpace page, read clever blog entries there, look at long lists of experimental rock bands - and so on!
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Never Bought A Ringtone
Like any self-respecting music fanatic, I prefer to have heard of or heard everything first (preferably before it comes out) but awards like the Grammys serve an effective winnowing function for figuring out what to listen because it is culturally significant in some way that might not have to do with musical merit. With that in mind, I still couldn't get past the third song of Stadium Arcadium, but the Dixie Chicks' Taking The Long Way Around (a band I always wanted to like but never quite made the jump) has proved to be a keeper. The title track retells the classic American rebel/road myth with economy and style. There's the self-consciously girly but still charming "pink RV with stars on the ceiling" and a passing reference to the anti-war remarks upscuttle (belabored subsequently on the song "Not Ready to Make Nice") but also a couple of awkward lyrics - the opening quatrain's reference to "...houses in the same zip codes/Where their parents live" is a little too sociological and "wouldn't kiss all the asses that they told me to" is sort of trite Nashville vulgarity, "take this job and shove it" redux.
My absolute favorite songs, the ones currently on endless repeat, tend to be where the vocal harmonies are so dense and gorgeous that I don't even notice what the songs are about ("Bitter End" and "Silent House", the former distinguished also by 12/8 meter, which I favor unreasonably). "Lubbock Or Leave It" is powered by a grainy Telecaster riff that evokes the Bakersfield modern of Dwight Yoakam, for me a preferable California country-rock reference point to the Eagles from whom I have a lifetime prejudice against the word "easy". Apparently the seemingly thin-skinned country music audience has a problem with this one too - I'm just reminded that I need to find and relisten to Terry Allen's semi-legendary Lubbock (On Everything). Finally, I was struck by the use of banjo (presumably played by Emily Erwin) - we are, I hope, through with the authenticity police scolding pop-country bands for using traditional country instrumentation as window dressing, and in fact the staccato, tactile timbre of the banjo tends to sit in the mix more like whatever the East Asian sounding stringed instrument is on the East Flatbush Project's "Tried By 12" (perhaps having Rick Rubin as producer has something to do with it).
My absolute favorite songs, the ones currently on endless repeat, tend to be where the vocal harmonies are so dense and gorgeous that I don't even notice what the songs are about ("Bitter End" and "Silent House", the former distinguished also by 12/8 meter, which I favor unreasonably). "Lubbock Or Leave It" is powered by a grainy Telecaster riff that evokes the Bakersfield modern of Dwight Yoakam, for me a preferable California country-rock reference point to the Eagles from whom I have a lifetime prejudice against the word "easy". Apparently the seemingly thin-skinned country music audience has a problem with this one too - I'm just reminded that I need to find and relisten to Terry Allen's semi-legendary Lubbock (On Everything). Finally, I was struck by the use of banjo (presumably played by Emily Erwin) - we are, I hope, through with the authenticity police scolding pop-country bands for using traditional country instrumentation as window dressing, and in fact the staccato, tactile timbre of the banjo tends to sit in the mix more like whatever the East Asian sounding stringed instrument is on the East Flatbush Project's "Tried By 12" (perhaps having Rick Rubin as producer has something to do with it).
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Dumpster Diving
One step below the dollar bin trawling, certainly in price and possibly in dignity (though rarely in degree of satisfaction), is picking records straight out of the trash. One recent foray turned up a number of items which may delight us over the coming days; Leonard Bernstein conducting his own three symphonies and Ravi Shankar on Apple Records performing the soundtrack to a film called Raga, which I suppose must be a documentary about Ravi Shankar (circa 1970, Howard Worth director), but this evening's high point is Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's "Missa Romana in F", as beautiful a baroque mass as you could want (for "6 Solo Voices, 2 five voice choirs, and double orchestra"). The sacred works that get their own chapters in history books are those like Bach's Mass in B Minor, which are monumental like Michelangelo's Medici Tomb Moses but sometimes you don't want something quite that heavy, and Pergolesi provides quite a refreshing contrast.
Also appealing is the fact that the record label credit is Harmonia Mundi/BASF. I believe the current multinational chemical corporation called BASF is the same - I once thought of them (when I thought of them at all!) principally as manufacturers of magnetic recording tape who branched out into the music industry by funding and distributing smaller record labels, most famously the German jazz labels Saba and MPS which yielded several fruits of my teenage forays into the ever more obscure, particularly Association P.C.'s Erna Morena.
Further aesthetic pleasure comes from the Unipak sleeve, a style which all BASF productions I've seen came in (I suppose they held the patent), a gatefold LP jacket with the slot for the record only accessible from the middle of the inside. There's a comparable CD sleeve design - reaching randomly towards the shelf, I find the Wiretapper 14 compilation came in such a package.
Also appealing is the fact that the record label credit is Harmonia Mundi/BASF. I believe the current multinational chemical corporation called BASF is the same - I once thought of them (when I thought of them at all!) principally as manufacturers of magnetic recording tape who branched out into the music industry by funding and distributing smaller record labels, most famously the German jazz labels Saba and MPS which yielded several fruits of my teenage forays into the ever more obscure, particularly Association P.C.'s Erna Morena.
Further aesthetic pleasure comes from the Unipak sleeve, a style which all BASF productions I've seen came in (I suppose they held the patent), a gatefold LP jacket with the slot for the record only accessible from the middle of the inside. There's a comparable CD sleeve design - reaching randomly towards the shelf, I find the Wiretapper 14 compilation came in such a package.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Good Will Hunting
The best vinyl dollar bin trawling on the Upper West Side is (in descending order) Gryphon Books at 81st and Broadway, the church basement thrift store at 96th and Amsterdam and the Salvation Army store on 96th Street west of Broadway, with the Goodwill on 79th street a distant fourth (or fifth if you count the amount of good stuff I've gotten from sidewalk vendors), but the headline was hard to resist.
Recent acquisitions in this realm include Carolyn Hester's self-titled 2nd LP from 1960 on Tradition Records. She has the vibrato-laden soprano which, particularly through Joan Baez, came to exemplify the earnestly ethnomusicological approach to folksong "collecting" that characterized the folk revival until Bob Dylan came along and injected a dose of scruffiness. Were you to write a formula for the model early 60s folksong LP (one cover of "House of The Rising Sun", check, one song in Spanish, check, one spiritual with liner notes about the performer's great respect for the American Negro, check), you would probably come out with this record. On the other hand, you can never have too many versions of "She Moved Through The Fair" and Hester chooses to go with the version of the last verse in which the young bride is dead and appearing in ghostly form.
The most iconic photo of Hester from the period is this one with a pre-fame Bob Dylan at her side and ubiquitous 60s folk session bass player Bill Lee (Spike's dad) to the right.
Also worth its dollar is Exuma's fifth record, Reincarnation, from 1972, on Kama Sutra/Buddha. Exuma (birth name McFarlane Anthony McKay, of Bahamian origin) was one of not too many black performers in the mid-60s Greenwich Village folk scene and sounded enough like Richie Havens that it would be hard to skip the comparison altogether. Working from a high sandpapery tenor and rapidly strummed acoustic guitar, his arrangements on this record include lots of percussion, and keyboards as needed. Starting with a bit of Belafonte-ish hokum called "Brown Girl" (which reminds you of the Buddha label's bubblegum origins), he takes an unexpected turn into a fairly faithful version of Paul McCartney's "Monkberry Moon Delight" distinguished from the original (which had only come out a year earlier) by escalating the comically aggressive surrealism of McCartney's vocal performance to a more genuinely crazed level. What could be fairly standard early 70s folk rock gets a lift from Exuma's broad range of vocal styles and the somewhat dark, mystical edge to a lot of his lyrics, with frequent references to Obeah, the Bahamian flavor of the syncretistic Afro-Caribbean religion called Santeria or Voodoo elsewhere.
Exuma's whole story is readily available at wikipedia and elsewhere - the record collector in me is, of course, intrigued by the stories of lost early 80s albums in micro-editions on barely extant labels that were anthologized in 1986 by ROIR records on Rude Boy, his final release.
Recent acquisitions in this realm include Carolyn Hester's self-titled 2nd LP from 1960 on Tradition Records. She has the vibrato-laden soprano which, particularly through Joan Baez, came to exemplify the earnestly ethnomusicological approach to folksong "collecting" that characterized the folk revival until Bob Dylan came along and injected a dose of scruffiness. Were you to write a formula for the model early 60s folksong LP (one cover of "House of The Rising Sun", check, one song in Spanish, check, one spiritual with liner notes about the performer's great respect for the American Negro, check), you would probably come out with this record. On the other hand, you can never have too many versions of "She Moved Through The Fair" and Hester chooses to go with the version of the last verse in which the young bride is dead and appearing in ghostly form.
The most iconic photo of Hester from the period is this one with a pre-fame Bob Dylan at her side and ubiquitous 60s folk session bass player Bill Lee (Spike's dad) to the right.
Also worth its dollar is Exuma's fifth record, Reincarnation, from 1972, on Kama Sutra/Buddha. Exuma (birth name McFarlane Anthony McKay, of Bahamian origin) was one of not too many black performers in the mid-60s Greenwich Village folk scene and sounded enough like Richie Havens that it would be hard to skip the comparison altogether. Working from a high sandpapery tenor and rapidly strummed acoustic guitar, his arrangements on this record include lots of percussion, and keyboards as needed. Starting with a bit of Belafonte-ish hokum called "Brown Girl" (which reminds you of the Buddha label's bubblegum origins), he takes an unexpected turn into a fairly faithful version of Paul McCartney's "Monkberry Moon Delight" distinguished from the original (which had only come out a year earlier) by escalating the comically aggressive surrealism of McCartney's vocal performance to a more genuinely crazed level. What could be fairly standard early 70s folk rock gets a lift from Exuma's broad range of vocal styles and the somewhat dark, mystical edge to a lot of his lyrics, with frequent references to Obeah, the Bahamian flavor of the syncretistic Afro-Caribbean religion called Santeria or Voodoo elsewhere.
Exuma's whole story is readily available at wikipedia and elsewhere - the record collector in me is, of course, intrigued by the stories of lost early 80s albums in micro-editions on barely extant labels that were anthologized in 1986 by ROIR records on Rude Boy, his final release.
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