Once Upon A Time – Kahimi Karie with the Olivia Tremor Control
released by Polydor Japan (2000)
download here
(file expires on April 9th.)
I’m a pretty big Olivia Tremor Control fan, but somehow — until this past weekend — I totally missed the existence of Once Upon a Time. Yet, there it is, nestled in the discography over at elephant6.com. Recorded in 2000 backing Japanese singer Kahimi Karie and released on Polydor in her native country, the Olivias serve up five tracks of spaced-out psychedelia replete with concrété chaos, horns, violins, cosmic blurps, and everything else one might expect (save for the giant Beatles choruses).
In an odd convergence, a few months ago, I asked my now ex-neighbor to give me the strangest music on her iPod. She gave me some tracks by Kahimi Karie that she’d lifted from a Japanese teen’s mp3 collection. And, lo, they were strange. Funny to find out now that she’s both a protégé of Cornelius (another fave), and has worked with the Olivia Tremor Control. Bizarro headphone candy, for sure. Once again, a peculiar noise called the Olivia Tremor Control…
(I’m pretty sure this EP/mini-album was never released in the States. It sure doesn’t turn up on Amazon. If anybody’s got any beef with me circulating it, let me know.)
“Walking With the Beggar Boys” – Elf Power (download here)
from Walking With the Beggar Boys (2004)
released by Orange Twin (buy)
(file expires on April 6th.)
“Walking With the Beggar Boys” uses the simple tools of rock — a circular guitar lick, a chorus that compares love to a dream, call and response — to create something ecstatic. There is nothing remotely progressive going on, but Andrew Rieger and the Elves go for it anyway. The refrain is perfect pop logic — “love was just a dream, you know I never got no sleep” — that comes at an oblique angle to the verses, which are about pretty much about what the title suggests. A brief Eno-circa-Warm Jets guitar solo gives way to the song’s moment of being: a breathless call and response between Rieger and Vic Chesnutt that recalls “I am the Walrus”: “I was you ” (“You were me.”) “He was she.” (“She was he.”) “They were us.” (“We were they.”) Crank it.
The Elves will be putting out a fine new album in April, Back to the Web, on RykoDisc. (If Warner buys Ryko, as promised, does that make this their major label debut?) They’ll also be touring a lot with The Instruments.
I’m taking the night off. Go play with some of Dad’s trippy software.
o Optical Atlas is the blogosphere’s first full-service Elephant 6 Recording Company resource. The last week has been full of news (an E6 documentary!) and goodies (a stunningly crisp, segue-loaded uncirculated Neutral Milk Hotel soundboard from ’97).
o Robert Hillburn interviews Jack White on the occasion of the debut of The Raconteurs, his extracurricular modern pop quartet with Brendan Benson.
o Alexandre Matias’s “The Dark Side of Tropicália, part 1,” published by Perfect Sound Forever in 2003, argues (essentially) that the tropicalistas have assumed an omnipresent cultural dominance in Brazil not unlike their baby boomer equivalents in the United States. Matias’s argument is as uncommon as it is well reasoned. Definitely an interesting read. (But where’s part 2?)
o Back in December, Nature published an article that claimed Wikipedia was only marginally more error-ridden than the mighty Encyclopedia Britannica. Britannica has fired back. Like many, I’m rather enamored with Wikipedia, and this is heartily disheartening on all counts. Nature refuses to retract the piece. (Thanks, Russ.)
Shiek Andy just posted the newest installment of the Frow Show. Word to your mother, Andy!
Listen here.
1. “In and Out of Grace” – Mudhoney (from Superfuzz Bigmuff plus Early Singles)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “5:30” – DNA (from New York Noise: Dance Music From The New York Underground, 1978-1982)
4. “Corrinna” – Ralph White (from Trash Fish)
5. “When the Stars Shine” – The Instruments (from Billions of Phonographs)
6. “You Can’t See The Stars In This Town” – Sam Champion (from Slow Rewind)
7. “Rocket #9” – Sun Ra (from The Singles)
8. “Second Movement” – Glenn Branca (from Symphony No. 6 (Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven))
9. “Sunken Treasure” – Wilco (from June 28, 2005, Metropolis, Montreal, Quebec)
10. “I Shall Not Be Moved” – Mississippi John Hurt (from Live)
11. “Accidentally Like A Martyr” – Jerry Garcia (from All Good Things box set)
12. “I’m Not Here 1956” – Bob Dylan (from Complete Basement Tapes bootleg)
“Just Another Day” – Brian Eno (download here)
from Another Day on Earth (2005)
released by RykoDisc/Hannibal (buy)
(file expires on April 3rd)
Last year’s Another Day on Earth, Brian Eno’s first solo collection of songs since 1977, is far from perfect. There’s almost no way to get around the fact that it’s synth-heavy New Age pop. Still, that core melodic gift that made his ’70s music special is present somewhere in nearly all of the tracks. After getting the album, I listened to it a bunch and tucked it away. Whenever one has come on lately, I’ve realized that I remember it and most of the words. He had to have been doing something right.
What “Just Another Day” has going for it is the fact that — on headphones, with one’s eyes closed — its first minute sounds and feels remarkably literally like the first rush of a psychedelic experience. The texture Eno chooses to express this breathtaking stereo-trickery recalls, for better or worse, a sonic approximation of a planetarium laser light show. After that, the song settles down into semi-trite (but, as I said, perfectly memorable) Eno-pop. Still, take a minute, put on your headphones, close your eyes, and zone. When was the last time you were at a laser light show, anyway? Do it ironically, if you need to, but do it.
(Nothing posted yet, but EnoWeb news reports that Robert Fripp’s Discipline Global Mobile site will be selling unreleased Fripp/Eno recordings soon.)
“Tropicália” – Caetano Veloso (download here)
from Caetano Veloso (1968)
released by Elektra (1990) (buy)
Yesterday, Os Mutantes announced that, following their May performance in London, they will come to the United States for two gigs, in New York and Los Angeles, respectively. Though it wasn’t on the collective concept album/manifesto that announced the tropicália movement that included the Mutantes, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, and others, Veloso’s “Tropicália” might as well have been. It’s as fine a template for Brazilian psychedelic music as one could ask for: textural, sophisticated, and beautiful. It’s the chorus that got me. It’s, y’know, toe tappin’.
Not that I understand a lick of them, but the verse lyrics (in translation, via Charles A. Perrone’s Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song) are pretty boss, too, with phrases like “Its heart swings to a samba’s tambourine / It emits dissonant chords / Over five thousand loudspeakers.” The choruses, especially, are filled with references to Brazilian culture, such as Carmen Miranda and bossa nova, and the verses recall various songs, as well as (according to Perrone) “‘The Letter of Pero Vaz Caminha,’ the first literary document in colonial Brazil.” Heady shit.
Album reviews:
Taught To Be Proud – Tea Leaf Green
solo Live Tonic 2002 – Billy Martin
Live at Houston Hall – Billy Martin and Grant Calvin Weston
Columns and misc.:
BRAIN TUBA: Brazil
Only in print:
o Paste #21 (Flaming Lips cover): album reviews of Live, Loose Fur, Gospel Music compilation; DVD review of Joel Gilbert’s Bob Dylan: Rolling Thunder and the Gospel Years; book review of David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green.
o April/May Relix (Frank Zappa cover): Fourteen Instances of Possible Conceptual Continuity (recurring sidebar), Zappaesque or the Story of the Dots (feature on Zappa’s composition, co-written with Matt Van Brink); album reviews of Tom Verlaine and Jack Johnson; film review of The Devil and Daniel Johnston; DVD review of the Velvet Underground.
o Spring Signal To Noise (Elliot Carter cover): album reviews of the Grateful Dead and Dimension Mix compilation.
o March Hear/Say (James Blunt cover): album reviews of Field Notes and Nicolai Dunger.
It’s hard to get more democratic than an interesting ranking of real data.
o Google Zeitgeist – A wholly important list summarizing the most recent week of searches. They are the top ideas currently circulating, which is sort of a heady concept. John Battelle calls it “the Database of Intentions.”
o Billboard’s Hot Ringtones – This week, Koji Kondo’s “Super Mario Brothers Theme” remains in the top five after 74 weeks on the charts. Harry Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme” isn’t too far behind. Go meme-pop, go!
o Most emailed stories from the New York Times and USA Today – The most emailed stories aren’t the most important. That is, they’re not usually proper news, about politics or the weather or anything. Rather, they’re stories that grow legs because (like the Google Zeitgeist) they speak to some idea circulating subliminally. It seems as if there is no crossover between the Times and USA Today.
o OCLC’s Top 1000 library books – The Online Computer Library Center compiled this list from the catalogues of over 53,000 libraries around the world. For all the talk I heard about the “demise of the canon” during four years of college English classes, it’s funny to see the canon itself spelled out in relatively hard numbers. It’s also funny to note that #15 — nestled between The Night Before Christmas and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — is Garfield at Large. Bill Watterson’s eponymous Calvin and Hobbes collection hits at #77 (with a bullet!) (BOMP!). Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan sits at #381. The writings of John Calvin do not chart. (Thanks, Kottke)
UPDATE:
Looks like democratic lists are on John Battelle’s mind, too. Here he fantasticates about TVRank.
My old roommate Kristie and I discovered the secret bonus Mexican joint at the back of the bodega by accident one long ago afternoon. It’s in Williamsburg, right on the main hipster drag of Bedford Avenue. The whole place is crammed with bric-a-brac: piñatas hanging from the ceiling, rows and rows of Latin CDs hanging on the wall, a box of sliced cactus in the dairy case, a numbered cubbyhole nook filled with candy, miniature nativity scenes tucked between the plexiglass and the cash register, refrigerators filled with neon Jarritos sodas, and (if you’ll excuse me) damn fine tacos.
There’s a generic red “FOR SALE” sign taped inside the front window. In the space where one is supposed to write a phone number or an asking price, somebody has simply written “store.” I expect to go there for dinner one night and discover that it’s been shut down, boarded up, and soon to be gutted for a boutique or fancy-ass eyeglasses shop. Each taco could be my last.
