WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Hoppe-hoppe Reiter! Improved Sound Ltd. mp3s

You know the feeling.  You stumble on a local yard / stoop sale that features a lot of tasteless glassware and sweatshirts, ancient kids' toys and one thin box of records seemingly dominated by James Last and Chicago records.  That feeling is despair.  But you pulled over, so you might as well get your fingers dusty.  Then you spot an inexplicable cover featuring the upper quarters of a Gérard Depardieu lookalike being ridden, hobbyhorse-style, by a mostly naked angel-winged nymph.  Hope creeps in.  You ask how much - the answer: a dime.  Turning it over, you spot song titles such as "Leave This Lesbian World", "Don't Know Baby If You Are Safe" and "Hit'em In The Face", mismatched with the frumpiest looking set of anti-rock stars Bavaria could cough up.  Yes yes, that despair has now flipped itself into a feeling indescribable yet holy and life-giving.  If you know, you know.  If you don't, well... it's like I said to Terre T during one of my insufferable attempts to justify my coffee-snobbery: "it's like trying to explain WFMU to your grandmother".

What this thing is is the soundtrack to one of those arty lite-porn German offerings from the late-60's (1969, precisely), written and performed entirely by the band IMPROVED SOUND Ltd.  The title is "Engelchen macht weiter hoppe-hoppe Reiter" (buy it here).  You want the plot?  Here's a Google translation, courtesy listener Freddy:

"Gustl seller leads a harmonious marriage with Helene, in which sexual life is not too short.  From the time Sexrummel infected, he would like to see a sex party to organize.  Because it echoes Mitmacher not a lack of potential, a date for the orgy reported, but since Gustl gets under suspicion, to have smallpox, he must away from the big event. When thinking about his Helene because without him so everything could drive, it packs the jealousy ..."

Jump the flip for mp3s, the full cover (of which the above is a zoom), some links, and a little more info.

Grotesque Expressionism of André Ethier

Toronto based artist André Ethier's paint is fat, quick and energetic. Ethier manages to refine a crude and wide expressionistic brush stroke into an elegant form defining mass. His colors at times vibrate with a vomit-inducing Van Gogh palette while his figures strike twisted German Expressionism poses.

Gene Simmons Knows From Prostitution

On July 8, the new book by New York Times bestselling author Gene Simmons will be released by Phoenix Books. Ladies of the Night: A Historical and Personal Perspective of the Oldest Profession in the World, is Gene's take on doing it for pay. Given that money and sex are his two fave subjects (and given that he's been talking about writing it forever), the book shouldn't be too big a surprise. The press release promises an "entirely new take on a traditionally taboo topic (which) promises to spark debate."

It's hard to really argue that it's such a taboo subject, but the book will no doubt be huge, if only because Gene will devote himself to endlessly telling the world how huge it is. And to say Gene is an expert on the subject is hardly a stretch. He's the brains behind what's easily the most merchandised band in rock history, and has never made bones about his whorishness.

Time for Jaye P. Morgan To Come Out of Retirement

I knew my ability to tear a phone book in half was beloved amongst my family (well, at least one nephew who's over it now), but I was more than chuffed to find notification in my inbox today that the new Dave Attel-hosted Gong Show will be holding auditions in New York City, next Thursday, May 22nd. As Joe Franklin once said, there is great talent out there that is the true foam waiting to rise to the top. Surely we will all miss Chuck Barris being around to snort up that foam. And while I hope that there may not be another Oingo Boingo waiting to be discovered by the new Gong Show, I do hope for another Gloria Hunter:

Great Moments in WFMU History #27

Broken Windows and Bullet Holes - by Ken Freedman and Liz Berg

WFMU’s old house on Springdale Ave. was located in a crime-ridden sector of East Orange, NJ, adjacent to the Upsala College campus. WFMU was not immune to the area’s problems, which became evident after a visiting band’s van was stolen directly from the front driveway within a week of the station’s move from a basement dormitory on the Upsala campus.

This initial van theft foreshadowed countless staff muggings, a beating or two, and many vandalized vehicles. One time a police chase ended on WFMU’s front lawn, where a car thief bailed out of the stolen vehicle and the East Orange cops opened fire. Another time, gunshots rang out during an outdoor staff meeting. Staffers discovered that the East Orange police were engaged in some leisurely post-BBQ target practice on the abandoned Upsala soccer field just across the backyard fence.

Illustration by Edward Lasala

 

Tom Waits & Dog

"Citizen of the World" Tom Waits is profiled in this clip from Night Flight circa 1991. The somewhat clueless narration can be forgiven thanks to the lively interview clips with Tom Waits & Dog.

This reminded me that there is a vast hole in my DVD library that needs to be filled by some Tom Waits vintage videos. Perhaps Jim Jarmusch should start working on a biopic (and the more confusing and fact-hiding a Waits biopic, the better). At the very least we need a video collection, as well as Big Time, which has been out of print for years and has yet to make it to DVD, despite rumors a while back to the contrary (Sorry, Torrent lovers, those are just burns of the VHS).

Customusic Part 3 (MP3s)

1. I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter (2:24)
2. Too Close for Comfort (2:27)
3. Call Me Irresponsible (2:51)
4. Willingly (1:31)
5. Fly Me to the Moon (2:19)
6. I Still Get Jealous (1:54)
7. I'm in Love with Love (1:42)
8. More (2:41)
9. Shauny O'Shea (2:20)
10. Love is the Sweetest Thing (2:07)
11. Deep Down Inside (2:03)
12. When Will You? (1:55)
13. It's All in the Game (2:44)
14. What Kind of Fool Am I? (2:31)

Following the Atmosphere and Production sides, our trip through the Customusic Sampler concludes with two sides labeled Commercial, including the obligatory cover of "More" from Mondo Cane.

This is mall music, so grab your economic stimulus check, load the songs onto your MP3 player, and rush out in a buying frenzy! "Shauny O'Shea" is highly recommended to feed your consumer drive.

Someone actually played these sides of the album a few times, so there's a bit of surface wear, but nothing that will distract from the jaunty, jingly goodness. An actual production credit appears on these sides, with arrangements for "Willingly" and "When Will You" attributed to an E. Cadkin, whose information is as elusive as any further insight into who played on this album. Cadkin is credited for the Sound Stage movie score collection Film Parade, but there are no other details about his life or work.

Dances That Make Me Nuts (Part 1)

Surfer's Stomp!

Xela Live on WFMU

When he's not busy co-running the UK's superb Type record label, John Twells records densely layered and somewhat hallucinatory sound pieces as Xela. His release, "The Dead Sea" received a fair amount of airplay in these parts when it came out last year and was called "absolutely stunning" by the folks over at Other Music.

John stopped by the WFMU studios a few weeks ago while on break from his tour with Zelienople and Helios to record a brief set that saw him shun the laptop based set-up often employed by similar artists in favor of a micro-cassette player, tons of pedals, trinkets purchased from hippies in the midwest and an unexpected foray into Brian Wilson vocal territory. You'll need to turn the volume up on this one as its rather quiet for awhile.

Xela - Heirs of the Fire (Brooklyn Version) - Live at WFMU (34:20)

Xela's most recent release, "The Illuminated",  is a cassette only deal put out on the esteemed Digitalis label. You can find out more about what he's up to on his myspace page.

Thanks to Scott for audio assistance.

Live audio licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license

Trumpet Love, Part 3: Videos!

It's nice to write about this music.  It's even nice to hear it.  But seeing it live is where it's at.  While ALL of the musicians from the first two posts have extremely active performance schedules, today in 2008 you can enjoy them from the comfort of your own browser any time you want.  Here now, trumpet videos.

Before you do anything, please watch Toshinori Kondo in his element circa 1995 with Die Like a Dog Quartet.  It is pretty mindblowing stuff (and embedding has been disabled by request).  Don't worry, it's only a click away.  Do come back, though, you won't want to miss the rest.

Peter Evans with Chris Dadge and Scott Munro:

Rabbit Silly

Beware the countdown to Global Digital Domination!  I wanted to have my shit together a little bit ahead of the 17 million Americans like me who are either cable service refusniks or in the lower socio-economic quarter who utilize Old School Rabbit Ears to catch the news, Gossip Girl, Access Hollywood, PBS, Fox, Montel and our "stories".
I planned it pretty well, ordering my government discount coupon two months ago, finally recieving it last week. It looked more like a debit card, pretty sophisticated I guess. I'm also guessing the government can now confirm that I'm a cheap asshole. I sat through an online tutorial that explained how easy this was going to be once I purchased and installed my converter box. How I'd suddenly get a bunch of channels I didn't even know I could get. They also mentioned the converter boxes were between $40-$70. In my naivete I figured since my coupon was worth forty bucks that I could ostensibly find a free deal. The truth was, the government's caveat was that I was only allowed to shop three vendors with the coupon and their cheapest boxes were $60 plus tax on the whole amount. So twenty-five dollars later I had my unit. Once I got home, I found out that this sleek little box had nearly a half dozen outputs that needed to be connected to my T.V. which, thank you very much, where almost all being utilized for things like my dvd and vhs players. I'd also suddenly discovered that I must've become catatonic at a key point during the online tutorial because -- no friggin' way -- I STILL NEEDED RABBIT EARS! Once I got everything up and sort-of running, I'm still fucking around with antennae trying to re-animate Katie Couric and get the cubes out her mouth during the CBS Evening News. Forget NBC - The Office and all that crap. I now no longer have that station or their local affiliates despite the appearance of The Magik Box and having my hands Reynolds Wrapped. I expect the typical "you shouldn't be watching that brain rot" and "go read a book" comments dear readers, and evidently I'm not really having my civil rights violated because it pretty much works, but I do feel just a little less fabulous about the transition than I thought I would.

The Scene; A Number of Names

The Scene was a television show aired in Detroit on WGPR, the first black-owned TV station in America. From 1975 to 1987 the show served as black culture's reinvention of the "dance show" format - and looking back on these amazing tapes now it hurts to understand why it remained a purely local phenomenon.

While white America was up to god knows what on American Bandstand aired Saturday mornings across America, The Scene was publicizing and helping give birth to Detroit Techno, a moment in American music that was so brililantly cross-pollinated, strange and compelling that it keeps presenting itself as safe material to bite on every like 4 years or so. (Lately it's more a matter of biting on Italians biting on Detroit who were of course biting upon ectomorphs in Germany but even that's working out pretty well.)

This clip from The Scene is choice. It features a track called Sharevari, a now-classic single by a group called A Number of Names. The song's title derives from an intentional misspelling of Charivari, a collective of young local promoters who were at the time making and flashing big bucks throwing parties in Detroit.

Can we bring back roller skates on the dance floor? Please? Here's the track; practice at home.

Revisionism Revisited (MP3s)

With the task of assembling a weekly radio show no longer a regular part of my life, my relationship with music has definitely shifted in some unexpected ways. I've been (happily) languishing in temporary-retirement mode from the WFMU airwaves since last summer, so instead of the constant off-air worries regarding which of a record's tracks could be used in a particular set of songs for the radio, I'm back to listening to albums in their entirety and digesting them as more singular works. Since signing off from my weekly airslot, I've enjoyed being able to listen more carefully through the zillions of sub- and counter- cultural artifacts I've acquired over the last twenty five years of adult life. I suspected there would be a lot of tracks I'd missed the first time around, and my suspicions seem to have been validated by the many great sounds I've blundered into lately. Most of them have been splendid reminders of why I ever sought reward in the realms of music and art in the first place, so for the purposes of supporting this rather ambitious claim, I'm including several MP3s at the end of this post.

First of all, I should warn everyone reading that I might have the crappiest record collection of any WFMU DJ in recent memory. And by "crappy", what I really mean is "most devoid of things that are very rare or cost me a lot of money." Perhaps shockingly, this is due more to my constant discarding of things I haven't listened to in a while than it is my arguably pedestrian musical tastes. As anyone who lives in a city will tell you, finding affordable apartments with enough room for an ample music collection isn't easy, and won't earn you any sympathy down at the Realtor's office or in the hinterlands of Craigslist. In my case, this ongoing dilemma resulted in the first of several materialist freakouts of my 30s in which I skimmed through thousands of records and applied the following criteria:

If-I-haven't-listened-to-it-or-played-it-on-the-radio-in-two-years-I'm-getting-rid-of-it.

Granted, this practice had been primed much earlier in my life. As a kid, I would routinely save money for new records, bring them home and tape them, and then return to the record store the next day to trade them in for still more new records. This was fairly common practice for people of my generation, and plenty of us still have boxes of rapidly decomposing cassettes in our closets right now to prove it. So before you get all bent out of shape and critical, let me assure you that I've regretted ever falling into this practice since my highly-coveted 7 Seconds / Prong cassette got eaten by the tape deck in my '81 VW Rabbit many years ago. Suffice it to say, malfunctioning equipment isn't the sole culprit in my long road towards a music collection that's almost completely devoid of nuance. Plenty of other good records that I did keep original copies of were lost along the way simply out of lapses in judgment, passing indifference, or during periods of financial duress. (The one and only time I resorted to selling records on eBay was to finance the purchase of a Hugo Boss suit for my wedding, and I would like to publicly thank Johnny Thunders, the 13th Floor Elevators, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and the many other diamonds in the rough that I hawked on that particular occasion. I haven't looked back once, and the suit has repeatedly come in handy in ways that I'm pretty sure the first Pop Group LP never would have.)

Googling My Keyboard

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Baltimore: "The Greatest City in America" (mp3s)

It's a city with 1000 slogans, but no defining song. Baltimore's bred and acted as a magnet for untraditional instrument builders, Wham City's Fort-Thunder-inspired transplants, and the Baltimore Club stylings of DJ Technics, Rod Lee and many more, as heard on television's The Wire.

What follows is an audio sampling of some of the many Baltimore artists who will be making their music available for free non-commercial use on WFMU's Free Music Archive. Afternoon Penis, The Agrarians, Arc and Sender, Dan Deacon, Double Dagger, Food for Animals, Fuzz Unlimited, Human Host, Lexie Mountain Boys, LO MOdA / Low Moda, Nautical Almanac, Newagehillbilly, Ponytail, Sejayno, Teeth Mountain, Jason Willett, and WZT Hearts. There are many more who we're hoping to get in touch with, and we welcome your ideas by email or comment.

Great Moments in WFMU History #26

Live Before the Acropolis - by Ken Freedman and Liz Berg

Back in the midst of WFMU’s halcyon prog years, DJ Richard Ginsburg went against the collective flow of airing 19-minute guitar journeys, hosting an electronic space jam show called “Synthetic Pleasure.” The program was wildly popular, as many New Jersey music fans had recently embraced the power of keytar, and it even went down in the books for being the first show on WFMU to play CDs. But perhaps Ginsburg’s most significant innovation was that he broke Yanni. Yes, that Yanni. In fact, Yanni used to visit WFMU fairly often to play his demo tapes and chat on-air. This was, of course, prior to his being widely recognized as an adult contemporary new age pimp.

Illustration by Matthew Thurber

Melt Banana does Monkey Man (MP3s)

Feeling sluggish? Need some energy? Then I got what you need, Melt-Banana covering Toots & The Maytals' 1969 ska classic "Monkey Man". Set the volume to 11 and put it on repeat. You'll feel better in no time.

Here is the MP3: Melt-Banana - Monkey Man

This appeared a few years ago on a split 7" with ska punk band Big D and the Kids Table on Fork in Hand Records. Good luck in finding the original vinyl...

How to Build and Design Microtonal and Electric Guitars (mp3s)

Uncle Woody Sullender checks in with this preview of his May 12th special, which airs Noon to 3pm:

Artist Paul Rubenstein has been teaching a class called "Building Music" at Franklin K. Lane and Wingate High Schools in Brooklyn.  Students learn to build their own guitars, from winding their own electric pickups to designing the guitar body to fretting the fingerboard (Paul has students utilizing a microtonal seven-tone equal temperament scale). After building the guitars, the class then creates original music with these instruments through amplifiers also of their own construction.   The students bring a sense of improvisational fun that would be expected from a class armed with homemade amplified electric instruments. 

Check out these MP3s to hear their music, vaguely reminiscent of early no wave:

Track 1 (Nick on square wave oscillator, Ayonde on guitar, Hector on electric saron, Rashid on claves, Vishal on guitar and Mr. R (Paul Rubenstein) on shaker)

Track 2 (Tyrone and Nick on the guitars they made, Ayonde on electric saron, Hector on claves, Angel on doumbek, Rashid on shaker and Mr. R (Paul Rubenstein)  on tambourine)

More tracks, photos, and videos are available on their website. This Monday, May 12th, some of Paul's students from Franklin K. Lane and Wingate High Schools will be showing off their amazing instruments on my show, noon-3pm on WFMU.

That Funky Tramp!

Continuing in a loosely defined series that has included explorations in the "Adults Only" party record genre spanning from Fax Records to the Laff label and the incomparable Rudy Ray Moore, we present a man who was a close friend of Dolemite (and had a role as a James Brown-esque nightclub singer in The Human Tornado - watch that here) named Jimmy Lynch. Lynch had some of the best cover art of any on the eccentric Laff Records roster in the nineteen seventies. This LP was released prior to his being signed to Laff, recorded in the nineteen sixties, and Lynch claims it is the first piece of vinyl to feature the word fuck. That last point is definitely disputable, but the undeniable intrigue that is this comedy record is not. Listen now to Jimmy Lynch - That Funky Tramp!

All The Old Punks (New Loafers and Mortgages)

"There is no crueler way to describe the birth and peak of a musical scene," David Fricke wrote in Mojo several years ago, "than saying 'You had to be there.'" Truer words - well, truer words have been spoken, but just think about it. No matter how old you are, you missed out on almost everything. Were you there the first time The Ramones played CBGB's? Yeah, well you missed the Haight-Ashbury scene. What's that? You're the one who suggested R. Crumb just use the place mat to draw on? Don't matter. You never saw Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club.

Except, of course, that nowadays we have access to everything. The hippest scene in history is only a Netflix envelope away. Is it punk to sit back and watch The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle DVD on your plasma screen? Nah, but what are you gonna do? There's hardly any good punk bands anymore anyway, so you might as well crack a Zima and live in the past.

(Old punk pic by Will Murai)

OMAP, "Walter Mondale is Eating His Chile" video (1983)

OMAP is a garage band.  We clear on that?  The Beginning of the End fronted by Twink...garage rock.  '68 Comeback and The Oblivians are not garage rock.  It is critically important we all take notice of this valuable distinction--proclaimed courtesy of the one-off, genderless YouTube enigma known as Elbowknees, son or daughter to either an OMAP guitarist or the drummer.

Let's see if I got this straight--overtly political archival footage and lyrics, gratuitous vocal echo/helium effects and more guitar feedback than James Stockdale's hearing aid...obviously garage rock.  There--that's finally settled (Elbow, ya poor thing; I think somebody needs to retake that Musical Genre course).

Despite Elbowknee's astute postulation--if you get right down to it, Cocteau Twins are nothing more than ethereal garage--I am quite enamored of his/her old man's project, itself unfortunately a one-off endeavor.  Again, very intoxicating spastic psychedelic echoes of B.O.T.E. kicking the base for Mr. Alder, he while presumably under an early 'shroom phase.  Where have you drifted, old men at play?  I don't know about you but I want OMAP back on the map.

Billy Jam presents: Back in Eighty Eight: Hip-Hop, Version 1988

Back in eighty eight, twenty long hip-hop years ago, hip-hop, or "rap" music as it was more generally referred to back then, was experiencing arguably (and it has been argued and debated, tirelessly by many a passionate hip-hop head) its finest moment. A part of hip-hop's much lamented, so-called "golden era" 1988 has been labeled many things by many people such as "The year hip-hop peaked" or "The last year for real hip-hop" or "The main year of the golden era." So revered is that year in the history of hip-hop music and culture that it has become the subject matter of many diehard hip-hoppers including the Rhymesayers emcee Blueprint who titled his 2005 album "1988" as a tribute to "the beats, the breaks, and themes" of what he (and many others) see as "hip-hop's heyday."

"Blueprint, who started his hip-hop career in the late 90's, was too young to have experienced 1988 hip-hop firsthand. But I wasn't. I was there and totally into hip-hop at the time: as a journalist writing about it, as a radio DJ playing all this great new music on the air at a time when there was little hip-hop to be found on the radio dial, and most importantly as a dedicated rap fan buying all these great new records and cassettes as they came out. Note at this stage in hip-hop it was still possible to buy near every new release without going bankrupt. I still am a big fan of '88 hip-hop: records like Public Enemy's "It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back," BDP's "By All Means Necessary," Eric B & Rakim's "Follow The Leader," EPMD's "Strictly Business," Too $hort's "Life is....Too $hort," and NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" etc. etc.  But while I love 1988 hip-hop today as much as I did all them years ago, I am not one of those aging b-boys who hates everything new in the genre. Sure I agree that there is a lot of shitty hip-hop coming out today but there is also lots more really great & innovative new hip-hop music being made today. But the classics will remain the classics. And 1988 was a classic year in hip-hop.

Australian New Wave, Italian Horror Metal, Madagascarian Doo Wop and French Hair Metal

Laugh if you want, but I’ve watched this Time Bandits video at least a hundred times and have taken copious notes.  Notice the lyric, "love is for the ones," as if only a group as exclusive as these models can really love.  Don't you want to love like these beautiful people do?  I'm not kidding, I find this video totally alluring.   You don't?  sorry... Other Aussie new wavers that have taken up too much of my time: Dugites, Eurogliders, James Freud...  On the right, Italy’s Death SS were not Nazis, but singer Steve Sylvester did lead a satanic sect at the time of this video's filming.  You know that feeling when you’ve watched TV for so long that your stomach hurts? Ugh…

I’ve also been spending too much time looking through archives of Mexican Doo Wop, although every one of those videos gets topped by Madagascar’s Les Surfs.  Mexican doo wop that has taken up too much of my time: Los Hooligans, Manolo Munoz, Los Hitters.  On the right is the fruit of too much time with French Heavy Metal.  A lot of music videos from this era are much more ridiculous, including many of Warning’s other music videos -  I chose this one because the song is a almost entirely unironic blast of Sabotage-era Sabbath meets Iron Maiden.  Runners up include: Dum Dum Bullet, Nightmare, Trust, Speed Queen.

Rambling Syd Rumpo (MP3)

Five bucolic yet lugubrious MP3s after the jump.....

On this week's episode of Le Show, Harry Shearer paid tribute to recently deceased radio personality Brian Clewer, who hosted the radio program "Cynic's Choice" on LA-area radio for more than 40 years. Clewer's program featured lots of British comedy, and Shearer played a few examples on his program from Peter Sellers, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and Flanders and Swann. This got me thinking about the British comedy I was listening to when I was in grad school ages ago, when the local public radio station used to air the amazing "Round The Horne", a BBC radio comedy program that made its name in the mid-to-late 1960s by pushing the limits of the British double entendre.

For the musical portion of the comedy, they relied on the amazing Kenneth Williams and his rustic folksinger character Rambling Syd Rumpo. The joke was that Syd was supposedly singing old English folk tunes with long-forgotten archaic words, but the lyrics (written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman) were an equal combination of sly innuendo and hilarious nonsense. It's better to demonstrate rather than try to explain, so in honor of Clewer's passing here are a small selection of Rambling Syd Rumpo songs that are sure to gladden your earholes and tug at your artefacts.

WFMU's Myspace Band Buddies - vote for your favorites, FINAL ROUND!

Good morning people! 

This is it!  The last round of voting for your favorite randomly selected bands from WFMU's hefty list o' buddies at a certain social networking site of which you may have heard.  Thanks to everyone who's listened and voted so far.

Here's the deal, in case you missed earlier installments:  the band or bands who get the most "Pump it" votes each week will be forever exalted on my FIRST EVER MARATHON PREMIUM called "In MySpace, No One Can Hear You Scream" (you can still pledge to this year's marathon here). Last round's favorites were Satanicpornocultshop, Porest, Paid in Puke, For Esme, and Bonbomb! Congratulations, band buddies!! 

Who will be next? It's up to you!!!