WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Die Goldenen Zitronen - Die Entstehung der Nacht (MP3s, video)

Two years ago I wrote a short blog post praising the criminally underrated German avant-punk-pop mavericks Die Goldenen Zitronen (The Golden Lemons). Unfortunately, it didn't catapult them to superstardom in the US, so I'll try again... Three years after their last studio album "Lenin" they finally released a new one, "Die Entstehung der Nacht" (The Emergence of the Night), as good or better as their last ones. Here is the strange and spooky video for the instrumental title song, apparently a modern version of the story of The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

As a bonus, here are two of my favorite non-instrumentals from the album as MP3s: Des Landeshauptmann's letzter Weg (with lyrics in the style of a Hölderlin ode about Jörg Haider and the weird way in which a law-and-order politician who liked the Nazis and died in a car accident, speeding and drunk, could become a popular hero in the Austrian state of Carinthia after his death) | Drop the stylist (features Mark Stewart of The Pop Group, Melissa Logan of Chicks on Speed, and some swearing in English, so don't play it on the radio or in church...)

Now if only a US distributor would pick up this album...

Feeling B - Ich such' die DDR (video)

Burroughs narrates Poe (video, MP3)

This post arrives slightly late for Halloween, but I'll take both William S. Burroughs and Edgar Allen Poe any time of the year. After some Poe readings by James Mason, we have this gem from the 1995 videogame "The Dark Eye", featuring William Burroughs reading "The Masque of the Red Death", accompanied by some creepy slides.

YouTube: Part 1 | Part 2
Just the audio, in slightly higher quality: The Masque of the Red Death (MP3) from RealityStudio

The Way Out, A Portrait of Xentos Jones (video excerpt)

This excerpt of the 2003 film "The Way Out, A Portrait of Xentos Jones" by Kosten Koper and Luke Fowler recently popped up on YouTube. I hope that the whole thing will be released on DVD some day...

YouTube: [link] | More info on Kosten Koper's blog: [link] | More Xentos on the WFMU blog: Die Trip Computer Die - Flowerball (a whole album for free!) | King Leopold Of All The Belgians (weird half-improvised radio play)

RIP Elizabeth Clare Prophet (MP3s)

This Thursday Elizabeth Clare Prophet (aka Guru Ma), the former leader of the bizarre new age doomsday cult Church Universal and Triumphant (CUT) aka The Summit Lighthouse, died at the age of 70 in a nursing home in Bozeman, Montana, after suffering from Alzheimer's disease since 1998. The Summit Lighthouse was started in 1958 by Mark Prophet in Washington, D.C. He later married Elizabeth, they moved it to Colorado, and she took over the leadership after Mark's death in 1973. Under the name Church Universal and Triumphant they eventually moved to California in 1976, and finally to Montana in 1986, where they bought a 12,000-acre ranch just north of Yellowstone Park. Being convinced that the end of the world was near, they built a 756-person underground bomb shelter in a pristine alpine meadow and stocked up on firearms. When everyone assembled in the bomb shelters on the date of the predicted apocalypse on March 15, 1990, nothing happened, and eventually CUT members started to lose faith in the prophetic abilities of Elizabeth Prophet, and left the church in droves.

Henry Hills - SSS (video)

SSS is an video by experimental filmmaker Henry Hills. From the description:

SSS is composed from footage of movement improvised on the streets of pre-gentrified East Village by Sally Silvers, Pooh Kaye, Harry Shepperd, Lee Katz, Kumiko Kimoto, David Zambrano, Ginger Gillespie, Mark Dendy, and others, painstaking synched to music previously improvised for the project at Noise New York by Tom Cora (cello), Christian Marclay (turntables), and Zeena Parkins (harp). Beauty emerging from rubble.

Gorefest - Autobahn (video)

RIP Arthur Ferrante

Arthur Ferrante, one half of the legendary piano duo Ferrante & Teicher, died last week at the age of 88, one year after his partner Louis Teicher passed away. While most of the later Ferrante & Teicher recordings are quite schmaltzy easy-listening fare, their early 1950s albums of prepared piano pop were masterpieces of the space age, goofy, inventive, catchy, and influenced by John Cage, something nobody had ever tried before. Here is a video of the song African Echoes from their 1956 album Soundproof (mono).

Originally, Soundproof was released in two different versions, stereo and mono, with completely different songs. To make the confusion complete, they concurrently released the album Soundblast, consisting of the same songs as the stereo version of Soundproof, but this time in mono. Negativland would have been proud of themselves had they had done this in the 1950s... And nobody should have lived without having heard their version of Tico Tico from Soundblast: Ferrante & Teicher - Tico Tico (mp3)

As an encore, here is Christian Marclay's remix-or-something of Ferrante and Teicher from his album More Encores: Christian Marclay - Ferrante & Teicher (mp3)

Pentecostal ZZ Top Impersonators (video)

Here is a very catchy song by WinterBand about the modern scourge of women talking in Church. The self-description reads "WinterBand is a father and son Christian rock/blues/metal band. We are Apostolic Pentecostal Acts 2:38 Christians." Take that, ZZ Top!

And if you wonder who the other two guys playing with Father and Son Winter are, here is another quote from their YouTube description: "Special thanks to Bobo on bass, Hayseed on guitar and especially the Dept of Corrections for allowing them to do this as part of work release."

The Cookie Monster and 9/11

Just after the 8th anniversary of the WTC attacks, I discovered this shocking cover of a 1976 Sesame Street special "Monsters on the Loose!" on David Icke's official forum. Click the link to read more about this story the government doesn't want you to know.

Bollywood Disco Dancer (video)

This could be filed under "Cheesy Euro-Disco" if only India was a part of Europe. But so it goes to show that Europe isn't the only continent producing cheesy disco videos. This clip is taken from the 1983 Bollywood movie Disco Dancer, a big success in India and the Soviet Union at the time.

YouTube: [link] (There is a higher quality version, too, and you will find more musical numbers from this film in the "related videos".)

Hildegard Knef (video)

Here is a vintage TV clip of one of the greats of German chanson, Hildegard Knef, live in Berlin in 1968. The original German title of the song is "Von nun an gings bergab", translated into English as "From Here On It Got Rough".

YouTube: [link]
Check out hoffmann9471's other uploads on YouTube if you want more of this.

The First International Sex Opera Band - Anita (MP3s)

Supposedly only sold through sex shops in Amsterdam during a short time at the end of the 60s, this is a truly bizarre psychedelic freak-out of an album. There isn't too much information about it out on the net, but apparently it is rumored that this was recorded by members of the popular Dutch rock band Sandy Coast. It is probably impossible to find the original vinyl, and I bet it would sell for a fortune if it ever popped up on eBay, but here are the MP3s, just in time for your next sex opera party.

The First International Sex Opera Band - Anita MP3s
Anita's First Appearance (Part 1)
Anita's First Appearance (Part 2)

Oh, and despite the title this is safe for your kids, your office, and the FCC, if you don't mind to expose them to the occasional heavy breathing, moaning, and screaming, plus a hefty dose of deranged psychedelia...

RIP Rashied Ali (video)

Five days ago, one of the greatest jazz drummers of all time, Rashied Ali, died at the age of 72. Here is an interesting short interview with him, apparently recorded from some Croatian TV broadcast.

YouTube: [link]

Frances Baskerville, Singing Psychic - Songs From The Beyond (MP3s)

Frances Baskerville, also known as the Singing Psychic, might be known to long-time WFMU listeners from the Incorrect Music show or from Irwin Chusid's book Songs In The Key Of Z. Here is her (second?) album Songs From The Beyond in MP3, in all its clairvoyant lo-fi glory.

MP3s:
01 The Grassy Knoll
02 A Whale Of A Tale
03 Love On A Hill
04 Miracles
05 The Vegetables Song
06 Come Step In My Space
07 Heaven's Highway
08 Dream Walk When You're Hot, You're Hot
09 Angel Talk
10 Dangerous Tools
11 Children Of The Street

If you want to know more about how a lumber truck hit her and unleashed her psychic powers, about Fran's psychic detective work, and how she found more than 5000 missing children, you can listen to an interview with her on the "Judy Joy Jones Show".

Bendaly Family - Do You Love Me? (video)

This is it, the best Kuwaiti beach music video of all times, shot in 1978. The song is "Do You Love Me?" by the Lebanese Bendaly Family. (The site is all in Arabic, but it has lots of Bendaly MP3s.)

YouTube: [link]

Pneumershonic - The Mark of the Beast (video)

This is a shortened web version of Mark Jasper's documentary The Mark of the Beast about outsider musician Pneumershonic, grabbed from YouTube.

You can read more about Pneumershonic and download his album Frequencies of the Beast, in this earlier post of mine. If you want to obtain the DVD with the whole documentary, your best bet would be to contact Matt Jasper via the MySpace page.

Die Trip Computer Die - Flowerball (MP3s)

It is always hard to describe music which doesn't fall into any known genre, but let me try anyway: Die Trip Computer Die sounds like a bunch of space aliens on acid with a sampler and various old records and sound effects. One of the myriad offshoots of DIY punk band The Homosexuals, this trio of Lepke Buchwater, Xentos 'Fray' Bentos, and Ted Barrow, is one of my favorite bands no sane person has ever heard of. Their discography is quite messy, a wild mix of a few official releases and numerous mysterious CD-Rs and MP3s on various Internet sites. The album "Flowerball" is one of those unofficial releases, and the scant resources I found on the Internet indicate that it was originally a CD-R not on any label. Here are the MP3s, listen at your own risk:

01 System of the Tortured
02 Gestations
03 A Bad Idea
04 In Bed With 1000 Priests
05 Seductive Song of War
06 Messrs Smirkett & Bloat
07 Fink Drummer
08 Chief-Inspector Kickback
09 Contains Psychological
10 Goodbye Again
11 Every 'Why' Is A 'How'
12 The Naked Statue
13 Roll, Frankie Roll
14 A Short Film About Gas
15 Flowerball

By the way, this album has been played on WFMU a few times on Tony Coulter's show, most recently here.

Wing does MJ (MP3)

I don't know if it had anything to do with Michael Jackson's cardiac arrest, but just before the King of Pop died, famous New Zealand singer Wing released her 16th CD "Beat It", featuring herself holding a baseball bat on the cover. Here is what you need to know about her and this most recent album, the official album notes from CDBaby (where you can get the whole CD).

Beat It is Wing's 16th CD and includes lyrical songs most requested by her fans -- at concerts in the US and UK during 2007 and 2008, and for delivery by her popular "live singing over the telephone" service. Wing the singer is admired by fans throughout the world for the passion and joy she shares through her CDs and performances of popular songs. With a unique voice and an ever-widening repertoire, Wing loves singing and she lives to sing. Her goal is to sing beautiful songs as they should be sung, and she spends 3-4 hours every day working towards this goal. Her singing teacher helps Wing work on her current repertoire, and helps to choose the songs for the next CD. A New Zealand resident, Wing's CDs have earned her an international cult following. She is a regular guest on radio shows and television celebrity guest and entertainment shows, and has appeared on programmes as diverse as TAB Sports Cafe (New Zealand), Rove Live (Australia) and the animated television satire show South Park. Her live performances have ranged from New York's Blue Note night club and San Francisco's famous Castro Theatre to old folks homes and hospitals to university gyms, private parties and corporate gigs. Wing's CDs are proudly manufactured in New Zealand by Media Technology.

Finally, here is the song you've all been waiting for: Wing - Beat It (MP3)

Trio Pied de Poule - Café noir (video)

Recently, I stumbled upon this great video of Trio Pied de Poule singing about black coffee.

YouTube: [link]

There doesn't seem to be much about these girls on the Internets, but a little more information can be found here.