WFMU's Beware of the Blog

ATP-NY 2009: Akron/Family (mp3s)

Known for their ever-modular, Dead-style song-suites, Akron/Family's All Tomorrow's Parties set offers a concise and ecstatic version of the 2009 model Akrons. Joined by auxiliary percussionists from the Caribou Vibration Ensemble, the Williamsburg/Williamsport trio build from invocatory psychedelic lulls through multi-sectioned beardo epics into free Afrodelic frenzy: a hippie tempest in Kutsher's low-ceilinged dining room. Hot jams, people. Hot jams. - Jesse Jarnow

This set originally aired on WFMU and was engineered by Richard Rusincovitch. For more highlights from WFMU's All Tomorrow's Parties broadcast, stay tuned to the FMA's ATP-NY-2009 collection and this here blog. Thanks to ATP and Akron/Family

Photo of Akron/Family live at ATP-NY 2009 by Irene Trudel. You can share these mp3s non-commercially under these terms (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives).

Mining the Audio Motherlode, Volume 35 (MP3s)

Give the Drummer Some's
6 Favorite Downloads from the MP3 Blogosphere

Well sure, mean people suck, but what about the "mean people" of China? The mean people were certain classes of citizens who were bonded to servitude by heredity. (Some of whom were relegated to such lowly occupations as frog-catching and sedan-chair bearing.) Among these groups were the yuehu, or musicians' households, who were subject to official discrimination for over ten centuries.

You may have mixed feelings about tomorrow's massive parade celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, but I think we should have all tooted a horn or two this past May 23 in honor of another notable event in China's history: On that date in 1724 the reform-minded Yongzheng Emperor (Qing Dynasty) issued an edict officially abolishing the second-class status of all them nice musicians.

To commence your own private commemoration, please avail yourself of Mining the Audio Motherlode's first offering, below, an astonishing 8-CD collection of music from ancient China. Toot!

String Dynasty
Various  ~  "Ancient Chinese Music" (8 CDs)
(Branle de Champaigne)

Nigerian Highlife Royalty
Cardinal Rex Lawson  ~  "...and His Rivers Men"
(Likembe)
From the album: Nkpa Ke Da Owo (mp3)

Buenos Aires Blues Rock
Pajarito Zaguri  ~  "Pajaro y la Murga del Rock 'n' Roll"
(Blog: En Busca del Tiempo Perdido)
From the album: Deja Que ya Escuche Su Oración (mp3)

Cello Colossus
Ernst Reijseger  ~  "Taiming"
(Blog: Lucky Psychic Hut)

Hey, Ain't the Hot Mud Family from Ohio?!
Various  ~  "Tennessee Folk Arts"
(Blog: Allen's Archive of Early and Old Country Music)
From the album: Rain and Snow (mp3) by Suzanne Edmunson & Rick Good

Another Psychotic-Hippie-Drug-and-Sex-in-the-Greek-Isles Movie
Mike Rozakis  ~  "She Knew No Other Way" (O.S.T.)
(Blog: Bug in the City)
From the soundtrack: She Knew No Other Way (mp3)

Listen for music from these and other incredible finds on
Give the Drummer Some, Fridays on WFMU, 9 to Noon (ET).

Check out every installment of Mining the Audio Motherlode

ATP-NY 2009: The Melvins (2 MP3's)

More sonic souvenirs from the Sept 11-13 All Tomorrows Parties from Kutshers resort in the Catskills, broadcast over WFMU. The Melvins. A lone blog post can't sum up all there is to say about these guys, except theirs is a world so universal that only these musicians could be the common thread between Lustmord and Gene Simmons (both of whom have made music with them). Simply calling the Melvins the godfathers of Northwest grunge shorts them on many accounts; their beauty, brutality, and enormous palette for experimentation and forward-thinking has never stalled out. It's no wonder they were a handful for Atlantic Records in the mid 90's, but thankfully their post-majors career sees the Melvins invigorated and making some of their awesomest sounds on stage and in studio. Their latest release "Chicken Switch" (Ipecac) finds them remixed by the likes of Merzbow, Eye, Sunroof, Christoph Heeman, Matmos and more. 

Their Saturday, October 12th set at stage 2 of ATP was the first chance I've had to check out the post-2006 lineup of the band, with 80's mainstays King Buzzo (guitar/vox) and Dale Crover (drums) actually merging their band with Big Business (Coady Willis on second drums, Jared Willis on bass). To say they slayed would be an understatement, and in all truth this is the only band that could have one of its members perform in a Snuggy and not lose one fraction of heaviness. We've got two approved MP3s from the set: "Zodiac" and "Kicking Machine" engineered during WFMU broadcast by Scott Konzelmann.

Sammy Davis, Jr. is Your Vehicle

WFMU Fest in Brooklyn This Thursday, Friday, Saturday: Faust, Teenage Jesus, Pissed Jeans and More

WFMU curates and produces its own festival this week! Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, October 1-3, we take over the Music Hall of Williamsburg (66 N. 6th Street in Brooklyn) for an all-out live assault with a myriad of some of our favorite local and international acts. Krautrock godfathers, No Wave pioneers, post-Gristle industrial coldwave, French post-rock doom, and full-on ass-flattening punk rock explosions will abound!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1st (doors 8PM, $20 advance or door)
Faust
Cold Cave
Aluk Todolo

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2nd (doors 8PM, $12 advance/$15 door)
Pissed Jeans
TV Ghost
VeeDee
Guinea Worms

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3rd (doors 8PM, $20 advance or door)
Teenage Jesus and the Jerks
Sightings
Drunkdriver
Talk Normal

More pics and info on the bands on an earlier post, and advance tickets are still available at the Music Hall of Williamsburg site, or Other Music (W. 4th and Lafayette Street in Manhattan). Words can't relate how happy WFMU is to be able to gather such a criminally great mass of live performers onboard for this. Our thanks to everyone who's bought advance tix so far, the bands, Henry Owings for the poster design and Chantelle Hylton-Simmons for helping us out as well. Great ready for a clobbering weekend of live music, and stop by the station's tables in the venue's lobby to say hello (and pick up some FMU wear or one of our limited-run WFMU Fest posters!) Once again, we are not broadcasting live, so get on out there to be part of this!

ATP-NY 2009: Caribou Vibration Ensemble w/ Marshall Allen (mp3s)

Earlier this month, WFMU brought an all-star crew up to Kutsher's Country Club for the second annual NY installment of the All Tomorrow's Parties festival. For everyone who missed the live broadcast, we'll be archiving many of them for on-demand listening on WFMU's blog and Free Music Archive, starting this week. We've lined up a post a day from the likes of Deerhoof, Deerhunter, Atlas Sound, The Melvins, Grouper, Akron/Family, Black Dice, the Dirty Three (w/ Nick Cave!), and more surprises await.

Let's start things off with the 16-person Caribou Vibration Ensemble, which featured Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra for this special festival performance. The heart of Caribou is Dan Snaith, a Canadian mathematician, who started his musical project back in 2000 under the name Manitoba. Following the success of the 2003 album Up In Flames, "Handsome Dick" Manitoba of the Dictators claimed ownership over the name Manitoba and threatened legal action. Snaith decided to change his name to Caribou "while on an LSD trip with friends in the Canadian wilderness" (source). Caribou sounds a lot like an LSD trip in the Canadian wilderness, led by a mathematician with a PhD and a penchant for laptop IDM. Snaith has taken an increasingly organic approach to live performance leading up to the formation of the Vibration Ensemble.

Taking the stage at the Stardust Ballroom on Sunday September 13th, the Vibration Ensemble included every musician who has ever been a part of a Caribou live performance -- from frequent collaborators like John Schmersal (Enon, Brainiac) and Kieren Hebden (Four Tet), to the one-off special appearance of the legendary Marshall Allen (current leader of the Sun Ra Arkestra). All-in-all, the ensemble includes four drummers, a 5-piece horn section, and a choir to bring every thunder and peak of Carbou's music to vibrant life. Engineer Rob Christiansen did a fantastic job mixing this set, we hope you'll enjoy these four selections (after the jump):

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)

Sexploitation for the Ears

A little over a month ago I mentioned that at the station where I do my show, there's an annual "show swap" in which a programmer of one show tries their hand at another, usually in a realm alien to them. I had signed up to man the helm on the Wednesday night sex talk show, but that idea was nipped in the bud rather quickly. I never really bothered to find out why (it wasn't a big deal), but I assume that it was assumed that I would make mockery of what is usually a serious, educational show. Now you can listen and see if this was the correct assumption, as I put together an all-sex episode of my own show, The Generation Exploitation Podcast. Listen to it here. Playlist is after the jump.

Mr. DeLay...Sir...I Strongly Urge You NOT To Do This...Tom...TOM!...NO!!

Kevin Nutt on BBC Lancashire Radio 9/26

WFMU's esteemed host of Sinner's Crossroads, Kevin Nutt, will present a 40-minute gospel set on the BBC Lancashire's "On the Wire" program this Saturday, September 26th.

OTW host Steve Barker is celebrating his program's 25th Anniversary and invited Mr. Nutt in on the festivities. Check out OTW's blog here.

Your Favorite Food vs. Hair In Your Favorite Food

Hi. Before we begin this installment of Swan Fungus on WFMU, I'd like to send a special birthday wish to my girlfriend Nicci. She's in Alabama right now acting in a play, and I'm very sad here in LA without her. My guess is she's very busy right now and will never read this. Still, I think it's important to share as many birthday wishes as possible with the girl I love. Maybe, somehow, my binary computer coded message will travel through the magical highways and byways of telecommunication wires and wireless signals to reach her little ears. Implausible? Yes. Moronic? Also yes.

I wanted to share with you all the Stephen David Heitkotter album Heitkotter today, because it is one of the most fascinating and highly sought-after private press albums in existence. Then I did a quick search of the Beware Of The Blog archives and saw that a commenter with the name Stephen David Heitkotter has visited this page before, and the last thing I want is for another post of mine to be removed due to it involving the intellectual property of a friend of WFMU. So, sorry, but no Heitkotter for you this week! Also, no Jerry Solomon. But if anyone owns a copy of Past The 20th Century you should get in touch with me ASAP.

Mining the Audio Motherlode, Volume 34 (MP3s)

Give the Drummer Some's
4 Favorite Downloads from the MP3 Blogosphere

In addition to the usual download selections, this week's Mining the Audio Motherlode offers a brief commentary on the recent Kanye West imbroglio.

Commentary:
The entire event seemed preconceived: The staging appeared blocked; the camera angles locked in; the Hollywood happy-ending scripted as if drawn up on a lunch napkin at Spago. Even more telling is that all involved had so much to gain: Kanye re-upped his bad-boy bona fides; Taylor got boosted into the pop-star stratosphere; Beyoncé cemented her status as the #1 one-name überdiva. Of course the increasingly irrelevant music biz profited most of all.

Set piece or not, what's truly disturbing about this third-rate melodrama is how the roles played by its three principals conjure those familiar old racist paradigms: 1) Angry black man; 2) innocent white ingenue (menaced by angry black man); 3) benevolent black mama (who cuts the black man down to size, reassuring the white power structure).

The detestable irony in all this is the unwitting involvement of President Obama, whose "jackass" comment only served to legitimize these standard-issue racial stereotypes. Is it any surprise that his off-the-record utterance was leaked? How better to cut our African-American-in-Chief down to size.

The whole thing was a trap. The extent to which we as a collective culture lock-stepped so willingly into its steel teeth suggests that there are still many more miles to trudge through the backwoods of the American soul before coming home for some steaming post-racial porridge.

Downloads:

R.I.P. Luther Thomas
Human Arts Ensemble  ~  Live, Vol. 1"
(Nothing Is V2.0)

The Gaithersburg Address
The Muffins  ~  "Air Fiction"
(Mended Records)
From the album: The Lagoon (mp3)

L'Affaire Messiaen!
Olivier Messiaen ~  "Petites Liturgies"
(Blog: A Closet of Curiosities)

Samm He Am
Bosho  ~  "Chop Socky"
(Blog: Lucky Psychic Hut)
From the album: Rail (mp3)

Listen for music from these and other incredible finds on
Give the Drummer Some, Fridays on WFMU, 9 to Noon (ET).

Check out every installment of Mining the Audio Motherlode

Free James Brown (MP3)

Robert Lusson & Some Cast Of Characters  -  Free James Brown  (3:41)

On September 24, 1988 James Brown went kinda nuts in Augusta, Georgia resulting in a total of 11 charges, including assault and battery with intent to kill, drunken driving, and a host of traffic offenses.  According to JET magazine, the incident began when Brown dropped in on an insurance seminar in an office building he owned and demanded to know who had been using his restroom. 

Brandishing a shotgun, Brown emphatically made clear his displeasure at the idea of the public using the bathroom in his office building and ordered the seminar attendees outside.  One of them called the police and when they arrived, Brown fled in his 1987 Ford pickup truck.  The police pursued him into South Carolina, where they shot out the truck's back tires.  Despite this, the chase continued for another six miles and back into Georgia at which point Brown, driving on his rims, finally steered his truck into a ditch.

In December 1988, the Godfather Of Soul was sentenced to 6 years in the State Park Correctional Institution near Columbia, South Carolina.  The groundswell of love and support from writers, DJs, fans, and his peers came to be known as the "Free James Brown" movement.

Brown was released on February 27, 1991 after serving approximately 26 months.

Scent Notes for the Downtrodden

It seems like every publication out there has a perfume review column now—The NY Times, The Topeka Booger, numberless zines—that it's about time WFMU had one. And if it already does, it could stand another. So I, Ed Shepp, senior perfumer for the Swedish American Futurimagineering Institut, am stepping up to provide one. And probably just ONE, since I'm very busy with my bringing lazy back and all you know. Anyway, let's get started, and as a once-in-a-lifetime gesture of kindness, I'll be uncharacteristically brief.

Let's review some stanky stuff.

Grasshopper, Snatch the Pebble from My Soul; My Castle of Quiet Session, 26thAug09

The duo of Josh and Jesse have real, university-type musical educations, met while playing brass in ska bands, and yet somehow arrived at playing this music, that which would peel the paint off Lucifer's '71 glossy-black Dodge Charger. Though the on-air session happened in late August, and the archive of the full show has been up since that time, I held back posting these cleanly cut mp3s in the hopes of making an impression, one separate from the band's on-air appearance—that this blissed-out, Krautrock-flavored, spine-shuddering set amounts to no less than the Irrlicht of contemporary noise/electronics. A horrid dungeon, no question, but also one where hope has not quite died, and pretty things occasionally flutter by the window bars.

Death Compass
Zombie Shark Mangler

A nautical theme, perhaps? Leviathan Rising. To view a short video excerpt from the Grasshopper WFMU session, see this entry on the My Castle of Quiet blog.

Grasshopper plan to take on Fabio Frizzi's Zombie Theme (the opening music I currently use on the show), and eventually execute a live score to the entire Lucio Fulci Zombie film. Got a big screen? Can we do it at your place? I'll "curate" with pride, whatever that might en(r)tail. Seriously.
email [email protected]

The Grasshopper session (also known—by myself anyway—as "two monumental slabs of horror incarnate") is covered by a creative commons attribution-non commercial-no derivatives license.

News of the Dead: This Just In—Soldiers Die in U.S. Civil War

Deaths come in pairs, and sometimes it seems that News of the Dead does, too. In the past week there have been two stories about the remains of Civil War soldiers in this area.

First there was the ceremonial burial of the remains of a New York soldier who died at Antietam (Sept. 17, 1862—the bloodiest day of the war, with over 23,000 killed). A tourist at the battlefield found some bone fragments, uniform buttons, a belt buckle, and scraps of fabric about a year ago; the buttons identified the remains as being that of a soldier from one of the 24 New York regiments that fought that day. Government Scientists and Experts had a go and decided the soldier was between 17 and 19 years old when he died. That was about as much as they could figure out, so the bits and bones were put into a box inside a “period-appropriate” pine coffin and sent to the National Cemetery near Schuylerville. Civil War re-enactors stood guard over the coffin until it was buried last week on the 147^th anniversary of the battle. The grave marker says it’s an unknown soldier who died at Antietam. “We’re going to remember him as a hero,” says Donald E. Roy, the director of New York’s Military Forces Honor Guard (and a civilian)—although, of course, no one knows who the soldier was or what he really did.

Next was the story of John F. Wescott Jr., who was fooling around with findagrave.com and discovered that his great, great, great grandpa, Capt. Andrew W. Davis of the 8^th Infantry Regiment of New Jersey, was buried in an unmarked grave in Newark. Last Saturday the Wescotts got together and installed a marker from the Veterans Administration over the Captain, who died from the wound he got when he was shot in the leg at Gettysburg.

These two dead Civil War soldiers caught my attention because at the time I was reading This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust. Of course I was aware that the Civil War changed the way death was regarded in the U.S.—it furthered the development and use of embalming, for one thing. But Faust’s book explains how far-reaching the changes were. The slaughter brought about the Federal Government’s first foray into arranging its citizens’ personal lives, caused people to reject their religious beliefs, and resulted in both widespread sentimentality and cynicism. It launched a tentative move towards women’s rights, created big advances in the field of statistics, and made James Russell Lowell write bad poetry (and lots of people write atrocious songs). It caused people to fret about identifying and returning the remains of their dead—just like the box of bone bits in New York and the Captain’s grave in New Jersey. It’s a terrific book, well-researched and well-written, and I recommend it to you.

Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and may God bless.

USC's 1970-71 Album (MP3's)

Here's an album capturing the sounds and events one might have encoutered if one attended USC during the 1970-71 school year.

I've heard plenty of high school and college year-in-review albums, but few have sounded like this one.

The A-side is a montage of sounds from around the campus during the school year. Even if I'd attended, I suspect I'd have found this production frustrating, because of the way it jumps from event to event, never explaining anything and never containing a complete recording of any one event, either. There are things captured here that I'd love to know about. If I'd been at the school that year, and hadn't been at an event captured here, I'd really want to know what I'd missed.

On the other hand, this is fairly well done, as a montage, and it reminds me of some of the montage work done by Nurse With Wound, among others, and with its recurring use of the song "Moments To Remember", I'm reminded of a particularly enjoyable Negativland "Over the Edge" CD. I do have to question whether the song "Moments to Remember" would have possibly connected on any level with college students in 1971, though.

If anything, the second side, while also an interesting listen, is even more frustrating. it captures the sounds of a music festival held at the school - presumably a yearly event. And it appears to have been a lengthy and wide ranging event, based on this sampling. But again, that's what we have here - a sampling. We few exceptions, these are excerpts from individual performances, with no information as to performers, and no ability to hear from beginning to end any but a couple of these songs.

I really wonder what the performers thought - if they found out they would be on the album, and then listened to it, and discovered that their four song set had been boiled down to 90 seconds out of one four minute song. As with the first side, there's some interesting stuff here (as well as some... not so interesting stuff), and I'd have liked to have heard it all the way through.

The album came in a mostly plain white sleeve, with two fascinating little bits of text on the front cover (at the top and bottom) which are scanned, below. The labels are also fairly plain, but I have scanned them, as well.

1.) USC album - Montage (Side One) (MP3)

2.) USC album - Songfest '71 (Side Two) (MP3)

Cover Scan One - Cover Scan Two - Label Side One - Label Side Two

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 Story of The Cavemen

Two weeks ago in this very spot we posted the pair of videos above featuring obscure novelty garage rock band The Cavemen doing a spot on The Mike Douglas Show during the 1966-67 season. The footage created a flurry of interest and a fair bit of debate about exactly who these young lads were and where they came from and what they recorded. Thanks to the miracles of the internet, we now have the full story courtesy the young blondie that Mike Douglas interviews, Vic Rose. Here is the story in his own words.

Chotchke : In the Rehearsal Studio, pt 1

The BASSOONCORE movement in the early 1990's consists of a short list of little-known bands and foremost among those is CHOTCHKE (1993-1998), who began life as a six-piece and went on through fluctuating memberships and styles to record a lot and release a little. During the construction of their unusual musics the band would record day after day of long and amazing improvisations, often sounding like arranged pieces, stretching and utilizing the multi-instrumental talents of its members and often spotlighting its talented bassoon specialist Carrie Barclay. To the eternal chagrin of the band, the finished, polished studio versions of songs and the  ever-changing sets used during tours and gigs rarely reflected the madness and majesty of the long and involved improvs created in the warm coccoon of the practice space. Anyone who has played more than twice a week with a group and tried to write music this way will empathize immediately. For one thing, re-playing inspired improvs tended to squeeze the 'life' out of them, and they never quite satisfied like the originals. Recently, while listening to the fantastic "Complete Jack Johnson Sessions" by Miles Davis I was tickled to hear that super-lineup grappling with many of the same issues, they come up with an amazing collection of sounds and riffs, and on the second and subsequent takes the piece begins to bend in all kinds of different  directions, not always as satisfying as the first take.
Today I will present the first in a series of studies of the unedited studio noodling of Chotchke, in various lineups and configurations. For instance in this first long six-part improvisation, taken from a ten-part 45 minute jam, the bassoon player is on a saxophone, and I believe plays guitar on the second stand-alone piece "F-Sharp Song/Blue Shorts". I enjoy hearing new ideas coalesce instantly while the members are playing, and crazy segues happen while the band is in motion. Let's get in the Wayback machine and slip into the groove.