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Hello Brooklyn! WFMU will be holding court at the Atlantic Antic street fair this Sunday, October 2nd, Noon-6pm.
Your favorite freeform station will be parked between Clinton and Henry Streets on the south side of Atlantic Avenue (closer to Henry) in Brooklyn, where we'll be hawking swag, exchanging high-fives with listeners, and stocking up on mozzarepa tubesocks.
Stop by the WFMU tent to say hi!
Let's give more time to how DJ's create their set's sound.
Duane opened his show with a set which included "My Country 'Tis Of Thee" by cross-dressing singer Sylvester, then the soul of Sandra Phillips, Monik, and Marc Eric. Notice how the sequence begins at a medium level of intensity, then is brought to quiet calm by Eric's mid-1960's beach sound.
Here's another way a DJ can smoothly change the feel of a set, mid-way: On More Than A Few Exciting Moments, Frank O'Toole played a mono mix of "Savoy Truffle" by the Beatles, then audio from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, then modern electronic music by David Holmes. Without the spoken Birds audio, the shift from the Beatles organic sound to the mechinized sound of Holmes would be jarring, but this audio opens a gap into which Frank can effectively insert any texture he wants.
On Underwater Theme Park, Meghan used three songs with different sounds but the same name, "Palestine." Hear how the middle eastern tinge of Gokh-Bi-System transitions into the psychedelia of Gong, then the punk guitar roar of Autonumadic. The connection might not be instantly apparent to the ear, but listen with the shared title in mind, and the thread shines more brightly.
Listen to Stan's show, on in the middle of the night, and his selections are often geared to work on the half-awake subconscious. Here, he plays the quiet guitar sound of Just Others, followed by the even softer "Easy On Your Eyes," 1970's-like soft-pop given modern jazzy revision by the Aluminum Group. You can listen actively and dissect each detail, or let the music seep in with your mind on sleepy auto pilot. The tracks could work together any time of day, but the early morning still and dark lend a dreamy nuance to Stan's work.
Nat Roe's show is even more custom fit for it's 3-6am time slot. He spends this time mixing any music he pleases, such as this set of the Top 100 Of 1987 or his Smooth Jazz For Special Night Moods. His raw material is not the point. The shimmering layers here are the stuff of your most fluid dreams, a reality that is impossible in conventional song structure, or waking hours. Nat's work is as shape-shifting as the dark you sleep in, as surreal as the mind leaving the constraints of time and space.
Fri Oct 7: Sinner's Crossroad's Kevin Nutt will be DJing a set or two of gospel / soul / rocksteady 45s at El Rey Burrito Lounge in Montgomery, Alabama (1031 East Fairview Ave) for the El Rey Burrito Lounge's Oktoberfest 2011. Kevin will personally spring for one of El Rey's famous, deadly margaritas to any WFMU-sters in the area who show up.
Sat Oct 15: Music Director Brian Turner DJ's on Saturday, October 15th at NEON MARSHMALLOW, an experimental/electronic 3-day fest happening at Public Assembly 70 N. 6th Street in Williamsburg.Info and lineup (which includes over the three days Rhys Chatham, Phill Niblock, Grouper, Tim Hecker and more) here.
Sat Oct 15: Mr. Fine Wine DJs at the Commodore (366 Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg)
Thurs Oct 20: Merging her love of art and music DJ Trouble will be spinning for the after party for Steven Harvey fine art projects at a new show called The Gap, about the relationship of what we see to what we know. There will be an opening at the gallery (208 Forsyth Street) from 6-8 and then a second opening starting at 9pm upstairs at 2A, (25 Avenue A at 2nd Street). Artists opening at the gallery include Sangram Majumdar, Stuart Shils and Kurt Knobesldorf.
Every Sunday, Dave the Spazz spins rock & roll records at Union Pool starting at 10pm (484 Union Ave at Meeker in Williamsburg Brooklyn) FREE.
Every Wednesday, Mr. Fine Wine spins soul 45s at Botanica (47 East Houston St.) 10 till late, free.
Too Much Information with Benjamen Walker was featured in a post on Rhizome on the topic of pseudonyms.
About.com interviewed former WFMU DJ and Wreck This Mess host Bart Plantegna about pirate radio.
Dave Mandl, who in one of his lives is a member of the writers' collective the Unbearables, has a piece about topless bars in the new anthology "The Unbearables Big Book of Sex." Dave encourages you to buy the book, but you can read his essay here for free, A Boob Stamping on a Human Face Forever. Dave also did a long interview with conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith (otherwise known as WFMU's Kenny G.) for the current issue of The Believer magazine. You can read it online here.
Currently on-WFMU-hiatus DJ Trent has gathered a bunch of mixtapes in one place for your free downloading pleasure at http://djtrent.com/mixtapes. The latest one came out this week and it's called Had to Make the Song Cry. Enjoy!
Noah teamed up with Get On Down to produce his latest re-issue. The Definitive Arthur Russell Sleeping Bag Recordings vinyl box set (also available on CD). The collection contains the Dinosaur L "24 -> 24 Music", Felix, Indian Ocean, Bonzo Goes To Washington and Sounds Of JHS 126 Brooklyn. Unpublished photos from Janette Beckman with liner notes, additional artwork, testimonials all housed in a screen printed box! Here's more information. Check out a video of the silk screening process for the box.
Fabio is included in an exhibition in Philadelphia called The Big Idea: An Exhibition of Work Concerning Failure, October 1 to October 29 at Little Berlin, 2430 Coral Street, Saturdays 12 to 5 and by appointment.
Bob Brainen celebrated his 34th anniversary on the air at WFMU last month by playing his first show from on September 8th, 1977. Hear it here.
DJ/Rupture (Jace Clayton) from Mudd Up interviewed Paul Octavian Nasca, the guy who wrote the 'Bieber stretch' software, for this article in Frieze (on slow music).
The Embarrassment were an unlikely group. Formed in Wichita, KS, in 1979, they sounded every bit a coastal or foreign post-punk band, one that might've shaken hands with the Feelies (NJ), Mission of Burma (MA) or Monochrome Set (UK) -- contempo units that shared the same aptitude for nervous, twitchy songs, albeit in much more populous and liberal burgs in the U.S. and abroad.
But the Embos called Wichita home, and their location didn't slow them down a damn bit. Because if their area didn't have a scene calling for such original music, they'd just build one. Which they basically did.
"At the time, the local scene -- it was kind of ours to create," explains guitarist Bill Goffrier today. "And the people who came to see us early on were sort of arty, intellectual types."
Most of those arty, intellectual types came from local universities. Some were wayward high schoolers. Some were general outsiders. A few had their own bands, like the Mortal Micronotz and Get Smart!, who hailed from nearby Lawrence, KS.
Of the three mentioned, the Embos were the first to release a single: 1980's "Sex Drive" b/w "Patio Set." Their debut 45 was a smart, minimal, oblique slab of double entendres and angular guitar chug. And it was, like most great r'n'r, an ingenious mix of caveman, troubador and horndog.
In the case of the Embarrassment, it was also an accomplished stride forward from a promising new gang of smartasses. "And we were proud of making that step," says Goffrier. "We had a lot of missteps leading up to that, so the single was kind of a milestone."
It remains a milestone today: one of the Great Plains' coolest forays into cracked post-punk territory. Last Laugh Records will reissue the single early next month. You can contact the label here to get your own.
WFMU presents a live performance by radio legend Joe Frank on Friday, October 28th at 8pm. Tickets are selling fast, so hit this page to get yours before the event sells out. Joe's appearance opens our first-ever RadioVision Festival, Oct 28-30, to be held upstairs from the Record Fair at Manhattan's Metropolitan Pavilion.
Give the Drummer Some's
Favorite Downloads from the MP3 Blogosphere
Hunting for music is pretty much a constant enterprise for me these days. In an effort to supply my weekly Motherlodes, twice-weekly radio shows and the 24-hour webstream Give the Drummer Radio (listen), I now spend more time scouring music blogs than I care to admit. If, like me, you try to keep tabs on a long list of music-sharing sites, I can't recommend highly enough the use of an aggregating device to manage the madness.
There may well be a better tool out there, but I'm satisfied with Google's Reader, through which I regularly follow nearly 500 blogs. Google Reader is RSS-feed aggregator that pulls all new posts from blogs you've subscribed to into one location. Instead of carpal tunneling your way from blog to blog in search of audible treasure, simply add each new blog you discover to the Reader's subscription manager and let the blog posts come to you. Every time a blog publishes a new post, the item shows up in the Reader's window. If the item is of no interest, simply disregard it. If you can't live without it, you can click right over to the original post. If it appears worth a later look, "star" the item and it gets saved in a special queue.
I'm actually rather proud of myself. You see, for the first time in over a year I've reduced the number of posts in my reader's "starred items" queue below the 10,000 mark! That represents ten thousand downloadable albums—going back well over a year—that I'm pretty sure I'm going to want to add to my hard drive. (OK, forget most of what I said about managing the madness.) Getting as backed up as I have could be a problem, especially since so many blogs and their DL links are getting deleted on a daily basis. One brilliant feature of the Reader is that it captures the cached page of blogs you subscribe to, so even if a blog has been deleted, you may still have access to its pages and links. This little trick has saved me countless times.
Of course you could decide to eschew all this and leave the blog slogging to me. No sweat. Just be sure to visit the Motherlode every Wednesday to see what's popped up in my reader. (And be sure to get on the mailing list for my newsletter in which I share additional download links not included here.)
Method to the madness...
Sly Stone ~ "Recorded in San Francisco: 1964-67"
(Blog: Hippy Djkit)
Camper-Van Beethoven
"Early works from Sly. Rare issue on Sculpture label with many early singles during 1964-67 in San Francisco, pulls together a mixture of pre-Sly and the Family Stone efforts. Sly used many electronic gadgets including clavinet, and essential drum breaks and organ on the cut "Rock Dirge." In terms of quality the ten tracks cover a wide spectrum, ranging from the surprisingly good "Take My Advice" and the unique Broadway-meets-rock "Life of Future & Fame" to the interesting 1950s flavored instrumental "Hi Love," a cover of Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man'' and the raw demo "Rock Dirge." Sly's spoken work cover of "Deck of Cards," "I Ain't Got Nobody" was eventually released as the first Sly and the Family Stone single." (DJ Fanis, at Hippy Djkit)
Various ~ "Bulawayo Jazz"
(Blog: Freedom Blues)
The Mind Is a Terrible thing to Waste
"The Bulawayo sound centered on the alto sax playing lead, usually as part of a front line that included tenor sax and trumpet. Strummed banjos and acoustic guitars, double bass or tubas and trombones playing the bass parts, and occasionally pianos and violins, made up the rest of the ensembles. Jazz aficionados may hear echoes of early New Orleans and Kansas City styles in some of the tracks. But the raw material is African folk music or original compositions based on traditional sources, not the blues and Tin Pan Alley pop tunes that fed early American jazz. This is distinctly African jazz, as fans of later artists like the South African saxophonist Dudu Pukwana will immediately recognize." (From a review by George De Stefano, at RootsWorld)
Augustyn Bloch ~ "Unusual Sounds: The Brain"
(Blog: Continuo's Weblog)
This Is Your Brain, on Vinyl
"Subtitled 'The Brain,' [this] second volume, published 1982, collects short sound experiments in the field of contemporary music and musique concrète. Traditional acoustic instruments like piano, flute, trumpet and percussion, are mingled into an unsettling sonic brewage thanks to primitive electronic devices and radical sound treatments. Bloch favors inside the piano playing and percussion sounds from the piano’s structure, while flute parts are usually graced with generous doses of reverb. Several tracks use heavily slowed down or distorted metronome sounds, in a kind of Pierre Schaeffer abstract études from the 1950s – the same process is applied to shrilling cat meows on track #15. Elsewhere, seriously paranoid synthesizer interjections reinstate the menacing atmosphere pervading in the track titles, while some piano parts recall Krzysztof Komeda’s Rosemary’s Baby soundtrack. A fantastic LP, by any standard." (Commentary by Continuo)
Jun Togawa ~ "Togawa Legend Self Select Best & Rare 1979-2008"
(Blog: The Incessant Noise)
She Survived Guernica
"There is a feeling I've had ever since childhood: that there exist many different "worlds" and I was born in the wrong one, a world I don't quite fit into. I've felt this strong feeling of wrongness all through my life. There is no space for me in this world. Every time I believe I've finally found my place, someone comes to me and says "Go away! You're not supposed to be here." I mean, I have always had this kind of feeling. I had a lot of trouble communicating with other children. The discipline was extremely strict in my family. I was not allowed go out freely with friends. So, I tried not to make friends. If I did, because I couldn't play with them outside like a normal child they would hate me. This made me turn away from the ordinary life of a child even more. The world of music and theater is what I finally came to live in." (From an interview with Jun here)
Vincent Gémignani ~ "Modern Pop Percussion"
(Blog: Free Défendu)
Everything But the Kitschy Sink
"These tracks were written for the Comédie Française for performances of the French adaptation of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" a the first Chateauvallon theatre festival in 1970, under the direction of J. Gilbert. This session was interprated with the help of the best french musicians and was recorded on vinyl." (Comment left at Discogs.com )
Listen to my radio show Give the Drummer Some—Tuesdays 6-7pm, on WFMU and Fridays 9 to noon—on WFMU's web stream Give the Drummer Radio.
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Check out every installment of Mining the Audio Motherlode
Jemaa El Fna has for centuries been an integral and vibrant part of the unique culture of Marrakesh. This Moroccan square, whose name can be translated to mean "the mosque of death," or "the rendezvous of the dead," is a historic gathering place, and with the marketplace, array of cafes, and constant, ever-changing stream of performers, from snake charmers to fortune tellers, is an always-bustling part of Marrakesh today. Sublime Frequencies's "Ecstatic Music of the Jemaa El Fna" provides lasting documentation of the local musicians who frequent the square, and of the blistering and beautiful music they make there every day.
Troupe Majidi, "Essiniya (Nass El Ghiwane)"
"Ecstatic Music" was recorded live by Hisham Mayet in 2005, and features the performance of songs taken from the Moroccan pop music canon by Troupe Majidi, Amal Saha, and Mustapha Mahjoub. Each track is recorded live, in Jemaa El Fna, with instruments powered by car batteries and amplified by megaphone speakers. In stark contrast to the incredibly precise, heavily-mastered studio recordings of Arabic music that circulate most frequently, each track on "Ecstatic Music of Jemaa El Fna" provides a heady, aggressive, and paired-down mix of thumping rhythms, fuzzy vocals, and piercing mandolin and banjo strings.
Amal Saha, "Lahmami (Nass El Ghiwane)"
Mustapha Mahjoub, "Tal Raibak Arzali (Cheb Hosni)"
With calls from the audience distinctly heard in Mustapha Mahjoub's "Tal Raibak Arzali (Cheb Hosni)" to the raucous hand-clapping and whistling of the gathered crowd during Amal Saha's "Lahmami (Nass El Ghiwane)," each song is felt to be not simply entertainment, but rather the product of a participatory group performance.
The tracks are crunchy, raw, and incredibly emotional. Each song is catchy and just plain fun; taken all together, though, "The Ecstatic Music of Jemaa El Fna" is a perfect representation of just why live music is so exciting, regardless of the time or place. The album has the personal and liberating quality of a spontaneous field-recording, with the content and quality of a studio album. The title of the album is particularly fitting; you can't help but feel ecstatic listening to these communal and free celebrations of music. Even without being physically present, the urgency and excitement of these Marrakesh musicians and their audiences is transmitted through each piece, making "The Ecstatic Music of Jemaa El Fna" the dazzling album that it is.
I made a quick visit to Seattle's Experience Music Project not long ago. The current main exhibit is titled: NIRVANA: Taking Punk To The Masses, and coincides with the 20th birthday of the band's Nevermind record. The exhibit not only has tons of Nirvana memorabilia, but is really a goldmine of great music sources from that same period of time. The facility is right next to Seattle's Space Needle (it's that dented looking brass thing to the right of it), and is full of cool exhibits having to do with music and film. Here's a giant guitar sculpture that lifts 35 feet into the air like a stringed cyclone. In the lobby they were showing parts of the movie Avatar, but the filming was of the actors pretending to fly, pre-special effects. Interesting the prep involved and the faux wetsuits they wore that tracked their body movement so it would be easier to morph them with their rendered additions (wings, dragons, etc.) at a later time. Something about it reminded me of a short I saw once that was the filming of the dubbing of Poltergeist. It was a hilarious process
actually. You'd think that dubbing a film is at least some kind of large production? That is what I thought and I was certainly proven wrong. Imagine a group of people sitting in a room all on folding chairs facing a screen. On the screen is a tickertape of words going by, and the lines spoken by each actor are in a different color and run across the screen in a different vertical position. The voice actors focus on their lines and stand up and shout them at the screen. There is a condenser microphone mounted in front of the screen in a central location. People were standing up, saying their lines, and sitting back down. They weren't watching the movie - it wasn't even playing! They all had scripts on their laps and were facing forward as if they were forced to. When the movie got a little nutty, those people were standing up, shouting their lines at this screen full of text, and quickly sitting back down again. It was surreal and deflating all at once- not exactly glamorous! It may be the same kind of activity going on at the stock market right now, and you know I'm not gonna go there!
Continue reading "The Best of the Northwest - Joe Preston and Seattle's EMP" »
Alvie Self - We Miss You Marty Robbins (3:15)
Here's Alvie Self's Marty Robbins tribute 45, We Miss You Marty Robbins. Last time we heard from Alvie here on Beware Of The Blog, he was running down dirty hippies. So he loved Marty Robbins and despised hippies...my kind of guy!
Robbins died in 1982, but if he were still with us he'd be cutting a slice of his 86th birthday cake today. Self held back on releasing his tribute to Marty for over five years after his death, so his sincerity seems beyond question. It's certainly not like he was attempting to cash in on a recent tragedy.
About a year ago when I was in Nashville, I hit the library and looked up Marty Robbins in an old city directory. Below is a photo of the house in which he lived in 1966, located at 807 Redwood Drive, a few miles south of downtown Nashville. Google map.
Here's an hour long teaser of the datadump I'll be unloading on this blog in the next few weeks. Listeners of my radio show know I've been obsessed with Hugo Keesing's Chartsweep of every #1 hit for too long now. After I made an homage to his work with a sweep of every #1 easy listening hit, I really saw the need in our society to have every large database of music cutup into tiny, bite sized pieces, but realized I didn't have the time to do it. So now that unix has turned 42 (happy b-day, big guy!!), I wrote a little patch using SoX to grab the hook from every mp3 in a folder and stich em together.
While pretty much everybody can identify and appreciate the hook from any individual song (it's the one part you remember of that song you hadn't heard in years!), definining the hook concretely is a tricky problem. It's usually the title of the song, but not always. It's usually at the beginning or end of the chorus, but not always. So when I wanted to teach a computer to grab the hook of a song I had to ask the deep question, what is the hookiness of these hooks?
With no real answer, my cheapskate workaround is that the hook of the song is almost always simply the LOUDEST part of the song. Super easy to teach a computer to do that, since an mp3 is nothing but a list of how loud sound is at a given time.
Yes, it's true, in this Darwinian yelling match that births the concept of a "hit song", there's no room for saving the hook for a quiet, subtle moment in the song. I'd go so far to say that any song that DOESN'T put the hook at the loudest part of the song is possibly communist. So even though these chartsweeps aren't nearly as pristine as Hugo Keesings, but they do get the point across pretty well. And as an added bonus, this program weeds out those songs that are immoral and unamerican.
I'll be posting a decade of chartsweeps every...eh, week or so, in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
I saw 'em explode once. So did many others. It was a sold-out show. May of '09. Opening for a reunited Chrome Cranks. Glasslands: place is packed with good-time misanthropes ready for a prime piece. Foursome lurks onstage, nary an introduction. Ratchets volume up to red levels. Volleys out waves of great, green ugly noise. It laps at the shore of the crowd for all of four songs. Then Ryan Skeleton Boy whips his bass at a wall, the other two gents drop their guitars, and drummer and all stalk to a dark corner offstage admist a glorious feedback serenade.
"I had people tell me that was our best show," says guitarist/vocalist Kristian Brenchley. "It was a lotta fun."
Fun, sure. Memorable, yeah. Volatile, you bet. A stellar display.
And an atypical one. Because beyond premature explosions and mere volatility, the band is actually a sort of machine -- a black paisley mash of Aussie dark-day rock (Scientists, feedtime), '80s Midwestern knuckle-drag (Drunks with Guns, first Vertigo 45) and LES dirt (Pussy Galore). Their din's bent by the metallic thud of Skeleton Boy's bass, tangled up in a caustic two-way guitar cacaphony of Brenchley and Brett Schultz, grounded -- but just barely -- by Alex Velasquez's thudding drum. When they're not tossing instruments at concrete walls, when they're just as focused as they are loud and unhinged, WOMAN are probably one of the better bands in the NYC area. Largely because they dare to keep this area scummy. Or at least celebrate when it once was.
As evinced by "When the Wheel's Red," culled from their self-titled LP on Bang! Records (2009), this foursome means it. And they're currently recording tracks for their follow-up album, which, judging from their live show, is going to be a good one.
Speaking of the live show, these gents are heading to Yurp in October. Be sure to catch 'em, because since vocalist/guitarist Schultz moved to Mexico City, they don't play as often as they once did. There's no telling when they might finally explode for good. Go forth:
This week I'll pair tracks from archives that work well together.
Daniel Blummin played "I Just Don't Know How To Say Goodbye." by Sandy Salisbury from 1969. The track was produced by Gary Usher, and mixes late-60's California pop with a cosmic cowboy, late Byrds feel. Listen to this next to Phil Ochs' "Pleasures of the Harbor" played by Irwin. Ochs' sad voice separates the track from Salisbury's--and is part of what made Ochs' a fixture on early FM radio. But both tracks combine the rustic with the baroque.
Lanie Lane's cover of Willie Dixon's "Hoochie Coochie Man," made famous by Muddy Waters, was played on 100% Whatever by Mary Wing. Lane's performance, done only on a hollow-body guitar, is music stripped to essentials. "Radio," by Nick Drake, played on Shrunken Planet by Jeffrey Davison, has more dexterous picking, making the track almost jazzy, but has the same bare bones texture.
Here's a texture you rarely hear in jazz: Bagpipes!-- played by Rufus Harley on "Scotch And Soda," selected by Monica. You may think the static, nasal tone of the pipes wouldn't work in jazz, but Harley's soloing swings as hard as that of John Coltrane, Bud Powell, or Don Ellis. Now, listen to Harley's sandpaper texture next to the steely guitars of The Monk's "Love Came Tumblin Down", played by Scott Williams.-
On Mudd Up! DJ/Rupture played the Curtis Mayfield produced "Hard Times" by Baby Huey, which Rupture comments has been "sampled to death." True, but independently, it is fantastic soul blues. The tension it sets up can be relieved by a melodic track, such as Astrud Gilberto's take on Chicago Transit Authority's "Beginnings," recorded on September 17 1969, and played by Therese.
Tony Coulter here, bringing you a special follow-up post. Last year -- on tax day, no less -- I posted a few tracks on BotB by the mysterious cassette underground outfit known as The Larry Mondello Band (these can be heard here). At the time I had little to say about the group, because, frankly, I knew nothing -- despite owning and treasuring five of their cassettes. In the interim I managed to track down one of the group's two founders and mainstays, Steve Defoe, and with his generous help I now bring you the definitive Larry Mondello Band post. I've decided to simply let him tell the story, which you'll find in his words after the jump, along with tracks from each of their releases, photos, and artwork.
Every program on WFMU is a unique mixture of loam and silt, manure and peat, each lovingly tended to to bring the finest harvest of ephemera, flotsam and mixed metaphor that can be guaranteed. In this installment, Dave Mandl explains what makes his garden grow.
Some WFMU DJs spend days preparing a show. They think about it all week, make notes, put select records from their collection aside in advance, plan exact sets, or even work out precise segues well ahead of time. Some DJs come down to the station with long, painstakingly assembled lists, so virtually all they need to do when they arrive here is mechanically pull each of those CDs or LPs from the wall and they’re all set. Some do their entire show from their personal collection, so they can step out of the elevator two minutes before airtime and stroll into the studio with three full crates of records, confident and ready to go. These DJs produce some of the best radio in the world.
I do things a little differently. I don’t prepare days in advance. I never make lists. I grab maybe a dozen of my own records and CDs (often fewer) just before I leave the house. To be honest, I haven’t got the faintest idea what my show’s going to sound like at that point, and five minutes before showtime I’ve still got almost no idea.
What I do do is pull almost my entire show, on the fly, from the walls of WFMU’s main library and New Bin in the few hours before I go on the air. The way I do this is the same every week. I pick a section of the library (say, the P section of CDs) and flip, flip, flip through each individual disc till I find a couple of things that (a) I’ve never heard before but look interesting or (b) I do know, and strike me as something I happen to feel like playing that day. Then I go to another section of the library (say, the Ws, or the film soundtracks) and do it again, then again. Occasionally I’ll think, “Hmmm, I haven’t played Care of the Cow in a while,” in which case I’ll go over to the C section, grab I Still Don’t Know Your Style, and toss it on the pile. But that’s the exception. For the most part I just go through the library as if I’ve never seen it before, flip through individual discs, and pull things one by one with absolutely no plan. For the discs in the resulting stack that I’m not at all familiar with (and there are always a few of those), I’ll then give them a quick listen to see whether they’re any good, and a lot of those will go right back in the wall. Then I flip through some more sections. I’m finished when it’s time to go on the air, and lo and behold, I’ve got a pool of maybe 75 records and CDs broadly representing how I happen to be feeling that evening. This is a s-l-o-w and tortuous process, and it’s why I prefer to arrive at the station a good four hours before airtime.
I’ve gone through this painful procedure week after week, year after year, for one reason: I hate preparing shows. Not because I have ADD (though as a matter of fact I do), but because improvising is what, um, gets me off. I’m a writer and a musician, and yes, I have spent time getting articles just right or perfecting bass parts, but not much time. In the unlikely event that I were to spend more than a couple of days working on a piece of writing, I’d probably hate the result. As for playing bass, one of the reasons (among others) that I could never play in a traditional pop or country band is that I’m constitutionally unable to play the same thing every day. The world needs those reliable soldiers who can provide predictable, rock-solid bass parts to the same songs night after night, but I’m not one of them. Over time in my musical career I naturally drifted toward the free-improvisation world, but long before then I was screwing with pop songs by improvising over boring chord changes on the spot wherever and whenever I could get away with it. What I need to do is come up with a brilliant riff or rhythm for this section of this song in this set RIGHT NOW.
But back to radio: The same way it would be torture going on stage knowing exactly what notes I was going to play for the next forty minutes, it would be utterly joyless for me to go into the studio and roll out three hours of music according to a pre-planned script. There’s nothing wrong with doing that, mind you; a great set is a great set, and there’s usually no way anyone listening can tell whether it took a DJ two hours or two months to put together a particular show: In other words, it’s not you, it’s me. But as far as I’m concerned, the fun of doing a show is seeing the CD counter tick down (00:17, 00:16, 00:15…) and having to come up with something now that is going to work absolutely perfectly when this current track ends. At any point in my show I can pretty much guarantee that I have no idea what the next song is going to be. As for the next set: forget it.
At the risk of veering into New Age territory (and there’s no one less New Age than I am), I tend to be in an almost trance-like state while I build my sets. It’s all done so quickly and under so much pressure that there’s almost no “thought” put into it—or, to be more accurate, there’s a lot of thought, but it usually has to happen in the space of 20 seconds to a minute. Doing a set that I’m truly proud of under those conditions is my reward, and I have to say, it borders on magic. Still, my mental state on the air is such that if I weren’t typing everything I was playing into a web page as the show progressed, I probably wouldn’t remember much of it an hour later. As a matter of fact, people often ask me the day after a show, “Hey, what did you play last night?” and it’s rare that I can name more than four tracks or so. I’ll usually have to go to the online playlist to see the set lists. This is not an exaggeration.
It’s not lost on me how similar this is to what I did when I was actively playing live gigs as a bassist. Of course I always had a sense of whether a show had been basically good or bad, as all musicians do, but after every one of them I’d have to go home and listen to the recording to find out what I’d played that night—and, mind you, these are gigs where I was playing songs, not doing free improvisation. It was usually only then that, if I were lucky, I’d become aware of some clever fill I’d pulled out of thin air during the set, and think, “Heh, that was pretty cool.”
(Photo: David Weinberg)
