WFMU's Beware of the Blog

La Düsseldorf - Rheinita (video)

This is a very weird version of La Düsseldorf's hit "Rheinita", apparently a rehearsal for the German TV show "Szene 79" with host Thomas Gottschalk (who seems weirdly out of place introducing a bunch of tripping Electro-Krautrockers.) I am not sure if this was ever broadcast.

YouTube: [link]

There is a Quicktime version of this clip on La Düsseldorf's website, but the quality is not much better: [link]

Devo - Private Secretary (video)

Another rare musical treasure, brought to you by the Internet via some bad VHS tape... Early Devo playing "Private Secretary" at Kent State in 1973.

YouTube: [link]

Trude Herr - Ich will keine Schokolade (video)

Here is a great clip from 1965, German actress and singer Trude Herr singing her 1960 hit "Ich will keine Schokolade" (I don't want chocolate).

YouTube: [link]

Sparklehorse - It's A Wonderful Life (Guy Maddin video)

After having recently seen my first Guy Maddin film, the wonderful and disturbing Brand Upon The Brain!, I stumbled upon this music video he did for the Sparklehorse song It's A Wonderful Life, as part of the Sundance Channel's Sonic Cinema.

In case you wonder about the instrumentation, Mark Linkous plays both an Optigan and a Chamberlin in this song.

YouTube: [link]

Vanya Schroeder - Last Year in Marienbad (video)

This is a two-minute summary of Alain Resnais' and Alain Robbe-Grillet's enigmatic arthouse classic L'Année dernière à Marienbad. In contrast to the original, this work  by Vanya Schroeder is in color, and the actors are toys. It is nearly perfect, only the creepy organ music is missing.

YouTube: [link]

Baby Zizanie (MP3)

Baby Zizanie was one of the many projects of J.G.Thirlwell (of Foetus), this one a collaboration with Jim Coleman (ex-Cop Shoot Cop), active from 2002 to 2003. Back then they played several gigs, among them a live session on Fabio's show on WFMU (Real Audio | Playlists), and released the 12" mini-LP Domestic Landscapes #3: Thalassaphobia on the Nail label in Italy in a limited edition of 500 copies. Later they recorded one more track for the Domestic Landscapes CD compilation on Nail, and then they disappeared.

According to J.G. Thirlwell, a Baby Zizanie anthology at some point in the future is possible, let's hope that this will eventually materialize. In the meantime, he has kindly given his permission to post one track from Thalassaphobia: Baby Zizanie - Milky Rise (MP3)

By the way, the word "thalassaphobia" is apparently a misspelling of "thalassophobia", which according to Wikipedia is "an intense, irrational and persistent fear of the sea".

Craig Baldwin - The 70s Dimension (video)

This is a cut-up of 70s music videos from the DVD extras for Craig Baldwin's film "Sonic Outlaws" about Negativland, U2, John Oswald, The Tape-Beatles, culture-jamming, copyright etc. YouTube: [link]

You should also check out this great interview with Craig from Steal This Film II (which you can download in its entirety from the official site.)

Shirin Neshat - Turbulent (video)

This 1998 video installation was directed by Iranian-American visual artist and director Shirin Neshat. The singers are played by Shoja Azari (though the voice is that of Shahram Nazeri) and the amazing vocalist and composer Sussan Deyhim. If you want to watch the same video on YouTube, go here: [link] And to help you make sense of it all, here is a great essay about the piece by director Atom Egoyan: [link].

Just this year, Shirin Neshat won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival for her feature film debut "Women Without Men", co-directed by Shoja Azari (who also wrote the screenplay).

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.