Word has it that some of you Maniacs have been looking for Wayne Butane's hilariously profane kooky kristmas kut-up in the handy popular mp3 format in all it's 12-minute glory. I figgured, well, if I'm going to post it, might as well post a whole mess of other holiday themed sound collages. These are some of the must-haves, the classics, mostly from the Golden Age of Mashups, the 2000s. Not included: anything featured on djBC's series of "Santastic" comps (number 8 just came out) since they are all still available. "A Mutated Christmas", likewise is also still in print, thru illegalart. And don't forget People Like Us' "Sounds of Christmas." But that still leaves plenty. Many of the "biggest" names in the field are featured here, but the ultimate just might be "All Your Christmases" which is nothing more than 7-and-a-half minutes of the word "christmas" taken from inumerable old xmas records artfully strung together, courtesy of Australia's Alias Frequencies. It's so great, and so annoyingly evil, bwa ha ha!
01 cassetteboy - xxxxmas 02 Voicedude - Here Comes Santa Claus In Black (Elvis Presley Vs. AC/DC ) 03 The Kleptones - Bling Crosby 04 The Bran Flakes - Lovely Sleigh Ride 05 Satan's Little Helper - All your Xmases 06 Evolution Control Committee - The Christmas Wrong 07 My Favorite Things (PISs covering Negativland) 08 A Very Special Wayne Butane Christmas 09 V/Vm (Michael Jackson vs Paul McCartney) - Simply 10 The Bran Flakes - Here Comes Santa 11 cuechamp - 942003 (Nutcracker vs Daft Punk) 12 BigBadBaz - Christmas in Compton 13 Jima vs George W. Bush - The Night Before Christmas 14 JoolsMF (BuenaVista vs Beatles vs DrDre) - Havana Good Christmas 15 Gordyboy - bam bam the Cavalry (Toots and the Maytalls vs Jonie Lewis) 16 BuG - 12 boots of xmasx 17 Culturcide - Depressed Christmas 18 BRAT Productions - Chemical Christmas 19 fukjamum - Hankys Park Minimix 20 rx - Happy RxMas & a Whole Lotta Love 21 John Oswald - White (plus: hideous bonus track!)
"Trout Mask Replica"..."Eskimo"...The Shaggs...any such list is now incomplete without a mention ofFive Starcle Men's "Gomba Reject Ward Japan." Coherent biographical info on this band is hard to come by, but apparently Five Starcle Men were two nuts in the '90s making low-fi (presumably) home recordings out in the desert town of Lancaster, CA. Or maybe they were from Austin, Texas. Or maybe they heard the works of those two town's most famous loonies, Capt Beefheart, and The Butthole Surfers, and said: "That's nuthin; get a load of this," and proceeded to lay down 28 tracks over the course of a few years that in comparison makes Ween sound like Journey.
At first, it may come off as a couple of stoners' self-indulgent mucking about on a Teac four-track, and there may be some truth to that, but keep listening, and one starts to wonder if there may be some genuine insanity at work here (apparently, one of the members killed himself, thus ending this band's "career.") Every sound is warped beyond recognition, lyrics range from unintelligible jabbering to surreal nonsense, samples and tapes loop themselves into delirium, unnatural rhythms pound away, all adding up to a mind-melting experience. Some "songs" sound like they were made up on the spot, many are less than 30 seconds long, and a surprisingly high amount of the tracks are really quite good. Play this for over 99% of the population (even those who consider themselves "alternative"), and they will probably will scrunch up their face and say, "What are you listening to?!" Free listening/download here: Five Starcle Men "Gomba Reject Ward Japan" courtesy of 'net-label Lost Frog, who have also blessed us with releases by R. Stevie Moore, The Happy Flowers, Animals Within Animals, Big City Orchestra, and some people who make noise music out of bicycles.
John F. Kennedy inspired a lot of music. This is some of the weirdest. Song-poems! A Frank Zappa composed/produced surf record! A singing psychic! Mexican music! And all 6 tracks from the great "Sing Along With JFK" album that featured pre-sampling tape manipulations of Jack's voice "remixed" with original music and a vocal chorus. You've heard of musique concrete? This is musique ridicule.
1. George Atkins and Hank Levine: Begin Anew For Two (from "Sing Along With JFK") 2. George Atkins and Hank Levine: Let Us Begin Beguine 3. George Atkins and Hank Levine: Alliance For Progress Bossa Nova 4. George Atkins and Hank Levine: Ask Not Waltz 5. George Atkins and Hank Levine: The Trumpet 6. George Atkins and Hank Levine: Let The Word Go Forth 7. Los Conquistadores: Homenaje a John F. Kennedy 8. Brian Lord & The Midnighters: The Big Surfer (written/produced by Frank Zappa, recorded in his Cucamunga studio, 1963) 9. Frances Baskerfield, "The Singing Psychic" - The Grassy Knoll 10. Johnny Tucker - Mr. Kennedy 11. Mike Macharyas - Lee Harvey Oswald (from the 2005 album "Ashlee Simpson" in which all Macharyas does is repeat famous peoples names over and over; he has 17 albums of this insanity) 12. Lee Roy Abernathy: John F. Kennedy The Greatest Of All (like the Johnny Tucker song, this is an indie country/folk record, but this guy seems really worried about Texas' reputation as much as anything else) 13. Norm Burns and the Five Stars: John F. Kennedy Was Called Away 14. Norm Burns and the Five Stars: John F. Kennedy's Election Race (Song-poems! This one's the more inept/funnier of the two)
Thanks for some of these to WFMU's Beware of the Blog, and master blogger Bob Purse.
They say there's no such thing as a free lunch. Yeah, well, "they" say all kinds of crap, don't they? What do you call all of these free/name-your-price audio feasts? Damn tasty, that's what you call 'em. And so I fling open the doors of the M4M diner and its' all-you-can-listen-to buffet:
Hanetration "Timelapse" EP - I quite liked this ambient oddball's previous releases, but at first I wasn't so sure about this one: the opener "Moon" has a nice head-nodding riddim that is at odds with a somewhat annoying amateur violin. But the next track is a minute-and-a-half of niceness, and then we get to this EP's centerpiece: "Opal" starts off with a compellingly off-kilter rhythm made by no known drums, and slowly, subtly increases in complexity and texture. Excellent. The closing track "Sleep" is a 7 minute long dystopian industrial ambient nightmare - very well done, but if you value peaceful sleep I don't know if you'd want to listen to it much.
Buttress O'Kneel's "Applied Metapop" is another action-packed thrill-ride from this mad sample-smasher's series of plunderphonic parties. I marvel at how B'o'K can take the lowest form of Top 40 manure and use it as mulch to grow great, big, loud mutant killer plants. This latest album even makes me listen to that "Gangland Style" song or whatever it's called, and like it. Bowie gets a sex change, Eno's "Baby's On Fire" might finally be the dance-club smash it always deserved to be, the "Breaking Bad" theme gets mashed, and is that the rantings of Francis E. Dec mixed in with Fela and "Yackety Sax"?
And dig these individual tracks:
The fate of "Flakes The Bunny", the stand-out track on Philip Stranger's new EP "Miscolab," makes me laff only the way an accordion-and-steel-drum bit of retarded nonsense like this can. If Mr. Stranger & Co. could concoct a whole album of this kinda thing, we might have a Bonzo Dog Band for our times. Or at least a They Might Be Giants.
Peopling "Live Session - Dandelion Radio": This EP by a New York noise-meister boasts the super-swell song "Which is Width," which features distorted vox & crunching rhythms topped w/bloopy Space Age electronics. (And "De Pelicula" is a fine instro drone, as well.)
Alen Robin, a comic with a droll, very nasal voice, took the Buchanan & Goodman "Flying Saucer" concept - intercutting found recordings with original comedy - and applied it to political speeches. His "Welcome To The LBJ Ranch" hit the top of the pops in the mid '60s, and can be found in approximately 84% of American thrift-stores.
This album continues the concept, with American politicos Humphrey, Thurmond, Rockefeller, Lindsay, Nixon, LBJ, Agnew, Buckley, Reagan, and Daley finding their voices ripped out of their original context, now making various bizarre and neurotic statements to Robin, playing their psychiatrist. It's still quite funny and clever, even if you don't know much about the speakers. Even more impressive: it's recorded live. Not sure how he did it in the days before laptop samplers. Maybe he had all the voices, and pauses allowing for him to speak, pre-recorded on a long tape. If so, his timing's amazing.
The above review was taken from my review of another Alen Robin album I posted few years back, with the names of of the sampled parties changed. There is one difference with this album, tho - the groovy psych rock of Billy Mure that abruptly cuts in and out of the funny faux-interviews.
Both sides of this album are pretty short (side two's only ten minutes long) so you just get two tracks here, one for each side:
Aren't ALL gifts 'free'? Isn't that what makes it a gift? Hey, if the advertisers and marketers of the world say it, then it must be true. So here's a goodie-bag of free inter-webular downloads that have grabbed my ears lately:
- A C Slate no r makes interesting sound collages by looping instrumental tracks as beds for spoken-word samples that are strung together in ways to suggest a kind of narrative. My faves are the apocalyptic "Angels Watching Over Me," and "$ money piano $," an examination of materialism. Check the tracks called 'tape stories.' Negativland fans will want to peep this. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Buttress K. O'Kneel has a new release that layers multiple versions of that most ultimate of classical music cliches, Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons." Any new music from this Australian outlaw is worth a notice, but this one represents a completely new direction, forgoing the usual breakcore mashup madness for a dizzying mix of wedding music, Steve Reich-like phase-shifting, and mind-fucking psychedelia:
Beethoven Dada - unfortunately only a minute-long clip. We want the whole thing! ----------------------------------------------------- - mw ensemble, a New York-based avant-classical crew, have a 40-second track for piano and vacuum cleaner that is, in fact, called "I, for piano and vacuum cleaner ~A." It is really quite cool. Available on this collection:
mw ensemble "6 Green Songs" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Music For The Muted is a German ambient/noise/drone combo with a new EP whose tracks all have numbers for names. I particularly like "7," seven minutes of slowly-growing dark clouds of electronic sound dramatically rolling across the sky; somewhat reminiscent of the "Forbidden Planet" soundtrack.
Soundcloud Mediafire ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- OH/EX/OHare seriously bringing the ambient/noise/drone thang. Str8 outta Manchester, this prolific artist traffics in some pretty dark 'n' spooky stuff at times. This name-your-price EP is suitably atmospheric:
The history of sampling the sounds of preachers is pretty much the history of sampling in general, as many of the most prominent names in sound collage, from the avant/electronic world to mashup/dance djs, have used 'em. And considering the classic status of so many of these tunes, how can you blame them? Passionate, loony, exciting, hilarious religious orators make for great (inadvertent) guest vocalists. The '80s industrial crowd, in particular, seemed particularly fond of this strategy. I remember reading (the L.A. Weekly, probably) around '87 or '88 that the sampling of preachers had officially become a cliche. No way - we weren't even half-way there yet! Part 2 takes us up thru the Internet/mashup era. [Preacher's name, if known, included in brackets.]
1 Steve Reich [Brother Walter] - It's Gonna Rain (Part II) [1965] 2 John Oswald [unknown preacher - R.W. Schambach maybe?] - Power [1975] 3 Brian Eno and David Byrne [Kathryn Kuhlman] - Into The Spirit Womb [1979] 4 Chris & Cosey [Dr Gene Scott] - Put Yourself In Los Angeles [1981] 5 Cabaret Voltaire [Dr Gene Scott] - Sluggin Fer Jesus (Part One) [1981] 6 Zoviet France [R.W. Schambach] - Ram [1984] 7 Adam Cornford and Daniel Crafts - Fundamentals [1985] 8 Tackhead - Mind At The End Of The Tether [1985] 9 Front 242 [R.W. Schambach] - Angst [1987] 10 Negativland [Rev. Estus Pirkle] - Christianity Is Stupid [1987] 11 John Adams/Edo De Waart: San Francisco Symphony Orchestra - Christian Zeal & Activity [composed in 1973/recorded 1987]
1 Praga Khan [R.W. Schambach] - Injected with a Poison [1991] 2 KMFDM - We Must Awaken [1992] 3 The Tape-Beatles - Home Problems [1993] 4 Lecture on Nothing - Truckload Of Bibles [1997] 5 Reality Engine - Blame The Kingdom Of God [1999] 6 Escape Mechanism - Worship [c. 1999-2001] 7 Fatboy Slim [Reverend W. Leo Daniels] - Drop The Hate [2000] 8 The Evolution Control Committee [Elder Marshall Taylor] - Don't Miss the Great Snatch [2003] 9 Celebrity Murder Party [12 year old preacher Rev William Hudson, III] - God vs the Gays [2007] 10 dj lobsterdust [Pastor Gary Greenwald] - It's Fun To Smoke Dust (Queen vs. Satan) [2009] 11 CutUpSound - God In a Linoleum Roll [recorded ?; released 2013]
I was amused to find out that two British acts, Chris & Cosey, and Cabaret Voltaire, both sampled L.A.'s infamous, frizzy-haired, cigar-chomping, foul-mouthed televangelist Dr Gene Scott. I wondered: how in the heck did they know about him? Turns out that Werner Herzog, no less, made a documentary about Scott called "God's Angry Man" in 1981 that provided much yucks (and sample fodder) for those wacky industrialists:
Making music out of music is common currency now (not so much back when this blog was founded and mashups were regularly featured), so sound-collage music has to really blow my mind to get me to pay attention to it nowadays.
Chief mind-blower of late is "Border Towns," an album by one Nick Brooke, a young avant-composer whose new album on Innova mixes a vocal choir with a mad brew of samples ranging from field recordings, to music, to radio dj chatter. It's all meant to drop the listener into the US/Mexico border realms. The m.o. of this album actually reminds me of the KLF's classic "Chill Out," which mixed numerous samples with electronic music to create a theoretical late-night cross-country drive across the southern U.S. Good luck trying to chill out to this album, tho - it's varied, dynamic, exciting, and a lot of fun. The idea of a choir is an odd choice, but works a treat. Sometimes they don't even sing, but do things like recite radio I.D.s with a straight-face ("more music...mas musica!")
Ergo Phizmiz and People Like Us are old pros, the deans of the collage college, but for a recent project, the music is all played and sung live. "The Keystone Cut Ups" is a multi-media show featuring all found video footage from black-and-white silent movies, mashing the more self-consciously anarchic works of the Surrealists with early Hollywood comedies. Numerous antique songs are suggested, and blended with others, and with original songs. New lyrics are sometimes sung over old tunes. Ergo told me "The only sampled bits are the bits from the films that pop over. Vicki [aka People Like Us] also did quite a lot of sound-effects on it." Live mashups, beautifully played and crooned on banjos, accordions, etc. Magical. There is a DVD of the show out that's on the top of my wish-list. The album can be downloaded thruillegal-art.
CutUp Sound is satirical sound-collage project only now coming to light, thanks to Rich at KillUglyRadio in Portland. He finally got his old pal Mr. CutupSound to go thru his tapes (some going perhaps as far back as the '80s) and put a career-spanning collection together. Lots of funny mass media/political/religious cut-ups in the Cassette Boy/Wayne Butane school of audio pranksterism, as well as some really impressive more musical tracks.
And finally, a completely ridiculous good old-fashioned A+B mashup by newcomer The Don Music Show, from Wisconsin. There's probably no artistic justification for this nonsense - I just wanna hear it loud when it's late and I'm drunk.
1. Ergo Phizmiz and People Like Us - Orchestra 2. CutupSound - It Is Called Radio 3. CutupSound - Breakfast 4. Nick Brooke - Del Rio 5. Nick Brooke - Columbus 6. The Don Music Sound - One Trek Beyond...
P.S.: Tim from Radio Clash (aka Instamatic, DJ NoNo, etc) has been putting up his '90s works from the days before he became a founding father of the British mashup scene. His Reality Engine release has a strange, creepy, and sometimes funny late-night atmosphere to it, accurately described as "ambient tracks, noise, electronic toys, feedback, hum, cut-ups, found sound, radio scans and noises, interruptions, drones, test tones and squeaks..." A journey thru England's dark underworld, e.g.: this snatch of intercepted conversation: 'I have not slept with anybody else, apart from you, and obviously, my wife.'
There's just no way you can dismiss today's music scene as not being as good as that of some mythical golden-age. I have so many new releases to cover, I split them up into last months' "From The Sublime..." and today's "...To The Ridiculous." The first batch was largly instrumental avant-gardsey-ness, but this batch, tho just as experimental, is more in the whacked-out weirdo spazzy song-form end of things. Most of these albums are not downloads, but are for sale - makes great gifts!
1. F.K. Dreyer & Mark Recording Co. "Intro/Aries": from the album - and, yes, there's a whole album of this - "Your Dogs Horoscope" 2. Michael McDaeth "Happy Just To Be Happy": a few tracks here from Seattle's McDaeth, and his 7-count 'em-SEVEN disk album, "The Socket Set." It's ramshackle one-man-band rock, sometimes a little too loose, sometimes dead-on in a Half-Japanese-for-the-Nirvana-generation kinda way. 3.Looping Jaw Harp Orchestra "Tuba for Klaus (Tribute to Klaus Nomi)": Vienna, Austria unleashed this mad crew of jews harps as the lead instruments, joined by the likes of steel drum, marimba, kalimba, accordion, etc. No normal Instruments! The entirety of their latest album "Universal Language" is great. Just the fact that they dedicate a song to Klaus Nomi proves their awesomeness. 4. The Chewers "Burn It Down": Another fantastic album- I reviewed their first one, and the new one "Chuckle Change And Also" is even better; low-key Beefheart/Residents influences filtered thru a Southern low-life sensibility, with lyrics examining a side-show's worth of human grotesqueries. Get it. 5. The Toilet Bowl Cleaners "I Forgot to Wipe My Bum": one of 2 tracks off their album "Songs About Poop, Puke & Pee." The fact that such an album even exists is amazing; the fact that the Toilet Bowl Cleaners have many albums, all focused on the subject of human waste, and that some of the songs are actually good, is nothing short of mind-boggling. The main toilet-bowl cleaner sez that he's released 8000 songs in the last 4 years. That's kinda prolific. Wanna hear 86 songs about dead animals? 6. Kitschstortion "Cutie Honey" - Another returning guest. The Kitschstortion release featured on these pages last year used the bizarre vocal synth gizmo the Vocaloid to dazzling effect. This is from the new EP "How To Have Boring Dreams" 7. Michael McDaeth "She's Just A Torso" 8. Flossie and the Unicorns "Jr. Troopers Are Go": 37-seconds of the album "LMNOP." 9. People Like Us "Seven Degrees": Another super bit of sound-collage pop from this British master (mistress?) of the form; the new one is "This Is Light Music." Sawing sound-effects (not musical saw) adds percussive zeal to samples of cheeseball '60s EZ instros, Morricone themes, and girl groups. I could leave this one on repeat for very long times. 10. 'Church On The Move' - Dad Life: I once knew a guy whose parents lived down the street from Snoop Dog in a thoroughly suburban neighborhood, far, far away from South Central LA. They'd see the infamous 'gangsta' shopping, taking his kids to the park, etc. This funny rap song about everyday domesticity really is 'keeping it real.' 11. Michael McDaeth "From the Midwest" 12. The Electric Grandmother "Mr Clyde": Not sure if a 'sitcom-core' band is really something the world needs, but this alleged ode to Bill Cosby's character is an agreeable bit of bizarre pop. 13. The Chewers "The Fat Man" 14. Looping Jaw Harp Orchestra "Wabba Dubu" 15. Toilet Bowl Cleaners "Gotta Poop, Puke & Pee (Simultaneously)" 16. Bobby & Paul "DMT9": these guys are from the late great electronic noise band Margaret Raven. They sent me this a year or two ago and I forgot about it. Sorry, guys, it's good stuff!
The Eagles! Fleetwood Mac! Styx! Marie Osmond! That's the kind of stuff I listen to now. All that weird, experimental stuff - what was I thinking? Writing a blog about music that so few people care about...what a sad lonely life I've been livin'... Well, forget that, I'm gonna be NORMAL! And what a relief it is, lemme tell you - I'm gonna hang out in sports bars, watch "American Idol," stop listening to college/public radio and keep my dial set on AM talk from now on. Hall & Oates! Chicago! Muthafuckin' ABBA! Hell yeah, where's my pink Izod shirt and penny loafers?!
This playlist is no joke. All the artist represented here making crazed noise, goofball novelties, flipped-out weirdness, and self-indulgent nonsense are the very same acts who made all those familiar mainstream hits (granted, including Joey Ramone here stretches the definition of 'mainstream' a bit). See? The Beatles weren't the only superstars to have a "Revolution No.9" in them.
UPDATE 12/2/12: Now on Zippyshare, for those of you who had trouble with Mediafire POLLUTING THE MAINSTREAM I was going to go into explanations about how these oddities came to be, like how that's Robert Fripp (!) playing on the Hall & Oates, how "Mother" was the only song by the Police that I loved, etc., but I think it's best for you to just listen to this and be amazed - play it for your friends and see if they can guess who's who. 1. Chicago "Free Form Guitar" 2. Donovan "The Intergalactic Laxative" 3. The Eagles "The Greeks Don't Want No Freaks" 4. Fleetwood Mac "Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In" 5. Frank Sinatra "Reflections On The Future In 3 Tenses" excerpt (by Gordon Jenkins)
6. Hall & Oates "Alley Katz" 7. Heart "Hit Single" 8. Debbie Harry "In Just Spring" 9. James Brown "The Future Shock Of The World" 10. Marie Osmond "Karawane" 11. The Police "Mother" 12. Nirvana "Montage of Heck Part 1" 13. Nirvana "Montage of Heck Part 2" 14. Prince "Bob George" 15. Buddy Holly "Slippin' And Slidin' (sped-up version #1)" 16. Styx "Plexiglass Toilet" 17. Joey Ramone "The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs" 18. Toto "Robot Fight" 19. Van Halen "Strung Out" 20. Willie Nelson "Cowboys are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other" 21. Abba "Intermezzo no.1" 22. Alice In Chains "Love Song" 23. Cat Stevens "Was Dog a Doughnut?"
The excellent Neon Lushell album that I wrote about recently was my first clue that strange things are afoot in Iowa. Turns out that it was just the tip of the iceberg: Dubuque experimental music maven Bob Bucko Jr. (aka BBJr) sent me a shoebox's worth of cassettes (and one vinyl), as well as a couple of 'zines, that all make a persuasive case for the Iowa experimental music scene. None of it sucks, much of it's exceptional.
You've got yer "A" list music cities that might be major (New York, LA, Berlin, London) or towns with smaller populations that, nonetheless, boast outsized musical reputations (Athens GA, Austin TX, Sheffield UK). And then you got yer "B" cities that no-one's paying any attention to, tho they have folks just as creative as can be found in any of the big boys. Dubuque falls into the latter - noise, ambient, drone, improv, rock, found sounds, all get thrown in the blender whilst steadfastly avoiding cliches. Mr. Bucko has prepared a sampler cd for free download for y'alls:
This collection starts off with a track that resembles "rock" music, before moving into thoroughly unpredictable territory by such artists as Implied Consent, Dead Man's Lifestyle, Distant Trains, and more from BBJr. Instrumentals predominate, veering from crunchy distortion to chilled electronics, sometimes both. BBJr's "At The Bar" recalls '70s cosmic Moog records; Aisle's "crest, fallen" could be one of Nurse With Wound's abstract, but humorous collages, with Chipmunk-y vox over unidentified sounds. The Floating Cave track is an ominous drone that really did make me feel like I was in a deep, dark cave. And Aural Resuscitation Unit's"Dubbing An Arab" isn't the reggae remix of The Cure that one would expect from such a title; it does sound like a (heavily processed) skipping record that might be the Cure, but who can tell? Whatever it is, it's 16 minutes of trippy amazing-ness.
Some of my fave stuff from this scene is only for purchase, like this one:
Well worth the mere few bucks it costs for BBJr's fascinating loop-driven sound collages. The industrial-strength funk of "Time is Something" is also worth your pennies. And another band not included on this cd are the Glimmer Blinkken, whose downtown New York c. 1981 sound comes closest to "normal" music.
The history of the scene outlined in the "Ruix" 'zines reveal that many of these cats come from a typical metal/rock background. So how did they end up here? To quote from the zine's new blog: "Like most river towns,Dubuque is teeming with personality, and its residents utilize the cultural vacuum of the midwest to great effect. Without an academy to report to or the bored shrugs of scene- conscious youth to deflect, folks in Dubuque have cultivated a diverse portfolio of artistic expression." Do scenes like this exist all over? Is there some crazy stuff in, say, Missoula, Montana that I should know about?
Was quite surprised to read the announcement earlier this week that GYBO is going off-line, after 10-and-a-half years of being the internet home of the mashup. When I joined GetYourBootlegOn in '03, I was just happy to have someplace to put my sound-collagey things that I'd been making for years to a tiny cassette audience - indeed, the first tune I posted was recorded back in 1992. The public awareness of "illegal music" was minimal, at least here in America. Negativland was well-known to the college-radio world, The Tape-Beatles and John Oswald had made some waves in avant circles, and hip-hop mix tapes were being sold under finer urban music counters. There were a few other, more obscure things, but that was about it. In the early days of GYBO, everyone was at least slightly familiar with everyone else. It was a small world.
I never expected much to come of this, but our small crew of 'net buddies soon found ourselves under the pop culture microscope, getting radio airplay, setting up club nights, being interviewed, getting pro deals. GoHomeProductions even quit his day job and went on to remix the likes of David Bowie and got his Blondie/Doors mashup on an actual Blondie hits album; Phil'n'Dog's "Doctor Pressure" boot (short for "bootleg" in mashup talk) also got an official release and went all the way to #3 on the UK charts; movie producers came a-callin' (I did stuff for an Antonio Banderos film called "Take The Lead" that, alas, went unused); Video game makers came for their "DJ Hero" game; San Fran's Bootie club opened "franchises" all over the world; hell, DJ Earworm even did mixes for the opening ceremonies for the recent London Olympics, even tho he's American. Yet GYBO never lost it's warm, clubhouse feel, and always welcomed newbies.
So why quit now, now that the word "mashup" is being entered into the dictionary (used in fiction and computers, as well as music), now that mashups have spread far beyond GYBO, to YouTube, to Bandcamp, to tv commercials, etc? Scottish producer/dj McSleazy, GYBO's founder/director, fears new UK laws that have thrown suckers in jail for illegally disseminating copywritten material. Granted, this was over copies of "Star Wars," for sale, which is not like freely distributing goofy little songs, but still, he doesn't want to take the chance. Like CBGBs, however, GYBO may be gone, but there are now zillions of cats 'n chicks out there doing what it's original denizens pioneered.
Here's a mix of some of the classics from the early years, roughly 2002-2005, massively popular tunes that most GYBO regulars would recognize - among other delights, you will hear Queen going ska, eminem go ragtime, Dubya rockin' the mic, Madonna vs Sex Pistols, Dolly Parton sing Led Zep, and every song in the world that features whistling. Almost every artist represented here was one of the "big names" of the scene. Most of these tracks still sound great, with all of the humor and inventiveness of avant-'tarde music at it's finest. I'll probably do 1 or 2 more volumes - it was way too difficult to narrow down the must-haves to just one disk's worth, and a lot of this stuff is no longer on-line - I had to pull out the old shoeboxes of CDs to rip these babies.
GYBO's Greatest Vol 1 (After clicking the above link, scroll down for a choice of downloading options. You may have to wait a few secs.)
01 Gay Muppet Bar - Phil'n'Dog 02 Billie's Spirit - McSleazy 03 We Will Ska You - Bitter Sound Foundation 04 Dance To The Velvet Underground - Dunproofin' 05 Smokey and the Yeah - Pheugoo 06 Stripper Jackson - DJ NoNo 07 Socialist Catholic Mutilation - poj masta 08 Blowin' in my Mind - totom 09 Safari Love - Loo & Placido 10 "Music Mash-ups Make the Mainstream" - CBS news 11 Ray Of Gob - Go Home Productions 12 Whistler's Delight - DJ Riko 13 50 Bluebells - Faither of E-Jitz 14 Imagine a Walk on the Wild Side - rx 15 Dr. Who on Holiday - Dean Gray [aka Party Ben and Team 9] 16 Marshall's Been Snookered - Freelance Hairdresser [aka Soundhog] 17 Love will Freak Us - Dsico 18 A Hidden Forest - Gordyboy 19 Stairway to Bootleg Heaven - DJ Earworm 20 My People Feel That Way In The Morning - The Kleptones
Buttress O'Kneel is the Australian madwomen who won our "M4M Idol" contest last year, and "Avant Retro: Post-Tardcore," her latest mashup/sound collage on-line album, continues her winning streak. She rarely just drops an acapella from one song over someone else's instrumental, and when she does, as in the 48 second Guns 'n' Roses vs Jane's Addiction "Been Caught", it's all-too-short. Many tracks seems to have at least 4 sources fighting to be heard. Other strategies include: creating amusing dialogues between the songs (dig Grandmaster Flash's back-and-forth with the B52s on "Jungle Rat"), pounding the likes of The Buggles and Rick James into breakcore submission, and glitching up a song into abstraction a la John Oswald's Plunderphonics ("Mother Nature's Mulch"). And what's not to love about a song with a title like "She Blinded Me With Shatner"? Pick hit: "Running For Party Leader." (And bonus points for elsewhere sampling nutty Rhino Records parodists Big Daddy.)
All of which makes her other new recordings so surprising: they are as chilled and meditative ("spiritualy-themed," she sez) as her usual stuff is violent and confrontational. She has recently uploaded a series of extremely-slowed down remixes (for lack of a better word) to archive.org. Stevie Wonder's "Superstition," the theme song to 'The Neverending Story' (at a never-ending 102 minutes long), and Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody', among others, have been streeeeeeetched to great lengths. The results are not the monotonous drone-fests you'd expect, but beatiful ambient music. My fave of the bunch is "Heaven," which elongates Zep's "Stairway To Heaven" to 77 minutes and 7 seconds. When Robert Plant's vocals show up at around the 9 minute mark, they are surprisingly legible - you can make out some of the lyrics. This track was even apparently actually played at a church service, but the sometimes spooky results are as ghostly as they are Gregorian. Free listen/download here:
So, so many albums out there! And some of them are even good! Wish I had time to dedicate one post to each one, but due to the usual time constraints, here's another mix of recent (or recent to me) albums for Maniacs, available for purchase or free download, or both. Not much avant-heaviness this time out, but lots of summer-fun silly/strange excuses for pop music here.
1. Neon Lushell "Leave Me Alone" - these Midwesterners have recently dropped one of the albums of the year, I sez, in "Modern Purveyors Of Filth And Degradation (In A Time Of Peace And Understanding)". It moves from the Ministry-like bangin' album opener featured here, to dark ambient, surreal soundscapes, and twisted folk. "Dark music" without a hint of the usual cliches, e.g.: death-metal, Joy Division soundalikes, etc. A lot of self-described "strange" or "experimental" artists submit music to me, but most of it lacks the originality and imagination of these sick kitties.
2. Jan Turkenburg "droodle20110809[F***TheMeaningOfLife]" - Wonderful sound-collage from the nutty Dutchman who's been posting a series of similiar cut-and-paste "droodles" on the the ever-crucial PCL Linkdump.
3. Bob Purse "It's Not A Regular Day" - Shamelessly silly-but-swell novelty tune from The Many Moods of Bob, the recent debut album compiling many years worth of home recordings from the great music blogger Bob Purse. The man even does covers of song-poems, forpetessake.
4. Lydia Kavina "Free Music #1 (1936)" - From the album "Music from the Ether: Original Works for Theremin" by the grand-niece of Leon Theremin himself, and sometimes member of bizarro surf band Messer Chups. Excellent stuff - if you buy one theremin album in your life, buy this one.
5. Ace of Clubs "Rehab Dem Bones " - a Herman Munster vs Amy Winehouse mashup collected off the internet. You'll laff!
6. DmR of AtoZ "Get Up" - Another mashup, this takes numerous Beatles vocals and expertly drops them over the bassline to Tom Waits "Step Right Up." From the on-line collection "You Can't Mash That vol 28" (which I haven't actually heard, just this song.)
7. the archaeologist "pouvons-nous avoir un cendrier" - This album "parlez vous francais?" is based on a French language instruction tape (+ beats, music), which gets to be a bit much after a while. Works great in short doses tho, like this yummy truffle that also throws in bits of Gil-Scott Herons' "Whitey's On The Moon."
9. The Fire Organ "Little Fishes" - Quirky pop tune that's quite good despite the off-key singing; from an album ("Dumbed Out") that doesn't seem to be on-line any more. Hmm, maybe he's re-cutting the vocals...
10. Ban This Sick Filth "Powerhouse" - Raymond Scott's 1937 cartoon classic gets a boomin' remix courtesy of this offshoot of London mash-masters Celebrity Murder Party.
11. Greg Reinfeld "Pink Ballerina" - This highly prolific free-internet-album guy's latest is "Poorest Almanac That Ever Lived".
12. Hanetration "Rex" - Taking a breather from all this silliness, this is from the all-too-brief 4 track FREE! download release "Tenth Oar" of evocative, compelling ambiance.
13. Snaps 'n' Claps "Soldier Boyfriend" - Charming Casio girl-pop that may be more knowing than it lets on beneath its naive presentation. From their Feeding Tube cd-r "Greatest Hits."
14. Maladroit "Musicbox Jungle (Negrobeat Remix)" - Hysterical break-core collision of the '70s E-Z instro "Music Box Dancer" with that '90s 'Mr. Boombastic' song, as all heck breaks loose. Australians seem to be good at this sorta thing.
15. 1001 "Nieszczesliwa milosc, hej!" - This Polish gent hipped me to some outsider music from his land, and when I checked out his own stuff, I found this song, which makes awesome use of loops of people laughing.
16. Moose A. Moose & Zee D. Bird "Everywhere I Go" - If you have kids, you probably know this insanely catchy tune from the video that used to be shown often on the Nick Jr network. It's not available for sale, or as an mp3 anywhere, so I recorded it off a YouTube video and it came out surprisingly well. Do you know how many people want this?! Esp. since apparently Nick Jr has stopped showing the Moose & Zee bits. I am doing a public service!
17. Janek Schaefer "Recorded Delivery [7" edit]" - From London comes this jaw-dropping artifact: a tape-recorder sealed in a box and mailed, which then recorded everything. "Recorded Delivery is a sound activated tape recording of parcel travelling through the Post Office system...The sound reactive dictaphone automatically edited the 15 hour journey to a 72 minute recording, capturing only the most sonically interesting elements of the journey."
18. Mari L. McCarthy "Weekend In New England" - This amateur tribute to '70s schlock crooner Barry Manilow entitled (hoo boy) "The Barry Thought Of You," sent to us by our frequent contributor windy, would be awful enough, but then on this song she goes and splices in the voice of Barry himself to create a Natalie/Nat Cole-like exercise in outsider horror. Why, windy, why??
19. Willful Devices"Lattice XVIIb" - This 2-man-band (electronics & clarinet/woodwinds) go absolutely nuts on this track. Free-improv can be fun!
This 1995 album, the second by American experimental composer David Shea, is constructed entirely out of samples played live. Yep, no computer mashups here - he would trigger the samples on a keyboard, and could actually perform these pieces in concert. The sources are mostly instrumental, and range from classical orchestras to Indonesian folk jams. And that's just the first track.
The two tracks that use classic cartoon sound effects and music, "Screwy Squirrel," and "Tex" (named for animator Tex Avery), are what really made me want to seek out this album back when I read about it, but really, I was looking for any sound collage music. It was hard to find in that period between The Great Copyright Clampdown of the early '90s and the turn-of-the-century post-Napster free-for-all. I would tape hip-hop dj mixes off the radio, or send away for John Oswald and Tape Beatles mail order cassettes. (Ah, the lure of forbidden fruit!) I don't recognize much of these samples, tho, so maybe that's how Shea was able to get away with releasing this.
But to give you idea of what's going on here, the track "Trio III," for example, features what sounds like traditional Middle Eastern chanting being brought startlingly up-to-date by a pounding techno drum beat. Then it gets all groovy '60s organ-a-go-go on us, before a jazz band crashes in, all honking sax and walking bass, and takes us to a tropical lagoon with some Martin Denny-ish exotica. And so it goes. Pretty dense, ADD-riddled stuff.
Tho I've writtenaboutErgoPhizmiz numerous times in the past, I can't even begin to fully immerse myself in the brilliant British eccentric's ouvre: the guy seemingly releases an album a month. I don't know if even he's heard all of his albums. So forgive me if I'm a little late to this party, tho I am familiar with some tracks off this 2010 collection - some of the songs, like the catchy opening ode to the scaly anteater "Pangolin", were from a collection he did with performer/scientist Irene Moon.. Yeah, I remember that one, good stuff.
Singing about scaly anteaters - that should give you some insight into Ergo's world. Many of these songs meet your basic pop music requirements - short, catchy, sometimes even sing-along-able. But they are experimental, of no known genre, and loaded with British whimsy. Banjos and kazoos merrily carouse with electronics, and old sampled records do the cha-cha with cartoonish sound effects. On "Daruckatekarte," glass bottles are struck to sound like gamelan over a head-nodding beat. The title of "Rock Me With Your Love" might sound like a bad '80s hair-metal song, but it's actually a sorta-bhangra banger with quoteably silly lyrics. It's followed by a lovely song for overdubbed violins, a kind of crude garage take on '60s baroque pop, a la The Left Banke. "Valse for Lydia" throws Groucho Marx samples over classical music, mixed with noisey beats. "Fuck The Free World" is downright funk-ay, even as it samples the voice of a woman talking about the voices in her head. And on and on...
Get your FREE download album here, courtesy of the wombnet label:
There's a lot of sampling music out there, but very few composers work it like Scott Johnson - he takes snippets of human speech, and, as I wrote when reviewing the re-issue of his classic "John Somebody," writes original music based the rhythms and cadences of conversation, and makes those voices sing.
This album from 1996 uses digital sampling (not the tape-lops of yore) of original conversations of Johnston's friends asking others for a favor. Johnson choose that device because of the quality of anxiety and pleading that creeps into one's voice when asking to, say, borrow something. He then wrote music around these voices for violin, cello, electric guitar, and synthesizer. "Air Compressor" is my fave track off the album...but why would someone need to borrow an air compressor?
The second half of the album is comprised of instrumentals that, frankly, don't do much for me. I like his sampling stuff. But it's still highly original, challenging work.
"Compost" is the aptly-titled 16 minute free download mini-album courtesy of of Nova Scotia, Canada's J fm. He grabs samples of pop music detritus, throws 'em in a grinder and makes hazy lo-fi audio mulch. Fans (like me) of the L.A. Free Music Society's woozy tape-loop shenanigans from the likes of Tom Recchion and Dinosaurs With Horns will dig this. Mr. J fm sez: "i just record onto a tape from my sp404, i carry a solid lil dictophone around and grab samples anywhere i can, everything's game. those sounds get treated, trashed and put into a shape on the sampler." Download it from the Divorce label website
Oh, my overflowing in-box! Now that I'm back from vacation, I simply MUST tell you about:
- Yrs truly, Mr Fab, will once again be spinning all the platters that matter for that internet host with the most, Spacebrother Greg, on his Radio Misterioso program this Sun. Jan 8th, 8:00 PST on killradio.org: two solid hours of as many strange sounds as we can cram in, including lotsa stuff I haven't posted here.
- RIAA's last (?) ever album "The Wonderful World of Sound" is now available for free download. 21 big hunks of mashup/sound collage goodness.
- The Amazing Australian Sound-Effects Bird can do more then say "Polly Wanna Cracker" - he can imitate stuff like power tools, water dripping, and a truck backing up. Made me laff!
- Bastiaan Maris' Large Hot Pipe Organ plays music by shooting fire thru tubes of different lengths; a 2 track ep is available that I'll have to track down, but 'til then, here's the monster at work:
- "Sin-atra" is a heavy-metal tribute to Frank Sinatra. Uh-huh. And it works about as well as you would expect, with results ranging from "actually, this is kinda cool" (Dee Snider's "Kashmir"-inspired version of "It Was A Very Good Year") to "train-wreck" and/or "hilarious" (pretty much the rest of the album). Members of Anthrax and Cheap Trick, among other metal stars, appear. Listen HERE for, if no other reason, proof that the world may have lost it's collective mind.
Thanks to windy & Whizzdumb (sounds like some old show-biz team!) for the tips.
I can think of no better way to spend seven-and-a-half minutes then with this stupendous stop-motion animation/sound & audio collage by Los Angeles' Janie Geiser. Like if one of Joseph Cornell's shadow boxes was animated by the Brothers Quay:
Halfcast Podcast, who made all those bee-YOO-tee-ful outsider-music videos for us last month, have returned with a hilarious Yuletide chestnut featuring the late, beloved Wesley Willis. Merry Christmas!
The use of the also late, great Del Rubio Triplets in the Wesley Willis video prompted me to revisit that magic moment from their appearance on the Pee Wee Herman Christmas special:
Ah, the Del Rubios. I miss 'em. Saw at the old Rhino Records store late '80s. They were well into their 60s at the time, in their trademark miniskirts and gogo boots, and were so chatty and friendly they spent half the time talking to the crowd. Actually, when I saw Wesley Willis in the late '90s he also spent half the time doing other things besides playing music. It was at the Luz de Jesus Gallery, to promote his show of identical-looking pictures of Chicago cityscapes, as obsessively repetitious as his music, and in lengthy stretches between songs, he'd grunt things like "kick a camel's ass," and have girls come up from the audience to head-butt him. Good night, sweet prince(esses).
04 The Bran Flakes - Lovely Sleigh Ride 
