no_rada

Summer feels like it's finally here and the profoundly uncomfortable days are made up for by clear and pleasant nights. This seems like a good time to introduce Casablanca Moon by Slapp Happy. The singer here is Dagmar Krause from Art Bears, the band I talked about this winter. While Art Bears takes some listening to, this album is a lot more immediately gratifying - it's prog pop at its most vital and entertaining.



I get the feeling that I've heard shades of Slapp Happy in many later bands, and maybe not even as a direct influence but via a sort of osmosis. Well, except for one other band: all through my first listen of this I was thinking of Bongwater and was pretty amazed when I heard The Drum - maybe the song I associate most with that band, recorded first by these guys! I feel like the two bands share a lot of elements. Besides, I think of Ann Magnuson (the person who discovered Klaus Nomi!) as the consummate New Yorker and Krause, who records with Englishmen and sings here in French, as the consummate European. In my opinion though, these guys have a bit more staying power. Here's a track:

01 - Casablanca Moon

- Received two interesting sounding Cabinet Magazine back issues: The Average and The Enemy (both published the year of my high school/college transition). The Average is immediately impressive, featuring a fold-out poster of a Times front page with all the text hand-alphabetized as well as this awesome diagram on the back cover:

"Place Vendôme, Paris. 1871. The Communards pose with the toppled statue of Napoleon.
When Michael Wilkinson turns the image on its side, it looks now as if the statue is upright and the crowd are dead, laid out in coffins.
The world turned the right way up again.
Either the emperor stands upright , and the people are dead.
Or the people stand upright, and the emperor is dead."

Courtesy k-punk.

Ahh, German music - there's hardly anything cooler. In particular, today I want to post about Malaria!, an excellent band from the early 80s started in part by Gudrun Gut, a member of the original Einstürzende Neubauten lineup. I really love the circuitous and percussive sound of these songs. It contains those qualities of post-punk that are now appreciated by almost everyone but with enough abrasiveness and experimentation to still be interesting.

There's really something for anyone on this disk (if "anyone" happens to be a fan of synthy post-punk): songs in German, songs in English, instrumentals. Anyway, here's a song from the album:

04 - Zarah

Since listening to this disk I've heard a couple other Malaria! related projects: Gut released some electronica in the 90s and collaborated with Blixa Bargeld. Fellow band member Bettina Köster entered into a cool cross-generational electronica collaboration, Autonervous, with someone named Jessie Evans.

Of course, you could always just listen to all your music on you tube. Music like this, courtesy of 1982:

I'm really impressed by Sergei Kuryohin's Sparrow Oratorium!

It seems like this is a good album for getting people into crazier music: the vocals here form a sort of net that catches all kinds of musical debris - it's all over the place but very solid at the same time. By far the best part of these Kuryohin albums is their endless and effortless ecclecticism. He makes it seem very natural and easy to cram all kinds of strange sounds into every song.

04 - Autumn

Also, only tangentially related,  here's an entertaining (and useful!) guide to surviving a fall from a jet liner: www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/carkeet.html -

Stills from Kenneth Anger's Puce Moment run through the YooouuuTuuube viewing enhancement utility. See it here in this format or here as a rippling psychedelic curtain. Or make your own!

Although Kanesuké Noguchi wore the mask of a beautiful young woman, his voice had nothing that would recall a woman's charm. It was a voice that made one think of the rasping together of rusty, discolored metal. Furthermore, his recitation was broken by interruptions, and his style of chanting seemed to be tearing the beauty of the words to shreds. But despite all this, the mood inspired was like the outpouring of a dark and ineffably elegant mist, like the sight of a moonbeam shining into the corner of a ruined palace to fall upon a mother-of-pearl furnishing. Because the light passed through a worn and ravaged bamboo blind, the elegance of the shattered fragments shone all the more.

Just then beauty itself began to walk before him. Like the beach plover, strong in flight but unsteady on the ground, the white tabi-shod feet moved on tiptoe as though come for a few brief moments to make their way through the world known to man.

That which chanted and moved about on the stage bathed in moonlight was now no longer the ghosts of two beautiful women but something beyond description. One might call it the essence of time, the pith of emotion, the dream that stubbornly obtrudes on reality. It had no purpose, no meaning. From moment to moment it fashioned a beauty not of this world.

Pictures from A Journey Round My Skull, text from Runaway Horses.

Those pictures of Bobby Brown behind his contraption provide a funny contrast to those old album covers of organists at their organs:







Pictures courtesy of The Organ Record Universe.

I've been meaning to write a post like this one for a while, but I still feel a little funny spotlighting individual records on sites as rich and extensive as Mutant Sounds or Take The Pills!. For each one of these I'm sure the are several that are even more interesting. Reading Mutant Sounds for the first time is a disorienting experience, you really feel overwhelmed by the cultural wealth of late 20th century music. Still, I suppose the thing to do is to keep digging.



Bobby Brown's "The Enlightening Beam of Axonda" is a concept record about spiritual enlightenment from 1972. Mutant Sounds describes Brown like this,And the record like this,

But don't not download it yet! The sound is great - quite lush and Moondoggish and unpredictable and its value as a cultural artifact is of course tremendous. What's really surprising to me is that Phillip K. Dick hasn't been mentioned in connection with this album, especially since he and Brown were both Californians and this was released just two years before his religious epiphany.

Another Bobby Brown album's been posted here but I haven't gotten a chance to hear it yet.



I first heard Julian Cope as the guy reading the poem on Sunn O)))'s "White1" but I didn't realize then how unique that was. Not many 1970s era pop artists have stayed active and relevant until now, much less collaborated with a drone band. This compilation of some of his work is fantastic.

The last of the albums I wanted to write about were this lp and 2 tape set by the early 80s synth band Moral. The sound is tremendous and quite catchy. The "Dance of The Dolls" tape in particular is great, featuring the beautiful title ballad and a startling track called "Involuntary Position", a sort of narcotized rant set to music.

I wanted to mention something about the Hays Code that I wrote about last week. The code wasn't legislated "from above" in the classic way, rather, it gained acceptance through economic factors. A film that violated the code would be boycotted by citizen's groups and therefore would fail to find distribution. When there was no boycotting power the code was unenforcible: there was widespread disregard for it early on, before the boycott system was in place and later, in the 1960s, when this power waned. This encourages the question: what is different now? Clearly nothing draconian is written on paper but still films are governed by a strong conformity to certain expectations of theme, logic and characterization.

One hilarious example comes from this Infinite ThØught post which outlines a measurement of characterization called the "Bechdel Test", which goes like this:

1. Does it have at least two women in it,
2. Who [at some point] talk to each other,
3. About something besides a man.

It's incredible how few films meet this standard.

This 80s record (and old time favorite of mine) sits somewhere between New Wave and Prog on the genre table, but is nowhere as busy as either of them. It's very lush with a romantic, synthy sweep that's always kept very tightly controlled. (And it's certainly not "boring", as one of my philistine friends would have it!)

Talk Talk is one of those bands that I want to hear more of but never do. The one other record of theirs I have is their first, "Party's Over" - or as my player has it, and as I prefer, "1982 - Party's Over". It's ok for basic New Wave, but the singer's very nasal voice makes him one of the worst matches for the style I've ever heard!

Anyway, here's a song:

03 - Desire

One of the links on the most recent Livejournal main page is the Russia! Magazine community, an interesting page that summarizes, in English, five Russian LJ posts every week. This week they've spotlighted a collection of grotesque illustrations published in Russian "Literary-Satirical" magazines in 1906 (gathered from a rare book collection at Yale, a neat site itself). The caption for the link on the Russia! community site is somewhat dull but the actual post provides a bit of a crazy analysis:



The tag for the post reads "ancient Russian sorrow" and leads to a series of posts, one of which is a great comment on Russian marriage ceremonies:

Excellent article in the latest Cabinet magazine on prostitution under the Weimar Republic: