I love Thee Makeout Party’s new record. It’s called Play Pretend, and it’s coming out on Teenacide Records for the CD and Recess Records for the LP version (I used to be in a Teenacide band, so I got an early copy).
Our one-time staffer Dan reviewed it over at L.A. Record.
Tulsa had its own synth-punk band in the early early eighties–Los Reactors. Actually, it’s not fair to call them a “synth” punk band, because during the height of their powers, their singer, Joe Christ, played a Farfisa, just like the dude in the picture in the header of this here website!
I first picked up a copy of their single “Be a Zombie” at a Tulsa yard sale back in the late nineties. I was pretty amazed that I’d discovered a punk band from back in the day in my hometown, especially one that wasn’t a hardcore band. They reminded me a bit of garage-oriented punk bands such as Teenage Head, but they also had a bit of Catholic Discipline, the Stranglers, and, you know, a tinge of the ever-unpopular “new wave.” But it was definitely America-hating, Jesus-revoking, consumerism-critiquing, snarling punk!
I immediately put it on a mix tape and bored my friends to death talking about this weird mysterious band that no one in my generation of punkers seemed to know about (and this was before everything that ever happened ever in the history of ever could be found by googling). Then yeaaaaaaaaars later, I found out that their singles plus a bunch of live stuff had been reissued on Rave Up Records out of Italy, which I got and loved even more than the singles. For a sample, take a gander at a live performance they did in ’82 on some local Tulsa TV show:
Now that I’m in L.A., I’ve learned that Los Reactors had a following that extended outside the Oklahoma borders. There’s even a rumor that the band either became white supremacists, or had a Nazi skinhead following. Not sure if that’s true, though I know lots of well-meaning punk rockers in Oklahoma have fallen into a shaven-headed rut at some point or another in their lives, especially back in the nineties. However some version of Los Reactors has been playing shows again in recent years, and even making movies. Somehow I feel the guy who stars in this trailer could never pledge allegiance to Adolph Hitler, but stranger things have happened:
I was thrift store shopping in Joshua Tree, and ran into this album cover. Ooh, sweet Jesus…
She’s got a face and a form that makes me want to shake the paint off her walls! I know that she was a bigot in the seventies and eighties who fought against the rights of gay Americans, but what else could she so, full to the brim as she was with virile heterosexual feminine rrrrargh!?! With that pretty mouth, those determined nostrils, and that lily-white Bible clutched to her bosoms, she’s so good and clean, it makes me want to get down and dirty! I totally want her to kneel before my second coming.
To get myself in the mood, I’ll let Anita herself cool me down, then heat me up with a funky funky freak song from the era of disco and good times. The dude who put this tune on YouTube won’t let me embed it, but you can click here to get God’s mojo workin’.
Another great purchase I got at Amoeba this weekend was Musica Futurista: The Art of Noises, a compilation of Futurist speeches, original recordings, and recreations of music and noise composed by the Italian Futurist ringleader F.T. Marinetti, as well as Silvio Mix, Franco Casavola, Francesco Balilla Pratella, and a bunch of other crazy Italian artist types. These guys dominated the avant-garde there from 1909 until the twenties, leaving Russian Futurism, Dadaism, Fascism, and a host of other more famous isms sprouting up in the fields they first sowed.
The spoken word portions of this CD are fascinating (Marinetti sounds like a mad scientist, even in Italian!), and the Futurism scholar and musical enthusiast Daniele Lombardi did a good job of playing a variety of pieces from different composers, including Marinetti’s fantastic “Five Radio Sintesi,” a pioneering sound collage that included random radio sounds, water sploshing, babies crying, drilling noises, and several large portions of pure silence, preempting John Cage by 20 years.
But the best stuff on here by far is something we only get a snippet of: the works of Luigi Russolo and the acoustic sound generators he constructed, called “intonarumori” or noise-intoners, that you see there on the CD cover. These were playable noise instruments with adjustable pitch, created to perform the new vocabulary of sounds that Russolo mapped out in his “Art of Noises” manifesto.
Here are the 6 families of noises of the Futurist orchestra which we will soon set in motion mechanically:
1 2 3 4 5 6 Rumbles Whistles Whispers Screeches Noises obtained by percussion on metal, wood, skin, stone, tarracotta, etc. Voices of animals and men: Roars Hisses Murmurs Creaks Shouts Explosions Snorts Mumbles Rustles Screams Crashes Grumbles Buzzes Groans Splashes Gurgles Crackles Shrieks Booms Scrapes Howls Laughs Wheezes Sobs
This chart was only a small-scale model of the thousands of sounds produced by animals, men, and machine, but Russolo was able to create sound boxes for most of them, with names like “gurgler,” “buzzer,” “howler,” “crackler,” et cetera that described exactly what the boxes sounded like. Despite several performances in Italy and London, all Russolo’s own compositions’ recordings and even full sheet music are lost, and gramophone recordings of orchestral music composed by his brother Antonio use the intonarumori only as sound effects, like the sound of thunder and rain punctuating an overture, rather than as intruments of their own. But Daniele Lombardi reconstructs one original fragment that has survived of Luigi Russolo’s “Awakening of a City” on this CD, as well as plays samples of recreations of some intonarumori, including an “enharmonic bow” that sounds like a wiggly saw meets a washtub bass!
“Awakening of a City” as a fragment is short but profound. Not only does it perfectly capture the soundscape of man-produced machinery (truly industrial music if there ever was), but the pitch-bending of these sound boxes and the rasps and clangs and catgut and buzzes predict everything from Silver Apples to Sonic Youth, LaMonte Young to Led Zeppelin to just plain old zeppelins. This was music truly ahead of its time, which perhaps explains why the Fascists condemned it so vehemently when they rose to power.
The fantastic site Theremin Vox has a great article on Russolo’s intonarumori, and in fact has some sound samples to rival the performances on “The Art of Noises” CD. Whereas the CD sounds more abrasive, like how they described early early Stooges live music, the MP3′s here show the sonorous beauty that this new style of music could have brought to the world, had its musicians not been destroyed by war (almost literally, in the case of Russolo’s WWI headwound) and by the Mussolini minions that followed. Take a listen and you’ll see how incredible this lost early noise music really was.
I went with my girlfriend to Amoeba Records this weekend–and of course, we both easily spent over a hundred dollars on records we previously never knew existed, yet could not afford to pass up.
But one of my purchases was a premeditated conquest. For a few years now, I’ve been selectively collecting the works of Gyorgy Ligeti, the Hungarian composer whose works have moved me like no other. As experimental as John Cage, yet as accessible as Ravel or sometimes even Bach, he’s perhaps one of the most enjoyable and moving of the near-modern day composers (he died just a few years ago, still in his prime). And this time around, I got Gyorgy Ligeti Edition Volume V: Mechanical Music.
Note that it’s “mechanical” music, not electronic music. Though Ligeti made great strides in electronic music early in his career, these pieces are mostly mechanical in that they are performed on somewhat traditional analog instruments that play themselves, based on instructions fed to them by reams of notched paper or MIDI controllers.
The first section of the CD is dedicated to the barrel organ, and while the calliope-like tone of this tiny organ takes some getting used to, it’s fantastic to hear some of Ligeti’s works composed for keyboards (performed elsewhere on piano) done by a machine that sounds childlike yet ghost-like in its lack of a true human touch. The piece “musica ricercata” is particulary disturbing because it recreates Ligeti’s famous minimal piano line from Eyes Wide Shut–but because it’s a barrel organ, the tones don’t decay or sustain at once, but rather pipe individually, long or short but not really soft or loud. And as things get more complicated and staccato, the pace moves impressively fast, faster than I’ve ever heard a pipe organ of any type play.
Same goes for the latter half of the CD, which is dedicated to the player piano. Here Ligeti and his henchmen tackle his Etudes, pieces which in their original human form were composed based largely on Ligeti’s exposure to Conlon Nancarrow, a composer who wrote player piano pieces of inhuman complexity. This CD allows Ligeti to return his own Etudes to a form more in line with their inspiration. In fact, we get to hear Etude XIVa, the original version, which was always meant for Player Piano and is blisteringly fast, yet somehow sounds organic despite being mechanically produced.
However, the reason most people bought this CD is probably because it chronicles a great performance of the “Poeme Symphonique for 100 Metronomes.” This was first performed for television while Ligeti was part of the Fluxus Art movement (sort of an honorary degree of artistry, since they added him to their number without his asking), but don’t think of it as merely a conceptual piece or music for shock value. Because the Metronomes are mechanical and are wound so that they eventually run out of clicking power at different times, it’s a musical exercise quite similar to his Atmospheres (which starts with every note in the scale played at once).
Here, we start with every possible tempo playing at once. We begin in utter confusion, like popcorn going everywhere, or the chirping of a thousand crickets. Then the anarchy and chaos slowly condenses and morphs into something a bit more calm and familiar. Individual pockets of action and interest constantly bubble to the surface, speak their peace, then change into other things or fade into the background as new ticks and tocks emerge to distinguish themselves.
It’s a really gradual, almost glacial process, but eventually one metronome after another drops off, until we’re left with just a few tocking metronomes almost aligning themselves, then becoming dissonant again. Finally there’s just one metronome left. Tock…tock…tock.
In Ligeti’s mind, this is where the piece goes from the “maximal entropy” of its beginning and returns back to a simple maximal entropy of one beat. To me, I was surprised at how after nearly twenty minutes of hearing irregular rhythms, the return to a singular rhythm made me shudder a bit. I actually had visions of Poe’s “Mask of the Red Death,” and my feeling about the piece turned very ominous, very “for whom the bell tolls.”
It’s quite a different experience to hear this piece as pure music with your “eyes wide shut” than to sit and watch the metronomes as it plays out, so I suggest you try it both ways. The CD version is perhaps better, though longer, than the one performed here, but I guess there are no right or wrong ways to wind your metronomes!
I was supposed to be writing a blog about Richard Powers’s The Goldbug Variations, and how I finished the book while on a plane to Mexico, with Glenn Gould’s 50′s and 80′s recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations tinkling in my ears via the power of my new iPod, and how once again I was overwhelmed by Powers’s genius, in his ability to weave science and literature and music into a book that actually teaches you about fields you are unfamiliar with, and then compares bits from the knowledge you just learned to bits of things you already know about, making new metaphors that you now desperately need to resolve puzzles you never even knew existed before. It’s not my first Powers novel nor my favorite (that would be Gain), but it’s the only one with such a direct link to music, with a pattern roughly based on that of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and which basically is a companion piece to Bach and specifically to Glenn Gould’s recordings (really, one cannot enjoy this book to its fullest without being familiar with and possibly simultaneously listening to Gould’s Goldberg Variations, as both works inform the reader/viewer about the other to a great degree).
But in researching the blog I wanted to write about, I got distracted and wound up being mesmerised by another author I’m sure will soon become a favorite of mine–William Gillespie, whose essay “Mapping The Gold Bug Variations” did a great job of covering all the bases I wanted to but also involved more research than I’d cared to do, including two interviews with Richard Powers that, like a smart-aleck, he only used a one-sentence quote from. I briefly checked out some works Gillespie had been involved with (including a book called 2002: A Palindrome Story in 2002 Words that is one giant palindrome), as well as his publishing company over at Spineless Books, and I’m going to be doing a lot of reading over at this site in the next week or two.
Part of this may be the legend of Love that their elder rock friends (like me!) have spread, on those drunken nights late at the party when we’ve yelled “That’s Love, motherfucker, and you’d better LIKE this shit!” But I think what makes Love still work for the punk rock set, aside from its place in the historical evolution of punk, is that there is something menacing, even hard, set down there amidst the orchestration and syncopation, a snarl of anger down under the flutes and the violins, a middle finger amongst the marigolds.
And that makes sense, because Arthur Lee was the angriest of flower punks in the late sixties L.A. music scene. Typically, Angeleno artists were more cynical than their San Francisco counterparts–Frank Zappa wrote lyrics full of ridicule and sarcasm, and Jim Morrison screamed and ranted on stage like Howling Wolf on acid. But Arthur (and to a greater extent, his writing partner Bryan MacLean) was perhaps more a part of the flower power scene than either of the above, and yet still poignantly aware that this “giant mass deception” was a bubble that would soon pop, a macrame tower surrounded by blood and guns, and this adds a bitterness to the sound and lyrics of Forever Changes. Add to that that his bandmates had largely become junkies, and that he thought we was going to die soon, and I can understand why his mindset would lead him to create an album that haunts you with prettiness, only to fall apart into the horrors of a sixties sound more evocative of the Weathermen and the Manson Family than of Woodstock and Wavy Gravy.
And perhaps that is why this album is so perfect and complete, because more so than any Doors album, Forever Changes is truly “The End.” It’s an ending to Love’s classic line-up, and it is an album about endings, with a particular focus on individual song endings. Each song on this album ends subtly, but in an interesting way, wrapping and turning so that the next song in succession starts in the perfect place. And it was very touching to me that Arthur Lee ended his life with these words on his lips, spending his time touring Europe and the Americas with a line-up that played Forever Changes from start to finish, the words “I want my freedom!” ringing loud and true as all hell.
On a slightly unrelated note, there’s a Love Story documentary floating around that’s a definite must for all Arthur Lee and Love fans. In one scene, he gets to return to the Castle, Bela Lugosi’s old mansion and the place where Love members spent the years of their second and third albums. It’s a great literal home-coming and just a taste of how great the documentary was:
Back in the day, when I DJ’d at dublab, I was the resident garage rock guy. I spun old Back From the Grave and Pebbles tunes, played rare Warlocks stuff I recorded live when they were just starting out, and had interviews with members of the Raymen and Fuzztones.
I was a far cry from the electronica and afro-cuban stuff the station usually played. I think dublab just picked me because they had to have one rawk guy, and because my show served as a good prequel to Nobody‘s psychedelic show. He would play Electric Sugarcube Flashbacks, the Zombies, and some other hippy-dippy stuff that I love now, but hadn’t yet gotten into because I was soooo rock and roll. I was impressed with his collection (he had just as much psyche vinyl as I had garage) but was even more amazed that this was just ONE show out of five he did every week, each with a different theme. He probably had an electronica show, a hip hop show, and god knows what else on the other two days of the week he DJ’d that slot, each as complex and original as my one-day show.
So, I loved his taste in music, but it took me a couple years to find an incredible appreciation for the music he himself composed. I wasn’t too impressed with his first album (probably because it was all hip-hop infused) but his second album continues to blow me away. It’s electronic, sample-heavy, and trip-hoppy, but with a definite nod to the psychedelic music he loves. There are even covers of the Monkees’ “Porpoise Song” and the Zombies’ “This Will Be Our Year,” and they’re done tastefully: not extended dance remixes or mashups of the originals, but true reworkings incorporating everything good from his own sound with all the wonder of the originals (and I think the Beachwood Sparks’ singer is the one doing the vocals). For those who want to find some electronic music to love from this decade, I think it’s a great “in” to this style of music, since it’s mellow, full of dynamics, and definitely has a few toes dipped in the psychedelic sounds pioneered by the likes of Silver Apples, Gandalf, the Nice, Love, and the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.
Anyway, this week he was interviewed in L.A. Record (yet again). It’s short but sweet, and there’s even a podcast there you can grab. And for New Yorkers, he’s coming your way.
The first Kiwis ever to win our hearts on an HBO show are also the first to win a Grammy for best Comedy Album. And I’m kind of impressed, not only with Flight of the Conchords but also with the Grammy folks themselves.
I mean, most years, who gives a fuck about the Grammys? These self-congratulatory record industry arseholes have rewarded the Milli Vanillis of the world for years, ignoring truly innovative musicians so that the pop fads of the moment, swimming in millions of dollars culled from preteen mall trash, can also have a chintzy award. And let’s not forget the big corporate grandpas–even this year, when the relatively talented Amy Winehouse took top honors, yawnfest dinosaurs such as U2, Bon Jovi, the Foo Fighters, Eric Clapton, and Spyro Gyra were nominated for a bunch of awards. And a bunch of them won (Don’t worry, Herbie, I’m not talking about you. You wrote “Rockit” and “Bring Down the Birds!”).
As a comedy fan, I’m just plain excited that a talented musical team won the Comedy Grammy for once. The award for best comedy album almost always goes to a popular American comedian, such as Steve Martin or Robin Williams, whose biggest achievements are in spoken word jokes and skits. And one thing I’ve noticed from collecting comedy albums is that most comedians who are great at stand-up can’t record a funny song for the life of them. No “King Tut” or “Boogie In Your Butt” or any of Robert Klein’s terrible songs that he insisted on including in his otherwise hysterical albums will ever match the wit their creators normally had.* Once in a while they’ll nominate Weird Al (often not even for his actually funny stuff), but there are so many good bands that do funny songs, from Ween to Tenacious D to the Dead Milkmen, and it’s stupid that the Grammys award only an average of 1.5 or so musical comedians a decade.
Luckily, Flight of the Conchords is such a funny show, and the songs are so great, that they just couldn’t be ignored. Here’s one of my faves–I don’t think this one is even on the EP (just an EP!) that won, but it’s fucking amazing.
*Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy and Robert Klein definitely can sing outrageously funny songs on the live stage, with great style and even great musical talent–but add a backing band of session dudes and a proper recording studio, and the yuks just fall away from them.
The day I met my girlfriend, I didn’t know yet quite how rad she was. So when we got in the car and I realized the Yellow Balloon was in the CD player, I tried to change it–most hip young thangs don’t think it’s too groovy to bop around in the car to sunshine jangle pop with five part harmonies–but she said she really liked it. And two years later, we’re still together.
Anyway, this album is one that keeps winding up in my car and staying there for weeks. It’s really good for the summer, but I’m also enjoying it on rainy nights this winter. Perhaps it’s because of the lyrics to their title song:
I never liked the rain before
It always made me stay inside
There’s one thing that I know for sure
I’ve got a reason to like it
Since you took me for a rainbow ride
I don’t give a fuck if the lyrics are cheesy. Love is cheesy, and you can capture more of its essence in carnivals and cotton candy than you can in watching Tom Cruise snog some bitch in a movie. Technically, “Silly Love Songs” is the most romantic song of all time!
As for this band, their sound takes the “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” yearning of Brian Wilson’s production on Pet Sounds and brings it full-swing to satiation and glee on the tracks of this CD. All the familiar tools of the Pet Sounds trade are here: harpsichords, concertina/accordions, banjos, virtually everything but the theremin. But the tone is brighter, sunnier, more infantile yet more knowing. It’s basically the child of Pet Sounds, or maybe the nephew or niece, the lost Beach Boys sunshine pop sound that Brian Wilson took just too much acid to ever find.
My favorite tune off here is “Stained Glass,” a beautifully arranged song with brisk strings and that evokes the Left Banke as much as the Beach Boys. It’s about standing at the threshold of love with someone special, and it’s always a joy to listen to.
There’s also a killer bubblegum/garage tune called “The Junkmaker Shoppe,” with odd rebellious lyrics about taking a girl and hiding with her in a shelf in the back, and a very “Try It” harmonica throughout. Here we see the punk-gum head of Gary Zekley’s writing really emerge, in the way it would soon do for the Clique’s “Superman.”
The whole thing is good, and like I said, this one will grow on you more and more with repeated listenings. There are also solo songs by Don Grady (yeah, the dude from My Three Sons) who was in the band (disguised with a wig, so his television fame wouldn’t dictate the band’s fame!). It’s a little bit of sunshine on such a winter’s day.
P.S. It came out on Canterbury Records originally. I wonder if that has any connection to the store Canturbury Records in Pasadena?
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