[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4yndU6NqUE]
“Fuck the pain away”(2000) – Peaches
Merrill Beth Nisker (born 1968 in Toronto, Canada), better known as Peaches, is an electroclash musician whose songs are concerned mainly with sex. She lives and works in Berlin. She has been called the Karen Finley of the 2000s. The song “Fuck the Pain Away” was used in a scene in the film Lost in Translation in which Bob and Charlotte, the two main characters, find themselves in a strip club.
Runaway Love (1978) – Linda Clifford
Linda Clifford’s 1978 album, If My Friends Could See Me Now produced two of Clifford’s biggest hit and put her on the music map. The first single, Runaway Love became an R&B hit peaking at #3 for two weeks. It was released as a 9:44 twelve inch on Curtom Records, written produced and arranged by Gil Askey, mixed by Jim Burgess. The lyrics (in the twelve inch version, not on the album version) dealt with female liberation.
Marquee Moon (1977) – Television
I was 16 or 17. D____ gave me this record. He didn’t like it or didn’t know what to make of it. To the last of knowledge, he lives on the Canary Islands. I don’t know where he got the record from. I no longer have this album. The World Dance Music classics category has been renamed to World Music Classics.
Marquee Moon is New York Television‘s post-punk outfit 1977 debut album. Television originally wanted to record Marquee Moon with veteran jazz recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder (John Coltrane‘s A Love Supreme, most of the classic Blue Note Records catalog) at his legendary recording studio. The album cover features a portrait of the band taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, who also took the cover of fellow CBGB rocker Patti Smith‘s Horses album. A cover version of the title track was recorded in 1990 by the Kronos Quartet for the compilation album Rubáiyát. The song “Marquee Moon” was done in one take; drummer Billy Ficca thought that they were rehearsing.
See previous entries in this series.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQWxrWSsI2k]
I’ve been listening to Pete Rock (born 1970) since he’s been releasing records with British label BBE, and it’s the most accessible route to date to his music. This video shows you how he makes his laid back beats. He uses this machine to “chop up” records:
“Sometimes … I’ll take something that’s a quarter of a bar, like a kick and a snare, that goes boom bap, but there’s enough air between it so that it sounds like it was just played together …”
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQTD76XxJRE]
“Addicted to Love” (1988) – Ciccone Youth
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0U5JfGYx4c]
“Addicted to Love” (1985) – Robert Palmer
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO96CaLFRBw]
Cargo de Nuit (1983) Axel Bauer
The clip is directed by French photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino (1983). It is an homage to the movie Querelle by Fassbinder. To us, in the early eighties, Querelle was the quintessence of the macho/gay sensibility and it was copied by musicians such as Luc Van Acker on the cover of The Ship[1] album. Jean-Paul Gaultier appropriated this seaman’s aesthetic and celebrated it all through the early eighties.
Querelle (1982) – Rainer Werner Fassbinder
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Fassbinder’s adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel features surreal sets that underscore the dreamlike quality and abstraction of the novel. It was Fassbinder’s final and, by his own words, most important movie.
Digression #1: Axel Bauer is not related to John Bauer:
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP_2qjzj73Y]
“Theme from S’Express” (1989) – S’Express
This is from the period when house reached the public consciousness in Europe. It was released one year after Coldcut’s Doctorin’ The House. Both tracks featured nervous “acid” bass lines. A similar track from that same era is Stakker by Humanoid.
See previous entries in this series.
Yesterday evening, I attended David Toop’s presentation of his forthcoming book Ways of Hearing. Toop’s music theory is very much about hearing. I will write more about the presentation in a future post. But for now: a documentary film on Christian Marclay, which illustrates Toop’s stance on music well.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yqM3dAqTzs]
Christian Marclay mini documentary
If you known where this documentary originated, please let me know.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JpD5skqGOo]
Knights of the Jaguar (1999) – DJ Rolando
See previous entries in this series.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOf4uNwvC6c]
The first part is Afrikaan Beat
Afrikaan Beat is a 1962 song by German musician Bert Kaempfert, which in a strange twist of fate became the basis of a very famous Jamaican riddim named African Beat, also known as Under Me Sensi, first recorded by Studio One, widely credited to Don Drummond. Listen to the jamaican riddim at jamrid.com (does not feature Kaempfert’s distinctive horn line). The Kaempfert song is an exquisite guilty pleasure.
Kaempfert would have become 87 tomorrow, had he not gone on a permanent vacation in 1980.
