Ocean of Sound (1995) – David Toop [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Its parallels aren’t music books at all, but rather Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Michel Leiris’s Afrique Phantôme, William Gibson’s Neuromancer … David Toop is our Calvino and our Leiris, our Gibson. Ocean of Sound is as alien as the 20th century, as utterly Now as the 21st. An essential mix. –The Wire magazine.
An incredible breadth an depth of knowledge. Recommended 10/10
See also: David Toop – 1995 – music journalism
A live version and one with Stevie of Tell me Something Good.
With the help of Stevie Wonder (who wrote it in a very Sly & the Family Stonesque vein), Rufus & Chaka Khan broke into both the pop music and R&B charts in 1974 with the hit “Tell Me Something Good”.
Connection: (“wanting connections we found connections (Eco)”) An unlikely place to find a cover version of this track is Return of the Super Ape (1978) by Lee Scratch Perry & Upsetters
Digression: I find it strange that after 10 years of internet something like Youtube should come along: audio and video on demand. Why strange? Because we do not have audio on demand. There is no such thing as Youtube for music/audio only. For audio, one always has to resort to the download paradigm (Limewire, Napster, etc…) or filesharing sites and one-click-hosters such as YouSendIt. I found two live versions of Tell me Somehing Good without even trying, but I had to download it from limewire to find the studio version, without being able to share it with you on the fly.
And here is my fave Chaka track.
Someone at myspace has four tracks of Arthur Russell to listen to. I first found out about Arthur Russell in the mid 1990s through the twelve inch single Is it All Over My face. His music holds a canonical place in my library next to George Clinton, Serge Gainsbourg, Larry Levan, Lee Perry, Fela Kuti and Neil Young. Enjoy.
Mr. Dante Fontana brings us a Google video of Moanin’ by Art Blakey and friends, originally recorded for Blue Note in 1958.
Mr. Dante Fontana is a regular contributor to PCL Linkdump but has his own blog Visual Guidance LTD here.
Recent (mostly Youtube) posts have included. Don’t forget to check Les Rita Mitsouko – Marcia Baila and kleenex / liliput – die matrosen.
Parent: underground – philosophy of place – culture
By medium: underground film – underground literature – underground press – underground music
“Ideas enter our above-ground culture through the underground. I suppose that is the kind of function that the underground plays, such as it is. That it is where the dreams of our culture can ferment and strange notions can play themselves out unrestricted. And sooner or later those ideas will percolate through into the broad mass awareness of the broad mass of the populace. Occulture, you know, that seems to be perhaps the last revolutionary bastion.” — Alan Moore
Related: alternative – banned – censorship – clandestine – controversial – counterculture – crime – cult – drugs – economy – forbidden – grotto – hidden – illegal – illicit – independent – a glossary of the non-mainstream – overground – prohibition – resistance – secret – subculture – subversive – taboo – transgressive – underworld – The Velvet Underground
Contrast: mainstream
Underground mining station, image sourced here.
A basement or cellar is an architectural construction that is completely or almost below ground in a building. It may be located below the ground floor.
The mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground. – Frank Zappa
Interconnected underground stems are called rhizomes
Bibliography: Lipstick Traces, a Secret History of 20th Century (1989) – Greil Marcus – Outsiders as innovators (1998) – Tyler Cowen – Notes from Underground (1864) – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Can anyone identify this disco sample (some horns and strings)?
Adam Goldstone (aka Tiny Trendies, Cultural Mambo, etc.) , an American house music DJ and producer died in a sudden accident late Tuesday.
You can read Kurt Reighley’s interview with him, circa the release of his Nuphonic studio album, Lower East Side Stories, here. Here is more from The Stranger. A couple of his DJ mixes live here and here.
Adam at Discogs.com, with links to his MySpace profile to commemmorate him.
See also: dance music
Via Boris
Woebot, whose knowledge of music is phenomenal, brings us up to date on the new releases of 2006 here.
We’ve had notable long-playing wax from Ghostface Killah, Matmos, Hot Chip, Scritti, Scott, Various, Johnny Dark, Villalobos, Luciano, Burial, Lily Allen, Devandra Banhart and The Arctic Monkeys, but they’ve all been distinguished by their distance from each-other, working apart in different scenes. It’s been a year for the Neo-Rockist Pop picker.
It’s been a good year for re-issues as well. Floating my boat have been the two exquisitely packaged Music Box records, fully-endorsed and taken directly from Ron Hardy’s stash of reel-to-reels, great stuff on the Trunk label, the second No-Wave Sampler on Soul Jazz (hold tight for Argabright’s Vol.3), the Broadcast collection of rarities and Martin’s “Roots of Dubstep” compilation.
And in a 2004 post speaks about MP3 blogs and download ethics.
It may have escaped your attention that the “hot boys” of the internet right now are none other than Fluxblog, Popnose [defunct], and Said the Gramophone. They represent a new hybrid of the FTP collective and the blog. They’re calling themselves mp3 blogs.
Via dadanoias:
Yann Tiersen – Comptine d’un Autre Ete.mp3
So beautifully mellow and sad, why did Amélie made me feel depressed? That faux happiness? Even this piece has its schmaltz and look how many people recorded themselves playing it at Youtube. There is – and this one has the highest level of kitsch, but it works – a version accompanied by an animation film (Aidan Gibbons – The Piano) of an old man reminiscing about his past life .
(check the 1987 version This Is Stranger Than Love by the British dub and industrial musician Mark Stewart And The Maffia. It has added vocals and sparse electronic beats, and is co-produced by Adrian Sherwood.)
Digression 1:
The Gymnopédies are three piano compositions by Erik Satie, which were published in Paris starting in 1888.
This article, besides describing the compositions and their orchestration by Claude Debussy, also discusses why Satie and his friend, the poet Contamine de Latour, chose to use the word gymnopédie, which refers to an Ancient Greek dance, the gymnopaedia.
Because the original gymnopaedia was danced in Sparta by naked boys, some see this as a not-so-subtle allusion to Satie’s supposed homosexuality. This article also addresses that question.
Digression 2: I was lead to believe that Satie’s condition was asexuality rather than homosexuality.