Forest Roxx: November 2010

Sunday, November 28, 2010

This is in honor of the $.50 Boards of Canada t-shirt I found at the thrift store yesterday. Hate to think of some IDM kid getting fat or getting dead and having someone surrender his shirt to an everyday urban thrift. For the record, there was also a $.50 Aphex Twin t-shirt.

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Pitchfork (review excerpt): Sometimes an album is so good and makes its case so flawlessly that it spawns a mini-genre of its own and becomes shorthand for a prescribed set of values. The Velvet Underground's third and Miles Davis' Bitches Brew are two older records that spring to mind, and I'd toss in Spiderland as well. It's not a long list, but somewhere on it belongs Boards of Canada's Music Has the Right to Children.

...Warp Records reissued Music Has the Right to Children worldwide, adding the bonus track "Happy Cycling" (which we Americans with our Matador-licensed copies have always known as the album closer) and redesigning the cover art as a foldout digipak. It's always a bit strange when an album is reissued when it has not, in any sense, ever gone away. How could we possibly have forgotten about Music Has the Right to Children when the sound Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin created here is still the predominant inspiration in IDM? And yet, here we are, new package and new marketing push. Even so, years after its original release is as good as any time to look into why Music Has the Right to Children has resonated so strongly.

Boards of Canada's sound was not wholly original. Seeds of it can be found in Eno, Aphex Twin (in a big way), The Orb, and all over the home listening electronic scene that sprang up in the wake of Warp's Artificial Intelligence compilation. Boards used drum machines, samplers, and an unfathomable collection of analog and digital synths, like others in their sphere. Their chords were typically gauzy ambient, their beats head-nodding downtempo. Properly speaking, they invented nothing.

And yet, the parts had never come together quite like this.

HEAR

Amália Rodrigues - The Best of Fado

Beautiful heartbreak in a bottle. The most sincere sound of sadness. ______________________

Perfect Sound Forever: "Fado" (from the Latin "fatum," destiny, what cannot be changed – "maktoub" in Arabic) is normally defined as the national music of Portugal. That is not correct: - although a very small country, Portuguese music varies dramatically from region to region. The origins of Fado are still not established, and, probably, will never be. Various theorists state that it came from North Africa, from Brazil and from Argentina, originally sung by slaves or immigrants as a way of expressing their loneliness, their longing for their loved ones, the impossibility of returning to their very own "Itaca." But let us leave that discussion for the historians of Fado. Amália Rodrigues put it in a very poetic way: "Fado came from the sea, the vast sea in front of us. Fado came from the lament for our sailors who departed and never returned."

Fado has always been an "inferior" type of music. Actually, there are probably not more than a dozen "root" Fados: all the rest is left to improvisation and to the interaction of the singer and the guitarists, and, very importantly, the response of the audience. Its composers and singers originated from the lower social classes, the ones excluded from the bourgeoisie, living on the fringes of society, such as thieves and prostitutes. Actually, nothing could be less respectable than being a Fado singer. Severa, the most famous "fadista" (fado singer) of her time (late seventeenth Century) was a prostitute. All this would change with the advent of the Amália Rodrigues phenomenon.

Read the rest here ===> PerfectSoundForever on Fado and Rodrigues

Hear Best of Fado, part 1

Hear Best of Fado, part 2

Sir Richard Bishop - Fingering The Devil

Such a lovely, hazy mystical thing.

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Recorded in London in July of 2005 at Southern Studios. Nine tracks of solo acoustic guitar, mostly improvised. An exploration into the shadow worlds of the Sub-Continent, North Africa, and other points on the Gypsy Trail.

Sir Richard Bishop is perhaps better known for the part he plays as one third of radical feral punk-noise collective Sun City Girls. Out of this band's intense unruly free jams grew Bishop's love for solo improvisation, which along with his appreciation for global folk musics largely shapes his solo work.

In 1998, Bishop released his first solo album--the beatific Salvador Kali--on John Fahey's Revenant label. Containing pieces for solo guitar and piano. 2004 saw Bishop following up Kali with a contribution to Locust's Wooden Guitar collection, which also featured pieces from the kindred musicians of Steffen Basho-Junghans, Jack Rose, and Tetuzi Akiyama. Richard's next album, Improvika, featured an unaccompanied free-flowing Bishop on a steel-string wooden guitar. Nine songs of wonderful beauty, showing the vast influences that Sir Richard has picked up through his years of musical adventures with the Sun City Girls. Fingering the Devil is of the same genesis, incorporating numerous musical strains in his virtuoso guitar playing. Middle Eastern, Pan-Asian and North African to name a few. The Eastern mysticism of Robbie Basho and the freewheeling gypsy jazz of Django Reinhardt can both be heard on Fingering The Devil, but you never lose sight of the man at the centre of this six-string mystical chaos, the one and only Sir Richard Bishop, by appointment to Her Majesty the Queen.

HEAR

Bastro - Sing The Troubled Beast

Many many aeons ago I believe it was Bay and myself who leaned against the chest-high stage of the Metro oggling McEntire's stick work and Grubb's evolutionary noodling. I've recently made a return to this music because it's got a very unique flavor - something many have tried to emulate but few have even enter the same stratosphere.

This record is the sound of some punk kids learning theory, growing up, exploring the angles and new lands. Chrysalis/Nympha in action.

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Allmusic.com: While the full-length debut Bastro Diablo Guapo found David Grubbs' post-Squirrel Bait project mining Chicago-styled noise thrash, Sing the Troubled Beast offers the first hints of the fractured melodicism he would embrace with his next group, Gastr del Sol. Tempering his extremist nature with actual hooks ("Demons Begone," "Krakow, Illinois") and subtle guitar textures (the mournful "Tobacco in the Sink, "), Grubbs creates music that is compact and expressive, although he brings back the noise on cuts like "The Sifter."

HEAR

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

The Feederz - Ever Feel Like Killing Your Boss? [1983]

GOD BLESS THE FEEDERZ!

they've been here in the forest before

(on the lovely Jellybeans comp)

back in '84, I bought this album

and pretty much every other album

by those bands on Jellybeans

and now with the holidaze

I thought i'd throw up something

a little traditional... you know:

a dash of homophobia
a sprinkle of misogyny

(like those relatives across the table)

Frank Discussion is Best

and more usefully

a heavy dose of

Situationist-based

anti-consumer sanity

so just shut up, and

EAT THE FUCKING TURKEY ALREADY

(worth the price of admission for their sublime Olivia Newton-John cover)

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Stereolab - The Groop Played Space Age Batchelor Pad Music [1993]

oh i remember this like it was yesterday:
my first theft from the (now defunct)
Tower Records on Clark St in Chicago

it was in the IMPORTS
and like twenty-five
fucking dollars!!!

sheeeeet.

i snagged it on account of Lou B
a penpal at the time, who highly
recommended them with weed
as the perfect heartbreak fix...

(aka melancholia indulgence)

NUMB?

Monday, November 22, 2010

La Roux - Bulletproof [2009]

La Roux!

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Blue Mountain Eagle - Blue Mountain Eagle - [1970]

In which Chicago, Blue Öyster Cult, and The Marshall Tucker Band cover that last Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks album.

That said, I do adore this album. You'll note it's from 1970.

Soar with the Eagle.