Edgar Froese - Kamikaze 1989 (1982)

Tangerine Dream mainman Edgar Froese scored the soundtrack to this weird cyberpunk science fiction thriller, which starred Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in 1982.  The album is a lot of fun, offering some paranoid sounding proto-techno alongside some lush soundscapes like this one, Blue Panther:


The album as a whole really got me hankering to hear some of my favourite old Detroit techno:




Tracklist:

01         Videophonic         
02         Vitamin C        
03         Krismopompas        
04         Police Disco        
05         Intuition     
06         Police Therapy Center         
07         Blue Panther        
08         Snake Bath         
09         Unexpected Death         
10         Flying Kamikaze         
11         Tower Block         
12         The 31st Floor

Get it HERE.

'O'Rang - Herd of Instinct (1994)

Deliciously deep and dubby, dark and disorientating, like a fall down the rabbit hole.  This is the first album from Paul Webb & Lee Harris, formerly of Talk Talk. It features guest appearances by Beth Gibbons (Portishead), Matt Johnson (The The), Graham Sutton (Bark Psychosis, Boymerang), Mark Feltham (Talk Talk) and Anthony Thistlewaite (The Waterboys).  I think you need to hear it.



Tracklist:

01 Orang         
02 Little Brother         
03 Mind On Pleasure         
04 All Change         
05 Anaon, The Oasis        
06 Loaded Values         
07 Nahoojek ~ Fogou

Get it HERE.

John Pfeiffer - Electronomusic: 9 Images (1969)

Last post I hastily suggested that the internet can be a wonderful thing. Then I started reading Paul Virilio's book, The Information Bomb in which he asserted (way back in 1998, when the WWW was still just a rumour for folk like me) that the internet is, among other things, a civilianised military technology that has caused a further shift of gear in the acceleration of reality. Information flows too quickly to ever be grasped or comprehended:

"Motion sickness...was the logical forerunner of instant transmission sickness, with the rapid emergence of the 'Net junkies', 'Webaholics' and other forms of cyberpunk struck down with IAD (Internet Addiction Disorder), their memories turned into junkshops - great dumps of images of all kinds and origins, used and shop-soiled symbols, piled up any old how"

P. Virilio, The Information Bomb, p. 38

Released in 1969, John Pfeiffer's Electronomusic is a strange buzzing, whirring, fluttering beast of sliding tones and oscillating frequencies. The album ends with a track called After Hours which is made up of the martial sounds of frantic typewriters - urgent messages tapped out to important men of power. Telephones ring and tickertape spills from the mainframe. The music builds in speed and intensity and comes to incorporate the sound of the guns and military technology that were being used to in an attempt to defeat the Viet Cong and the spread of Communism. The piece seemed to synchronise with Virilio's theory of dromology.

Maybe you're interested and maybe you're not.

"Drops drop, sounds sound - analogies in rhythm. Drops are forms in space. But a "drop" suggests motion; motion and sounds are events in time. Can sounds then be Drops in time? Perhaps.
Dimensions of time and space occupy our physical attention, our physical being. But our conceptual being can warp time and space limitlessly. Fantasy, imagination, emotion - the transformations of the physical order - can interpret, clarify, contradict, affirm or deny, even create. It happens in moments. And musical events are moments strung together, time ordered, mood ordered. During those moments sound can order the sensory being to re-form time, space and their occupants."

From the sleeve notes.

Tracklist:

01 Warm-Up, Canon And Peace
02 Reflection Of A String
03 Drops
04 Moments
05 Take Off
06 Forests
07 Pavone
08 Orders
09 After Hours

Get it HERE.

The Marvelettes - The Marvelettes (1967)

A couple of weeks ago Dominic from Gigante Records posted a comment warning us that Motown Meltdown Volume 2 was about to be released as a freely downloadable album. Well, thank you Dominic for getting in touch, I've now had the chance to check out the music and I can wholeheartedly recommend it. If you're interested in hearing some seriously demented re-workings of classic old Motown tunes, then this is the album for you...and its all free and fun.
And if all that lunacy whets your appetite for a little more Motown, then you could do worse than to check this out:


In the early '60s, The Marvelettes were one of Tamla's biggest girl-groups scoring the company's first number 1 single in 1961 with 'Please Mr Postman'.
This 1967 album features killer versions of Robert Parker's 'Barefootin' and the Velvettes 'He Was Really Sayin' Something'. The real classic here though, is the gorgeous 'The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game' which has some beautiful lyrics and a really soulful feel as well as fantastic backing from the Funk Brothers:

Tracklist:

1. Barefootin'
2. Message to Michael
3. The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game
4. When You're Young and in Love
5. I Know Better
6. I Can't Turn Around
7. He Was Really Sayin' Somethin'
8. The Day You Take One (You Have to Take the Other)
9. When I Need You
10. Keep Off, No Trespassing
11. Tonight Was Made for Love
12. I Need Someone

Get it HERE.

Aboombong - Asynchronic

I don't often (ever, would be more accurate) write posts related to contemporary music, I feel a bit old and don't really spend the time or the money trying to keep abreast of what's happening in today's patchwork of cool underground scenes. I've been quite enjoying some of the dubstep (or whatever you like to call it) stuff that's been drifting through my ears, particularly the Purple Wow Sound mix by Bristol producer, Joker. But we won't talk about that.

Much more out there and freeform than any of that stuff is this great album of clatter, hum and fuzz from the very mysterious Aboombong. The album is an intriguing blend of lo-fi drones, tape manipulation, mangled afro percussion and twitchy free-jazz drumming. And I'm liking it a lot.

Check it out.

Timmy Thomas - Why Can't We Live Together (Glades 1972)

The title track from this album is probably familiar to many, its deep, minimal gospel inflected
soul sound is striking and stays with you long after the song finishes. Like many 'message' songs (from the sublime 'Imagine' to the ridiculous 'Where is the Love?') this one proved popular with the record buying public, making the top 3 in the US and the top 10 in many European countries in 1972 and '73. What struck me when I first heard it was the inventive use of an early drum machine and the rudimentary production that lends the song a weird, otherworldly quality. I picked this album up at a boot sale last sunday and was unsure as to whether it would be any good, but was really surprised to find that the otherworldly reverberations seep across the whole album. Some of it comes on like someone spiked the drinks at the tea dance on the end of Blackpool Pier. The album is entirely solo. Timmy Thomas is the only musician on the album; the beatbox is built into the keyboard and he squeezes out bass lines with the foot pedals. Here he is in action (try to ignore the out of step go-go girl):

Hope you enjoy this one as much as I have.

Tracklist:

01 Why Can't We Live Together
02 Rainbow Power
03 Take Care of Home
04 The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
05 The Coldest Days of My Life
06 In the Beginning
07 Cold Cold People
08 Opportunity
09 Dizzy Dizzy World
10 Funky Me

Get the goodness HERE.

Carl Craig - The Detroit Wizard (1991 -1996)

Its hard to believe that two of these records are 18 years old. I was working in a record shop back in 1991 when Carl Craig's 4 Jazz Funk Classics was released, and it pretty much blew my mind, opening me up to a whole host of musical possibities. These records pretty much defy categorization. They rode in on the back of the Detroit techno invasion, but the sonic palette employed is coloured with a range of sounds and rhythms and textures that were unique in the dance music of the time. Carl Craig draws on a disparate range of influences that includes funk and soul and disco, cosmic italo, industrial, rock, jazz, modern experimental composition; the whole of musical history is probably in there somewhere, distilled down into a dizzying gritty mess of euphoric confusion. Perfect for Interplanetary Disco Dancing:


The tracks:

69 - 4 Jazz Funk Classics (Planet E 1991)

01 69 - Ladies & Gentlemen
02 69 - If Mojo was A.M.
03 69 - My Machines (pt 1)-Extraterrestrial Raggabeats (pt 2)-My Machines (reprise)
04 69 - Frequency Finale

69 - Lite Music (R&S 1994)

05 69 - My Machines
06 69 - Microlovr
07 69 - Jam the Box
08 69 - Desire

Innerzone Orchestra/Shop - Untitled EP (Planet E 1992)

09 Innerzone Orchestra - Bug in the Bassbin
10 Shop - Nitwit
11 Shop - Surreal

FRS - Harder (Global Cuts 1994)

12 FRS - Harder
13 FRS - Love is the Message
14 FRS - Theme from FRS

Carl Craig presents Paperclip People - The Floor (Open 1996)

15 Paperclip People - The Floor
16 Paperclip People - Reach
17 Paperclip People - Steam

Get it HERE.

Electronic Music - Various Artists (Turnabout Records 1967)

I don't know much about modern classical music, Cage and Stockhausen and that academic avant garde stuff, but what I do know is that Luciano Berio's piece 'Visage' is one of the most incredible, confusing and completely psychedelic pieces of music I've ever heard. The piece was composed in 1961 and it is basically a 20 minute tape cut up (a la William Burroughs) of opera singer Cathy Berberian's astonishing voice. To call it a cut up however, is to underplay the stunning complexity of the sound, for the voice is layered and manipulated, pieces of tape are speeded up and slowed down...what is recognisable as human voice is entirely wordless, beyond language, transporting you to a place of pure emotion, or pure thought. This is music to fall into, maybe something like an aural black-hole?

The other tracks are worth a listen too...

Tracklist:

01 Ilhan Mimaroglu - Agony
02 John Cage - Fontana Mix
03 Luciano Berio - Visage

Get it HERE.

Louie Austen - Consequences (Cheap 1999)

This is a strange thing. Sinatra obsessed middle aged rat-pack wannabe crooning over sci-fi lounge sounds and messed up electronica. Notes of a dirty old man and heartbroken whisky soaked tales of loneliness and regret. Louie Austen still makes music, but what I've heard has had smoother, more polished sound. This, his debut album on Patrick Pulsinger's Cheap label, is an all together darker affair, all crunchy beats and Blade Runner-esque retro futurism.

Tracklist:

01 Hear My Song
02 My Life in 3 40
03 When You Walked Away
04 Remember
05 Holdin' On
06 I'm a Star
07 Northern Sunrise
08 u're an Alien
09 Where is Love
10 Sinatra 3000

Check it out!