MR. ZOLON MIX

CHECK IT OUT

JET SET LIFESTYLE - MISTY ZOLON

ONE MAN WOMAN - QUINCY JONES

GET ON TEH FLOOR - MIKE JACKSON

JUST BE URESELF - CAMEO

BACK AND FORTH - CAMEO

FLIRT - CAMEO

THE LOVER IN YOU - SUGAR HILL GANNNNG

NEVER SAY DIE - CLEF RICHARD

PERCUSSION ON THE GO - MIKE MORAN

DEMAGOGOS - JOXAREN

HURME - VC

LES PINGUINS L'AMUSANT - VARIOUS ARTISTS

SEX CONTINUUM - MRS. QUAEDA

ENDLESS RACE - WALLY BADAROU

FLEXXY-BALL THEME - FLEXX

NEW SONG - HOWARD JOENS

MUSIC TAKES YOU - BLAME

DOLLARS - PAUL B. DAVIS

ZOOO000M000000OM - HUDSON MOHAWK

PLAY - JENNIFER LOPEZ (WITH SKWEE INTERLUDE)

PON' DE FLOOR - MAJOR LAAAAAAAAAAAYZRRRR

WHEN YOU HEAR THE BASSLINEEEEEE - MAAAJOOOOR LAAAAAZEEERRRRR

VOID VISION - CYBER PEOPLE

SOLAR - BINARY GHOST

POOL - SIMON PARK

Good Film

Dirty Projectors, November 22, 2009 Bowery NYC

Nice recording of a very recent gig.

Saw them live fairly recently and the arrangements for some songs have already changed quite a lot.

The Roots feature on two tracks but it's a bit pointless and David Byrne is just sounds lost on the Knotty Pine collab which unfortunately ends the show.

GET IT HERE THOUGH SOME REALLY COOL VERSIONS OF SONGS

Bob Brown

THREE TRACKS BY BOBBY BROWN

Girl Next Door

Every Little Step

Roni

SOUNDS SO GOOD

Jet Set Mix

PART ONE - 14 minutes

Rising 5 - Hudson Mohawke

Zapz - Misty Forest

Sega Rally

Let's Be Adult - Ambitious Lovers

(John Oswald link)

Pop The Glock (Slowed Down) - Uffie

Domino Dance - Logic System

PART TWO - 13 minutes

Superdoop - Simon Park (Library Music)

(Pachelbel's Canon in D-major - ALF System link)

Gluetooth - Hudson Mohawke

Lightworks - Raymond Scott

Sweet Tooth - R Kelly

Night School - Frank Zappa

PART THREE - 14 minutes

Too Much Pressure - Dirty Projectors + Sidetrack

Green Light - Beyoncé (Misty Forest Mix)

FUSE - Hudson Mohawke

Electric Bamber-boo - Bun Butler and his Mouse Pad

PART FOUR - 11 minutes

Shiz Ko E - The Tuss (Aphex Twin)

(gz50m_mallet link)

(Misty synth link)

Pizza Boy - Tim and Eric

Pro-Motion - Alan Hawkshaw (Library Music)

Soles Sweat (Instrumental) (Sped Up) - Debruit

DVNO (Sped Up) - Justice

PART FIVE - 7 minutes

Secret Entrance - Mr Zolon and Misty Forest

Adult Games - Randy Barracuda & Mesak

Ice Cream (Slowed Down) - Muscles

DOWNLOAD

Norman McLaren

Gets particularly interesting at 2:50

Posted a really good animation of his quite a long time ago.

OTT

Misty Forest Time

DOWNLOAD SONG

Summer of Love

Dumb Inevitable Awesome

www.myspace.com/rarecandyband

Check Out "Trainer Battle - Gym Battle".

4:47

Karel Appel

From UBU

Captain EO

Part 2 is particularly cool:

MONEY HUNT

Ryan Trecartin

Completely insane.

From UBU

Overnight Romancin'

DEBRUIT

MYSPACE

Washed Out

HIS MYSPACE

(HIS BLOG)

Even though there's really a lot of suspiciously trendy, nostalgic (1980s), lo-fi music around, this stood out for me, or maybe it just clicked.

His biggest track "Feel It All Around" makes use of this, which is quite funny. (Good idea to slow it down).

Beirut Outtakes

By Peggy Ahwesh

Spike Jonze Direction

Beach Boys A Cappella

MORE

Construction

http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/

Hausu

Original post

Cory Arcangel Ideas

PDF

Speaking Piano

DETAILS

Ambitious Lovers

ENVY (1984)

GREED (1988)

When The World Comes To An End

More info and a downloadable MP3 at Stereogum.

Malek Khorshid

I really like dated animations with surreal and very interpretable plotlines.

So I enjoyed this 1975 animation by Ali Akbar Sadeghi.

There's something quite videogame-like about the whole thing too.

Courtesy of UBU again.

The Finger

It's just a relatively cheap plug-in enabling you to play around with sound in loads of ways using different keys to trigger different effects and editing techniques.

Kind of ridiculous how easy and accessable it will make all of that stuff, but that's probably a good thing!

LOOK

Saying that, for it to be fully customisable you've got to run it through Reaktor, which is relatively hardcore territory.

Hudson Mohawke Interview

Look at him he's just a boy!

Good Morning Mr. Orwell

Amazing video from 1984 led by Nam June Paik.

Played on New Year's Day and presented live by various people across the globe, so there are some awkward live moments but it's filled with amazing people and graphics.

More info at UBU.

Logic System

At risk of just being a filter of Mutant Sounds (which would actually be quite useful in a way), I found a really good post they did earlier this year on Logic System (aka this guy, who did loads of sound programming for the Yellow Magic Orchestra).

In my opinion the first album is better than the second one but they're both HERE.

Good, quite dancey, melodic, 1981, Japanese, pretty fashionable...

Library Music

Companies hire composers to write music, the music is then fully owned by the companies who can easily licence the music, which is useful for people who make television etc.

There are quite a few blogs dedicated to spreading library music, and the amount that was made is incredible.

They were never available for public sale, so blogging them is sort of the only way for them to really exist nowadays.

A lot of of the composers who were involved are fairly anonymous in the sense that it's hard to find out much about them even if the names are clearly labelled, although I think some of them might have used pen names, and there are a few cases of musicians who did this sort of work for a bit to make money then became famous for other things.

As I said there are a lot of blogs dedicated to Library Music but the one that seems to have the most consistent results is The Library Hunt.

This is also to do with the fact that all of the posts are quite clear about what style of music each collection holds.

Saying that, the records themselves had to have quite clear titles for commercial reasons.

Two particularly good ones I've come across are "High Tension" and "Thrills and Spills", both from the company Bruton Music.

I've also uploaded the title track from this album by Simon Park.

It's a bit different to some of the other tracks I've come across in the sense that it's less atmospheric and a bit more like a wacky instrumental pop song.

CHECK IT OUT

More Mario

DanielRadcliffe777

Many Many Women

Petr Kotik

Many Many Women

Text by Gertrude Stein

S.E.M. Ensemble

3 hours and 35 minute excerpt

"The recording is an edited version of the complete 6-hour long performance. The nature of the music makes it impossible to to repeat and correct various passages, therefore, the recording proceeded despite occasional lapses and mistakes, impossible to avoid in a live performance. The recordings (two complete performances) were edited and combined by discarding parts, not acceptable for a record release."

Written in the late 70s and recorded in 1980 by Petr Kotik's own ensemble, Many Many Women was apparently respected within certain circles, but is definitely not famous, and the same pretty much goes for composer Petr Kotik.

I heard one of his compositions (via this) and really liked it, so tried to get hold of his "magnum opus" but found it extremely difficult.

Ended up finding it on eBay and it involved a fairly extreme price and shipping distance but it got here eventually.

I definitely feel that it was worth sharing via the blog for that fact alone!

I still haven't listened to it in it's entirety but I'm impressed.

It's got a pretty much non-stop use of parallel fifths, which is a hardcore approach to melody and harmony, but I think it works.

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

Here is quite a nice review with good photos and anecdotal details.

Artikulation

Hot Troche

My parents got a few CDs for me when they went to Japan last year.

Quite a lot of it was fairly extreme electronic stuff that they had never heard of, like this album Munaa Poyu by Hot Troche which I didn't really like at first.

Listened to it recently though and actually now I really like it!

Still quite extreme though, there's a quote online (which could be a joke) about it containing "approximately 700 hours of music compressed".

It does remind me of these guys as well as maybe more obviously this guy.

Impressively, the blog Mutant Sounds have beat me to uploading this by about a year, so download it from there.

Dirty Talk

MIDI Player Piano

Jeff Stolet using an infared sensor to trigger MIDI algorithms which are then sent to a player piano.

Taken from Deviant Synth.

Ascending Melody

Coming out in two weeks on their Temecula Sunrise EP.

Muse

Muse are so shit it's insane.

However, in anticipation of their new album which has just been released, loads of fans put up fake versions of what they thought the final tracks (the Muse penned Exogenesis Symphony) would sound like, which sort of brings the "Muse sound" to a new level.

Here are just two of them:

Instant Sampling

Check it out!

Hours of fun!

Goodiepal TV

Goodiepal

http://brainwashed.com/vvm/downloads/gpal/various/goodiepal_future_shock_may_2008.mp3

Gene

Analog Session

Butter Snips

Another fun upcoming release from Warp Records!

This is just an album sampler but it sounds like there'll be some good bits.

Early America

http://www.youtube.com/user/madocseren

100 Reasons

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=41&threadid=18110

More Carl Stalling

Second disc of his stuff released by Warner Bros.

PART ONE

PART TWO

Check out his IMDB page too!

Battle

Max Tundra Peel Session

Read about these a while ago, but they have recently been uploaded onto last.fm as free downloads!

Tracks from around the time of "Mastered by Guy at the Exchange" arranged for an 8 person band, which is quite a feat.

Originally transmitted on the 14th December 2004, which was after John Peel's death, but I'm pretty sure it was a genuine Peel Session.

HERE

Vanilla Brains & Chocolate Brains

Britney

Embedding disabled by request so link here!

100 Metronomes

Eric Wareheim Direction

Exciting Upcoming Release

SGP

Oskar Sala

Oskar Sala is a German composer mostly known for playing an old electric instrument called the Trautonium.

I found an album by him that I really like which has some nice compositions (all of them by Sala except the first track, which is by Paul Hindemith), although the instrument itself stands out more than anything else.

The download from megaupload hasn't got properly labelled tracks, but a tracklist can be found at discogs.

DOWNLOAD

Actually do, it's a pretty special album!

Bonus links:

The extensive www.trautonium.com

Youtube video by someone who really can't play the Trautonium

He Needs Me

Helicopter

Dennis Greenidge

WOW

Meccano

Schoenberg Was Not A Great Painter

Newsflash!

Leo Stoller

Not strictly a music post, but one of my posts got removed by the person it was about so I got a detailed email from Google and then started reading about that sort of stuff.

Leo Stoller is an "intellectual property entrepreneur".

You can read the wikipedia entry here, but I love the word-art images above outlining the words he owns.

Stillness Is The Move

Really like this song and they just made this video for it which is also really nice.

I've already come to terms with the fact that I like almost everything this band does.

Nancarrow

Don't want to say too much about Conlon Nancarrow, but he was known for his compositions for player pianos. They were ahead of their time (early/mid-20th century), because rhythmically the player piano allowed pretty much anything.

Here's a trilogy for player piano:

A - measure=72

B - measure=50

C - measure=92

For violin and player piano:

Toccata, for Violin and Player Piano

And a special arrangement of one of his early player piano "studies"  by Yvar Mikhashoff:

Study No.7 (Arr. Yvar Mikhashoff)

Se7en

Made an album with a pal about the seven deadly sins.

He tackled Greed, Sloth and Lust while I sorted out Pride, Gluttony and Wrath.

We then made Envy out of bits and pieces of the first 6 tracks.

DOWNLOAD

Band Leader

I'm A Band Leader by Captain Beefheart. 

It's funny and it works cos it's Captain Beefheart!

Spoken word track, just a warning.

World News

Here's MJ's original demo version of "Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough":

Pretty cool.

Forever

This video was taken off Youtube a while ago but it's back now.

Phew.

B Day Highlights

Beyoncé's second album sold loads but less people seem to remember anything about it (there's no Crazy In Love or Single Ladies).

It's noticeable for being quite Jay Z influenced too, with him popping up all over the shop.

I think he also influenced the insane process behind making the album (quote brought to us by MTV News via wikipedia):

"She had multiple producers in Sony Studios. She booked out the whole studio and she had the biggest and best producers in there. She would have us in one room, we would start collaborating with one producer, [and] then she would go and start something else with another producer. We would bounce around to the different rooms and work with the different producers. It was definitely a factory type of process."

Anyway, here are two tracks from the album that I really like:

Kitty Kat

Green Light

RSM

R. Stevie Moore is a very early lo-fi musician.

He's very much a magnet for words like genius and legend, which I think has a lot to do with him remaining relatively obscure.

Definitely interesting though!

Here are some videos made for tracks of his from the 70s.

Yeah!

John Zorn Filmworks

John Zorn somehow manages to run the non-profit label Tzadik which releases a huge amount of music, including a lot of his own.

A lot of the releases fall under a particular series, and Zorn releases music he's written for films under the "Filmworks" tag.

I ended up buying number VII, Cynical Hysterie Hour the other day as I read it was music written for a set of Japanese cartoons by Kiriko Kubo.

The music is played by an extremely tight band, here are some tracks:

Hysteric Logo

Walk To Park

Fighting Pirates

Filmworks XXII, The Last Supper is extremely different, being written for voices and drums.

It's more typical "soundtrack music" in a way. Here are three tracks:

Opening Invocation

Dance For The Vernal Equinox

Le Diable

I'm not sure which I prefer, but it's impressive as these releases are kind of a sideline to his main stuff.

Changes

Basically went through my awesome blog and took out almost all the download links.

Makes some of the posts look even more futile than they did in the first place, sometimes in quite a funny way.

Just trying to change the nature of things a bit!

Love to all my fans,

Alex 

x

Lovely

Better than Hall and Oates

Dark Was The Night Concert

Only really into the first 4 songs, but sounds like it was a fun concert.

Find it here thanks to NPR.

Ringer EP

Only just got round to hearing this EP Four Tet released last year, and I actually really like it!

I used to be really into his stuff but eventually got super bored of it, so it was a nice surprise.

Better than Devo

From The Daily What:

PEHDTSCKJMBA

Thanks to Dom for showing me this:

Some Albums

Civilization Phaze III by Frank Zappa, his last album completed before his death in 1993, released in 1995, heavy use of Synclavier, really cool production...

Big Bam Boom by Hall and Oates, released in 1984, sounds very 1984, loads of hits, has sold over 3 million copies...

Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich, thorough info here...

Kurt Weisman

Nice songs, especially nice production.

Nice probably isn't the word actually.

Myspace here!

Francesco Zappa

Bought this in a charity shop today and thought it might be a joke, but no, sometime in the 80s Frank Zappa stumbled across an 18th century composer called Francesco Zappa and decided to record a large number of his compositions using a Synclavier, or "The Barking Pumpkin Digital Gratification Consort (Frank Zappa, conductor)" as it says on the sleeve.

Worst of/Best of

John Oswald Interview

Fairly interesting interview with John Oswald on UBU.

Includes useful snippets of sound.

Here you go!

I Hear A New World

Concept album written and recorded by Joe Meek in 1959, partially released in 1960 and fully released in 1991.
The album is known for its space-inspired production techniques which were ahead of their time.

It obviously sounds dated now, but in quite a cool and interesting way.

Bits of it are pretty insane, as was Joe Meek himself.

Drumming

Steve Reich's piece Drumming from the early 70s.

Really like parts 2 and 4, but it must have been even more amazing at the time!

Found out from Alex Ross that Steve Reich also just won the Pulitzer Prize!

Pinball

Amazing music and animation!

What "DozerBoy25" from Youtube has to say about it:

"A throwback to the days of Sesame Street... this is a compilation of different pinball skits all rolled in to one. Check it out for those of you who remember!!

Performed by The Pointer Sisters. Pinball Number Count was originally produced in 1972 by Imagination, Inc. in San Francisco, California for the Children's Television Workshop. It made its debut on Sesame Street in 1976."

Loverboy

Kinda scary video but I quite like this song.

Good bassline!

Ujino and the Rotators

Japanese artist turns objects into mechanical instruments.

Free show at the Hayward gallery for another week or so.

Youtube channel

Website

Glazin

Actually quite like this music video.

Not sure about the song though.

It's "Glazin" by Black Dice.

Probably done by band member/artist Bjorn Copeland who I like a lot.

Bitte This Bitte That

I've mainly been listening to the leak of "Bitte Orca" by Dirty Projectors, which is very good and something that I'll definitely buy when it comes out, but I don't feel comfortable uploading that!

Frankenstein!!

Here's that HK Gruber thing that I mentioned in the last post.

"Frankenstein!!" is a piece written in the 70s for "chansonnier" and orchestra.

This 2008 performance is from Vienna and stars Gruber himself, presumably as the chansonnier.

I can't actually understand what he's saying but I like it a lot.

Download

Classical in the Air

I found a good blog which uploads many classical music concerts from all around the world called Classical in the Air.

He's a member of a specific torrent site that uploads lots of live music and is kind enough to make good selections from that and bring them to the blogging world.

Quite a lot is uploaded and he has quite a broad taste in classical music, which is good if you're doing that type of thing.

I've so far been listening to the HK Gruber from this post a lot and just got the Frank Zappa from here.

It's a nice way of encountering different composers through looking for other ones as a lot of the live performances are well curated.

The downside is that many of the posts are three part Rapidshare files which then turn out to be FLAC.

Here is a good converter though called Switch, which makes things a bit easier.

Chromeo Remix

Vampire Weekend's "The Kids Don't Stand A Chance" gets "the Chromeo treatment".

It's pretty stupid but nice and fun.

Makes the chorus sound a lot like The Police.

If you want to hear that then click here.

Micachu

I've heard the name thrown around a lot but I only just properly listened to her album yesterday and actually it's very good!

Quite abrasive but done really well. 

The album was produced by Matthew Herbert so that's probably why a lot of the weirder sounds are pulled off so well.

It's nice to hear something original come out of London anyway.

And it's worth noting that she's also a 21 year old composition student at Guildhall.

Jerzy Kucia

The Next Justice

Probably not, but Peter Bjorn and John's new single is very D.A.N.C.E.

The album has a much more bleak "hip-hop" sound, which is pretty cool but the songs aren't that great.

That's kinda the PBJ way though.

Here's the amusing video:

Here's the actual track:

"Nothing to Worry About"

Here's another track off the album with single potential, but relatively extreme lyrics:

"Lay it Down"

The Flying Lizards

Here are some late 70s/early 80s singles from a British experimental group called The Flying Lizards.

I found them on an old Mutant Sounds "Whacked Out Singles" post.

"Whacked Out" is a pretty good description actually, but they're still quite accessible.

Download

 

What's Up?

Interesting instrumental band from Oregon called What's Up?

Check out their Myspace page.

Boxcutter

First dubstep related music that I've actually liked, probably cos it isn't really dubstep.

It's a nice balance of styles actually, all within electronic music of course.

Problem Solvers

Best Fwends

Released in 2007 and hyped a few years ago this is already kinda "old".

Just two dudes recording lots of short tracks and claiming not to be talented enough to have a set "sound".

Double Up

Borderline comedy album released in 2007.

Not even in a completely ironic way. 

Some of the lyrics are just unbelievable, especially considering his pending court cases at the time.

Shoukichi Kina

Shoukichi Kina is an Okinawan musician and this compilation was released on David Byrne's Luaka Bop label in 1994.

I like some of the songs way more than others but I think the sound is really cool.

Björk interviews Arvo Pärt

From the 1997 BBC program "Modern Minimalists"

Gurus

There's a very interesting three disc compilation called "Ohm - The Early Gurus of Electronic Music" which seems to be everywhere on the internet.

It collects a lot of very pioneering people and I haven't digested it all yet but the discs can be downloaded here.

Dirty Projectors live at SXSW

Recorded a few days ago by NPR.

Listening to it now.

I think it's all new, soon to be released material.

You can access it here.

More Raymond Scott

This time its a collection of his music for real instruments.

Quite a few were used in cartoons but weren't written for that purpose.

Saying that, most of his compositions have quite good, cartoony titles.

aPAtT

I've been trying to find interesting bands based in London or the UK, just out of interest to see if they exist!

Here is one called aPAtT.

Worth listening to a bit of their stuff before making any solid judgements as it's all quite different.

They have a pretty comprehensive website too.

Brian Joseph Davis

This guy is a relatively young Canadian artist/musician/writer who makes quite a lot of interesting and amusing work.

Here is his website, but you can listen to quite a few of his projects on UBU.

He's made songs out of burned banned records, turned Adorno's writing in a punk band, and done quite a lot of equally odd stuff.

Here is his cover of "Sony's best song", the End User License Agreement:

"Eula" by Brian Joseph Davis

The Minister of Enjoyment

King Sunny Adé (the King bit is surprisingly relevant, he was born into Nigerian royal family) brought African "Juju music" to the global masses with a record deal with Island in the 80s.

He was known for incorporating the pedal steel guitar to his sound after becoming a fan of American country-western music, but also began to use synthesisers and drum machines like on his album Synchro System.

Twi the Humble Feather

These guys have taken "Sung Tongs" by Animal Collective and turned it into a band.

I'm sure they'd hate me for saying that, but check them out anyway.

Minnie Riperton

Check out the high notes in this live video.

I'm talking about the really high notes.

The ridiculous stage set and camera techniques are also quite amusing:

For Shannah

Here is another find from the amazing UBU 365 days project!

This found cassette was made by some dude called Jimmy in 1988 for a girl called Shannah to show off his musical talent.

Most of the songs are novelty but quite a lot of effort has been put into the home production.

Reminds me of some of the tracks I've made for people in the last few years, although it was quite a lot harder to do 20 years ago!

The first track is the weakest, but there are some good moments afterwards.

The weak jokes never stop though.

"For Shannah (Songs I Made)" by Jimmy

More info from UBU here.

The Eight Seasons Of Chromalox

A musical made in the late 60s/early 70s by a heating company called Chromalox to promote itself.

I thought this kinda stuff only found its way into musical form in the satirical consumerist lyrics that pop up on Frank Zappa records!

Anyway, here it is and if you want to read way, way more about it and possibly find stuff a bit like it, go here.

Disgusting Musical Overload

Kimitaka Matsumae

Mutant Sounds has a lot of good and extremely rare stuff on it, but I think this guy is especially amazing!

He's a Japanese video game music composer and that comes through very heavily in some of the tracks. The four albums in the series "You Are The Fox" all contain loads of quite short tracks which jump around between many ideas,  ranging from cute to insane in quite a hyperactive way.

Most of them are executed electronically, which gives them some coherence, and there is some sort of style that comes through as the tracks race past.

Here's a link to the links provided on Mutant Sounds, although I had trouble downloading CD1, part one, and started with CD 2, part one, but let me know if that's just me.

It's all on Rapidshare though, making it a bit of a pain to download it all. 

So far I've only got the whole of CD2 and CD 1, part two, but already there's loads of stuff that I really like.

Tokyo Rose

Here's yet another album by Van Dyke Parks, except this one was especially hard to find.

I ended up buying it from an Amazon "third party merchant" but it wasn't too much.

"Tokyo Rose" was released in 1989 and aims to mix Eastern music with his already trademark take on Western music.

I think the mix is done quite well, although my knowledge of Eastern music extends mainly to hearing the soundtrack to Okami for hours at a time.

It's still pretty cheesy in some bits, despite being very clever, and if you haven't heard any Van Dyke Parks yet then I'd recommend starting with his debut (and best) album "Song Cycles".

Another bonus to actually buying the physical CD was getting to see the back cover which is more amusing than the front.

"Tokyo Rose" by Van Dyke Parks

Like this... Like this... Midget...

Bombay Bicycle Club have got their new single "Always Like This" up on their Myspace.

Check it out if you like that sort of stuff.

I heard it a few months ago actually in a bizarre car ride, and I remember it being a stand out track on the album (which is gonna come out in June).

They're signed to Island records now too, so they could seriously make it or break it!

Anyway, what I found amusing about the single was how much the looped "like this" vocal hook reminded me of how the word "midget" was dealt with at the end of this.

I can't believe I've already linked to that twice on this relatively young blog.

Actually, I can. And to prove it here's the track "Sweet Tooth" off his album "Double Up".

Worth listening to while reading the lyrics, just to experience the full blast of its horny crudeness.

Konono N°1

These guys are an African band who play electric versions of "thumb pianos", or likembé if you wanna call them that. Then they're backed by various percussion instruments and sometimes vocals.

Liquid Liquid

This band sounds pretty ahead of their time, or times haven't moved on very much.

One or the other.

Raymond Scott

Raymond Scott (1908-1994) was an American composer who made very early and impressive use of electronics.

Nico Muhly

Young composer based in New York. Went to Columbia and Julliard. Generally acclaimed as a wonder-kid with the usual backlash.

"Mothertongue" is his second album and was released last year.

Its ten tracks divide three large and quite different compositions.

It's arguable if he's breaking any new ground, but its very ambitious and Muhly pulls it off quite well, with the most successful experiment being the last one.

Called "The Only Tune" its a warped and disjointed version of old folk/Americana which I found interesting and actually enjoyed!

Not surprising but quite funny...

"Britney Spears' live microphone feed, isolated."

XTC

I've had some of their music for quite a while now but I'm only recently getting really into it.

They started out in the 70s and most of their known stuff is from the 80s, but they were still active until quite recently.

Very much a predecessor to Blur's experimental pop (Blur even wanted one of them to produce "Modern Life Is Rubbish"), but I'd say they're actually more ambitious and complex than Blur most of the time.

Their 1986 album "Skylarking" is considered one of their best, despite the fact that it didn't sell very well at the time and that the recording sessions with Todd Rundgren (who did a very good job in the end) were quite strained.

Here is a video of them performing slightly earlier material - "Yacht Song" from their 1982 album "English Settlement". It might even be one of their last live performances seeing as their main man Andy Partridge had a breakdown around that time, turning them into a studio band.

Martin Creed

You know that artist who won the Turner Prize in 2001 for a piece of work which was simply the lights of an empty gallery space turning on and off?

Well it turns out he makes music too!

This song was recorded a few years ago but reminds me of the recent Dirty Projectors collaboration with David Byrne which I posted a while back, especially in the chorus.

"I Don't Know What I Want" by Martin Creed

You might also want to check out his extremely well catalogued website or him talking about the track and how it links to his work.

Microsoft Songsmith

Trifle posted this on Videothunder a few days ago and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. 

Basically, Microsoft Songsmith takes melodies you sing and finds chords to fit them. The software's barely out and people have already posted videos using acapellas from known songs.

This one's surprisingly catchy:

Circle of 5ths ahoy!

Anyway, this one's actually more original than most covers:

The bridge for this is made amazing, but the chorus flops hard:

"Embedding has been disabled by request" but watch it anyway.

Animation

Extremely impressive and hypnotic animation done in 1952 by Norman McLaren.

Cool music too.

The whole thing really reminds me of videogames, which is especially odd considering when it was made.

More Van Dyke Parks

This one's cheesier and harder to find!

"Come Along" is a good breakthrough track to get into the album.

Carl Stalling

This post is kind of an extension of the last one about John Zorn, but also connects quite well to the first post I ever wrote featuring Van Dyke Parks.

To paraphrase wikipedia, Carl Stalling was an American composer who wrote most of the music for the Looney Toons cartoons. He worked at Warner Bros. for 22 years, writing on average one complete score every week.

It's funny how the opening of "The Good Egg" is so familiar, yet listening to it just as music makes you realise how good it is and actually how well it fits the wacky animations.

Here is the first compilation of Stalling's music released by Warner Bros:

"The Carl Stalling Project" by the Warner Bros. Studio Orchestra

Naked City

This is a band led by avant-garde composer and saxophonist John Zorn who's done lots of interesting work mixing composition with improvisation in a way that works surprisingly well.

This particular project's debut album (released in 1989) is testing the limits of the traditional "rock band". 

Zorn's ridiculously tight band make many sudden turns, showing a childlike interest in almost all genres and inspired by the way music for cartoons have a structure that is not defined in the same way as most music, but still makes sense.