The Stranglers - “Hanging Around”
The Stranglers - “Peaches”
Pan sonic: ‘Kone’ (2000)
“Film made for an exhibition about ‘light’ and sponsored by Philips:Hot re-strike, de Warande, Turnhout, Belgium, 2005. This film is made only using photos sent by people from Turnhout.”
Pan Sonic: “Rähinä II / Mayhem II”
Their shows are awesome. You can feel the bass enter your body through the bottom of your feet, exit through the hair standing at attention on the back of our neck …
Pan Sonic: “Rähinä II / Mayhem II”
From the album Kesto (2004)
Pan Sonic (formerly known as Panasonic) is a Finnish duo that has produced some of the most brutally beautiful electronic music of the past couple decades.
Pan Sonic’s aesthetic is decidedly minimalist, even ascetic. Using simple sonic elements, they construct dense, noisy, and rhythmically driven songs that combine aspects of industrial and electronica into an imaginary soundtrack for a bleak, dystopian discotheque.
Their album Kesto (“strength” or “duration”), released in 2004, is their magnum opus, comprising four CDs, each more ambient and arhythmic than the last. The fourth disc contains a vast, hour-long drone track entitled “Säteily / Radiation,” which bears an uncanny resemblance to Coil’s epic drone album ANS, released in the same year.
“Take Care” by Beach House, from Teen Dream
The last song on each Beach House album has this amazing depth and clarity that makes me forever enamored. Although I love the albums as a whole, there is something specific about their closing tracks. Each one appears to be built on these repetitive last lines that are impossible to forget. The lyrical content is simple enough but every time I listen to one of them, I can’t help but feel moved, certainly more moved than the rest of the songs on the albums. Each album seems to tell a chapter of one continuous story, and as the last song fades out (and it always fades out), I anticipate the next album, ready to consume the next part of the narrative. The fade out feels like a cliffhanger, telling the listener that what they’ve experienced is complete in itself, but there is more to understand, more to uncover and appreciate.
This one is especially poignant. It is woozy and completely evocative. Listening to it makes you feel young, romantic, and contented; you are hopeful, yet wistful, for the next step.
(via annicka)
Konono N°1 - Paradiso
emusic describes Congotronics as “Jimi Hendrix meets Talking Heads in the heart of the Congo” on their top albums of the decade list. I could not resist the Remain In Light-baiting and dove in. I still have to fully digest the album, but those amped up thumb pianos hit a sweet spot between tone and distortion.
Anywho Allmusic does a fascinating history report on their review:
This amazing record is the product of utility, coincidence, and accidental discovery as much as it is a product of academic deliberation, and it manages to sound old and traditional even as it is refreshingly (even radically) new and avant-garde. Konono No. 1 was formed in the 1980s by a group of Bazombo musicians, dancers, and singers from the Democratic Republic of Congo to play traditional likembe (thumb piano) music in the streets. They soon discovered, though, that they needed amplification to be heard and — this is where the story of this album really begins — they took a DIY and utilitarian approach by building their own amplification systems out of junked car parts, magnets, and other flotsam. Once assembled, the system produced a huge hum that Konono No. 1 embraced as part of the sound of the group. At the center of everything were three amped-up thumb pianos tuned to three different registers, and coupled with all manner of pots, pans, whistles, and brake drum snares for percussion and with the vocals blasting through megaphones, all embedded in the huge buzz and hum of the homemade PA system, the group accidentally created a sound that was at once both ancient and traditional and yet eerily akin to experimental 21st century electronica. Congotronics is Konono’s second album (the first was a live outing entitled Lubuaku), and while it was ostensibly recorded in a studio setting, it sounds wonderfully live and immediate, as if the dozen members of the group were standing on a busy street corner like some Congolese version of a second-line Mardi Gras band, only with thumb pianos instead of horns. Musical themes emerge and reemerge in the various tracks, and what sounds initially chaotic and random is revealed to be nothing of the sort, giving the whole album the feel of a ragged, joyous suite. Part traditional, part African rhumba, part smart avant-garde electronica, Congotronics is the sound of an urban junkyard band simultaneously weaving the past and the future into one amazingly coherent structure, and not only that, you can dance to it. This is the band Tom Waits has been looking for all his life.
Acknowledgment, 1964
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Could have gone west. Could have packed your things,
who cares that you weren’t old enough to drive.
Could have sold yourself to truckers
and highwaymen. Could have gone down
the dark road between home and somewhere
better, the whole world watching tv and not one thinking of you.
Could’ve got lost. Could have said, “I don’t know”
when the waitress asked, “Where you live at?”
You could have lied and said, “New Jersey”
or “Mobile.” Of course, that assumes
you’d get past Mason Dixon.
You could have seen battlefields:
Gettysburg, Fredericksburg even Chicago
if you waded deep enough into summer. Could have slept
with your head on the ground like your sister,
her ear to the transistor, listening,
listening to “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
You could have said, “Fuck the Beatles”
and left them behind, shooting the lights out
of every stadium, every coliseum.
You could have made girls scream because
you were the stranger under the bleachers, that ember
of the cigarette burning in the darkness just outside their
porch lights’ glow. You could have named them;
Helen, Rachelle, Ida May, and in Texas Irene Rosenberg
a girl just as lonely as you. Imagine,
your leaving before it ever got started. Where’s that
girl you married? You don’t know. You were half way
to Billings or Provo or Bend. You watched the cities
of the Midwest burn. You threw bottles and never
cut your hair. Remember the drum kit in Schlessinger’s
Instruments? How you crawled through the broken
window and banged away in the shards of that city.
If they could have seen you then! All muscle
and heart, sweating, sweating no more stupid melody
holding you back. Just the bass line, just the gas line
hissing and your foot on the pedal.
You could have gotten away. The country was different.
A boy could walk without getting beaten beyond an inch
of his life, without getting lashed to a fence
in God forsaken Wyoming. Why, God hadn’t forsaken
Wyoming or Birmingham yet. Chaney, Goodman,
and Schwerner safe in their beds. Perhaps you passed
by them. You could have passed me by and saved yourself
the whole mess. My mother doesn’t know you yet. She’s
on her back in the grass with some other man’s son.
Guernica / Acknowledgment, 1964
Amazing poet discovered at this year’s Miami Book Fair International. A neat person to watch boxing matches with.
