ILMiXor

Our journey is complete.

2005-09-12T06:27:00.000-04:00

Kode9 + Space Ape: Ghost Town

2005-09-11T08:50:00.000-04:00

'I am the ghost captain.' (Lee Perry)

Cavernous, Dark Dubstep. The Product of Glasgow (Kode9, the producer) + Jamaica (the vox) + Coventry (the source) + India (samples) = The sound of (South) London. It couldn't have come out of anywhere else.

Yello: Domingo

2005-09-08T16:45:00.000-04:00

We're not ready to cross the waters for Britain yet, so we take a detour to the Continent. Over the Alps, and we come to the country of fondue, yodeling and direct democracy; also home of one of the quirkiest pop acts ever to have blessed our planet. Of course we're talking about Yello.

If anyone, the duo of Dieter Meier and Boris Blank would've been perfect guides for our deconstructionist, looping and relooping world tour. Messrs Meier & Blank have swallowed the whole cake of Late Modernity and spit out - themselves. Though their music includes disparate elements such as Latin percussion, European disco, Arabic chants, spoken word bits in French or Italian, salsa, hard rock, swing and musicals, you can't really say the're "eclectic" or that they're "influenced by". They simply accept anything as input, yet the output is never nothing but their own. Ever since they released their first LP in 1980, they've been forerunners and a source of guidance for the ever-expanding plateaus of electronic music. Still, their uniqueness has guaranteed that they have no true followers. No one does, no one can sound like Yello.

The song I've chosen is "Domingo" from the 1985 LP Stella, often rated as Yello's best. On this song, Boris Blank's production is a manic brew of hard guitar riffs, rumbling bass and sinewy drums, complete with a gorgeous epic synth line that would make any modern-day trance producer envious; Dieter Meier's vocals and lyrics are, as always, more cinematic than cinema. Meier fills Yello songs with vivid images, glimpses of unfinished screenplays for the movies in his head. Almost any Yello track could be a soundtrack piece for some forgotten expressionist dada film noir masterwork. I won't go on and try to interpret what "Domingo" is about, but here is an approximate transcript of the lyrics:

We are here
In this holy cave today
To celebrate
The reincarnation
Of Domingo de Santa Clara
The man who convinced us
That there is no Lord
For His name is Buddha, Allah, Shiva, Yahweh
Outside our bodies

We are God
'Cause only we can create the idea
Of His existence in our holy brains

Je deteste l'idee de dieu et de son fils
[I hate the idea of God and His son]
C'est une des idees les plus diaboliques
[It's one of the most diabolical ideas]
Dans l'histoire entiere de l'homme
[In the whole history of man]

Let us pray to ourselves and our spirits!

Domingo you show me just nothing
Like no one before

Domingo of Santa Clara
You made us believe
That you are no phantom
One without

The slightest spot of a thousand nations
Your spiritual brother Domingo

We all know
Domingo of Santa Clara
Will be born today, tomorrow, and the day after
Billions of times
'Til the end of the Universe
Here with a smile on his face
As the rest of our species watches
The catastrophe

Domingo you show me just nothing
Like no one before

Luka Bloom - Bad

2005-09-08T09:56:00.000-04:00

An Irish icon covering an Irish icon. Folk singer Luka Bloom released this song on his 2000 LP of cover songs called Keeper of the Flame. When selecting material to cover he was disappointed that he couldn't seem to find a song from another Irish icon, Van Morrison, that suited him but he suggests that this U2 song found him at a memorable time away from home:

"It was winter, 1988. Do the gig at the Red Lion in Greenwich Village and decide to take the night train back to D.C. I’m in Penn Station at one a.m. It’s a very sad and scary scene there -- many walking wounded, cold, huddled, mumbling casualties. By the time the train pulls in, I’m in a dark place inside. I sit on the train and take out my walkman. As the train pulls out of Penn, I stumble across a radio station, the opening notes of the Edge’s intro ease into my ears, and I instantly feel connected to something serene and beautiful. I leave the New York skyline to the sound of ‘Let it go, and so to fade away...’ Somehow, all was well in the world again. I was meant to hear this song, in this way, at this moment. And so it is one of my very favorite songs of all time. I could never have imagined that 12 years later I’d be singing it, celebrating it, passing it on."

Hearing a familiar song while alone in a foreign land can have an incredible power. It is almost like enjoying the warmth and comfort of an old friend. Hurrah for music.

Beaver Harris / Don Pullen 360 ° Experience - Gorée

2005-09-07T05:15:00.000-04:00

From Brazil we make the transatlantic journey and land on the island of Gorée, the westernmost point of Africa and former center of the slave trade. This excerpt combines two separate segments from the full 17 minute piece.

Vinicius Cantuária - "Inútil Paisagem"

2005-09-06T04:23:00.000-04:00

Vinicius Cantuária makes dream pop, 21st Century Nova Bossa Nova, fragile love songs coated in dubby sugar. He ought to be the biggest Pop Star in the world; maybe, somewhere, he is.

Murcof - "Mes"

2005-09-06T02:15:00.000-04:00

Speaking of fake authenticity, here, courtesy of producer Murcof (from Tijuana, Mexico), we have recontextualized Morton Feldman uneasily looping through rain-slicked yet impeccably focused Hitchcock streets. It is a bit of a crime to take a piece of what is such a well-conceived and well-regarded piece of musical DNA (the 2002 album Martes), but there you have it. This music excels not only on the level of dubbed-out horizontal micro-house, but as a first rate example of an inclusive reach backward to the original “classical avant-garde” whose techniques and ideas loom large over modern laptop techno sounds. That it is so engaging on a level outside such scholarly pusuits is another game altogether.

Hilary Duff - The Tiki Tiki Tiki Room

2005-09-05T09:48:00.000-04:00

There was a time in 20th century American history when the Polynesian Chinese restaurant was all the rage. In stark contrast to today's no-nonsense, decorless noodle shops, the Polynesian Chinese restaurant was high tack, all lipstick-red carpeting and brass statues of fire-breathing dragons. Some restaurants had aquariums with exotic fish; some had pebble-strewn fountains adorning the dining area. The food never strayed particularly far from your parents' American-Chinese favorites, but there might have been a pineapple ring on the plate, to satisfy the "Polynesian" requirement.

As I was growing up, these places were dying out. 1980s restaurantgoers found the caricaturishness offensive, and they wanted their experience to be guilt-free (if not completely unassimilated).

The same was happening with the Disney brand around this time. And although Disney took at least another decade to become synonymous with baptism-by-Noxema, its science project EPCOT Center was chipping away at the spirit that made the eponymous Anaheim park so iconic: its warped sense of adventure, its passion for surrealist children's-fiction, and its thirdhand knowledge of the far-flung.

Hilary Duff's Tiki room isn't one of rumbling, soundstagey Arthur Lyman- like war drums, or menacing monolith monsters with wide eyes frozen open in stone. Hers is a fake authenticity that builds on the premise of an older fake authenticity, while removing the scary edges. And since her very young demographic doesn't come equipped with reference-knowledge of Easter Island and mid-century cod-kitsch and so on, the multiple levels of removal are meaningless to them.

But in a way, their cognitive tabula rasa puts them at an advantage over me; they're free to come up with a whole new arsenal of ridiculous constructs.

Dry & Heavy - Dawn Is Breaking

2005-09-01T03:00:00.000-04:00

A new obsession of mine is dub. I stumbled headlong into the music through my best friend's band and found the love crystallized when I befriended some DJs heavily into dub, dancehall, and roots reggae. I have plenty of not-so-fond memories of the music. Growing up, my neighbors were notorious for their Saturday night parties where they would treat the block to their basement soundsystems, pissing off most of the houses around them.

My pick is in Japan, one of the major homes of reggae music. It's such a giant market that there are special dub plates made there that never make it to other sections of the world. I stumbled across Dry & Heavy trying to find some dub remixes. The drum and bass duo of Shigemoto Nanao aka Dry and Takeshi Akimoto aka Heavy make experimental roots reggae with help from friends. This song features the vocal stylings of Likkie Mai and the gentle waves that lull you to a comfortable zone. Music to think or smoke to. Music to comfort the soul.

Huun Huur-Tu - Aa Shuu De Kei-oo (live)

2005-08-30T13:55:00.000-04:00

Wiggling eastwards from Mumbai, and jiggling a little northwards, we now find ourselves nestling on the border between Mongolia and Siberia, deep in the heart of the Republic of Tuva (Тыва Республика). Maybe we're on the banks of one of the republic's 8000 rivers? Or maybe we're on horseback, thundering across the steppes? Since many Tuvan songs concern themselves directly with equestrian matters, then I guess it's probably the latter.

Think of Tuva, and naturally you'll think of Khoomei: the country's indigenous folk music, with its instantly recognisable brand of throat singing. Along with the altogether rockier Yat-Kha, Huun Huur-Tu - here recorded live, about three or four years ago - are the music's best known ambassadors. This track features Khoomei's most distinctive characteristic: that low, almost mechanical drone, with its multiple harmonics, as produced and sustained by a circular breathing technique which, notoriously, can shave several years off one's life expectancy.

Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar - "Disco '82"

2005-08-29T07:00:00.000-04:00

I'm stranded in Russia, left for dead by a cackling Dan Perry and two well-known teen lesbians. (It is unclear if he is mocking my fate, or giggling due to being in the company of well-known teen lesbians.) It's freezing cold and all I have to get out of here is a magic iPod that will transport me to the country of origin of the song that I play. But the Leningrad Cowboys are actually Finnish or something, I know nothing of the music of the Middle-East, and the battery is too weak to carry me back the home turf that is Australia, the one place that I could offer any real insight. I thumb through the artists and find a familiar Sri Lankan name, but I waver. "Imagine if this was not the fantastic adventure it clearly is, but some kind of ...collaborative musical archiving project - do you really want to be the 82,495th person to post an M.I.A. song on an MP3 blog?" But the backlight is fading - time is running out! I chance upon a mysterious playlist entitled "Bollywood soundtrack disco" and press play. The landscape warps around me, then settles. I find myself now standing outside a nightclub in Mumbai. A DFA-ish disco rhythm is echoing from the door. Have I been cast into some sort of Indian hipster enclave?? Thankfully, the distinctive strings and Hindi-English singing comes in over the top, and it turns out that I am in fact on the set of 1982 Bollywood flick Khud-Daar. I eventually negotiate an uncredited walk-on role in the movie, exchange the appearance fee for a second-hand battery charger and zap home.

* thanks to Gaz Mullygrubber for the track - apparently there is much, much more where this came from!

t.A.T.u - All About Us

2005-08-25T17:05:00.000-04:00

Ironic indie's favorite pop duo since Daphne & Celeste roar back with a vengeance with this juggernaut of a song. I didn't understand why t.A.T.u. was the pop group it was okay for everyone to like (okay, that's a lie; if they hadn't spent so much of their onstage career tonguing each other down and tweaking nipples, many people wouldn't have looked twice at them) until I heard "Show Me Love", a roaring, stomping banshee wail of malevolent desire awash in more production tricks than Britney Spears' voice. When these girls are on, they are a menacing beast; throughout the pop sheen and fragile girly-girl vocals lurks a palpable sense of rage. You can taste the fury zooming out of their best efforts, the feral snarl of a couple of girls sworn to rock the world that hates yet covets them.

Given that foundation, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that "All About Us" starts out like a serial killer stalking a half-naked coed drenched in sweat through a fun house and then proceeds to smack the listener in the face with a sock filled with awesomeness. Shame on me, I guess; I'd written them off as a flash-in-the-pan encapsulation-of-one-moment act who wouldn't be heard from again. I certainly didn't expect them to swan back onto the scene with the most stirring, emotionally-charged song of their career. Every time I play this song, I want to stomp and smash things; it amps me up in a way I haven't felt since the first time I heard Big Black. Somehow they do this by remaining completely faithful to their initial sound palette and overlaying it with the creepiest ascending vocal line ever recorded. I can't adequately explain it; it's almost like watching Alaskan fishermen club Seal.

"If. They. Hurt. You. THEY. HURT. ME. TOO."

Me hear you, ladies. Me hear you.

Leila - 'A Vital Resolution'

2005-08-24T22:03:00.000-04:00

A good old-fashioned bootleg, just like Momma used to bake in 2001. Audaciously, it mix-and-matches two of the most stunning pieces of music ever committed to disc: the spectral passion of Aaliyah's 'We Need A Resolution' vocal and Vitalic's so-clean-it-hurts nosebleed techno tour de force 'Poney Part 1'. Odd choices, given how un-malleable both originals sound, and indeed the mix starts off awkward, almost like it's a mistake. There's genius at work here though. It rapidly coheres, the two songs sliding into place alongside each other like vast tectonic plates, and propels itself with the force of an earthquake to a climax which will fuck with your head: a cacophony of Aaliyahs poltergeisting desperately over empty space, bruised and battered by the pound pound pound of all those questions - "where were you last night?" "what was in your head?" "am I supposed to change?" and the monstrous, unrelenting Vitalic force.

Originally I thought I'd have to justify this with the most tenuous of links to the theme. Vitalic was born in rural Ukraine, according to his online bio, which is kinda east of Israel if you have a really bad sense of direction. (Never mind that this all turned out to be a filthy LIE which the sly Frenchman designed to fool gullible journalists like yours truly.) And, um, the original 'We Need A Resolution' sounded kinda Eastern. But that was before I realised who the Leila responsible for this was. The treatment of the voice rang a faint bell, the way as the track builds it increasingly resembles an instrument being manipulated and distorted rather than a human singing, while at the same time having its most emotive vocal qualities magnified. And then I found Leila's website, whence this was originally jacked, and lo and behold it was that Leila, the one who used to be Björk's keyboardist, who did a couple of fantastic electronic soul albums (Like Weather and Courtesy Of Choice) a few years back which made liberal use of that vocal trick, who is originally from Iran. Quelle coincidence!

(PS this also makes me realise that further mixes of Ciara's 'Oh' and Ginuwine's 'Pony' over 'Poney' are needed post fucking haste.)

Jacob Hoffman with Kandel's Orchestra - Doina and Hora (Hebrew Dance)

2005-08-23T20:55:00.000-04:00

We've slipped a tiny bit to the West with this one, but Ned forced my hand by posting Marc Almond brooding over melancholy Russian folk music.

More Klezmer music should feature blazing xylophone solos played over blurry violin drones. In fact, the mixture of drones plus mad soloing recalls Coltrane's "India", at least in my mind. Naturally, I've always felt that jazz should feature more solos played over drones as well.

In truth, the age (1923) and fidelity of the recording smears the line between droning and lo-fi fuzz, but no matter. After a tension-filled intro, the piano finally leads the tune into the proper "dance" portion, which sounds like mild elation after what preceded it even though it's not much more than a series of drunken lurches. But soloist Hoffman is the clear superstar here with his dextrous, delicate xylophone work. It kind of makes me wonder how he would have fared as a swordfighter ...

Marc Almond -- "Always and Everywhere (I Will Follow You)"

2005-08-23T01:49:00.000-04:00

Partially suggested by Tantrum's observation of the melancholy in Prezioso's song, partially also by the (very) low-key electronics at the heart of my chosen tune, ultimately my choice here is simply due to my remembering one of the more inspired moments in Marc Almond's wide-ranging work. Almond's been huge in Russia for a number of years, and starting with a solo tour in the early nineties he has since returned many times, to the point where he maintains an apartment there, but the idea to do an album concentrating on nothing but Russian songs from throughout the twentieth century (and before) came from a fan and fellow musician, Misha Kucherenko, who felt that Almond (to use Marc's words in describing it) "would have a feel for those torch songs that express the Russian soul." Almond was surprised but eventually persuaded to participate in a wide-ranging project released as Heart On Snow, one of his best albums.

According to the liner notes, this song was one of the standards in the repetoire of Vadim Kozin, a musical superstar in WWII-era Russia who fell foul of Stalin partially due to his refusal to perform for him in 1945, partially due to his homosexuality, which though criminalized in the Soviet era he openly flaunted. Though he survived through the mid-nineties, Kozin never regained his fame, living quietly with a lover near the Arctic Circle gulag he suffered in for five years.

It's little wonder that Almond, a student not only of song but personality, would have found Kozin's story of interest, and the song as translated is notable for being a love song -- again like Prezioso's -- that specifies no gender in the object of desire. The delivery and arrangement is elegant, sad, shrouded in nighttime shadow, the melodrama in the lyric perfectly apt for Almond while suggesting the potential emotional depths of Russian poetry and music both. It is perhaps a bit formal as well -- Almond has had more gripping vocal performances over the years -- but it's an exercise that still works, an exploration into, for non-Russian musicians and listeners both, unknown waters.

Prezioso featuring Marvin - "Somebody"

2005-08-22T21:45:00.000-04:00

Four-to-the-floor detour! This is a wonderfully melancholic slice of Italo-trance-pop. At first blush, it sounds like your standard-issue bleeps-vocoders-and-rainbows-everywhere gorgonzola, but then you catch bits of the lyrics:

Hey, what about today?
Is everything ok?
The world is in my hands
But I don't care
Something in my mind
If I could realize
The colours in my eyes are black and white

Don't believe it's true
If I blame it on U
I'm only trying to hide
I'm not right
Forgive me if U can
Sometimes I'm not a man
My body's here but it's without me

Lonely among a thousand people
This is how I feel...

Somebody please help me where is my soul
Somebody please help me where is my soul
Somebody please help me where is my soul
Somebody please help me where is my soul

This is the kind of thing you'll likely find on my iShufffle when I need to spend more than two hours on a plane, and am simultaneously sleepy, overcaffeinated, and in need of a shower & a hug.

P.S. Many thanks to Ms. Candicissima for the hosting space!

Dr Alban ft Leila K - "Hello Africa"

2005-08-22T18:10:00.000-04:00

"Hello Africa, tell me how you're doing / Hello Motherland, tell me how you're doing." Born in Nigeria, living in Stockholm, qualified as a dentist, working as a pop star - this was Dr Alban's first hit and his style comes intact. The loping digital reggae rhythms, the gentle and polite flow, the slight, let's admit it, gaucheness. Alban is a long way from home, so is the music he plays: technically these beats and rhymes are a planet, not just a continent, distant from JA or NY, but that cut-off adds to the appeal. "Hello Africa" isn't unique among 90s Scandopop in its focus on the mother continent - the marvellous Stockholm Eritreans Midi, Maxi and Efti recorded a beautiful album later in the 1990s in which their heavy-handed Western teenpop styles are always in suspension with echoes of Africa, a translated, digitised, mediated Africa. I could have picked one of their songs but "Hello Africa" strikes as deep. Unlike many of the serious rock musicians who drew inspiration from Africa, Alban wants an answer to the conversation he's starting: he knows that transient pop hits are likelier to do well on the streets of Abuja and Lagos, his greetings are genuine.

T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Contonou Dahomet - "Minsato Le, Mi Dayihome"

2005-08-18T21:48:00.000-04:00

Go very slightly east, then south, then back in time. West Africa in the '70s: a musical polyglot, where the cultures of one country sashayed with another, resulting in some propitious musical strains. Fela's the prime example. The embodiment of flexible continental borders, French and English colonialism, intercontinental pollination from North America, Cuba, Jamaica, Europe; rock, funk, jazz, bossa nova, PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC, etc; places to play, people to make dance, the proliferation of cheapish recording studios and record pressing. Revolution!

The Republic of Benin's most outstanding '70s band (actually, the only band from Benin I've ever heard, but no mind), T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou Dahomey, kicks off this year's fantastic Luaka Bop comp, World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love's a Real Thing, with the track "Minsato Le, Mi Dayihome". The tune is all fading sun, mosquitoes and after school fights, buoyed by the inherently supple rhythms of coastal living (does Benin even have a coast?). Fela Kuti and James brown are criterions of this kind of merciless A-to-B funk, yet neither possesses the well-ventilated touch or polyrhthymic variations of Poly-Rythmo. Alert but never manic (authentic JB screams aside), the song builds its psych cache atop a raw "Psychotic Reactions" intro. Aside from fundamentals, a singular sound, though for reference, it seems to have developed in parallel and half a world away from Os Mutantes, and is one of my personal favorite musical unearthings of the year. More where this came from on Soundway's immaculate T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo compilation The Kings of Benin Urban Groove, 1972-1980.

Ornette Coleman and Prime Time - "Unlabeled Track 3"

2005-08-18T09:10:00.000-04:00

This is from a concert recording I um...found...on a um...network in a folder labelled "London 1987." The sound quality is not so great, theres a lot of tape hiss, but the band is pretty clear and very audible. I don't recognize the song, although it may be off "Virgin Beauty" given the date, but Prime Time is playing like crazy. Ornette doesn't hit the mic until about halfway through, when he blows through first on trumpet, then alto sax.

To you, MCD

edit - DAR! Listening to this again I don't know where I came up with that stuff about Ornette not showing up til halfway through. He's all over this track, from around 40 seconds in, switching back and forth from sax to trumpet and back.

Around the World in Eighty Minutes!

2005-08-18T08:57:00.000-04:00

Alright, here we go! The theme of the mix is "Around the World In Eighty Minutes" and so to imitate the classic tale, we're going to start and finish in London, heading east the whole way.

We'll try to keep this moving pretty fast, with everyone given a full workday to post, and going in the order they signed up, and if they can't finish in time, whoever's behind them gets 'cuts' and the one who dropped the ball goes afterwards. Since I proposed the resurrection of the mix, that means I'll be starting things off.

Coming up after me, MCD, then Tom from Freaky Trigger, then Tantrum the Cat.

2005-08-16T09:32:00.000-04:00

So, what do you say to another round, then?

Here are the individual blurb booklets for each CD.

2005-04-12T17:16:00.000-04:00

Volume One.
Volume Two.
Volume Three.
Volume Four.

Each booklet should be printed using double-sided (Duplex) printing, with the print setting set to "flip on short side".

2005-04-11T18:45:00.000-04:00

Thanks to all you spudboys and spudgirls who participated in or otherwise contributed to the ILMiXor shenanigans. Now that we've finished Disc 4: Maximalism, we're going to take a break, and possibly pick up again over the summer, if the ILMiXmasters are recharged and ready for more.

To recap, if you haven't been following along: We've been doing a series of collaborative mix CDs in the form of an mp3 blog called ILMiXor. Ostensibly, a group of ILM-ers would assemble in a queue, and each of us would take a turn posting an mp3 relating to the chosen theme (using our own hosting space or borrowing someone else's), and writing a blurb about the track. It didn't always work out so neatly -- our final disc was pretty much a first-come-first-serve free-for-all from the get-go. Somehow we filled four 80-minute CDs, almost all of them to capacity.

Many of these mp3s are still available here; if you missed a few the first time around, I'll be posting the whole works as a zip file or a torrent or something. Stay tuned while I sort it out. Artwork and liner notes for Discs 3 and 4 will be up soon as well.

Special thanks to Austin Swinburn for the idea, Elvis Telecom for the cover design, and Mike T-Diva for assembling the blurbs into CD booklet form (.doc file).

Cornelius, "Ball In - Kick Off"

2005-04-09T12:00:00.000-04:00

When it comes to maximalism, always bet on a guy who's last album made minimalism appear bombastic. The particular gift of Cornelius records in the late 90s was his refinement of the sound chaos he embraced on the final Flipper's Guitar album, Dr Head's World Tower, and his second solo disc, 69/96, so that by Fantasma the meat of the songs and the tiny details were all treated as equal. That you could hear a space transmission almost as clearly as a bludgeoning riff, spazzed-out breakcore, a verse, a hook, several backing harmonies, and half a dozen melodies without feeling like being beaten about your steadily disintegrating ears is a marvel no one else has ever truly approached, though not for lack of trying (hi, Basement Jaxx; yo, The Avalanches; lovely to see you, Plus-Tech Squeeze Box). Perhaps it's the control freak within, being a (mostly) one-man band and all, but his ability to make his music spray large funny sounds from your speakers without spreading samples in every spare place and still sound bigger than anything you've ever heard in any genre ever (again, even in his present "grandfather" stage) is what lets Keigo stand 50 feet above the heads of his peers.

'Ball In-Kick Off' is one of the loud ones, and almost certainly crazier and funkier than anything on Fantasma, save perhaps the toytown Mr Magoo theme and the arcade machine d'n'b Bach cover. Ostensibly about football, it precedes Shaolin Soccer by a few years and was probably all over Japan during the World Cup days of 2002. And it's easily as enjoyable, skipping gaily over musical forms with and without a care for any. He likes to tease, does old Keigo, but when you reach the payoff as he's putting the "multi" in "layered" and "crazy frickin' madman" in "schizophrenic", you know the ride was worth it, and anyway, your ass should have been moving too much to fritter your cares away into three big funk-metal riffs, two football commentators flipping across your speakers - one from Earth, one from the Cylon galaxy - a group of cooing Corneliuses, a tropical backbeat and a breakbeat that may have been inspired by throwing marbles on the ground and watching people lose their balance. Spector...Bomb Squad...Spector...Bomb Squad. He can scare you if he's so inclined. I've seen it happen.

He dares you, too. Dares you to deny its bounceability and its sense of adventure. Dares you to shake your pants, to rock out, to deny it's just a funny little pop song about footie. It's the beautiful game in his head, and it's an interesting trip, so won't you all step inside? Oh, and your headphones? Don't come without them.

Organum, "Shin-En"

2005-04-09T04:38:00.000-04:00

When you get right down to it, Organum has been the perfect moniker for the loose collective of merry pranksters led by David Jackman. There is just something about all of the music released under the name. It puts one in mind of open sores, internal bleeding, failing endocrine systems. Something is slightly ill, something a tad seasick about the creaky drones conjured up by Jackman and his cohorts. Even amidst Organum's more serene material -- and make no mistake, Organum's work on the whole is leagues above the garden variety shit-spew of the squatters down the block with their "denatured" pedals and household appliances -- there is an intimation of looming dread. That's the feeling one gets from this scary and beautiful music made by human beings taking up instruments in their hands and blotting out the sun. There is one hell of a robust method to this madness.

I'm actually not very big on the whole British noizenik nutball scene; your Stapletons, your Tibets. Never really been my steez. I only have two NWW records! I'm certainly no fan of the cult or whatever that attends to this stuff. My hangup, my loss, I am sure. But I guess above all, I'm just so impressed with Organum's attention to sound. BIG sound. Big sound filling up all the available space on the sonic spectrum with slowly bowed strings and shreiking metal and other grumblings that advance like a plague of locusts. Or maybe it's worms? Put it this way ... remember that scene in Temple of Doom when Indy and the kid are in that vault with all of the insects crawling and tumbling all over each other? Lucas & Co. should have totally made that scene like 5 excruciating minutes long, used Organum as the music, and then we might have had some serious-ass DREAD on our hands.