Category: Music

I’m just about to give Ma Fleur its first listen.

Update: It’s very nice indeed.

I was going to call this my Summer compilation, but I’m not sure how much summer is left in the UK, where I guess most listeners will be, so here’s the hypothesis: it’s early September, and an Indian Summer has arrived. A warm afternoon mellows into a balmy evening. This is what plays on your stereo as you enjoy a few drinks in the garden. Of course, these tunes work just as well for an ordinary summer day. It starts with some storming afro-beat, sashays into some latin grooves, takes an electronic turn and turns folksy at the end.

Click here to listen to my Indian summer compilation (61.5mb quicktime file). I’ll remove it after two weeks, just in case someone takes issue with me putting tunes here.

The link has been removed.

There are few things that make me dance around the living room singing when I’m not already drunk, but I confess the arrival of a new Divine Comedy album is one of those things. I realise I’m a little behind, and that everyone back home is about three single releases ahead of me, but I’m surrounded by the uninitiated here in California. The album’s not even released in the USA, so last week I ordered it from a company based in Hong Kong.

So far it sounds like Neil Hannon’s most consistent piece since 1999’s Fin de Siècle but I’m only six songs in. It definitely starts strongly; I’m going to have to keep myself from singing "I don’t want to die a virgin!" in front of my staff at the cinema.

So far my favourite lyric is from Diva Lady

She’s got a famous boyfriend
They go out in style
She makes him look hetero
He helps her profile

Once in a while I discover a song which sounds like the inside of my head. The latest of these discoveries is from the Talking Heads 1979 album Fear of Music. Mind sounds much like a superior version of one of the tunes that my head creates but never expresses.

Today I picked up the appropriate soundtrack for the fast-approaching long weekend of drinking in the Catskill mountains with Courtney’s family. John Barleycorn Must Die is an ancient song which has a number of well-established interpretations. Most obviously, though, it’s a song about barley and the drinks one can make from it – beer and whisky.

Traffic’s 1970 version is highly regarded. I think it was in an issue of Mojo that I read Steve Winwood was reincarnated was Paul Weller without actually dying. The comparison is particularly relevant when you compare John Barleycorn… to Weller’s Wildwood. There’s a similar pastoral tinge, and Weller’s instrumentation is almost a direct lift – with bluesy piano, gutsy hammond organ and fluttering flute augmenting guitar, bass and drums.

Lyrics for John Barleycorn Must Die are the other side of the link below.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Beth Orton’s previous album, Daybreaker, but I’m back in love with her thanks to the new one, Comfort of Strangers. Produced by Jim O’Rourke, who’s been working with Wilco recently, it’s pure Beth stripped of the lavish arrangements that characterised Daybreaker. Consequently her voice returns to the fore, complete with its endearing quirks and occasional flashes of Naarfolk accent. Folksy.

I also treated myself to a long-overdue Django Reinhardt album, 1949’s Djangology, recorded in Rome with Stephane Grappelli. I’ve been using a version of Django’s Minor Swing to time my editing of the Varsity Documentary opening sequence. I’m not going to be able to use it in the final film for copyright reasons, so I hope the musician who’s helping me out will be able to deliver something with a similar feel and exactly the same timing!

I’ve been into Django since I was a little ‘un, thanks to Mum and David-Dad taking me to the Upton Jazz Festival every year. The event is always overburdened with mediocre old white beardy trad players, but there is always one stage dedicated to Hot Club style gypsy jazz, and that’s where we’d hang out. Over the years I’ve seen many, many excellent Djangologists, including Manouche gypsy Fapy Lafertin, but all of them had the use of all the fingers on their left hands (the tendons of Django’s pinkie and ring fingers were damaged in a caravan fire when he was eighteen). A couple of days ago I came across a video file of Django complete with a close-up on his two-fingered fretboard style. It was a pretty wonderful thing to behold.

Click here to see the movie, and click here to see where I got it from. The WFMU page also has a link to France Gall performing dirty old Serge Gainsbourg’s Poupee De Cire, Poupee De Son. Cracking.

Wow, has so much time already passed since I promised to write more blog posts? Time flies when you’re having visitors. In fact, I’ve over a month’s worth of thought backlog to transcribe and edit into legible form.

About a month ago, James and I were merrily meandering down Haight Street when we came upon what is probably the best record shop in the world. The experience of walking into Amoeba records for the first time is roughly similar to going downstairs in Blackwells in Oxford. You see the lines of shelves running away and converging on the distant horizon and your mind somersaults to think that there’s so much good stuff out there. There can’t be enough hours in a human life to listen to all the CDs in Amoeba, but if the staff would have let me sleep there I’d have been tempted to try.

I was good; I limited myself to one purchase – and what a purchase! I shelled out eighteen clams for a little cardboard box titled Oscillons from the Anti-Sun. Said box contains three CDs of tracks from Stereolab’s elusive EPs, a DVD of promo videos and live performances, and little CD sleeve sized stickers of their EP covers. All excellent, but most importantly it has the song Fluorescences, which I heard once in 1996 on Mark Radcliffe’s Radio 1 graveyard slot and have wanted ever since. It’s just as good as I remember.

A lot of the early Stereolab stuff I haven’t heard before. Listening to Jenny Ondioline I realised that, odd as it may sound, there are aesthetic similarities between Stereolab and Wilco, especially when you compare the groop’s early stuff to material from Wilco’s latest, A Ghost is Born. There are moments where both bands will build up a tapestry of noise, a repetitive riff, a synthy drone and mechanical percussion, and then they’ll break through this with a pretty melody sung by a modest voice.

And what’s an oscillon? It’s a recent (1996) discovery in the field of physics. Here’s a video of an oscillon in action. Essentially they are surprisingly constant patterns formed by vibrating particles, of great significance to those who study chaos theory.

And who are Stereolab? They’re an oddly retro-futuristic band who often stuff a gamut of musical styles into three-part pop songs. Half of the band are from London, the other half from Paris, and I’m a sucker for their singer, Laetitia Sadier. Imagine Juliette Binoche playing a cooly detatched pop singer and you’re almost there.

I’ve been kind-of a fan for years, ever since I saw them in support of Radiohead in Oxford, but recently I’ve been getting more into Sigur Rós. Yes, yes, I know I’ve come to them fairly late, but I’ve not been buying quite as many CDs for the last couple of years and it’s not as if they get any airplay on US radio.

No, the reason I’m getting into them quite so much besides Jonsi’s voice, the bowed guitar, the lush arrangements and haunting melodies, is because they have a very sensible website. Rather against the norm, it’s extremely informative, doesn’t stream music at you unbidden and, best of all, offers a plethora of free high-quality mp3s for you to download. It’s enough to pique my interest, and it’s in keeping with the band’s ethos that they treat their fans as real human beings rather than cashcows.

I bought ágætis byrjun and thanks to the website I know how to pronounce it too. I expect I’ll be getting hold of () next. Being able to get hold of tunes for free has – shock – made me more likely to buy the band’s music. Big record companies are so not rock’n’roll. If they were they’d know the best business model is the heroin dealer’s: the first couple of fixes are free – after that you pay.

While I’m on the subject of music downloading, the restrictions programmed into files bought from iTunes, Napster, etc. make buying from them a real rip-off. Thankfully there are some sites that sell downloadable music without the DRM. One of them is run by Warp records and through it you can buy music from a cool (if small) selection of labels – including Ninja Tune. Oh yes. It’s called Bleep.

It’s not as good as having a CD with liner notes, but it is cheaper.

Finally, what could be more intriguing than a stone marimba made by a man in a hobbit hole? The story of a man who makes stone marimbas in hobbit holes badly translated from German, perhaps?