hey guys geuss wat............ i am listenin to e ery volyume of thre anthologee of noise and electronic mosiocbut i am startoin with the first columne even do day r n achronoilogsical ordewr lolz. fangs 2 spotify 4 da music!11musiquew concreert is so goffik john cage said sensoryly becoz he was bi

F U DONT LIMKE NOSES UR A PREOP AN AGY STO FPAMING

nagaglie said sexily 

but seriously the first volume is very uneven and didn't really have anything mind-blowing

This Girija Devi best of is ace as heck, though.

The Goat Rodeo Sessions obviously have excellent, virtuosic playing, and I love the like classical-bluegrass hybrid, even if it's pure NPR music, but it needs more variety. On a similar note, the first Crooked Still album is fine stuff, but honestly just feels redundant: we've heard these songs before, in versions both similar and better, and there's nothing to set them apart from any other pack of tradition-minded country folk with fiddles and banjers.

okay so nobody told me there are unfinished outtakes from "Remain in Light" and y'know what? they're still better than like 97% of other rock-related musics and sound like they could be released today and still be relevant and probably get the critics all hot 'n' bothered like on a MPP-scale - at least, they could if they were finished. But for glorified jams? Shit-hot. Best album in the rock canon, no contest. Not sure what happened afterwards, do. :'( oh wait yes i do: the eighties.

e: actually I just realized that MDK is in the rock canon now, sort of, and I also remembered TMR exists but yeah RIL (acronym overload!) is Up There. but then I'm not as anti-canon as lotsa people (myself included sometimes) think I am.  

Super Jerkin' Vol. 1 just makes me wanna move to California, 'cuz that stuff's way more infectious and fun than trap, as I may have already said.

now I'm listening to a bunch of Pink Dollaz singles - "Bad Bitch" is a lil too trap and "Out My Face" is a little too Ke$ha and "Whose (sic) to Blame" is kind of cinematic "31 Flavors" is practically grime and yeah I'm done.

also I enjoyed a Bill Evans album for like a whole two minutes pretty much entirely because of Jim Hall, but then yeah Billy baby turned it into a snoozefest, which is what he does best, and actually is the only thing he ever does, really. still one of the all-time great cover photographs.

now I'm mainlining Girija Devi albums and they're all starting to blend together, and none of 'em are as good as Vol. 2 but the Golden Raaga Collection I is quite quite nice. Now I just need to learn the difference between thumri and khyal and all that jazz. :/

I really didn't expect to hear an album under twenty-five minutes today that impressed me less than any of the Fela albums, but then I listened to Tracey Thorn's A Distant Shore. It's an folksy arguably twee indie pop album on Cherry Red with an androgynous female vocalist and a Velvets cover, and it comes highly touted by someone whose taste I trust very much, so obviously on paper I should adore it, but ugh it's just kind of grating and completely unmemorable. But then I kind of hate Marine Girls, so maybe it shouldn't've come as a surprise. 

the Busy Twist are good -  quite good, actually - but there's something disingenuous and bourgie about listening to hiplife that's been released on Soundway, especially if basically your entire knowledge of hiplife is... Ata Kak. But I guess I can't really expect me to just somehow be born with or acquire knowledge of hiplife without any effort on my part.

oh and wait half of Busy Twist is the dude who did the Boondocks' theme? agh I sux

I am become No_, destroyer of canons

god I'm really going to get flamed for this, and I may just be in one of my moods, but fucking hell, Fela Kuti really is the Bob Marley of African music - look, I used to think he mostly lived up to the hype and praise, that he was one of the most consistent artists ever, even if certain albums of his I didn't love the way I was "supposed" to, but I started to cool on him a few years ago, and started to prefer his 80s work, perhaps out of contrarianism, but I didn't have all of his albums readily available to sample and I still mostly conceded his worth. Now that I have like three dozen disks of his at my fingertips on Spotify, I'm so not impressed - I started with Expensive Shit, then moved on to my RYM friends' second favorite, Sorrow, Tears and Blood, and now I'm on MY old favorite, Shakara, and fucking hell, this shit is SOPORIFIC and SLUGGISH and LETHARGIC my god - it's not funky, never let anyone convince you that Afrika 70 were funky, and it's not "fiery" and it's not. really. that. good. I'm probably just being harsh because Fela is The Only Musician to Ever Come From the Entire Country of Africa Wait What Do You Mean Africa Is Not a Country? to so so many people, but I'm getting the vibe from his twelve-minute-long songs that I get from Morton Feldman's six-hour-long compositions: I guess I would like this more if I was sleep-deprived or on codeine. Also if something would happen. I know it's blasphemous, it really really is and maybe I'm just an uppity ignorant cracker, in fact, yeah I am that, but still, I Officially Do Not Get the Appeal of Fela Kuti and I'm Going To Throw Out the "O" Word in 3...2...1:OVERRATED. Phew. Glad to get that out of my system. Maybe afrobeat is just not my favorite African genre? Actually, it's certainly not, but I never realized how little I liked it compared to highlife or soukous or fuji or tizita. Even the 80s stuff sounds mostly unengaging now. Pity. At least it's not Zam-rock, though, 'mirite? 

fuji 'n' filmi 'n' Fela oh my!

Salil Chowdhury's Madhumati has the distinction of having a five star overall rating on RYM, from four users. I can't keep the streak up, but it's still beyond excellent.  Baazi is more than okay, too. ugh I have no idea why I suck so much at reviewing today. Spotify has sapped my ability to discuss music apparently.

Barrister's Fuji Garbage Series 1 is about as good as you could expect from an album with a keytar on its cover (twice!) It actually works surprisingly well for being so synthetic in such a cheap way though obviously it's almost obscene compared to the original Fuji Garbage album. Still, even in plastic, the grooves still cook and are pretty intoxicating once you get into 'em. The second one's a touch less plastic, but also more static and overlong.

also hey relistening to Expensive Shit is reifying (geddit, like gender?) my decision to not have any Fela on my 70s list - dude can make thirteen minutes feel like thirty, in the bad way. He got better in the eighties, swear to god.

back 2 the fuji - Fuji Ropopo by Kollington Ayinla is a touch warmer than the Barrister albums, and has a little more variety. But I think I might need to pace myself with fuji albums because it can very easily get very tedious.

so yeah I've officially decided that Spotify is way better than Soulseek for discovering music because Spotify ACTUALLY REMEMBERS THAT ASIA AND AFRICA AND LATIN AMERICA EXIST AND THAT THERE IS ACTUAL MUSIC THAT COMES FROM THOSE PLACES WOW. I put my Walklady and main external hard drive up in my closet so that I could FREE MYSELF from the chains of compulsive music listening but then I got addicted to Spotify so eh fuck that. Music is my life! I'm coming to realize more and more. I don't need to lose weight, I don't need to transition, I don't need a girlfriend, I just need Spotify. 8\ 

though the only new things I've listened to have been Marian Anderson's album about her cat, Snoopy, which is adorable, and that Pauline Oliveros composition that has no ratings on RYM though it shares its name with another one of her works and, currently, Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe's Onye Ije Anatago, which is just kind of there by highlife standards, but I am going to be GORGING myself on filmi and fuji and free jazz and lord knows what else for a while.  

re: Kruder & Dorfmeister's DJ Kicks: remind me to never listen to anything tagged downtempo, even if it's also tagged atmospheric drum 'n' bass.

re: drum & bass: Andy C's Nightlife mix is too bombastic and only rarely danceable enough to make up for it; it's also coated in a layer of proto-brostep douchiness.  

why yes I am getting into token canon d'n'b mixes thanx 4 noticing how tokenist and canon I am :*

re: the canon: King Tubby! wow, he sure is an obvious choice for a kid trying to expand her reggaerizons and fill in the gaps in the Essential Reggae Releases she's heard: Dub Gone Crazy is perfectly fine, but I think I'll have to file it next to King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown under Well This Is Perfectly Adequate But I Don't Really Get Why You Guys All Want to Like Buttfuck It All Day Every Day - I heard its sequel first and dug it and I have the feeling that I'd still prefer it.

Me listening to Reba McEntire's first greatest hits album seems to be a classic example of Hey I Am Going to Show the World How Eclectic and Open-Minded I Am *starts listening to album* Oh God Oh My God What Is Wrong With You People *vomits* except the first two-thirds or so of the record are still obviously a cut above what gets played on country radio nowadays and even with some treacly undernourished arrangements and production, and tons of maudlin weepiness, it's still clearly actual country, with real ties to the genre's golden years and after a few tracks I began to remember how much of a sucker I can be for classic country formulas - that vaguely-witty wordplay and pedal steel backing really does wonders for me in the right mood - and I wonder if I wouldn't truly appreciate country music much more if I didn't associate it with so many ignorant, disgusting people I know - it's not just that they're white: I know no metalheads who listen to anything heavier than Queensryche, I know no one into True Emo, nobody around me listens to modern classical - so those genres aren't tainted with negative associations involving Sarah Palin and chaw and Confederate flag bumper stickers like the omnipresent contemporary country. So if I lived in Belgium, I might wear my Kitty Wells Fan badge with pride, but I just straight-up know too much about the genre's fan base, and I'm just exposed to too much of its utter crap, to really nourish my honky tonk side the way I nourish my BRUTAL side and my NOODLE side. But even towards the end of the album, and there are only ten tracks, the songs start straying further and further away from actual country - the music was always MOR but it starts getting AOR and adult contemporary - it must be symptomatic of the way all of Nashville was going during the mid-80s - the rise of Countrypolitan and so on. And then Reba's SECOND greatest hits comp is just absolute utter goddamn fucking rubbishy shitturds, just unholy anti-music without a single redeeming second. And I downloaded the third, but yeah, I'm not that much of a masochist.           

I was really hoping, after the mesmerizingly bangin' first two tracks on each disk, that Soul Jazz' 100% Dynamite NYC might equal their similar An England Story, my personal favorite v/a comp of all time, pairing as it does, at its best, vintage dancehall style with vintage boom bap drums, but, alas, the highlights are too spread out - of course I've heard the England comp dozens of times, and this one only once, but I don't think any amount of listenings will salvage the Fu-Schnickens track or the grotesquely graphic slackness of the Rayvon and Nikey Fresh songs. It really could've been a wonder if cut in half, though, a real all-time corker. Pooh.

Come Ethiopians by Phillip Frazer is just about the most excruciatingly average roots release I've ever heared - it's like it was created by a roots robot programmed with the intention of creating the most cliched, irrelevant roots reggae record possible, starting with every lyrical trope in the Rasta bag. Meh. and now there's a dub version of the opening cut on this King Tubby comp (Freedom Sounds in Dub)! It's still not very good, but then I'm distinctly underwhelmed by the comp in general.

Naushad's Mughal-E-Azam has these super girly tracks that give me estrogen highs.  

Them Dirty Blues by Cannonball Adderley has a great take on "Dat Dere," one of the catchiest heads in jazz not written by Monk, and Nat's "Work Song" but their Tokyo live album is just wonky and noodly, except for the Trane tribute, which features Yusef Lateef on oboe!

Kano's debut is probably a top, say, fifteen disco album, and probably a top five eighties disco album. Hope their next two stay in the same territory!

And, finally, returning to d'n'b, more or less, Uncle Dug's Rinse mix isn't earth-shattering but it's just immensely enjoyable, partially, probably, just because it's jungle rather than jump-up or ad&b. just love it.  

This is supposed to be a 16-bit tribute to library music but I don't hear it - but other than "Charisma," which seems more italo-disco than library, anyway, it just sounds like typical vintage video game music to me - but when has that ever been a bad thing? It's actually really nice!

Speaking of 16-bit, I think the Bare Knuckle soundtrack might be the best I've heard in the style (format?) - sorry, David Wise!

e: Actually I just got a craving to play Donkey Kong Country 2 for the first time in over a decade and yeah that's still the best soundtrack. damn such nostalgia.

The Trojan Upsetter boxset makes me realize why hipsters care so much more about Scratch than Bob Marley: it's not simple contrariansm - because sloughing off a genre's most popular artist for an artist an argument could be made for still being one of the genre's five most well-known artists in the white world (and who collaborated with said G'sMPA), even ignoring the wildly different roles they play in their respective music, isn't just crappy contrarianism, it's Scaruffism (the Beatles are wildly overrated and suck because they're famous! Listen to more obscure music, ya' punks! The Doors' debut is still one of the greatest rock albums ever, however...) but, anyway, the point is that the reason Lee Perry is Thee Official Kool Dude in Jamaican Music to so many people like me is 'cuz he's really friggin' weird! You don't really realize just how strange he is until you get to the more recent tracks at the end of the box set, like "Time Marches On" and "For Whom the Bells Tolls," where Perry just rambles (with lots of overdubs) over a static beat for anywhere between four and eleven minutes (sample lyric from the latter: "love your poop, say poop poop poop poop poop poop.") It's not the culture shock strangeness that sometimes is detected by white ears listening to Caribbean music, it's good old fashioned ODB-level "this guy's either on something or his mother was while pregnant with him" weirdness, and so why wouldn't we, being weird people ourselves, find that sort of thing way more resonant than any old clean-cut, gee-whiz, normal-pants dude like Bob? Who wants "No Woman No Cry" when you could have "love your poop say poop poop poop poop poop poop?"

Anyway, that Kiki Gyan comp from a few years ago is probably better than its reputation would suggest: it seems peeps come in expecting the typically African elements to be more noticeable and instead get really really great disco that could've been from anywhere. But I just wanted disco, not afro-anything, and I got my money's, err, my mouseclicks + time's worth, and then some.  

Muddy Waters is goddamn terrible bullshit

Seriously.

Folk Singer is awful, and every song sounds the same, but at least it's acoustic, so it doesn't quite feel like Stevie Ray Vaughan and George Thorogood doing projectile vomit bukkake on yr soul - Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Live is very possibly the worst album of non-white music I've heard that was released before the eighties. It's motherfucking blooze rock. I know I shouldn't blame Porter Wagoner for Trace Adkins or Genesis P-Orridge for Trent Reznor, but god I really think that even if Eric Clapton and Paul Mayall, etc, didn't exist, Chicago blues would be the opposite of everything I want in music. I'm listening to the Chess box now and it's just execrable. There's so fucking much GOOD blues out there, why do people gravitate to this?

I think I might actually (really) like Howlin' Wolf, though, 'cuz his music has spark and charisma and a little variety and he makes me think of of Captain Beefheart, instead of being hit on by John Belushi in sunglasses or whatever. He's proto-Bo Diddley instead of proto-pre-marimba+strings-Stones, s'whatI'msayin'. Good shit. 

need help finding library dub albums

I just enjoyed a comp of German 70s commercial music (actually two!: both volumes of Popshopping, though the second's a little better, just like Cumbia Cumbia) more than a more or less universally worshiped comp of classic roots (Jack Ruby Presents the Black Foundation), so if there's a hell below, I'm going to go. But then I may have actually preferred the album of Mauritian Moorish music I heard, Ooleya Mint Amartichitt's Praise Songs, to both, so maybe I'll get to purgatory?

Bruno Nicolai's Rendez Vous is spooky-flavored without containing any actual dread or scares. But it's still moody and vaguely angsty enough to warrant a listen for libraryphiles.

e: and speaking of roots, Jacob Miller's Who Say Jah No Dread is as uneven as its highlights are fantastic - I think I finally get the appeal of "King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown" now - (them drums!) - but there's just too much that's utterly inconsequential: who really thinks "Girl Name Pat" stands up well next to "Keep On Knocking" or "False Rasta?" nobody, that's who.

whoohoo big shitty review dump post:

Abner Malaty's Astral Decay is maybe the only album I've ever heard that could be considered eco-industrial, but otherwise it's about bogstandard for its scene.

At the Hideout by Jaap Blonk, Jeb Bishop, Lou Malozzi and Frank Rosaly shows the veteran freaky mouth sound maker in fine form, and is one of two albums featuring Rosaly that are near the top of last year's improv pile.

Ras Shiloh's Babylon You Doom basically just serves as a reminder to why no one listens to modern roots - 's'not terrible, but it just feels like a hollow retread of much better records with shoddy production and keyboard tones.

both volumes of Wizzz(!) are totes excellent, but the second is the truly exceptional, superior one despite the first comp featuring my beloved Christine Pilzer.

Peter Lemer's Local Colour is an mid-60s ESP-Disk new thing album and actually really pretty good but the thing I want to point out is that the artist's last name is only one letter away from "Lemur" and that's exactly the sort the pseudonym that a lemur would take when recorded a supposedly human-made jazz album, the crafty beasts! You can file it next to other all-time Lemur-created jazz classics like Destination Out! or any early Gato Barbieri album.

Games' That We Can Play basically turns vaporwave into typical hipster retro synth pop blah and who wants that? It's supposed to give you flashbacks to that time you took acid in Toyko in 1987, not sound like... the actual eighties, y'know?
 
The more I think about it, the more The Sound of Philadelphia: Gamble and Huff's Greatest Hits really feels like a nostalgic moneygrab, like the black version of a Yet Another Chicago Best Of, but, hey, the music's too good to deny no matter how it's packaged: you might think they shot themselves in the foot by putting "Love Train," "Back Stabbers," "the Love I Lost," the title cut AND "Me and Mrs. Jones" in the very first six tracks, but, c'mon, there's so much more to that scene! And except for Teddy Pendergrass' creepy sexytime jam "Close the Door," the second half is up to par with the first and you still get "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now!" There's more comprehensive (and better) Philly comps, but eh get this for yr uncle or whatever if you've got a cool black uncle and not a disgusting racist fundamentalist uncle cracker turd person like mine!

Surgeon's Basictonalvocabulary is probably the best 90s techno album with a track named after a 70s rock genre ("Krautrock"), but it also probably doesn't have much competition, unless there's a Luke Slater album featuring a track called "Zeuhl." Extra props should be given for the dreamy interlude "Waiting," which sounds like a digitized excerpt from some forgotten library album. 

Guido Deiro's Vaudeville Accordion Classics might not have the charm of the calliope, and two full disks of marches, waltzes, rags and foxtrots, with the occassional polka, tango and mazurka, all scored for one instrument might prove a little samey, but pick any dozen tracks at random and you've got a classic the whole family can love - even my family, who suck and I hate them!  

I reviewed an earlier album of theirs fairly positively but all I have to say about the other Rovo I've jammed is that they are godawful boring, even with live and slightly lo-fi (as on Tonic 2001) and even when in jazz fusion drag (as on MON.) Heck, MON might be their most unfathomably dull!

Speaking of dull, there's really no reason to listen to the Roland Kovac New Set, no matter how much the idea of krautlibrary tickles yr fancy.

You ever get a wish answered and then wish you hadn't wished that wish? I was wishing pretty hard for a while at the beginning that Professor Longhair's Complete London Concert would be instrumental, because his voice is so hesitant and thin and I love the combination of boogie-woogie piano and bongo, but then the last two tracks are instrumental and they're really boring, so I guess the vox are necessary. Plus, who wants to hear "Tipitina" sans "mallawalladalla"s?

the Cough/Windhand split just makes me realize I don't like sludgey doom or doomy sludge metal? like at all? or maybe they're just bad examples of the genres.

Birds and Blades, by Bury Gie and Even Parkour, might've benefited from being one disk, but what a doozy that first disk is! Mayhem, I tells ya', pure surreal mayhem, perfect sensory bombardment music.

Robert Mandel's East-European Hurdy Gurdy Music is just the thing if you crave a new hurdle-gurdle album because you've heard everything by Valentin Clastrier and Dominique Regef, but don't want anything too challenging. It's not really exceptional otherwise, however. Oh and it has bapgipes!

When the Fizzbombs' Surfin' Winter EP started I thought "my god, finally a band combining the joys of buzzyfuzzynoisy no-fi black metal production and indie pop songwriting!" but then it just seemed too tame: too retro on the songwriting side and not noisy enough after all. Stick to the "Sign on the Line" single, 'cuz that's just about perfect.

Rockstone - Native's Adventures With Lee Perry... might not make you reconsider your all-time top five Black Ark productions, but it's still super swell, with lyrics that, while a little closer to than Paul Simon than a lot will be comfortable with, run rings around most non-dub poetry Jamaican lyricism.

It's a bad comparison for two main reasons (genre and quality) but structurally Allesandro Allesandroni's Prisma Sonora can't help but make me think of Cheryl Lynn's debut: they both have seven great tracks (though nothing on Prisma Sonora comes close to any of the good tracks on Cheryl Lynn, obviously,  'cuz that's one of the best albums ever) followed by two slices of treacly sentimentality with no redeeming factors whatsoever.

Solaris' Marsbeli Kronikak is... well, it's just an eighties prog album. It's not despicable, for an eighties prog album, and it's not neo-prog, thank glob, but... eighties prog is one big whatevs.

actually this is getting unreadably long,so I guess I'll split it up into two posts.

Sperrmüll's s/t isn't quite "mistagged unkraut" or pure schlock cock rock in the same sense as Hairy Chapter or Electric Fruit but, well, it has a song called "Land of the Rocking Sun" and if that doesn't turn your nose up...

and Ikarus' debut is little better, even if it has a coupla' moderately tasty jazz-rock bits, so I think I'll cancel that third-string kraut album marathon I had planned. There's too much music in the world to focus on any form of white rock music for an extended period of time. Just as European, but I think I'll move on to the perpetually underrated library scene for now, and start with the Roland Kovac New Set, as a bridge between genres.