Side A's hypnotic techno sans the beats innit. In the tradition of Ashra's New Age Of Earth & E2-E4.
Side B's a bit like if Neu went all insane hyper cosmic electro disco and hosted an all night psychedelic dance party. This shit really was conceptually pre-rave even if it doesn't quite exactly sound like how acid house or rave-y tech ended up sounding. You could def have your hands in the air like you just don't care and lose yourself in the continuous upbeat bliss while participating in the stimulating or psychedelic drug of choice.
More 80s in-between scenes electronic music. Scottish synthesist Trucknell did a handful of DIY tapes and one cassette on the MIXMUSIC tape label whose roster included Tim Stebbing, Paul Nagle and Nik Arkle. Trucknell also appeared on comps issued by INKEY$, Synthtrax and Auricle. So there was some kind of underground network for these guys.
The ace title track of the 1980 Syrinx LP reminds me of something like Illitch circa 10 Suicides but with added violin. Syrinx's one and only LP Meteora is a cosmic prog electro jam. This German group never get mentioned anywhere by anyone and this album has never been reissued.
Maximilian Marzinkowski's, the mastermind behind the Syrinx, only other synth performance and songwriting credits post Syrinx were for a couple of (pretty bad) singles for fledgling pop stars. The other band members never participated any further in the recording industry.
Surely these qualities are all worthy of making Syrinx a mythical group...
For the gear heads here's a list of stuff Marzinkowski played on Meteora: KLH computer-controlled loudspeakers model 1 + 2, ARP 2600, ARP-AXXE, ARP String, Roland Jupiter, rhythm computer, analog sequenzer, digital sequenzer, vocoder.
Then you realise sometimes the best records are the most popular. For You, despite being a number one LP in Japan in 1982 and one of the most revered Japanese city pop albums ever recorded, is still an elusive listen. It had a vinyl reissue a month ago but if you missed it, like me, you can now only pay an absurd fortune for a copy. The For You full album youtube uploads keep getting struck down and Yamashita refuses to put it up on spotify. So you gotta grab a piece of the fleeting phenomenon while you can. I mean is anybody really gonna pay over sixty Australian dollars plus shipping for the bloody reissue of the tape? Enjoyment for tonight only and maybe tomorrow night too... you never know your luck in the big city (pop)!
*For those who haven't been paying attention the boring mainstream rock-crit consensus cannons have become increasingly irrelevant since the internet. Lists by the likes of Rolling Stone, NME etc. were notoriously snobby particularly towards non American/English acts and heaven forbid genres like metal.
So now we get to see ratings of music by the music fan people. The two lists of best albums of any particular year as voted by the website's users seem to be Best Ever Albums and Rate Your Music. The Best Ever Albums lists appear to best accurately reflect the choices and rankings of people I know. I love how Europe sits next to The Feelies as 43 & 44 respectively in the list of best 1986 LPs. Rate Your Music is more uber fan-ish but no less populist and with a broader scope than just rock & pop radio LPs. That is to say their lists encompass a lot more classical, experimental and niché genres.
In recent years it has been noticeable and pretty embarrassing to see places like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone retroactively scrub their canonical lists and replace them with lists that don't accurately reflect the magazine's past identity, past music obsessions and past musical biases. They're probably doing this for retarded cultural revolutionary (DEI) points, definitely for broader market appeal but also because they might have realised that legacy rock critics thought they were better than the average popular music fan, were narrow minded and had petty grievances with certain genre music tribes.
What I'm getting at here is that Tatsuro Yamashita's For You LP has gained a lot of status in the last twenty years. The World Wide Web is exactly that: Worldwide. For You never dented a western country's pop chart back in the day but due to a change in popular music listening paradigms, 41 years later it is rated by Best Ever Albums as the 30th best record of 1982 trailing Michael Jackson, Iron Maiden, Kate Bush, Donald Fagan, Bad Brains and The Fall while coming out ahead of 1982 efforts by Toto, Talking Heads, The Dream Syndicate, Gun Club and Siouxsie & The Banshees.
In the Rate Your Music's best LPs of 1982 list For You comes in at an astonishing number sixteen behind The Cure, Philip Glass, Glenn Gould doing Bach, Judas Priest & Prince but just ahead of Alice Coltrane, Discharge, SPK, Pagan Altar and Faustos.
Rare and unheard since the 80s this recently uploaded recording from cult synthesist Tim Stebbing is finally getting some exposure.
When you've heard the entire catalogue of 70s synth LPs but you still want more Radiophonic, cosmic and analogue synth experimentation, fear not, plenty of DIY cosmic synth stragglers were lurking in the shadows during the 80s. These guys were dwelling in the cassette underground and thank God for their stubborn love of all things synth-y.
This British fella from Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast released eight cassettes from 1985 - 1991. Orbiter from 1985 was his second tape. I guess you would describe this as an in-between scenes album. It's post cosmic synth and radiophonic heyday but it's before the new electronica and ambient house of early 90s Britain.
If you can't get enough of that glinting sweet melancholic synth texture beloved of Paddy Kingsland and later Boards Of Canada you'll find much to like here. An array of cosmic synth, peculiar, minimal, ambient and electro sounds are also assembled here for your listening pleasure. Somewhere between deep space exploration and cosy telly soundtrack quaintness. Today is the day you become enamoured with the sounds of Tim Stebbing.
When you hear a track like this and you know you've heard it before or is it just déjà vu? Who knows you might have heard this on ten different tv shows from the 70s and 80s. I'm surprised there's not a website documenting the historic minutiae of every single library track's film and telly usage. Surely I first heard Drifting in 1981 on a wildlife documentary or perhaps not at all.
A lot of these early Bruton libraries were used in British and Australian telly of the day. Tunes from Bruton Music BRM4 Fear were used in Southern Television/ITV series The Famous Five (1978/9) and that's about as specific as the information I've found gets.
The back cover of BRM4 Fear readsFear: Small Mostly Woodwind Instrumentation. Suitable For Both Drama and Documentary Application. At the bottom it's written BRM4 Suspense, tension.
The notes for this track state Drifting: Suspended with underlying fear.
Not just a top library album but one of the greatest albums of all time. Macchi was a master of atmosphere. His strings, scrapes, clanks, throbs and echoes conjure an unsettling ominous beauty all of their own.
Egisto Macchi a shadowy figure from the Italian electro-acoustic/musique concrète/contemporary classical/improv avant-garde also made a stack of music for telly and film. In the 1970s he got involved in making library music LPs where he could bring together and meld these disparate musical forms. Macchi combined outré and popularly conventional elements to create uncanny sound-worlds of the most delicious variety. High and low art were brought together like never before and he had a run of fabulous LPs.
I futuribili is notable for its irregular tenebrous space.
Chess please. Left to right Morricone, Evangelisti and Macchi.
Wozo - Hydro-Electric (Music De Wolfe DWLP 3412 Power Source) 1980
Cosmic library music at its best. Although I guess by the title of this track they were going for more of an environmental industrial engineering vibe. I mean it's all about the futuristic science and optimism of mankind so it all works well.
In the mid/late 00s I thought those early records by neo-kosmische acts like Oneohtrix Point Never, Emeralds etc. sounded much closer to this kind of gear than say they did with Tangerine Dream.
This track was used in the NASA documentary Space Shuttle: A Remarkable Flying Machine (1981) at the end when space shuttle Challenger was coming in for landing. Then used in the follow up doc STS-2 The Second Flight (1981) in the opening scene which is a flashback to the first flight's landing.
Even as a 9 year old I used to think "Sure this is cool and all but it's not better than going to the moon is it? Why aren't they going beyond the moon?"
Anyway getting back to this 1980 Music De Wolfe LP Power Source, it's one of the great cosmic electronic library records. Every track is a little gem and thematically cohesive so it works like a cosmic-synth or sci-fi soundtrack record. You can just imagine all these tunes as part of an early 80s science documentary series or space age exhibit at the planetarium.
Power Source is a classic instrumental synth album. On the back cover it states Unusual, atmospheric and futuristic moods played on electronic keyboards. I'd place it as one of the top British electronic LPs of 1980, vying for top spot with John Foxx's Metamatic. I don't recall this record being mentioned on that Synth Britannia documentary but perhaps it should have been.
Wozo info (and music uploads) on the interwebs is pretty scarce. The main guy behind this project is English fella John Hynde who also goes by the name of James Harrington and/or John Saunders. Saunders is also the man behind prolific production/library music act Astral Sounds who released over 20 LPs between 1977 & 1986 on labels like Music De Wolfe, Rouge and Hudson Music Company.
More golden carefree sounds. An ez tropical faux-bossa jam with that little bit of wah-wah puts this in the sweet summer soundz zone. As it's the middle of winter and I'm freezing my bollocks off this seems rather fitting.
Like Summer was originally from the 1973 KPM 1127 LP Happy Rainbows which also featured compositions from James Clark, Steve Gray and the legendary Alan Hawkshaw.
Breezing Along - Laurie Robertson Murphy (1979) There was a time sometime in the 00s when library music was pretty much all I listened to. At the start of the sharity blog thing there were a bunch of collectors putting up all manner of impossibly rare and unheard library delights. I reckon I must have downloaded between a thousand and fifteen hundred library LP win-rar files. I've got a hard drive gathering dust in the bureau where all these sounds reside. ....
The whole thing started in the mid 90s when the exotica and easy listening scene had to go further afield to find deeper cuts and a bunch of great library compilation series cds followed: The Sound Gallery, Blow Up Presents Exclusive Blend, Mo'Plen, Beat At Cinecitta, Music For Dancefloors, Cinemaphonic et al. I should go through my old cobwebby cds, I loved these collections.
Okay I'm off on a tangent. This tune I think I only discovered recently. It's taken from an American Library called Major Records who I know nothing about. Roger Roger did some work for the label apparently though.
Breezing Along is a perfectly apt title for this song that just breezes along like a soundtrack for somebody just breezing along. A sweet low-key funky jam with splendacious strings, it comes from Production Music6114 LP a 1979 Major Records library. Laurie Robertson Murphy contributed five tracks. The only other credit I can find for Laurie is another Major Records Library from 1978 Untitled 6109 of which she contributed five tracks also.
Laurie Robertsson Murphy is quite the mysterious figure. I'm guessing it's a woman. If it is a woman she might have been married to soundtrack and library composer Walter Murphy who also worked for Major Records.
This 12" Club Version mix on West End Records is by Larry Levan. My God it's t's the jam. Everything here, I'm sure, is intuitively designed for maximum psychedelic dancefloor affect. That funky bass, yes it's a funky sensation. That slowed down disco beat makes this entire monster jam an outstanding anomaly: weird and infectious. The breathtaking hand clap science is also absolutely fascinating. The hook that is the hypnotic swirling funky guitar riff that begins to mutate at 4:12 in on an irresistible groove. The break at 5:57 that just halts everything is so on the money, I mean how could it not be with the alchemy of synergy taking place here, everything seems to be serendipitously falling into the right place.
Dre surely ripped this off for his G-funk blueprint did he not? This particular version of Heartbeat seems to be a vastly influential track. Don't let that put you off though because it's infinitely better than what it influenced. With regard to the history and aspects of this tune the club version of Heartbeat is the main show.
Heartbeat like the previous post's Funky Sensation by Gwen McCrae was written, arranged and produced by Kenton Nix in association with Henry Batts. So they were having a killer 1981.
Get your foots out for some toe tappin...it's is the funky sensation!!!
Funky Sensation's right in that funky post-disco boogie zone and it's a sweet spot innit. Only problem is it's way too short. We need another ten or fifteen minutes of this!
Francesco Castelluccio with Bob Crewe producing and writing, you can't go wrong. Sweet funky disco love song with an ace guest appearance from Patti Austin. The more you listen the more you realise there is a lot going on here. I mean Swearin' To God's got those divine strings, big brass action, that funky wah-wah Shaft scratch guitar and an even funkier bassline. This epic is also a trumpet and saxamophone extravaganza, with an array a saxes including my favourite saxophone, the rarely heard in pop music outside of Pet Sounds, baritone sax.
For me though it's all about those congas. Conga players never get the credit they deserve and yet they contribute so much to a dance floor number. I mean they are integral just about more than anyone else as to whether your disco track is going to be a toe-tapping success or not. So I'd like to highlight the wonderful Miss Bobbye Hall. I'm assuming this is her as she's the only one credited in the sleeve notes with playing congas although there are also several percussionists with credits too. Hall's credits are vast and many, you've heard her play congas and bongos on a lot of records throughout the years including those by Judee Sill, Boz Scaggs, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bill Withers, Stevie Wonder, The Doobie Brothers etc.
Another short but sweet bit of 80s Pärt. More bells. This time though they're accompanied by the insanely intense brass from the Brass Ensemble Staatsorchester Stuttgart. This was the title track from his second ECM album. Pärt was on a roll here with his solo ECM albums that continued on with a classic run of five masterpieces from 1984 to 1993: Tabula Rasa, Arbos, Passio, Miserere and Te Deum.
Another one from the "wow" playlist. When this came on... just wow. That opening guitar line took took my breath away and my heart went funny. My body had a memory of this song before my mind did. A vibe like this is priceless, it's simply the best. All the elements are in perfect unison to create one of the greatest toe tappers in history.
My brain's not functioning beyond "ME like" today so it's handy that the fans of this very special tune in the comments are unusually articulate.
- A bass riff to die for...
- My world changes from winter blues to summer sunshine in just a few minutes...
- Absolutely stunning - beautifully understated - sends a shiver down my spine!
- Quietly addictive..and that opening riff! digs real deep!
- Great organ bridge moving to solo guitar...
- Proper music...
- So cool...
- This is faultless...
- Doesn't come any better. Pure 100% class...
- Sublime...
Nobody mentioned that insistent rhythm which makes If I Could Only Be Sure so joyously infectious.
A fabulous toe tappin' symphonic-soul number that sounds like a Curtis Mayfield production but is actually some dude from Scotland. Everything here is just pop perfection. I was going through a mysterious playlist I'd created on youtube a while ago called "wow" and this popped up. So it was actually a "wow what a great tune" moment so I thanked my past self for compiling this list. I imagine this is some kind of northern soul classic.
Name It You Got It will put a smile on your face, a spring in your step and make you feel glad to be alive!...well for the duration of the track at least but hey that vibe just may stick with you for the rest of the day.
Rewind.
[Later research]
Reveals the music director here is none-other than producer, arranger and guitarist Pip Williams. His prolific production and arrangement credits include Sweet, Walker Brothers, Status Quo, The Moody Blues, Shirley Bassey, Richard O'Brien, Dr. Feelgood, Barclay James Harvest, Geordie, Mud, Uriah Heep, Colin Blunstone, Carl Douglas, Ringo Starr, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, The Kinks and many more.
Arvo Pärt - Cantus in Memoriam of Benjamin Britten (1984) Because sometimes the best music is the most obvious music cf. The Rolling Sones. Bells bells bells. Listening to this just makes me want more bells. I kinda wish some mental improv group would do like an hour long interpretation of this with way more bells. Also why didn't Arvo write way more suff for bells?
There's a shitload of versions of this on youtube but it's a case of the original is best. This was the recording most of us first heard Cantus In Memorium... as it featured on Pärt's breakthrough album Tabula Rasa on ECM in 1984. I can't find an earlier version but one must exist because, if I recall correctly, the head honcho of ECM heard it on his car radio years before he ever tracked Arvo down and organised the Tabula Rasa recording project. Perhaps it was a live radio only concert version... who knows?
Five of the best minutes in recorded music history.
Geez this Shizuka tune is fucking devastating. If you don't know but you love yer Velvets, Paisley Underground, Galaxie 500, Mazzy Star etc. this is for you but it's way more emotionally cathartic.
The core of Shizuka were singer-songwriter guitarist Shizuka Miura and her husband ex-Les Rallizes Dénudés/Fushitsusha guitarist Maki Miura.
In the 90s they appeared on volumes two and three of PSF's Tokyo Flashback compilation series and Virgin's Cosmic Kurushi Monsters double cd. This nine minute epic comes from Shizuka's one and only studio LP Heavenly Persona released on the legendary PSF label in 1994.
Similar to Les Rallizes Dénudés, Shizuka were mainly a live concern. They also had a bunch of live records and several live vhs video tapes issued during their 18 year existence. Shizuka have become near mythical since the rumoured suicide death of Shizuka Miura in 2010.
This was Vajra's opening salvo and it was infernal to its psychedelic core.
We've got both Keiji Haino and Kan Makami sharing insane vocal and guitar duties while Toshiaki Ishizuka takes care of percussion in this trio.
I think it was Keiji Haino who said in the pre-Napster/pre-Spotify 90s that he'd listened to something like thirty three thousand LPs so it's no surprise that this instrumental odyssey could be claimed by at least ten different genres: Psychedelic, avantgarde, cosmic, no-wave-y post-punk, improv, goth, shoegaze, folk, noise rock, black metal, post rock, drone etc. In a way I feel like it's closest to Swans in spirit and sound than anything else though.
I guess I'm talking about the song up until the 5:16 point where it then proceeds to become another song entirely. I still don't know what this second stage is exactly...some kind of absurd avant folk blues.
Haino and Makami are very rarely about comforting the listener with musical compositions similar to what you've heard before so whilst the first five minutes here seem to have a past within their present and future the remaining 27 minutes of Vajra's debut LP doesn't have such easily navigable coordinates. You need to be a fearless psychonaut to venture beyond this track which has the English translation Before The Snow Falls, Falling Leaves Have No Meaning as it was included on that Virgin comp Cosmic Kurushi Monsters sans the second part if I recall correctly.
Vajra - Tsugaru (1995)
In the 90s I used to wonder; why isn't Keiji Haino (and his myriad of projects) a massive indie star on the same sort of level as Sonic Youth or at least as popular as Boredoms. After listening back to Vajra's brilliant 1995 cd Tsugaru today I can understand why. Maybe his other outfits Fushitsusha or Nijiuma could have been big though as they had more accessible potential whilst still being immensely dark in tone.
I finally caught Haino live sometime in the early 00s in Melbourne and I have to say it was the least fun show I think I've ever been to. I honestly don't know how he did it. I can listen to the most unlistenable rackets at the best of times but on this bleak winter's evening on a week night he improvised the most discomforting dysphoric music possibly ever created. Haino assembled the most aesthetically displeasing sequence of sounds these ears have heard. He made Neubauten and Masonna sound like Herb Alpert but hang on perhaps that's a misnomer as noise artists actually often create music that's incredibly pleasing as it might have psychedelic or cathartic properties. No the music on this night while not sounding like a cross between Polka and Celine Dion style pop had a similar revolting aesthetic affect on me and my mate. Then again maybe we'd just smoked too much pot, drank the wrong amount of beer and were a bit grumpy.
Another latin pop delight from Elia & Elisabeth taken from their self-titled 1973 LP. My mind has gone blank, was there a name for this genre of music?
This one has a vibing sweet pop sound that is along the lines of what you would expect to come out of South America in the late 60s/early 70s except it has a wide eyed innocence all of its own.
Soy Una Nube is a tropical funky-psych-pop confection of the most enchanting variety. It's still garage rock though innit. I mean it feels like the backing band are gonna fully break loose any minute with G-L-O-R-I-A!
This is the sweetest, breeziest tropical garage pop sound ever.
In 2014 Vampi-Soul issued a compilation of Elia y Elisabeth's work from the early 70s, introducing this wonderful duo to the western world forty years after their heyday. These tunes were little revelations of the latin tropical pop variety. Elia and Elisabeth Fleta were sisters who were somewhat famous in Spain and Columbia where they appeared often on television. They were grandchildren of famous Spanish musician Miguel Fleta.
Ponte Bajo el Sol is an infectious tropical pop gem infused with a garage psych vibe. Check out the subtle fuzz, farfisa and wah-wah here. This tune even popped up on an episode of the tv show Narcos. Elia y Elisabeth's two LPs have recently been reissued in terrific remastered form which I recommend.
Heard this for the first time today. This is wild, great fun flute damaged driving heavy psych with bonus cowbell. I Know nothing about Mexican music whatsoever so this has opened my eyes. I've got psych comps from everywhere on earth but I don't own one from Mexico. I guess nobody ever recommended any and I never heard any Mexican music on the radio. I thought I had all of those great Love, Peace & Poetry psych comps but somehow no I missed the Mexican one. Anyway how good is flute in rock music? Don't trust the anti-flute taste police. The world needs more funky heavy psychedelic flute led rock!
So the last post was 2023's The Beggar Lover (Three) from Swans and it is apparently the last piece in the trilogy which started here twenty five years ago with the first Body Lovers album. The Body Lovers were Michael Gira's first post Swans project. This was recorded not long after their 90s break up and it was an auspicious debut cd. When we first got to hear this, it made the demise of Swans seem not so bad. If we were going to get incredible recordings like this who needed the Swans moniker anymore.
This is the the first part of the trilogy. A beautiful yet brutal expansive epic instrumental jam encompassing an infinite plethora of cosmic thrum. Check out some of the underground travellers contributing to this eternal monolithic mother of "psycho-ambient"* James Plotkin, Norman Westberg, Christoph Hahn, Larry Mullins, Mika Vaino, Martin Bisi, Helge Sten etc. Now lots of all star recordings end up with too many cooks spoiling the musical broth but not here. I think my favourite contribution here is by Ultra Vivid Scene's Kurt Ralske who plays a mesmerising flugelhorn for a glorious ten minutes from the 17:10 mark. He creates an entirely eerie stillness of the most wintry variety.
Number One Of Three is a whirring rumble of infinite proportions and is indeed one of the great recording of the 90s. I can't remember if it was held in high esteem like say Techno Animal's Re-Entry or Talk Talk's Laughing Stock or Deathprod's 90s trilogy or early Pan Sonic but it deserves to be. It was disappointing that The Body Lovers/Body Haters project only went on to record one more cd before Gira started the less inspired Angels Of Light (I gotta say I stopped buying their cds after the first couple, maybe I need to go back...)
*Psycho-ambient is a nifty term Michael Gira created to describe Number One Of Three.
**Swans sleuths have pointed me in the direction of the bonus cd accompanying the deluxe edition of 2010's My Father Will Guide Me... cd for the location of part two of the trilogy. It's a 46 minute track called Look At Me Go.
It was extraordinary that Swans released the best LP of 2012 because you know they'd been around forever and even broken up. Recalibrated bands never really work cf Pixies: Nobody cares about their new music. Thee Seer (2012) however was glorious and quite possibly their best work. This never happens.
So it is excellent to hear this new 44 minute epic because it is actually comparable to the title track to The Seer as well as The Body Lovers/Body Haters project. There are no classic era Swans members left like Mosimann, Jarboe or Westberg. I love my 80s & 90s Swans but somehow I can just accept this 2023 band without many qualms. I guess in my head it is the 21st century Swans: A separate entity where the boundaries of Soundtracks For The Blind era, The Body Lovers, Angels Of Light and solo Gira dissipate then intermingle...anyway blah blah...I was not expecting anything from the second resurrection of Swans to be this monumental, so The Beggar Lover (Three) is like Christmas.
A Michael Gira megamix of cosmic proportions. Expansive to infinity...
