Moroccan Music

I am not the guy who has written an article in this month's Wire magazine about Canadian experimental music going by the name of Tim Rutherford-Johnson because I don't have a Johnson at the end of my name. I'd be more likely to write an article about experimental music from Melbourne or Sydney anyway. I did notice there's also a piece on Moroccan trance music which has caught my attention, I may have to actually buy this issue. I'm assuming this article is not about the techno variety of trance, however I may be wrong.

I've been interested in Moroccan music ever since I discovered The Master Musician Of Jajouka in the early 90s. In the last few years after exhaustively listening to my half a dozen Jajouka/Joujouka recordings I've been tuned in to the great blog Moroccan Tape Stash. This blog is a treasure trove with music from pop to sacred trance music and everything else in-between. This scene is still hard to navigate though and can often be confusing. Some of the best tapes posted by Tim Abdellah (a lot of Tims today) on his blog are by unknown artists. I tried to get some youtube clips of the below tape but there's a language barrier. Anyway it makes being a fan of this music a bit more...I dunno...challenging. A bit like in the old days when you had to seek the arcane knowledge of the subterranean music scene, you know before the interwebs. To be honest half the time I don't know exactly what constitutes berber, Jilala or Bendir music. Fuck I like it though. Along with Gamelan music Moroccan music is where I go when current music's not doin it for me, which is 75% of the time.

Couldn't find this on Youtube...It's great though.

So this is the record that started it all for a lot of Moroccan music fans. Brian Jones arranged this recording of The Master Musicians Of Joujouka and this LP was issued in 1971 on Rolling Stone Records. All your favourite creepy hipster Morocco dwellers were involved with the liner notes of this album as well ie. William s Buroughs, Brion Gyson, Paul Bowles etc.

The Residents Live @ Etrange Festival 2015

Now here's another surprise from the San Fransisco pre/proto/post-punk milieu. I rate all those 70s Residents records from 1974's Meet The Residents right up until 1980's The Commercial Album plus all the singles, EPs and tapes in-between. I've heard a few things here and there since, some I've liked a bit and others that I really didn't. 13 or 14 years ago I borrowed a couple of live Residents dvds from the city library. One was a mid 90s concert while the other was from the early 2000s. I really wanted to like these films but they just weren't that good. By that I mean the band had become pretty lame and very boring. Watching those dvds almost ruined the old records for me but thankfully I soon forgot about them. The 70s catalogue remains a treasure to me.

So I was trying to get some sleep during a crazy heat wave we're currently having here in the Desert City. Yesterday it was 44 degrees and today it's currently sitting at 46, that's Celsius! That's 115 degrees in Fahrenheit terms. I went on youtube and found a Residents playlist, hit play and lay down on the couch with the dog at my feet. As I drifted off I could hear some old Residents classics and a few I was not too familiar with. After an hour I woke up just as the above concert was starting. The first track was great but I was expecting it to swiftly get rather shite. No, an hour and a half later I was still transfixed, forgetting the heat for a little while.

The band here are stripped down to a 3 piece and are perhaps a little more guitar-centric than they were in the 70s. Musically/sonically they were in incredible form, at the peak of their powers. They have lost the eyeballs though. Two members had skull masks with grey dreads while the singer had an old clown face mask. I couldn't help but think that the singer's real face was probably quite similar to his mask. Anyway it was a hell of a nice surprise to be engrossed by this concert. Then I started regretting not going to see them when they played in Melbourne for the 'What Is Music?' festival in 2005. Those old dvds had really put me off. So now I'm wondering how much good stuff  I've missed. There's a good 25 years of their work I haven't explored. I'm guessing at least a quarter of it is probably good and quite possibly more.



Ye olde classics from The Commercial Album.

Chrome's Lost Tapes

Holy shit how the fuck did I miss this? These tapes were certainly lost on me. Half Machine From The Sun: The Lost Tapes From 79-80 was released in 2013! San Francisco's Chrome circa Alien Soundtracks (77) & Half Machine Lip Moves (79) were one of the greatest bands ever, hands down. There were some choice moments on their following 3 LPs too. Chrome's brand of scuzzy sci-fi psych rock was a supremely innovative creep show. So what a belated surprise this was today. These 4 tracks that I've posted could have easily made it onto the proper albums, for sure. Some of this collection's tunes are pretty eye opening and you can see why others were never released. There are even rather commercial songs that were putting me in mind of Roxy Music and even Blue Oyster Cult. I reckon you could cut this 18 track compilation down to about 10 or 11 and you would have a classic missing Chrome LP.

TAZ - Hakim Bey(Creep)

Recently I revisited Hakim Bey's TAZ album that he did with Bill Laswell. I'd heard it on the radio in the 90s. Even local Melbourne fanzines had big write ups on the book and cd. He was some kind of modern day cult figure with his feet in anarchistic and post-situationist camps. I remember thinking he was a bit didactic but had a couple of good things to say about modern life. The TAZ record contained Bey reading excerpts from his book, of the same name, over Laswell's world muzak. So I listened to it last week and it really got my goat. Within the first 10 minutes I thought this guy's philosophy really opens itself up to normalising some dodgy shit ie. paedophilia and incest. Then as I kept listening I was convinced this guy had spent his whole life studying radical movements, anarchism, esoteric history, secret societies and whatever else so he could justify paedophillia. The entire cd became very creepy (not in a good way). I was thinking 'Am I just reading too much into it?' So I went online to see what he was on about. Right there on the interweb was a lot of chatter about Paedophillia and Bey who is also known as Peter Lamborn Wilson. He'd allegedly written for a Paedophile journal etc. etc. Its funny though because I felt so guilty and disgusted after listening to TAZ and some of Wilson's lectures on youtube but back in my early 20s I don't think I ever felt guilty reading William S Burroughs. Another weird thing is that Bey goes on and on about many figures in secret and forgotten history and calls them creeps......the irony.

RIP Jaki Liebezeit

TIM'S ULTRA ROUGH GUIDE TO ROCK - PART X

CAN - EGE BAMYASI

Krautrock's sonic Goliaths 3rd studio album proper is their most pop affair. That's not to say there aren't any outré experimental moments though. This is Germanic telepathic polyrhythmic psychedelic rock 1972 stylee. Can had a top ten single in Germany with Spoon taken from this record. Kanye West even appropriated Sing Swan Song wholesale for his tune Drunk & Hot Girls in 2007! - Tim 'Space Debris' Rutherford *

*(Old blurb review I did for a website)

The first Can song I came across was this in cover version form by The Jesus & Mary Chain!

Everyone's doing a bit on Jaki so I'll keep it short and personal. In my book he was the best drummer ever closely followed by Tony Allen. If Can didn't have him they simply wouldn't have been Can. You could say that about all the instrument players in the Group, I guess. They had the synergy, They were synergy! I also enjoyed Liebezeit's drumming on other projects though. He often played on fellow Can members solo records as well as with other great artists like Michael Rother, Eno, David Sylvian, Jah Wobble, Pluramon and Burnt  Friedman.

I think the last time I heard him was in 2013 in collaboration with Burnt Friedman on their 5th instalment of Secret Rhythms. He still had it on Secret Rhythms 5 and I thought he would just go on infinitely like his style often conjured.

How can you choose just one tune from Future days? They all belong together in this sequence. Is this the most cohesive LP ever? Well perhaps you could say that about Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi and Soon Over Babaluma as well. The tunes on Future Days feel like 4 movements of the one piece.

This blows me mind every time! I could keep on posting Can songs, particularly everything off those aforementioned LPs. Monster Movie, Soundtracks, Landed, Unlimited Edition, The Lost Tapes and most of Flow Motion are great too ......

RIP Jaki Liebezeit.

2017 with Marc Acardipane

WE HAVE ARRIVED IN THE PHUTURE

These first two are on the same record from 1990!!!

From 1992 this is a one sided LP.

A classic from 96. A pretty ominous title right there and a rather fitting sound for now doncha' think?

Of course these are all Marc Acardipane aliases and that was an alias for Mark Trauner. Marc was THE German producer of hardcore techno/gabba/gloomcore from 1989 onwards, more like a genre unto himself! Acardipane must have had over 100 pseudonyms and trying to collect his full back catalogue must be a futile task but it would be kind of heroic if you had them all. He had a big thing about 2017. I'm not really sure what it was, can't remember if I ever knew, but perhaps all will be revealed this year. On his record sleeves he kept saying See You In 2017. Surely he's gonna make a comeback and be as big as Beyonce....well it's a nice thought anyway. Perhaps It'll just be the end of the world as we know it and Acardipane will feel fine.

Best Of 2016

LONG
Professional Sunflow - Laraaji & Sun Araw
Rock To TN34 - eMMplekz
Purple Reign - Future
Exit Pantomime Control - Moon Wiring Club
Blackstar - David Bowie
Lodestar - Shirley Collins

Creaking Haze & Other Rave Ghosts - Assembled Minds

Black Peak - Xylouris White
Blank Face - Schoolboy Q
Caramel - Konx-Om-Pax
Strands - Steve Hauschildt

Return - Blue Smiley
Toll - Kemper Norton
2845 - Convextion
Colour - Katie Gately
Pacific Image - Hybrid Palms
...Presents The Mechanical Abrasions Of (Volumes 2&3) - Ashtray Navigations
Stranger Things OST - Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein
Holy Sauce - Sauce Walka

FENCE
I, Gemini - Let's Eat Grandma
Sometimes I think this is a fantastic missing link between Kate Bush, Grime and god knows what else, other times I just wanna smash the stereo in.
Jeffery - Young Thug
Some good tunes here but something about the production is not quite right....but it's good though...I think... maybe it's still growing on me.
Borderland: Transport - Juan Atkins & Moritz Von Oswald
Classic intersection of Detroit techno and 90s Berlin dub-tech or a bunch of old geezers recording trax for the electronic music preservation society?

WTF?
Islah - Kevin Gates
His mixtape run up to this, his major label debut, was unsurpassed. What happened?
New Ways Out - Belbury Poly
Their previous 4 records were ace, this however...
The Life Of Pablo - Kanye West
I listened and listened again but I'm sure there's only two good songs here.

ARCHIVES
Close To The Noise Floor (Formative UK Electronica 1975-1984) - Various 
No Cabs, Numan or Depeche, but hey you've heard them. Have you heard Third Door From The Left, We Be Echo, Storm Bugs or 5XOD?

The Emperor's New Music - Gerry & The Holograms
Even unplayable art prank 7"ers are getting reissued. Why not?

When A New Trick Comes Out I Do An Old One - Moon Wiring Club
A 3 cd compilation of archive material from Hauntology's finest.

Cryptik Stepperz - Ekoplekz
Archival gear from 2012. Nick's off-cuts are just as good as his on-cuts.

Venezuela 70: Venezuelan Experimental Rock In The 1970s - Various
Soul Jazz Records go in search of further afield South American sonic delights and strike gold.

Boogie Breakdown: South African Synth Disco 1980-1984 - Various
Get down to these sweet South African soundz courtesy of the marvelous Cultures Of Soul Records. Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1984!

Doin It In Lagos: Boogie, Pop & Disco In 1980s Nigeria - Various
Soundway Records does it again! Get down to these sweet Nigerian soundz. Contains one of the greatest tunes ever in Steve Monite's Only You.

Space Echo: The Mystery Behind The Cosmic Sound Of Cabo Verde 1977-1985 - Various 
Get Down To These Sweet soundz from Cabo Verde. Another Analog Africa joint.

TELLY
Fleabag
Atlanta
Line Of Duty
Happy Valley

BOOK
Shock & Awe: Glam Rock & Its Legacy - Simon Reynolds
Grant & I - Robert Forster

Best Tunes Of 2016

CHOONZ

Purple Reign - Future

Pick Up The Phone - Young Thug & Travis Scott feat Quavo
Perky's Calling - Future
The Face In The Mirror Is Not Mine - Assembled Minds 
Why You Always Hatin' - YG feat Drake & Kamaiyah
So High - Beatking feat Gangser Boo
Eat Shittake Mushrooms - Let's Eat Grandma
That Part - Schoolboy Q feat Kanye West
OOOUUU - Young M.A.
Starboy - The Weekend feat Daft Punk
Guwop - Young Thug feat Quavo, Young Scooter & Offset
Awake Awake/The Split Ash Tree/May Carol/ Southover - Shirley Collins
Wolves (Balmain Campaign) - Kanye West feat Sia
Webbie - Young Thug feat Duke
Low Life - Future feat The Weekend
Lazarus - David Bowie
50 On My Wrist - Sonny Digital
Black Beatles - Rae Sremmurd feat Gucci Mane
Do Ya Mind - DJ Khaled feat Nicky M, Chris B, August Alsina, Jerimih, Future & Rick Ross
Bad & Boujee - Migos feat Uzi Vert

Pick Up The Phone - Young Thug w Travis Scott feat Quavo

I can't believe this wasn't a number 1 smash...if it wasn't.

Angel Rada

This is taken from the Soul Jazz comp Venezuela 70 which was released this year. I don't think I'd ever heard anything from Venezuela before. I have many records from Brasil, Columbia & Peru but this is a new territory for me. The above tune is the outstanding one for me on that collection - South American space synth jam dedicated to Klaus Schulze.



This one's on Venezuela 70 as well.... pretty good too. Details about Rada on the web are v sketchy. He was in the band Gas Light then went solo. He studied music in Germany in the 70s. That's about it.



Wow...this tune is not on the Soul Jazz compilation but is incredible. Upadesa puts me in mind of an even stranger Illitch if that's possible. This is fabulous lost Kosmische synthesiser music. A musical revelation to the eardrums. So all of the above tracks were on Angel Rada's record Upadesa released sometime in the 70s (???). This is the kind of thing that would have been posted on Mutant Sounds back in the day. Is there more unheard gold out there?

...from1983 apparently [added entry 11/11/22]