V/A – Music & Rhythmn (Peter Gabriel, XTC, Lots of World Music) (1982 WEA Rec.)
David Sancious – The Bridge (1981 Elektra)
The Golden Palominos – This Is How It Feels Thanks, Milton!
Renaldo and Loaf – Songs for Swinging Larvae (Ralph) Thanks, Anon!
Sun City Girls (almost any) Thanks, Weevil Doer!
Eugene Chadbourne – There’ll Be No Tears Tonight Thanks, Secret Whistler!
Shockabilly – Heaven (pre-Shimmy remix)
Anybody got these on a shelf, garage, hard drive?
Live in Warsaw (2000)
DGM Club
A really nice sounding set from the post-double trio Crimson, around the time of ConstrucKtion of Light album. It’s a great demonstration of the concept that Fripp has long stated; that King Crimson sounds much better and is more engaged performing live in a way that cannot be replicated in the studio. Everyone is in top form and every track buzzes with electricity. Most of the selections center on the aformentioned album and the previous ThraK. Adrian Belew plays a solo acoustic version of Three Of A Perfect Pair and the album closes with a cover of Bowie’s Heroes (which Fripp played on two decades prior to this).
Lineup:
Adrian Belew – guitar & vocals
Robert Fripp – guitar
Trey Gunn – touch guitar, ashbory bass, talker
Pat Mastelotto – electronic drumming
Riddim Warfare
Outpost Recordings
Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky in a great album that incorporates elements of Hip-Hop, Spoken Word, Musique Concrete and Ambient music for a malange known as Illbient. Miller’s sonic creations are both post-modern, yet organic in nature and urban without becoming trendy nor easily dated, a common pitfall of mainstream Hip-Hop. It helps that he’s also a great bass player (he plays upright and electric) with a great feel for the beat. Guest here include Kool Keith, Wu Tang’s Killah Priest, Karsh Kale and even Arto Lindsay!
This is probably one of Dj Spooky’s finest albums and offers a good stylistic cross-section of his extensive oeuvre.
Lost in Translation
Axiom
Nice sonic tapestry woven out of Material tracks, as well as other Axiom releases and original pieces. It’s a nice mix throughout, with pastoral, natural background sounds that bridge the tracks. Two late, great guitar heroes - Sonny Sharrock and Eddie Hazel – perform a duet together, albeit in studio edited form.
Bernie Worrell, Bootsy Collins, Buckethead and George Clinton star in Cosmic Trigger. All tracks have really long running time, save for one that clocks in at eight minutes. Fans of the ambient label and mid-nineties Material will no doubt enjoy this two-disc set.
Hear No Evil
Meta (2000 reissue)
A repackage/reissue of Laswell’s 1988 solo album Hear No Evil (the original came out on the Venture label). This album reminds me a lot of the previously posted Hallucination Engine, lineup-wise, but the emphasis is on stripped down instrumentals over classical Indian music. Nicky Skopelitis‘ Coral Sitar is also a predominant feature throughout. Two songs from the album – Kingdom Come and Lost Roads get lengthy treatments, each being stretched out as two atmospheric ambient pieces on a second disc.
Both Discs ripped @ 320kbps
Seven Souls
Worldly Troika
“…Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast? If humans and animal souls are seen as electromagnetic force fields, such fields could be totally disrupted by a nuclear explosion. The mummy’s ‘nightmare: disintegration of souls, and this is precisely the ultrasecret and supersensitive function of the atom bomb: a Soul Killer, to alleviate an escalating soul glut.” ~ William S. Burroughs
I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate to follow up the last post…
Lots and lots of Burroughs reading from The Western Lands. In this incarnation of Material, some of the music is Hip-hop-ish and features multiple remix/remodels of the song Seven Souls. Some notable guests (other than the usual stable-mates) are rapper Rammellzee, DJ Spooky and Tetsu Inoue.
Ripped @ 192kbps
Seven Souls
(re-upped 12/28/06)
Hallucination Engine
Axiom
What can I say about this release?
It’s the one that kicked off my long obsession with collecting all things Laswell and – truth be told – an interest in world music in general.
This album has all the primordial elements for most of Bill Laswell’s future projects; a sound that is exotic to the point of being both mystical, ancient yet very modern and urban. Here Material crafts a world fusion sound that is never sentimental or pandering and seems to advocate the dissolution of borders – with regard to both nations and musical genres.
In 1993’s Hallucination Engine, they’ve edged away from funk and reggae (and are miles away from the herky-jerky experimentalism of just- post NY-Gong Material) in favor of a poly-fusion of Arabic, Indian, North African music and contemporary jazz.
Wayne Shorter’s saxophone takes center stage of several tracks and Zakir Hussain and Nicky Skopelitis’ playing are also predominate features here. At the heart of this album is a William S. Burroughs piece that undoubtedly introduced lots of folks to his words and writing. John Coltrane’s Naima emerges from the middle of a beautiful classical Arabic piece that features Simon Shaheen.
One of the wonderful things about Material is that no two albums are the same.
I bought many Material albums after falling in love with this one and haven’t found another (although I enjoy nearly every one) that effects me in the same way that this one does. For me, this is truly a desert island disc.
Ripped @ 320 kbps
Message from Home
Verve
A really nice n’ funky album from the great Pharoah Sanders, produced by Bill Laswell and featuring many mid-nineties Material alumnis (Bernie Worrel, Jeff Bova, Foday Musa Suso, Aiyb Dieng with engineering by Robert Musso, natch!).
Here’s what AMG has to say about it:
Message From Home is rooted in, but not exclusively devoted to, African idioms, as the overpowering hip-hop groove of “Our Roots (Began In Africa)” points out. But the record really develops into something special when Sanders pits his mighty tenor sound against the pan-African beats, like the ecstatically joyful rhythms of “Tomoki” and the poised, percolating fusion of American country & western drums and Nigerian juju guitar riffs on “Country Mile.”
Hey there.
I’ve been finding so much cool music that I can’t even remember where half of it is.
Let’s see if I can try.
A great new (to me, anyway) punk blog is PunchDrunk.
He’s got (some with nearly complete discogs of) Crass, Rudimentary Peni, Stranglers, Ramones and – my hometown heroes – Dead Moon.
Speaking of Punk, another one I just discovered is Hangover Heart Attack (how can you not like a blog named after a Poison Idea song?). He’s got a lot of New Bomb Turks, DRI, 7 Seconds, NoMeansNo and more…
..He also does the great Real Punk Rock – The Spirit of 77- the title of which is pretty damn self explanatory. If you cut your teeth on punk and hardcore, it’s well worth visiting.
Another new discovery ( I think she popped in at someone else’s digs – I can’t possibly remember.) is Sheila is Dangerous. I will take her word for it; nearly every Sheila I’ve ever known has been. But here she’s got a great Masada album (507) on the download that you might wanna snap up – and fast.
Many of us have been on a Eugene Chadbourne kick , sharing what we have and finding new stuff in the process. I gave up trying to document it as it made my head hurt. If you were in our little Potluck (as we call it in the colonies), Potlatch – whatever, feel free to shout out in my comments and I’ll bring it on forward.
And now for the usual suspects (not the derivative american movie):
Speaking of Masada, White Noise has up the incredible Electric Masada Live at the Mountian of Madness. Wow! This is Masada cranked up to 11, with lots of great Marc Ribot guitarwork. Check it out.
C’Est la Merde has put up a great Marc Ribot album Spiritual Unity.
Weevil Doer made of the coolest contribution to the above-mentioned Chadfest, with the EC home taped Dinosaur. many of the songs are cruder versions of the ones that appeared on Shockabilly’s Heaven, but the real surprise is all of the untitled tidbits that make up the rest of it. Freeking amazing!
Moogpower has loads of cool stuff, including the great Laswell/Wobble’s Radio Axiom. Dubtastic!
He also has Consolidated’s great Play More Music.
Mr. Lucky (brought to you by the letter M) has got some great shares over at his non-M digs Oranj Aural.
Right now he’s got up the dual Axiom compilations Manifestations and Illuminations. WOOHOO!
Post Punk Junk has just put up the entire Steven Jesse Bernstein album Prison. Run and get it now.
Posts might be light for me, I’ve got to go to a real potluck. In the States – someone inevitably brings one jello salad too many, someone bringing seven kids only brings a watermelon and you get sick on a combination of too much beer, artichoke dip and potato salad all percolating in you gullet.
Cheers comrades!
Filmtracks 2000
Tzadik
An odd, mixed bag from Laswell from the ongoing Tzadic film series. It’s not altogether clear if any of this songs have been used in any movies and most are only cinematic by virtue of their exotic, world-beat nature, the emphasis here being on Middle Eastern music styles. Oum El Bouaghi is a great integration of Arabic music styles with dub and O Haji Baig has an almost Turkish flavor to it. Some sound like extracts and/or out-takes from other Laswell projects and indeed Deadly Haven seems lifted out of the middle of 2000’s Lo. Def. Pressure. Fans and completists of Laswell’s recorded output would do well to snap this up (I did), even though, taken as a whole, it seems kind of redundant or unnecessary.
