The Cry of Jazz

Stockhausen: Tuning In

Amen

Couple of notes here: 1. It's not "ironic" that "Whole Lotta Love" was recorded in the same year as "Amen Brother." It's just a coincidence. 2. I love Squarepusher, chinstroking and undanceable as it may be. The same things were said about Charlie Parker.

Bjork Explains Modern Music

Roky Erickson, "I Know the Hole in Baby's Head"

Jandek on Corwood

Drone Theater

I don't think Andy Warhol really knew how to work a camera, but he sure knew what to point it at. Hat tip to Open Culture. This most verite of documentaries is called A Symphony of Sound, an absurdly redundant (& very Warholian) title. Below that is VU's "Nothing Song" used as a soundtrack to another Warhol film.




Here's some more rare early Velvet Underground. I'm reminded of why The Velvet Underground & Nico is my favorite of their albums (and in my top 5 all time, probably). Lou Reed and John Cale are both geniuses and while Nico is far from a technically good singer, she has a strange sort of beauty- I can't think of a good word to describe it. It's like some ancient crag covered with mist.  No one band could hold these volatile elements together for long. I love all the other albums, but while it lasted the Reed/Cale collaboration was pure magic. The demo version of "Venus in Furs" is gorgeous. Cale sings it in a folk style not far removed from Simon & Garfunkel (musically, not lyrically; I'd love to hear S&G sing "taste the whip, now bleed for me"). The last piece, "Loop," is credited to VU, but I believe it's just John Cale.

Episode #12: Postpunk Apocalypse

Playlist

1. Forces at Work- The Feelies
2. Human Cannonball- The Butthole Surfers
3. Totally Wired- The Fall
4. No Love Lost- Joy Division
5. Ack Ack Ack- The Minutemen
6. Another the Letter- Wire
7. Optimo- Liquid Liquid
8. Baby's On Fire- Brian Eno
9. Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances/La Mer- Patti Smith
10. Punk Love- The Magnetic Fields
11. Ghost Rider- Suicide
12. Ruby- The Silver Apples
13. Connemara, Let's Go! (Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go)- The Pogues
14. Fiery Jack- The Fall
15. Nature Without Man- The Minutemen
16. I am the Fly- Wire
17. Anthrax- Gang of Four
18. Drug Sores- Jealousy
19. Sand in My Joints- Wire
20. No Exchange- The Minutemen
21. Roadrunner- Jonathan Richman
22. Wind in the Rigging- Young Marble Giants
23. Suicide (Live)- Spacemen 3
24. Big A Little a- Crass





Download Episode 12!

I Desperately Need to See This Movie. You Do Too. I'm a Monk, You're a Monk, We're All Monks.

It's beat time, it's hot time, it's Monk time.


 

It's telling to me that the American Jon Spencer identifies the Monks with primal Rock n' Roll, while the Germans tend to pick up on elements like the pulsating, mechanical rhythms of the Monks which link them to electronic and industrial music. This is why Julian Cope identifies the Monks as the "missing link" between American R&R and German experimental kosmiche musik in Krautrocksampler. I discovered the Monks through my interest in '60s garage-rock, but they've always sounded closer to The Velvet Underground than The Sonics or any of the Nuggets artists.

. . . NO-ONE ever came up with a whole album of such dementia. The Monks' Black Monk Time is a gem born of isolation and the horrible deep-down knowledge that no-one is really listening to what you're saying. And the Monks took full artistic advantage of their lucky/unlucky position as American rockers in a country that was desperate for the real thing. 
- Julian Cope, Krautrocksampler

Jazz on a Summer's Day, on a Winter's Day

This film is transcendentally beautiful, and the music sublime. You want to watch, yes?

Performers include Jimmy Giuffre (very underrated!), Sonny Stitt, Anita O'Day, George Shearing, Gerry Mulligan, and Louis Armstrong.


 

The Meek Shall Inhe(a)rit a New World

As a space-cadet/listener, you may have wondered at some point, "What is that crazy music he plays during the boring parts when he talks?" Well, it's by a band called the Tornados, the English instrumental band responsible for everybody's favorite retro-futurist pop hit "Telstar," (come on, it's been on Mad Men already, so it's now become canonical early 60's culture), not to be confused with the Californian surf band  the Tornadoes whose "Bustin' Surfboards," served as Jules and Vincent's exit music from that diner at the end of Pulp Fiction. The song is called "Jungle Fever," and it was produced by the infamous Joe Meek, who was a sort of British Phil Spector, except a paranoid gay occultist instead of a paranoid gun-toting psycho. There's been a documentary on Meek in the works for years now, and if you've got a few extra ducats lying around you can become a financier of this worthy project! To tide you over until then, I found this BBC doc. It's interesting, but doesn't delve much into the occult stuff, nor to my mind does it feature some of Meek's best music ("Jungle Fever," for instance.)







Or these fine tunes:

An Oral History of Heavyness: Such Hawks Such Hounds

 

Support your local psychedelic freak rock and roll band. Go to their shows and give them drugs.

The Halcyon Days of Symmetry

Ineffably self-explanatory, it's the Sun City Girls.


 

Krautrock-Doc

This is a really wonderful documentary, not only because it is a tribute to music that I love (however dubious it is as a "genre"), but because it shows how important music can be in healing a culture.

Sun Ra, Brother from Another Planet

Like so many music documentaries, there's too many talking heads here. Still, it's cool to have a Ra doc out there, and there's a lot of clips of Ra being freaky & awesome.