Old Year Mix

Here’s a mix I made.  Sounds like a good one to do drugs to, though I don’t touch ‘em.  Works for video games.  Mainly I recommend headphones.  That’s why I call it the ‘07 Headphones Mix.  Oh, all of the songs are either new releases last year or from albums reissued last year.  (Lee Perry, Bruce Haack, Der Plan, and Lubomyr Melnyk are the reissued songs.)  Try this to download:

http://rapidshare.com/files/80610553/VA__07_Headphones_Mix.rar.html

I’m sure there is lots about this out there.  You can find it as easily as I can.  1962.  Recorded very near the recording of Duke’s “Money Jungle”.  Very classy, but not boring.  The two play off of one another really well.  The first track may be favorite.  If you’ve not heard Coltrane, this is a good first.  I’ve not heard much Ellington, but I’d like to.  Any fans out there want to recommend some records?

Also, everyone feel free to make a pick whenever you feel inspired.  I like this, and I hope people will jump in.  If not, I’ll keep picking.  Only one rule: Try to give each album one week from the posted date. 

Ray Charles – Modern Sounds in Country and Western

I’m going to be too lazy to go very in-depth with this one.  Here’s what I know: Once he made a name for himself, he signed a contract with ABC Paramount that included a full artistic freedom clause.  He used that freedom to produce this album, despite the fears of label executives that a genre cross-over would fail.  From what I’m hearing while I write this, those fears were unwarranted.  This is less a blending of two genres than it is a straight R & B record using songs that had previously been recorded as country.  The lyrics and song structures for the songs chosen (and probably most country songs at the time [and now, probably]) seem pretty easily transferrable from one style to another.  Here’s what this guy has to say about it.

Laurie Anderson – Big Science

I don’t know a lot about this album, except that I remember hearing O Superman years ago.  Lately, it’s become one of those recurring references.  Even before I heard that it was being rereleased, it seems like I kept hearing and reading her name and especially O Superman.  The song seems to have been given new significance since the September 11 attacks.  (It’s Sept 11 as I write this and that had nothing to do with my choosing Big Science.  But interesting anyway.)  Laurie Anderson herself seems like quite a piece of work. 

     “One of her most-cited performances, Duets on Ice, which she conducted in New York and other cities around the world, involved her playing violin along with a recording while wearing ice skates with the blades frozen into a block of ice; the performance ended only when the ice had melted away.”

Not bad.  I guess before Big Science she was known mainly for her performance art.  According to wiki, Big Science is musical segments from an 8-hour performance piece called United States Live.  Hmm…, I think I’ll stick to the 60 minute album. 

I searched for her on you tube, but didn’t find anything I wanted to post here.  O Superman might be the best song you’ve ever heard.  I hope the rest of this is just as good. 

Nina Nastasia – The Blackened Air

So I haven’t listened to this album at all yet. I haven’t really listened to any of her stuff all that much. But I like her voice. I guess that’s all there is to say, really. Oh yeah, she’s cool looking, I think:

Anyway, pretty basic contemporary indie-folk pick (which is a kind of music I’ve really liked this past little while). I hope it works out.

jim o’rourke eureka

if you haven’t heard of Jim O’Rourke then you haven’t been paying attention. Apparently he won a Grammy for producing Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. He also joined Sonic Youth on a few albums and eps. Oh yeah and he scored the movie Love Liza. i like that movie. Eureka, released by Drag City in 1999 was named after the 1984 Nicolas Roeg film of the same name. he named 3 more of his albums after Roeg films. you can read pitchforkmedia’s stupid review here. but don’t base your opinion on that idiots review. listen for yourself. i like this album a lot, but it is kind of all over the place. it’s both beautiful and strange.

Tom Waits — Alice

I’m sorry about the delay. I just moved cross country and I simultaneously lost both of my computers. My pick for this week is Tom Waits’ Alice.

Alice seems like one of those albums that people own but have forgotten. I for one bought this album its first week in stores. I might have listened to it three times before forgetting it and subsequently loosing it. It was only the Alice theme that stuck with me as I was I racking my brain for ideas.

The songs on Alice were written for an avant-garde Robert Wilson opera performed at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, Germany in 1992. It is loosely based on the inner life of Lewis Carroll and his seeming obsession with the young Alice Liddell (who inspired Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass). He describes his work this way:

“Alice is adult songs for children, or children’s songs for adults. It’s a maelstrom or fever-dream, a tone poem, with torch songs and waltzes…an odyssey in dream logic and nonsense.”

Waits also sources his wife, Kathleen Brennan, as a major inspiration for the album. “Kathleen is my Alice,” said Waits. “We met on New Year’s Eve, 1980. We used to play a game called ‘Let’s Go Get Lost.’ She’d say ‘turn here, turn here…until we were lost. It’s kind of like writing songs together. In the studio, Kathleen will submerge herself in seven newspapers and a novel, and then at just the right time she’ll raise her head and make a remark that will become the eyes and ears of the song. Will and Ariel Durant said, ‘A book is like a quarrel. One word leads to another and may erupt irrevocably in blood or ink.’ That’s kind of like me and Kathleen writing. When we’re totally lost, we know we have something.”

On second listen, I’ve decided it’s a shame I lost this record. It’s everything you might expect from Waits collected into one album, crooning and madness. Much like the Alice books, at any moment anything could happen. Metacritic chose Alice as the best album of the 1990’s.

Interstellar

Your turn, when you’re ready.

Bessie Smith – Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues

I’m really excited about this album. Bessie Smith is someone I’ve heard about, but have never really given enough attention to in favor of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone and other really well-known blues singers. But, from what I’ve heard so far, she seems totally awesome. The lyrics to the first song on this album are so sad, but she sings it in this voice that’s just like “well-what-can-you-do?”

She has a way of sounding sexy and on the verge of cracking up at the same time.

And I chose this collection because it seems like Scorsese puts a lot of effort into finding the most authentic performances in his blues documentary series. I guess there have been a lot of problems with her recordings with pitch and tone, and from what I’ve read this one is pretty close.

So far I’m in love. I hope you guys like it.

KILLER

Starting now, Killer Buds! Pick of the Week.  Yep.  Every week a different Bud will choose a strange, obscure, foreign, esoteric, rare, neglected, underappreciated, or otherwise interesting album.  The rest of us try our best to give the selection a good listen, and use this address to comment on the experience.  Sounds good.  I started last week with the kinda boring Joni Mitchell album “The Hissing of Summer Lawns.”  A. Wood is in charge for the first official Pick, starting whenever he is able to get on here and post.  I’m assuming by this time that anyone interested can figure out how to get their hands on the albums.  If its an especially hard to find pick, try to help others get a copy.  This could be pretty fun.  Actually, Killer Buds can be used for any posting you’d like.  One day we’ll get a real website.