August 31, 2010
August 27, 2010
HALLELUJAHS - 肉を喰らひて誓ひをたてよ (1986)
"There’s something about this record that’s hard to get a grip on. It seems to float on layers of melody rather than rhythm, and in places it has an incomparable start of autumn melancholic atmosphere." --Alan Cummings
Niku Wo Kuraite Chikai Wo Tateyo
(Thanks to Immortal Serenades for the fine photos)
August 16, 2010
August 12, 2010
LOVE LIFE - Discography (2000-2002)
(stolen with love from Jeff Winterberg's Rat-a-Tat-Tat Birds)
Love Life
• After releasing their debut, The Rose He Lied By (2000), the band toured extensively, released a 7", then their final album, Here Is Night, Brothers, Here the Birds Burn (2002) on Jagjaguwar before they called it quits.
• Thanks to My Tape Up In Here for the beautiful rip of the Hex It Out heart-shaped 7" (or is it a 10"?).
August 10, 2010
Anatomy of Anatomy: Minagaki Yasukazu's Kaibo Zonshinzu
Interestingly, the Japanese began to adopt Western medical techniques at the same time they were closing the book on a rather disasterous chapter of Western cultural incursion. When guns arrived for the first time in 1543 with Portugese traders, Japan was fifty years into Sengoku Jidai ("Age of the Country at War"). Feudal lords were vying for military control of the country, and so began to purchase large quantities of guns from the Europeans for an upper edge. The lords learned quickly that, with the musket, the greatest warrior with a lifetime of training could be easily killed by a footman with only a minimal set of skills.
Within a hundred years, the Tokugawa shogunate had appropriated almost all of the remaining guns on the island, and Samurai had largely returned to using swords and spears. When 20,000 Christian peasants were led by prophecy to take up guns and occupy Hara Castle in the so-called Shimabara Rebellion of 1638, the Japanese government used their dusty old rifles to suppress the rebellion. It was the last time guns were used in Japan for 200 years. The rebellion prompted the shogun to ban all Westerners from the island, except the Dutch who had given the government aid against the Christians with their battleship and cannons.
For the next 200 years, encroachment of Western culture was literally confined to an artificial island, known as Dejima. Forged from a natural penisula, there was only one bridge on and off the island with a guard on either end to prevent foreigners from interacting with the mainland. At this time in Europe, great strides were being made in medical science. Holland began sending scientists to Dejima, who would bring their various books of learning with them. Some of these books would then be sold illicitly to Japanese scholars or offered as gifts to the shogun. Eventually, an exchange of information between the Dutch scientists and Japanese scholars was formalized in what became known as the Rangaku Movement. Appointed scholars could study and learn European sciences, but could not practice them.
One student in particular, Sugita Genpaku, obtained a copy of Ontleedkundige Tafelen, a Dutch anatomy book, and it blew his mind. The Japanese had never practiced any form of dissection. Making an official inquest to dissect the bodies of executed criminals*, Sugita was amazed by the detail and accuracy of the anatomy illustrations. Eventually, he published the Kaitai Shinsho, Japan's first anatomy book. Beholden to the European aesthetics, the book even sports Greek columns and a Classical style of illustrating anatomy. As Pink Tentacle points out, the typical anatomy illustration of the day featured an idealized physique in Classical Greek pose and a placid expression on the face of person whose organs are yet exposed.
In 1819, Minagaki Yasukazu (南小柿 寧一), a physician from Kyoto, painted these illustrations as part of an ongoing Rangaku correspondence with Dr. Philip von Siebold. 83 illustrations from over 40 dissections, and there's little information available beyond that. But what we can glean from these remarkable illustations is that Minagaki was interested in disseminating accurate anatomical information in an aesthetic style more familiar to the Japanese than the Classical Greek bodies of the Kaitai Shinsho, with their placid expressions and disemboweled organs. Here, the faces of these executed criminals look twisted in anguish and bodily fluids pool beneath body parts. There's a realism to them that the European anatomies of the time lacked -- which is the more macabre is up to the taste of the reader.
足ノート
* The Japanese weren't the only ones who used the cadavers of executed criminals to learn about the human body. In Europe and America, though it was technically illegal, almost all of our knowledge of human anatomy came from executed criminals or robbed graves. In England, anatomy instructors would even tell their students exactly how many corpses they were required to furnish for their own studies that semester. Universities officially employed grave-robbers to keep up with growing demand in the medical field, and their income was substantial. It wasn't until the twentieth century that grave-robbing ceased to be an unspoken prerequisite in college anatomy classes. In general, the students would pay professional "resurrectionists," who might dig up as many as 500 corpses in a year.
• All 83 illustrations of the Kaibo Zonshinzu used to be hosted online at the Tohoku University Library until very recently. As far as I can tell they are no longer availabe, but I will keep a weather eye to post them here again when I find them.
July 25, 2010
July 22, 2010
VA - Chaabi Music From Al-Maghrib + Black Plastic Singing Flats (Mississippi Records Cassette Series)
Chaabi Music From Al-Maghrib is a collection of Moroccan music in the "proto-rai" vein of Sublime Frequencies' 1970s Algerian Proto-Rai Underground fame. Black Plastic Singing Flats is a pan-Asian collection of pop and psych. True to the hand-made enthusiast quality of these tapes, there are typos and misappropriation of artists to songs, but the point is to hear things you may not have heard before, and then go seek more of it out yourself.
I separated Chaabi Music From Al-Maghrib into individual tracks and cleaned it up a little bit. If I recall correctly, I copped Black Plastic Singing Flats from BIG STATES. And every good sort owes himself a visit to Root Strata where you can find just about any of the Mississippi cassettes available to be found. On a Doo Wop/Soul tip, I also recommend the two House of Broken Hearts tapes I posted back when.
July 21, 2010
黑暗休会: The Voice of Magic Saw
Wang Jiahua performs 甜蜜蜜 ("Sweet Honey") + 瀟灑走一回 ("???")
The "Magic Saw" technique involves amping a traditional Chinese musical saw performance, and sometimes adding drum machine and effects. Musical saw was very popular throughout southeast Asia and continues to have its followers. I am particularly interested in Hong Kong's Fang-Teng Lee, otherwise known as the "The Sound of Magic Saw," who released several albums in the late sixties. Wang Jiahua, for her part, is known as "The Voice of Magic Saw" ( 魔鋸之音), and is a street performer living in Taiwan.
July 17, 2010
Jean-Claude Vannier est étonnant et passionnant!
Jean-Claude Vannier arranged much of Gainsbourg's psychedelic sixties soundtracks as well as Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971). He has gained more notoreity recently with the recently reissued L’enfant assassin des mouches (1973), where this video was provided as a bonus. He recorded five other very rare solo albums, he was a painter, writer, and the comic radio host of gardening and cooking shows for France Culture.
Andy Votel's JC Vannier mixtape, Histoire De Melody Vannier, is absolutely essential, and the only readily available means of hearing some of Vannier's amazing soundtrack and studio work.
June 29, 2010
SERGE GAINSBOURG - Gainsbourg Percussions (1964)
Serge Gainsbourg created this, his first of many concept records, out of African and Carribean percussion rhythms. Still relatively new to the scene in 1964, Gainsbourg's fanbase was mostly confined to Chanson-jazz afficianados. Gainsbourg Percussions (1964) is a divergent path for the fated Dirty Old Man of France and an overlooked gem. In the early 60s, the Chanson genre was on the decline as American pop took over French radio. Later in the decade, Gainsbourg jumped on the yé-yé bandwagon, writing a slew of pop hits for notable French ladies.
June 5, 2010
June 3, 2010
ግልጽ ያልሆነ ጉድጓድ: Tlahoun Gèssèssè
***
• The Ethiopiques series has made Tlahoun Gèssèssè's music widely available in the West for the first time.
• Minyahel Tlahoun followed in his father's footsteps and became a star when he was still a teenager.
June 1, 2010
LA LUPE - La Era de la Lupe (1968) + Dos Lados De Lupe (1968) + Definitivamente La Yi-Yi-Yi (1969)
"A sado-masochist with a sense of rhythm." – Guillermo Cabrera Infante
La Lupe's act was an exorcism. Her fans gave her the nickname, La Yiyiyi, for her ecstatic cries and wails. On stage, she picked at her face compulsively, pulled her hair and bit herself, clutched her breasts, and tore her clothing. She flung herself back and forth as she sang until her shoes, clothes, and wig were strewn about and her make-up smeared with drool.
In New York, La Lupe's popularity soared when she partnered with Tito Puente. It wasn't La Lupe's violent performances that proved too controversial for Tito Puente. His career enjoyed a second wind due to their partnership. Her raw boleros serve as an obvious bridge from the popular Big Band sound enjoyed by America's middle class style to a barrio style that forged the New York City Salsa scene in the 60s and 70s. But her public devotion to Santería-- which remained steadfast during even her greatest time of wealth and fame-- proved too provocative for Puente. And he feared his association with La Lupe's dark arts might sully his squeaky-clean persona. Divinations of evil spirits and bad omens caused her to behave erratically, even cancelling appearances at the last minute. Puente abruptly ended their partnership by kicking La Lupe off their tour in 1968, replacing her with El Lupo (aka El Yiyiyo), a drag queen impersonator.
Though she continued to record throughout the 70s, she was nevertheless forced into obscurity. Puente famously told their mutual manager: "I'm not working anywhere that that black woman plays." Excessive payments to santeros and battles with drug abuse brought La Lupe to poverty. In 1984, she suffered a severe spinal injury while trying to hang a curtain. She was briefly homeless after an electrical fire destroyed her home. Some years later, she was healed miraculously by an evangelist at a Christian Crusade. She abandoned Santeria and briefly became a Pentecostal minister before dying at the age of 55.
May 21, 2010
La République de Guinée - Sons Nouveax D'Une Nation Nouvelle (1962)
Sons Nouveax D'Une Nation Nouvelle. La République de Guinée
• Throughout the sixties and seventies, Tempo International released many, if not all, the République de Guinée albums. Check out the discography here.
May 11, 2010
Goodbye, Barry Hannah (A Belated Remembrance)
Barry Hannah has been my favorite living author for much of my adult life. On March 1st, to little fanfare, he became one of my many favorite dead ones. Reading Hannah for the first time as a teenager in the Deep South, completely rearranged my orientation to the habitat around me, and I began to experience Hannah's world in real ways. I wandered upon Airships, Hannah's first collection of short stories, in the public library and opened it to "Coming Close to Donna," because it was the shortest story in the book. I read about a fight between two young men in a graveyard:
I ask her, "Say, what you think about that, Donna? Are you going to be whoever win's girl friend?"
"Why not? They're both cute," she says.
Her big lips are moist. She starts taking her sweater off. When it comes off, I see she's got great humpers in her bra. There's a nice brown valley of hair between them.
"I can't lose," she says.
In the early 80s, Hannah moved out to Hollywood to write and bunk up with Robert Altman. I've always wondered what kind of home those two American oddballs might have had together. Back in Oxford, Mississippi, legends loom large of his adventures. He could live a pretty wild life sometimes, drank a great deal and sobered up. It's been said he pulled a gun on one of his writing students after the kid had played the smartass in front of his class. I've also heard, in a time of crisis, he spray-painted everything in his kitchen silver, floor to ceiling, inside and out. Everything in the cabinets and the items in the fridge silver too. He shot up the floorboard of his yellow Chrysler convertible to drain the rainwater out and was once arrested for shooting flaming arrows at Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's estate.
In 1993, he published Bats out of Hell, his best collection of stories since Airships. He almost died of pneumonia in 2000. While laid up in hospital bed, he saw Jesus come to him. His near-death experience inspired him to write what would be his last and arguably most experimental work, Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2006).
I'd like to present, from Airships, "Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa." It is, so far as I know, unavailable online, and, just one of the best short stories around:
* Constant Pain in Tuscaloosa *
by Barry Hannah
I went by this Chrysler on my Honda the other day. It was a sort of cold green car, in front of the bank. This nigger was eating a banana, hanging his leg out the front seat on the curb. He didn't have socks. He was truly eating that banana. Eating it was giving him such pleasure, I rounded the block and came by again to see him finish it off. By that time he was throwing the peel in the gutter.
I shut off the bike.
“Hey, man! You can't foul up the streets like that!” I said.
He looked at me awhile and then got out and picked up the peel.
“Who's that car belong to?” I said.
I'm a very slight guy and about that time something embarrassing happened. The motorbike fell over on me and I couldn't squirm out from under it before the muffler pipe had burned the dook out of my leg through my jeans. I pulled my leg out of the bike and jumped around on the walk. One of my old girl friends walked by and I was humiliated.
“My sister,” said the nigger.
“You just sitting out here eating a banana waiting for her?”
“Correct.”
“Oh ho. You been educated.”
“Junior college.”
I was still hopping around somewhat.
“It hurt, don't it?” he said.
“Somewhat.” My leg was about to go over the border into some kind of new state of pain.
He had him another banana by then.
“You wearing a nowhere helmet, baby,” he said.
“What's wrong with my goddamn helmet?”
“Look like some other person ought to be in it. That's some kind of airplane orange, ain't it?”
“Lets 'em see you at night, brother.”
“What you come here criticizing my bananas for?”
“There was a way you were doing it, eating. Your eyes were big and your jaw humped out. You were really having fun. It's not the same with the one you have now. You're doing it more casual-like now, little bitty bites, more civilized.”
“I never came in your house watch you eat,” he said. “Tomorrow I'm coming over your house watch you eat. I'm gone drive my sister's Chrysler into your house and hang out the window watch you eat. Where you live?”
“Wait. No offense. I didn't mean anything by it,” I said.
“Where you live?”
“I don't have to tell you that.”
“This Chrysler is my home. It's me and my sister's home. Where you live?”
“Three oh four Earnest Lane.”
If I hadn't been in such pain, I'd never have told him.
“This car's the only home we got,” he said. “We be by your place tomorrow.”
His sister came out of the bank. She had on stilt shoes and this African jewelry all over her. She got in the Chrysler. I heard her talking to him.
“They turned us down for the loan,” she said.
He never even looked my way when they backed out and drove off. I was trembly. My stomach was upset, and my leg had never quit hurting. Another thing. I'd been driving my bike around town thinking things over about reality and eternity and went by the Baptist church several times reading the marquee. It said: Pay Now, Fly Later. I'd decided I was going to quit fucking around and be a Christian.
So right in front of the church there's Dr. Campbell, the minister of that church, a big guy with not much hair left and old acne marks and a look in his eye like he'd never thought about nooky one way or the other and had had his children by a holy accident. We all have our flaws. I walked over to him.
“Say, Doctor Campbell, I'm surrendering my heart to Jesus.”
He laid scrutiny on me. The few hairs he had left were oily and carefully set in a dramatic way.
“Tell you what, my son.” He laid hand on my shoulder. He whispered. “I'm not the person to talk to. I hate your guts, after what you did to that poor disk jockey.”
“He was a queer and it was an even fight,” I said. “He had a baseball bat and I had a TV antenna. On the roof there wasn't anything else.”
“He's still lying out in Druid Hospital.”
“I know where he is. I take beer to him under my coat. What about Jesus? I was surrendering my heart.”
“I've got to this position, Ellsworth. I don't think Jesus wants you. He's too dead to want. He was a hell of a sweet genius guy, but he's dead. The only thing left is humanism. Are you humanistic?”
“Right on.”
“Precious are the hours we touch one another,” the son of a bitch said.
The Honda had hurt me so bad I was sort of timid about getting on it again, but it took me home. I sat in my house and listened to the two records I own on my Sears stereo. Three years ago my wife left this place. All the pictures she hung and the decorations she did are still around. Sometimes late at night on the phone she says she might come back. She says her condition is one of constant pain. She's been in constant pain in St. Louis, Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Mobile. A guy in Fayetteville called me one night at one o'clock. He said, “Who's this, is this the authentic Ellsworth?” Lots of people were in the room he was in and I could hear they thought my name was funny. “You know what I just did with your wife, Ellsworth?” said the guy. “What I did was get in an Ellsworth costume and have sex with her—har har har,” said the guy.
“Why're you calling me?” I said. “I loathe her and don't give a spit for her career. She was something I screwed and nagged me into marriage. I'll tell you what I'll do for you, however. My name is Ellsworth and I don't know what yours is, but I don't like this laughter about my name. You and me, phone person. Just give me your name and I'll be in Fayetteville to take care of your number.”
“Wonderful, wonderful,” said the guy. “We knew you'd be like that.”
You could hear my wife among the tittering.
Actually it tore the last shred out of my bosom. I don't love her, but she was mine, and I don't want anybody else to, either. She knows that, that's why she called. She wants me to join her in constant pain.
I sat three places on my table and swept up the house. I was sweeping the front steps when my leg, the one that was burned, went through the top step and I was up to my hip in my porch. I wish my landlord could've seen that. Maybe eighty-five per shouldn't get you a palace on the moon, but goddamn, it ought to get you something. It sprained the hell out of my crotch muscle, plus tore my boot.
The rest of the day I just lay around and swore. I didn't even get a beer out of the fridge. After you've drunk a hundred fifty thousand Falstaffs, the taste goes on you.
I made sure the house stayed clean. About midnight, I went out and looked over at Mrs. Earnest's flower tree. All her lights were out. I stole about fifteen blooms off her tree. Then I got this pussy-looking green dish my wife bought and put the flowers on the table. I bought some steaks in the morning. I didn't have a barbecue, so I got a hub cap and pulled the grill out of the oven to go over it.
About three in the afternoon, they showed up in the Chrysler. I looked out and they were looking at the house, engine running. The spade had another banana he was chewing on. His sister was driving. I went out on the porch as if to check out the curb on my Honda.
“Oh, hi!” I called. “Come in the house now you're here!”
They came in the front room. His sister shook hands with me. She had blue fingernails, long ones, and that African jewelry all over and some new elevated nigger sandals and her toenails were blue too. When she walked, she rattled like a walking chandelier. The guy had on a plain shirt and just looked like an ordinary nigger. He went straight for the fridge.
“You got any soda or yogurt around?” he said.
“Hold on. This ain't a delicatessen,” I said.
“It for straight sure ain't,” his sister said. “You got a hole in your porch. Hey, look at the flowers!” she said. She went over and picked up one of the flowers out of the water. “I get off on flowers,” she said.
I was so pleased, I guess I blushed.
She called her brother Rip or Reap, I couldn't quite make it out. He never called her name.
“Man, look at the number of these beers! Are you some kind of beer salesman?”
“I keep it for friends who drop by,” I said.
“Ain't nobody drop by here,” he said. “You got some handsome steaks in there.” He made a motion for me to move aside so his sister could get a view of the fridge. “Look at them steaks,” he said.
“I get off on big old steaks,” she said.
“We're gonna get those on the grill in a couple of hours. Let me put on some music and you people sit down and relax.” I put the two records on. “I got some dope if you...”
“You what? We don't use no dope! We don't like no rock-and-roll music, either,” he said.
“I get off on Ralph Vaughan Williams,” said the sister. “You got any Ralph Vaughan Williams?”
“Come out here, look at his barbecue,” the dude said to his sister. He was looking out the back door of the kitchen at my unit. “That a space-age model, ain't it?”
After a while they said they were going out and sit in the Chrysler for the air-conditioning. I thought it was a ruse to leave for good. When they shut the door, I had to call back this yell that was coming out my throat. It was a yell that if it had come out would've been the weirdest sound I ever made.
I knew I'd hear the motor start. They were out there fifteen minutes. I couldn't stand it. I went and got a beer in each fist and killed them in four minutes. I pushed the curtain to the side.
The nigger was working on another banana and talking to his sister. She sat in the driver's seat looking like she was really grossed away by his eating etiquette. They got out and opened my door again.
“Get cooled off?” I said.
“We're out of gas,” said the nigger.
“It's cooling down some now. We can get those steaks on in half a sec. The other side of that record isn't so much of a roar. I turned it down. It's got some nice soft licks in it.”
“I'm a vegetarian,” said Rip or Reap.
“He's lying through his face, Ellsworth,” said the girl. “This family man in Baltimore, he came out on the parking lot with two buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken on his arms. He”—she pointed at the nigger—“cruised by and robbed them right off the man. He put his face in the bucket and eat that chicken out just like a hog.”
“Beauty ain't gone keep you well forever,” said the nigger to her.
“He had slaw on his nose,” she said.
The nigger made a move at her.
“Freeze, buster,” I said.
“What you got can stop me?” He looked around.
I ducked in the back room and got that UHF antenna I messed up Oliver Darling with. By that time he was half-nelsoning his sister.
“Leave off, Rip, Reap!” I shouted.
He sprung off her and came out with something yellow from his hip. It was a banana. He was a larger-looking nigger now and he raced over and beat the damn light out of me. When I woke up, he was still laying on my burned leg with what was left of the banana, these peel fibers. They stung in a vicious way.
“Stop it, stop it!” his sister was saying. “You woke him up, for Jesus's sake!”
I washed up and after we'd eaten the steaks, with light bread and ketchup, we were all lying around pretty sleepy. The girl drank half a beer. It'd drunk five or six for pain. The girl stood up and went to use the bathroom.
“Say,” I said to the nigger while she was out. “I'm kind of in love with her. I know that's not the right thing to say now. It's just my feeling talking.”
“You what?” He got wall-eyed like a joke nigger.
“Got a crush on your sis. Don't come at me again. You don't need to get tough on me. Thought we could talk this out. You think I'd have a chance with your sister?”
“Yeah. Cause you're white and she's terrible tired. You weren't too bad-looking till I blued you all up in the face.”
She came back and sat down on the floor. Pretty soon she was fast away asleep.
“I'll tell you,” he said softly, “you can't get away from people bothering you anymore. People coming by laughing at even what you eating. Don't move,” he whispered, and eased out of the room.
***
April 27, 2010
April 19, 2010
SLAVES - Devil's Pleasures (1999)
[l to r: Andrew (Douglas) Rothbard, keys; Dave Clifford, drums; Joshua Hughes, guitar]
San Francisco's Slaves were originally the band behind Sonny Kay's scary voice in VSS. Slaves became better known as Pleasure Forever when they signed to Sub Pop-- a high concept project devoted to Sadean debauchery and Reichian acquiescence to pleasures of the flesh. But back when they were Slaves, it was exploited labor and the occult which informed their style. Equal parts goth punk and trashcan glam, synth swells blend with sharp, atmospheric guitar for a clautrophobic feeling throughout. Dave Clifford would usually end their shows standing up to beat the drums as hard as he could. Devil's Pleasures [Troubleman Unlimited] is a compilation of their two EPs before the change of name and label. Pleasure Forever's two albums are also worth seeking out.
March 31, 2010
CLIKATAT IKATOWI - August 29+30 1995
To the working classes...
March 11, 2010
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