Category: Music

We’re gonna continue on an Endtroducing tip with a few links.
An after-school percussion group at Minnetonka High School, Minneapolis, play two tracks from Endtroducing, over on this page, circa 2005. Word. The drummer even keeps in the weird drum edits. Big version of file here. Hot damn. Sounds like Steve Reich.
Eliot Wilder wrote a whole book about the album.
There’s also this very long review of Entroducing over at PopMatters by Tim O’Neil.

Endtroducing… was a field report from the frontlines of a brave new world, a world which has now become slightly less strange but no less visceral. It would have been hard to rank it above similarly important albums by artists like Orbital, the Chemical Brothers, Underworld, New Order and Kraftwerk, but while each of those artists have produced albums which are perhaps the equal of Endtroducing…, there’s not a one of them I could in good conscience put squarely above it.

DJ Shadow’s 1996 Endtroducing… is a masterpiece of sound collage and turntable skills and still sounds incredible 12 years later. The sheer number of samples place this album up there with the Beastie Boys “Paul’s Boutique” and Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet”. And now blog Goons Dancing Under Full Moons has compiled all the samples into one large 250mb file for educational purposes.

This was a monster. When I saw the sample list I almost gave up before I started. These samples took me to the bowels of the internet and on the way I think I learned enough German and Portuguese to talk my ass out of a fight. If I tried to remember and list all of the different blogs and forums that helped me in my search my brain would bail out my ears. So here goes nothing and everything. 70 mthrfckng samples.

Interesting artists on the list: Metallica, Tangerine Dream, Meredith Monk, Roger Waters, Alan Parsons Project. Who knew?

“WOOOOOOOO!!!! EPIC!!!!!”
So says the man who shot this audience video of Prince covering “Creep” at Coachella two weeks ago. I just heard about it over the weekend, and then all the YouTube versions were down, but then I found this.
I like how the Purple One changes the lyrics to suit his needs. I couldn’t imagine him singing “I’m a loser” or “I wish I was special,” and he didn’t. Shoop-shooooo!

Not everybody knows Laurie Anderson, even during her most popular period, 1980-1986. So I have trawled YouTube to see what I could find for all y’alls education. Her most enduring track is 1980’s O Superman, her mesmerizing 8 minute opus that amazingly went to Number One in the UK in some sort of aberration of coolness. If you’ve never seen it, well:

Then there’s her 1984 album, Mister Heartbreak, which has a number of great tracks on it. But Sharkey’s Day was the only (?) video from it:

There’s some great moments of early video surrealism here.
Finally, there’s a great Stop Making Sense-like concert movie called Home of the Brave, which has yet to be released on DVD. In the meantime, here’s the Language Is a Virus video, which is a sort of trailer for the film. This remix of the song is not in the film, but was produced by Nile Rogers to promote it.
For an idea of what the film actually looks like, though, here’s one of the best songs, Smoke Rings. There’s several things I love here: the gameshow intro (a parody of a SNL skit); Anderson’s second microphone, which is connected to a echoey delay so she can sing a single high note into it and have it careen around the mix; the morphing of a smoke ring into a zero and then its binary opposite, a ‘1’, then turning into ‘911’; Anderson’s weird electronic sampler-violin at the end that make sawing, diving sounds.

All three tracks of Sgt Pepper isolated, then played together. (the fourth track I think was used for the crowd sounds.)

It’s also the only time that I’ve heard the track trail off into studio jamming and not segue into “With a Little Help”…

Where this comes from I don’t know. (Well, the link was found on boingboing, but who “Beatlepuzzle” is, I don’t know.

My first favorite song of 2008. The lead singer looks like the lovechild of Buggles-era Trevor Horn and Elvis Costello. And is the band’s maneuvering through the video a tribute to these kind of Japanese game shows?

If we’re gonna go out, let’s go out like this song, joyous in the face of un-knowledge and un-certainty.

There’s a city in my mind
Come along and take that ride
And it’s alright, baby it’s alright
And it’s very far away
But it’s growing day by day
And it’s alright , baby it’s alright
Would you like to come along
You can help me sing this song
And it’s alright, baby it’s alright
They can tell you what to do
But they’ll make a fool of you
And it’s alright, baby it’s alright

I think we all need that comforting feeling in that repeated last line…

I’m back from Hawaii (didn’t you know I’d gone?) and I’ve been sorting through blogs and mail and such. And this new video from Denki Groove is TEH COOLNIZ. It starts awesome and continues through several variations on awesome. To be more coherent, it is steady zooms on ’80s style Japanese girls. It’s cute and creepy at the same time, and the hair! the hair!!
Credit where credit’s due to Chipple for pointing this out.
(Hawaii photos coming soon…)