Category: Music

Readymade Records HIRMC-1004
2003.05.15
The joke’s on us, apparently. This CD came free with the decidedly unfree Readymade Magazine and is a series of tracks by Readymade artists and their friends, all of which are audio collages, some incorporating rare groove material, others using English and Japanese text samples. It’s Attention Deficit Disorder Music, with no groove staying longer than a couple of bars to form the center of anything. It’s like John Oswald without the density, or Negativland without the politics or satire.
Now, there is some discussion over on the Pizzicato Five mailing list and elsewhere whether DJ Yoshio is actually Yasuharu Konishi. On his track he plays longer samples of tracks that Konishi has used in P5 songs and elsewhere. Does this seem like another transparent admittance?
I think the idea of the CD is to provide DJ “lessons” to the listeners, either through presenting a DJs favorite samples or through showing how much can be mixed together in one sitting. Then there’s also a few Japanese spoken word tracks seemingly against Bush and the war (the monkey gets sampled a few times). What is it all about? In what environment does this CD make sense?

Capitol Records (rereleased on M&M records, MMCD-1009, 1997
1968
I have this album with no real information, just a track listing and a date: 1968. Apparently they are the offspring of the other King Singers, and here cover some Bacharach, some Beatles, some Beach Boys, and some Roger Nichols. What I want to know is who did the arrangements (for groups like this, the “auteur”). The stop-start of “Good Day Sunshine” is clever and the vocals go to and fro between solo and sweet harmony.
As usual with soft-rock groups, the Japanese are crazier about this stuff than the West. Google results in 80% pages found with Japanese domain names. The Western stuff is mostly just a mention in a “For Sale” list or a spot on some indie-radio station’s playlist.
Any Pizzicato Five fan worth their salt should seek this one out–I bet Konishi wore his copy out. Just listen to “I Fell” and then P5’s “Triste” and all should be apparent.

I have a love of digging up the original sources from which hip-hop and now all modern music samples from. This has especially been true since I got into Pizzicato Five, as they cut and paste everything. But let’s go back to the classics, first.
I’ve always wondered where that breakbeat comes from that has been used on everything from Erik B and Rakim’s “Paid in Full” to Milli Vanilli’s “Girl You Know It’s True”–my favorite, however, is its use in Brian Eno’s “Ali Click.” Well, with a little searching, I found out. It’s a record by the Soul Searchers from 1974 called “Ashley’s Roachclip.” The famous two seconds come in about 3.5 mins into the song. You can hear a low-quality RealAudio sample over at this one person’s Milli Vanilli site. But for the muthaload, check out These Are the Breaks, a list of ten of the most recognizable samples in hip-hop, including my all-time favorite, the Apache break. Mmm, bongo goodness!

Polystar PSCR6118
2003.07.23
PM is the companion remix album to Cornelius’ “Point” and by far the worst of all his remix albums. Having opened up the remixing challenge to any and all who came to his web site in 2002, Cornelius then collected the best of the lot and put them out here. He has said of his delight in receiving completely crazy remixes from people worldwide, none of whom have record contracts. He doesn’t mention that none of them are any good.
Maybe some of it rests in the samples he posted. Instead of full vocal lines or some serious loops, there were nothing but a few solitary drum samples, a bass note, or a single word. What could be made of it? Anything, really, but nothing that remotely resembles the album it comes from.
Worst of the remixes is “MC Cat Genius’ BomBassTic Re-bomb” by Animal Family featuring MC Cat Genius, the sort of tedious self-reflexive, self-defeating undergrad stuff that dares you to like it. No, we don’t need three minutes of you telling us how hard it is to finish your remix. Stop moaning.
The rest is chop-up ProTools-y stuff, with very little groove, just a lot of stop-start business.
Accompanying this, I also listened to some of the hard-to-find Nova Musicha e.p.s that Cornelius put out at HMVs and Tower Records in Tokyo (collect all 8, suckers). There’s a few pleasant tracks: The very brief “Star-Spangled Gayo” which reconfigures the national anthem and reveals its musical roots (very baroque), and “Search,” which is not by Cornelius I just found out but Takashi Tsuzuki, of whom I know nothing. “Search” is a collection of hiccups, bubbles, and sound bites that exists and goes away, but just by doing so has more going on than the entirety of PM.

Polystar PSCR 5916/7
1985 (rereleased 2000)
Wow, I never expected this, it’s like Penguin Cafe Orchestra or some other more acoustic Editions EG record from the early ’80s. I thought, being on the Non-Standard label, the music would some burpy electronica. No, this is happy little miniatures of acoustic guitar, punchy barrelhouse piano, a few minimal effects, a gong or two, and Meredith Monk-like vocals. Completely charming, working out a few simple chord progressions. Adding to the effect is the low-fi, recorded at home feel. “Music Train” is a a cheerful number with “la laaa la” vocals and a drum that reminds me of the There’s bits of Harold Budd and Saboten in here too.
Very few things date this: there’s a bell sound that comes straight out of a Yamaha, but for the most part this could have been recorded anytime. There’s nothing very “Japanese” about the group either.
I’m listening to this as I read a very long unpublished Lester Bangs interview with Brian Eno just posted on Perfect Sound Forever. And the Eno theories are coloring my experience of listening to it (of course, it helps that they are coming from some similar places). The minimalism of World Standard reminds me of some of Eno’s Music for Films pieces.
And then there’s the live track, tucked away at the end as “Ishi no hana”, where the arrangement is exactly the same as the studio version, but now the whole thing is bathed in echo (real echo, too), and the audience (sounding like about 20 people–I’m thinking it’s one of those ultra-cramped Tokyo basement clubs, full of smoke) gets processed along with everything else, their murmurings turning into a little black stream of sound. Majestic.
Bangs’ interview (it seems to be around 1981) ends with the author’s anxiety about Eno’s comfort of working with machines:

There is something just a little too comforting about this insistence that this stuff takes place totally outside of the world’s arena. Music stirs people, in one way or another; it can be used for evil purposes, it can make evil things happen. One thinks of the stories of Jews in World War II who reported finding themselves excited by Nazi songs even as they knew there were the anthems of their own destruction. Rock is a form of music, let it be admitted, particularly susceptible to the creation of mass states of pointless rage and destructiveness, although Eno’s music, if it ultimately has any social consequences at all, points in the opposite direction: towards pacification. His stance makes you sometimes wonder if he couldn’t go merrily along creating his pleasant little ambient tapes under the most totalitarian regime, which leads you to further speculate that it might have been amoral in the first place.

Of course, Eno’s outspoken essays against the Iraq invasion, his criticism of more modern technology (CD-ROMs, synthesizers and software made by programmers for programmers–not artists), have put those anxieties to rest. How threatening those analog machines must have sounded back then, how warm they sound now.
Addendum: Actually, the above description above applies to “Youthful Standard,” the 2-CD of bonus tracks and demos that came with the 2000 reissue of this album. Because of various factors, I wound up listening to it first about five times before I even put on the studio version. And I can say I like some of these demos better! The studio versions do indeed have lots of synths and are exceedingly clean and airy, and “Coconut Fruit” reminds me of the first Pizzicato Five ep. In fact, Konishi appears on tracks 1 and 4, singing chorus. The album is produced by YMO’s Harry Hosono (as was the P5 e.p.) and is a chirpy thing and good in its own way. But I’d rather put the second disc on first!

UUTWO records DDCU-2002
2003.04.16
Or: the problem of listening to remix albums without knowing the original.
Who has a truer listening experience? The person who picks up a remix album without knowing the originals, or the one with a deep understanding of the material to be remixed? And does it matter if the remixer winds up using little of the material (70% of all remixers)? What if the remixer uses nothing but the material and then reconfigures it into something new (Sean O’Hagan’s remixes of Cornelius and Pizzicato Five, both of which are wonderful)? What is the criteria? How “danceable” something is? How much something is “rescued”? How faithful to the material? How sacriligious?
Kenji Jammer is the pseudonym of Kenji Suzuki, of whom I know nothing except he seems to have started in the ’80s, done his time playing hard rock (opening for still-famous-in-Japan Deep Purple and Stevie Ray Vaughan), moved all over the world, and now in this alter ego explores acoustic and lap steel sounds with a definite mellow bent. Fortunately, the CD ends with two of his originals, or one would never know what’s being remixed here. “Sail On” is a skanking jam, and takes nearly all of the track until the steel guitar comes in. Okay, so it makes me wonder what Hula Hula Dance, the original, sounds like. It also reminds me, for the third time in a row today, of the Orb.
So then, the best of the mixes are Fantastic Plastic Machine’s mix of “Daddy’s Delight,” which seems to mix a vocoder with Kenji’s slide guitar, and the “Across the Border” mix of “Universe”, which toodles along very politely, even seeping into the background. It’s pleasant.