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For the last several years I have been exchanging music with a few relatives and friends as a kind of year-end/holiday tradition. These are my selections for 2010. Enjoy! — John |
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For the last several years I have been exchanging music with a few relatives and friends as a kind of year-end/holiday tradition. These are my selections for 2010. Enjoy! — John |
From Irwin Chusid on WFMU's "Beware of the Blog," Don't Mess With the Power Child: The Amanda Chronicles:
The "Amanda" recordings have emerged as an unexpected cult sensation on my WFMU program over the past two years. The chronicles feature Amanda Whitt, a growling (think Cookie Monster), defiant pre-pubescent with a Southern twang spewing mayhem over 1980s breakbeats and disjointed shards of pop hits. On some tracks Amanda shrieks while clanging pots & pans. The recordings exude undeniable charm, but there's nothing cute about it. Any sentient adult witnessing this behavior would commence punitive action or summon law enforcement.
Power-child Amanda was recorded between 1986-89 at home in Alabama, between ages 8 and 11, by her older (by 7 or 8 years) brother Joseph (a.k.a. Jody). Joseph and Amanda were a couple of hyperactive kids pretending to be, respectively, a music video director and a child star. Most recordings were captured on cassette, others on video cam, in the lowest of lo-fi. The duo sometimes enlisted friends in the frolics, and often drove their parents crazy (with incidents caught on tape). The most durable performances were titled (e.g., "The Pickle People," "Horrible Hybrid Tulips," "Indian Hoots Echo Baby," "Me Swinging in Cookieland") and compiled on "albums," whose design awkwardly replicated the commercial cassette format. Inserts were pasted up and xeroxed, and collections assigned titles (e.g., Primitive Swagger, Monumental Whopper Turmoil Jam, Empires and 5th Dimension Perspective, and Worship Me). The recordings were not circulated beyond friends.
At age 11, Amanda began to chafe at Jody's stage-brother puppeteering; she soon discovered boys, and the recording project was abandoned. The tapes were stored in shoe boxes in Joseph's closet, where they remained for decades as forgotten adolescent artifacts.
A longtime fan of WFMU and outré sonics, Joseph began to share recordings with my longtime buddy and DIY legend R. Stevie Moore. RSM layered electric guitar on one track ("Squaw Hootenanny") and slipped it on one of his self-released (but typically underheard) comps, where I discovered it. RSM provided the backstory and compiled for me two CDs of Amanda madness. I instantly fell under the spell of her playful chaos and, in December 2008, launched the radio portal for Amanda's wider notoriety. Listener reaction was jubilant—Amanda unleashed the arrested adolescent within. Later I connected with Joseph, who provided additional recordings.
Joseph moved to Brooklyn about four years ago; Amanda still lives in Alabama and manages a BBQ restaurant (part of a family-owned chain).
Aside from the exquisite weirdness of this recording, "Up Against the Wall" is a gorgeous production. The keyboard drifts in and out of harmonic sensibility. The Joseph's backup vocal provides a perfect counterpoint to her raging lead. The improvised and canned percussion work well together. And it is all so well mixed.
David Longstreth's wonderful arrangement is even better done acoustically, with only the good parts included.
In November, Mike Oberst of the Tillers produced an extraordinary concert that brought New Lost City Ramblers members John Cohen and Tracy Schwarz to Cincinnati. The concert raised money for the foundation funding research into the type of cancer that killed Mike Seeger and also Mike Oberst's mother.
On the program was a young banjoist, Clifton Hicks, from Florida, who now resides in Boone, North Carolina. His set was spectacular, and his command of the banjo, his understanding of its purpose, was as complete as I've heard in a long while.
Around age 14, living in Florida, Clifton Hicks became enamored with the banjo. He bought one, got discouraged, and set it aside as so many people do. His mom, however, kept encouraging him, taking him to concerts and buying recordings. One recording he especially like was banjo luminary George Gibson, who Hicks learned wintered in a nearby Florida town. He began hanging out at George's house, absorbing everything he could over the course long music sessions, as Gibson protégés are wont to do.
At age 17, as an early high school graduate, joined the army against his parents wishes. In 2003 he finished basic training eager to go and fight in the new war. A few months on the ground in Bagdad as a soldier in an M1 Abrahams tank unit, he came to see things differently. The key issue was that the enemy he fought was not Al Queda or terrorists but local community members who banded together to resist a foreign invader.
Hicks endured his tour without protest. But just when he was positioned to cycle out, Muqtada al-Sadr raised up his Mahdi army and started the month-long April 2004 battle that began the long chain of redeployments that came to define the war. Hicks began posting to an anti-war blog reporting the views of front-line soldiers. He was eventually fined and demoted, and later honorably discharged as a conscientious objector.
Back home he found Iraq Veterans Against the War and began speaking engagements at colleges and Winter Soldiers, reporting his experiences seeing the killing of Iraqi civilians. Recently he has began channeling Woody Guthrie songs in support of the Occupy movement.
Sick of Sarah is a women's power pop band that wowed me at MPMF this year.
"The Old Piano" is a segment of a live concert that may have been the best live show of 2011. Shockabilly star Eugene Chadbourne teamed up with daredevil percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani to form one of the unlikliest artistic duos imaginable. But Nakatani's antics seemed only to amplify Chadbournes irreverence as they mined American country music for its most over-the-top classics. The result was hilarious from start to finish. You can see a segment of a YouTube video similar performance or stream/download the entire Southgate House audio from which this segment was taken.
Ann Weigel is a two piece lo-fi, bedroom punk band hailing from an area where drunken garage rockers and hippie punks reign supreme; Cincinnati, Ohio. The band, consisting of Miles Uroshevich and Jessa Perrin, might be the worst band in Cincinnati right now and I mean that in the best possible way. Uroshevich plays a thrashed two string guitar and sings through a broken microphone while Perrin bangs away on her, fresh off the clearance rack, drum kit. Combine the anti-folk humor of Jeffrey Lewis, the awkward energy of Jad Fair, the fuck it mentality of Psychedelic Horseshit, and the simplicity of Beat Happening and your somewhat close to getting an idea of what this band is all about. Recorded and produced by Jon Lorenz (Wasteland Jazz Unit, Art Damage), to ensure full lo-fidelity, at the Marburg Hotel. Edition of 50.
"Loop and Lil" refers to the parakeets briefly mentioned in a song by Townes Van Zandt, where they serve as incidental witnesses to his profession of love. It is composed and performed here by Indiana songwriter Joe O'Connell, who performs under the name Elephant Micah.
The parakeets-as-witnesses idea is in itself an extraordinary premise for a song—I can imagine a thousand songs about Van Zandt not near so clever or perceptive. It plays upon the role of the birds as spiritual spectators, expanding their scope to examine Van Zandt's whole life, his death, and the sense of sacrifice that he imposed on the world.
Then add to this premise the delicately ironic posturing of the album, Elephant Micah Plays the Songs of Bible Birds, and put Van Zandt's parakeets in the biblical frame, or the frame imagined by the legendary Bible Bird Man, or the frame that declares that whole story to be a hoax. Then add to that the harsh lo-fi recording, the pump organ, the close harmony—all deliberately foregrounded to affect a kind of gospelesque performance. A lot to think about.
Actually, this is a live digital recording from an NPR session, rather than the lo-fi original. You can download or listen to the whole nine-song set; "Loop and Lil" is towards the end.
As I have said before, Joe O'Connell has spent his last decade producing a collection of relentlessly excellent songs. Consider this the tip of the iceberg, get hooked on this songwriter, and check out the catalog on your own. If you don't, there's just no hope for you.
This is a very short version of "Cabin" as she does it in her minimalist configuration. This is solo percussion/vocals, and you can hear a different solo/guitar version on the MySpace page.
I saw Indian Jewelry at MPMF this year, and the one word that comes to mind with them is "lush." The stage is awash in heavy strobe effects. They prowl the stage, talking to each other, with studied aloofness, as if they don't notice the audience is even there. Everything is eroticized: you don't hear the music aesthetically, rather you feel it as some primal physical experience. The "live" link above captures this experience very well. The "video" link I think is a film collage set to this music.
Here is the entire Wikipedia entry for this singer: "J. Glenn is an American drummer. He was the original drummer for My Morning Jacket, which he left in November 2000. He is currently on a solo career in the vein of Hasil Adkins." If you don't know what that means please investigate. Glenn carries this banner well, positioning himself as a kind of Adkins-style hillbilly oppositional figure. At least that is the way I interpret Adkins: He was simply consumed by his music and all that it made of him. He took complete unqualified pleasure in his grotesqueness, assuming it with such fierceness that it became anarchy. He took risks that cannot be confined to any stereotype. His creativity was unimaginable, so that any response is reduced to awe.
Lawrence Raab teaches at Williams College and has a lifetime of publications of poetry. "The Luminists" refers to the school of mid-nineteenth century American nostalgic landscape painting, and through them to the way America was imagined by nineteenth century explorers and painters.
Noveller is a sound art project of Sarah Lipstate of Brooklyn. "Fades" is performed live here, without any canned sounds, all on guitar, rubbing or striking the strings with various abrasive objects (violin bow, pair of scissors, pick, etc.) and looping/distorting sounds so that they overlay each other. As a sound artist, Noveller tends toward subtlety, veering more towards musicality than noise, weaving experimental tones around a core of conventional harmony. This performance was done live on WKCR, New York, and can be downloaded from her website.
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer is a well-known novelist and poet who taught for many years at Brooklyn College. "L & M" is from the collection Alphabet for the Lost Years (1976). It is part of a four-letter sequence of poems, running "J, K, L, & M", on the subject of jealousy. So, in "Really, it is hard to keep out," the word "it" refers to jealousy.
Lohio is an indie pop group from Pittsburgh. They write sweetly melodic, close-to-home songs about things and people they care about. The Shins-style vocals drift from unison to harmony and back, but always remain up front and easy to hear. I have not seen them live but hope they pass through some day.
Grab your toothbrush. This is pure sugar-coated indie pop from England. It comes from Amanda at the coffee shop where I go to escape the madness. She is morning barista-in-chief, which earns her the privilege of plugging in her player over the sound system. At least I think that's how it works. Anyway she's got some wild stuff on it, and won (by my reckoning) best-player-of-the-year honors among all those I hear—though Darren made a strong December run that gives him the edge for next year.
On the way out the door on a drive to Nashville, just for something to listen to in the car, I grabbed a freebie festival CD that I might otherwise have tossed. I skipped through the cuts fairly quickly, but was completely halted by this lush composition.
It is such a sad song, and there may not be much more to it than that. But I am reaching (maybe overreaching) for a connection between the young girl and the "city that's bountiful." Since Altman took it on, Nashville has just been a fascinating place to imagine.
This is Cincinnati's beloved Wussy. I think that the world their songs describe, much like Cincinnati itself, is like a relationship not bad enough to leave but not good enough to want to stay in. They speak to the angst of those who are drawn here, moth-to-candle like, by the mysterious inertia that is Cincinnati.
Coltrane Motion are two crazy electronics guys from Chicago. I caught them a couple of years ago, and it was the first time I'd ever seen anyone try to get it on with one of those noise antennas. They are the producers here of the "Maglite" remix from This Will Not End Well, a tribute project done this year in honor of Wussy, with lots of friends remixing their greatest hits. The vocals are still Chuck and Lisa but lots of the instrumentation is new.
Rumi was a 13th century Persian Muslim and Sufi poet, known for his philosophy of universal love. He has had many English language translators.
When I was learning fiddle in the 1970s, there was this tune "Citaco," from one of the reissue albums, that no one seemed to want to play. The definitive recording I remember was the version by the Swamp Rooters reissued on the immortal Old Time Fiddle Classics, Vol. 2, with Lowe Stokes fiddling and Riley Pucket playing the customary one chord on guitar. But my friends and I, we didn't just not play it. We ridiculed it. There was "no melody"; it sounded "like the record skipped."
So, when Rhys Jones announced his recording, and I saw he had recorded the tune, and the time listed in the notes was eighteen minutes, I thought, "Surely this is a printing error." But it might not be, and I just couldn't resist the temptation to buy the cut to see what he'd done.
It was definitely not an error. Rather, it was a coup, a statement, maybe the most innovative thing in recorded old-time music that I'd heard in decades. It just goes on and on, with relentless creativity.
There has always been brash talk about recording long cuts of fiddle tunes, but I don't know of any recording reaching eighteen minutes. It is just so evocative of the old-time music experience, the late-night jam sessions, the dances that go on and on, and the mindless extravagance of playing the same tunes over and over again for all your life.