Chang Space

Originally published at c h a n g s p a c e. Please leave any comments there.

Hey. So I’m still a little hungover. Saturday night I got into it in a way I don’t usually. Good beer with a high alcohol content. It’s what I had. Wohoo!

SO. Music! Not sure what I can come up with since I’m recovering AND babysitting my snow leopard update. He was on version 3.9 and 4.0 has the adamntium claws and wifi.

SOKO: ALIEN

This lass reminds me of the cute artistic girls I pined after in college who turned out to be completely insane. Case in point:

The video is cute, some funny stuff, but kind of naive and attention hungry. Nonetheless it got stuck in my head for days.

FELA KUTI: BEAST OF NO NATION

Y’all should know by now that I’m a huge Fela Fan. The other day this came up on Pandora and I was like “WHAT?” and spent the rest of the day listening to it. The sound quality sucks because it’s from an anicent 197th generation VHS tape but the song is still banging. FELA and EGYPT 80 rocked. He died too young. Dig in:

And here’s part II:

Sigh. Sadly that’s all I got today. Check you next week!

UPDATE: OH MAN!!! How could I forget this? I did spend all day yesterday watching Archer and in one episode his phone keeps ringing. The song is surprisingly catchy. But what is it? It is this gem:

You’re welcome.

Originally published at c h a n g s p a c e. You can comment here or there.

Hey. Whuh-what? The title? No, son! Not recovery like 12 steps or anything. I’m just wiped out from the weekend. And the week. My kid was on vacation from school and for some reason I suddenly adopted the sleep schedule of a 14 year old with a healthy social life and little or no responsibilities. WHich is great if you are 14 but not 44 with a full time job and family. Plus the VSS was this weekend and while we cold rocked it recovery from those is always a 2-3 day affair.

So here’s a mixed bag of tracks.

LA DUSSELDORF: CHA CHA 2000

Last night as I was watching the Oscars I found an old notebook that contained among other things lists of artists, bands and albums I needed to get. Most of these came from my listening to WZBC in Newton, one of the best radio stations ever. While most of the stuff I’d picked up over the years, one name stood out as needing to be further looked at: CHA CHA 2000. Like a dork I went straight to iTunes and bought the album without listening to any of the tracks first. Kind of hard when your spouse os glaring at you to be present with them but you’re in your customary four things at once mode. Listening to this today I’m not totally sure what I liked about it enough to write it down. Maybe the sheer weirdness. The track plays like a Star Wars influenced gay-roller-disco space opera (And I’m not hating because I loved STARLIGHT EXPRESS when I saw it as a kid in London!). As it was released in 1978 I suppose someone was huffing futurism a little too deeply and this is the result. From what I can tell there may be some members of Neu! and other Krautrockers involded (Dusseldorf is the home of the man machine gods Kraftwerk after all). But it’s kinda late period Krautrock leaving me to believe these cats were wringing the last dregs of patchouli from their bellbottoms while the rest of the world was embracing punk. If any head wanna educate me as to what is really up be my guest. Otherwise, listen in and you decide:

MATTHEW DEAR: FIGHTING IS FUTILE

I was listening to the Electric Deluxe podcast last week specifically Episode #89 by Gary Beck (this is a dope podcast so if you don’t listen to it already you should. It’s produced by Speedy J and has different artists each time. They play a wide variety of stuff from techno to krautrock to prog to way out stuff). One track stood out enough for me to get a lil’ forensic and check it out. Matthew Dear is one of the founders of Ghostly International and that’s pretty cool as it is. That he makes his own music and it’s great is even better. Since I found the Seth Troxler remix first I’ll list that but I the original is quite funky, too. Dear’s music is a nice, competent blend of electronics and pop but it’s not sugary. He’s got a great voice, kind of Peter Murphy, Low-Bowie but also very much his own. The album BEAMS from which this song comes is so far dope. Check it:

A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS: NIGHTMARES

SO I slept like crap last night, up 5 times in the course of the night due to nightmares, a full bladder and an awakened mind. Sometimes I’ll stay up if it’s like 5AM but at 4AM I just munch something and diddle around then crash again. Well, I went back to bed and finally dropped off around 5:30AM only to be awoken at 6:30AM by the alarm. SO the brain was a little foggy and ramble. All of a sudden in the shower this track comes up out of nowhere. And with it a flood of memories like me trying to learn the bass part and even stabbing away at the guitar part. The song?

I’m getting goosebumps listening to it now!(Their bass player was criminally underrated as was their guitarist) I have two immediate thoughts about this. One is how this is such a typical early 80′s mini-movie like many of the videos of that time were. The band plays a bunch of parts and most of them were terrible actors. They all do nutty shit that looks ridiculous almost 30 years later but still cool to some of us old farts.

The other things is a specific memory around this song. My Aunt HArriet to whom I owe much of my interest in Eastern philosophy, yoga and things occidental. Here’s a picture of her:

His Holiness The Dalai Lama and Harriet Ramsdell.

Oh that guy next to her is one Tenzin Gyatso, aka His Holiness The Dalai Lama. Yeah. So Aunt Hat was way into all sorts of mysitcal stuff. So in 1988 she was satying with us for my eldest brothers wedding. Then she was on her way to CHINA AT AGE 84!!! I’m 44 and I don’t even want to go to Boston unless I know I can sleep for 8 hours once i get there. Anyway she’s staying with us and I’m all of 19 and busy rocking out to fave tunes. I felt a little weird with her in the house but then I figured my music wouldn’t disturb her as she was just about 100% deaf. So I was busy working on my cover of Nightmares (thank god that shit never made it to tape!) when all of a sudden she’s standing in the doorway dressed pretty much as she is in that picture above. I stopped and looked at her, suddenly shy.

“Well don’t stop playing!” she said in her warmly voice (I wish you could hear it. She was a hoot). “Keep playing yer bongo’s there!”

“Uh, okay,” I said. I hit play on the drum machine, everything starts and –

She starts dancing. Granted it was old lady hopping from side ot side but god bless her Aunt Hat was rocking out to her great-nephew’s horrible playing, shaking there with her sensible oxford, wool flannel skirt and cardigan. I played the whole song through and when I stopped she was a little winded but not so much that she didn’t start telling me about ritual dance and how I was channeling some deeper tribal energy with my music and the rhythms and everything. Ignorant as I was then I smiled and shrugged. Now I totally get it. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do in my music: get to another level and dimension even by playing with repetition, rhythms and sounds. God Bless You, Aunt HAt. I miss you and wish I could play for you and you could dance to my music again. Namaste.

TEST DEPT.: SIEGE & CURRENT AFFAIRS

In hunting down music for the VSS Alice and I were brainstorming when we suddenly looked at each other and said: “TEST DEPT.!” ALice had been in a dance troupe that used this song in a piece of choreography:

And I just love this one because it’s a good song for creating total fucking mayhem if you play it really loud. Someday I will get my niece and nephew all jacked up on sugar, give them each a crowbar and see what kind of damage they can do in six minutes nineteen seconds.

Kudos to the uploader who finally put these online. I’ve been waiting ages since my vinyl of this long ago vanished.

———-

Okay now if you’ll excuse me I gotta go count out my millions. Of pennies.

Piece out, space counts!!!

Originally published at c h a n g s p a c e. Please leave any comments there.

So, Autechre’s newest album dropped last week (you can get it here if you haven’t already but if you’re one of the three readers of this blog then chance are you got it last week the second you saw the email announcing it) and if you noticed a certain hush and then a concentration of energy like a tsunami building int he depths of the Pacific before unloading all over the internet it was because of that.  There followed the sound of millions of nerds screwing their headphones in and setting their beady eyes upon the web to unleash their opinions about Exai (a clever pun on the fact that this is Autechre’s 11th album).  The consensus is this:

It sucks and Autechre is the worst band ever.

or…

It’s awesome and they are the greatest composers since Xenakis, Dockstader, Parmegiani or ____________________. (Put your favorite obsucre composer in there.  Bonus points if you add a story of something Keith Fullerton Whitman did that is better than Autechre)

As for me, I did the deed, waited until Friday to begin to listen to it.  5-10 years ago I would have called in sick to listen to it the whole day but that wasn’t an option this time around.  I did get a break in form of Superstorm Nemo which forced me to shut down my shop and get some special time in with my family.  And Exai of course.

But I’m not here to render an official opinion on it as I haven’t gotten even a quarter of the way through it’s 2.5 hours of music.  I will say that so far it’s only begun to interest me at about track 5 or so (my daughter, 14 and an expert on all things, says the music reminds her of “fighting” and “video games.”  And she’s been listening to Autechre since birth!).  ”bladelores” is the first track that got me to sit up and pay attention.

No, what I want to do is go back a bit and cover my favorite Autechre tracks.  I got into them around Amber but I’d been digging one of their tracks since before then around 1994 or so.

In fact Chatter is a song I often begin my workouts with.  Simple, pumping 303 lines, some weird atmospherics and a beat.  Funny but listening to this now I can hear elements of the newer stuff in there.  As if in almost 20 years they have veered too far off track.

This is from their 1st album.  One thing they excelled at was simple, lush melodies and great rhythmic work.  Classic example.

This is harder than I thought because among the first 5 albums there are almost no songs I dislike.  And then there’s the EP’s!  My God The EP’s!

A simple repeating melody with slow modulation and development.  Autechre were the kings of restraint and method back in the day.  I love this song and want it played at my funeral.  Take note of that.

If there could be such a thing, “Second Peng” is my favorite Autechre song.  I listen to it several times a week and it is also on my workout playlist (I think myself superior for listening to Autechre at the gym).  The drums are nuts, the opening pads are still mind boggling to me and the whole thing takes you on a journey from one place to another again and again.  Love this track.

Overand is a bit of ear fuckery that makes me want to hibernate but also become a sentient mushroom.  Some tracks are like that.  This one is best at about 2AM on a Friday night after you’ve been working hard all week.  Again, it’s a masterpiece of subtlety and simplicity.

To my ears Tilapia marks a goodbye to a certain era of Autechre.  After this we would get Chiastic Slide which was to many ears and minds the last solid Autechre album (in my mind that’s LP5 though it took me years to get into it.  And as Autechre themselves say to Thom Yorke’s pronunciation that it’s their best album ever, “No. We’ve made loads better albums.  Anyway…).  This is a really beautiful track and the way it slows down at the end always brings me to tears.   Genius.

Something Autechre was great at for years was the apocalyptic album closer.  Incunabula, Amber, Tri-Repetae and Chiastic Slide all end with a lengthy breakdown mindmelter of a track.  Nuane is perhaps the best of these and weighs in at a hefty 13 minutes and change.  If you click through it you can hear that it goes through several different passages and movements.  It’s the final track on an album where Autechre used all their best tools and tactics to create a masterpiece.

Corc off of LP5 is another classic of theirs.  All Clavia Nord Lead sounds and all Ae:  melancholic, rhythmic, noisy and great.  My favorite track off of one of my least favorite Autechre albums.  I’ll admit that the next three left me cool and puzzled about where they were at.

Only two tracks from their 00′s output has excited me:

And

Sad to say but Confield was self-parody, Draft 7.30 was “meh” IDM hiphop Max fuckery and Untilted was just them practicing on their Elektron Machinedrum.

Some have said Chiastic Slide was underwhelming; I think it’s massively underrated as the first album to incorporate a heavy use of DSP and hardware synthesizers.  After this they would stick to the Clavia Nord keyboards for a while before largely going into MAX programming and a love for “autogenerated” tracks (a term they hate but best describes what they do).

After this I had a hard time digging where they were going.  LP yields few gems for me and was the first time in I’d ever found myself thinking, “I wish they were still making tracks like _________”, a thought which I find anathema to electronic music and music in general.  If you can’t follow where an artist is going it’s not really their fault.  Autechre will never be a Moby-type band, playing their hits and churning them out again and again.  They’ve been committed to doing something new and different since day one.  Only their earliest track bear any resemblance to their influences.  By Incunabula they were into entirely new territory that no one else has explored.  Sure there are artists out there using MAX, DSP, electronics and random generation.  But no one is as far out as Autechre in their commitment to go beyond expectations and go deeper into their own explorations of sound.  They’ve often stated they are interested in making music they want to hear, not what others want them to make.  And it’s that statement that has been both their herald and I think to a certain degree their downfall.  Because after a certain point of insularity and isolation like that you really cannot make anything others can understand or identify with.

Or maybe I just want them to rehash the hits.  Who cares?

Be seeing you!

Originally published at c h a n g s p a c e. Please leave any comments there.

Took some pix of the storm. Dig ‘em.  Please note overuse of dog as subject.

The kids birthday party

Sleeping boy sleeps on couch

Before, when the city plowed in my studio’s doors

After, when I blared the new Autechre and bug it out.

Hard to see but ALL the snow that landed on our building ended up in this corner

Snow dog senses no squirrels nearby

A shining phallacy rises from the storm

Snow dog. Adjusted.

Running pup with info.

Phallus with info.

Originally published at c h a n g s p a c e. Please leave any comments there.

Originally published at c h a n g s p a c e. Please leave any comments there.

Hey all. Wussup?

So I want to focus entirely on her majesty Beyonce this week as her superbowl performance was –

Just kidding. No Beyonce. But as it’s Black History Month I figured I’d focus on some African-American musicians (and an Afro-Carribean author).

I’ve been listening to podcasts again, mostly from XLR8R magazine’s archives. I love these as I get a good deal of exposure to new stuff through them (I tried to listen to the Autechre megamix from 2011 but I’m still only 4.5 hours in). So here are some highlights from these listening journeys.

ASTARIUS MIRACULII

I found out about Astarius through the CRYSTAL ARK podcast from XLR8R. “Spirit Rap” leads up that particular podcast and it is some next level shit. I love stuff like this and I am especially fond of African-American mystics like Astarius, Laraaji (see below) and especailly the really out there cats like the “Real Jews Are Black” guys you used to see in Times Square in New York and the New Egyptian types (for the record I do believe the original inhabitants of Israel were brown-skinned and wooly haired as it says in the Bible how they got pale and white I don’t know). The RJAB guys do border on some anti-Semitic stuff which is reprehensible but for sheer insanity that’s kind of like someone believing the mythology of Parliament records was real they cannot be beat.

Ok, back to Astarius and Spirit Rap. Here’s two versions for you. Here’s the album version:

And here’s the man himself reciting this:

LARAAJI

I actually discovered Laraaji via my obsession with all things Adrian Sherwood. I read about him working with a Japanese dub band called Audio Active (I got their first two album swhich are pretty dope and border on some punk rock stuff while skirting on hiphop and dub. There are some recognizable dub workouts with Mr. Sherwood at the controls. On their second album they teamed up with Laraaji which must have been one hell of a trip). Born Edward Larry Gordon in Philadelphia, he eventually went to New York and as one will found a spiritual path after trying out standup and acting. Eventually he became Laraaji and voila! The legend was born! This is one of the better cuts from that union. It’s long so be prepared for a journey:

Here’s Laraaji and some guy named Brian Eno:

DREXCIYA

I never quite got into early Detroit techno but I have tremendous respect for them as without that I would still be doing Skinny Puppy covers and wondering why girls didn’t like them. I tried Drexciya after an awesome writeup in THE WIRE where they talked about Afronauts and Afrocentric space travel. Here’s a song called Hydro THeory which I think fits nicely into their cosmology:

LEE SCRATCH PERRY

I don’t think I could talk about Afrocosmosis without a video by the original spaced out Afronaut, Lee Scratch Perry. With all due respect as I love the funk, you can keep George Clinton and I will take Scratch any day of the week. The man is totally out there. One day far-reaching probed will be out in the Oort cloud and they will run across his pronouncements on radio waves being beamed back from the stars long after he is dead – if he ever truly dies.

TOBIAS BUCKELL

And I think this is a good time to mention a writer who has done a huge amount for the Afrocosmic awareness. Tobias Buckell has written a series of books about Caribbean refugees in space and they are amazing for the storytelling and how he nails down the culture but then transposes it into space. He is from the Caribbean himself and nails the language in ways I could never hope to. Sly Mongoose is a great book in that series. Check out this interview:

That’s all from me looking outside within. Hope you’re staying warm and getting it done whatever it is.

Peace!

Originally published at c h a n g s p a c e. Please leave any comments there.

Recently I discovered that a writer I know is getting his first novel published and it’s getting good press from various folks around the internet. No, I will not tell you who because it will only make me look more pathetic and petty than I already feel.

Against my better wishes I hate him. I hate this writer. I hate his success. I loathe his success. I wish for his demise. I’m glad for his misfortunes. Anything to ameliorate the fact that he’s so damn happy about getting published.

Because I’m not. At least not any time soon from what I can tell.

I mean, I kinda ruined Christmas Eve a little when I just had to follow up on a Tweet-quest despite my wife’s request that I put my phone down and enjoy a movie with my family. I brushed these requests off for a time until eventually I spoke loudly and clearly that I had to do this one thing and I would put the phone down. Well, needless to say conversation stopped around that time and didn’t resume normal levels until we made up before bed.

I hate that.

I hate my own jealousy more. I despise that cold, burning feeling in me, the gut-level certainty that someone else is getting something better while I’m not.

Or more to the point they’re getting what I want so badly I would ruin Christmas Eve to pursue it.

I’m no better than a pallid little greasy Gollum muttering to himself and clutching a headless fish as he longs for his precious.

Except perhaps that I know how disfiguring my jealousy is. I mean literally disfiguring. Truly. I know it’s damaging my brain and my body. And yet here I sit, mostly silently, occasionally muttering about what I’m not getting while another guy is standing shining upon the hill, so to speak.

Why does it have such a hold on me? I know the negative effects it has. I do my best to let go of jealousy when I see it rear up but my god it still has claws that run strong and deep within me.

~*~

I’m a yoga teacher by profession, a yogi by life so I know the price of jealousy.  It’s an aspect of attachment which is a widely covered subject in the field of yoga and buddhism.

“Jealousy doesn’t work the way you think it does,” we say.

“Jealousy is like taking poison and expecting the other person to get sick.”

When you google the word jealousy one of the first things you come across is this tidbit from Psychology Today:

As emotions go, jealousy is neither subtle nor kind, but it is definitely complex, encompassing feelings from fear of abandonment to rage to humiliation. It strikes both men and women when they perceive a third-party threat to a valued relationship, and that distinguishes it from envy, which involves wanting something someone else has. Conventional wisdom holds that jealousy is a necessary emotion because it preserves social bonds, but it more often destroys them. And it can give rise to relationship violence.

Huh. 3rd party threat? So I’m one party, the writing is the 2nd and the success of this other writer is the 3rd? Interesting.
Here’s another quote about jealousy. From a science fiction author no less:

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
Robert A. Heinlein

Man, fuck you, Heinlein! Seriously? Damn.

Ahem. Where was I?

~*~

Jealousy. Right.

I’m sure Heinlein had his jealousies and just wrote shit like that to make himself feel better when Asimov and Clarke hooked up and made fun of him (I am not implying Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were gay but it does make for a good story, yes?). But he had the good graces to keep it from the rest of us and make like he knew exactly what he was doing. So it’s hard to be jealous of the dead.

In my experience, jealousy shacks up with self-pity a lot of the time; it certainly does in this case. I mean, this guy’s younger, in great shape and hasn’t been writing as long as I have (I was 12 when he was born, and began writing around that age) and he’s getting his first book published while I’ve got three in the can and two more under way. He’s also incredibly nice and funny, especially that one time I met him. Poor me. Poor, poor, poor me.

It feels disgusting typing that. It feels worse thinking that’s correct.

Recognizing there’s a problem is the biggest step for me. Admitting to my wife why I made Christmas a little tense was very hard. I refused to accept her condolences because it only validated the tiny little crabman within me, where I literally felt a tiny warm glow form within at her kind words.

I suppose it’s made worse by the fact that my writing output has dropped significantly in the last six months. Work’s taken a lot of time and I suppose I must admit some time lost to Skyrim, Tumblr and sloth.
It’s no surprise that I’m thinking about this as the year comes to a close. End of year lists abound and reflection is as common as hangovers and cries of “Just one more cookie!” I may be feeling overly maudlin but I think my writing output this year is possibly half or almost half the previous year.

But I’m not one to sit and wallow for long.

I’m planning on resuming a regular writing schedule for 2013, as well as stepped up submissions. It’s really the only thing I can do? I suppose I could sit around and mope more, curse this guy and BPM (Bitch, Piss & Moan) my days away. But writing seems a much more enjoyable way to spend my time and efforts.

Who knows? One day I might even get published.

Chang out!

Originally published at c h a n g s p a c e. Please leave any comments there.

Jeff & Jeff’s Pandemonium: StarBird Space Avenger; toys JPX never had, but often wished for.

More Starbird awesomeness. I had one of these as a kid and I loved it. The cardboard space station was about as sturdy as… A cardboard space station! But it fueled my imagination and gave me many hours of enjoyment.

until I discovered girls. Who also fueled my imagination but gave me much less hours of enjoyment.

Originally published at c h a n g s p a c e. Please leave any comments there.

Toys of Christmas Past – Star Bird | AEIOU…and Sometimes Why.

I loved my starbird. A little too much. I took it into battle in the sandbox one to many times with one to many cotton balls soaked in rubbing alcohol or if I was feeling extra cocky some gasoline! THat shit burned quick. But hot. Oh, the destructiveness of youth!!!

Originally published at c h a n g s p a c e. Please leave any comments there.

Man, I spent most of the week recovering from last week.  Between dreaming of sleep no more (ha.  irony) and the damn cat keeping me from a full night’s rest I’ve been on half steam all week.  But that doesn’t mean I didn’t have time to rock.

DAVE BRUBECK

I’m not a big fan of jazz. I love dixieland, big band and the crooners. I love Miles Davis and have a soft spot for Dark Magus. Let us not forget his outer space majesty Sun Ra. My dad’s a big jazz fan and loved Brubeck. He got me into him at a young age and I could ear ball Brubeck songs pretty quickly. Everybody and their mom knows “Take 5.” Which inspired a lot of reggae and dub covers. Not surprisingly, I love these as I love dub!

UPDATE: Homepiece and fellow EMerson grad Jon the writer hipped me to this awesome Take 5 cover:

Sweet!

My favorite Brubeck song has an amusing little story attached to it. I remember the first combination lock I ever had was a Masterlock with a long cable covered in red plastic. My brother taught me to sing the combination along to a song I knew to remember it as a mnemonic device. I never knew the name but damn if I don’t have the tune embedded in my brain folds. It worked so well Is till remember the combination (21-11-25). Sing it along with this now, will you?

I love how in every single video of this song when it’s played live EVERYBODY begins clapping within 10 seconds of hearing those opening bars. And Brubeck is always smiling like it’s his birthday AND he won the lottery. Thank you, sir.

THINK TREE

Back in the dazzle of the 90′s, I was an adjunct member of the Boston Beer Mafia thanks to my wife and brother.  One other memebr of that was Jeff B aka Jim-Jim aka drummer of ThinkTree. They were one of the first all synth bands I encountered and they rocked.  They were HUGE in Boston and had a bit of a national following.  Criminally underrated and now nearly forgotten I’m here to shed some light back on them.

Here’s a documentary about them. Nice and short.

And here’s their bullet “Hire A Bird”

I miss this time. We were young, shiftless, had no kids and easy jobs that allowed us to hang out late, drink beer and do crazy shit. I wish I’d hung out with these guys more and gotten actually play with Jeff B who was almost the live drummer for Psychic Buddhist Gorillas. Sad.

IKE YARD

I don’t know how I made it this long without hearing of these guys!  I asked homepiece JUMGLE JMC why I missed them and he shrugged his shoulders on the internet.  Anyway, here’s a taste.

Some cat said they were the American Cabaret VOltaire.  I would think they were more like an American DAF (which is kinda funny if you think of it).  Some cat on YouTube said:  ”Sci Fi Miles Davis!!”  I kinda like that.

Here’s another:

ANDY STOTT LIVE SETS

Oh, man.  I’ve been on a huge kick with this guy Andy Stott.  I goggled and found some live sets that are totally baller. There’s this set on Soundcloud which is also in video form below.

And here’s another awesome live set from a little earlier. Interesting to hear the evolving version of Numb in both of these.

YO MAMA

No, you didn’t read that wrong as YO YO MA or something. I said Yo Mama!

Laters!