Playlist for
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
January 6, 2012

Hosted by Greg Lyon on FRIDAYS at 2-5 pm (today 2-7 pm)
on Asheville Free Media (www.ashevillefm.org)

You can listen to the most recent program by going to the Archives Page at Asheville FM, or by accessing the MP3 stream directly here (available for one week starting early Saturday morning and then gone).

This particular show is also available for streaming here.

Notes: I invited Justin Farrar to come in and bring his favorite jams of 2011 so we could present the year together, discussing and playing what we liked, and musing about general trends in underground music.

My Top 20 new releases (not reissues) of the year were the following:

1. The Field – Looping State of Mind (Kompakt)
2. The Skull Defekts – Peer Amid (Thrill Jockey)
3. Cut Hands – Afro Noise 1 (Very Friendly, Susan Lawly)
4. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake (Vagrant)
5. The Dirtbombs – Party Store (In the Red)
6. The Psychic Paramount – II (No Quarter)
7. Alvarius B. – Baroque Primitiva (Poon Village)
8. Bonnie Prince Billy – Wolfroy Goes to Town (Drag City)
9. Cruddy – Negative World (12XU)
10. Moon Duo – Mazes (Sacred Bones)
11. The Men – Leave Home (Sacred Bones)
12. The People’s Temple – Sons of Stone (HoZac)
13. Omar Souleyman – Haflat Gharbia: The Western Concerts (Sublime Frequencies)
14. White Hills – H-p1 (Thrill Jockey)
15. Bill Orcutt – How the Thing Sings (Editions Mego)
16. Feist – Metals (Cherrytree/Interscope)
17. Total Control – Henge Beat (Iron Lung)
18. Dum Dum Girls – Only in Dreams (Sub Pop)
19. Kitchen’s Floor – Look Forward to Nothing (Siltbreeze)
20. Dirty Beaches – Badlands (Zoo Music)

Look back soon for Justin’s list. Justin certainly convinced me that electronic music was where it was at in 2011, and I can tell you that my 2012 list will likely be much heavier in that category than in the post-punk and garage rock that has been the staple of my listening for many years. It’s where things are going. I’ll probably be drawn to some combination of the two, like The Field, who are really a rock band that grooves and loops with electronics. I also think the Cut Hands album is a harbinger for more avant-garde electronic and tape manipulation based on complex African rhythms.We shall see…

Archive note: We lost the recording of about 30 minutes of the show beginning with the Andy Stott track, which is a shame. Just be warned that when you’re listening, there’s going to be a jarring jump in the set at that point.

On another note, Asheville Free Media was given a fantastic birthday present by Michael Gira of Swans and by Sir Richard Bishop last Saturday, Sept. 10. We simulcasted their live show that night at the Orange Peel here in Asheville, and the second rebroadcast of the entire show will be during Sunday brunch this week (Sept. 25), 10am-1pm. That’s during “Mental Notes”. Don’t miss it–there will be no archive. Tune in!

A man on a porcupine fence
Used me for an ashtray heart
Hit me where the lover hangs out
Stood behind the curtain
While they crushed me out

This is how I felt yesterday when I heard that Don Van Vliet had passed away. Captain Beefheart hadn’t conjured up any music since 1982, and we all knew there would be no more coming. He had MS and didn’t want to deal with the music industry anymore anyway. Still it was somehow reassuring to know that he was still up there somewhere in northern California painting and writing poetry. The news was crushing.

Later last night while driving home I heard a BBC World News segment announcing that “experimental musician” Captain Beefheart had died. The report went on to describe him (not once providing his real name) as one of the most original musical artists of his generation. Anger began to well up inside me. Experimental???!!! Original!!!??? Of his generation!!!??? What understatements! Those descriptions just don’t cut it. Obituaries will rightly point to Trout Mask Replica (1969) as his magnum opus. But I wonder how many will adequately convey what this album achieved? Trout Mask picked avant-garde jazz up by the heels, swirled it around like a dead cat (which by that time, it was), and slung it through the cement wall separating blues-rock from high modernism. It did so without ironically announcing its own radicalism or sacrificing the earthiness of the blues–a feat I feel Van Vliet’s good friend (and Trout Mask producer) Frank Zappa never quite pulled off (not that he wanted to).

But Trout Mask is also damned difficult to listen to all the way through. I pity the young musical explorer who downloads it or buys it on CD. You need to get up, take a deep breath, and flip the vinyl every 20 minutes. Otherwise, it may cause brain damage. Repeated listens–no matter the format–will undoubtedly leave clear marks and irreversible mutation. If you’re a musician, those marks will dramatically increase your chances of being loved by music geeks and ignored by everyone else. Lazy music critics (and DJs and bloggers like me) will categorize your music as “post-punk”. The Fall, Minutemen, Pere Ubu, The Ex, Sun City Girls, and U.S. Maple are simply inconceivable without Beefheart. And I can’t imagine my life without them–and many more of their kin whose records line the walls and fill the crates around me now. “I’m into C.B.!”–yes, Mark E. Smith, you clearly are. And so am I.

But the first record I picked up today was not Trout Mask. It was Doc at the Radar Station (1980)–hands down my favorite of the later Beefheart albums. It’s more personal and direct, accessible yet still wickedly weird. “Ashtray Heart” is easily a finalist for my World’s Most Wrought Break-Up Song list, but “Sue Egypt” may be my favorite Beefheart song of all. I rarely listen to songs on repeat, but this one never fails to trap me.

The song is about memory and oblivion, as the narrator tries to make sense of the enormous distance between Sue Egypt’s life and her mummified remains:

I think of all of those people that ride on my bones–
That nobody hears
That nobody sees
That nobody knows.

But it’s in the middle break that things get truly wonderful and frightening. The guitars fade out suddenly, overtaken by first a flute and then a demonic pump pedal organ (well, it’s all probably a Mellotron)–while Beefheart dives throat-first into that cloudless night on the ancient Nile when Sue Egypt drinks her poison:

Big smoke fingers wave
Come here, come hear:
“Bring me my scissors”
And those on waters.”
The moon was a
Wisdomatic
Pristocratic
Vagabond.
Bad vuggum!!
A pitcher of red hot juice
A picture of red garnet juice.

This flat-out creepy dream is over as abruptly as it begins. The guitars break in and snap us back to the present, where the narrator ends screaming desperately after Sue Egypt as she floats off into the afterlife:

Scenes
Dreams
Boats to forever
Boated ether
Creep the ether feather
Sue Egypt!
Sue Egypt!

At least that’s how I read it today. I think I have good reason.

Click on the image to go to WFMU’s blog post on Captain Beefheart’s 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing. You owe it to yourself. And if you know any guitar players, you owe it to the rest of us to send them the link.

The Captain Beefheart Radar Station website has been around for years but is a treasure trove of links to interviews, videos, rare audio, images, etc.–and it seems to get updated.

Below are some videos. The first is the 1980 appearance on Saturday Night Live by Beefheart and the Magic Band. They play “Hot Head” and “Ashtray Heart”. The video quality is not good, but for the love of humanity, just click play. Be sure watch to the end of “Ashtray Heart”–at about 5:30 it goes beyond brutal. Eric Drew Feldman (bass), Jeff Morris Tepper (guitar), and Robert Williams (drums) pound on mostly one note for over a minute, and then Beefheart breaks out the soprano sax for the finale. It’s so intense that someone in the audience reflexively yells “Shit!” right after it’s over and before they cut to host Malcolm McDowell.

Next we have Don Van Vliet’s two appearances on Letterman (together in one video). They made me smile.

Here we have the 1968 video of the band playing “Electricity” on the beach at Cannes:

And then the BBC special on Beefheart (45 minutes in 3 parts), narrated by John Peel. There are several clips I’d never heard–and others with much better sound quality than anything available (legit or bootleg). Wonder where they got them? One in particular is at 2:50 in part 1, a studio demo version of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Somebody in My Home”–not on the Grow Fins box set (and in much better shape than in any of the bootlegs that do have it).

The image to the right is one of their three t-shirt designs this year. I’m also partial to the tote bag, but good blog layout principles–about which I know absolutely nothing–prevent me from using more than one image. So go to the WPRB Membership Drive website and download the premium gear pdf to look for yourself.

Just so you know, WPRB is listener-supported, independent radio. It is not subsidized by Princeton University or by student activity fees. It’s a very strange, quasi-extinct animal, a non-profit in the commercial band, so it does sell ads, but because of its adventurous programming, ad income is woefully inadequate to keep the station going. Thus, the membership drive.

The membership drive runs through Sunday evening. Don’t wait. Donate now.

I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings (because style is violence and I am not violent).

[Notes, 1964-65]

If the post revealing the secrets of the elusive simple Italian red sauce is not enough to entice you to check out Style Is Violence, I believe that Blaise’s two TED talks will do the trick. First his 2007 talk on Photosynth, which allows viewers to navigate 3D environments stitched together from vast quantities of images taken from photo-sharing sites like flickr:

Blaise’s second TED talk from earlier this year shows how the Photosynth technology (and more) has been woven into Bing Maps:

I will only mention in passing Blaise’s earlier, groundbreaking work (with Princeton’s Paul Needham) applying imaging technology and computational analysis to shine bright light on a major puzzle in the history of early printing, namely the inner workings of Gutenberg’s press, which had remained frustratingly obscure for ages. You can get a taste by going to the BBC/Open University website which accompanied a documentary on the subject.

My secondary goal here is to make Blaise blush almost as much as I did upon reading his post about the WPRB School of eclectic exploration in music–and my small role in the transmission of it. But only Blaise could have come up with the Wavelet of Musical Pretentiousness (image above).

Why do I mention this now? See my next post.

I will also continue to write about music and other nonsense in this blog. Stay tuned.

Here’s the playlist for August 6, 2010. I dedicated a set to Dutch jazz giant, Willem Breuker, who passed away last week. Stay tuned for comments later. I’m out of town on August 13, but I’ll be back with a new show on August 20. Stay tuned!

Playlist for
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
July 30, 2010

Hosted by Greg Lyon on FRIDAYS at 2-5 pm
on Asheville Free Media (http://AshevilleFM.org)

You can listen to the most recent program by going to this show’s landing page on the Asheville FM website, or by accessing the MP3 stream directly here (available from early Saturday morning after airing through the next Friday and then gone gone gone).

Notes:

– The first two sets today were focused on the piano, and that allowed for a lot more classical than I usually play on the radio (that’s not an apology), although only one track was "classical" classical : a fugue by Bach (played by Sokolov). I really liked the piece entitled "Alien Heart," by the New York-based post-minimalist composer Elodie Lauten. It’s from a recent 2CD collection of her early-to-mid 1980s Piano Works. I’ve also been listening a lot to the 100 Transcendental Studies of the English composer Kaikhosru Sorabji (1892-1988), who was of Indian Zoroastrian (Parsi) ancestry. Only the first half or so (43 out of 100) of these Studies have been made available on CD so far, in a series on Bis Records and played by Fredrik Ullén. I hope the rest of them come out at some point soon.

– Trombonist Grachan Moncur III’s "Space Spy" (1969) is some seriously tension-laden minimalist avant-garde jazz, centered on a single three-note piano chord repeated over and over by Dave Burrell, with the unfailingly excellent Andrew Cyrille on drums quietly circling the proceeding like a menacing buzzard. I also started the show with new music with Andrew Cyrille (thank god he’s still at it) at the kit, on a CD by Steve Colson.

– Wreck Small Speakers on Expensive Stereos, a band from Dunedin, New Zealand (1980-1986), featuring Michael Morley (later of The Dead C) and Richard Ram (later of nothing that I know of), have been wrecking the speakers on my stereo pretty consistently now for a few weeks. I rediscovered the 1993 collection, River Falling Love (Ajax Records), and it’s going to make me scour the planet in search of their entire output–I’m sure in vain. It might even get me to re-listen to my pile of Dead C albums. Continuing the unintentional minimal/intense theme, at times they remind me a lot of Young Marble Giants, particularly when Denise Roughan (then of Look Blue, Go Purple, and later of The 3Ds and Ghost Club) provided guest vocals on the song "Rain;" I guess I’ll have to play that one in the coming weeks.

– Analog Africa continues to be, in my estimation, the most consistent African reissue label. Afro-Beat Airways: West African Shock Waves (Ghana & Togo 1972-1978) is the 8th and newest release. It makes me happy.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Wanna take it to the next level? Check out the project “How Vinyl Records Are Made-And How to Pirate (Copy) A Vinyl Record” from the site DO IT: Projects, Plans and How-Tos (Get Up and Do Something). This is where I found the videos above (courtesy of my friend Dan Ruccia).

“The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” is on Fridays 2-5pm. You can always hear the most recent show using this DIRECT LINK. You can also go the schedule page, find my show under Friday, and click on ‘Listen’. Playlists are on the Asheville FM website under my show’s page. I will be posting them here as well–along with my usual commentaries.

OK, some music content: I must admit that I’m excited about the upcoming Grinderman 2 record. They just sent me the first single, “Heathen Child,” and it… will likely grow on me. The video trailers for the album, though, are pretty darned interesting, so I’ll try to embed them (never done that before!):