heep see (feb/mar)

Pointer Sisters: "Automatic"
Guilty pleasure of the moment (along with Greg Kihn Band's "Jeopardy" and Dolly Parton's "Potential New Boyfriend"), no thanks to thinking back to when Thom from Rub-N-Tug dropped this into a set. In much the same way that Patrice Rushen's "Forget Me Nots" makes me sing "galaxy defenders" on the second line of the chorus, I always think of the 80s show, Automan, at the chorus, who I just presumed this song was always about.

Phil Ochs: Greatest Hits
"50 Phil Ochs Fans Can't Be Wrong" the back cover attests on this misnomer of an album, Ochs' last studio effort. Bitter and resigned, with Ochs clad in a shiny gold Elvis suit, this album still confounds me. Musings on fame, James Dean, Watergate, petrochemical dependence as love song (or vice versa), but against a backdrop of country chords and harmonizing and harpsichord.

Laura Gibson & Ethan Rose: Bridge Carols
In the best way, this reminds me of those spacious ambient moments from The Reminder. At barely a half-hour, it evaporates in the best possible way.

Thomas Fehlmann: Gute Luft
Over fifty now, this sounds like, if not Fehlmann's best work, then at least like the greatest overview of what he does best: pop ambience, shimmering schafel, jazzy breakdowns, gentle psychedelia, and pliant minimal techno, all woven together into a cohesive whole. In some perverse way, I wish that Gute Luft, which is the soundtrack to 24H Berlin, a 24 hour documentary, was itself an entire day's worth of music, as I trust the man to make it all work.

Jim O'Rourke: The Visitor
What once seemed its weakest quality (that aleatoric, sound snippet-ness that I originally mistook for some anti-piracy gimmick that Drag City does), now feels like this suite's greatest attribute. Played this while driving through the strange El Nino rainstorms of San Diego. All the delicate instrumentation would get washed away in the downpours of rain, the wobble of the windshield wipers overpowering it, and I think the player would reset somewhere between the 7 to 27-minute mark, making it feel transparent, ephemeral, yet delectably without end.

Van Dyke Parks: Song Cycle
Another California-soundtrack album. Grappling with folks like Owen Pallett and Joanna Newsom of late, I somehow forgot what a touchstone this remains, a record I spun thousands of times a decade ago when I was obsessed with the Beach Boys and Charles Ives, but had forgotten recently. It sounds decidedly different in the California sun.
It reminded me that the very first piece of music-writing that I had published (about Lee Dorsey in Sound Collector Audio Review) used Parks' Discover America as a jumping-off point. A deft and dense merger of pop and orchestra infused with a brand of wit that leaps beyond any categorization. Still hearing more jokes and allusions within it, not to mention Los Angeles neighborhood references I wouldn't have understood back in Texas.

Joanna Newsom: Have One On Me

A pity to have to review this album from a digital stream (especially from a label that doesn't even "do" digital). Had I been allowed to hear it uncompressed, I realize now that I would've argued for the main review slot at Spin and given it a higher score. Or to borrow a line from Anthony Lane's review of The Red Shoes: "(It's) like drinking champagne, whatever the vintage, through a plastic straw."

Now that Have One On Me can unfurl in the morning air, the treasures of this album reveal themselves without hurry. And hurry is this album's antagonist. Imbibed in slower, deeper lengths, leitmotifs start to emerge that truly mesmerize. Rather than rely on previous male collaborators (Albini immediately springs to mind) for their input, I believe that Joanna surrounded herself with folks she trusts (O'Rourke, Noah Georgeson, Ryan Francesconi) to not second-guess her; producing the album herself feels crucial for its sense of warmth and depth.

Ray Mang: "Bulletproof"
When I first spun this collaboration between Mang (a/k/a/ Raj Gupta) and Miss Lady Kier (doing a George Clinton cut), I lamented that it didn't drop in say...2006, when it's anti-war blasts might have resonated a bit deeper on the dancefloors. Maybe Mang was falling off? Then I realized I always have at least three of his 12"s in my bag and that we're still fighting two wars circa 2010.

heep see (feb)

"We believe in the importance of what we have just said or written, if for no other reason than that it is impossible to take back the sounds or erase the marks, but the temptation to be silent pervades our body, the fascination of silence, to be silent and immobile like the gods, watching and nothing more."
Jose Saramago: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

"I haven't got an America I can go away to like you. Over here we've lost all sense of where we're going. If we draw any comparisons, it's with the past. And we've given up wanting anything, except perhaps to be children again. We're always talking about the first years, our own first years and the first years of our history."
Peter Handke: Short Letter, Long Farewell

"His interest in her grew despite the things she said and he continued to find her very exciting. Had any other girl been so affected, he would have thought her intolerable. Faye' affectations, however, were so completely artificial that he found them charming. Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. From in front, the stupid lines and grotesque situations would have made him squirm with annoyance, but because he saw the perspiring stagehands and the wires that held up the tawdry summerhouse with its tangle of paper flowers, he accepted everything and was anxious for it to succeed...While she often recognized a the falseness of an attitude, she persisted in it because she didn't know how to be simpler or more honest. She was an actress who learned from bad models in a bad school."
Nathaniel West: The Day of the Locust

heep see (special scopitone version)

Inspired by a DVD sent by David Serlin, who penned this loving tribute to the Scopitone in an early issue of Cabinet. Believe he sold me on such campy celluloid by deeming it "the Dead Sea Scrolls of music videos" or something similarly biblical.











(This one might be my favorite, as the woman has a set of furry panties that match her poodle.)

heep see

Bonnie "Prince" Billy: Lie Down in the Light

Not prone to use such vocab, but this is Will Oldham's "best" album, his "masterpiece," my "album of the year." Call it the polar opposite to what's often considered his most fully-realized work, I See A Darkness, full of life and light. In making such a proclamation though, it's difficult to pinpoint just what it is about this album. He's audibly happy and in love, and for some reason, that's led to song structuring that feels perfected yet not strained. Of course, he said-she said dialogues are present, as is his ever-present naturalism.

Rather than the "first thought, best thought" in his approach in the studio, it seems like there's a place for everything here, be it a clarinet or a guitar tone right out of "Rock'n'Roll." The best example I can conjure off the top of my head occurs on "So Everyone," which seems at first like its chords are based upon Fred Neil's "The Dolphins." But whereas that song was world-weary, finding solace not in another human being but in submerging that pain in the animal kingdom, here Oldham finds his peace in his betrothed. That it's a blowjob song appropriate enough to play at a wedding reception is just the cherry on top.

Portishead: 3

A few months back, listening to a promo of the new Boris album, I kept being struck by the "rupture" inherent in its sonics. That is, until I paid enough attention to realize that it was just an edited, truncated promo. Such rupture is instead best put on display here: re-vitalizing a decade-dormant career only to riddle their telltale sound with shards of ancient synthesizers and drum pads. Or else plunking in an homage to The Jerk that endearingly --albeit wholly-- derails the album's momentum. Recurdling sour times only to leave listeners in an ice-bath. Laid flat by the appearance of "Threads" (which could totally be covered by Sunn O))) ), I kept hearing behind Beth Gibbons's mewl this hole where a man's voice could've been harmonizing. That is, until I realized the hole was in fact a man's howl. I think it clenches into that Morricone-esque yip nearer the end, but I'm always so unsure.

Erykah Badu: New Amerykah Part One

It'd be easy to say that Erykah's been getting her daily dose of Parliament/ Funkadelic, but then I thought that maybe she's just watching Spongebob with her kids and getting all those tweaked voices from there instead. But much like Bill's paternal turn in Kill Bill, Erykah also weans her kids on kung-fu matinee, too. A true pothead's album: indulgent, meandering, prone to lean and headnod, super-paranoid, silly, messy, weirdly anal retentive, knee-deep in dusty funk, apocalyptic.

Lindstrøm: Where You Go I Go Too

As I stated on the I Love Music message board, this is the Ys of Neo-Disco, every bit as expansive and endgame for its respective musical subgenre, save HP's effort is Jacuzzi-warm instead of chilly.

Les Autres:

Blues Control: Puff
Toumani Diabaté: The Mandé Variations
Earth: The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull
Low Motion Disco: Keep It Slow
Daniele Baldelli and Marco Dionig: Cosmic Disco?! Nah...Cosmic Rock!!!

heep see

Husbands dir. Cassavetes

A friend sweetly and unexpectedly bought me a bootleg copy off of eBay of my favorite John Cassavetes film, to this day not available on DVD (thanks AAAA). The only noticeable effect of such a transfer is that there's this weird artifacting on the black fabrics, which makes the funeral scene turn slightly psychedelic. This marked my fifth time through the film, and I realize that the promise I made to myself a decade previous upon my first viewing of the film --that I would one day be as sartorially unfuckwithable as Mssrs. Cassavetes, Gazarra, and Falk-- has still not come to pass. I also lament that there's no sort of Smell-O-Vision here, especially as the bender the three husbands indulge in stretches on ever longer. If only you could get a whiff of Peter Falk's vomit and cigarette breath.

Seriously though, click this and sign the petition to have Husbands released on DVD.














Battle of Algiers dir. Pontecorvo

Since the Iraqi War is no longer front-page news, it may be best to learn about our enemy via a forty-year-old documentary-style story on how Algeria threw off French occupation. The Criterion set is heavy, revealing that the film was made less than five years after liberation, on the very streets that were covered in blood and rubble but a few years previous and including a roundtable discussion with Richard A. Clarke (author of Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror) about the movie's effects. Mandatory viewing for both Al Qaeda recruits as well as US special ops.

While the film's depiction of both torture and terrorism tactics (see women hiding their bombs in their baskets or police using live wires on suspects) are chilling and spot-on, there's something else at work. We see how effective both strategies are, in that the bombs kill hundreds of innocent civilians, rally Algerians to their cause, and entice the oppressors into more self-defeating policies, while the gruesome torturing of captives allows the police to capture/ kill the insurgents and their leaders. Yet at movie's end, both terrorism and torture fail. And yet, due to some intangible movement that the camera does not register, liberation still occurs. Even the film itself professes to have no answers as to why independence finally comes, why the populace finally rallies and throws off the French. It is, as Clarke states though, about an invisible war, a war of ideas.


2 or 3 Things I Know About Her dir. Jean-Luc Godard

Perhaps it's as Godard intended, to have the Law of Diminishing Returns enacted on celluloid. While my first viewing of this film imparted a giddy and heady rush, each subsequent viewing has turned into more of an pedantic slog. It's also incredibly noisy, with a near-constant clamor of construction work and a clanging pinball machine. There's still whispered Brecht, mere reportage of the senses, 'Nam polemics from the mouths of babes, endlessly quotable lines like "Language is the house man lives in" and "If you can't afford LSD, try a color TV," but it tells of things to come (like the execrable Le Gai Savoir, which we also suffered through. That said, it has two of his most poetic visual musings, one involving the play of tree-dappled light atop a candy-red car hood, another of that cosmic cup of stirred coffee.

heep see

The Pawnbroker dir. Sidney Lumet

MoMA's theatre must run an elderly special, as we were the youngest people in the crowd by a good three decades. Caught this early Lumet flick as part of the museum's ongoing (and simply exhaustive) overview of jazz-inflected soundtracks for American and world cinema, Jazz Score, I would've written this up for my soundtrack column, save that I can't find any usable clips for this film on YouTube. Lumet weds Quincy Jones debut film score to the gritty B&W cinematography of Boris Kaufman, and shows how a cage can follow a man. Who knew that 1960's Harlem bore such close resemble to concentration camps? Or that in the middle of this depressive/ redemptive film would appear the theme from Austin Powers?


Crazed Fruit dir. Ko Nakahira

Also part of the MoMA Jazz Score series. This directorial debut from Nakahira (who --according to critic Donald Ritchie-- was assigned more middling fare ever after) was the first film of Japan's new wave, kin to Rebel Without a Cause and Breathless. Was delighted to learn that this film features the first score of Toru Takemitsu, whose significant soundtracks I dig immensely. Here, Takemitsu presents a winsome interplay between Hawaiian steel guitar and muted trumpet. Damn YouTube, why is there no clip of the subtle seduction scene, wherein the slight movements of fingers, thighs, and quick glances (all while the sea heaves and seaweed wags and sighs) hint at the urges teeming just beneath the surface? One of my favorite scenes in recent memory. And the ending remains jarring some fifty years on.


Cat People dir. Jacques Tourneur

Reading Martin Scorsese's lecture/ book on American cinema got me excited about trolling deeper into low-budget noirs, which prove that whole "necessity is the mother of invention" adage. Can't afford special effects to transform Simone Simon into a black panther (no afro wigs and hip-huggers in the 40's)? Then convey such animalistic change and its attendant fear and bodily terror via shadows, shrieks, the disorientation of light that comes from a pool, the held shot of an otherwise orderly descent of stairs growing more ominous merely through deepening lines of shadow.

















Gun Crazy dir. Joseph H. Lewis

Again, as recommended by Scorsese, a raw and careening predecessor to Bonnie and Clyde. The gun-loving guy is disgusted not by death, but instead by the resulting convenience: "Two people dead? Just so we can live without working?" Too many incredible shots to be had here: the camera on the floorboards of the getaway car, the tracking shot through hallways of carcasses or else a looooong backseat shot that follows the heist and pistol-whipping of a cop outside of the bank before following them on the getaway, then that discreet smile back at us as they speed away. And is there a sexier cinematic entrance than that of Peggy Cummins (as Annie Laurie Starr) firing her six-shooters at the county fair?

Looking at IMDB now, it makes sense that Dalton Trumbo helped on the screenplay. Check this dialogue:

Him: "It's as if nothing were real anymore."
Her: "I'm yours. And I'm real."
Him: "But you're the only thing that is. The rest is a nightmare."