Calin with Fantastic Plastic Machine : Samba de Minha Namoradinha

Fantastic Plastic Machine is the stage name for Tomoyuki Tanaka, a Japanese musician and DJ, who put together a series of critically acclaimed albums in the late 90's and early 2000's. He is one of the progenitors of the Shibuya-kei movement, which is sort of an electronic take on easy listening.

I believe Calin is the singer, but I could find nothing about her.

The tune kicks off with a scat on a jumpy little melody. It sounds very circular, but it's very groovy, and it reappears a few times throughout the song, which is good, because it's fun. There follows an organ-based jam over a samba beat percolating under some pretty, poppy Japanese lyrics. It's a light, fun little record, and is great to play in the car on a sunny day with your windows rolled down.

In the background you can hear a guy popping in with a quick, familiar-sounding 'mahna mahna'. That's a nod to a tune called 'Samba Mah Nà' from Piero Umiliani's soundtrack to Svezia, Inferno e Paradiso, which is itself a variation on Piero's classic, "Mah Nà Mah Nà". In case you were wondering.

This particular song comes from a compilation Shibuya-kei music, the awkwardly named Sushi 3003 from 1996.  It's full of other groovy, electropop gems and is a solid buy if you like this sort of thing.

[You can listen to Calin with Fantastic Plastic Machine's "Samba de Minha Namoradinha" by navigating to the post "Song063" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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Lassigue Bendthaus : Superbad (Soul Substitute)

Lassigue Bendthaus is one of the many many nom de plume's for Uwe Schmidt (also know as Atom Heart and Señor Coconut), a German musician who dabbles primarily in electronic music. In the mid-90's he developed his own software that performs "vocal simulation based on vocal resynthesis generated from original vocal raw material". So, what I take from that is, the software samples his vocals, chops them up, then reconstructs them, which introduces all sorts of interesting digital artifacts. It's along the lines of "glitch" music, where the digital edges and errors of electronics and samples, rather than being fixed or smoothed over, are embraced and used as the very source material for the piece. The vocals are chopped into tiny phonemes which are repeated and stretched providing a very robotic sound.

"Super Bad" is an early James Brown original, and as such is an extremely analog piece of hard funk. One of the cool things about Uwe's version is that, even though the song is completely reliant on digital technology, constructed completely in the realm of the electronic, from the programmed drums to the android vocals to the synthesized horns, he's managed to keep the organic funk of the original. Even with all the bleeps and bloops, it rocks, and though it doesn't have the sheer sweat-soaked fury of the original, it could easily wind up a dance floor.

The album, Pop Artificielle, consists of ten covers of a wide variety of musicians, from Donovan to Prince to ABC (which I almost posted instead), all done in this very digital vein. It's an excellent album and a fun listen.

[You can listen to Lassigue Bendthaus' "Superbad (Soul Substitute)" by navigating to the post "Song057" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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