Bikini Machine : Monkey Bum Bum Boogie

Okay, aside from having one awesome song name, what does this song have going for it? Well, first of all, it's by Bikini Machine, a French band named for the titular contraption in the camp flick Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. There's not much on the interwebs about them, alas, but they do have a few albums out. Their sound is electronic-oriented dance rock, similar to Hot Chip, but they lean more towards the pop spectrum.

"Monkey Bum Bum Boogie" is a nifty slice of dance rock about, well, doing the monkey bum bum boogie I suppose. It's got a groovy little backbeat, reminiscent of the 60's, with a bit of organ mixed in with the rock guitars. The vocals echo 60's-style funky R&B, with an almost Temptations-like delivery. But even with its retro trappings, it's decidedly modern, draped in swathes of electronica and wrapped in the production styles of today. You could easily toss this on at an underground rave or a Northern Soul rave-up. It'd fit either nicely.

"Monkey Bum Bum Boogie" can be found on Bikini Machine's debut release, 2003's An Introduction to Bikini Machine. Being French and not particular popular, their discs are tough to find, but Amazon has a couple. It's a great, fun record, just in time for summer.

And with that, song #100, I leave you temporarily.  I love sharing music, but this writing thing, while fun, is starting to push other more important things aside, so I'm going to set it aside for a while.  Once summer seriously kicks in, I would like to get back to it, because I do enjoy it.  But I gotta stop & catch up on some other stuff first.  Thanks for listening.

[You can listen to Bikini Machine's "Monkey Bum Bum Boogie" by navigating to the post "Song100" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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Party Ben / Radiohead : Reckoner

I'm not a big Radiohead fan, so I'm not real familiar with this tune.  I am a big Timbaland fan, although he's kind of played out lately, but I'm not familiar with the instrumental (Justin Timberlake's "My Love") used here either.  In any case, like many good mashups, I think this is a fortuitous juxtaposition by someone with a good ear.

The Radiohead tune is typical long-winded keening from Thom Yorke.  The original has him moaning over a pretty standard rock four-by-four beat.  Party Ben has taken the ultra-funky backing track from Justin's song and layered Thom's vocals over it and the result is, in my opinion, a drastic improvement.  The song moves from pedestrian to symphonic, with the lyrics soaring over the syrupy-thick electronic backdrop.  And the catcalls and beatboxing sprinkled liberally throughout, serve to destroy the cloying pretentiousness that normally permeates a Radiohead track.  Plus, they're just awesome.

You can't purchase the mash, but Radiohead's original is available on their 2008 release, In Rainbows, and Justin Timberlake's "My Love" is available on his 2006 release, FutureSex/LoveSounds, which also houses his smash hit "SexyBack".

[You can listen to Party Ben's mash of Radiohead's "Reckoner" by navigating to the post "Song087" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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Laurie Anderson : Gravity's Angel

"And at his funeral all his friends stood around looking sad. But they were really thinking of all the ham and cheese sandwiches in the next room."

Laurie Anderson is awesome. Well, at least until the mid 80's. I think she kind of lost her edge and went a little too poppy. You know, that thing where one of your favorite artists comprises their sound enough that it totally sucks for their long time fans (you), but not enough that anyone who wasn't listening before would suddenly be interested. That is, it's too mainstream or mediocre to be interesting to you, but still way too bizarre to be interesting to anyone listening to Top 40 radio.

But I love her. Come on, she uses a tape-bow violin for god's sake. Could you be more awesome than that? Her work centers primarily around musical rhythm and the rhythm of speech. It's primarily spoken word, often funny, very dry, and backed with all manner of electronics, samples, drum machines and other musical technology.

"Gravity's Angel" covers all of those bases, plus a little bit of singing and Peter Gabriel too. You've got the constant rhythm of the bell, the scattered, electronic rhythm of the drum machine, samples floating in and out, and her trademark stilted vocals with her trademark wit and excellent turn of phrase, plus just a dash of pathos. I like the way the song conveys stasis, almost like the stories are frozen in amber and she's excavated them, holding them up like a historical curiosity for you to examine.

"Gravity's Angel" comes from her 1984 release, Mister Heartbreak. It's slightly more accessible than Big Science, but not much. It's an amazing album though.

Not that you care, but I used to have her Home of the Brave video until I sent it off to the Goodwill, thinking I would definitely get it on DVD. Except that it's not available on DVD. Dang it.

[You can listen to Laurie Anderson's "Gravity's Angel" by navigating to the post "Song073" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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Scott Johnson : John Somebody, part 1

"You know who's in New York?  Remember that guy... J- John somebody?"  Ahhh, a sentence that is, quite literally thanks to Scott Johnson, music to my ears.  I first ran across this record in the hallowed halls of WRUW-FM Cleveland where I did an electro-acoustic and experimental radio show for seven years or so.  John Somebody, on Nonesuch Records I think, was a staple of that show.  I actually own the LP.

The entire piece is based around speech samples.  Scott takes a tiny bit of speech, or maybe a laugh or an "uh", and loops and splices it.  Then he builds a piece from the natural rhythms and tonal qualities occurring in the speech, and plays counterpoint against it, primarily with electric guitar, but there's some horns on the record as well.

It's an impressive piece of work, really well done.  But the other thing to remember was that this was created in 1982, well before the introduction of the sampler into the common musical vernacular.  That means this entire piece was done with tape.  Yeah, that means he sat there in the recording studio with a razor blade, a reel-to-reel and bits of scotch tape and built this entire thing by repeatedly bouncing the samples from tape to tape, cutting and splicing at exactly the right place, and overdubbing like a madman.

Today, we'd use a sampler, and it'd still be an awesome piece.  But to pull this off back then was beyond astounding, into the realm of the unthinkable.  The sheer amount of dedication and work to bring it about is just unfathomable.

The greatest thing about it is, the average person can enjoy to it.  It's not some extreme, wacked out, cold, classical-based electro-acoustic piece.  It's very jazzy, a little funky, almost poppy, and extraordinarily listenable.  If he had thrown some drums under it and managed to put a video together for MTV, I bet he would have had a top 40 hit, it's that accessible.  Well, I listen to some fucked up things, so maybe I'm not a great barometer for what's accessible, but I'm telling you, you could play this for your mom and she'd probably dig it.

The full piece, which is really more a suite of studies than one continuous piece, is nearly 30 minutes long.  I'm only giving you 'Part 1', which is how it's tracked on the CD.  The original John Somebody LP was released in 1982, but in 2004, Tzadik released a new remastered version on CD which includes two other pieces that are just as great.  Enjoy!

[You can listen to Scott Johnson's "John Somebody, pt. 1" by navigating to the post "Song064" 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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Hot Chip : Out At the Pictures

There's not much to say about Hot Chip that hasn't been written by someone else. They are clearly indie music media darlings, stars of the "genre", along with the likes of MGMT, Animal Collective, Bon Iver or Bright Eyes (none of which I particularly like, oddly enough). That being said, I'll just say they are an eclectic, primarily electronic, rock band. "Out At the Pictures", from their 2008 album Made in the Dark, is a pretty typical offering.

The whole thing starts with a long but cool synth intro that builds in speed and is clearly live (or extremely well faked), as you can hear the audience screaming in the background. This intro is welded to the front of a speedy little dance rock number, chock full of buzzing, overdriven synths and aggressive, rocking, but still danceable drums. The lyrics are pretty simple, concentrating more on the sound of the words as an instrument rather than deep meanings, to the point where they repeat the word "whether" sixteen times in a row in the chorus. Yeah, I know that sounds like it might be annoying, but it's used to good effect. I like that the song has all the trappings of a techno number, but the band has used them to create a real rocker instead.

The rest of Made in the Dark is mostly more of the same, which is why it's so good. There is the occasional acoustic ballad and even some songs that might fall along the 'soft rock' side of the spectrum. Still, they know their strengths and play to them well. It's a very good album.

[You can listen to Hot Chip's "Out At the Pictures" by navigating to the post "Song054" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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Nicolas Collins : Strange Heaven

Nicolas Collins is an electronic music composer who deals primarily with sampled and re-sampled sound and homemade electronics. He experimented for a while with a setup he called "trombone-propelled electronics" where he uses the slide of the trombone as an analog controller for on-the-fly digital sampling. It's pretty cool, really, to a geek like me.

His album Sound without Picture is a selection of spoken word pieces he's collected, each of which has to do with a sense, or the lack thereof: sight, blindness, touch, smell, sound, deafness, taste. These are read over different electronic backdrops that he creates. In one piece he uses a broken CD player playing a string quartet which creates the backdrop for a live trumpeter, all of which creates a backdrop for the reading. On a different track, he has a real string quartet recreate the effect of the broken CD player, along with the trumpet and the reading. Very sweet. So much so that this was almost the track I picked for you.

But instead, I'm going with a different track. For one, the track was, on the surface, very similar to "Mom's" which we debuted a few days ago. (I think the interplay of the broken robotic digital repetition and the live analog is cool enough to warrant a new post, but that will have to be some other day.)

For another, the track I chose uses the aforementioned tricky trombone to manipulate the sound of the spoken parts which is then used as the bed for the actual spoken word. The voice is stretched and warped, digitally processed almost beyond recognition, but there's a ghostly hint of the source that wafts through and really underscores the intangible dreaminess of the pitch black world of the blind and the purposeful daydream of memory, both of which are subjects for the spoken part of the piece.

The composition has plenty of space around the vocals where there is just that ethereal sound and the source material he reads is really touching. On top of which, he has a great speaking voice, solid without being overtly dramatic. It's really a great composition all around.

"Strange Heaven" can be found on Nicolas Collins' 1999 release, Sound Without Picture. It's a fantastic CD. Highly recommended.

And once again, the piece is 13 minutes long, so I downsampled it. I couldn't go to mono though, as stereo is an important part of the piece, so it still ended up being 13mb. Sorry.

[You can listen to Nicolas Collins' "Strange Heaven" by navigating to the post "Song045" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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Carl Stone : Mom's

Carl Stone is an electronic music composer, which means you're in for an ear-bending. The album Mom's was released on New Albion records, which generally specializes in very atmospheric sound washes, the ambientest of ambient. There are several pieces like that on this album (one of which I almost chose), but this is not one of them.

"Mom's" the piece is basically a song that has been put through an audio blender. Imagine a CD player that aggressively skips, so that it's always plowing forward, even as it skitters back. In this case, it sounds like someone has seriously abused a CD of zydeco music, so you've got some horns, some fiddle, some crazed accordion and even a little Creole in the mix. It sounds like it would be a mess, but there are two things that hold it together and make it an amazing piece.

First, the result is kind of mesmerizing. Even though the tune has been shattered beyond recognition into a zillion pieces, the pieces themselves are startlingly recognizable. You know something is in there, even if you can't piece together what. To me, it's the audio equivalent of staring into a fire. There's flickers and shapes and the whole thing is completely abstract, but at the same time, fascinating. Your brain is hard-wired to find patterns, and I think part of the fascination in this piece, is that, between the recognizable instruments, the constant stuttering repetition, and the familiar feeling rhythms, it feels like there is a pattern there, even if there isn't.

Second, there is a pattern. I don't know the source material, so I can't say what the original song sounded like, but there is a definite progression through the source material. We are not jumping hither and yon in a random fashion. The skipping itself is localized, staying in one place to cover, over and over, the same bits of sound, before moving on to the next bit. So, in a sense, we get a feel for what the entire song is like, the opening crescendo, the instruments coming in and out, the verses and choruses, without ever actually hearing it. And the overarching structure of the source material brings internal structure to the otherwise crazy, broken sound coming out of the speakers.

It's a truly great work. It's random without being random, startling without being harsh, and somehow manages to be both organic and digital at the same time. "Mom's" is available on Carl's 1992 New Albion release, Mom's. The rest of the album is great too, but it's far more relaxed and ethereal than this piece.

Oh, also, I had to downsample this to 128k, since it's 11 minutes long. I listened and it still sounds good, but just so's you know.

[#39]

Dan Deacon : Snookered

Yet another artist I don't know a lot about. Dan Deacon is an electronic composer whose works fall somewhere between rock, IDM and electro-acoustic music. I first heard of Dan on a podcast where he actually did a lot of this stuff live, which is just crazy. And it's not just Dan sitting there clicking buttons on his laptop. Lately he's been touring with an actual fourteen person band. So, serious props for that.

This tune is relatively straightforward compared to the rest of his stuff, if you can believe that. It builds from a quiet, reflective sonic pool into a maelstrom of sound. It takes a bit to get going, but once the rhythm kicks in, it drives on straight-ahead, fast and furious. Dan (I assume) sings some very Eno-esque vocals over the top, and garnishes the whole thing with frantic riffs on some sort of malleted instrument and a variety of electronic gewgaws. Plus there's a killer sampled-vocal breakdown in the middle. He rocks on it hard for a few minutes, then suddenly it quits out from underneath you, like the cliff under Wile E. Coyote, and you're back at that reflecting pool at dusk wondering what the hell just ran you over. What's especially neat is, if you listen to the song on repeat, it's tough to tell where the loop actually comes around. It just sounds like one endless eternal song.

This eight-minute rocker can be found on Dan's most recent release, Bromst.

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